Speaker

Alex Adamopoulos
Chief Executive Officer, Emergn Limited

Alex is a hands-on executive with more than 25 years experience and a successful track record in global professional services and technology organizations. Alex founded Emergn Limited in 2009. His work has spanned early stage and startup organizations and also Fortune 1000 companies.  Alex has extensive international experience with a deep understanding of culture, work, and life ethics especially in relation to establishing alignment and crossing cultural barriers.

Alex has served in several key leadership roles in his career with well known organizations always with a distinct focus on leadership  development, change management and international growth and expansion. Emergn‘s education led transformation approach is a culmination of a career centered on learning as a change agent.

Speaker

Paul Allen
Founder, Ancestry.com, SOAR.com; Senior advisor at Gallup

Paul is sometimes called the “father of internet genealogy.” He co-founded Ancestry.com in 1997 and devised the content subscription business used today. He pioneered many of the internet marketing channels that Ancestry utilized to become the leading genealogy company in the world. He was honored in 2000 as the Ernst & Young Utah Entrepreneur of the Year and in 2008 as the MarketingSherpa National Entrepreneur of the Year. He is a fellow of the Utah Genealogical Association, one of his greatest honors.

In 2007 Paul founded FamilyLink, whose Facebook apps for families “went viral” and attracted more than 120 million users by 2010. From 2012-2017, Paul lived in Washington D.C. where he worked for Gallup and helped lead the “global strengths movement” based on the StrengthsFinder 2.0 assessment which has been taken by more than 24 million people.

Today Paul runs Soar.com, a leading coaching & training platform. Soar has a major partnership with the International Coaching Federation, the gold standard in professional coaching. Soar also filed a provisional patent on its AI & voice inventions which will soon allow highly valuable curated content in personalized playlists to reach billions of users around the world. Some call it the “Spotify for Human Development.”

Paul advocates what he calls “Massively Distributed Capitalism” -- a voluntary form of free-enterprise that seeks to get ownership interests into the hands of as many stakeholders as possible. He intends to invent the D Corporation--or Distributed Corporation--which will use a blockchain to publicly track company ownership and algorithms to prevent concentrated ownership. B Corporations were first created in Maryland in 2009 under then Governor Martin O’Malley. Paul consulted with the former Governor as he began working on the D Corporation concept.

Long term Paul hopes to launch the Center for Distributed Capitalism at a major university, which will study the 130 million corporations worldwide and celebrate and promote companies with employee ownership, distributed ownership, and the highest percentage of company earnings going to labor. He wants to create a worldwide entrepreneur and consumer movement to support distributed capitalism as a means to reducing economic inequality.

Paul taught entrepreneurship for two years at Utah Valley University and internet marketing for two years at Brigham Young University. He was named a Cyber Pioneer in 2010 by the Cyber Law Section of the Utah State Bar. He was the honored alumnus of the BYU Humanities College in 2016, having graduated in 1990 with a BA in Russian. Paul and his wife Christy live in Provo. They have eight children and four grandchildren.

Speaker

Steven Baert
Chief People & Organization Officer of Novartis

Steven Baert has been Chief People & Organization Officer of Novartis since 2014. He is a member of the Executive Committee of Novartis.

Mr. Baert joined Novartis in 2006 as Head of Human Resources Global Functions in Switzerland, and served in this role until 2008. He has held other leadership positions at Novartis, including Head of Human Resources for Emerging Growth Markets within Novartis Pharmaceuticals from 2008 to 2009; Head of Human Resources for the United States and Canada within Novartis Pharmaceuticals from 2009 to 2012; and Global Head of Human Resources for Novartis Oncology from 2012 to 2014. Prior to joining Novartis, he held HR positions at Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and Unilever.

Mr. Baert studied in Belgium and received a Master of Business Administration from Vlerick Business School in Ghent, a Master of Laws from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and a Bachelor of Laws from the Katholieke Universiteit Brussels. He serves on the board of WeSeeHope charity USA, and from 2015 to 2018, he represented Novartis on the board of GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare Holdings Ltd.

Speaker

Alain Bejjani
CEO Majid Al Futtaim Group

In February 2015, Mr. Alain G. Bejjani was named Chief Executive Officer of Majid Al Futtaim Holding.

Majid Al Futtaim is a Dubai-based lifestyle conglomerate operating in 16 countries and 13 diverse industries. It is the leading shopping mall, communities, retail and leisure pioneer across the Middle East, Africa and Asia. As CEO, Mr. Bejjani led the fundamental shift of Majid Al Futtaim Holding into a strategic architect and Institutional Shareholder for the group, and has been instrumental in transforming the business to be ‘fit-for-purpose’ and sustainably serve the 560 million customers visiting its destinations annually.

Under Mr. Bejjani’s leadership, the company grew its revenues, profits, employment and geographic footprint; established the Majid Al Futtaim Leadership Institute as a centre of excellence for developing current and future leaders; established the Majid Al Futtaim School of Analytics & Technology as a platform for leadership in understanding, predicting and responding to customer preferences; launched a Net Positive strategy, targeting a positive corporate footprint by 2040; and invested in technology that allows the ‘voice of the customer’ to be heard and acted on daily. He has positioned Majid Al Futtaim for long-term growth and success, while cementing its position as the leading privately-owned conglomerate across the region.

Before being named CEO, Mr. Bejjani was Chief Corporate Development and Brand Officer for Majid Al Futtaim Holding, where he was the architect behind the company’s corporate rebranding and redefined its sense of purpose. He also served as Vice President of Legal and Head of Business Development for Properties, the company’s largest operating business. Prior to joining Majid Al Futtaim in 2006, Mr. Bejjani was Executive Vice Chairman of the Investment Development Authority of Lebanon from 2001-2005. From 1999-2006, he was a founding partner of a law firm.

Mr. Bejjani was appointed as Co-chair of the World Economic Forum 2020 Stewardship Board for the Middle East and North Africa, with responsibility for shaping the regional agenda. He was recently appointed Executive Chairman, Board Steering Committee, for the University Leadership Council in the UAE. Mr. Bejjani holds a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Law and a Master’s degree in Civil and Corporate Law from Université Paris-Est Créteil. He is married and has two daughters.

Speaker

Guy Ben-Ishai
Head of Economic Policy Research, Google

Dr. Ben-Ishai serves as the Head of Economic Policy Research at Google Inc. Prior to joining Google, he completed three years of distinguished public service as a senior government official and the Chief Economist at the New York State’s Attorney General’s Office. 

Earlier in his career, Dr. Ben-Ishai also served as a private consultant in both testifying and consulting roles. He advised clients on a wide range of antitrust matters relating to monopolization, price-fixing conspiracies, mergers, and damages. He was also a Visiting Fellow at the Milken Institute in California and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Toulouse in France.

Moderator

Amy Bernstein
Editor, Harvard Business Review & VP and
Executive Editorial Director, 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. Hailing from Rabat, Morocco, he edits the Yale Historical Review and the Yale Herald, writes columns for the Yale Daily News, and has worked on French political campaigns. A former intern at the American Enterprise Institute, the French National Assembly, and the Tikvah Fund, his work has appeared in National Review.

Speaker

Antoine Blondeau
Co-founder and managing partner of Alpha Intelligence Capital

Antoine Blondeau is co-founder and managing partner of Alpha Intelligence Capital, a venture capital firm investing in deep algorithmic science-based Artificial Intelligence companies, globally. A seasoned entrepreneur and investor, Antoine has 25 years of experience in the technology industry, having held senior leadership positions at Good Technology, Salesforce.com, and Sybase.

Antoine’s career highlights include leading Dejima as CEO, the company that powered DARPA’s foundational CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) project that later evolved into Apple’s Siri. Antoine was also chief operating officer of Zi Corporation, whose smart text input software was embedded in hundreds of millions of devices. He was also the co-founder of Sentient Technologies, one of the most advanced AI platform companies in the US.

Antoine is a personal investor, board member and advisor in a number of technology companies in the US, Greater China and Europe. He is an advisor to Pictet & Cie and to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR). Antoine holds a MBA from the Paris Graduate School of Management (ESCP) and has studied at Chuo University in Tokyo. He is the author of 6 patents.

Moderator

Alexandra Borchardt
Journalist, Journalism professor, Adviser, Book author

Alexandra Borchardt is a senior journalist, book author, journalism professor and media adviser. She works as a consultant for the World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) and Hamburg Media School, where she heads the Digital Journalism Fellowship. She is also a Senior Research Associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, where she served as Director of Leadership Programmes. Prior to this she was managing editor of Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), Germany’s leading quality daily.

Alexandra is a journalism professor and programme co-manager at the University of the Arts in Berlin and teaches “Leadership and Strategy in the 21st Century” at TU Munich. She gives lectures and keynotes on digitalisation and the media and regularly publishes commentaries and essays, for example with Project Syndicate, European Journalism Observatory and ada, a German magazine for digital life. She is the author of Mehr Wahrheit wagen – Warum die Demokratie einen starken Journalismus braucht (Dare more truth – Why democracy needs strong journalism), Duden Verlag, 2020, and Mensch 4.0 – Frei bleiben in einer digitalen Welt (Freedom in a digital world), Random House, 2018.

At the Council of Europe she is a member of the Committee of Experts on Freedom of Expression and Digital Technologies and prior to that served as vice chair in the Committee of Experts on Quality Journalism in the Digital Age. She is also a member of the Committee for Editorial Indepencence at Czech publishing house Economia.

At SZ she held several functions in the politics and business sections. She was also founding editor of Süddeutsche’s ‘Plan W’, an award-winning quarterly magazine for women and business. In her reporting she has focused on internet and democracy and the future of work. In 2015 she published Das Internet zwischen Diktatur und Anarchie: Zehn Thesen zur Demokratisierung der digitalen Welt (The Internet between Dictatorship and Anarchy: Ten Assertions about Democracy in the Digital World), Süddeutsche Zeitung Edition Streitschrift. Before joining SZ she worked for Financial Times Deutschland and Deutsche Presse-Agentur.

Alexandra holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Tulane University, New Orleans (1994), and in 2013 completed a Programme for Management Development at IESE Business School, Barcelona. She lives outside of Munich with her husband and two teenage children.

Speaker

Charles-Édouard Bouée
Founder and Managing Partner, Alpha Intelligence Capital;
former CEO, Roland Berger

Charles-Edouard Bouée is a Senior Executive, Investor and Management Thinker. From 2013 to 2019, he served as CEO of Roland Berger, the only leading strategy consulting firm of European origin, which he led from crisis through transformation to a record year in the firm's 50+ years history. Today, he is an active investor in deep tech early stage ventures as Founder and Managing Partner of Alpha Intelligence Capital.

During his more than 20 years tenure in the consulting industry, Charles-Edouard became a seasoned expert in large-scale strategy and reorganization projects, as well as performance improvement. He specializes in disruptive innovation, new technologies and digital transformation, and has developed particular expertise in Artificial Intelligence.

Charles-Edouard has lived and worked in five countries – France, UK, US, Germany and China – and today operates out of Paris and Shanghai/Hong Kong. He sits on the Harvard Business School (HBS) Alumni Board, as well as on the Advisory Board of the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), and is involved in various other business and community organizations around the globe, such as the World Economic Forum’s Global AI.

He has authored a number of groundbreaking books on modern management and China, such as China’s Management Revolution: Spirit, Land, Energy (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2011), Light Footprint Management: Leadership in Times of Change (Bloomsbury, 2013) and Re-entrepreneuring: How Organizations Can Reignite Their Entrepreneurial Spirit (also Bloomsbury, 2018). His latest work on Artificial Intelligence, The Fall of the Human Empire (Bloomsbury, 2019) was first published by Grasset in 2017 (original title: La Chute de l’empire humain), three years after Confucius et les automates (also Grasset, 2014). His books were translated into various languages, including Chinese and Japanese.

Speaker

Tiffani Bova
Chief Growth and Innovation Evangelist, Salesforce
WSJ Bestselling Author, Growth IQ

Tiffani Bova is the global customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of GROWTH IQ (Portfolio). Tiffani was recently named to the Thinkers50 Global  Ranking of Management Thinkers, has appeared on MSNBC and Yahoo Finance and is a regular contributor to Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Marketing Matters on Wharton Business Radio - SiriusXM in addition to a variety of industry-leading podcasts. She is a top influencer in Customer Experience, Digital Transformation, the Future of Sales, Marketing and Customer Service, and was recognized as one of Inc. Magazine’s 37 Sales Experts You Need to Follow on Twitter, a LinkedIn Top 50 B2B Sales Expert in 2019, a Brand Quarterly Magazine Top 50 Marketing Thought Leader, and one of the most Powerful and Influential Women in California according to the National Diversity Council. 

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

Richard Brem
Senior Advisor, Peter Drucker Society Europe

Richard Brem is a freelance journalist, working mainly for Austria's public radio station Ö1. He met Peter Drucker in 1999 on the occasion of Drucker's 90th birthday amd conducted a lengthy video interview with him, which is currently being re-edited and will be released under the title "Drucker Unplugged" on the Peter Drucker Society website later this year.

Speaker

Tim Brown
Chair, IDEO

Tim is a leading voice on the value of design thinking in business and society. His ideas and experience are widely sought in industry, academia, and the nonprofit community; and he’s a regular participant in the World Economic Forum at Davos. Tim is a board member of the Mayo Innovation Advisory Council and the Advisory Council of Acumen Fund, a not-for-profit global venture fund focused on improving the lives of the poor. Tim has a special interest in the convergence of technology and the arts, as well as the ways in which design can be used to promote the well being of people living in emerging economies. In fact, the first seeds for IDEO.org were planted by Tim after a life-changing trip to India. And he has nurtured their growth ever since. Tim joined IDEO in 1987 after earning his MA in design from the Royal College of Art in London.

Speaker

Thomas Bubendorfer
Solo climber and author

Thomas Bubendorfer is one of the most successful active extreme climbers. He has set new standards in modern alpinism when solo climbing the highest and most difficult mountain faces in the Alps, Patagonia, the Andes and Tibet. He is the author of seven books and one of Europe’s most sought-after keynote speakers. He was educated in England and speaks four languages. His clients include IBM, APPLE, Roche, Merck, Allianz, Goldman-Sachs, Bentley, General Electric, KPMG, McKinsey Company, Sber Bank, and many more. He speaks four languages and is co-founder of the Intelligent Peak Performer® method which teaches high-performing business executives how to fulfil their potential without burning out.

In 1988 and 2017 Thomas suffered two near-fatal falls; nevertheless, he achieved his hardest climbs after these accidents. He says that in contrast to success, which is “a bad teacher”, it is through these crises that he has learned the most and that true change came through them.

He has been brand ambassador to companies such as Rolex, Siemens, Sony, Leica, Lanxess and Porsche.

Thomas is presently working on his first book in English and training for the first ascent
of an unclimbed face on Mont McKinley, scheduled in 2021.

Thomas has three children and lives in Monaco.

Moderator

Curtis R. Carlson
Professor of Practice at Northeastern University; Distinguished Executive in Residence at Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Founder & CEO, The Practice of Innovation; Former CEO of SRI International

Curt Carlson in an internationally recognized innovator and thought leader on the practice of innovation.

As CEO of SRI International in Silicon Valley from 1998 to 2014, SRI became a global model for the creation of high-value innovations worth tens of billions of dollars, such as HDTV, Intuitive Surgical for robotic surgery, and Siri on the iPhone.  Mayfield Ventures partner, David Ladd, said, “SRI is now the leading company in the world at converting its technology into commercial value.” 

His teams have won two Emmys, one for HDTV and one for optimized satellite broadcast image quality.  He has helped start over twenty-five new companies. 

