Alumni Ink
Why we make the decisions we do is the puzzler Rohit Bhargava 97B explores in Likeonomics: The Unexpected Truth Behind Earning Trust, Influencing Behavior, and Inspiring Action. Bhargava, an adjunct professor of global marketing at Georgetown University, believes we make decisions based on whether we like or dislike a person or a company. The key to a successful business is not just in how good its product is or how smart its leader is, it's in cultivating deeper relationships. This influence doesn't stop at consumers; companies that are liked by their employees are more efficient and successful, as well. "Only one in five people give full discretionary effort at work. How do you motivate people to work harder?" Bhargava asks. The power of likeability can earn trust, inspire action, and wield influence. Even in the digital age, to be truly likeable, social media isn't enough; it often still hinges on face time. "I am still meeting people. There is no substitution for that," Bhargava says. Likeonomics hit number one in the category of Global Marketing and Motivation and Self Improvement on Amazon.com.
Graduating from the Gradies
July 1964 finds Mark Telfair embarking upon a five-year training adventure in general surgery as he begins an internship at Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital. Going to the Gradies is set against the backdrop of an era filled with racial tensions, mixed feelings about the Vietnam war, and rapidly changing sexual attitudes. At Grady, Telfair quickly learns to find refuge in sanity-saving humor, while meeting his future wife in the operating room. While the novel by Georgia native Jon Traer 60C 64M 69MR is fictionalized, it contains many parallels to Traer's life, including the fact that he met his wife, nurse Mary Catherine "Kaye" Payne Traer, in the Grady OR.
Spiritual Revival
In 1418, seventeen monks journeyed to Florence from Padua to revive Santa Maria di Firenze, a venerable Benedictine abbey called the Badia that was at risk of ruin. The monks worked to revitalize it, but soon realized that reformed spiritual practice alone could not save the Badia. Abbott Gomezio di Giovanni commissioned a new cloister to be decorated with vivid and engaging frescoes. Anne Leader 92C, professor of art history at Savannah College of Art and Design, explores the abbey's rebirth in The Badia of Florence: Art of Observance in a Renaissance Monastery. "The most comprehensive and holistic approach to the important, yet much neglected, Florentine monastery ever undertaken," writes Adelheid Gealt of Indiana University.
Quiet Revolutionary
Elbert Parr Tuttle was chief justice of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit from 1960 to 1967, during the tumultuous years of the civil rights movement. As head of the federal appeals court serving the deep South, he led the court to rule on landmark cases involving voter registration, school desegregation, access to public transportation, and other civil liberties. Georgia State Professor of Law Anne Emanuel 75L, who clerked for Tuttle, has written his only authorized biography, Elbert Parr Tuttle: Chief Jurist of the Civil Rights Revolution.
