FRED Leadership Spotlights

FRED shines a light on exceptional leaders to recognize their contributions as inspirational role models.

We also honor exemplary leaders at the FRED Forum to celebrate their stories and learn from their experience. 

Leadership Spotlights have included:

Poonam Ahluwaliah

Poonam Ahluwalia is the Founder & President of Youth Entrepreneur and Sustainability (YES) Inc., an international non-profit and development organization. The YES Campaign is an initiative in 55 countries that responds to the enormous global challenge of youth unemployment. Youth Trade is a YES project designed to promote entrepreneurship among people under the age of 35 by creating new markets for their products.

Camila Batmanghelidjh

Camila is the Founder and Director of Kids Company. She founded Kids Company in six converted railway arches in London. Camila has created a unique and pioneering approach in delivering services to vulnerable children. She has always focused the organization's activities on the needs of the most vulnerable without making compromises in order to hit current trends or government priorities. Camila has become an advocate for vulnerable children, speaking regularly at conferences, contributing to numerous publications, and through her book, Shattered Lives: Children Living with Courage and Dignity.

Mimi Silbert

Silbert is the Founder, President and CEO of Delancey Street, a world renowned non-profit organization providing residential rehabilitation services and vocational training for people who have hit bottom. Headquartered in San Francisco, Delancey Street has six national centers serving ex-felons, prostitutes, substance abusers, and others.

The organization's methods have been widely praised and emulated internationally, including by Dr. Karl Menninger who called Delancey Street, "The best and most successful rehabilitation program I have studied in the world." Delancey Street has had more than 18,000 successful "graduates" over more than 40 years.

Silbert is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including 10 Honorary Doctorate Degrees from Brandeis, UMass, Golden Gate University, San Francisco State University, and others.  She will receive her 11th honorary degree from Israel's Ben Gurion University in May 2011.
 

Jim Collins

As author of the business best-sellers, Built to Last, Good to Great, and How the Mighty Fall, Collins is a world-renowned expert on leadership and keen observer of great organizations - how they grow, attain superior performance, and how good organizations can become great.Collins' highly regarded book, Built to Last, has been a fixture on the Business Week best-seller list for more than six years, and has been translated into 29 languages.

Additionally, his work has been feature in Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Harvard Business Review, and Fast Company.

Collins second book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't, attained long-running positions on the New York TImes, Wall Street Journal and Business Week best seller lists, has sold 3 million hardcover copies since publication and has been translated into 35 languages, including such languages as Latvian, Mongolian and Vietnamese.Collins' most recent book, How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In, was published on May 19, 2009.
 

Frances Hesselbein

Hesselbein is one of the most highly respected experts in the leadership development field. She currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Leader to Leader Institute (formerly the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management).  In 1998, Hesselbein was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is America's highest civilian honor.  The award recognized her leadership as Chief Executive Officer of Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. from 1976-1990, her role as the Founding President of the Drucker Foundation, and her service as a "pioneer for women, volunteerism, diversity and opportunity."

Hesselbein is Editor-in-Chief of the award-winning quarterly journal, Leader to Leader, and a co-editor of a book of the same name.  She also is a Co-Editor of the Drucker Foundations' three-volume Future Series and Leading Beyond the Walls, and Leading for Innovation, Organizing for Results, the first two books in the Foundation's Wisdom to Action Series.

Additionally, Hesselbein is Co-Editor (with Marshall Goldsmith) of The Organization of the Future 2: Visions, Strategies, and Insights on Managing In a New Era (2009).  She also is the author of the books, Hesselbein on Leadership and Be, Know, Do: Leadership the Army Way, written in collaboration with General Eric K. Shinseki (USA Ret.).  Hesselbein is the co-editor of 27 books in 29 languages.
 

Warren Bennis

Bennis is one of the world's foremost experts on leadership and the author of 30 books and numerous articles on leadership, change, and creative collaboration.  He is the Founding Chairman of USC's Leadership Institute, Distinguished Professor of Business Administration at the USC Marshall School of Business, and Advisory Board Chairman of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School.  Bennis is also a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Harvard Business School. 

Bennis has consulted for many Fortune 500 companies and has served as an adviser to five U.S. Presidents.  In May 2000, the Financial Times referred to him as "the professor who established leadership as a respectable academic field."  Forbes Magazine has called him the "dean of leadership gurus."  And Business Week named Bennis as one of the top 10 most influential thought leaders in 2007.

His book, Leaders, was named by the Financial Times as one of the top 50 business books of all time.  Additionally, he received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his book, An Invented Life.  His later book, Geeks & Geezers (co-authored with Bob Thomas) was republished (2007) in paperback as Leading For A Lifetime.