先有一系列的 Hilton Hotels
再另外Conrad Hotels定位為更高級的
再整個賣掉?
Spotlight:
 | |
| Pittsburg's Hilton Hotel |
Quote:
欧洲共产党的失败始于波兰团结工会的成立。这是东欧的第一个独立工会，由列宁造船厂电工瓦文萨领导。瓦文萨组织了东欧历史上最大的罢工，并 且后来成为波兰总统。他回忆道："在1980年的罢工中，我们成功地统一了波兰所有社会组织，甚至外国工会也表示了对我们的支持。我们可以对那些共产党人 说，你们一直在欺骗我们，我们才是大多数，我们不想再让你们统治了。这是反共产主义民众第一次以和平的方式战胜了共产主义。他们不再具有号召力，也不能再 象以前那样行事了。另外一个成功是，这是东欧第一个非政党运动。"
百分之八十的波兰人相信，1979年一位波兰人被推选为教皇约翰·保罗二世对团结工会的成立，以及东欧共产主义体制的崩溃产生了直接的影响。波兰政 府1981年12月13日颁布了戒严令，并且将瓦文萨关押了一年。但这并没有动摇瓦文萨认为共产体制必将崩溃的信念，"我在被关押期间对当局称，我们将是 最后的胜利者！我们将为你们这些共产党人钉最后一颗棺材钉。我当时非常肯定，这样强大的运动是难以阻挡的。在胜利的道路上尽管仍旧有这样或者那样的挫折， 但我从来没有对我们取得最后胜利产生过怀疑。"
1983年，瓦文萨获得了诺贝尔和平奖。这更增强了他的必胜信念。由于瓦文萨不愿意离开波兰，他的夫人和儿子去斯德哥尔摩代他领取了奖章和证书。瓦文萨一直坚信，他领导的这场民主运动迟早要获得诺贝尔和平奖的。而该奖又为团结工会的民主运动带来了动力。
Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: 1980年，瓦文萨对罢工的工人讲话1988 年，雅鲁泽尔斯基的波兰政府表达了妥协的意愿，请求瓦文萨停止罢工活动，与政府举行谈判。这位工会领袖清楚，他们离最终目标更近了，"我坚信一点，也努力 为之奋斗，即，没有团结工会便没有自由。我打算继续推动这场运动，直至共产党政权的垮台。当然我也与政府达成了一定的妥协。没有妥协也不能取得最后的胜 利。"
波兰共产党领导人终于明白了，如果他们继续禁止团结工会，忽视瓦文萨的存在，那将会在波兰一事无成。瓦文萨回忆说："我认为圆桌会议是一剂迷魂药。 共产党领导人知道我们的弱点，也知道尽管他们自己并不是很强大，但比我们强大。因此他们提出了一项对自己保险的提案，即为团结工会提供35％的议会席位。 而我们必须乖乖地为他们解决那些棘手的问题。如此，共产党政权可以继续。而我想的是，只要给我一块阵地我就能扩大它。推翻波兰共产党政权的最后一战就此拉 开了序幕。"
如果瓦文萨回忆波兰共产党垮台后这20年历史的话，他对自己的奋斗没有丝毫的后悔，尽管他曾为此付出了自由的代价，"这一切都是值得的。如果我有机 会再选择一次的话，我会做同样的事情。我在之前从来不敢相信波兰能够在我的有生之年从苏联的奴役下解放出来，成为一个自由的国家。而这一切都成为了现实， 而且我为此做出了一份贡献。我对波兰的发展及我们的胜利感到万分的高兴。"
作者：Barbara Coellen / 王雪丁
责编：乐然
Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94.
Paul A. Samuelson at M.I.T. in 1950, where he used mathematics to analyze complex economic theories.
In 1996, President Clinton awarded the National Science and Technology medal to Mr. Samuelson.
Mr. Samuelson discussed the implications of outsourcing in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004.
Mr. Samuelson arrived at Yale graduation ceremonies in 2004.