Carlson is a professor at WPI and Northeastern Universities, where he teaches value creation and innovation.  Northeastern University has created an online program for Coursera that teaches his value creation methodology, Innovation for Impact (https://www.coursera.org/learn/valuecreation).  An article in the Harvard Business Review will be out this month describing his methodology. 

Carlson’s company, Practice of Innovation, works with companies, governments, and universities to improve innovative performance.  Services include workshops based on Carlson’s proven value-creation practices. These practices are used word-wide by leading companies and government agencies, including in Sweden, Finland, Chile, Singapore, Japan, and Taiwan.

He served on President Obama's National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He was also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Singapore.

With the National Academy of Engineering he helped develop improved U.S. R&D and innovation policies and practices for the National Science Foundation. He has served on many commercial and government boards, including the Air Force Science Advisory Board.

Carlson is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. He won the Otto Schade Prize for Display Performance and Image Quality from the Society for Information Display and he received the Suffolk University’s first Global Leadership in Innovation Award. 

He has honorary degrees from the Malaysian Technical University, Stevens Institute, Kettering University, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.  He is an honorary Kobe, Japan Ambassador.

Carlson wrote with William Wilmot, Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want. That year Innovation was selected by BusinessWeek as a Top-10 Business Book.

Moderator

Laurent Choain
Chief People, Education & Culture Officer, Mazars

Laurent currently serves as Chief People, Education & Culture Officer of Mazars, an international, European-originating, integrated and independent organisation in professional services. Mazars can rely on the talent of 40,000 professionals, led by 1000+ partners in 90+ countries over 6 continents. 

Laurent has led a career at the crossroads of leadership in large companies (banking sector, luxury hospitality), consulting, entrepreneurship as well as business schools.  For more than thirty years, his vocation has been to develop executive education through innovative endeavours in both academic and corporate worlds, founding and leading corporate universities, launching post-graduate programmes for executives and chairing think tanks on the future of leadership education. In June 2011, he joined the board of EFMD as well as the EQUIS Awarding Body in 2014, and became in 2013 a member of the board of the Peter Drucker Society Europe. Laurent also sat on the French Regulation Authority of Business Schools (CEFDG) between 2011 and 2017. He is a professor of leadership at the University of Paris Pantheon Assas, and fellow of ESCP Europe.

Speaker

Jon Clifton
Global Managing Partner, Gallup

Jon Clifton is the Global Managing Partner of Gallup, an advisory firm that specializes in big data analytics of employees, customers, students and citizens. Jon’s mission is to help 7 billion citizens be heard on their most pressing work and life issues through the Gallup World Poll, a 100-year initiative spanning 150 countries.

Jon is a nonresident Senior Fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. He serves on the board of directors of Gallup and has previously served on the board of directors of three non-profits and a startup – Meridian International, StreetWise Partners, Chess Challenge in DC, and Findyr.

Because of his expertise, Jon has been interviewed on BBC News, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, and Al-Jazeera, and has testified in front of the U.S. Congress on the state of American small business and entrepreneurship. He is a frequent contributor on Gallup.com and has written for The Hill, The Diplomatic Courier, and The Global Action Report.

Jon received a bachelor’s degree in political science and history from the University of Michigan and a juris doctor in international law from the University of Nebraska. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Midland University.

Speaker

Scott Cook
Founder and Chairman of the Executive Committee, Intuit

Scott Cook co-founded Intuit Inc. in 1983 and now serves as the chairman of the Executive Committee.

Before founding Intuit, Cook managed consulting assignments in banking, foodservice, and technology for Bain & Company, a corporate strategy consulting firm. He previously worked for Procter & Gamble, the household products giant, in various positions, including brand manager, for four years.

Cook is a member of the board of directors of Procter & Gamble; the Harvard Business School Dean's Advisory Board; the Center for Brand and Product Management at the University of Wisconsin; and the Intuit Scholarship Foundation.

Cook earned an MBA from Harvard University and received a bachelor's degree in economics and mathematics from the University of Southern California.

Speaker

Eric Cornuel
President, EFMD

He holds a degree of Sciences Po from IEP Paris, an MBA from HEC Graduate School of Management, Paris, and a DEA in strategy and management from Paris Nanterre University, together with a Doctoral Certificate in Strategy from HEC Paris and a PhD in management, written on international network organizations, from Paris Dauphine University.

Eric started his career as an entrepreneur by setting up a hydroelectric power plant in France when he was still a student. He was also Director of the HEC Institute for Central and Eastern Europe. From 1997 to 1999 he served as Dean of KIMEP, at the time the leading Business and Economics school in Central Asia, where he was awarded an honorary professorship. Since 1996 he has been Affiliate Professor at HEC Paris. He has taught for 15 years at various management schools in Europe and Asia and received several awards, including, in 2018, the Magnolia Award from the city of Shanghai and the French National Order of the “Légion d’honneur”.

Eric’s key qualifications are in the areas of strategy, international management and entrepreneurship and he is a regular contributor to the Emerald Management Journals. His latest book “The Institutional Development of Business Schools,” which he co-authored with prof. Andrew M. Pettigrew and prof. Ulrich Hommel, was published by the Oxford University Press in 2014.

Eric is, among others, a Board Member of CEIBS (China Europe International Business School), EABIS (European Academy of Business in Society), EBP (European Business Journal), EIASM (European Institute of Advanced Studies in Management), GRLI (Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative), IJBS (International Journal of Business in Society) and ISBM (International Schools of Business Management). He also sits on the board of several companies.

Speaker

Claudia Crummenerl
Managing Director People & Organization globally and Head of People and Organization CE, Capgemini Invent

Claudia is an expert in the people perspective of digital, automation and AI. She collaborates and support clients in how leadership in the digital age is evolving, how workforce and organizations transform through automation and AI, how the HR function is composed and how to engage with employees during the process. Her particular project expertise lies in the rollout of large transformation programs in an international context.

Claudia combines Industry and Consulting expertise. She started and spend half of her career in the automotive industry in various positions in Germany, US and Japan driving change and HR projects. Since joining Capgemini Invent for their reputation in organizational transformation and change management, Claudia has been part of the German consulting team and now is Managing Director for the global People and Organization capability.

With Capgemini Invent’s strategic focus on Digital Transformation, Claudia has focused her thought leadership on how digital is transforming leadership, workforce and organizations. She regularly authors studies with the reputed Capgemini Research Institute and speaks at conference and client events.

Moderator

Gemma D’Auria
Global Leader McKinsey Leadership Practice

Gemma is the global leader of McKinsey’s Leadership Practice. She began her career at the Firm in New York, and is currently based in Dubai.

Gemma is passionate about helping executives enhance the organizational effectiveness of their companies. She drives transformational change programs that lead to stronger performance while also boosting overall organizational health. Her areas of focus are organizational learning and leadership development, two of the most critical levers in driving sustainable and long-lasting change.

In her advisory work, Gemma primarily works with consumer and retail-oriented businesses. She also has served leading financial institutions, principal investors, and family-owned businesses.

She leads McKinsey’s leadership and learning work in EEMA, which offers leadership development and capability building opportunities to leaders across the public and private sectors. She has co-authored a number of articles on organizational topics (most recently, “Leadership in a crisis: Responding to the coronavirus outbreak and future challenges”, “Tuning in, turning outward: Cultivating compassionate leadership in a crisis”, and “Reimagining the post-pandemic organization”) and is one of the contributors to a book recently published by McKinsey, called Leadership at Scale, focused on how to effectively enhance leadership capacity in organizations.

Speaker

Tracey Davidson
Deputy CEO, Handelsbanken Plc; Chair, Handelsbanken Wealth and Asset Management

Tracey joined Handelsbanken from Barclays in 2003 to help to establish banking operations in the UK, where she then became Senior Vice President and Head of Northern UK in 2010. Having successfully secured the acquisition of Heartwood, In 2013 she joined the company as Executive Director, where she led the integration and business development agenda. Tracey subsequently became Chief Executive Officer in 2014 and is now Deputy CEO of Handelsbanken Plc and remains the Chair at the newly renamed Handelsbanken Wealth and Asset Management.

• Board Member of the Personal Investment Management & Financial Advice Association (PIMFA)  
• Board Member at the Chartered Institute for securities and investments (CISI)
• Chair of the Integrity and Ethics Committee at the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investments (CISI).
• Tracey holds the IAC certificate from the CISI and the ACIB qualification from the London Institute of Banking & Finance.

Speaker

Jos de Blok
Founder & CEO Buurtzorg Nederland

Jos de Blok is the founder and CEO of Buurtzorg (neighborhood nursing), a Dutch organization with more than 10.000 employees, offering community based (home) care services to more than 80.000 patients a year. Founded in 2006 with one team of four nurses,  Buurtzorg has transformed home-based health care and it has created an innovative method for nursing care at home. As a community based and client centered organization, Buurtzorg connects highly qualified licensed nurses and clients to create positive and proactive solutions that are effective, holistic, and sustainable. Organized in small autonomous teams of up to 12 nurses within a neighborhood-sized care area, Buurtzorg nurses bring groundbreaking synergy and expertise in a direct and connected relationship between care-giver and client. Buurtzorg has succeeded in reducing administrative burden for nurses, improving quality of care and raising work satisfaction for their employees (Buurtzorg  was awarded three times employer of the year in the Netherlands). Buurtzorg is supported by an innovative IT system and works without management structure. Internationalization started by launching in Sweden, US, Belgium, Japan, China, South Korea, Scotland and UK.

Jos de Blok is a nurse by education and considered a change agent in the Netherlands when it comes to the organization of community based (home) care. Before he established Buurtzorg he had several senior management positions in home care organizations including director Innovations for medical services.

Moderator

Aaron De Smet
Senior Partner, McKinsey & Company

Aaron counsels leadership teams as they transform their organisations to improve performance, organisational health, speed, and agility. He is an expert on leadership development, organisational design, corporate culture, team effectiveness, capability building, and transformational change.

He writes frequently in McKinsey Quarterly and elsewhere. Recently Aaron acted as lead author of the series Leadership in a crisis: Responding to the coronavirus outbreak and future challenges. It draws together McKinsey’s collective thinking and expertise on five behaviours to help leaders navigate the pandemic and recovery. Separate articles describe organising via a network of teams; displaying deliberate calm and bounded optimism; making decisions amid uncertainty; demonstrating empathy; and communicating effectively.

Before joining McKinsey, Aaron worked at several other consultancies, and as a research associate at the Institute for Behavior Resources. He has a PhD from Columbia University, where he specialised in organisational dynamics, culture, human-resource management, leadership effectiveness, and strategic change.

Moderator

Steve Denning
Member of the Board of Directors of SD Learning Consortium; Forbes contributor

Steve was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He studied law and psychology at Sydney University and worked as a lawyer in Sydney for several years. He did a postgraduate degree in law at Oxford University in the U.K. From 1996 to 2000, Steve was the Program Director, Knowledge Management at the World Bank where he spearheaded the organizational knowledge sharing program.

In 2000, Steve Denning was selected as one of the world’s ten Most Admired Knowledge Leaders (Teleos) and in 2003 he was ranked as one of the world‘s Top Two Hundred Business Gurus by Davenport & Prusak, “What‘s The Big Idea?” (Harvard, 2003).

He now works with organizations in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia on leadership, innovation, business narrative and most recently, on radical management.

Steve Denning is the author of the award-winning books “The Leader‘s Guide to Radical Management: Re-inventing the Workplace for the 21st Century“ (Jossey-Bass, 2010), “The Secret Language of Leadership” (Jossey-Bass, 2007) and “The Leader‘s Guide to
Storytelling” (Jossey-Bass, 2005).

Moderator

Tina Deutsch
Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Haufe Advisory

Tina Deutsch is Co-founder and Managing Partner of Haufe Advisory, an innovative online platform that brings over 1.000 of the most sought-after freelance consultants & coaches to organizations worldwide – thereby significantly shaping the future world of work. Through this network of senior professionals, Tina observes daily how the current crisis has shifted demand of leaders looking for external support and what the biggest struggles of leaders are during times of constant change.

Prior to founding her own company, Tina spent 10 years in the corporate world leading large transformation programs and managing international teams. Parallel to growing and then selling her company and becoming one of the most successful start-up founders in Austria, Tina became mother of now seven-year-old Anna Sophia. Tina is a regular panelist and keynote speaker on leadership, entrepreneurship and the new world of work.

Moderator

Philippe Dewost
Senior Advisor Internet, Tech & Digital Transformation Co-founded Wanadoo

Since the start of Wanadoo (Europe’s #1 Internet Service Provider), Philippe Dewost has been successfully launching consumer services, software startups, technology ecosystems, and corporate transformation programs. His innovation driven expertise spans across the private and public sectors, where Philippe is recognized as an senior advisor as well as an inspiring speaker.

Philippe has a deep experience in deploying for the many, through both scaling and empowering. He built and ran product management for Wanadoo across its first 4 years and first million subscribers. As CEO of imsense in Cambridge, he turned proprietary, patent protected dynamic range processing into eye-fidelity™ technology, now used half a billion times a day to enhance pictures taken with iPhones after Apple acquired the company.

While deploying Leonard, VINCI Group’s Corporate Innovation and Transformation Program, he combined a series of exploration groups ranging across 7 key future topics (Autonomous Vehicle, Climatic Resilience, AI, …) with an Intrapreneurship Program currently considered as a reference by other large Corporates.

He had previously led a €4,25 Bn digital package for the French Government - the Investments for The Future Program, where he wrote the report for the Prime Minister on how to make France a more attractive destination for innovators, Tech Entrepreneurs, and foreign Venture Capital Firms : his report sparked "La French Tech". He then initiated a joint Blockchain R&D effort with 27 institutions and partners.

A graduate in Physics at Normale Sup (Ulm), former Navigation Officer in the French Navy, Philippe holds a Master in Telecommunications from Telecom ParisTech and a MBA from Collège des Ingénieurs.

Moderator

Karen Dillon
Former editor of Harvard Business Review

Karen Dillon is the former editor of the Harvard Business Review and long-time collaborator with Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, including co-authoring the forthcoming book The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lifts Nations out of Poverty with Efosa Ojomo. She is also the co-author, with Christensen, of the New York Times bestseller How Will You Measure Your Life? She is also the editorial director of BanyanGlobal Family Business Advisors. A graduate of Cornell University and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, she has been named by Ashoka as one of the world’s most influential and inspiring women.

Speaker

Amy Edmondson
Professor of Leadership & Management, HBS

Amy C. Edmondson, PhD is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, a chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society.

Edmondson has been ranked by the biannual Thinkers50 global list of top management thinkers since 2011 (most recently #13). She teaches and writes on leadership, teams and organizational learning.  Her most recent book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety for Learning, Innovation, and Growth offers practical guidance for leaders who are serious about building a thriving organization in the today’s uncertain environment. Her prior books, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate and Compete in the Knowledge Economy and Teaming to Innovate (Jossey-Bass, 2012, 2103) and Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation (Berrett-Koehler, 2016) explore teamwork in dynamic, unpredictable work environments.

Before her academic career, she was Director of Research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she worked on the design and implementation of transformational change in large companies. In the early 1980s, she worked as Chief Engineer for architect/inventor Buckminster Fuller, and her book A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller (Birkauser Boston, 1987) clarifies Fuller's mathematical contributions for a non-technical audience. Edmondson received her PhD in organizational behavior, AM in psychology, and AB in engineering and design, all from Harvard University.

She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, George Daley, a physician-scientist and Dean of Harvard Medical School, with their two college-age sons.

Speaker

Tamara J. Erickson
Leadership Advisor; top ranked management thinker, T50

Tamara J. Erickson is a McKinsey Award-winning author and a widely-respected authority on new approaches to leadership, the changing workforce, collaboration and innovation, and the nature of work in intelligent organizations.  At London Business School, Erickson has designed and directs the school’s leadership programme for senior-most executives, Leading Businesses into the Future, works with executives in a number of custom programmes, and teaches in the School’s Masters programmes.

