2020 BIFMA Leadership Conference

by Robert Beck | January 27th, 2020

As if prior experience hadn’t taught us that this is a serious conference and not some BS golf junket to Florida mid-winter, after brief welcoming remarks from BIFMA Board Chair, Hank Menke and BIFMA Executive Director, Tom Reardon, the first session got underway almost immediately after many of us arrived at the venue. The first speaker was Nancy Koehn. She is both a tenured professor at the Harvard Business School and a historian, which is a highly unusual combination. But she does research into effective leadership – both past and present, so it seems less strange in that light. She said she’s not interested in the past for its own sake, but rather for what it can teach us that we can apply in our own leadership roles. Specifically she said she wanted to talk to us about the kind of courageous leadership that is forged in crisis. To help …