Recent Publications & News of Interest

Stewart D. Friedman PhD (Wharton): Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life
(Book, 2008)

Now more than ever, your success as a leader isn’t just about being a great businessperson. You’ve got to be a great person, performing well in all domains of your life — your work, your home, your community, and your private self.  That’s a tall order.  The good news is that, contrary to conventional wisdom about “balance,” you don’t have to assume that these domains compete in a zero-sum game. Total Leadership is a game-changing blueprint for how to perform well as a leader not by trading off one domain for another, but by finding mutual value among all four. Veteran Wharton professor Stew Friedman shows you how to achieve these “four-way wins” as a leader who can:

  • BE REAL: Act with authenticity by clarifying what’s important
  • BE WHOLE: Act with integrity by respecting the whole person
  • BE INNOVATIVE: Act with creativity by experimenting to find new solutions

With engaging examples and clear instruction, Friedman provides more than thirty hands-on tools for using these proven principles to produce stronger business results, find clearer purpose in what you do, feel more connected to the people who matter most, and generate sustainable change. Most leadership development books focus only on your professional skills, while books about personal growth concentrate on your needs beyond work. Total Leadership is different. It’s a unique and long-awaited resource that shows how to win in all domains of life

Pamela Stone's Opting Out: Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home
(Book, 2007)

Noting a phenomenon that might seem to recall a previous era, The New York Times Magazine recently portrayed women who leave their careers in order to become full-time mothers as "opting out." But, are high-achieving professional women really choosing to abandon their careers in order to return home? This provocative study is the first to tackle this issue from the perspective of the women themselves. Based on a series of candid, in-depth interviews with women who returned home after working as doctors, lawyers, bankers, scientists, and other professions, Pamela Stone explores the role that their husbands, children, and coworkers play in their decision; how women's efforts to construct new lives and new identities unfold once they are home; and where their aspirations and plans for the future lie. What we learn–contrary to many media perceptions–is that these high-flying women are not opting out but are instead being pushed out of the workplace. Drawing on their experiences, Stone outlines concrete ideas for redesigning workplaces to make it easier for women–and men–to attain their goal of living rewarding lives that combine both families and careers.

AAMC President Darrell G. Kirch MD: Culture and the Courage to Change
(Conference Address, 11/4/07 AAMC Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C.)

In his address to the AAMC 2007 annual meeting, AAMC President and CEO Darrell G. Kirch, M.D., urged the leadership of the nation’s medical schools and teaching hospitals to change the culture of academic medicine by emphasizing "collaboration, shared accountability, and team performance.Kirch’s remarks, "Culture and the Courage to Change," were presented before a record 4,000 attendees.Recognizing that this culture change will require courage, Kirch stressed the potential for this shift to create "a much more meaningful and gratifying culture for our faculty, staff, learners, and especially the patients they have committed to serve."While medical schools and teaching hospitals have expended considerable effort on growth strategies because of constraints in state and federal support over the past 10 years, a "failure to put at least as much energy into improving our culture as we put into advancing our strategy," according to Kirch, "has led to a fundamental imbalance within our institutions.""While higher education and health care have held fast to their traditional, individualistic culture," Kirch noted that the world has fundamentally changed to a greater emphasis on collaborative, coordinated, and integrative efforts in research, patient care, and medical education.

Molly Carnes MD, MS and Carole Bland PhD: Viewpoint: A Challenge to Academic Health Centers and the National Institutes of Health to Prevent Unintended Gender Bias in the Selection of Clinical and Translational Science Award Leaders
(Article, Academic Medicine. 82(2):202-206, February 2007)

In controlled studies, both men and women preferentially select men over women for leadership positions, even when credentials are identical and despite field studies demonstrating women's equivalent or slightly better leadership effectiveness. The assumption that men will make better leaders than women is attributed to the pervasive existence of unconscious stereotypes that characterize both men and leaders as agentic or action oriented and women as dependent.

The Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap is a novel, prestigious award that will place considerable power in the hands of one principal investigator-conditions that predict activation of bias in favor of selecting male leaders. The authors review research supporting this assertion. To mitigate the impact of this bias and broaden the pool of potential leaders for this transformative initiative, the authors offer the following suggestions. To academic health centers they suggest (1) internal search committees comprised of at least 35% women that establish a priori the desired qualities for the CTSA leader and broadly solicit applicants, (2) explicit specification of the full range of desirable skills of a CTSA leader, and (3) systematic efforts to increase awareness of the negative impact of unconscious gender bias on women's advancement. To the NIH they suggest (1) the new multiple principal investigator rule for the CTSA program, (2) a statement in the request for applications (RFA) encouraging diversity among principal investigators, (3) repetition in the RFA of the public NIH statement of the importance of work life balance for young investigators, and (4) constitution of study sections with at least 35% women.