Meta-Leadership Community meta-leadershipcommunity.org

Sunset of the Online Meta-Leadership Community and Transition to the LinkedIn Group, Meta-Leadership Connections

Thank you for your continued commitment to meta-leadership. You have been critical to the success of this online community, and we appreciate your ongoing engagement and support. The CDC Foundation is excited to announce the Meta-Leadership Summit Resource Center that is designed to help meta-leaders - and prospective meta-leaders - build on the meta-leadership model. Although not a substitute for the Meta-Leadership Summit for Preparedness program, the Resource Center provides templates, sample documents, idea starters and videos that may help you initiate or continue meta-leadership activities in your community. Be sure to check out this new Resource Center.

As our funding for the Meta-Leadership Summit for Preparedness initiative comes to a close, the CDC Foundation will no longer continue to host Summits or manage the online community through this Groupsite platform. But, we want to help you keep the momentum going. If you are interested in staying engaged with other meta-leaders, we encourage you to join a new LinkedIn Group, Meta-Leadership Connections. This group connects you to trusted contacts and helps you exchange ideas, resources and opportunities with a broader network of professionals. Connect with other meta-leaders today to receive updates, take part in discussions, and provide feedback to fellow meta-leaders. If you're interested in helping to manage the LinkedIn group, please contact me at mark@tpargroup.com.

This online community will come to a close May 31st so please be sure to join the LinkedIn Group, Meta-Leadership Connections. 
Again thank you for contributing to the success of the online community and for advancing the practice of meta-leadership. We appreciate your involvement and support.

The Meta-Leadership Online Community Team

U.S. Remains Vulnerable to an EMP

An article recently published by the Los Angeles Times discusses how solar storms pose a grave threat to Earth. Mike Hapgood, a space weather scientist in England, says that the world is unprepared for such a storm, and one is likely to occur soon.

The Heritage Foundation has led a vital campaign aimed at informing the American public about the seriousness of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks. An EMP is typically described as occurring when a nuclear weapon is detonated at a high altitude, resulting in a high-intensity burst of electromagnetic energy caused by the rapid acceleration of charged particles. The second scenario involves massive explosions on the sun's surface ("space weather").

Society is becoming increasingly more dependent on electrical devices, and this leads to greater vulnerability to space weather and EMP attacks. These charged particles, if strong enough, cause the destruction of electrical circuits. This would affect cell phones, computers, vehicles, airplanes, and even the power grid. In the case of an EMP, from "space weather" or a high-altitude nuclear detonation, transportation systems would be halted, communications would be rendered useless, and grocery stores would be unable to preserve or restore food supplies. As observed in 33 Minutes, a successful EMP would send the United States spiraling back to the 18th century.

For Full Article

Getty Images

Small Businesses Embrace Disaster Preparedness

It's not just large businesses that are looking to cutting-edge technologies such as virtualization, cloud computing and mobile devices to beef up their disaster preparedness capabilities. A significant number of small- and medium-size businesses are adopting these innovations as well, a new survey shows. And the move is paying off for them.

More than one-third of SMBs are now taking advantage of mobile devices for business use, according to a worldwide survey of more than 2,000 organizations with between five and 250 employees sponsored by Symantec, the IT security company. Virtualization is also on the radar of SMBs, with 34 percent currently deploying or already benefitting from server virtualization. Even more popular is cloud computing, the survey found, with 40 percent deploying public clouds and slightly more (43 percent) implementing private clouds.

For Full Article

A Partnership That Works

By Daniel Ratcliffe, Former CEO of The Southern Company  Atlanta Journal-Constitution

During a business trip to Hong Kong, a woman picks up what is seemingly a cold. But within a few days, her condition worsens and she collapses, suffers severe seizures and dies. Then the same thing happens to her son.

If this scenario sounds familiar to you, it's because it's the plot of the 2011 film "Contagion." While the story is fiction, the threat is real. In "Contagion," the effects rippled across the nation, closing businesses and schools and disrupting the economy. On a smaller and slightly less dramatic scale, everyday threats such as the flu, heart disease, contaminated food and cancer affect our businesses, our communities and our families.

In a recent survey conducted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Business Civic Leadership Center (BCLC), corporate leaders identified health care among the top five issues affecting their businesses. However, the survey also found that health care is among the top five issues that corporate leaders feel they are least able to affect.

Public-private partnerships offer a solution for those in the business community looking to effect change through corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs. When they met recently in Atlanta, BCLC members learned, in part, about the partnerships forged by the CDC Foundation to help the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) do more, and do it faster.

At their best, partnerships combine resources and expertise from business, government and nonprofit organizations, allowing business leaders and nonprofits to make a difference on the toughest challenges facing our country. In that spirit, the CDC Foundation brings outside corporations and foundations together with the CDC to build innovative partnerships that advance the CDC's lifesaving work to protect us all.

For Full Article