She has five times been named one of the 50 most influential living management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50, the respected ranking of global business thinkers. Her leading-edge work is consistently showcased in the prestigious Global Drucker Forum, an international conference of prominent business leaders. She has authored five books and numerous widely-cited articles.

An experienced executive and global advisor, Erickson has also served on the Board of Directors of two Fortune 500 corporations, where she served on Governance, Audit, and Compensation Committees and as the Lead Independent Director.

Erickson holds a BA degree from the University of Chicago and an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, where she was the recipient of the James Thomas Chirurg Fellowship.

Moderator

Mark Esposito
Professor at Hult International Business School,
Co-Founder & CLO, Nexus Frontier, Author, and Advisor

Mark Esposito is recognized internationally as a top global thought leader in matters relating to The Fourth Industrial Revolution, the changes and opportunities that technology will bring to a variety of industries. He is Co-Founder and Chief Learning Officer at Nexus FrontierTech, an AI scale-up venture. He was inducted in 2016 in the radar of Thinkers50 as one of the 30 most prominent rising business thinkers in the world.

He is a global expert of the World Economic Forum and advisor to national governments. In his academic career, Mark has held academic appointments for some of the world’s leading institutions such as Hult International Business School, Harvard University, University of Cambridge, Arizona State University’s Thunderbird and IE Business School.

He has developed executive courses for Harvard University's Division of Continuing Education and served as Institutes Council Co-Leader, at the Microeconomics of Competitiveness program (MOC) at the Institute of Strategy and Competitiveness, at Harvard Business School under the mentorship of Professor Michael E. Porter.

He is a nonresident Fellow at the Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government in Dubai as well as Research Associate for the University College London, Blockchain Technologies. He serves as Senior Advisor at Cambrian Futures a global advisory deep tech thinktank. Since 2020, he is a Subject Matter Expert for the National Program on Artificial Intelligence at the Prime Minister Office of the UAE.

In his career he has written hundreds of op-eds and professional publications, over 150 peer review articles, several book chapters, over 40 case studies and 11 books, including two bestsellers. Mark is indeed the co-author of the best seller “Understanding How the Future Unfolds: Using DRIVE to Harness the Power of Today's Megatrends”. The framework contained therein was nominated for the CK Prahalad Breakthrough Idea Award by Thinkers50, the most prestigious award in business thought leadership. In 2019, Mark's book on AI, The AI Republic, became #1 bestseller in the US, UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy and received global accolades.

He holds a BA and MA in Social Sciences from the University of Turin, a PhD in Business and Economics from the International School of Management in Paris/New York and an Executive DBA from Ecole des Ponts Paris Tech, one of France's most prestigious Grande Ecole.

He is fluent in 6 languages and in his nonacademic life, he holds the rank of Master Instructor, Black Belt IV Dan, at the International Budo Institute in Canada

Twitter: Exp_Mark

Speaker

Claudio Fernández-Aráoz
Executive Fellow, Harvard Business School

Claudio Fernández-Aráoz is a top global expert on talent and leadership, repeatedly ranked by Bloomberg as one of the most influential executive search consultants in the world and selected by Thinkers50 as one of the world’s leading thinkers on talent.

An Executive Fellow for Executive Education at Harvard Business School, Claudio teaches at the school’s comprehensive leadership executive programs for company owners, CEOs, senior executives and general managers.  His focus is on Leadership, Talent, Professional Services and Family Businesses.

Upon graduation at Stanford’s GSB he worked initially for McKinsey & Company in Europe, and then for over three decades for Egon Zehnder, where as a partner he was a member of its global executive committee for more than ten years.

While at Egon Zehnder he founded the firm’s assessment and development practice, and served as global leader of the firm’s professional development, people processes, and intellectual capital development.

Claudio is a frequent keynote speaker at business gatherings in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. He has personally advised many CEOs of some of the world’s major global companies, as well as several progressive governments.

His latest book, It's Not the How or the What but the Who, was the winner of the Axiom Gold Award for the best HR book in English in the whole world.  He is also the author of Great People Decisions, with 15 international editions.

He has also published several bestselling Harvard Business Review articles on leadership, development and talent, including “The Definitive Guide to Recruiting in Good Times and Bad”, “21st Century Talent Spotting”, “Leadership Lessons from Great family Businesses”, and “Turning Potential into Success: The Missing Link in Leadership Development”.

Claudio earned a Masters in Science in Industrial Engineering from the Argentine Catholic University (Gold Medal, highest GPA ever in that university) and an MBA from Stanford University, where he also graduated with honors as an Arjay Miller Scholar.

Speaker

John Ferriola
CEO (Retired), Nucor

John retired as Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President of Nucor Corporation on December 31, 2019.

Mr. Ferriola joined Nucor Corporation in 1991 as Manager of Maintenance and Engineering at the Jewett, Texas bar mill. In 1995, he was named General Manager of Nucor’s Grapeland, Texas joist fabrication division. Later the same year, he was named Vice President and General Manager of Nucor’s Norfolk, Nebraska bar mill. From 1998 to the end of 2001, he served as Vice President and General Manager of the Crawfordsville, Indiana sheet mill. In January 2002, John was appointed as Executive Vice President and in September 2007 was named Chief Operation Officer of Steel Making Operations. He became President and Chief Operating Officer and a member of the Board of Directors in January 2011. On November 16, 2012, Nucor announced that its Board of Directors had elected John to the position of Chief Executive Officer and President, effective January 1, 2013.

In addition to leading Nucor Corporation, John served on the Board of Directors for two Nucor joint ventures: Nucor-Yamato Steel Company and NuMit LLC.

Mr. Ferriola served as Vice Chairman of Worldsteel. He was also a member of the Board of Directors of the American Iron & Steel Institute (AISI) and on the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). He has been active in the Association for Iron and Steel Technology (AIST) for over 20 years and previously served on its board of directors.

Prior to joining Nucor, John began his career with Bethlehem Steel Corporation in 1974, and worked for 17 years in various operating and management roles.

John graduated from the Maritime Academy, State University of New York with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering. In the spring of 2012, he received an honorary Doctorate from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. In 2014, John was awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters from the State University of New York Maritime College.

Speaker

Yannick Fierling
CEO, Haier Europe

Yannick Fierling is CEO of Haier Europe since 2015, driving it towards a constant double-digit growth in the home appliances industry.

In January 2019, after the closing of the acquisition of Candy Hoover Group, he took over the guide of all the European activities, with the aim to accelerate Haier’s positioning in the region.

Prior to joining Haier, Yannick Fierling worked for fifteen years at the multinational home appliance manufacturer Whirlpool, where he acted as General Manager of the Fabric Care business unit and Vice President of Whirlpool EMEA. During his time at Whirlpool, he held increasingly significant positions in Europe and North America in terms of responsibilities, and developed strong entrepreneurial, managerial, technical and leadership skills.

His impressive academic resume includes two Master’s Degrees in engineering from institutions in North America and Europe. He obtained an MSc at the UTC Engineering School in Compiègne, France (1992 – 1994), followed by a MSc at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (1993 – 1995). Most recently, Yannick Fierling was awarded a degree in Finance for Executives by the prestigious INSEAD graduate business school in France (2009).

Moderator

Michael Fleischhacker
TV Anchor and Journalist

1969: born may 26
1987: high school graduation , Admont.
1988-90 unfinished  theology, german language, latin & greek language studies, Karl Franzens Universität Graz.
1991-99  Kleine Zeitung (deputy editor-in-chief, member of managing board, responsible for strategy & new media)
2000-01 managing editor, „Der Standard“.
2002-12 „Die Presse“ (editor-in-chief 04-12).
2014-16- editor-in-chief NZZ Austria
2014- host „Talk im Hangar 7“ (weekly talk-show / politics)
2017- publisher & editor „Quo Vadis Veritas“ (addendum.org)

Books:
 „Wien, 4. Februar 2000 oder Die Wende zur Hysterie“ – Ein Essay. Czernin, 2001
 „Politikerbeschimpfung: Das Ende der 2. Republik“ Ecowin Verlag , 2008
„Die Zeitung. Ein Nachruf“ Brandstätter Verlag, 2014

Speaker

Donna Flynn
VP, Global Talent at Steelcase

Donna Flynn is Vice President of Global Talent, leading our efforts to attract, retain, develop and inspire Steelcase employees around the world. She has been with the company since 2011 and was appointed to this role in March 2020. Prior to this work, Donna served as vice president, Workspace Futures, where her team of researchers studied the future of work, workers and the workplace. The team’s insights, developed by studying people, their habits and interactions, inform Steelcase culture principles and product development.  

Before joining Steelcase, Donna spent eight years as an experience strategist and research manager at Microsoft, helping to develop user experiences guided by a consistent set of design tools. She was also a social science analyst at the International Center for Research on Women (1997) in Washington, D.C., as well as an international development consultant (1996-98).  

Donna earned her bachelor’s degree in Anthropology/African and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Colorado. She was a Fulbright Scholar from 1993 to 1994, and additionally received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Northwestern University.

Moderator

Arne Gast
Leader Organization Practice Asia, McKinsey

Arne Gast is the leader of McKinsey & Company’s Asia Pacific Organization Practice. His work focuses on creating organizations for the future, and making change happen in large transformations.  As one of McKinsey’s most experienced leadership experts, he has worked across many industries, including telecom, banks, insurance companies, healthcare, oil and gas, consumer goods and public sector. Over his nearly 20 years in McKinsey, he has worked and lived 8 years in Asia, and his client work stretches across Malaysia, India, Indonesia, China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines, Korea, Japan and Australia.

Moreover, Arne is the co-founder and CEO of Aberkyn (www.aberkyn.com) , McKinsey’s special group of transformation facilitators. He is one of the lead facilitators of our Talent Leaders Forums and Change Leader Forums. He has written multiple McKinsey Quarterly articles, most recently on purpose – and was part of the teams writing the books Blue Ocean Strategy, Beyond Performance, Reorg and Leadership at Scale.

Selected examples of his work include:

• Developing the “organization of the future” for leading Asian insurance company, including simplifying the base structure and processes, and going agile in focused areas, all linked to new CX experience.  Developing change management, including Top 400 leadership development programs.
• Helping the shift to agile operating model in multiple Asian companies, including telecom, banking and oil and gas – including design of new people processes, organization structures, strategy mechanisms and leadership development.
• Developing a new operational model for the two leading SE Asian utilities. Developing new org structure, key new processes, and critical talent to value roles and leadership development programs.
• Redesigning the talent system and leadership development for the Asia-Pacific part of a global med-tech company.
• Future of Work planning for leading National Oil Company, working business-back to identify the most critical skill shifts, assessing the impact of new technologies, assessing impact potential.
• Developing the People Strategy for a leading Asian Bank, in a shared business/people strategy project, Assessing the Future of Work imperatives, critical HR initiatives, demands for the HR function. 

Beyond McKinsey, Arne studied Liberal Arts in the U.S., and holds a MSc in Economics from Erasmus University and an MBA from INSEAD. He is a Dutch national, and lives in Kuala Lumpur with his wife Lidewij and children Floris, Olivia, Tessel and Lotte. His passion is in Leica photography, building on a student career in photojournalism. His social impact focuses on education, co-founding Leerkracht Foundation that has helped to improve >500 Dutch schools, working with the Dutch-Moroccan Leadership Institute, Young Leaders Malaysia, a network of schools for highly gifted children, and multiple universities.

Speaker

Maelle Gavet
Tech executive, Author

One of the tech industry’s brightest stars, Maëlle Gavet has been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, one of Fortune’s 40 Under 40, one of theMost Creative People in Business by Fast Company and was fifth among Time Magazine’s List of the Top 25 ‘Female Techpreneurs’. After six years as a Principal at the Boston Consulting Group she went on to become CEO of OZON, Russia’s largest e-commerce site.

At the Priceline Group, she was tasked with driving the company's strategy and integrating its six major brands including OpenTable, Kayak and Booking.com. Most recently as Chief Operating Officer at real estate platform Compass, valued at over $6bn, Gavet oversaw technology, product, marketing, and other corporate functions and was responsible for the execution of the company’s strategic priorities.

She is the author of a forthcoming book, Trampled by Unicorns: Big Tech’s Empathy Problem and How to Fix It.

Speaker

Katherine M. Gehl
Business leader, author and political innovator

Katherine M. Gehl is a business leader, author, speaker and political innovator. Katherine was president and CEO of Gehl Foods, a $250 Million high-tech food manufacturing company in Wisconsin. In 2015, she sold her company to focus on the urgent need for non-partisan political innovation on both state and national levels. She is co-chair of the National Association of Non-Partisan Reformers, a board member of Unite America, co-founder of Democracy Found and founder of The Institute for Political Innovation. In 2020, she published The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy along with her co-author Michael Porter.

Speaker

Michael J. Gelb
Author, Executive Coach and Management Consultant

Michael J. Gelb works with visionary leaders to support them in nurturing more innovative and human-centered cultures and to inspire and equip them with the creative thinking tools and conscious communication strategies that help translate ideals into reality. Michael has led seminars, consulted and provided Executive Leadership Coaching for clients including AT&T, DuPont, Emerson,  Merck, Genentech, Microsoft, Nike, Unilever and YPO.

The author of 17 books including How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci, Innovate Like Edison and The Art of Connection: 7 Relationship Building Skills Every Leader Needs Now. Michael’s books have been translated into 25 languages and have sold more than one million copies.

In 2003, Michael was awarded a Batten Fellowship in Innovation from the University Of Virginia’s Darden Grauate School of Business, and he co-directed the acclaimed Leading Innovation Seminar there for more than 10 years. In early 2020, Michael was invited to become a Senior Fellow of the Center for Humanistic Management and a member of the Leading People and Organizations Advisory Board at the Fordham University Gabelli School of Business.

A fifth degree black belt in the Japanese martial art of Aikido, he is also a master teacher of the Alexander Technique, the method taught at The Juilliard School for cultivating commanding stage presence, and the author of the classic work: Body Learning: An Introduction to the Alexander Technique. Michael is a former professional juggler who performed with the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. He is also gifted teacher of Tai Chi and Qigong and is the originator of the acclaimed Super Qi Summit at The Omega Institute.

A champion of Conscious Capitalism, Michael has served as Master of Ceremonies or keynote presenter at five global CC conferences. He co-authored, with Raj Sisodia, The Healing Organization: Awakening the Conscience of Business to Help Save the World. His most recent book is Mastering the Art of Public Speaking: 8 Secrets to Overcome Fear and Supercharge Your Career.    

michaelgelb.com
healingleader.com

Speaker

Marshall Goldsmith
Business Educator & Executive Coach

Dr. Goldsmith is the author or editor of 38 books, which have sold over 2.5 million copies, been translated into 32 languages and become listed bestsellers in 12 countries. Amazon.com recently recognized their ‘100 Best Leadership & Success Books’. His books, Triggers and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, were both recognized as being in the top 100 books ever written in their field. Marshall is one of only two authors with two books on the list. His other listed bestsellers include: MOJO, Succession: Are You Ready and The Leader of the Future.

Marshall’s newest book, How Women Rise, with lead author, Sally Helgesen, is a Bookscan #1 book for Women in Business and a Top Ten Business Bestseller.

Marshall’s other professional acknowledgments include: Harvard Business Review and Best Practices Institute – World’s #1 Leadership Thinker, Global Gurus, INC and Fast Company magazines – World’s #1 Executive Coach, Institute for Management Studies – Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching, American Management Association - 50 great thinkers and leaders who have influenced the field of management over the past 80 years, BusinessWeek – 50 great leaders in America, Wall Street Journal – top ten executive educators, Economist (UK) – most credible executive advisors in the new era of business, National Academy of Human Resources – Fellow of the Academy (America’s top HR award), World HRD Congress (India) – the global leader in HR thinking. His work has been recognized by almost every professional organization in his field.

