'Executive Insights' Speaker Series Hosts Gallup CEO James Clifton

UNIVERSITY PARK, PA (October 25, 2007) – Penn State's Smeal College of Business welcomes James Clifton, chairman and chief executive officer of The Gallup Organization, to campus on Nov. 2 as the final guest this semester in the college's speaker series, Leadership in Focus: Executive Insights.

Clifton will join Smeal Dean James Thomas for an on-stage conversation at 11:15 a.m. in the Business Building's Struthers Auditorium, during which Thomas will pose questions submitted by students and faculty in the audience. The event is open to all students, faculty, and staff.

In 1988, Clifton led the acquisition of The Gallup Organization, one of the world's largest think tanks and providers of public opinion polling and management consulting. Under Clifton's leadership, Gallup has enjoyed a tenfold increase in its billing volume and has expanded from a predominantly U.S.-based company to a global organization with 40 offices in 20 countries.

Clifton is best known in the business world as the creator of The Gallup Path. This metric-based economic model establishes the linkages between human nature in the workplace, customer engagement, and business outcomes. The Gallup Path is integral to the performance management systems in more than 500 companies worldwide and forms the basis of most of Gallup's total revenues.

Clifton's most recent innovation, the Gallup World Poll, is designed to tell the 10 million people who lead, govern, and manage the world what the world's 6 billion citizens are thinking. Clifton has pledged to continually collect people's opinions for 100 years in more than 100 countries to determine the general well-being or "soul" of a country, city, or culture. Questions in this ground-breaking project delve into individual and social needs, including food and shelter, safety and security, mental and physical health, education, jobs, economics and finances, transportation, water and air quality, hope and futurism, leadership approval, religion, and war and peace.

Clifton serves as chairman of the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund. He has received honorary degrees from a number of institutions, including a Doctor of Commerce degree from Bellevue University in Nebraska and Doctor of Humane Letters degrees from Medgar Evers College in New York and Jackson State University in Mississippi.

Leadership in Focus: Executive Insights, an initiative started in the 2006-2007 academic year, is designed to complement the Smeal educational experience by bringing high-profile business leaders to the college to connect with students, faculty, and administrators to share some of their experiences in leadership.

Smeal alumna Julie McHugh '86, company group chairman of Global Virology Business for Johnson & Johnson, was the college's guest on Sept. 28, and alumnus Stephen Sheetz '69, chair of Sheetz, Inc., spoke on Oct. 19.

The speaker series will continue in the spring 2008 semester with guests including Robert Pasterick, vice president and CEO of commercial airplanes for Boeing, and Smeal alumnus James Stengel '83 M.B.A., global marketing officer for Procter & Gamble.

Previous Executive Insights guests include Art Rooney II, president of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and James Turley, chairman and chief executive officer of Ernst & Young.

For more information on the Executive Insights series, visit www.smeal.psu.edu/about/lecture/execin.html.