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Mr. Samuelson helped build into one of the world’s great centers of graduate education in economics.
In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Mr. Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from one that ruminates about economic issues to one that solves problems, answering questions about cause and effect with mathematical rigor and clarity.
When economists “sit down with a piece of paper to calculate or analyze something, you would have to say that no one was more important in providing the tools they use and the ideas that they employ than Paul Samuelson,” said Robert M. Solow, a fellow Nobel laureate and colleague of Mr. Samuelson’s at M.I.T.
Mr. Samuelson attracted a brilliant roster of economists to teach or study at the university, among them Mr. Solow as well as others who would go on to become Nobel laureates like George A. Akerlof, Robert F. Engle III, Lawrence R. Klein, Paul Krugman, Franco Modigliani, Robert C. Merton and Joseph E. Stiglitz.
Mr. Samuelson wrote one of the most widely used college textbooks in the history of American education. The book, “Economics,” first published in 1948, was the nation’s best-selling textbook for nearly 30 years. Translated into 20 languages, it was selling 50,000 copies a year a half century after it first appeared.
“I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws — or crafts its advanced treatises — if I can write its economics textbooks,” Mr. Samuelson said.
His textbook taught college students how to think about economics. His technical work — especially his discipline-shattering Ph.D. thesis, immodestly titled “The Foundations of Economic Analysis” — taught professional economists how to ply their trade. Between the two books, Mr. Samuelson redefined modern economics.
The textbook introduced generations of students to the revolutionary ideas of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who in the 1930s developed the theory that modern market economies could become trapped in depression and would then need a strong push from government spending or tax cuts, in addition to lenient monetary policy, to restore them. Many economics students would never again rest comfortably with the 19th-century view that private markets would cure unemployment without need of government intervention.
That lesson was reinforced in 2008, when the international economy slipped into the steepest downturn since the Great Depression, when Keynesian economics was born. When the Depression began, governments stood pat or made matters worse by trying to balance fiscal budgets and erecting trade barriers. But 80 years later, having absorbed the Keynesian teaching of Mr. Samuelson and his followers, most industrialized countries took corrective action, raising government spending, cutting taxes, keeping exports and imports flowing and driving short-term interest rates to near zero.
Lessons for Kennedy
Mr. Samuelson explained Keynesian economics to American presidents, world leaders, members of Congress and the Federal Reserve Board, not to mention other economists. He was a consultant to the United States Treasury, the Bureau of the Budget and the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.
His most influential student was John F. Kennedy, whose first 40-minute class with Mr. Samuelson, after the 1960 election, was conducted on a rock by the beach at the family compound at Hyannis Port, Mass. Before class, there was lunch with politicians and Cambridge intellectuals aboard a yacht offshore. “I had expected a scrumptious meal,” Mr. Samuelson said. “We had franks and beans.”
As a member of the Kennedy campaign brain trust, Mr. Samuelson headed an economic task force for the candidate and held several private sessions on economics with him. Many would have a bearing on decisions made during the Kennedy administration.
Though Mr. Samuelson was President Kennedy’s first choice to become chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, he refused, on principle, to take any government office because, he said, he did not want to put himself in a position in which he could not say and write what he believed.
After the 1960 election, he told the young president-elect that the nation was heading into a recession and that Kennedy should push through a tax cut to head it off. Kennedy was shocked.
“I’ve just campaigned on a platform of fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets and here you are telling me that the first thing I should do in office is to cut taxes?” Mr. Samuelson recalled, quoting the president.
Kennedy eventually accepted the professor’s advice and signaled his willingness to cut taxes, but he was assassinated before he could take action. His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, carried out the plan, however, and the economy bounced back.
Adding Bite to Academia
In the classroom, Mr. Samuelson was a lively, funny, articulate teacher. On theories that he and others had developed to show links between the performance of the stock market and the general economy, he famously said: “It is indeed true that the stock market can forecast the business cycle. The stock market has called nine of the last five recessions.”