Dr. Goldsmith is a Professor of Management Practice at the Dartmouth Tuck School of Business. His Ph.D. is from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, where he was the Distinguished Alumnus of the Year. His MBA is from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, where he was recognized as the Distinguished Entrepreneur of the Year. He is one of a select few executive advisors who has worked with over 150 major CEOs and their management teams. He served on the Board of the Peter Drucker Foundation for ten years. He has been a volunteer teacher for US Army Generals, Navy Admirals, Girl Scout executives, International and American Red Cross leaders – where he was a National Volunteer of the Year.

Dr. Goldsmith has over one million followers on LinkedIn and his YouTube videos have over 3 million views. Hundreds of his articles, interviews, columns, and videos are available online at www.MarshallGoldsmith.com for viewing and sharing. Visitors to this site have come from 197 countries and have viewed, read, listened to, downloaded, or shared resources tens of millions of times.

Moderator

Sarah Green Carmichael
Editor, Bloomberg Opinion

Sarah Green Carmichael is an editor and writer at Bloomberg Opinion. Previously, she was an executive editor at Harvard Business Review, where she led the podcast program, hosting the HBR IdeaCast and co-hosting Women at Work. She has also been a managing editor at Barron's, a baseball columnist, and a researcher for Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Ellen Goodman at the Boston Globe. She graduated magna cum laude from Brown University.

Speaker

Hal Gregersen
Executive Director, MIT Leadership Center, MIT Sloan School of Management

Hal Gregersen is executive director of the MIT Leadership Center and a senior lecturer in leadership and innovation at MIT Sloan School of Management. A Thinkers50 globally ranked management thinker, he is the author of the Harvard Business Review article “Bursting the CEO Bubble” and co-author of The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators. Gregersen is also the founder of the 4-24 Project, an initiative dedicated to rekindling the provocative power of asking the right questions in adults so they can pass this crucial creativity skill onto the next generation. Putting his insight into practice, he is co-creator (with Sam Abell) of Leadership and the Lens: Learning at the Intersection of Innovation and Image-Making, an executive education experience through MIT Sloan Executive Education in association with Santa Fe Photographic Workshops.

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.

Moderator

Jacob Haesler
Serial entrepreneur

Jakob is a Paris-based entrepreneur and advisor. He spent the first 11 years of his professional career at McKinsey in Berlin and Paris, where he was one of the founding partners of the French Public Sector/Health practice, and leader of the French Organization and Leadership Practice.

In 2010 he co-founded tinyclues, a now leading AI player in CRM-marketing. Since 2015 he has been an active investor and advisor while also pursuing a new, personal entrepreneurial project. He has been strongly involved as an investor and advisor in the biotech/dermatology startup Skintifique, and the AI-startup Taktile, since their foundation. He is a recognized expert on Big Data/AI, Technology and Innovation, and was nominated to the expert panel for the first Report on Big Data at the OECD. Since 2015 he has also been acting as a member of the Investment Committee for the funding of Data /IT Infrastructure startups/projects at the European Institute of Technology. He was nominated one of the 40 under 40 European Young Leaders in 2012/13, and continues to be strongly involved in the European think tank Friends of Europe.

Jakob studied at the University of St.Gallen (lic.oec.), the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Sciences-Po) de Paris (non-degree), and obtained an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). He is currently the President of the Harvard Club of France and serves as member of the Global Alumni Advisory Board of the Harvard Kennedy School. Jakob is married, has a daughter, and lives in Paris, France.

Speaker

John Hagel
Consultant & Author

John Hagel III has nearly 40 years’ experience as a management consultant, author, speaker and entrepreneur. After recently retiring as a partner from Deloitte, he is writing a new book that addresses the psychology of change and will generate a series of programs to help people navigate through change at many levels. John has founded a new company, Beyond Our Edge, LLC, that works with companies and people who are seeking to anticipate the future and achieve much greater impact.

While at Deloitte, John was the founder and chairman of the Silicon Valley-based Deloitte Center for the Edge, focusing on emerging business opportunities that are not yet on the CEO’s agenda. Before joining Deloitte, John was an independent consultant and writer and prior to that was a principal at McKinsey & Company. John has served as senior vice president of strategy at Atari, Inc., and is the founder of two Silicon Valley startups.

John is also a faculty member at Singularity University where he gives frequent talks on the mounting performance pressure created by digital technology and promising approaches to help traditional companies make the transition from a linear to an exponential world. He is also on the Board of Trustees at the Santa Fe Institute, an organization that conducts leading edge research on complex adaptive systems.

John is the author of The Power of Pull, published by Basic Books in April 2010. He is also the author of a series of best-selling business books, Net Gain, Net Worth, Out of the Box, and The Only Sustainable Edge. He is widely published and quoted in major business publications including The Economist, Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal, as well as general media like the New York Times, NBC and BBC. He has won two awards from Harvard Business Review for best articles in that publication and has been recognized as an industry thought leader by a variety of publications and institutions, including the World Economic Forum and Business Week.

John has his own website at www.johnhagel.com, a joint website with John Seely Brown at www.edgeperspectives.com, a personal blog at www.edgeperspectives.typepad.com as well as joint blogs with John Seely Brown at Harvard Business Review, Fortune and Techonomy. He is active in social media and can be followed on Twitter at @jhagel

John holds a BA from Wesleyan University, a B.Phil. from Oxford University, and a JD and MBA from Harvard University.

Speaker

Gary Hamel
Director, Management Lab; Visiting professor, London Business School;

Gary Hamel is one of the world’s most influential and iconoclastic business thinkers. He has worked with leading companies across the globe and is a dynamic and sought-after management speaker. Hamel has been on the faculty of the London Business School for more than 30 years and is the director of the Management Lab.

Hamel has written 17 articles for the Harvard Business Review and is the most reprinted author in the Review’s history. His landmark books have been translated into more than 25 languages. His most recent bestsellers are The Future of Management and What Matters Now. In these volumes, Hamel presents an impassioned plea for reinventing management and lays out a practical blueprint for building organizations that are “fit for the future.”

Fortune magazine describes Hamel as “the world’s leading expert on business strategy,” and the Financial Times calls him a “management innovator without peer.” Hamel has been ranked by The Wall Street Journal as the world’s most influential business thinker and is a fellow of the Strategic Management Society and of the World Economic Forum.
Hamel’s groundbreaking concepts such as “strategic intent,” “core competence,” “industry revolution,” and “management innovation,” have changed the language and practice of management in organizations around the globe. 

Hamel’s work inside of organizations has been equally pioneering. Highlights include:

• Building one of the world’s first “idea markets” inside a global energy leader.
• Using crowdsourcing to help a European high tech company build a game-changing strategy.
• Orchestrating a comprehensive effort to turn a venerable durable goods manufacturer into one of the world’s most innovative companies.
• Helping a leading Korean company re-engineer its management practices around the principles of openness, community and meritocracy.
• Designing and deploying an online platform that allowed the employees of a top fashion house to share and develop ideas for strengthening their company’s core values.
• Developing innovation tools and platforms that have helped companies around the world de-commoditize mature industries and accelerate growth.
• Running an online “hackathon” in which more than 1,700 senior executives collaborated to reinvent the HR function.

In his work, Hamel has led transformational efforts in some of the world’s most notable companies and has helped to create billions of dollars in shareholder value.

Hamel is one of the world’s most sought-after management speakers on the topics of strategy, leadership, innovation and change.

Speaker

Charles Handy
Social Philosopher

Charles Handy is a social philosopher and a writer and lecturer. He regularly features among the top names in Thinkers Fifty. His books on the changing shape of work and its effects on our lives and organizations have sold almost two million copies around the world - his most recent book is ”The Second Curve“, published in 2015.

With Elizabeth Handy, a photographer, he has collaborated on a number of books including ”The New Alchemists“ and ”A Journey through Tea“.

In his career, he has been an oil executive with Shell, a business economist, a professor at the London Business School, the Warden of St. George’s House in Windsor Castle (a study centre for social and ethical issues) and the Chairman of the Royal Society of Arts in London. He was appointed a CBE in the New Year’s Honours List in 2000 in recognition of his contribution to the human Resource profession.

Charles is an Honorary member of the Peter Drucker Society Europe.

He is Irish and grew up in Kildare, but now lives in UK with his family.

Speaker

Rahaf Harfoush
Digital Anthropologist

Rahaf Harfoush is a Strategist, Digital Anthro-pologist, and Best-Selling Author who focuses on the intersections between emerging technology, innovation, and digital culture. She is currently working on her third book entitled “Hustle & Float,” about our contemporary work culture and the realities of a post-work society. Her second book, “The Decoded Company: Know Your Talent Better Than You Know Your Customers,” was a NYT and USA Today Best Seller, and winner of a Gold Axiom Award.

Formerly, Rahaf was the Associate Director of the Technology Pioneer Programme at the World Economic Forum in Geneva where she helped identify disruptive-startups that were improving the state of the world.

Rahaf is the founder of Red Thread Inc., Think Tank and Special Projects Agency that supports organizations in transforming digital trends into strategic opportunities. She teaches “Innovation & Emerging Business Models” at Sciences Po’s MBA program in Paris. She was recognized a top future thinker by the Hay Literary Festival and as a Young Global Shaper by the G20 Think Tank Summit. Rahaf is also named a Young Global Shaper by the World Economic Forum and a Rising Talent  by the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society.

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

Margaret Heffernan
Entrepreneur; Professor, University of Bath School of Management England

Dr. Margaret Heffernan produced programmes for the BBC for 13 years. She then moved to the US where she spearheaded multimedia productions for Intuit, The Learning Company and Standard&Poors. She was Chief Executive of InfoMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation and then iCast Corporation, was named one of the "Top 25" by Streaming Media magazine and one of the "Top 100 Media Executives" by The Hollywood Reporter.

The author of six books, Margaret’s third book, Willful Blindness : Why We Ignore the Obvious at our Peril was named one of the most important business books of the decade by the Financial Times. In 2015, she was awarded the Transmission Prize for A Bigger Prize: Why Competition isn’t Everything and How We Do Better, described as "meticulously researched... engagingly written... universally relevant and hard to fault." Her TED talks have been seen by over twelve million people and in 2015 TED published Beyond Measure: The Big Impact of Small Changes. Her most recent book, Uncharted: How to map the future was published in 2020.

She is a Professor of Practice at the University of Bath, Lead Faculty for the Forward Institute’s Responsible Leadership Programme and, through Merryck & Co., mentors CEOs and senior executives of major global organizations. She holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Bath and continues to write for the Financial Times and the Huffington Post.

Speaker

Sally Helgesen
Author and leadership advisor

Sally Helgesen, cited in Forbes as the world’s premier expert on women’s leadership, is an internationally best-selling author, speaker and leadership coach. She has been ranked number 6 among the world’s top 30 leadership thinkers by Global Gurus, honored by the coaching consortium MEECO for her transformational influence on organizational cultures and chosen as the Thinkers 50/Marshall Goldsmith world’s top coach for women leaders.

Sally’s most recent book, How Women Rise, co-authored with legendary executive coach Marshall Goldsmith, examines the behaviors most likely to get in the way of successful women. It became the top-seller in its field within a week of publication and rights have been sold in 15 languages.

Previous books include The Female Advantage: Women’s Ways of Leadership, hailed as the classic in its field and continuously in print since 1990, and The Female Vision: Women’s Real Power at Work, which explores how women’s strategic insights can strengthen their careers. The Web of Inclusion: A New Architecture for Building Great Organizations, was cited in The Wall Street Journal as one of the best books on leadership of all time and is credited with bringing the language of inclusion into business.

In addition to delivering leadership workshops and keynotes for companies around the world, Sally has consulted with the United Nations on building more inclusive country offices in Africa and Asia, led programs at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Smith College and been visiting scholar at Northwestern University, U-Nordic Stockholm, and the Lauriston Institute Melbourne AU. She is a contributing editor for Strategy + Business magazine and a member of the MG 100 Coaching Network and the New York and International Women’s Forums. She lives in Chatham, NY.

Speaker

Sabine Herlitschka
CEO & CTO, Infineon Technologies Austria

Sabine Herlitschka is Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer of Infineon Technologies Austria AG.

Her professional career includes industrial biotechnology research, international cooperation and financing in research technology and innovation, Internships at leading organizations in the USA, Fulbright Scholar at George Washington University and Johns Hopkins University/School of Advanced International Studies, as well as founding Vice-Rector for Research Management and International Cooperation at the Medical University of Graz/Austria.

Until 2011 she headed the European and International Programmes of the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) and was responsible for the operational implementation of the European Research and Technology Programmes in Austria, in particular the 7th EU Research Framework Programme.  In 2011 Herlitschka was appointed to the Management Board of Infineon Technologies Austria, in 2012 to the Management Board for Technology and Innovation and in April 2014 to the position of CEO.

For more than 20 years she has been frequently involved in European Research as advisor, project coordinator & proposal evaluator, as well as participant and Chairperson in various European & international expert groups, in particular member of the Austrian Council for Research and Technology Development, University Councilor at the Vienna University of Technology, member of the Senate of the German Fraunhofer Society, as well as other research & innovation institutions. Since February 2018 she is Chairwoman of the Governing Board of the European Public Private Partnership ECSEL-Electronic Components and Systems for Electronic Leadership.

Herlitschka holds a Ph.D. in Food- and Biotechnology with Postdoc specialization in molecular biology and genetic engineering and an Master of Business Administration.

Speaker

Lisa W. Hershman
Chief Management Officer, US Department of Defense

Ms. Lisa W. Hershman is currently Performing the Duties of (PTDO) Chief Management Officer of the Department of Defense. Ms. Hershman has been serving as the Deputy Chief Management Officer of the Department of Defense. Ms. Hershman is a recognized thought leader in business transformation who brings extensive private sector expertise to her service in the Department of Defense.

She is the principal management officer for the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense responsible for delivering optimized enterprise business operations to assure the success of the National Defense Strategy.

Ms. Hershman is responsible for ensuring that business transformation policies and programs are designed and managed to improve performance standards, efficiencies and effectiveness among the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), the Services, Combatant Commands, and Defense Agencies and Field Activities. Additionally, she oversees the collection and management of common, enterprise-wide data sets to drive best decision-making throughout the Department.

Ms. Hershman is a charter member of the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Performance Improvement Council, and serves as the Performance Improvement Officer for the Department of Defense. She also serves as the Cross-Agency Priority goal leader for Category Management and Workforce of the 21st Century in support of the President’s Management Agenda.

Prior to her service to the Department of Defense, Ms. Hershman was Founder and CEO of The DeNovo Group, a business transformation and process management consultancy. She is the former CEO of Hammer and Company, serving as the successor to the late Dr. Michael Hammer; the MIT icon, best-selling author and founder of the field of business process reengineering. Ms. Hershman is co-author of the internationally acclaimed business book, Faster Cheaper Better, with Dr. Hammer and has been featured in BusinessWeek, Forbes, Fox Business News, and Investors Business Daily.

In addition, Ms. Hershman served as Senior Vice President of Operational Excellence at Avnet, a global distributor of electronic components and technology systems. As the executive in charge of transformation and customer experience in 72 countries, her work was honored with the Avnet Corporate Chairman’s Award. Ms. Hershman began her career with General Electric, where she managed a portion of the Seawolf submarine program.

Her civic engagement includes serving as the 2017 Chairwoman of the Scrum Alliance, Vice
Chair of the Indiana Commission for Higher Education, and as a member of Ball State University’s Miller School of Business Entrepreneurial Education Advisory Council.

