Speaker

Tal Ben-Shahar
Lecturer Harvard University, Author and Co-founder The Happiness Studies Academy & Potentialife

An expert on leadership and the science of happiness, Tal Ben-Shahar combines scientific studies, scholarly research, self-help advice, and spiritual principles to teach people how to optimize their success and wellbeing.

After graduating from Harvard with a BA in Philosophy and Psychology and a PhD in Organizational Behavior, Tal taught two of the  most popular courses in Harvard’s history: Positive Psychology and The Psychology
of Leadership.

He is an international, best-selling author whose books have been translated into more than 25 languages.

Tal is the co-founder of The Happiness Studies Academy and Potentialife.

He is a certified yoga instructor whose work bridges Eastern and Western traditions, ancient wisdom and modern technology, science and art.

Recent book:

Happier, No Matter What: Cultivating Hope, Resilience, and Purpose in Hard Times

Speaker

Amy Bernstein
Editor, Harvard Business Review & VP Harvard Business Publishing

Amy Bernstein is the Editor of Harvard Business Review and Vice President and Executive Editorial Director for Harvard Business Publishing, where she leads the company’s Educational and Learning Content unit. Prior to joining HBR in 2011, she had been VP, Global Thought Leadership, at ManpowerGroup. She has also held senior editorial positions at strategy+business, Business 2.0, The Industry Standard, Brill’s Content, and U.S. News & World Report.

Speaker

Mathis Bitton
Student of philosophy and political theory, Yale University

Mathis Bitton is a student of philosophy and political theory at Yale, currently working at the magazine Palladium. Hailing from Rabat, Morocco, he edits the Yale Historical Review and the Yale Herald, writes columns for the Yale Daily News, and serves as the Vice President of the Yale Political Union. A former intern at the American Enterprise Institute, the French National Assembly, and the Tikvah Fund, his work has appeared in National Review.

Speaker

Steve Blank
Adjunct Professor at Stanford and Senior Fellow for Innovation at Columbia

Steve Blank is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford and Senior Fellow for Innovation at Columbia. He has been described as the Father of Modern Entrepreneurship. Credited with launching the Lean Startup movement the curriculums for the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps and Hacking for Defense and Diplomacy he’s changed how startups are built; how entrepreneurship is taught; how science is commercialized, and how companies and the government innovate.

Steve is the author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany and The Startup Owner’s Manual which revolutionized how startups were built-- and his May 2013 Harvard Business Review cover story redefined how large companies can innovate at speed.

Steve's latest class at Stanford is Technology, Innovation and Modern War, which is providing crucial insight on the impact of commercial technology on the future of warfare.
 
Steve blogs at www.steveblank.com.

Conference Chair

Eduardo P. Braun
Leadership expert, consultant and author

Eduardo Braun is a leadership expert and consultant, keynote speaker, and author. For more than 15 years Eduardo has traveled the globe and interviewed -both on-stage and before cameras- world-renowned management leaders, heads of state, and top academics and entrepreneurs, including personalities such as Pope Francis, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Jack Welch, among others. His new book "People First Leadership" is the result of these many conversations, where he shares intimate stories and practical life lessons of successful leaders who use culture and emotion to drive unprecedented results, and introduces a new vision of leadership where The New CEO -Chief Emotions Officer- establishes stronger connections that get better results and create a culture of inspiration and success. Eduardo is an industrial engineer from the University of Buenos Aires, he has an MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He worked in the US, Europe and Latin America for more than two decades in companies such as Booz Allen & Hamilton, Etex Group, and The HSM Group -global multimedia management company and organizer of the World Business Forum. Eduardo lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with his 6 children.

Speaker

Bernard Charnwut Chan
Non-official Member of Hong Kong's Executive Council, President of Asia Financials Holdings Ltd.

Bernard Charnwut Chan is a deputy to the National People’s Congress of China, a non-official member of Hong Kong’s Executive Council (2004-09 and from 2012) and (from 2017) the Convenor of the Non-Official Members of the Executive Council. He is also a former member of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council (1998-2008).

A graduate of Pomona College in California, he is the President of Asia Financial Holdings and Chairman of Asia Insurance. He is Chairman of the Hong Kong – Thailand Business Council and an advisor to Bangkok Bank (China) Co. Ltd.  He sits on the boards of several local and overseas companies in financial services and is a director of Bumrungrad Hospital Public Company in Thailand.

Among his public service activities, he is Chairperson of the Hong Kong Council of Social Service, Chairman of the Hong Kong Palace Museum Ltd, Chairman of Tai Kwun Culture & Arts Co. Ltd., Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Hong Kong Chronicles Institute, Chairman of the Committee on Reduction of Salt and Sugar in Food and Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of Our Hong Kong Foundation.  Past positions include Council Chair of Lingnan University, Chairman of the Council for Sustainable Development, Chairman of the Antiquities Advisory Board, Chairman of the Advisory Committee on Revitalisation of Historic Buildings and Chairman of the two Standing Committees on Disciplined Services and Judicial Salaries and Conditions of Service. He is also a Trustee Emeritus of Pomona College.

He was appointed a Justice of the Peace in 2002, and a Commander (3rd Class) of the Most Noble Order of the Crown of Thailand in 2004.  In 2006, he was awarded the Gold Bauhinia Star by the Hong Kong SAR Government, and in 2020 he received Hong Kong’s highest honor, the Grand Bauhinia Medal. He has been conferred honorary degrees from Lingnan University, City University of Hong Kong, the Open University of Hong Kong and Savannah College of Art and Design.

