The Secret to Getting Promoted in Government: Give

• By Mark Micheli
• 7:00 AM ET
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We’ve all been taught that those who succeed are the sharks--the one’s who ceaselessly pursue their own self-interest. They’re aggressive. They’re ambitious. They’re laser focused on their own needs. The successful, we’re told, are the takers. But our guest, Wharton Business School Professor Adam Grant, argues the opposite.

Grant has spent 10 years studying success and, in particular, the dynamic between givers and takers. In his new book, Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, Grant argues that most of us are matchers—we give favors in return for a favor later. But his research has found that those who are most successful tend to be givers—those who give openly and unreservedly.

When it comes to work, whether public or private sector, Grant’s research showed that givers tend to be those most often in line for promotions and advancement. “Groups reward individual sacrifice,” said Grant. “Employees who go above and beyond the call of duty end up earning the respect, trust and goodwill of their team members and then, overtime, those are the employees who are most likely to get promoted ...

The Double Anniversary of the Double Helix

• By Dr. Francis Collins
• May 1, 2013
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Last week, April 25 marked a very special day. In 2003, Congress declared April 25^th DNA Day to mark the date that James Watson and Francis Crick published their seminal one-page paper in Nature describing the helical structure of DNA. That was 60 years ago. In that single page, they revealed how organisms elegantly store biological information and pass it from generation to generation; they discovered the molecular basis of evolution; and they effectively launched the era of modern biology.

But that’s not all that’s special about this date. It was ten years ago last month that we celebrated the completion of all of the original goals of the Human Genome Project (HGP), which produced a reference sequence of the 3 billion DNA letters that make up the instruction book for building and maintaining a human being. The $3 billion, 13-year project involved more than 2,000 scientists from six countries. As the scientist tasked with leading that effort, I remain immensely proud of the team. They worked tirelessly and creatively to do something once thought impossible, never worrying about who got the credit, and giving all of the data away immediately so that anyone who had ...

3 Big Developments in Federal Performance Last Month

• By John Kamensky
• May 1, 2013
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The big news for many was the announcement last week that Shelley Metzenbaum, who is the Office of Management and Budget official spearheading the Obama Administration’s performance management initiatives on a day-to-day basis, will be leaving to return home to Boston.  “She arrived with a plan and gave us a set of priorities,” notes Jeff Zients, who serves as President Obama’s chief performance officer. Her legacy includes the framing and initial implementation of the GPRA Modernization Act.

But April has seen a number of other performance-related items as well, beyond the IBM Center report released in mid-April on the federal government’s new performance framework: 

1. Senate Task Force Renewed.  Last week, the Senate Budget Committee announced that its Government Performance Task Force, chaired by Senator Mark Warner, would be continued in the 113^th Congress.  Budget Committee chair Patty Murray said, “This bipartisan Task Force is an important tool to improve efficiency and effectiveness in government operations.”  In 2010, the Task Force played a key role in the drafting and passage of the GPRA Modernization Act.

2. Federal Performance Agenda in the FY 2014 Budget.  The section in the budget dealing with government performance and management initiatives ...

The 5 Agencies with the Most Out of Touch Senior Leadership

• By Mark Micheli
• April 30, 2013
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The growing disconnect between the SES and the rest is real—and growing. The Partnership for Public Service released data in mid-April showing that, government-wide, members of the SES are more positive than other employees, scoring 18.6 points higher in the annual Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings, with respect to job satisfaction and commitment.

This widening gap in satisfaction tells us where leaders in the federal government are most out of touch with what’s happening on the ground in their organizations. The gap was lowest—meaning, where the SES and other employees had the most similar job satisfaction scores—at the Department of Defense, Department of Commerce, Social Security Administration, Department of Justice, Department of Veterans Affairs and NASA.

The gap between the SES and the rest—that is, where the SES and other employees were found to be most out of touch with respect to job satisfaction—was highest at the following five organizations:

Most Out of Touch Senior Leadership

1. Department of Homeland Security (Gap: 26.0)
2. Department of Agriculture (Gap: 24.2)
3. Department of the Navy (Gap: 23.2)
4. Department of the Air Force (Gap: 21.4)
5. Department of Transportation (Gap: 20 ...

Saturn's Hurricane Is a Super Storm on Steroids, Even for the Solar System

• By Alexander Abad-Santos
• April 30, 2013
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Now that we've got our first good look at it, let's put the mega storm on top of the sixth rock from the sun into some perspective: According to NASA, the eye of Saturn's massive hurricane is about 1,250 miles wide — approximately the distance between Los Angeles and Oklahoma City. That's about "20 times larger than the average hurricane eye on Earth," and the wind speed from the outer edge of this storm, making planet-fall around Saturn's north pole, is being clocked at 330 mph. The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, which gives us the categorical 1-5 labels we use to measure hurricanes on this planet, clocks a Category 5 storm as those with winds higher than 157 mph — and says that kind of storm can leave towns and cities in ruin, uninhabitable for weeks or months, as the 174 mph Hurricane Katrina winds demonstrated. For Saturn's storm, which has been brewing since before Katrina, try almost doubling that.

The first photos to emerge in close-up and in decent enough light to make your jaw drop were actually shot in November by NASA's Cassini space craft. But this thing has actually been tracked ...