Ms. Hershman earned her engineering and industrial distribution degree from Clarkson
University and has studied innovation with MIT and IMD and finance with Cornell.

Speaker

Pierre Hessler
Senior Adviser, Capgemini

Pierre Hessler is a Capgemini Fellow and Chairman’s delegate. He focuses on business transformation, business technology, the digital enterprise and new business behaviors.

He is also head of Actideas.

Pierre Hessler started his career in 1965 in IBM Switzerland, holding executive positions in Europe and in the United States, notably as corporate vice-president for marketing, and general manager for marketing, services and operations of IBM Europe.

In 1993, he joined Cap Gemini, where he served in several executive positions, notably as a member of the Directoire and as chairman and CEO of Gemini Consulting. He was on the Board of directors between 2000 and 2012.

Between 2003 and 2019, he was first chairman, then member, of the Board of Bureau Veritas and also chairing its Compensation and Appointments Committee.
Swiss and French citizen, married with 2 children, graduate of the University of Lausanne with degrees in law and economics, author of “Media and Corporate Scandals”.

Moderator

Andrew Hill
Management Editor, Financial Times

Andrew Hill is an award-winning columnist and senior journalist at the Financial Times. As Associate Editor and Management Editor, he writes a weekly column on business, strategy and management, as well as contributing longer features and taking part in video discussions and podcasts. He is a regular public speaker and chair of panels on leadership and management.

Since joining the FT in 1988, Andrew has worked in various roles, including editor of the daily Lombard column on British business and finance, Financial Editor, Comment & Analysis Editor, New York Bureau Chief, Foreign News Editor, and correspondent in Brussels and Milan. He is a member of the FT’s Editorial Board.

Andrew was named Business Commentator of the Year 2016 in the Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards and Best Commentator at the 2009 Business Journalist of the Year Awards, where he also received the Decade of Excellence award for sustained achievement in business and financial journalism.

His latest book is Ruskinland (Pallas Athene, 2019), a personal exploration of John Ruskin’s life, work and enduring influence on our world, published to coincide with the bicentenary of the great thinker’s birth. He is also the author of Leadership in the Headlines (FT Publishing, 2016), a selection of his FT columns and insights about how leaders lead.

Speaker

Vlatka Hlupic
Professor of Leadership and Organizational Transformation, Hult Ashridge Executive Education

Vlatka is an international award-winning thought leader, an activist for humanising management, and an author of a ground-breaking book 'The Management Shift - How to Harness the Power of People and Transform Your Organization for Sustainable Success' (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), which was listed by Forbes as one of the top eight business books in 2014. She is a Professor of Leadership and Organizational Transformation at Hult Ashridge Executive Education, a Visiting Professor in the Department of Organizational Psychology at Birkbeck, University of London, an Honorary President at the Academy of Executive Coaching, a global faculty member of Headspring, by Financial Times and IE Business School and a Global Thought Leader at ICG Group. Vlatka was also a Professor of Business and Management at the University of Westminster, an Adjunct Faculty at London Business School, and a consultant for Said Business School. She is a founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Management Shift Consulting Ltd and the Drucker Society London. She received a PhD in Information Systems at the London School of Economics, as well as a BSc (Hon) in Economics and an MSc in Information Systems from the University of Zagreb. She was voted one of the Most Influential HR Thinkers in the world in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 and 2019 by HR Magazine  and has won the Croatian Woman of Influence Award as well as an Honorary Award from the Leadership Awards in 2016.

Vlatka is the winner of the CMI Management Articles of the Year Award 2015 and the winner of the Axiom Business Books Award (silver medal in the "Leadership" category). She has been nominated for the Thinkers50 list and "Ideas to practice" Award. Her book has been shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year Award and it has been nominated for the FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. Her new book "Humane Capital" (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018) has been nominated for 5 awards and the Foreword was written by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

As a renowned professional keynote and TEDx speaker, she regularly presents at major business events worldwide, including events at the Houses of Parliament, European Commission, Home Office, the Economist and Financial Times. She has published more than 200 academic articles, including the award winning 'To be a Better Leader, Give up Authority', Harvard Business Review, December 2009.

Vlatka is also an executive coach, management consultant and Board adviser, helping leaders and organisations worldwide to  substantially improve performance, engagement, innovation and profit. She has advised major international organizations including the House of Commons, GlaxoSmithKline, BP, The National Health Service, Learndirect, Brand Velocity USA, the Drucker Institute USA, the Croatian Government and the Hungarian National Bank. For her consulting and coaching engagements, Vlatka uses her research-based and empirically validated tools described in 'The Management Shift' book, helping leaders and organisation to shift to the new level of working and success.

Speaker

Julia Hobsbawm
Honorary visiting professor of workplace social health, The Business School, Cass. London
Chair of new UK Workshift Commission

Julia Hobsbawm is a writer, speaker and strategist who addresses Social Health and simplicity in a complex age, finding solutions for humans in the most challenging time in living memory. Her work has been featured by organisations and institutions ranging from the OECD and World Economic Forum and Global Drucker Forum to global corporations such as Zurich Financial Services and Shell. Julia is Honorary Visiting Professor in Workplace Social Health at London’s Cass Business School and a columnist for PWC’s business publication Strategy + Business She consultats for private clients through The Simplicity Principle. Between 2017-2019 she was on the board of The European Workforce Institute (see her report The APPlied Human at Work: The World of the Worker In the Digital Era, 2019) and is currently advising the British Academy’s Future of the Corporation project. The editor and author of six books, Fully Connected: Social Health in an Age of Overload was shortlisted for Management Book of the Year 2018 and Business Book of the Year 2018 and her latest, The Simplicity Principle: Six Steps Towards Clarity in a Complex World (also available in the US) was described by James Harding, founder of Tortoise Media as ‘clairvoyant’ and widely welcomed in the time of COVID19. In addition to being a columnist for Strategy + Business, a regular broadcaster on Sky News, Julia is Editor-at-Large for Arianna Huffington’s wellbeing portal, THRIVE Global. Julia presents The Simplicity Principle Podcast and has written and presented series for BBC Radio 4. A social entrepreneur, Julia founded the network and content business Editorial Intelligence in 2005, and the Social Capital Network in 2019. She was awarded an OBE for Services to Business in 2015. She is a Patron of The Zoe Education Trust, and the Facial Surgery Research Foundation and a founding trustee of the medical tech charity OurBrainBank.

Moderator

Raymond Hofmann
Management & Organisation Designer

Raymond Hofmann (@raymond_hofmann) works as an independent advisor and helps executive teams improve their organisations’ performance. It is part of his mission to help make management and organisations simpler, more human and above all more effective. Raymond dreams of a world where more organisations let people thrive, delight their customers and make meaningful contributions to society. In this world, management is a force for good, realises its full potential as the social technology of human accomplishment and ranks among the noblest of professions.

Raymond is based in Switzerland but works with clients on a global basis. His clients include Fortune 500 companies, SMEs and family-owned businesses. Before setting up his independent consulting practice over 15 years ago, Raymond served as a C-level executive in the banking and software industry. He started his career in tech and management consulting, first with Accenture and later with McKinsey & Company.

A long-time critic of the leadership industry and business schools, Raymond recently joined one of Europe’s leading business schools to lead an initiative aimed at designing a unique new general management program to develop leaders for the 21st century. Although the initiative quickly ran into internal resistance and failed, Raymond remains convinced of the need to re-think the mainstream approach to leadership and leadership development.

A life-long student of management and heavily influenced by Peter Drucker, Raymond aims to make a contribution to help advance the practice of management beyond his client work. He’s been a long-standing associate of the Gobal Peter Drucker Forum and is also an occasional speaker and writer. His latest piece is titled “What if management models ate ecosystem strategies for breakfast?” and was published in “Ecosystems Inc.”, a collection of essays by leading management thinkers, curated and published by Thinkers50 in 2020.

Raymond holds a Msc in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) and an MBA from INSEAD.

Speaker

Ingmar Höhmann
Senior Editor, Harvard Business Manager

Ingmar Höhmann is a senior editor of Harvard Business Manager. He is an award-winning journalist who previously worked for German and British newspapers, such as Handelsblatt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, and The Times. Before joining Harvard Business Manager he lived and worked as a journalist in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Spain, and France.

Speaker

Chester A. Huber
Senior Lecturer Harvard Business School, former CEO Onstar

Chet Huber is a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Business School, teaching the second year elective course Building & Sustaining a Successful Enterprise. The course is designed to provide future General Managers and CEOs with tools to manage through the opportunities and risks inherent in pursuing sustaining and disruptive innovations, and how to shape their strategies to improve the odds of creating successful new growth businesses.

Prior to HBS, Chet spent his entire career with General Motors, initially in their locomotive business where he ultimately led the division’s global sales and marketing activities. In 1995, he was selected to lead Project Beacon, a cross-company initiative conceived to develop a vehicle services business by exploiting the technical capabilities of GM’s Hughes Electronics and EDS subsidiaries. Inadvertently and unknowingly applying many of the theories and models he now teaches in the classroom, Chet and his team survived a series of trial and error excursions and near death experiences that allowed them to develop a deeper understanding of the technologies, business model imperatives and brand position that became the foundation for OnStar’s eventual success. During his fourteen year tenure as President and CEO, OnStar grew to over six million subscribers, built a market leading brand and intellectual property position, generated annual revenues in excess of $2 billion, and achieved industry leading profitability. He retired from GM with 37 years of service in October of 2009.

Chet holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Kettering University, an MBA from the Harvard Business School, and an MS in National Resource Strategy from the National Defense University’s Industrial War College. He has served on Federal Advisory Committees at NASA and the CDC, has been on the board of directors of Sirius XM, and holds multiple patents in the areas of wireless technology and vehicle integrated services.

Chet and his wife Barbara have two children and currently reside in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan.

Speaker

Santiago Iñiguez de Onzoño
President, IE University

Santiago Iñiguez de Onzoño is the President of IE University and a recognized influencer in global higher education. He was the first recipient (2019) of the Founders Award by Thinkers50, the prestigious global ranking of thoughtful leaders in Management.

Iñiguez serves on the boards of Headspring, a joint venture between IE Business School and the Financial Times, offering custom programs for companies, as well as on the boards of EFMD (European Foundation for Management Development), Renmin University Business School (China), Antai Business School (Jiao Tong University, China), LUISS Business School (Italy), Mazars University (France), the Russian Presidential Academy (RANEPA, Russia), and FGV-EASP Fundaçao Getulio Vargas (Brazil). He is a past Chair of the Board of AACSB, the global association of business schools.

Iniguez is the former Dean of IE Business School and has played a leading role in business education. He was portrayed by the Financial Times as “one of the most significant figures in promoting European business schools internationally”. He was the first European appointed as “Dean of the Year” by Poets & Quants (2017).

He is the author of “The Learning Curve: How Business Schools Are Reinventing Education” (2011), “Cosmopolitan Managers: Executive Education That Works” (2016), and “In An Ideal Business: How the Ideas of 10 Female Philosophers bring value to the Workplace” (2020), as well as co-editor of “Business Despite Borders: Companies in the Age of Populist Anti-Globalization” (2018), all published by Palgrave Macmillan (Springer).

Iniguez is a regular speaker at international conferences and frequently contributes in different journals and media on higher education and executive development. He is one of the 500 Global LinkedIn Influencers and in 2019 has been recognized as the leading Spanish influencer in Management by the Mexican magazine Entrepreneur.

Iniguez is Professor of Strategic Management. He holds a Degree in Law, a Ph.D. in Moral Philosophy and Jurisprudence (Complutense University, Spain) and an MBA from IE Business School. He was a Recognized Student at the University of Oxford, UK.

Speaker

Darja Isaksson
Director General, Vinnova, The Swedish Innovation Agency

Darja has been working with digitalisation since the 1990-ies, she is the founder of two successful agencies. In her work, she has led teams where the results have been innovative services and products used by millions of customers. Apart from being executive advisor and board member of multiple companies, she has served as advisor to the Swedish Government in the Digitalisation council as well as the Swedish Prime Ministers Innovation Council, evaluated national research and innovation programmes and served on the board of Swedish research institutes RISE ICT and RISE Interactive. As a result of her work, she has been awarded "Most powerful opinion maker in Sweden", and is listed as one of the "Worlds' 100 most influential people in digital government."

Moderator

Gabriel Joseph-Dezaize
Editor in chief, Harvard Business Review France

Gabriel Joseph-Dezaize, 58, is the chief editor of Harvard Busines Review France. He studied Political Sciences in Grenoble (France) and he is also a guitar player and composer.

Speaker

Radoslaw Kedzia
Vice President, Huawei CEEN Region

Radoslaw Kedzia was appointed as Regional Vice President of Central Eastern Europe and Nordic Region in H2 of 2019. He was the first European manager to be appointed as Huawei General Manager. He has been working for Huawei since 2008. Mr. Kedzia began his career in Huawei Kenya as Chief Operating Officer, then as a Regional Technical Director for the Eastern and Southern Africa Region, in 2013 he became a Chief Executive Officer in Uganda Representative Office and in 2015 was appointed as the CEO of Czech Representative office. 

Before his career in Huawei, Mr. Kedzia worked in Poland for PTC and TPSA and later, since 1999 in international, technical and managerial posts for Ericsson, Safaricom and Siemens in various countries such as Kenya, Israel, Great Britain, Spain and Czech Republic. His hobbies are music, art and reading.

Speaker

Barbara Kellerman
Lecturer in Public Leadership, Kennedy School, Harvard University

Barbara Kellerman is the James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is the Founding Executive Director of the School’s Center for Public Leadership. And from 2003 to 2006 she served as the Center’s Research Director. Kellerman has held professorships at Fordham, Tufts, Fairleigh Dickinson, George Washington, Uppsala, and at both Dartmouth and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. She also served as Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at Fairleigh Dickinson, and as Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Leadership at the University of Maryland.

Kellerman received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and her M.A. (in Russian and East European Studies), M.Phil., and Ph.D. (in Political Science) degrees from Yale University. She was awarded a Danforth Fellowship and three Fulbright fellowships. At Uppsala (1996-97), she held the Fulbright Chair in American Studies. Kellerman was cofounder of the International Leadership Association (ILA), and is author and editor of many books including Leadership: Multidisciplinary Perspectives; The Political Presidency: Practice of Leadership; Bad Leadership; Followership; Women and Leadership (co-edited with Deborah Rhode); Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (2010); The End of Leadership (2012); and Hard Times: Leadership in America (2014). The End of Leadership was long listed by the Financial Times as among the Best Business Books of 2012, and selected by Choice as “essential” reading. It was also named by Choice as an “Outstanding Academic Title for 2013.” In 2015 Hard Times: Leadership in America received an Honorable Mention Award for its “significant contribution to the field of leadership” from the University of San Diego. And, in 2016 it too was selected by Choice as an “Outstanding Academic Title.” Kellerman has appeared often on media outlets such as CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, Reuters and BBC, and has contributed articles and reviews to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the Harvard Business Review.

Barbara Kellerman speaks to audiences all over the world, including Berlin, London, Moscow, Rome, Sao Paolo, Shanghai, Zurich, St. Gallen, Jerusalem, Turin, Toronto, Montreal, Mumbai, New Delhi, Amsterdam, Kyoto, Munich, Beijing, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Leipzig, and Seoul. She has served on many different boards and was ranked by Forbes.com as among “Top 50 Business Thinkers” (2009) and by Leadership Excellence in top 15 of “thought leaders in management and leadership” in 2008-09 and 2010-2011. In 2010, she was given the Wilbur M. McFeeley award by the National Management Association for her pioneering work on leadership and followership. In 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 she was ranked by Global Gurus as among the top 20 on the list of “World’s Top 30 Management Professionals.” In 2016, she was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Leadership Association. Her most recent book, Professionalizing Leadership, was published in 2018 by Oxford University Press. It was reviewed as “exceptional” and “highly recommended” by Choice. And it appeared on Forbes’ “Recommended Books for Creative Leaders in 2018.” Kellerman’s next book (co-authored with Todd Pittinsky) is titled, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy & Legacy. It will be published in September 2020 by Cambridge University Press. She also posts digital articles on regular basis at barbarakellerman.com.

