Fables and the Art of Leadership—Applying the Wisdom of Mister Rogers to the Workplace

Donna Mitroff received her PhD in Education and a Master's in Special Education from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently the president and founder of the children's media consulting group, Mitroff & Associates. She has served as president of Mediascope (an entertainment industry non-profit), senior VP at Fox Family Worldwide, and VP of WQED West. She has served as executive producer for 'Rinko: The Best Bad Thing,' 'You Must Remember This,' and 'The Fixer Uppers.' She was the executive in charge of production for the National Geographic Specials and for 'Conserving America' and spent several years as development manager for 'Wonderworks Family Movies' on PBS. As a specialist in the Children's Television Act, she has helped networks such as The Hub and production companies such as Cookie Jar Entertainment, American Greetings, Studio B, Chorion, Cinar, and SD Entertainment create shows that meet the Act's requirements. She has been a member of numerous advisory committees and children's programming juries such as The American Center for Children and Media, the Children's Television Advisory Committee for Univision, DIC Educational Advisory Committee, NHK's Japan Prize, and the HUMANITAS Prize. She currently serves on the Advisory Board for Hollywood, Health & Society at USC Annenberg's Norman Lear Center. Ian Mitroff is an emeritus professor from the University of Southern California (USC), where he taught for 26 years. While at USC, he was the Harold Quinton Distinguished Professor of Business Policy in the Marshall School of Business; he also held a joint appointment in the Department of Journalism in the Annenberg School for Communication, where he taught Crisis Management and served as associate director of the USC Center for Strategic Public Relations. Currently, he is an adjunct professor in the College of Environmental Design, and a senior research associate at the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, Haas School of Business, all at the University of California Berkeley. In addition to teaching, he is president of Mitroff Crisis Management, a consulting group that offers an integrated approach to Crisis Management. For 35+ years he has been sought out as an analyst and consultant on human-induced crises, including major incidents such as the Tylenol poisonings, Bhopal, Three Mile Island, the scandal in the Catholic Church, Enron, the war in Iraq, the oil spill in the Gulf, and most recently, the tragic devastation in Japan due to earthquakes and tsunamis. He is widely regarded as one of the 'fathers' of the modern field of Crisis Management. He is the author of several books, including: A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America (1999); Crisis Leadership (2003); Why Some Companies Emerge Stronger and Better from a Crisis (2005); and most recently, Dirty Rotten Strategies: How We Trick Ourselves and Others into Solving the Wrong Problems Precisely (2009). He has an Honorary PhD from the Faculty of Social Sciences, The University of Stockholm. He is the recipient of a Gold Medal from the U.K. Systems Society for his life-long contributions to systems thinking. He is a fellow of The American Psychological Association, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, and The Academy of Management. His PhD is in Engineering Science (Industrial Engineering) and the Philosophy of Social Systems Science from the University of California, Berkeley.