He is married and has two children.

Speaker

Tom Davenport
Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management, Babson College; Senior Advisor to Deloitte U.S.

Profile upcoming soon.

Speaker

Emmanuelle Duez
CEO, The Boson Project

On completing her pluralistic studies (Law,  Sciences Po Paris, ESSEC, Bocconi), Emmanuelle founded WoMen'Up in 2011: the 1st association to interweave the themes of gender and generation.

In 2012 she launched 'The Boson Project'  (named after the Boson of Higgs,' the elementary particle of the universe, infinitely small but indispensable to the whole): an atypical and committed consulting firm and research center, which carries and offers with every mission the response to the following question: what if human capital were a treasure and the only lever worthy enough to transform organizations in a sustainable way? The Boson Project focuses on creating within organizations, may they be public or private, the conditions for the full expression  of human potential, individual and collective. In 2016, the consulting firm used its expertise to set foot in the real estate sector hence creating yet another vector for human excellence.

In 2014, Emmanuelle put her energy and convictions to the service of the French Navy. Upon becoming a Navy Reserve Captain, she worked on building bridges between civil society and the military to make the most of the managerial and organizational teachings from both universes. She thus created in 2017, with the War College, the annual event 'À la Croisée des Mondes,' which brings together civilian and military perspectives to inspire leaders and commanders on the notion of leadership.

The power to grasp contemporary issues  is what she wants to give to organizations as well as to collaborators and citizens on the whole. So, in 2018, she ventured outside the company's walls with an original concept: 'Tchatche', a festive and crazy free-fight oratorical show whose ambition is social and civic: to rehabilitate complex thinking, present information in all its nuances, and provide informed debate. In 2019, the civil citizen component was extended upon by opening 'Belleville by Boson', a Parisian agora for people to question  their commitment, their companies, their city. She also joined 'Bugali', a project of non-invasive edutech at the service of toddlers to awaken them to the humanities.

In 2019, Emmanuelle appeared in "Thinkers  50 Radar Class", which lists 30 prominent people to follow for their revolutionary ideas in terms of leadership, business, and management.

Speaker, author of numerous articles and  surveys, she has made it her mission to disseminate information on the opportunities for this new world.

In short, what are the core themes she takes  to heart? New relationships in the workplace, resilience through human excellence, the responsibility of organizations and leaders, managerial transformations, the role of space in transformations, management, the alignment of organizations, and the leadership  of tomorrow.

“The future, you don't have to foresee it, but allow it. "
– Antoine de St Exupéry

Speaker

Juan Enríquez
Author, academic, life sciences venture capitalist; Research affiliate at MIT’s synthetic neurobiology lab; Co-Founder Excel Venture Management;

Juan Enriquez author and teacher on the economic impact of life sciences and brain research on business and society. Business leader and entrepreneur.  He is a bestselling author, a life sciences venture capitalist and a research affiliate at MIT’s synthetic neurobiology lab. He co-founded Excel Venture Management. Author and co-author of multiple bestsellers including As the Future Catches You: How Genomics Will Change Your Life, Work, Health, and Wealth (1999), The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing and Our Future (2005), Evolving Ourselves: Redesigning Humanity One Gene at a Time (2015), and RIGHT/WRONG: How Technology Transforms Our Ethics (2020). Works with the CEOs of a number of Fortune 50 global companies, as well as heads of state, on how to adapt to a world where the dominant language is shifting from the digital towards the language of life. A TED All-Star with ten TED talks on a variety of subjects, as well as dozens of TEDx talks. Serves on multiple for profit boards as well as a variety of non-profits including The National Academy of Sciences, The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, GBH, The Boston Science Museum, Harvard Medical School, and  Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center. He was the founding Director of the Harvard Business School's Life Sciences Project. He sailed around the world on an expedition that increased the number of know genes a hundredfold and was part of the peace commission that negotiated the cease fire with the Zapatistas. Graduated from Harvard with a B.A. and an M.B.A., both with honors.

Recent publication (2020): Right/Wrong-How Technology Transforms Our Ethics

Speaker

Gerd Gigerenzer
Director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy, University of Potsdam

Gerd Gigerenzer is Director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam, Faculty of Health Sciences Brandenburg and partner of Simply Rational - The Institute for Decisions. He is former Director of the Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) Center at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and at the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Munich, Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago and John M. Olin Distinguished Visiting Professor, School of Law at the University of Virginia. In addition, he is Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, the German Academy of Sciences and Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He was awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Basel and the Open University of the Netherlands, and is Batten Fellow at the Darden Business School, University of Virginia. Awards for his work include the AAAS Prize for the best article in the behavioral sciences, the Association of American Publishers Prize for the best book in the social and behavioral sciences, the German Psychology Award, and the Communicator Award of the German Research Foundation. His award-winning popular books Calculated Risks, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, and Risk Savvy: How to make good decisions have been translated into 21 languages. His academic books include Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, Rationality for Mortals, Simply Rational, and Bounded Rationality (with Reinhard Selten, a Nobel Laureate in economics). In Better Doctors, Better Patients, Better Decisions (with Sir Muir Gray) he shows how better informed doctors and patients can improve healthcare while reducing costs. Together with the Bank of England, he is working on the project “Simple heuristics for a safer world.” Gigerenzer has trained U.S. federal judges, German physicians, and top managers in decision making and understanding risks and uncertainties. The Swiss Duttweiler Institute has distinguished Gigerenzer as one of the top-100 Global Thought Leaders worldwide.