His speeches and his voluminous writing had a lucidity and bite not usually found in academic technicians. He tried to give his economic pronouncements a “snap at the end,” he said, “like Mark Twain.” When women began complaining about career and salary inequities, for example, he said in their defense, “Women are men without money.”
Remarkably versatile, Mr. Samuelson reshaped academic thinking about nearly every economic subject, from what Marx could have meant by a labor theory of value to whether stock prices fluctuate randomly. Mathematics had already been employed by social scientists, but Mr. Samuelson brought the discipline into the mainstream of economic thinking, showing how to derive strong theoretical predictions from simple mathematical assumptions.
His early work, for example, presented a unified mathematical structure for predicting how businesses and households alike would respond to changes in economic forces, how changes in wage rates would affect employment, and how tax rate changes would affect tax collections.
His relentless application of mathematical analysis gave rise to an astonishing number of groundbreaking theorems, resolving debates that had raged among theorists for decades, if not centuries.
An Economic Theorem
Early in his career, Mr. Samuelson developed the rudimentary mathematics of business cycles with a model, called the multiplier-accelerator, that captured the inherent tendency of market economies to fluctuate.
The model showed how markets magnify the impact of outside shocks and turn, say, an initial one dollar increase in foreign investment into a several dollar increase in total domestic income, to be followed by a decline.
Mr. Samuelson provided a mathematical structure to study the impact of trade on different groups of consumers and workers. In a famous theorem, known as Stolper-Samuelson, he and a co-author showed that competition from imports of clothes and similar goods from underdeveloped countries, where producers rely on unskilled workers, could drive down the wages of low-paid workers in industrialized countries.
The theorem provided the intellectual scaffold for opponents of free trade. And late in his career, Mr. Samuelson set off an intellectual commotion by pointing out that the economy of a country like the United States could be hurt if productivity rose among the economies with which it traded.
Yet Mr. Samuelson, like most academic economists, remained an advocate of open trade. Trade, he taught, raises average living standards enough to allow the workers and consumers who benefit to compensate those who suffer, and still have some extra income left over. Protectionism would not help, but higher productivity would.
Mr. Samuelson also formulated a theory of public goods — that is, goods that can be provided effectively only through collective, or government, action. National defense is one such public good. It is nonexclusive; the Navy, for example, exists to protect every citizen. It also eliminates rivalry among its many consumers; that is, the amount of security that any one citizen derives from the Navy subtracts nothing from the amount of security that any other citizen derives.
The features of public goods, Mr. Samuelson taught, stand in direct contrast to those of ordinary goods, like apples. An apple eaten by one consumer is not available to any other. Public goods, he concluded, cannot be sold in private markets because individuals have no incentive to pay for them voluntarily. Instead they hope to get a free ride from the decisions of others to make the public goods available.
A Predictive Principle
Mr. Samuelson pushed mathematical analysis to new levels of sophistication. For example, economists routinely write mathematical models of market economies that assume consumers and producers make choices to maximize their well-being. The question arises when such economies are stable: if disturbed by, say, droughts or wars or technological change, will the economy return to appropriate levels of prices and output or, instead, fly out of control? What Mr. Samuelson’s “correspondence principle” shows is the theoretical link between the behavior of individuals and the aggregate stability of the entire economic system. Information about individual responses, Mr. Samuelson’s theorem holds, shapes predictions about overall economic stability.
He analyzed the evolution of economies with a mathematical model, called an overlapping generations model, that scholars have since used to study, for example, the functioning over time of the Social Security system and the management of public debt.
He also helped develop linear programming, a mathematical tool used by corporations and central planners in socialist countries to calculate how to produce pre-set levels of various goods and services at the least cost.
Late in his career, Mr. Samuelson laid out the mathematics of stock price movements, an analysis that became the basis for Nobel Prize-winning research by his student Mr. Merton and Myron S. Scholes. They designed formulas that Wall Street analysts use to trade options and other complicated securities known as derivatives.
