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Fleishman-Hillard Innovation

On June 1, I began a three-month journey of self-discovery. This morning I returned to Fleishman-Hillard eager and ready to share my learnings – both professional and personal – with you, my colleagues and my clients.

Among my many educational experiences this summer were piano lessons. I’ve never been particularly musical, but I wanted my daughters to develop an appreciation for music. And, since I never had the chance to play an instrument growing up, I decided to challenge my brain and see what piano would be like.

My kids had taken piano lessons before with little success due to lack of enthusiasm, but I thought that by modeling behavior, maybe we’d all get better results.

My experiment paid off. Both my kids were really into it. My 12-year-old, Monica, became especially competitive and obsessed with practicing more than me and improving more than me. It’s proof that our kids do what we model.

This lesson translates well to a business environment where managers are charged with motivating their employees’ actions. People don’t necessarily behave as directed, but they do model the good behavior of others.

Additionally, I found that the challenge to my brain was real. I felt an actual struggle between the technical left side of my brain and the pas

Education for All in Post-Katrina New OrleansAugust 30

Last Friday, I wrote about the budding entrepreneurial spirit taking over New Orleans. Well, it looks like the entrepreneurs aren’t the only people trying to improve the city in five years since Hurricane Katrina. In fact, it appears that administrators in New Orleans’ public education system have used this time to build better schools.

“I feel that since New Orleans kind of had to start over, we’ve improved in a lot of different things,” student Jazmine Sylve told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “Now we have charter schools and a lot of schools are more on top of it. And we had to rebuild a lot of the schools so they look better.”

According to CSMonitor.com, “New Orleans has become a laboratory for education reform, largely by necessity. With virtually all its students and teachers evacuated for the better part of the 2005-06 school year, it had to dramatically downsize and regroup. In the wake of the storm, the state become the overseer of most schools through its Recovery School District (RSD), originally set up to take over academical

Five Years After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is an Entrepreneurial HubAugust 27

On Aug. 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. Five years later, many residents are still living in trailers, while some, who evacuated, still haven’t returned home. VOANews.com reports that in New Orleans “a total of about 50,00 residential properties are still either uninhabitable or empty lots.”

Still, it appears, there’s hope in the region.

Gulf Coast resident Ed Wikoff, who decided to stay and rebuild with his wife, told “Good Morning America,” that “this is a great opportunity, I think, for our community to make some significant improvements. You can see some of that happening.”

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper echoed Wikoff’s sentiments in an interview with the Huffington Post. “A lot of the money that’s been promised has been delivered on,” he said. “The convention business is back, restaurants are back. There’s a kind of new life … and a grassroots movement here as well, which is exciting.”

In fact, according to a recent Brookin

Is America in Decline? Newsweek Says “Don’t Despair.”August 26

Having followed America’s competitiveness for some time now, I was particularly excited to receive last week’s Newsweek featuring its first-ever Best Countries issue.

Like other studies before it, the Newsweek study found that the United States is slipping. The United States ranked 11th. But, unlike the other studies, Newsweek found a glimmer of hope for our nation.

Among the chief arguments for America’s decline that these other studies have made include fewer college graduates (particularly in science, technology, engineering and math), less R&D and patent creation, and decreased manufacturing and exports. Newsweek did not ignore these indicators. Rather, Newsweek agreed that “America has clearly suffered some decline, relative to other nations, and a loss of prestige.”

But Newsweek argued, the future is not as bleak as the “declinists” suggest. “But even battered and beaten down, American power is more resilient than the naysayers give it credit for. And so is the international system that depends on American power as its central stabilizer.”

Simply put, Newsweek said the United States just doesn’t have a rival. Not even China. Its “model of autocratic capitalism,

Is There Value in $578 Million School?August 25

According to the Associated Press (AP), the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) laid off nearly 3,000 teachers in the past two years, cut the academic school year and various programs. “The district also faces a $640 million shortfall and some schools persistently rank among the nation’s lowest performing.”

So why, then, did it just build a $578 million school?

Well the short answer is that this school – or rather, complex of schools – has actually been in the works for quite some time. According to the AP, “officials say new schools were planned long before the economic pinch and are funded by $20 billion in voter-approved bonds that do not affect the educational budget.”

In fact, according to LATimes.com, LAUSD first set its sights on the location of the complex in the 1980s. Interestingly, the schools are built on the site of the former Ambassador Hotel, where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968. The complex is called the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools (RFK).

After