Speaker

Alice Guilhon
Dean, SKEMA Business School

Profile upcoming soon.

Speaker

Rita Gunther McGrath
Professor, Columbia Business School

Rita McGrath is a best-selling author, a sought-after speaker, and a longtime professor at Columbia Business School. She is widely recognized as a premier expert on leading innovation and growth during times of uncertainty. Rita has received the #1 achievement award for strategy from the prestigious Thinkers50 and has been consistently named one of the world’s Top 10 management thinkers in its bi-annual ranking. As a consultant to CEOs, her work has had a lasting impact on the strategy and growth programs of Fortune 500 companies worldwide.

Rita is the author of the best-selling The End of Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). Her new book is Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). She has written three other books, including Discovery Driven Growth, cited by Clayton Christensen as creating one of the most important management ideas ever developed. She is a highly sought-after speaker at exclusive corporate events around the globe, such as the Global Peter Drucker Forum.

She received her Ph.D. from the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) and has degrees with honors from Barnard College and the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs.

Follow Rita on Twitter @rgmcgrath. For more information, visit RitaMcGrath.com.

Speaker

Valerie Hackl
Managing Director of Austro Control GmbH, Vienna

Dr. Valerie Hackl has been Managing Director of Austro Control since January 2019, except for the short-term appointment as Federal Minister for Transport, Innovation and Technology as part of the transitional government in Austria in May/June 2019.

Austro Control is a public, privately organized Austrian company responsible for the safe air traffic management in Austrian airspace. The company spectrum ranges from of the passenger aviation up to the approval of drones.

Before she became Member of the Board of ÖBB-Personenverkehr AG in 2015, Austria's largest mobility service provider, she was Head of Group Strategy at ÖBB-Holding AG and worked as a consultant for Bain & Company, one of the world’s leading management consulting companies.

Valerie is a native Austrian and studied Business Management at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and the University of British Columbia / Vancouver. She obtained her doctoral degree at the Swiss Research Institute of Small Business and Entrepreneurship at the University of St. Gallen.

Speaker

John Hagel III
Management consultant and author; Founder Sequoia Group

Profile upcoming soon.

Speaker

Hermann Hauser
Co-founder and Venture Partner, Amadeus Capital Partners

In 2015 Hermann was awarded an KBE for services to Engineering and Industry.

Serial Entrepreneur and Co-founder of Amadeus Capital Partners, Dr Hermann Hauser KBE has wide experience in developing and financing companies in the information technology sector. He co-founded a number of high-tech companies including Acorn Computers which spun out ARM, E-trade UK, Virata and Cambridge Network. Subsequently Hermann became vice president of research at Olivetti. During his tenure at Olivetti, he established a global network of research laboratories. Since leaving Olivetti, Hermann has founded over 20 technology companies. In 1997, he co-founded Amadeus Capital Partners. At Amadeus he invested in CSR, Solexa, Icera, Xmos and Cambridge Broadband.

Hermann is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry and of the Royal Academy of Engineering, as well as an Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. In 2001 he was awarded an Honorary CBE for ‘innovative service to the UK enterprise sector’. In 2004 he was made a member of the Government’s Council for Science and Technology and in 2013 he was made a Distinguished Fellow of BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT.

Hermann has honorary doctorates from the Universities of Loughborough, Bath, Anglia Ruskin, Strathclyde, Glasgow and York.

Speaker

Xavier Huillard
Chairman and CEO, Vinci SA

Born in 1954, Xavier Huillard is a graduate of the École Polytechnique and the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées. He has spent most of his working life in the construction industry in France and abroad. Mr Huillard joined Sogea in December 1996 as Deputy Chief Executive Officer in charge of international activities and specific projects, and then became its Chairman and Chief Executive Officer in 1998. He was appointed Deputy General Manager of VINCI in March 1998 and was Chairman of VINCI Construction from 2000 to 2002. He was appointed Co-Chief Operating Officer of VINCI and was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of VINCI Energies from 2002 to 2004, then Chairman of VINCI Energies from 2004 to 2005. Mr Huillard became Director and Chief Executive Officer of VINCI in 2006 and was appointed Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer of VINCI on 6 May 2010. He served as Chairman of the Institut de l’Entreprise from January 2011 until January 2017. He was appointed Chairman of VINCI Concessions SAS on 20 June 2016.

Speaker

Herminia Ibarra
Professor for Organizational Behaviour, London Business School

Herminia Ibarra is the Charles Handy Professor of Organizational Behavior at London Business School. Prior to joining LBS, she served on the INSEAD and Harvard Business School faculties.

An authority on leadership and career development, Thinkers 50 ranks Ibarra among the top management thinkers in the world. She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network, a judge for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, and one of the 100 most influential people in gender policy around the world, according to Apolitical.

Ibarra is the author of the best-selling Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader (Harvard Business, 2015), which explains how managers step up to bigger leadership roles, and Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career, which describes the process of reinventing one’s career. Her current research investigates enablers and barriers in the adoption and implementation of cognitive technologies in established organizations.

Author of numerous articles in the Harvard Business Review and leading academic journals, she also writes for business publications including the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times, and speaks internationally on leadership and organizational transformation.

Ibarra received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University, where she was a National Science Fellow.

Speaker

Adi Ignatius
Editor-in-chief, Harvard Business Review Group

Adi Ignatius is Editor in Chief of the Harvard Business Review Group, where he has led the transformation of HBR, HBR.org, and HBR’s book-publishing unit. He launched HBR’s Future Economy Project last year to affirm the publication’s commitment to ambitious sustainability goals. Prior to joining HBR in 2009, Mr. Ignatius was the No. 2 editor at TIME.