But beyond his astonishing array of scientific theorems and conclusions, Mr. Samuelson wedded Keynesian thought to conventional economics. He developed what he called the Neoclassical Synthesis. The neoclassical economists in the late 19th century showed how forces of supply and demand generate equilibrium in the market for apples, shoes and all other consumer goods and services. The standard analysis had held that market economies, left to their own devices, gravitated naturally toward full employment.
Economists clung to this theory even in the wake of the Depression of the 1930s. But the need to explain the market collapse, as well as unemployment rates that soared to 25 percent, gave rise to a contrary strain of thought associated with Keynes.
Mr. Samuelson’s resulting “synthesis” amounted to the notion that economists could use the neoclassical apparatus to analyze economies operating near full employment, but switch over to Keynesian analysis when the economy turned sour.
Midwestern Roots
Paul Anthony Samuelson was born on May 15, 1915, in Gary, Ind., the son of Frank Samuelson, a pharmacist, and the former Ella Lipton. His family, he said, was “made up of upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants from Poland who had prospered considerably in World War I, because Gary was a brand new steel town when my family went there.”
But after his father lost much of his money in the years after the war, the family moved to Chicago. Young Paul attended Hyde Park High School, where as a freshman he began studying the stock market. At one point he helped his algebra teacher select stocks to buy in the boom of the 1920s.
“Hupp Motors and other losers,” he remembered in an interview in 1996. “Proof of the fallibility of systems,” he said.
He left high school at age 16 to enter the University of Chicago. “I was born as an economist on Jan. 2, 1932,” he said. That was the day he heard his first college lecture, on Thomas Malthus, the 18th-century British economist who studied the relation between poverty and population growth. Hooked, he began taking economics courses.
The University of Chicago developed the century’s leading conservative economic theorists, under the later guidance of Milton Friedman. But Mr. Samuelson regarded the teaching at Chicago as “schizophrenic.” This was at the height of the Depression, and courses about the business cycle naturally talked about unemployment, he said. But in economic-theory classes, joblessness was not mentioned.
“The niceties of existence were not a matter of concern,” he recalled, “yet everything around was closed down most of the time. If you lived in a middle-class community in Chicago, children and adults came daily to the door saying, ‘We are starving, how about a potato?’ I speak from poignant memory.”
After receiving his bachelor’s degree from Chicago in 1935, he went to Harvard, where he was attracted to the ideas of the Harvard professor Alvin Hansen, the leading exponent of Keynesian theory in America.
As a student at Chicago and later at Cambridge, Mr. Samuelson had at first reacted negatively to Keynes. “What I resisted most was the notion that there could be equilibrium unemployment” — that some level of unemployment would be impossible to eliminate and have to be tolerated. “I spent four summers of my college career on the beach at Lake Michigan,” he said. “It was pointless to look for work. I didn’t even have to test the market because I had friends who would go to 350 potential employers and not be able to get any job at all.”
Eventually he was converted. “Why do I want to refuse a paradigm that enables me to understand the Roosevelt upturn from 1933 to 1937?” he asked himself.
Mr. Samuelson was perceived at the outset of his career as a brilliant mathematical economist. He shot to academic fame as a 22-year-old prodigy at Harvard when he began a boldly sweeping and highly technical doctoral dissertation, published as a book in 1947 by Harvard University Press.
At Harvard, as at Chicago, he was not shy about criticizing his professors — “respecting neither age nor rank,” according to James Tobin, a Nobel laureate of Yale University. The young Mr. Samuelson’s chief complaint against economists was that they preoccupied themselves with finer economic principles while all around them people were being thrown into bread lines.
A Bold Dissertation
His attitudes did not endear him to the austere chairman of the economics department at Harvard, Harold Hitchings Burbank, with whom he had a rocky relationship.
But the publication of his dissertation was an immediate success. It won him the John Bates Clark Medal awarded by the American Economic Association to the economist showing the most scholarly promise before the age of 40; it would eventually help him win his Nobel, and it was frequently reprinted despite the heavy resistance of Professor Burbank, selling to economists around the world for more than 20 years. (“Sweet revenge,” Mr. Samuelson said.)
