Overall Conference Highlights
Phil Buchanan and Ellie Buteau share new data and research on foundation performance assessment and orient conference attendees as to what has changed—and what has not—in the last decade of foundation evaluation.
Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research co-founders Michael J. Fox and Debi Brooks discuss the challenges and surprises they experienced creating a major new medical research foundation.
How does the leader of the largest foundation in the world think about the challenge of developing, implementing, and assessing strategy? Jeff Raikes, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, shares his candid thoughts in this discussion with Nadya Shmavonian, president of Public/Private Ventures.
Foundation leaders face unique leadership challenges. They work to address some of our toughest social issues, presiding over what seem to be significant resources but often pale in comparisons to the scale of the problems. They are removed from the front lines and lack universal performance measures and natural feedback loops. How, then, should foundation leaders lead? How can they motivate the kind of change they wish to see, both within and outside their organizational walls? How do they stick to strategy while simultaneously fostering the innovation that can lead to breakthroughs?
The leader of a group of economists that Bloomberg BusinessWeek has dubbed “the pragmatic rebels,” economist Esther Duflo has brought a data-driven, analytic approach to poverty reduction efforts. Duflo has been named one of Fortune‘s “40 under 40,” included in Foreign Policy‘s “Top 100 Global Thinkers,” and has been the subject of profiles in The New Yorker and other major publications. Duflo shares her thinking on the approaches needed to determine the best solutions to our most pressing societal problems, drawing on her new book Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty.
No one intentionally makes bad decisions. Yet we make them all the time. In fact, some of the worst disasters in recent history—the collapse of major investment banks, the global financial meltdown—were the result of seemingly reasonable decisions made by a lot of smart people. How does this happen? Michael Mauboussin, author of Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition, explores the answers to these questions in this session.