He is the editor of two books: President Obama: The Path to the White House and Prisoner of the State: The Secret Diaries of Premier Zhao Ziyang. Both made the New York Times Bestseller List.

Mr. Ignatius lived and worked for nearly 20 years overseas. He was Editor of Time’s Asian edition and earlier served as Beijing Bureau Chief and Moscow Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal.

Speaker

Elsbeth Johnson
Senior Lecturer MIT's Sloan School of Management, Managing Director, SystemShift

Dr. Elsbeth Johnson is a Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics. Prior to joining MIT, she taught at London Business School for five years, having previously worked as an equity analyst and a corporate strategist.

She is a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review and the Sloan Management Review, as well as the author of the book, “Step Up, Step Back: How to Really Deliver Strategic Change in Your Organization” (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Elsbeth is the founder of the consulting firm, SystemShift, which works with organizations and their leaders on issues of leadership, strategy and change. She is based in London.

Speaker

Luc Julia
VP Innovation and Director of Technology, Samsung

Dr. Luc Julia, CTO and Senior Vice President of Innovation for Samsung Electronics, directed Siri at Apple, was Chief Technologist at Hewlett-Packard and cofounded a number of start-ups in the Silicon Valley. While conducting research at SRI International,he was involved in the creation of Nuance Communications, now the world leader in speech recognition.

Recipient of Légion d’Honneur, the highest order of France, and member of its National Academy of Technologies, he holds degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from theUniversity Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris and earned a Ph.D. in ComputerScience at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Paris.

He is the bestselling author of the book “There is no such thing as Artificial Intelligence”, holds dozens of patents and is recognized as one of the top 100 most influential French developers in the digital world.

Speaker

David J. Kappos
Partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP

David J. Kappos is a partner at Cravath. He is a leader in the field of intellectual property, including IP management and strategy, the development of global IP norms, laws and practices as well as commercialization and enforcement of innovation-based assets.

From 2009 to 2013, Mr. Kappos served as Under Secretary of Commerce and Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In that role, he advised the President, the Secretary of Commerce and the Administration on IP policy matters and was instrumental in achieving the greatest legislative reform of the U.S. patent system in generations through passage and implementation of the 2011 Leahy-Smith America Invents Act.

Prior to leading the USPTO, Mr. Kappos held several executive posts in the legal department of IBM. From 2003 to 2009, he served as the company’s chief intellectual property lawyer. In that capacity, he managed global IP activities for IBM. During his more than 25 years at IBM, he also served in a variety of other roles including litigation counsel and Asia Pacific IP counsel.

Mr. Kappos has received numerous accolades for his contributions to the field of IP, including being named one of the “Top 25 Icons of IP” by Law360, one of the “50 Most Influential People in IP” and the “Outstanding Practitioner of the Year in IP Transactions” by Managing IP, one of the “Top 50 IP Trailblazers & Pioneers” and one of the “100 Most Influential Lawyers in America” by The National Law Journal, “IP Professional of the Year” by the Intellectual Property Owners Association and being inducted into the Intellectual Property Hall of Fame by Intellectual Asset Management Magazine in 2012.

Mr. Kappos serves on the Boards of Directors of the Partnership for Public Service, the Center for Global Enterprise and the Intellectual Property Owners Education Foundation. He is the Chair of the Advisory Council of the Naples Roundtable, and the U.S. Chair of the U.S.-China IP Cooperation Dialogue. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Law School, where he teaches copyright litigation, and Cornell Law School, where he teaches legal advising for the start-up general counsel.

Mr. Kappos received a B.S. summa cum laude in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Davis in 1983 and a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1990.

Speaker

John Kay
Economist; Editorial contributor to FT; former Chair at LSE, LBS and Oxford; Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to economics

Profile upcoming soon.

Speaker

Julia Kirby
Senior Editor, Harvard University Press

Julia Kirby has been with Harvard Business Review for over a decade and in that time worked with hundreds of expert authors to bring their ideas to the magazine’s managerial audience. Marketing management and strategy are particular areas of interest; she stays on top of the issues facing marketers in leading firms and seeks out new academic research with important managerial implications. She is also the author of a book (with Christopher Meyer) on how the rules of capitalism will change as the center of gravity of global commerce shifts to emerging economies: “Standing on the Sun: How the Explosion of Capitalism Abroad Will Change Business Everywhere“ and Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines (with Thomas H. Davenport)

Speaker

Karim R. Lakhani
Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

Karim R. Lakhani is the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration and the Dorothy and Michael Hintze Fellow at the Harvard Business School. He is founder and co-director of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard, the principal investigator of the NASA Tournament Laboratory at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, faculty co-founder of the Harvard Business School Digital Initiative, and co-founder and co-chair of the Harvard Business Analytics Program.

He specializes in technology management and innovation. His research examines crowd-based innovation models and the role of analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) in the digital transformation of business and operating models. Karim is known for his pioneering scholarship on how communities and contests can be designed and managed to achieve innovative outcomes. He has partnered with NASA, Topcoder, Harvard Medical School, the Broad Institute and Linux Foundation to conduct field experiments on the design of crowd innovation programs. He serves on the Board of Directors of Mozilla Corporation, Local Motors and advisor to several AI-based startups including StormForge and VideaHealth.