Among Mr. Samuelson’s fellow students was Marion Crawford. They married in 1938. Mr. Samuelson earned his master’s degree from Harvard in 1936 and a Ph.D. in 1941. He wrote his thesis from 1937 to 1940 as a member of the prestigious Harvard Society of Junior Fellows. In 1940, Harvard offered him an instructorship, which he accepted, but a month later M.I.T. invited him to become an assistant professor.
Harvard made no attempt to keep him, even though he had by then developed an international following. Mr. Solow said of the Harvard economics department at the time: “You could be disqualified for a job if you were either smart or Jewish or Keynesian. So what chance did this smart, Jewish, Keynesian have?”
During World War II, Mr. Samuelson worked in M.I.T.’s Radiation Laboratory, developing computers for tracking aircraft, and was a consultant for the War Production Board. After the war, having resumed teaching, he and his wife started a family. When she became pregnant the fourth time, she gave birth to triplets, all boys.
Marion Samuelson died in 1978. Mr. Samuelson is survived by his second wife, Risha Clay Samuelson; six children from his first marriage: Jane Raybould, Margaret Crawford-Samuelson, William and the triplet sons, Robert, John and Paul; and 15 grandchildren. Mr. Samuelson is also survived by a brother, Robert Summers, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Pennsylvania and father of Lawrence H. Summers, director of President Obama’s National Economic Council and former secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton and former president of Harvard.
A Keynesian Textbook
The birth of the triplets doubled the number of children in the Samuelson household, which soon found itself sending 350 diapers to the laundry each week. His friends suggested that Mr. Samuelson needed to write a book to earn more money.
He decided to write an economics textbook, but one that would not only be compelling for students but also sophisticated and comprehensive. And he wanted to center it on the still poorly understood Keynesian revolution. President Herbert Hoover, he noted, had never referred to Keynes other than as “the Marxist Keynes.”
“I never quite understood that venom,” Mr. Samuelson said.
He said he “sweated blood” writing his book, employing detailed charts, color graphics and humor. He wrote: “Economists are said to disagree too much but in ways that are too much alike: If eight sleep in the same bed, you can be sure that, like Eskimos, when they turn over, they’ll all turn over together.”
It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of “Economics.” Business Week, taking note of the textbook’s publication in Greek, Punjabi, Hebrew, Russian, Serbo-Croatian and other languages, once said that it had “gone a long way in giving the world a common economic language.” Students were attracted to its lively prose and relevance to their everyday lives. Many textbook authors began to copy its presentation.
“Economics,” together with shrewd investing, made Mr. Samuelson a millionaire many times over.
Friendship With a Rival
A historian could well tell the story of 20th-century public debate over economic policy in America through the jousting between Mr. Samuelson and Milton Friedman, who won the Nobel in 1976. Mr. Samuelson said the two had almost always disagreed with each other but had remained friends. They met in 1933 at the University of Chicago, when Mr. Samuelson was an undergraduate and Mr. Friedman a graduate student.
Unlike the liberal Mr. Samuelson, the conservative Mr. Friedman opposed active government participation in most areas of the economy except national defense and law enforcement. He thought private enterprise and competition could do better and that government controls posed risks to individual freedoms.
Both men were fluid speakers as well as writers, and they debated often in public forums, in testimony before Congressional committees, in op-ed articles and in columns each of them wrote for Newsweek magazine. But Mr. Samuelson said he always had fear in his heart when he prepared for combat with Mr. Friedman, a formidably engaging debater.
“If you looked at a transcript afterward, it might seem clear that you had won the debate on points,” he said. “But somehow, with members of the audience, you always seemed to come off as elite, and Milton seemed to have won the day.”
Mr. Samuelson said he had never regarded Keynesianism as a religion, and he criticized some of his liberal colleagues for seeming to do so, earning himself, late in life, the label “l’enfant terrible emeritus.” The experience of nations in the second half of the century, he said, had diminished his optimism about the ability of government to perform miracles.