Moderator

Bernhard Kerres
Former Opera Singer & Silcion Valley Entrepreneur

Moderator

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“

Speaker

Art Kleiner
Editor and author

Art Kleiner is a recognized expert on management thinking, and an advisor on thought leadership, scenario planning, and executive success. His books include The Wise Advocate: The Inner Voice of Strategic Leadership, with Jeffrey Schwartz and Josie Thomson (2019: Columbia University Press) and The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management (1996, 2008: Warren Bennis Books). For 15 years, he was the editor-in-chief of strategy+business, the management magazine published by PwC. He is editor of a forthcoming book series with Berrett-Koehler, editorial director of the popular Fifth Discipline Fieldbook series with Peter Senge, and a longstanding faculty member at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

www.linkedin.com/in/artkleiner/

Speaker

Jørgen Vig Knudstorp
Executive Chairman, LEGO Brand Group

Jørgen Vig Knudstorp was the President and Chief Executive Officer of the LEGO Group from 2004 to 2017. In 2017 he was appointed Executive Chairman of LEGO Brand Group.

Prior to joining the LEGO Group in 2001 as head of business development Jørgen Vig spent three years with McKinsey & Company as a consultant.

Jørgen Vig is a PhD in Business Economics and a board member in the LEGO Group, Merlin Entertainments Group and Starbucks.

Moderator

Angelica Kohlmann
Chairman & CEO, Kohlmann & Co AG

Dr. Kohlmann has collected over 25 years of experience in the fields of pharmaceuticals and international trade. Since starting Ifitech in 2008 and Ifitrade more recently, she has successfully ventured into new branches by linking her entrepreneurial thinking with a substantial international network. She has been a business consultant for several industries in numerous countries. Before, she was staff member at Hoechst AG’s Board in Frankfurt, Germany. Prior to that, at Behringwerke AG, she was responsible for marketing products in over 50 countries.

After her studies she worked as a medical doctor in the field of cancer research.
She was born and raised in Brazil, lived in 5 countries and speaks six languages.
Dr. Kohlmann is Chairman Advisory Board Peter Drucker Society Europe

Speaker

Georg Kopetz
Co-Founder and member of the Executive Board, TTTech

Georg Kopetz is co-founder and member of the executive board at TTTech. He is responsible for the overall strategy of the corporation, marketing, sales, finance, human resources, the business units aerospace and industrial solutions as well as for the off-highway joint-venture company TTControl. He studied law at the University of Vienna and has comprehensive professional experience in the financial and legal field, having worked as a finance and law consultant in Austria and abroad.

Speaker

Ashok Krish
TCS Global Head, Digital Workplace

Ashok Krish is the Global Head of Digital Workplace for Tata Consultancy Services, heading an interdisciplinary group of behaviour scientists, designers, application architects, full stack developers and workplace infrastructure engineers who help large organizations reimagine their workplace. Outside of work, he is an author, columnist and amateur musician who plays the violin, cello and guitar.

Moderator

Wolfgang Lassl
Associate Partner, Pure Management Group

Wolfgang Lassl, MALD, MTh, is an associate partner at Pure Management Group and works as a management advisor, author, and educator. He is a specialist in organizational design and transformation processes. Wolfgang Lassl advises organizations in the private, public, and non-profit sector. In 2019, he published a book on the factors constituting organizational viability as well as one on organizational diagnosis and governance. Both books were published by Springer Nature. He is an associate member of the Peter Drucker Society Europe.

Apart from his passion for management issues, his second main area of interest is philosophy. He holds a Master’s degree in Theology as well as in International Relations (Fulbright scholarship). He looks back at teaching and research assignments at Tufts University, University of Vienna and Salzburg.

Speaker

James Li
Member of the Supervisory Board, Senior Vice President, President of the European Region, Huawei

From 1992 to 1996, Mr. Li Jian held a bachelor's degree from Xidian University; majored in communication engineering.

From 1998 to 2001, Mr.Li Jian held a master’s degree from Xidian University; majored in communication engineering.

From 2001 to 2003, Li jian was an engineer engaged in WCDMA in Huawei Shanghai Research Center.

From 2003 to 2006, he was promoted to deputy GM of the Nigeria Rep Office and part-time GM of the Ghana Rep Office.

From 2007 to 2008, he acted as the vice president of the West Africa Region.

From 2008 to 2009, he acted as the vice president of the Accounts & Regions Business Support Dept, and the special assistant of the president of the Sales and Service System.

From 2009 to 2010, he was the president of the CEE & Nordic European Region and a member of management team of the European Region.

From 2011 to 2012, he worked as a member of the Human Resources Committee, a member of the management team of the Joint Committee of Regions (JCR), and the president of the Latin American Area.

From 2012 to 2017, he acted as the vice president of the JCR, a member of the JCR management team, the global process owner (GPO) of LTC processes, and President of Latin American Region.

Since 2017, Li Jian has been acting as a Member of the Supervisory Board, ICT infrastructure managing Board Office and the president of the European Area.

Speaker

Isabella Mader
Executive Advisor, Global Peter Drucker Forum CEO, Excellence Institute

Isabella Mader, MSc, is CEO of the Excellence Institute, Executive Advisor for the Global Peter Drucker Forum and lecturer at universities in the fields of information and knowledge management, IT- strategy and collaboration. 

2013 she was awarded “Top CIO of the Year“ (A).

Before her current position she built up a post graduate university programme that she then managed for several years. She also acted as the CEO of a software company (booking platform) and at the United Nations in the field of methodology development.

At the Excellence Institute she concentrates on knowledge management, information management, IT strategy, communities and networks as well as on network economy/sharing economy and New Work.

Speaker

Lukas Mandl
Member oft the European Parliament

Speaker

Vikram Mansharamani
Lecturer, Harvard University

Dr. Vikram Mansharamani is a global trend-watcher who shows people how to anticipate the future, manage risk, and spot opportunities. He is the author of the recently-released THINK FOR YOURSELF: Restoring Common Sense in an Age of Experts and Artificial Intelligence and BOOMBUSTOLOGY: Spotting Financial Bubbles Before They Burst. He has been a frequent commentator on issues driving disruption in the global business environment. Vikram’s ideas and writings have also appeared in Bloomberg, Fortune, Forbes, The New York Times and a long list of other publications. Linkedin twice listed him as their #1 Top Voice for Money, Finance and Global Economics and Worth has profiled him as one of the 100 most powerful people in global finance. Millions of readers have enjoyed his unique multi-lens approach to connecting seemingly irrelevant dots.

Vikram is currently a lecturer at Harvard University, where he teaches students to use multiple perspectives in making tough decisions. Previously, he was a Lecturer at Yale University. In addition to teaching, he also advises several Fortune 500 CEOs to help them navigate the radical uncertainty in today’s business and regulatory environment. He has a PhD and two Masters degrees from MIT and a Bachelors degree from Yale University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Vikram lives in Lexington, MA with his wife, daughter, son, golden-retriever, and two cats, one of which he believes may be clairvoyant.

Moderator

Xavier Marcet
President, Lead To Change

Xavier Marcet is the President of Lead To Change a consultancy focused on strategic innovation for businesses, governments and universities based in Barcelona, Boston and Santiago de Chile. He is founder of 8Wires, a start up on Big Data. He was formerly CEO of several companies in different sectors and has led multiple projects in the field of public administration and universities.

His academic background has been developed in Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, ESADE, IESE and HAAS Business School (UC Berkeley). Currently teaches as part-time professor in Barcelona Business School (Pompeu Fabra University). He founded the Barcelona Drucker Society and is its current President. He is president of the Board of Trustees EUNCET Business School. He is a President of the Board of Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia.

He is the author of several books, the most recently published: “Cosas que aprendemos después” (Plataforma Editorial, 2010). “Innovación Pública” (Santiago de Chile, 2013) Esquivar la mediocridad (2018). He is a regular contributor to the newspaper La Vanguardia in articles on Management

Speaker

Roger L. Martin
Strategy Advisor, former Dean Rotman School, top ranked management thinker, T50

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

Sara Mathew
Chair of the Board, Freddie Mac

Ms. Mathew is the Former Chairman and CEO of D&B.  She joined D&B in August 2001 as its Chief Financial Officer (CFO), after 18 years at Procter and Gamble.  At D&B she was appointed CFO and SVP of International in 2005, CFO and President of the U.S. business in 2006, and President and Chief Operating Officer in 2007. She was named Chief Executive Officer in January 2010 and assumed the role of Chairman of the Board in July of that year, a position she held until her retirement in 2013. Ms. Mathew was a member of D&B’s Board of Directors from 2008 to 2013.

During her tenure at D&B, Ms. Mathew was instrumental in transforming D&B from a data company to a more innovative, digital enterprise, leveraging technological advances to expand its reach to new customers and structural changes to transform the underperforming International business. She led the re-build of D&B’s core technology platform and data assets, introducing Data-as-a service (DaaS) to access new customers and accelerating Big Data Analytics to create new insights for its existing customer base.

Ms. Mathew has received numerous accolades during her tenure at D&B. In 2012, she was named to FT’s 50 Women at the top; in 2013, Top value creator in the S&P500 by Chief Executive magazine; in 2015 NACD’s Directorship 100 list; in 2017, FWA’s Woman of the Year; in 2018 Ascend/Deloitte’s Pan Asian Director of the year. In 2019, Sara was awarded NACD Director of the Year for the New Jersey Chapter will be the recipient of P&G’s John G Smale Award for outstanding alumni in October 2019.  Prior to D&B, Ms. Mathew spent 18 years at Procter of & Gamble.

Ms. Mathew currently Chairs the Board of Freddie Mac and serves on the Boards of State Street and Reckitt Benckiser. She has previously served on the Boards of Campbell Soup, Avon and Shire and has about 35 years of cumulative Board service. Sara holds a bachelor's degree in physics, chemistry and mathematics from the Women's Christian College in Madras, India, and a master’s degree in business administration from Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Speaker

Stanley A. McChrystal
General (ret.); Founder, McChrystal Group

A transformational leader with a remarkable record of achievement, General Stanley A. McChrystal was called “one of America’s greatest warriors” by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. He is widely praised for launching a revolution in warfare by leading a comprehensive counter-terrorism organization that fused intelligence and operations, redefining the way military and government agencies interact.

The son and grandson of Army officers, McChrystal graduated from West Point in 1976 as an infantry officer, completed Ranger Training, and later Special Forces Training. Over the course of his career, he held leadership and staff positions in the Army Special Forces, Army Rangers, 82nd Airborne Division, the XVIII Army Airborne Corp, and the Joint Staff.  He is a graduate of the US Naval War College, and he completed fellowships at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1997 and at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2000.

From 2003 to 2008, McChrystal commanded JSOC - responsible for leading the nation's deployed military counterterrorism efforts around the globe. His leadership of JSOC is credited with the 2003 capture of Saddam Hussein and the 2006 location and killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. In June 2009, McChrystal received his fourth star and assumed command of all international forces in Afghanistan.

Since retiring from the military, McChrystal has served on several corporate boards of directors, that include Deutsche Bank America, JetBlue Airways, Navistar, Siemens Government Technologies, Fiscal Note, and Accent Technologies. A passionate advocate for national service, McChrystal is the Chair of the Board of Service Year Alliance, which envisions a future in which a service year is a cultural expectation and common opportunity for every young American. He is a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where he teaches a course on leadership. Additionally, he is the author of the bestselling leadership books, My Share of the Task: A Memoir, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, and Leaders: Myth and Reality.

General McChrystal founded the McChrystal Group in January 2011. Recognizing that companies today are experiencing parallels to what he faced in the war theater, McChrystal established this advisory services firm to help businesses challenge the hierarchical, “command and control” approach to organizational management.

Speaker

Alistair McQueen
Head of Savings and Retirement, Aviva

Alistair McQueen is an economist and heads Aviva’s savings and retirement business, leading its engagement with government, regulators and the media. He is a regular commentator on all issues related to personal finances and ageing.  Aviva is the UK’s largest and the world’s oldest insurer – found in 1696. The business serves 30 million customers around the world, supporting their insurance, healthcare and retirement needs. Aviva lists ‘ageing’ as one mega-trends set to shape life and work in the 21st century. Aviva’s, and Alistair’s, goal is to ensure that ageing represents no barrier to opportunity.

Speaker

Miriam Meckel
Founding publisher of ada, the platform for digital life and the economy of the future, at Handelsblatt Media Group

Miriam Meckel, PhD, is the founding publisher of ada, the platform for digital life and the economy of the future, at Handelsblatt Media Group. Previously she had been editor-in-chief since 2014 and publisher of WirtschaftsWoche, Germany's most important weekly magazine for business in Düsseldorf, since 2017. Miriam Meckel has been Professor of Corporate Communication at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland since 2005. She was Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and Visiting Professor at the Singapore Management University for several years. Miriam Meckel received the Cicero Speaker Award in the category "Science", published numerous books, scientific journal articles and journalistic articles.

Speaker

Antonella Mei-Pochtler
Special representative of the Austrian Federal Chancellor; Head of Think Austria

Antonella Mei-Pochtler worked in international strategy consulting for 30 years, covering various top management positions. She gained extensive experience especially in the media, technology and digital transformation areas, helping both global corporates and public institutions develop and execute innovative strategies. In addition, the native Italian and mother of three is also involved in various charitable initiatives in the field of healthcare and education. She also serves on the board of various international public companies.

Since March 2018, Dr. Mei-Pochtler acts as a Special Advisor to the Austrian Federal Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, and Head of Think Austria, the Federal Chancellor’s strategy and planning unit.

Speaker

Florent Menegaux
CEO, Michelin

After graduating with a degree in finance, management and economics, Florent Menegaux joined Price Waterhouse in 1986 as a consultant. He was soon appointed manager, specializing in interest rate risk control and management for banks.

In 1991, Exel Logistics France, a logistics and transport company, offered him the position of Finance Director. Six months later, he was promoted General Manager. From 1995 to 1996, Florent Menegaux was General Manager of the General Cargo Transport division for the Norbert Dentressangle Group.

In 1997, Florent Menegaux joined Michelin as Commercial Director for truck tires in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In 2000, Michelin appointed him Sales Director for Truck Tires Original Equipment and Replacement markets for North America. In 2003, he became head of Truck Tires for South America.

In 2005, he was appointed head of the Africa – Middle East Zone.

In January 2006, Florent Menegaux became responsible for the Group’s Passenger Car and Light Truck Tire Replacement Business Unit for Europe, before being appointed Executive Vice President for the Passenger Car and Light Truck worldwide activities, becoming a member of the Group Executive Committee, in 2008. He also oversees Michelin’s Motorsports activities and Materials business.

In December 2014, he was appointed Chief Operating Officer and then Senior Executive Vice President of the Michelin Group in 2017. Starting in January 2018, he also supervises the Group’s Business Directions, and the Manufacturing, Supply Chain and Customer Experience Operational Directions.

On May 18, 2018, Florent Menegaux is named General Managing Partner of the Group. He is appointed CEO of Michelin on May 17, 2019.