Karim was awarded a Ph.D. in management and an SM degree in technology and policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Management from McMaster University. Prior to coming to HBS he served as a Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Karim has published over 150 papers and teaching cases, is the co-editor of Revolutionizing Innovation: Users, Communities and Open Innovation (2016) and Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software (2005). He is the co-author of the book Competing in the Age of AI (2020).

Speaker

Erik J. Larson
Computer scientist and tech entrepreneur whose writings help to shape society’s discourse about artificial intelligence

Erik J. Larson is a computer scientist and tech entrepreneur whose writings help to shape society’s discourse about artificial intelligence. His new book, with Harvard University Press, is The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do. The founder of two DARPA-funded AI startups, Larson is currently working on core issues in natural language processing and machine learning. He has also written for The Atlantic and for professional journals, and been able to test the technical boundaries of artificial intelligence in work with the IC2 tech incubator at the University of Texas at Austin.

Speaker

Maurice Lévy
Chairman of the Supervisory Board, Publicis Groupe

Maurice Lévy is Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Publicis Groupe, the leader in business, marketing and communications transformation. He joined Publicis in 1971 as IT Director, and was appointed CEO of Publicis Conseil, the Groupe’s flagship agency, in 1981. He was named CEO of Publicis Groupe in 1987, a role that he fulfilled for 30 years until being named Chairman of the Supervisory Board as of June 1, 2017. He was responsible for transforming Publicis from a great, French creative agency into a global leader, covering all segments of the advertising industry. With spectacular acquisitions such as Saatchi & Saatchi, Bcom3 (Leo Burnett, Starcom, Mediavest) Zenith or in the digital space with Digitas, Performics, Razorfish, Rosetta and Sapient, today Publicis represents more than 80,000 talents, $10 billion in revenue and is present in more than 104 countries.

In 2016, to celebrate Publicis Groupe’s 90th anniversary, Maurice Lévy was determined to look to the future rather than the past, keeping in line with Publicis’ pioneering spirit. The result was two initiatives – Publicis90, through which Publicis Groupe invested in 90 promising startups and Viva Technology Paris, a global event dedicated to the collaboration between large companies and startups.

Widely recognized as a leading figure in the communications industry, Mr. Lévy also co-founded the French Brain Institute (ICM) in 2005, and serves as the Chairman of the board for several entities, including the International Board of Governors for the Peres Center for Peace. In 2015, he was appointed Chairman of the Pasteur-Weizmann Institute. Mr. Lévy has been honored with numerous distinctions and accolades for his contributions to media, business leadership, tolerance and peace. Mr. Lévy holds the distinctions of Commandeur of the French Légion d’Honneur and Grand Officier of the Ordre National du Mérite.

Speaker

Wolf Lotter
Journalist and Essayist; Co-founder brand eins

Profile upcoming soon.

Speaker

Roger L. Martin
Strategy advisor; former Dean, Martin Prosperity Institute

In 2017, Roger Martin was named the world’s #1 management thinker by Thinkers50, a biannual ranking of the most influential global business thinkers. He was ranked 2nd, 3rd, 6th and 7th in the other ranking years over the past decade.

Roger is a trusted strategy advisor to the CEOs of companies worldwide including Procter & Gamble, Lego and Ford.

Roger Martin is a Professor Emeritus at the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto where he served as Dean from 1998-2013, Academic Director of the Michael Lee-Chin Family Institute for Corporate Citizenship from 2004-2019 and Institute Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute from 2013-2019. In 2013, he was named global Dean of the Year by the leading business school website, Poets & Quants.

Prior to his time at Rotman, he spent 13 years as a Director of Monitor Company, a global strategy consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he served as co-head of the firm for two years.

His research work is in Strategy, Democratic Capitalism, Integrative Thinking, Design of Business, Incentives & Governance, and Social Innovation. His extensive writing includes 12 books and 28 Harvard Business Review articles. His newest book is When More is Not Better: Overcoming America’s Obsession with Economic Efficiency (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020). His previous 11 books include: Creating Great Choices written with Jennifer Riel (HBRP, 2017), Getting Beyond Better written with Sally Osberg (HBRP, 2015) and Playing to Win written with A.G. Lafley (HBRP, 2013); Fixing the Game (HBRP, 2011); The Design of Business (HBRP, 2009); The Opposable Mind (HBRP, 2007); and The Responsibility Virus (Basic Books, 2002). Both Getting Beyond Better and Playing to Win won best book awards at Thinkers 50.

In 2010, he was named one of the 27 most influential designers in the world by Business Week. In 2007 he was named a Business Week 'B-School All-Star' for being one of the 10 most influential business professors in the world. Business Week also named him one of seven 'Innovation Gurus' in 2005.

He serves as Chair of The Good Jobs Institute and the I-Think Initiative, and on the Board of The Nine Dots Prize.

Roger received his BA from Harvard College, with a concentration in Economics, in 1979 and his MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1981. in 2018, he was awarded a Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) by the Royal Military College of Canada. He lives in South Florida with his wife Marie-Louise Skafte.

Speaker

Ikujirō Nonaka
Professor Emeritus, Hitotsubashi University

Speaker

Muriel Pénicaud
Ambassador, Permanent Representative of France to the OECD

Muriel Pénicaud was Minister of Labour of France from May 2017 to July 2020.

She led several structural reforms leading to a significant decrease of unemployment: the reform of the Labour law (2017), the “Professional future” law for apprenticeship, continuing education, and gender equality (2018), inclusive programs for vulnerable people, and short-time work system during the COVID-19 crisis. She was also heavily involved in negotiating European directives, including on posted workers.

