The McIntire Center for Financial Innovation
The Center for Growth Enterprises
The Center for the Management of Information Technology
UVA Lead

Present

The 2006 Fall Forum
Leadership and Positive Societal Change

Sept. 29, 2006
Old Cabell Hall Auditorium
The Lawn

2006 Fall Forum Theme & Overview

To celebrate and ponder the new millennium, the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia initiated a series of symposia considering the complex nature and origins of organizational success. Early symposia focused on the role of venture capital and private equity in creating and sustaining growth firms (2000), organizational factors facilitating the creation of “visionary” organizations (2001), and the role of creative organizational processes leading to innovative strategies appropriate to mature industry settings (2002).

Considering organizational excellence requires an understanding of commerce’s integral role in culture and society from varied perspectives, and McIntire’s symposia evolved to examine this issue, echoing the School’s historic cross-disciplinary orientation. The 2003 symposium addressed the foundation of organizational excellence, decision making. Economics Nobel laureate and psychologist Daniel Kahneman led a broad discussion about “regularized irrationality” applied to decisions ranging from investments to foreign policy. This context deepened with the 2004 symposium’s legal, historical, managerial, and journalistic perspectives on the challenges inherent in the most important revolution of our time: globalization. In turn, the 2005 program built on this broad global perspective, blending environmental and geopolitical perspectives with financial and managerial topics to consider risk in a global age.

The 2005 symposium was followed by two forums exploring specialized topics that arose from its discussions. The 2005 Fall Forum addressed the potential economic risk of a “bubble” in our nation’s real estate markets; the 2006 Spring Forum explored a set of cases on leadership in crisis situations, including Hurricane Katrina and the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11.

We continue this series of more pointed discussions with the 2006 Fall Forum. The program, “Leadership and Positive Societal Change,” exemplifies McIntire’s cross-disciplinary commitment with an outstanding group of thought leaders of various perspectives reflecting on leadership and its role in affecting positive societal change. The program will be a catalyst in the launch of UVA LEAD, a three-year, interdisciplinary leadership program for U.Va. students who aspire not only to grow intellectually in their chosen domains, but also to enhance their abilities to effectively lead within their respective organizations and fields. The 2006 Fall Forum also coincides with the University’s Capital Campaign Kickoff.

We are excited that Harvard’s Howard Gardner (author of over 20 books, including Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership and Changing Minds) will keynote the forum and lead its discussions. Professor Gardner’s work is as extraordinary as those individuals about whom he has so eloquently written. After presenting a summary of his views, he will be joined by two outstanding professor-leaders from the University of Virginia in a discussion designed to extend his concept and emphasis on “leadership as a cognitive enterprise...between…the minds of leaders and followers,” including the clear distinction between “indirect leadership” and “direct leadership.”

Leaders who successfully manage to take their academic message beyond its narrow domain to a broader general audience transcend the role of indirect leaders to have an impact on society as a whole. This task is not easy. As Gardner notes, “Even when the stretch is modest, however, leaders must make a choice. It is almost impossible to meet the quickly changing needs and demands of a specialized domain...and the far less rigorous (though often fickle) demands of a heterogeneous audience.” Two UVa professors who have become recognized leaders in their fields while accomplishing this feat will be interviewed by Professor Gardner: Julie Bargmann, the University’s own “Queen of Slag,” whose life has transformed industrial wastelands and the lives and careers of her students in landscape architecture, and Dr. W. Michael Scheld, whose leadership in the world of infectious diseases positively influences the lives of his colleagues and students but, more importantly, the lives of those suffering from infectious diseases. Both professors exemplify Gardner’s “hallmarks of effective leaders: multiple intelligences (linguistically, interpersonally, and existentially), instinct, and integrity.”

The program will address the following potential questions: What do we know about leadership and societal change and how can we use it positively? How are audacious goals best used in effecting positive change? For example, do we really have the power to eradicate poverty, as Columbia’s Jeffrey Sachs has recently suggested? How can we most effectively harness the power of entrepreneurial leadership to do “Good Work” in today’s complex world? What are the political dynamics of building community and effective positive change? How can we develop leaders who can bridge the gap between limited knowledge domains and the general public? What is the role of our educational system in developing the leaders of the future?

The benefits of McIntire’s symposia and forums are significant, including ongoing discussions across disciplines, inspired students, expanded faculty research, improved teaching effectiveness, and enhanced management practice within the circle of participating alumni and friends. They also serve as catalysts that rekindle old friendships, enhance our intellectual lives, and renew our belief in the significance of Mr. Jefferson’s University for both individuals and the nation.