Moderator

Timo Meynhardt
Professor for Business Psychology and Leadership,
HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management

Timo Meynhardt is full professor and chairholder of the Dr. Arend Oetker Chair of Business Psychology and Leadership at HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management and managing director of the Center for Leadership and Values in Society at the University of St. Gallen. In his research, he links psychological and business management topics, especially public value management, leadership and competency diagnostics. He is strongly committed to research in the field of public value as well as to the application of the concept in business and administration. Timo was the first researcher to apply the concept to the private  sector. He developed a unique public value theory, which conceptualizes public value as “a necessary fiction” for individuals and groups.

Timo publishes the Public Value Atlas for Switzerland and Germany (www.gemeinwohlatlas.de, www.gemeinwohl.ch), which aims at ranking and making transparent the public value of companies and organizations. His Public Value Scorecard provides a management tool to measure public value creation along five basic dimensions. Timo co-initiated the Public Value Award for Start-ups, where he is chairing the jury. He is as well the chair of the jury of the public value award for public baths in Germany.

Speaker

Julia Middleton
Founder & Innovation Officer, Common Purpose

Julia is passionate about helping people from all backgrounds to develop as leaders and make an active and tangible contribution to their communities and to wider society.

In the autumn of 1989, Julia founded Common Purpose, which has grown to be one of the biggest leadership development organizations in the world. Julia stepped down from the position of Chief Executive in 2018. She is now the Innovation Officer, driving new initiatives across the world.

Julia was a founder of the Impetus Trust (developing venture philanthropy in the UK), the Media Standards Trust (fostering high standards in the news media) and Alfanar (developing venture philanthropy in the Arab World). Today, she is on the board and chairs the investment committee of Alfanar, is on the International Advisory Council for Fundação Dom Cabral (a non-profit business institution in Brasil) and is a Goodwill Ambassador of the Aurora Forum (a global humanitarian initiative run out of Armenia).

Julia was born in London and educated at French Lycées around the world. She worked for the Industrial Society after receiving an economics degree from the London School of Economics. She is married, and has five children and one grandchild.

Julia is the author of two bestselling books: Beyond Authority and Cultural Intelligence. Julia defines Cultural Intelligence (CQ) as "the ability to cross divides and thrive in multiple cultures".

Speaker

Katharina Moser
Founder, MOSAIK - Designing European Experiences; Co-Founder, Creative Cooperation

Katharina Moser designs and moderates events that connect people. She is driven by the vision to inspire a feeling of togetherness as the basis for successful cooperation. Having worked for the Foreign Ministry, the British Council or the European Forum Alpbach, she founded MOSAIK in 2015. MOSAIK’s projects were awarded with the State Prize on Europe, the European Citizens' Award or the Innovation Award by Corps Touristique Austria. Katharina designed, organised and moderated around 200 events and also works as a speaker and workshop host. In 2020 she put her focus on how to create meaningful online and hybrid events. For the Global Peter Drucker Forum she took care of designing the online experience of the event 2020.

She is on the board of Bürgerforum Europa; Austrian Society for European Politics, founding member of Alliance4Europe and member of the BMW Responsible Leaders Network.

Speaker

Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Professor of Business, Harvard Business School

Rosabeth Moss Kanter holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professorship at Harvard Business School, specializing in strategy, innovation, and leadership for change. She is also Chair and Director of the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative, a Harvard-wide innovation she co-founded in 2008, a growing international model that helps successful leaders at the top of their fields apply their skills to national and global challenges in their next life stage, to build a new leadership force for the world.  She is currently working on a book about digital disruption, organizational transformation, and the do-it-yourself entrepreneurial revolution, as well as scaling the idea of advanced leadership.

Her strategic and practical insights guide leaders of large and small organizations worldwide, through teaching, writing, and direct consultation to major corporations and governments. The former chief Editor of Harvard Business Review, Professor Kanter has been repeatedly named to lists of the “50 most powerful women in the world” (Times of London), and the “50 most influential business thinkers in the world” (Thinkers 50, and is now in their Hall of Fame). She has received 24 honorary doctoral degrees, as well as numerous leadership awards, lifetime achievement awards, and prizes, which include Distinguished Career Awards from the Academy of Management and the American Sociological Association (Organizations, Occupations and Work Section); the World Teleport Association's “Intelligent Community Visionary of the Year” award; the Pinnacle Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce; the International Leadership Award from the Association of Leadership Professionals; the Warren Bennis Award for Leadership Excellence; the Everett Rogers Innovation Award from the Norman Lear Center for media and society; and several Harvard Business Review McKinsey Awards for the years’ best articles.

She is the author or coauthor of 19 books.  Her recent book, MOVE: Putting America's Infrastructure Back in the Lead, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, is a sweeping look across industries and technologies shaping the future of mobility and the leadership required for transformation. Her book The Change Masters was named one of the most influential business books of the 20^th century (Financial Times); SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good, one of the ten best business books of the year by Amazon.com; Evolve! Succeeding in the Digital Culture of Tomorrow, one of the five best books of the year by the Toronto Star.  Confidence: How Winning & Losing Streaks Begin & End, a New York Times bestseller (also a #1 Business Week bestseller), describes the culture of high-performance organizations compared with those in decline and shows how to lead turnarounds, whether in businesses, schools, sports teams, or countries. Men & Women of the Corporation, winner of the C. Wright Mills award for the best book on social issues and called a classic, offers insight into the individual and organizational factors that promote success or perpetuate disadvantage for women; a spin-off video, A Tale of ‘O’: On Being Different, is a widely-used tool for diversity training. A related book, Work & Family in the United States, set a policy agenda, honored by a coalition of university centers creating in her honor the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for the best work/family research. Another award-winning book, When Giants Learn to Dance, showed how to master the new terms of competition at the dawn of the global information age. World Class: Thriving Locally in the Global Economy identified the dilemmas of globalization for cities, a theme she continues to pursue in her book MOVE.

She advises numerous CEOs and senior executives, including co-founding and leading a consulting group and serving as a Senior Advisor for IBM’s Global Citizenship portfolio from 1999-2012. She has served on many business and non-profit boards, such as City Year, the urban “Peace Corps” addressing the school dropout crisis through national service, and on many national or regional commissions including the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and the Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors. She speaks widely, sharing the platform with Presidents, Prime Ministers, and CEOs at major events, such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and national industry conferences in over 20 countries. Before joining the Harvard Business School faculty, she held tenured professorships at Yale University and Brandeis University and was a Fellow at Harvard Law School, simultaneously holding a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her Ph.D. is from the University of Michigan.

Moderator

Rainer Münz
Expert in Demography, migration and data analysis

Rainer Muenz is an expert in Demography, migration and data analysis. Until 2020 he was Adviser on Migration and Demography at the European Political Strategy Centre (EPSC), the in-house think tank advising European Commission President J.C. Juncker during his time in office (2014-2019) and IDEA, the in-house think tank advising European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

Prior to joining the European Commission, Rainer Muenz was – between 2005 and 2015 – Head of Research and Development at Erste Group, a Central European retail bank headquartered in Vienna. He also worked as Senior Fellow at the European think tank Bruegel (Brussels), the Hamburg Institute of International Economics (HWWI) and at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI, Washington DC).

Until 2004, Rainer Muenz had an academic career as researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, 1980-1992, and at the Department of Mathematics of Finance/ TU Vienna, 2002-2004, as well as a tenured university professor at Humboldt University, Berlin, 1993-2003. He also was visiting professor at the Universities of Bamberg, UC Berkeley, CEU Budapest, AU Cairo, Frankfurt/M., HU Jerusalem, Klagenfurt, St. Gallen (HSG), Vienna and Zurich as well as at the Austrian Diplomatic Academy in Vienna.

In 2000-01, Rainer Muenz was member of the German commission on immigration reform (Suessmuth commission). Between 2008 and 2010, he was Member of the high level “Reflection Group Horizon 2020-2030” of the European Council (Gonzales commission). Between 2015 and 2019 he was chair of the Migration Advisory Board of the UN International Organisation for Migration (IOM). Currently he is one of the chairs of KNOMAD, the World Bank’s Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development (since 2013).

Speaker

Kevin Nolan
President & Chief Executive Officer, GE Appliances

Kevin Nolan is the President & Chief Executive Officer of GE Appliances, a Haier company, headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky. GE Appliances is the fastest growing appliances company in the U.S.

Mr. Nolan is a seasoned engineer and a passionate maker with 29 patent awards and a 30-year career at GE, including 10 years as GE Appliances’ Chief Technology Officer.

He took innovation to a new level when he conceived and co-founded FirstBuild, the first Corporate maker’s space in the world and global co-creation community that harnesses the power of the maker movement to change the way home appliances are conceived, designed and manufactured.

Originally from Connecticut, Mr. Nolan is an active voice in Louisville, KY, working directly and through several organizations to attract new investements to the area; promoting STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) programs in schools and community centers; mobilizing resources to close the digital and educational gap in the city and personally participating in several community development organizations, including Metro United Way.

Currently as CEO of GE Appliances, Mr. Nolan is successfully leading the company’s transformation, redefining structures, promoting a new culture and shaping the future of an organization founded more than 100 years ago.

Speaker

Helga Nowotny
Professor emerita of Science and Technology Studies ETH Zurich;
former President European Research Council

Helga Nowotny is Professor emerita of Science and Technology Studies, ETH Zurich, and a founding member of the European Research Council. In 2007 she was elected ERC Vice President and was ERC President from March 2010 until December 2013. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University, New York, after having obtained a doctorate in jurisprudence from the University of Vienna. She has held teaching and research positions at the University of Vienna; King’s College, Cambridge; University of Bielefeld; Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales; Collegium Budapest/Institute of Advanced Study, Budapest and others. Throughout her career she has been engaged in science policy at EU level and in various advisory roles.

Helga Nowotny has published widely in science and technology studies and on social time. Her latest books are The Cunning of Uncertainty (Polity, 2015) and An Orderly Mess (CEU Press, 2017). Currently she is a member of the Austrian Council for Research and Technology Development and Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore as well as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Falling Walls Foundation, Berlin; Vice-President of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings; Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Complexity Science Hub, Vienna; and active in other advisory boards in Europe. She is a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and of Academies of Science in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Austria and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, USA. She has been honoured by the rarely awarded Gold Medal of the Academia Europaea, the Leibniz-Medaille of the Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften and the British Academy President's Medal.

She has received honorary doctorates from universities and academic institutions in Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Israel, Norway, Singapore and the United Kingdom. 

http://helga-nowotny.eu/

Moderator

Tony O'Driscoll
Adjunct Professor, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University

Tony O’Driscoll is an adjunct professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and a Research Fellow at Duke CE. This dual-role affords Tony the opportunity to operate at the intersection of cutting-edge academic research in business and real-world business challenges faced by leaders.

During his 18-year corporate career, Tony held several strategic leadership positions. He was a founding member of IBM Global Service’s Strategy and Change consulting practice where he consulted at the highest level with business executives on creating sustainable competitive advantage in increasingly complex environments. He also served as a member IBM’s Almaden Services Research group where he investigated the changing roles of leadership, innovation, and collaboration as enterprises become more global, virtual, open and digitally mediated.
 
Tony has authored and co-authored articles for business periodicals such as Harvard Business Review, The Financial Times, Strategy and Business, CLO Magazine and Dialogue. His current research examines how rapidly emerging technologies are disrupting existing industry structures and business models. He specifically focuses on how to develop leadership systems that enable organizations to adapt and evolve in increasingly unpredictable and turbulent business environments. 

Speaker

Efosa Ojomo
Senior Research Fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute

Efosa Ojomo was selected as one of 30 thinkers in the 2020 Thinkers50 Radar list, the world’s most reliable resource for identifying, ranking, and sharing the leading management ideas of our age.

He researches and writes about how innovation can transform organizations and create inclusive prosperity for many. In January, 2019, alongside Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen, he published the book, The Prosperity Paradox: How innovation can lift nations out of poverty.

Efosa leads the Global Prosperity research group at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, an innovation-focused think tank based in Boston and Silicon Valley. Over the past several years, his work has been published and covered by the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, The Guardian, Quartz, Forbes, Fortune, The World Bank, NPR, and several other media outlets.

He speaks regularly and has presented his work at TED, the Aspen Ideas Festival, the World Bank, Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and at several other conferences and institutions.

His TED Talk on Innovation and Corruption has garnered over 1.8 million views.

In a Wall Street Journal review of The Prosperity Paradox, Rupert Darwall writes, “the authors return the entrepreneur and innovation to the center stage of economic development and prosperity.”

Click here to view a list of some of Efosa’s published work.

Efosa graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in computer engineering and got his MBA from Harvard Business School.

Speaker

Alexander Osterwalder
Entrepreneur and Business Model Innovator, Co-Founder Strategyzer

Dr. Alexander (Alex) Osterwalder is one of the world’s most influential strategy and innovation experts, a leading author, entrepreneur, and in-demand speaker whose work has changed the way established companies do business and how new ventures get started.

Ranked No. 4 of the top 50 management thinkers worldwide, Osterwalder is known for simplifying the strategy development process and turning complex concepts into digestible visual models. Together with Yves Pigneur, he invented the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map – practical tools that are trusted by millions of business practitioners from leading global companies including Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, MasterCard, Sony, Fujitsu, 3M, Intel, Roche, Colgate-Palmolive, and many more.

Strategyzer, the company Osterwalder co-founded in 2010, is an innovation powerhouse, providing online courses, applications, and technology-enabled services to help organizations effectively and systematically manage strategy, growth, and transformation.

Osterwalder’s books include the international bestseller Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design, Testing Business Ideas, and his newest one, The Invincible Company.

He holds the Strategy Award from Thinkers50 and the European Union’s inaugural Innovation Luminary Award. In 2019, Osterwalder successfully chaired the prestigious Drucker Forum for the first time, the premier annual business management conference. A frequent and popular keynote speaker, Osterwalder travels the world discussing his ideas and strategies at Fortune 500 companies, premiere innovation conferences, and leading universities.

He holds a doctorate from HEC Lausanne, Switzerland, and is a founding member of The Constellation, a global not-for-profit organization connecting local responses to global issues around the world.

Speaker

Dinesh C. Paliwal
Board member Bristol-Myers Squibb, Nestlé and Raytheon Technologies Corporation and Harman

Dinesh Paliwal is Senior Advisor to the Board of Directors and CEO of HARMAN, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. In addition to the HARMAN Board, Dinesh also serves on the boards of Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE:BMY), Nestlé (SIX:NESN), and Raytheon Technologies Corporation (NYSE:RTX). Previously, he served on the boards of four public companies: Tyco International Ltd. (Switzerland domicile), ADT Security Services, Embarq (now CenturyLink Inc.), and as chairman, ABB India Ltd.

Dinesh joined HARMAN as President and Chief Executive Officer in 2007, and served in this position before stepping down in 2020. In 2008, the HARMAN board of directors elected Dinesh as the chairman of the board, succeeding the founder and chairman Dr. Sidney Harman. Dinesh served as chairman and CEO until HARMAN was sold to Samsung for $8.8 billion in 2017. He has transformed the company into a customer- centric and innovation driven technology leader, expanding the company's business in high-growth emerging markets, instituting best-in-class operating processes that have resulted in significant top and bottom-line growth, and positioning the company beyond its audio heritage to the premier tier one technology partner to automotive companies around the world. In the last decade, 2009-2019, under his leadership company revenue grew 300%; BRIC/ASEAN market revenue grew 1000%; automotive order backlog grew 360% to $29 billion; and shareholder value rose 1100% from $9 in 2009 to $112 in 2007 upon its sale to Samsung.

Prior to joining HARMAN, he spent 22 years with ABB Group (NYSE:ABB), where he rapidly moved up to take on leadership roles of progressively greater responsibility in the U.S., Singapore, Australia, China, and Switzerland. His last role at ABB was in global headquarters in Switzerland as group president with responsibility for the company's global P&L. Simultaneously, he took on a dual role as chairman and CEO of ABB Inc. to turnaround the perennially loss-making North American region, where he successfully achieved profitable growth for the multi-billion operation.

