DATE: 1:30 p.m. Feb. 16, 2007.

EVENT: Paul Tagliabue, former longtime commissioner of the National Football League, will deliver a public lecture for the Yaffe Center for Persuasive Communication, part of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. His talk, “Persuasion: Lessons Learned in the NFL,” is free and open to everyone. No advance reservations or tickets are required.

During Tagliabue’s tenure as commissioner from 1989 to 2006, the NFL grew from 28 to 32 teams; operated under successive long-term labor agreements with the NFL Players Association; supported the construction of more than 20 new stadiums; established NFL operations in multiple overseas markets; created a league-wide Internet network and the subscriber-based NFL TV Network; and secured the largest television contracts in entertainment history, including contracts through the 2011 NFL season worth $25 billion.

Tagliabue is now engaged in several endeavors, including in higher education where he chairs the board of the Graduate Institute of International Relations and Commerce at the State University of New York in New York City and serves on the board of Georgetown University. He also is involved with other not-for-profit organizations.

Before becoming the NFL’s CEO, Tagliabue represented the league as an attorney at Covington & Burling, a Washington, D.C., law firm. Earlier, he served in the office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense as a policy analyst and is now a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Born in New Jersey in 1940, Tagliabue graduated in 1962 from Georgetown University and received his law degree in 1965 from New York University School of Law.

PLACE: Rackham Auditorium, Rackham School of Graduate Studies, 915 E. Washington St. Central Campus map: http://www.umich.edu/~info/maps.html.

SPONSOR: Yaffe Center for Persuasive Communication (www.yaffecenter.org) at the Ross School of Business (www.bus.umich.edu).