In 2019, she chaired the “G7 Social” of ministers of labour, concluding a tripartite declaration between G7 countries and global business and workers’ organizations, aiming to build social protection for all worldwide.
Previously, from May 2014 to May 2017, Muriel Pénicaud was CEO of Business France and French Ambassador for International Investments. Business France is the national agency supporting the international development of the French economy, responsible for fostering export growth by French businesses, as well as facilitating international investments in France and promoting France attractiveness. Ms Pénicaud led the creation of Business France by merging two agencies (AFII and UbiFrance).

From 2008 to 2014, Ms. Pénicaud held the position of Executive Vice-President, Human Resources at Groupe Danone, where she was a member of the Executive Committee, and also served as the Chairman of the Board of the Danone Ecosystem Fund for societal innovation and ESG. She founded and produced the Eve program to develop Women’s Leadership in business, and created “Dan’Cares” a program providing social protection for all employees worldwide.

From 2002 to 2008, she was Executive Vice-President, responsible for Organization, Human Resources and Sustainable Development and member of the Executive Committee at Dassault Systèmes, a global leader company in 3D technology.

After starting her career as a local government administrator (1976-1980), she held a number of management assignments as non-profit organizations director (1981-1985), and then at the French Ministry for Labour from 1985 to 1991. She was a member of the ministerial Cabinet from 1991 to 1993. From 1993 to 2002, she held several international executive positions in Human Resources at Group Danone.

Board positions

Between 2011 and 2014, Ms. Pénicaud was a member of the Board of Orange, chairing the Governance and Corporate Social & Environmental Responsibility Committee.

From 2013 to 2015, she was member of the Board of SNCF, chairing the Transport and Logistics Committee, and she has been a member of the Supervisory Board from 2015 to 2017.

In 2014, she was appointed as a board member at Aéroports de Paris until 2017.

Ms. Pénicaud has also chaired AgroParisTech (Paris Institute of Technology for Life, Food and Environmental Sciences) in 2013 and the French Committee for Economy and Education in 2014.

She previously co-founded (2010) and became Vice-President of TV DMA, the leading academic TV channel for Corporate Management and Business Law at Paris-Panthéon la Sorbonne until 2017. Since 2016, she has been a member of the International Planning Committee of the Global Summit of Women.

Since 2020, as Ambassador of France to the OECD, she is a member of the OECD Council, which is the governance body of the international organization.
 

Education

Master degrees in History and Educational Sciences, post-degree in Clinical Psychology. An executive alumna of INSEAD Business School.

She has also been awarded Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour, Officer of the Order of Merit and Commander of the Swedish Royal Order of the North Star.

She was born in March 1955. She has 2 children.

Speaker

Daniel H. Pink
Author

Daniel H. Pink is the author of six provocative books about business and human behavior. His books include the long-running New York Times bestsellers When and A Whole New Mind — as well as the #1 New York Times bestsellers Drive and To Sell is Human. Dan’s books have won multiple awards, have been translated into 41 languages, and have sold more than three million copies. He lives in Washington, DC, with his family.

Speaker

Patricia Pomies
Chief Delivery & People Officer, Globant

Patricia is a rising star at Globant as she takes on new and diverse leadership roles. Her mission is to ensure key elements of the business: the speed, quality and services of product delivery. As Globant’s operative leader, she oversees the revenue and margin for company-wide operations so that Globant can smartly execute its strategy with maximum value for clients and stakeholders.

Recognizing the importance of Globers’ wellbeing, training and skill development, her responsibilities have recently expanded to include oversight of the People department. Bridging the gap between the People and Delivery areas is a pillar of Globant’s strategy to provide greater value to its clients. To execute her duties efficiently, Patricia regularly takes the pulse of the global company, whether it be consulting with regional management across Globant’s markets, or joining happy hours with software developers to hear their stories.

Her role has become ever more complex as the company has grown to what is today a publicly traded company of 12,000 people working in seventeen countries worldwide. To rapidly scale up the company from startup to multinational, Patricia and her team were the architects of Globant’s secret sauce of agile pods. This industry-disruptive approach gave more autonomy and resources to company teams, putting them at the center of the organizational framework.

Shaped by her experience as a working mother, Patricia is an advocate for having more women in management positions, recognizing the gender gap in the tech industry.  She was one of the architects behind Globant’s Be Kind initiative, encompassing development areas in gender equality, technology ethics and renewable energy, among others.

Patricia came to Globant with a background in education and communications, having taught at four universities. For four years, she was a general manager at Educ.ar, an initiative of the Argentine Ministry of Education to enable digital education access throughout the country, regardless of any student’s geographical or socio-economic disadvantages. Despite moving into the private sector, she continues her passion for women in business and inclusive education by participating in the Women Corporate Directors organization, as well as the advising council of Generación Única, UNICEF’s digital education project in Argentina.

With her husband, Pedro, Patricia enjoys spending time with their daughter Filippa. In her free time, she enjoys painting, water skiing, alpine skiing. She enjoys making cocktails for her guests at home, and also spends time learning from Buenos Aires’ most renowned mixologists.

Speaker

Stéphane Richard
CEO & Chairman, Orange Group

Stéphane Richard, born in 1961, has been Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Orange since March 1, 2011.

He joined the Orange Group in September 2009 and has successively occupied the positions of Deputy CEO in charge of French Operations, CEO Delegate, and CEO. Between 1992 and 2003, Stéphane Richard was successively deputy to the CFO of Compagnie Générale des Eaux, Chief Executive Officer of Compagnie Immobilière Phénix, and Chairman of CGIS (Compagnie Générale d’Immobilier et de Services), now Nexity. From 2003 to 2007, he was Deputy CEO of Veolia Environnement and CEO of Veolia Transport, as well as being a director of Orange.

