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Cristóbal Conde, president and CEO of IT services company Sungard, who endorsed transparency and called “creating a platform for collaboration” the most important task of today’s business leader. It didn’t matter that he almost literally borrowed his own words from an interview with the New York Times earlier this year – they still rang true. “Collaboration is one of the most difficult challenges in management. I think top-down organizations got started because the bosses either knew more or they had access to more information. None of that applies now. Everybody has access to identical amounts of information.” Conde said further: “The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart. And it actually is not a question about monetary incentives. They do it because recognition from their peers is, I think, an extremely strong motivating factor, and something that is broadly unused in modern management.” Conde: “Micromanagement doesn’t scale because it spirals down, and you end up with below-average employees in terms of motivation and ability.”

But add to this array of unexpected connections the work of Imam Rauf on behalf of the U.S. government—which includes serving as an FBI “consultant” and being recruited as a spokesperson by longtime George W. Bush confidante Karen Hughes, who headed up the administration’s propaganda efforts in the Muslim world—and a compelling picture begins to emerge. Bush’s favorite Imam, with backing from a funder with connections to the CIA, the Pentagon and the currency trading company that now sponsors rightwing firebrand Glenn Beck, proposes to build a mosque around the corner from the site of the most devastating terrorist attack ever visited on America. In the name of “[cultivating] understanding among all religions and cultures,” he puts forth a project that offends a majority of Americans and deals a significant setback to the broader acceptance of Muslim-Americans. It’s a little like Billy “White Shoes” Johnson claiming the only reason he moonwalks after scoring a touchdown is to lower tensions on the football field and raise the other team’s spirits.

Chris Owens, the newly elected male district leader from the 52nd Assembly District, “Reform will come to Brooklyn’s Democratic Party eventually. […] The longer Vito Lopez tries to keep the floodgates closed, the more powerful the tide of change will be when they burst.”

The biggest news in North Brooklyn was in a race for one of the smallest seats: Insurgent reformer Lincoln Restler narrowly leads Warren Cohn for district leader as voters were split between two twenty-something candidates pitted on opposite sides of the county’s reform movement. Here’s all the news that’s fit to print on a tight, caffeine-aided deadline (all results reflect 100 percent of the precincts reporting)

To the authoritarian mind, there are only two responses to a demand: submission or defiance, and anything less than total submission is defiance.

The “20th-Century bosses,” as Caputo called them, got whupped.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver isn’t the only Albany leader with a stock-portfolio stake in companies that do business with the state. Republican Senate boss Dean Skelos and his wife, Gail, own shares in 14 companies with a combined 111 state contracts worth more than $2 billion.