The 2012 Mission Driven Management Summit was a great success. A quick recap and pictures are included here.

Thank you to all the attendees of this year's Mission-Driven Management Summit! The event, held March 6-8th at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, brought together speakers and organizations from around the world to hear case studies and participate in interactive sessions designed to help make the connection between strategy and execution, as well as reach peak performance within an organization.

As you know from our announcements, emails, and tweets, we are giving away a grant for a great mission-driven performance effort. Well, the applications came in, and we narrowed it down to the final 6. Below are the summaries of the finalist stories. All the applications were inspiring, so thank you everyone that applies. It gives us inspiration to continue to help mission-driven organizations.

The 2012 Mission-Driven Management Summit is just a few weeks away, so I wanted to offer ten reasons you should register today (if you haven't already):

I think I am like most people in that I use some of my holiday season downtime to catch up on leisure reading I haven't had the opportunity to get to over the previous months. So, when I found myself flipping through my latest issue of the Defense Acquisition Research Journal (DARJ), I was pleasantly surprised to see an article titled "Motivating the Knowledge Worker," by the Defense Intelligence Agency's (DIA) Dr. David E. Frick.

The title immediately drew me to the article because it is the same topic Dan Pink will be discussing at Ascendant's Mission-Driven Management Summit (MDMS), March 6-8, at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

Why do you want to go to the Mission-Driven Summit this year? Ascendant wants to know, and in return, we're awarding two FREE all-access passes to MDMS 2012. All you need to do is shoot, edit, and post a video to our Facebook page that says why YOU should be the attend MDMS 2012.

In a Harvard Business Review blog yesterday, Raymond V. Gilmartin argued that CEOs need a new set of beliefs. What's surprising -- especially for those of us that work in the mission-driven sector -- is that this even bears saying. But what struck me the most in the post was that Professor Gilmartin (the past CEO of Merck) argues that "Purpose, meaning, and recognition are more powerful motivators than economic self-interest, and large external rewards can reduce intrinsic motivation."