Sun Microsystems: "1000% ROI for mentoring"
Sun just issued a research report documenting the ROI for companies that deploy mentoring programs. Their conclusion? Every dollar spent on mentoring returns $10 of tangible value to the company. Sun Microsystems has a long cultural history of understanding and promoting the value of mentoring within its organization. Now the leaders of the mentoring mission for Sun, Katy Dickinson, Tanya Jankot and Helen Gracon, have published a wonderful and lengthy study of the outcomes of mentoring for the company, "Sun Mentoring: 1996-2009". Among their many conclusions, supported by careful study and research, are that mentoring produces:

• 1000% ROI for the company. Every dollar spent on mentoring produces ten dollars of tangible value
  
• Networks across the company for knowledge transfer
  
• A wide variety of talents
  
• A diversity of ideas and innovation

Our own data at MentorNet show convincingly that positive outcomes through mentoring occur not only intramurally but in connecting corporations to universities and colleges.

CEO's CORNER MentorNet and the Future of Civilization
By David Porush, CEO
"One of the measures of freedom is access to 21st century communication channels..." OK, maybe that's a little grandiose. But let me tell you how I got there. One of the measures of freedom is whether a nation provides equal access for its people to 21st century communication channels. One of the most certain signs of a country afraid of freedom is that it blocks, monitors, or heavily censors the Web, cell phones, television, newspapers, radio, public speech, and school curricula. A second measure of freedom is how women are treated in the culture or under law. The Sunday NY Times Magazine had a wonderful issue last week devoted to women's rights as "the cause of our time." As article after article showed, creating access to opportunity for women alongside men is one of the measures of the civilization of a nation and a precondition for global peace. MentorNet's small, if powerful, contribution to this global project is to help pave both roads to freedom together. We use the Web to build relationships between those who aspire to and those who have already had professional success without regard to boundaries of gender, race and ethnicity. (One of our taglines for our project is "Where aspiration meets experience.") We have traditionally concentrated on women and minorities in engineering and science. Altogether, that puts our work at the intersection of pathways to a more civilized global future.

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