From 2007 to 2009, Stéphane Richard was Chief of Staff to the French Minister for the Economy, Industry, and Employment.

He is a graduate of École des Hautes Études Commerciales (HEC) and École Nationale d’Administration. He is a French national.

Speaker

Paul J.H. Schoemaker
Author, educator, researcher and entrepreneur in strategic management, decision making, innovation and leadership

Dr Schoemaker is an author, educator, researcher and entrepreneur in strategic management, decision making, innovation and leadership. He was among the first to combine the practical ideas of decision theory, behavioral economics, scenario planning and risk analysis into a set strategic tools and methods for managers.  Paul was the founder and executive chairman of Decision Strategies International, a decades old strategy consulting and training firm, as well as the Chairman of two other companies in Europe and the USA. Paul served for many years as the research director of the Mack Institute for Innovation Management at the Wharton School, where he was also a professor teaching strategy and decision making. He is internationally known for his 115+ articles and twelve books on decision making, leadership, innovation and strategy, including the landmark book Winning Decisions.  Paul also writes a periodic column for Inc.com which has attracted up to 2 million page views. Earlier, Paul was a professor at the University of Chicago for 12 years, where he conducted academic studies in its Center for Decision Research and became a highly cited scholar (top 1% globally). Paul recently started a new company (Q2 Tech) to develop behavioral digital tools for managers steering teams in intelligent enterprises. He also published a new book with George Day, See Sooner - Act Faster (MIT Press, 2019) examining how leaders and organizations can thrive in an age of digital turbulence (MIT Press).

Paul’s hobbies include tennis, golf, and piano. He lives with his wife on the east coast of the US, while retaining roots in the Netherlands, where he was born and raised. 

Speaker

Philippe Silberzahn
Associate Professor, EMLYON

Profile upcoming soon.

Speaker

Michael Skapinker
Associate Editor, Financial Times & columnist

Profile upcoming soon.

Speaker

Richard Straub
Founder and President, Global Peter Drucker Forum

Richard Straub has drawn his ample experience of leadership and management from a 32-year career at IBM during which, among other things, he was instrumental in developing IBM’s PC business in Austria and Europe. As IBM Chief Learning Officer he oversaw the initial drive toward e-learning to enhance traditional education programs. Over the past decade, he and his wife Ilse have built up the Global Peter Drucker Forum. Its aim is the continuous improvement of the practice of management in business and in society. Today, the Drucker Forum is recognized globally as a leading management conference, as reflected in strategic partnerships with the likes of the Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times and the City of Vienna.

In 2012 Richard Straub was awarded the Heinz von Foerster Prize for Organizational Cybernetics and in 2019 he received the Grand Decoration of Honor for the Republic of Austria in recognition of the impact and reputation of the Drucker Forum.

Speaker

Robert I. Sutton
Professor of Management Science, Stanford University of Engineering

Profile upcoming soon.

Speaker

Behnam N. Tabrizi
Consulting professor, Stanford University, Department of Mgmt Science

Behnam Tabrizi is a world-renowned expert in Organizational and Leadership Transformation, best-selling author, and an award-winning teacher, scholar and global advisor.  He has served as a faculty member of Stanford University for the past 25 years; over which time he’s written six books on leading innovation and change. His latest book, The Inside-Out Effect: A Practical Guide to Transformational Leadership, is an international bestseller and was featured by the Washington Post as its best book on the subject of leadership. Another book by Dr. Tabrizi, Rapid Transformation, was chosen by Business Insider, and getAbstract, which covers over 20,000 business books, as their No. 1 book on leadership.

Dr. Tabrizi has advised thousands of global CEOs and leaders in a wide range of industries—including high-tech (Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM and HP), banking and finance, retail, healthcare, and government—on how to plan, mobilize, and implement transformational initiatives that have lifted leaders’ aspirations and created over $23.5B in revenue and over $2.4B in savings for the world‘s most well-known companies. He’s also had the privilege of advising the President of the United States, his cabinet, and the top leadership team at the European Union.

Dr. Tabrizi’s doctoral thesis, a global study of more than 100 companies conducted with McKinsey & Co., was the recipient of the prestigious ASQ award in organization studies. The study demonstrated that faster, more dedicated prototyping—versus more planning—results in a more agile culture capable of rapid product development. His research, touted as “pioneering work” in The Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and the San Jose Mercury News, helped lay the foundation behind both design thinking and agile development.

His work has also been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The Financial Times, The Economist, Strategy+Business, Fast Company, BusinessWeek, and Fortune. Dr. Tabrizi has also been interviewed regarding his work on transformation by the BBC, CNN, and C-SPAN.

Dr. Tabrizi has served on the boards of Clever Sense (sold to Google), WebMBO (merged with Realm Corp.), Catapult Ventures, and has held positions at the Harvard Business School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He received a B.S. in computer science, summa cum laude, and then earned a master’s degree in computer science at the University of Illinois-Urbana. He earned an M.S. degree in engineering management as well as a doctorate in strategy, organizations and digital transformation from Stanford University.

