"In this era of upheaval, CEU Business School's aspiration - to merge teaching and research on business and society with traditional commercial subjects to train leaders for markets in transition - applies to all nations, developing and developed."

"Four fundamental, interrelated governance actions inside corporations are essential to create real economic value (not the paper chase that brought the sector low), to enhance accountability, to increase the confidence of investors and other stakeholders and, in this era importantly, to ensure that the public trust and public mission of finance is honored."

"In the multi-polar world of today's foreign affairs, we obviously have no great adversary---no crusade in Europe, no containment of world communism. For the moment, the great powers alternatively compete over economics and resources and haltingly (hypocritically?) seek to cooperate on global problems like climate change. Ours instead is an era of asymmetrical threats originating from failed and failing nations, where there is searing (though not yet nation-threatening) death and destruction involving military units and civilians and only shadowy, incomplete victories."

"The American public is not focusing on Afghanistan today. But, despite a lack of national debate, the administration is making decisions that make Afghanistan its issue---and potentially its very messy problem."

"The fixed fee is not an easy answer to the economic conflicts between firms and corporate clients. But the current economic crisis makes it imperative to have greater predictability and regularity on billing and payment for both law firms and corporate clients. Beyond economic necessity, the fixed fee provides the opportunity for better cooperation on money, just as the enhancement of in-house lawyers has made for much better cooperation on matters."

"Whether in the public sector or the private sector, leaders must at a minimum have the intellectual courage and strength to form red teams and blue teams which fight over the fundamentals of the analysis and isolate and challenge the assumptions which, when eroded, erode in turn the apparent precision of mathematical or systems models."

"Yes, the president deserves some credit for the "beer summit' as successful damage control. But, overall, his personal intrusion into the Cambridge arrest was very damaging: he diverted attention from health care; he failed to teach the nation a lesson on the critical importance of getting the facts right before rendering judgments; and, by subsequently saying that both Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley were good men but each had overreacted, he put the salient issue of racial profiling to the side and, to some extent, just rekindled the debate about the particular facts of a particular arrest."

"Yes, inside corporations we need to alter executive compensation dramatically to reduce the naked annual bonus and the naked stock option as outsized components of executive compensation. Yes, we need to devise compensation systems that pay over time for real economic performance and creation of economic value, that pay for financial discipline and risk management, and that pay for creating a culture of integrity(law, ethics, values). But will needed executive compensation reform inside companies founder because relentless short-term pressure from (some) powerful institutional investors undermines the need to reward executive achievement of performance, risk and integrity measures over a number of years."

"Indeed, the great irony of the President's failure to focus on the importance of facts and the processes for ascertaining them is that the problem of racial profiling stems, of course, from making law enforcement judgments based on stereotypes, not on facts which legitimately give rise to a proper stop or arrest."

"The pervasive problem, however, is that anti-corruption rhetoric exceeds commitment and accomplishment on all fronts. Corruption is deeply entrenched because it is based on lust for money and for power."