If government gets too big, and too great a portion of the nation’s income passes through it, he said, government becomes inefficient and unresponsive to the human needs “we do-gooders extol,” and thus risks infringing on freedoms.
But, he said, no serious political or economic thinker would reject the fundamental Keynesian idea that a benevolent democratic government must do what it can to avert economic trouble in areas the free markets cannot. Neither government alone nor the markets alone, he said, could serve the public welfare without help from the other.
As nations became locked in global competition, and as the computerization of the workplace created daunting employment problems, he agreed with the economic conservatives in advocating that American corporations must stay lean and efficient and follow the general dictates of the free market.
But he warned that the harshness of the marketplace had to be tempered and that corporate downsizing and the reduction of government programs “must be done with a heart.”
Despite his celebrated accomplishments, Mr. Samuelson preached and practiced humility. The M.I.T. economics department became famous for collegiality, in no small part because no one else could play prima donna if Mr. Samuelson refused the role, and, of course, he did. Economists, he told his students, as Churchill said of political colleagues, “have much to be humble about.”
| 書名 | An invented life: reflections on leadership and change |
| 作者 | Warren G. Bennis |
| 版本 | 重印 |
| 出版者 | Perseus Books Group, 1994 |
| ISBN | 0201627140, 9780201627145 |
| 頁數 | 256 頁 |
Warren Gamaliel Bennis (born March 8, 1925) is an American scholar, organizational consultant and author, widely regarded as a pioneer of the contemporary field of Leadership studies. [1] [2] Bennis is University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Business Administration and Founding Chairman of The Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California. [3]
“His work at MIT in the 1960s on group behavior foreshadowed -- and helped bring about -- today's headlong plunge into less hierarchical, more democratic and adaptive institutions, private and public,” management expert Tom Peters wrote in 1993 in the foreword to Bennis’ An Invented Life: Reflections on Leadership and Change. [1]
Management expert James O’Toole, in a 2005 issue of Compass, published by Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, claimed that Bennis developed “an interest in a then-nonexistent field that he would ultimately make his own -- leadership -- with the publication of his ‘Revisionist Theory of Leadership’ in Harvard Business Review in 1961.” [4] O’Toole observed that Bennis challenged the prevailing wisdom by showing that humanistic, democratic-style leaders better suited to dealing with the complexity and change that characterize the leadership environment. [5]
Contents[hide] |
Bennis grew up within a working-class Jewish family in Westwood, New Jersey, before enlisting in 1943 in the United States Army. He would go on to serve as one of the Army’s youngest infantry officers in the European theater of operations, and was awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star. [6]
He enrolled in Antioch College in 1947 following his military service. Antioch president Douglas McGregor, considered one of the founders of the modern democratic management philosophy, would take on Bennis as a protégé, a scholarly relationship that would prove fruitful when both later served as professors at the MIT Sloan School of Management. [There, Bennis would hold the post of chairman of the Organizational Studies Department.] [7]
Within the area of management, Bennis sought to move from theory to practice in 1967, taking the post of provost of the State University of New York at Buffalo and the presidency of the University of Cincinnati in 1971. He authored two books on leadership during his presidency: The Leaning Ivory Tower, 1973, and The Unconscious Conspiracy: Why Leaders Can’t Lead, 1976. [8]
Bennis chose to return to the life of a teacher, consultant and author following a heart attack in 1979, joining the faculty of the University of Southern California. Most of the best-known of his 27 books followed, including the bestselling Leaders and On Becoming A Leader, both translated into 21 languages. [9] An Invented Life was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. More recent books, Organizing Genius, 1997, Co-Leaders, 1999, and Managing The Dream, 2000, summarize Bennis’s interests in leadership, judgment, organizational change and creative collaboration. Geeks & Geezers, 2002, examines the differences and similarities between leaders thirty years and younger and leaders seventy years and older.[5][2]
Bennis spent time as an adviser to four United States presidents and several other public figures, and has also consulted for numerous FORTUNE 500 companies. [10]
He has also spent time on the faculties of Harvard and Boston University and taught at the Indian Institute of Management-Calcutta, INSEAD and IMD. In addition to his current posts at USC, Bennis serves as chairman of the Advisory Board of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. He is a visiting professor of leadership at the University of Exeter (UK) and a senior fellow at UCLA’s School of Public Policy and Social Research.