Speaker

Yoshikuni Takashige
Chief Strategist, Global Marketing, Fujitsu Limited

Yoshikuni Takashige joined Fujitsu in 1984. He was engaged in international business, taking strong leadership in developing Fujitsu’s important strategic partnerships and joint ventures with global companies. Throughout his career, he has been exposed to many different people, businesses and cultures around the world, which has helped him shape his thought about transformation of business and society. Since 2012, Yoshikuni has been leading the creation of the Fujitsu Technology and Service Vision, which sets out Fujitsu’s human-centric vision and its thinking on how organizations can innovate by leveraging digital technology. It was first launched in 2013, and has been updated annually. He speaks about innovation and digital transformation internationally.

He received an MBA degree from the Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University, and a Bachelor of Law degree from the University of Tokyo.

Speaker

Zeynep Ton
Professor of practice, MIT Sloan School of Management; President Good Jobs Institute

Zeynep Ton is a Professor of the Practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Zeynep's research focuses on how organizations can design and manage their operations in a way that satisfies employees, customers, and investors simultaneously. Her work has been published in a variety of journals, including Organization Science, Production and Operations Management, and the Harvard Business Review.

In 2014, Zeynep published her findings in a book, The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits. The book draws on 15 years of research to show that the key to offering good jobs to employees, great service to customers, and superior returns to investors is combining investment in employees with specific operational choices that increase employees’ productivity, contribution, and motivation.

After her book was released, company exeutives started reaching out to Zeynep to understand how to implement the Good Jobs Strategy in their organizations, or to describe how they were already adopting the strategy. Zeynep cofounded the nonprofit Good Jobs Institute to help them transform through assessments, workshops, and longer term partnerships.

Prior to MIT Sloan, Zeynep spent seven years at Harvard Business School. She has received several awards for teaching excellence both at HBS and MIT Sloan.

Zeynep lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and four children. A native of Turkey, she first came to the US on a volleyball scholarship from the Pennsylvania State University. She received her BS in industrial and manufacturing engineering there and her DBA from the Harvard Business School.

Speaker

Amy Webb
Founder, Future Today Institute

Amy Webb advises CEOs of the world’s most-admired companies, three-star admirals and generals, and the senior leadership of central banks and intergovernmental organizations. Founder of the Future Today Institute, a leading foresight and strategy firm that helps leaders and their organizations prepare for complex futures, Amy pioneered a data-driven, technology-led foresight methodology that is now used within hundreds of organizations.

She is a professor of strategic foresight at the NYU Stern School of Business, where she developed and teaches the MBA course on strategic foresight. She is a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University’s Säid School of Business, a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center, a Fellow in the United States-Japan Leadership Program and a Foresight Fellow in the U.S. Government Accountability Office Center for Strategic Foresight. She was elected a life member to the Council on Foreign Relations and is a member of the Bretton Woods Committee. She is a member of the World Economic Forum where she serves on the Global Future Council on Media, Entertainment and Culture and the Stewardship Board of the Forum's Platform for Shaping the Future of Media, Entertainment and Culture. She was a Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where her research received a national Sigma Delta Chi award. She was also a Delegate on the former U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission, where she worked on the future of technology, media and international diplomacy.

Webb has advised CEOs of some of the world’s largest companies, three-star generals and admirals and executive government leadership on strategy and technology. She is the author of several popular books, including The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity, which was longlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year award, shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Digital Thinking Award, and won the 2020 Gold Axiom Medal for the best book about business and technology, and The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream, which won the Thinkers50 Radar Award, was selected as one of Fast Company’s Best Books of 2016, Amazon’s best books 2016, and was the recipient of the 2017 Gold Axiom Medal for the best book about business and technology.

Webb was named by Forbes as one of the five women changing the world, listed as the BBC’s 100 Women of 2020, and the Thinkers50 Radar list of the 30 management thinkers most likely to shape the future of how organizations are managed and led.

Speaker

David Weinberger
Senior Researcher, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University

In books, articles, posts, classes, and talks, David Weinberger, Ph.D. explores the effect of technology on ideas. He is a senior researcher  at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and is currently serving as writer-in-residence at Google PAIR (People + AI Research). His latest book, Everyday Chaos (HBR Press) was named Best Business Commentary of 2020 by Axiom, among other international awards. He also edits the open access Strong Ideas book series for MIT Press.

In his varied career, he has been a marketing communications VP and consultant to hi-tech companies, co-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab,  a journalism fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center, an adviser to presidential campaigns, a Franklin Fellow at the U.S. State Department, and a philosophy professor.

Beginning with the best-seller Cluetrain Manifesto, in five books he has explored the effect of technology on knowledge, on how we organize our ideas, on business, and on the core concepts by which we understand our world.

Dr. Weinberger has a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Toronto and lives in the Boston area.

Speaker

Judith Wiese
CHRO, Member of the Managing Board, Siemens AG and Labor Director

Born on January 30, 1971 in Lüdenscheid, Germany
LinkedIn: Judith Wiese

Special responsibilities
– Human Resources
– Global Business Services
– Sustainability

Education
– Master of Business Administration Int’l School of Economics (NL) / University of Duisburg (D)
– Mars Leadership – Exec. education at Harvard Business School

Professional history
2013
– Mars Inc., Brussels/Mount Olive, Belgium/USA
− Vice President OD Chocolate

2014
– Mars Inc., Brussels/McLean, Belgium/USA
− Vice President Talent

2015
– Mars Inc., McLean, USA
− Vice President Corporate

October 2017
– DSM N.V., Heerten, Netherlands
− Chief Human Resources Officer

October 2020
– CHRO, Member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG and Labor Director

Memberships of other boards or committees
– Gartner Global CHRO Advisory Board