In June 2005, Bruce Pasternack was named president and CEO of Special Olympics. One year on, Abeer Anwar, sees what has been accomplished Bruce Pasternack spent almost 30 years as a senior vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. before deciding to join Special Olympics for disabled athletes. "It was a very difficult decision but I felt it was the right time to use my experience in serving the Special Olympics athletes. It is very interesting to manage an organisation that you helped design." Pasternack, 58, was making his first visit to Egypt, taking part in the first managing directors meeting to take place outside the United States and Europe. He met with the seven managing directors of Special Olympics to evaluate the 2000-2005 growth plan and discuss the coming five-year plan. "We hold such meetings to share experiences and learn more about others' mistakes." Commenting on the previous five-year plan, Pasternack said, "It was a challenging one as we focused mainly on doubling the number of athletes from one million to two million. It was a very ambitious target that we were able to achieve successfully. "It is an achievement but we still have other challenges, not only the numbers matter. We still have a long way to go." Pasternack is always looking for perfection. "It is not only quantity that matters but also quality and that is one of our main focus in the 2006-2010 plan." Another focus is collecting $300 million, a huge figure as he admits. "But we can't change any policies except with money. To provide high quality training and competitions and meet the athletes' capabilities, we need more money," Pasternack said. "We need to get our message out. As a global movement we have reached 160 countries but there are still more on the map." According to Pasternack, Special Olympics has to improve the way it operates around the world as one entity. Asked to evaluate the seven regions' performance after the first five-year plan, Pasternack said North America was the most established. "It provides a lot of cash that helps other regions but it needs to grow more. "Special Olympics is not strong in big cities as it is in small suburbs. As for Latin America, Pasternack said he was satisfied with its growth "but we are not growing in some big countries as Brazil and we have to continue working on getting best practices all over the region." In Africa, Pasternack said it is experiencing great growth in some places but that there is still a big challenge in getting right leaders in place in a number of programmes in some countries. "That is our big challenge in Africa: to strengthen local leadership besides overcoming other problems as health and food." Europe-Eurasia has 57 programmes in 57 countries "but we have very mature programmes that are not growing such as in France, Germany and England. In order to overcome such things we need to build awareness and acceptance in such key countries. Also, most of the sports federations are in Europe so we need to build bridges between us and them. "East Asia is growing heavily but the problem is how to manage such growth. Again it is leadership, the most critical thing in East Asia. "The MENA region is one of the most successful. We have great leadership in Ayman Abdel-Wahab. He is a model leader, he's smart and understands the keys of growth and works hard to make key people give a helping hand to the movement. But the challenge is that it needs a lot of trained staff as this is a very hard job for one person although he is doing it well. It is hard to manage a region and that is the key of success of Wahab, that he is making it one of the best regions in spite of such challenges. "The region also has a number of political instabilities in Iraq, Iran, Sudan and Palestine." Pasternack spent 28 years as a senior vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. and was managing partner of its San Francisco office. He was the founding partner and leader of Booz Allen's firm-wide organisation and strategic leadership practice, which is concerned with top management organisation, business model transformation and leadership issues. Pasternack led a worldwide study with the World Economic Forum on how companies build the organisational capacity for leadership and renewal, which was reported on in Davos, Switzerland. Prior to joining Booz Allen, Pasternack was associate administrator for Policy and Programme Evaluation at the Federal Energy Administration (predecessor of the Department of Energy), responsible for all energy policy development and coordination in the presidency's executive branch. He served as principal staff to the president's energy resources council and participated in the Camp David energy summit. Before coming to the FEA, he served as a staff member at the President's Council on Environmental Quality. His industrial experience includes more than four years at General Electric Company's Space Division where he was an aerospace systems engineer, and at Exxon Research and Engineering. Pasternack was brought up in a low-income family and was the first to go to university. "Whenever I do something for the welfare of the intellectually disabled I feel very happy. I also feel that I am among my family members. "It is a challenge but I love it as it is very rewarding on the psychic and emotional levels."
