Indispensable

I'm often asked by non-profit professionals, volunteers and staff, "How can we tell whether we need a marketing plan?"Here's my list of answers:Overconcern with money. This is the most noticeable symptom of the need for a comprehensive, integrated marketing plan. Money is so critically short that every decision becomes one of crisis proportions.There is a desperation quality to events and programs. If one event doesn't meet its funding goal, everyone panics. Soon, the board is checking the financials quarterly, then monthly.

"He swathed himself in quotations -- as a beggar would infold himself in the purple of Emperors." -- Kipling Two roads lead to a reputation for learning and cultivation. The harder is to read a great many worthy books, which is laborious and unfashionable. The easier is to buy an anthology of famous quotations and skim it to garner tags to drop into conversation. For successful bluffing, a comprehensive book of quotations is an indispensable tool. H. L. Mencken wrote in the 1920s that in the United States, "the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive aristocracy."

The Google Story David A. Vise and Mark Malseed Random House / 336 pages If you needed any further demonstration of Google's contribution to the economy, go to Google Book Search on the Internet, type "Google," and see 34,000 published pages that mention the search-engine company and scores of books that are devoted solely to it. Most of these books are user manuals for the product that has become to 21st-century marketing what magazines and newspapers...

Washington -- Among the little-noted ironies of the continuing hoo-ha over John H. Sununu's travel practices is that he took his famed limousine ride to New York the day President Bush gave a prime-time speech on domestic policy that was widely deemed to be a fiasco.In defending his chief of staff later, Mr. Bush said he needed the chauffeured car because he was rewriting the speech along the way -- which explains a lot about the muddled message of the address. A ''tone poem'' on the president's philosophy of government was overlaid with a critique of the slow pace of Congress that suggested lawmakers should be more like delivery men handling hot pizza.

Polls show that Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's name is recognized by about 95 percent of Marylanders. Alan Fleischmann is known by so few that nobody's ever bothered to ask, and he would just as soon keep it that way. Chief of staff is his job, but that title doesn't begin to describe his role in Townsend's professional life. Just about anywhere the lieutenant governor goes on public business, the relentlessly cheerful Fleischmann is likely to be at her side -- providing advice, support, unwavering devotion and occasional damage control.

WASHINGTON -- After nearly a decade as the world's only superpower, the United States still fits uneasily into the role."The indispensable nation," as Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright describes the United States, has assumed so many responsibilities overseas as to stir resentment in some regions as a military and economic bully.It's a bulwark against Iraqi germ weapons, Iranian terrorism, Balkan ethnic carnage, Latin American narcotics and Asian financial turmoil. Yet at crucial points, Washington has trouble getting its way.Despite sending 10,000 extra troops and two aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf, Washington found itself unable to call the shots in negotiations with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

By his own estimation, Yale Stenzler's mark is on 90 percent of Maryland's 1,400 schools. Yet his name isn't chiseled on a one, nor is it recognized by most Marylanders. In 22 years as director of the state Interagency Committee on School Construction, Stenzler reviewed and approved billions of dollars in school building and renovation projects -- so many that he has lost count. He retired in January with attendant chicken dinners and speeches, but now he's been hired on a part-time basis to advise the committee he used to head.

WASHINGTON - The single biggest killer of American and British troops so far in the war with Iraq is a notoriously dangerous and fickle piece of machinery that coalition forces wouldn't dare go into battle without. Helicopters - their own helicopters - have killed 19 American and British servicemen in crashes in and near Iraq over the past week. Two more Americans were captured when they had to ditch an Army helicopter 50 miles south of Baghdad. Another six died last week in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.

ORFOLK, Va -N. - The great recession, mounting debt, military burdens, overconsumption. From New York to Beijing to Paris, there is talk, sometimes jubilant in tone, that the United States is on the decline. Some have even said that it's about time. The truth is, if the U.S. declines, who else could take on the tremendous world role? No one. Rather than jeering, the rest of the world should consider just how much the U.S. does and step up support for it. The security of the world is at stake.

Dr. Roger W. Voigt wasn't confused about the operation that he was about to perform on Don and Jackie Choate's son, nor where his first slice into the 9-month-old boy would be. But Voigt nonetheless stopped to visit little Trey just before the surgery last week at the University of Maryland Medical Center, scrawling his initials on the boy's lower right abdomen to mark the spot while Trey's parents watched. "It was reassuring to me that he came before the operation," Jackie Choate said as she fed Trey a bottle after the surgery, in which Voigt successfully explored for a testicle that hadn't descended into the scrotum before birth.