Brad Rourke’s Blog
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Join Me for a Session with Seth Godin in DC – Free!
I was very excited when I learned that a singular thinker in marketing, Seth Godin, was planning a road trip where he would be leading all-day sessions that would be open to the public. I immediately signed up for the July 22 session in DC at the historic Warner Theater. Turns out that the theater…
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Join Me For A Webinar: 'An Emerging Relationship: The Executive Branch, Philanthropy and Civic Engagement'
As you may recall, in May my friends at PACE-Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement released a white paper I authored. Titled An Evolving Relationship – Executive Branch Approaches to Civic Engagement and Philanthropy, it is based on a briefing paper I wrote for a White House meeting earlier this year between leaders of the philanthropic community…
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Things I Don't Understand
Just a few things I don’t understand: Why are 90% of beauty salons named with a pun? (“Shear Energy.” “The Mane Event.”) Why do real estate and insurance agents have their photos on their business cards, when it actually makes them seem less trustworthy? Why do bureaucrats (and people who aspire to bureaucratism) say “at…
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New Collaborative Governance Council Mandated By Law in MN
One of my very first clients when I started working independently (I hung out my own shingle back in November 2003) was a group called the Policy Consensus Initiative, along with its sister organization the National Policy Consensus Center. I will always be grateful to PCI’s founder Chris Carlson and NPCC’s director Greg Wolf for…
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Cognitive And Civic Surplus
Andrea Jarrell drew my attention to this talk by one of the deepest thinkers about the new structures in society, Clay Shirky. In this talk, Shirky describes the idea of cognitive surplus, and relates it to the way media gets produced and consumed. I urge you to watch the whole fifteen minutes, it is chock…
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Cool Optical Illusions
I was doing some house cleaning in my “Brad Personal” folder and ran across these cool optical illusions. No doubt you’ve seen some of them before, but I like them collected in one place:
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A New Role with the Kettering Foundation
As many friends and colleagues know, I have enjoyed a long association with the Kettering Foundation. When I first came to know the Foundation while I was working at the Institute for Global Ethics, I felt I had discovered an intellectual and philosophical home. And I was right. Over the years, the good people at…
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Some Contrarian Bullets
Just a few contrarian bullets . . . thoughts, complaints, and predictions: When someone talks about their “personal brand,” I cringe. You have a reputation. You must manage it. But please don’t put on airs. You ain’t Pepsi. If someone trots out “Oh, The Places You’ll Go!” one more time for grads, I’ll . . .…
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Oh, D.E.A.R. — How to Respond to Crisis: Eat the Whole Bug
I spent the last weekend, as I do a couple of times a year, leading ethics and leadership sessions at the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership’s Candidate Training Program. This is a bipartisan, intensive boot-camp for new candidates, delivered within an ethics framework. It has been proven to work and numerous grads are now holding…
