You don’t want to miss these presentations by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Peter McLaughlin and David Macaulay
Sunday, Sept. 9
Opening General Session 10:00 – 11:30 a.m.
The Moral Authority of the Presidency
Doris Kearns Goodwin
After more than two decades spent in writing a series of presidential biographies, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize winning author, historian, and political commentator, examines the ability of the president to mobilize the country toward morally correct and socially just courses of action. She draws from examples of a number of presidents from Abraham Lincoln to William Jefferson Clinton. With the voice of a storyteller, Goodwin brings to life the social context of the times in past presidents’ moral authority, and explores the parallels between those times and the moral authority of leaders today.
Goodwin is a panelist on PBS The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and a news analyst and commentator for NBC. She also served as an assistant to Lyndon B. Johnson in his last year in the White House. She later assisted Johnson in the preparation of his memoirs. In 1976, Goodwin authored Lyndon Johnson &The American Dream, followed in 1987 by the political biography, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. Her next book, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Home Front During World War II was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1995.
Monday, Sept. 10
General Session 10:00 – 11:00 a.m.
CatchFire: Igniting Energy, Defusing Stress, and Maximizing Your Performance
Peter McLaughlin
Forget struggling through your workday stressed out, tired, or scatter-brained. To work at peak productivity today you need focus, flexibility, confidence, humor, and a balanced, healthy lifestyle. Peter McLaughlin’s CatchFire program is all about unleashing the energy, enthusiasm, and enterprise you need to maximize your performance at work. This program offers proven strategies to revitalize your body and brain, and provides real life examples of how individuals and corporations stay healthy, focused, and fun in the midst of tough deadlines, heavy workloads, and constant change.
McLaughlin is a top business consultant, the co-author of the highly acclaimed book Mentally Tough: The Principles of Winning at Sports Applied to Winning in Business, and author of CatchFire: A 7-Step Program to Ignite Energy, Defuse Stress, and Power Boost Your Career. His principles have helped hundreds of leading organizations-from Fortune 500 companies like AT&PepsiCo, and IBM to small businesses and associations-reenergize themselves.
Wednesday, Sept. 12
Closing General Session 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 noon
Building Big: The Most Impressive Examples of Engineering in the World
David Macaulay
David Macaulay, host and narrator of Building Big, talks about his experience in bringing to television a series of films about the biggest and most impressive examples of engineering. Macaulay brings to life the magnitude of this two-year film project, sharing stories of entertainment and challenge-from a cameraman’s harrowing fall off the city wall in Istanbul to sound equipment that somehow never made it onto the flight between Paris and Florence to predictably uncooperative Scottish weather.
Building Big aired on PBS affiliate stations around the nation in October 2000. Telling the stories, both past and present, behind some of the greatest pieces of civil and architectural engineering, the films feature bridges, domes, skyscrapers, dams and tunnels. Combining archival footage with on-camera sequences and animation, David Macaulay provides a historic overview and basic introduction to the way these engineering megastructures work.