Bennis’ impact on the fields of leadership and management theory is significant. The Wall Street Journal named him as one of the top ten most sought speakers on management in 1993; Forbes magazine referred to him as the “dean of leadership gurus” in 1996. The Financial Times referred to Bennis in 2000 as “the professor who established leadership as a respectable academic field.” In August, 2007, Business Week ranked Bennis as one of the top ten thought leaders in business. [11] [12]
Bennis has been ranked as one of the top 30 Leadership professionals in the international Leadership Gurus survey for 2008. The “Leadership Gurus survey” award, by Global Gurus International identifies the top and most influential Leadership professionals in the world by merit and public voting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Beecher_Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe (June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896) was an American abolitionist and author. Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) depicted life for African-Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the U.S. and Britain and made the political issues of the 1850s regarding slavery tangible to millions, energizing anti-slavery forces in the American North, while provoking widespread anger in the South. Upon meeting Stowe, Abraham Lincoln allegedly remarked, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!"[1]
想當年，林肯總統會見《湯姆叔叔的小屋》（Uncle_Tom‘s_Cabin）的作者斯托夫人（Harriet_Beecher_Stowe）時，曾稱頌這位瘦小的老太太為美國黑奴解放戰爭的偉大旗手。
哈里特·伊莉莎白·比徹·斯托（Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe，1811年6月14日－1896年7月1日），美國作家、廢奴主義者，最著名的作品《湯姆叔叔的小屋》成為美國南北戰爭的導火線之一。她的一生以寫作為生，發表了多部作品。
斯托夫人的父親里曼·比徹(Lyman Beecher)是著名的公理會牧師和廢奴主義者，共有8個孩子。她四歲喪母，由長姊教育，在哈特福德長大，後來隨父移居俄亥俄州辛辛那提，一個廢奴情緒強烈的州。成為教師的她，積極參加文學界和教育界的活動。1836年和牧師兼神學院教授斯托(Stowe)結婚，丈夫鼓勵她繼續寫作，但丈夫體弱多病，因此生活貧寒；他們共生有7個孩子，但大都早夭。
辛辛那提和蓄奴州肯塔基州只有一河之隔，他們在那裡生活了18年，經常接觸逃亡奴隸。她自己也到過南方，親眼目到黑奴的悲慘生活。他們的家後來成為幫助南方奴隸逃亡的中轉站之一。1850年，由於丈夫工作變遷，他們搬到緬因州，她從1851年到1852年為華盛頓特區的 報紙《民族時代》撰寫連載小說《湯姆叔叔的小屋，卑賤者的生活》，揭露南方黑奴受到非人的待遇，因此受到南方奴隸主的痛恨，卻在北方受到熱烈的歡迎——成 本印刷出書時，首天就賣出三千本，第一年賣出30萬冊，翻譯成超過40種文字，後來改編成劇本，每次上演場場爆滿，大大促進了北方的廢奴情緒。1853年她發表了《湯姆叔叔的小屋題解》，列舉了大量文件和證據證實《湯姆叔叔的小屋》中的描寫是真實的。同年她去歐洲旅行，在英國受到熱烈讚揚。
1856年她發表《德雷德，陰沉地大沼澤地的故事》，進一步揭露蓄奴制的社會墮落現象。
1859年她發表小說《牧師的求婚》。1869年，《老鎮居民》都是描寫她熟悉的新英格蘭生活。
1869年，她經過對歷史資料的研究，發表了《拜倫生活真相》，揭露拜倫和他妹妹有過亂倫的戀愛關係。因為詩人拜倫是英國人心中的偶像，這篇文章在英國引起大嘩，英國人開始攻擊她。
