>Morning, frenz
>Mornin' Ralph… Please pass the Covfefe.
PB
>>18127895, >>18127984 Penn Biden Center Follow the Pen?
Follow the Linda Rabbitt
UPenn contracted rand* to provide construction services for the new tenant interior project for the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. The project required a complete demolition of an existing tenant space and full build backwhile coordinating with five other construction projects in the building. Constant communication with the building engineer was critical to maintain a master delivery schedule to coordinate loading dock access, freight availability, and dunnage removal with the other contractors working in the building.
The project was a highly custom design featuring custom: wood floors, millwork, glass, lighting, and drywall finishes. The office spaces wrap around a rotunda that required all custom pieces for the finishes. All doors in the project were unique sizes and fabricated specifically for the project requiring coordinated shop drawings with the adjacent glass and millwork wraps. Due to schedule constraints, millwork cabinets were fabricated off-site using hold-to dimensions were topped with lacquer panels both inside and outside the cabinets to have a uniform finish. The kitchen appliances were cladded in custom millwork panels to match the design language of the kitchen. The high-end design and aggressive schedule required careful planning and coordination with the design team and client in preconstruction to ensure the success of the project.
Linda Rabbitt
Founder and Chairman
Linda Rabbitt founded rand construction in 1989 and was one of very few female leaders in the industry at the time. She is still an active leader as Owner and Chair of the Board of Directors, and serves as a resource to the new CEO, leadership, and management teams as they work to advance the vision and strategies for rand’s future.
Under her leadership, rand* grew from being a small tenant interiors firm into a $400+ million national multi-market construction corporation. Her knowledge of the industry and professional experience has enabled rand to deliver award-winning work for a vast client base. With a focus on networking, innovation, quality, and customer service.
Linda serves on the Board of Directors of the Economic Club of Washington, DC, acting as a Trustee of George Washington University, and working as a Director of the International Women’s Forum, she served on the Federal Reserve Board – Richmond, and on the Board of Directors for Brookfield Properties. Furthermore, she is a Horatio Alger Award winner and is featured by sponsoring a program at Harvard Business School teaching women to excel in business and how to join corporate boards. Named as one of the “100 Most Powerful Women in DC” by Washingtonian Magazine and “Outstanding Director” by the Washington Business Journal, Linda continues to push the bar for Women’s causes and achievements in business.
A graduate of George Washington University with a Master of Arts, and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan, she is at heart a teacher and a visionary for advancing the next generation of leaders through education. She enjoys philanthropy, history, traveling the world, and spending time with her five grandsons.
UPenn contracted rand* to provide construction services for the new tenant interior project for the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. The project required a complete demolition of an existing tenant space and full build back while coordinating with five other construction projects in the building. Constant communication with the building engineer was critical to maintain a master delivery schedule to coordinate loading dock access, freight availability, and dunnage removal with the other contractors working in the building.
The project was a highly custom design featuring custom: wood floors, millwork, glass, lighting, and drywall finishes. The office spaces wrap around a rotunda that required all custom pieces for the finishes. All doors in the project were unique sizes and fabricated specifically for the project requiring coordinated shop drawings with the adjacent glass and millwork wraps. Due to schedule constraints, millwork cabinets were fabricated off-site using hold-to dimensions were topped with lacquer panels both inside and outside the cabinets to have a uniform finish. The kitchen appliances were cladded in custom millwork panels to match the design language of the kitchen. The high-end design and aggressive schedule required careful planning and coordination with the design team and client in preconstruction to ensure the success of the project.
>The Director of Penn Biden Cente
>for the opening of the Penn Biden Center they brought in Alan Greenspan's wife.
>Professore Joe
> Follow the Pen?
>Follow the Linda Rabbitt
Rabbitt funded a program at GW around the same time as the Confucius Intstitue was kicking off
Q: One of the school's newest initiatives is On Board, which prepares female executives to serve on corporate boards. What sets it apart from other programs to build boards?
A:This was the brainchild of Linda Rabbitt[MA '72], a trustee of the university who gave a very generous gift to start the program. It's well known that there is a glass ceiling in corporate leadership. Only about 15 percent of the Fortune 500 companies have women on their boards. We care about gender parity, and we care about solutions. So we'll prepare women to serve on corporate boards. For example, there's a New York Stock Exchange certification that guarantees that you have the knowledge to be on an audit committee. Most women don't have that. Our program will focus on leadership elements like that.
What differentiates this program is that we have a close partnership with the International Women's Forum and its network. And we have built a curriculum for this initiative that is deeper than similar programs at other universities.
Q: You're not a typical business school dean. You were barely 41 when you became dean. You speak Mandarin Chinese.You don't have an MBA or a degree in finance—your academic background is in the social sciences and humanities. How does this affect the way you view business education?
A: It applies directly to where I see business schools going. When I graduated from college, I was an area studies major in Chinese language and literature. I believed that to understand China you needed a deep understanding of the culture. The other part comes out of organizational philosophy—the subject of my PhD—and that's the need for corporate responsibility and business ethics.
These values for me were the product of humanities, in the first place, and of social sciences, in the second place.
Being removed from their universities and from society has hurt business schools. I'm a huge believer that business schools have to draw from the disciplines including humanities. There are plenty of people with great critical-thinking minds in the humanities who can help people think about the role business should play.
Q: GWSB has a new partnership in Suzhou, China, in collaboration with Renmin University of China-International College. You did your dissertation research in China, and your 2009 book, China and Globalization, looked at China's role in the world. What does the China initiative mean for students—and for the school?
A: Having deep knowledge and deep ties to a specific place in the world is a critical part of successfully doing business in the global economy. It's wonderful that we have a large and robust international business department in this school, but we need to take it a step further. We need to think about deep institutional relationships in different parts of the world. It's not just about creating opportunities for students and for faculty to do research; we need to think about how we actually change as an institution by having deep relationships.
Dean Guthrie addresses an MBA cohort during orientation.
Jessica McConnell Burt
Our identity as a school and the type of students that we attract will be built around these deep relationships. All sorts of opportunities will come about for our students—both our Chinese students and our American and international students.
Even as you're looking to the other side of the globe, GWSB is also planting deeper roots in Washington, D.C.
We cannot be removed from the societies with which we co-exist—whether we're talking about deep relationships with China or deep relationships with the nation's capital. There are some business schools that build deep relationships with major corporations or industries. But I think the more interesting relationships are with local economies.
There is no more interesting opportunity than that of Washington, D.C. It's a mid-sized city but, at the same time, a cultural center and the capital of the nation. What happens in D.C. really matters. There are lots of strengths in the city. It is the large base of a federal procurement industry. It has a powerful real estate industry that hasn't declined like that of the rest of the country. It also has some of the highest unemployment rates in the entire country. The mismatch between the industries that exist and the jobs that are needed is quite striking.
https://www2.gwu.edu/~magazine/archive/2012_fall/feature3.html