Agenda

8 a.m. Welcome Reception

8:15 a.m. Introduction of Program
Carl P. Zeithaml, F.S. Cornell Professor in Free Enterprise and Dean, McIntire School of Commerce

8:30 a.m. Leadership and the Mind
Howard Gardner, John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Harvard University; Adjunct Professor of Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine, and Senior Director of Harvard Project; Author of over 20 books translated into 22 languages, including Frames of Mind; Art, Mind and Brain; The Unschooled Mind; Extraordinary Minds; Leading Minds; and Changing Minds; and Co-Author of Good Work

9:15 a.m. Panel Discussion
Julie Bargmann, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, U.Va. School of Architecture; ongoing design research: Project D.I.R.T.
Dr. W. Michael Scheld, Bayer-Gerald L. Mandell Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Virginia; Past President of the Infectious Diseases Society of America; Co-Director of the training program at the Academic Alliance for AIDS Care and Prevention in Africa

10:15 a.m. Audience Q&A

Participant Biographies

Howard Gardner
John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard University
Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He also holds positions as Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Adjunct Professor of Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine, and Senior Director of Harvard Project Zero. Among numerous honors, Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981. In 1990, he was the first American to receive the University of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Award in Education, and in 2000 he received a Fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has received honorary degrees from 20 colleges and universities, including institutions in Ireland, Italy, and Israel.

The author of over 20 books translated into 22 languages and several hundred articles, Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments. During the past two decades, he and colleagues at Project Zero have been working on the design of performance-based assessments; education for understanding; the use of multiple intelligences to achieve more personalized curriculum, instruction, and assessment; and the nature of interdisciplinary efforts in education. In recent years, in collaboration with psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, Gardner has embarked on a study of “GoodWork,” work that is at once excellent in quality and also socially responsible.

Julie Bargmann
Associate Professor Landscape Architecture, University of Virginia
Julie Bargmann is internationally recognized as an innovative designer in building regenerative landscapes and with interdisciplinary design education. Her ongoing design research Project D.I.R.T. (Design Investigations Reclaiming Terrain) continues to excavate the creative potential of disturbed landscapes.

Design research infuses projects at the D.I.R.T. studio (Dump It Right There), where past and present industrial along with urban processes lay the groundwork for ecological systems, cultural constructs, and emerging technologies. From closed quarries to abandoned coal mines, fallow factories and urban rail yards, Bargmann joins teams of architects, artists, engineers, historians, and scientists to imagine the next evolution of these working landscapes.

D.I.R.T. studio challenges restrictive policies, conventional remediation practices and redevelopment pressures that plague Superfund sites and Brownfields. Critical site-seeing is a means to reveal multiple site histories, giving legible form to complex processes, offering renewed relationships for communities in tired and toxic surroundings. D.I.R.T. projects have included the revitalization of manufacturing operations (Ford River Rouge Plant, US Steel South Works, Philadelphia Navy Yard), old rail yards (Menomonee River Valley, Evanston Round House Park) and urban infrastructure (Hudson Yards and the High Line).

At the University of Virginia, Bargmann leads multidisciplinary design studios where students encounter real places in real time. Addressing degraded landscapes and marginalized communities, students are challenged to assume a proactive role as design citizens. With her coursework in regenerative technologies, Bargmann charges students to deploy ecological technologies to revitalize urban and industrialized neighborhoods.

Examples of design studios engaging communities include BOOM, working with Hagerstown City Planning and the Central Chemical Citizens Task Force to demonstrate how they could take charge of the remediation and redevelopment of a Superfund site; MUCK, supporting the efforts of the nonprofit Elizabeth River Project to involve neighborhoods and schools in the regeneration of their polluted watershed; and WATTS UP, pairing students with community leaders and residents to leverage the restoration of a polluted stream as integral with the revitalization of their east Washington, D.C. neighborhoods.

Along with a degree in sculpture from Carnegie-Mellon University, Bargmann earned a master’s in landscape architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design. She built award-winning landscapes with Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates and tracked Etruscans as a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Bargmann’s work was awarded the 2001 National Design Award by Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum. TIME magazine and CNN, along with national and international design publications, have recognized Bargmann as leading the next generation in making a difference for design and the environment.

W. Michael Scheld M.D.
Professor of Internal Medicine, Infectious Disease
W. Michael Scheld is the Bayer-Gerald L. Mandell Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Virginia and past president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. In addition, he is the co-director of the training program at the Academic Alliance for AIDS Care and Prevention in Africa.

Scheld is a 1973 graduate of Cornell University Medical College and completed his internship, residency, and fellowship in infectious diseases at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

Scheld’s research interests include molecular mechanisms of bacterial pathogenesis, sepsis and septic shock, adenosine receptors, inflammation, innate immunity, anthrax, antimicrobial resistance, appropriate use of antimicrobial agents, HIV/AIDS, and vaccines.

Scheld is the author of more than 380 publications and is editor of the textbook Infections of the Central Nervous System, now in its third edition. He is also section editor for infectious diseases for The Cecil Textbook of Medicine.
 

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