Dinesh has worked and lived in six countries on four continents, including the U.S., China, Switzerland, Singapore, Australia, and India. Moving to Beijing in 1994, Dinesh established ABB's operations in China and North Asia, where he grew the region's
business ten-fold in four years. After becoming the youngest executive to join the ABB management board in 2001, Dinesh was tapped by the board to run the global Automation division, representing more than half of ABB's sales. As president of the division reporting directly to the chairman, Dinesh posted 14 consecutive quarters of top-line and earnings growth and was subsequently promoted to group president of ABB in 2006.

He is a member of the CEO Business Roundtable and serves on the corporate advisory board of The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He also serves on the board of directors of the U.S.-India Business Council (USIBC) and the Board of Visitors of the Farmer School of Business, Miami University. He has also served as chairman of the U.S. National Foreign Trade Council (Washington DC) and on the boards of the U.S.-India CEO Forum, the U.S. China Business Council, the National Symphony Orchestra (Washington DC), and the International Swimming Hall of Fame.

Among his many accolades from the business, industry and media communities, Dinesh was named to Motor Trend's Power List in 2018, in recognition of his instrumental role in HARMAN's transformation. In 2017, Dinesh was named to the inaugural Recode 100, which recognizes the year's most influential people in tech, business, and media. In 2015, Dinesh was named to Yahoo Finance's short list of five-star CEOs, and in 2014, Dinesh was named to Fortune magazine's “Business Person of the Year" list. In 2012, Dinesh was inducted into the International Honor Society Beta Gamma Sigma, and the Asian American Business Development Center presented him with the “Pinnacle Award." In 2011, the American India Foundation (AIF) honored him for “Corporate Leadership." In 2010, Ernst & Young named him “Entrepreneur of the Year" for the New York region, and the Global Organization of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) honored him with “Indian American Achiever" Award.

Dinesh holds a Master of Science in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Roorkee) and in 2019, IIT board of directors elected him for the Distinguished Alumni award. He also earned a Master of Science in applied engineering as well as an MBA in Finance from Miami University of Ohio. In 2019, the board of trustees of Miami University conferred an honorary Doctor of Laws to Dinesh for his ongoing efforts and contributions toward advancing the University's leadership in business, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurial endeavors.

Dinesh is regularly recognized for his role in driving innovation and social progress. He is a recipient of the prestigious Ellis Island Medal of Honor, founded by the Ellis Island Honors Society (EIHS), which counts among its past medalists seven U.S. presidents, Nobel Prize winners, and other world leaders of government, industry, education, the arts, and sports. In addition, B'nai B'rith International honored Dinesh with its Distinguished Achievement Award. Dinesh also has been honored by the global nonprofit Breakthrough for his contributions to advancing women's causes, and The T.J. Martell Foundation recognized him with its Music Innovation Award.

Speaker

Peter Paschek
Management Consultant

Peter Paschek (born October 1949, Homberg/Lower Rhine , Germany), Studies in Social Sciences and Economics in Germany , UK and USA (Dipl. soc oec.).

Management Consultant since 1979. From 1976 to 1979, scientific staff member, Chair of Sociology I (Prof. Dr. J. Papalekas), Ruhr University Bochum, Germany.

In 2015 Paschek continued his work as Management and Executive Search Consultant as free lancer , after operating as Managing Partner and Co-Owner of Delta Management Consultants GmbH for more than 20 years.

His academic teaching activities (St. Gallen Iniversity till 2013, and particularly at Technical University Munich) kept him constantly connected with academia.

Paschek is a disciple of Prof. Dr. Peter F. Drucker , who was friend and advisor to him for nearly 30 years. In 2004 both edited a book, titled „Kardinaltugenden effektiver Führung“ which was translated in Chinese, Korean and Portuguese.

Paschek‘s newest book , titled „Peter F. Drucker- memories of a conservative christian Anarchist“, will be published end of 2019.

Speaker

Fleur Pellerin
Founder and Chairwoman, Korelya Capital;
Former minister for SMEs, Innovation and the Digital Economy

Fleur Pellerin was born in 1973 in Seoul. In 1974, she was adopted by a French family and subsequently spent her childhood in the Paris region. After graduating from ESSEC (Graduate Business School), the Paris Institute of Political Studies (“Sciences Po”) and lastly ENA (National School of Administration), she joined the French Court of Auditors in 2000.

On 16 May 2012, Fleur was appointed to Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault’s government as Minister of SMEs, Innovation and the Digital Economy. During this time, in addition to launching the “French Tech” movement and carrying out various tax and regulatory reforms to support entrepreneurship and investment in France, she strove to make digital a key focus for the Government and the country through various measures such as including coding in the school curriculum, converting government agencies to digital, or designing the ultra-high speed broadband program to roll out fiber optics and bridge the digital divide in remote regions.

On 9 April 2014, she became Secretary of State for Foreign Trade and Tourism, in the Government led by Prime Minister Manuel Valls. On 26 August 2014 she was appointed Minister for Culture and Communication, where she focused on access and democratization, but also on entrepreneurship and digital transition, including multilateral negotiations on copyright and intellectual property safeguards. In March 2015, for example, she launched an anti-internet piracy program to starve illegal streaming websites of advertising income by having advertising firms, authors and artists representatives and online payment firms sign a charter. She boosted France’s attractivity for the movie industry by increasing tax credits for French and foreign features, animation films, and TV series. She has reformed video game and music production tax credits in the same direction to support the dynamism of the French creative industries. She also incepted with Nobel Prize Jean Tirole the Laffont Research Chair at the Toulouse School of Economics in order to study the evolution of microeconomic models in a world driven by data and knowledge economics. As such, for the first time ever, academic economic research contributed to cultural policy.

After leaving the Government on 11 February 2016, she resigned from the public service and, in September that same year, she founded Korelya Capital, a 200 M€ Venture Capital Fund specializing in tech growth deals all across Europe. Fleur is also the President of the International CannesSeries Festival whose first edition took place in April 2018 and became one of the first worldwide cultural events dedicated to TV series. She is a director of Schneider Electric, KLM, Talan, Devialet, and Naver Francen, and also sits on the boards of various cultural institutions or think tanks (Louvre Museum Foundation, Eurockéennes Festival, France Digitale, Institut Montaigne).

Fleur speaks English, German, and Japanese (intermediate level).

Speaker

Muriel Pénicaud
French Ambassador to the OECD, former French Labor Minister

Muriel Pénicaud was Minister of Labour of France from May 2017 to July 2020.
She led several important reforms: the reform of the labour law (2017), the “Professional future” law (2018) for apprenticeships, continuing education, and gender equality, 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’ organisations, aiming to build social protection for all worldwide.

Previously, Muriel Pénicaud was CEO of Business France and French Ambassador for International Investments from May 2014 to May 2017. 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 promoting and facilitating international investments in France.

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 SMEs. She held a number of executive positions in the same group between 1993 and 2002. She founded and produced the Eve program to develop Women’s Leadership in business in 2010, and created “Dan’Cares” a program providing social protection for all employees worldwide.

From 2002 to 2008, she was Executive Vice-President for Human Resources and Sustainable Development and member of the Executive Committee at Dassault Systèmes, a 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 organisations director (1981-1985), and then at the French Ministry for Labour from 1985 to 2002, and was a member of the ministerial Cabinet from 1991 to 1993. She previously co-founded and became Vice-President of TV DMA, the leading academic TV channel for Corporate Management and Business Law.

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

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

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

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

Speaker

Gianpiero Petriglieri
Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour, INSEAD

Gianpiero Petriglieri (@gpetriglieri) is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD. He directs the Management Acceleration Programme, the school’s flagship Executive Education programme for emerging leaders. He is an Academic Director of the INSEAD Initiative for Learning Innovation and Teaching Excellence.

Gianpiero’s research interests bridge the domains of leadership, identity, and learning. His work focuses on how and where people become mindful, effective, and responsible leaders. He is particularly concerned with the development of leadership in the age of "nomadic professionalism," in which authenticity and mobility have replaced loyalty and advancement as hallmarks of virtue and success.

In this context, he contends, a narrow focus on the acquisition of new knowledge and skills is inadequate to develop competent and trustworthy leaders. His research casts a light on the psychological, social, and cultural functions of leadership development. His innovative teaching methods provide an example of how to perform these functions purposefully for the benefit of individuals, organisations, and society at large.

Gianpiero’s research has appeared, or is forthcoming, in leading academic journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Learning & Education, and Organization Studies. His work on the personal foundations of leader's development received the GMAC Award for the most significant contribution to graduate management education and the Best Article Award of the Academy of Management Learning & Education. Gianpiero writes regularly for the Harvard Business Review, and for four of the past five years, his essays have been included among the "ideas that shaped management". His work has been featured in various media including the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, and Businessweek. He has chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on new models of leadership and was shortlisted for the Leadership Award by Thinkers50, the ranking of the most influential management thinkers in the world.

Building on his research, Gianpiero has contributed to refining a unique approach to experiential leadership development that aims to deepen and accelerate the development of individual leaders as well as to broaden and strengthen leadership communities within and across organisations. Besides the Management Acceleration Programme, he directs customised leadership development programmes for multinationals in a variety of industries. He also speaks widely on how to develop and exercise leadership in fast-changing, uncertain, and diverse workplaces.

Gianpiero taught the Leading People and Groups core course in the INSEAD MBA programme for five years, receiving the Outstanding Teacher Award. He currently teaches the Practical Wisdom in Business core course. He has received numerous Dean's Commendations for Teaching Excellence in both MBA and Executive Education programmes. He has held visiting professor positions at the Harvard Business School and at Copenhagen Business School. Prior to joining INSEAD, he contributed regularly to executive education and MBA programmes at the IMD in Switzerland. 



Gianpiero holds a Medical Doctorate and a specialisation in Psychiatry from the University of Catania Medical School, Italy, and a diploma in Advanced Organizational Consultation from the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London. He has practiced as a psychotherapist and served on the staff of group relations conferences in Europe and the United States.'

Moderator

Stefan Pickl
Professor; Chair for Operations Research, Department of Computer Science, Bundeswehr University Munich

Studied mathematics, electrical engineering, and philosophy at TU Darmstadt and EPFL Lausanne 1987-93. Dipl.-Ing. ’93, Doctorate 1998 with award. Assistant Professor at Cologne University (Dr. habil. 2005; venia legendi "Mathematics"). Since 2005 chair for Operations Research (-Management Science-) at UBw Munich.

Visiting Professor at University of New Mexico (U.S.A.), University Graz (Austria), University of California at Berkeley, Naval Postgraduate School NPS Monterey (U.S.A.).  Visiting scientist at SANDIA, Los Alamos National Lab, Santa Fe Institute for Complex Systems and MIT (USA). Chapter “Data Science and Optimization - Intelligence Analysis” within German Master Program for Intelligence and Security Studies (MISS).

International Best Paper Awards ’03, ’05, '07,`15,`19. Chair of the Advisory Board of the German Society for Operations Research (GOR). Chair Special Interest Group “Analytics-Artificial Intelligence” of German CIO society VOICE. Vice-Chair of German Committee for Disaster Reduction DKKV. Honorary Professor University of Nottingham at Malaysia Campus. Fellow European Academy of Industrial Management.

Director COMTESSA. Core Competence Center for Operations Research Management – Tenacity – Excellence – Safety & Security ALLIANCE.
Founded 2005 in the spirit and memoriam of Peter Drucker.

Speaker

Paul Polman
Co-Founder, IMAGINE; former CEO Unilever

Paul Polman is co-founder of IMAGINE, which mobilises business leaders around tackling climate change and global inequality. He is also Chair of the International Chamber of Commerce, The B Team, Saïd Business School and The Valuable 500, and Vice-Chair of the UN Global Compact. A leading proponent that business can and should be a force for good, he has been described by the Financial Times as "a standout CEO of the past decade”. As CEO of Unilever (2009-2018), he demonstrated that a long-term, multi-stakeholder model goes hand-in-hand with excellent financial performance. Paul was a member of the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Panel that developed the Sustainable Development Goals, and he remains an active SDG Advocate in working with global organisations and across industry to deliver the 2030 development agenda.

Moderator

Deepa Prahalad
Design strategist and Social Innovator

Deepa Prahalad is an author, business strategist and consultant specializing in opportunities at the intersection of consumer experience, technology and strategy. Passionate about emerging markets and innovation, she began her career searching how to improve efficiency in UN procurement and later moved to Singapore to become a commodities trader with Cargill. Deepa has worked as a management consultant with firms from start-ups to large multinationals. In 2008, she researched and co-authored the book, “Predictable Magic: Unleash The Power of Design Strategy To Transform Your Business” (Wharton School Publishing). Deepa speaks at business schools such as USC and Harvard on design strategy using the EMPOWER framework she developed and conducts workshops for executives. A frequent blogger on the Huffington Post and Harvard Business Review, she has also written about the business case for design in Bloomberg Businessweek and other magazines.

She currently serves on the Advisory Boards of Lappeeranta University of Technology (Finland) and the Challenge: Future global youth think tank and student competition. Deepa also works with several initiatives that support the work of her late father, CK Prahalad, such as the Prahalad Center for Emerging India in Chennai and the Prahalad Initiative at the University of Michigan. Deepa is a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from the University of Michigan and an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and is on twitter at @deepaprahalad.

Speaker

Sunil Prashara
President & CEO at Project Management Institute

As President & Chief Executive Officer of the Project Management Institute (PMI), Sunil Prashara is the lead advocate for PMI's global organization, serving more than three million professionals working in nearly every country worldwide.

Since joining PMI as CEO in March of 2019, Sunil has reinvigorated the association's strategic vision and accelerated the implementation of a forward-leaning transformation program. He has established the 50-year-old association as a truly global and innovative enterprise serving a more comprehensive range of project professionals and change-makers worldwide.

Sunil's key priorities have included expanding the PMI footprint globally, digitizing the organization's offering to benefit its members through the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and advocating the value of project management to C-suite leaders and decision-makers from some of the world's leading organizations.

During his tenure, critical accomplishments for the organization have included launching a bold and energetic new brand identity, driving two ground-breaking acquisitions to assume greater leadership in the Agile space, implementing a powerful new regional model, and crossing the threshold of one million active Project Management Professional® certification holders around the globe.

The CEO Publication has recognized Sunil as one of the Top 20 Dynamic CEOs of 2020 in the United Kingdom. Under his leadership, PMI has also received a range of industry awards. These honors include being named as one of the Top 100 Associations that Will Save the World by the American Society of Association Executives, and winning a Silver Stevie® award for corporate social responsibility in recognition of PMI's partnership with the United Nations that saw the PMI community pledge over 150,000 hours of service aligned with the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

An engaging and dynamic speaker, Sunil has presented on a variety of topics related to The Project Economy and the future of work at high-level forums around the globe, including events hosted by TED and the United Nations. He is widely recognized as a thought leader on emerging trends in the workplace, including gymnastic organizations, citizen development, and cultivating "Power Skills" to succeed in the age of automation.

Before joining PMI, he served as CEO of i1too Ltd in the U.K., a sales accelerator for digital start-ups, which he founded in 2016 and grew internationally. He previously served as CEO of Expereo International and held numerous executive leadership positions throughout the information and communications technology and telecommunications industries. His extensive multi-functional, cultural, geography experience includes managing sales, operations, and digital transformation for companies such as Vodafone, Nokia, Accenture, and Perot Systems (NTT). As a business executive, he has developed an appreciation for project management expertise and understands from an "outside-in" perspective on how PMI can expand its reach globally.

Sunil speaks Punjabi and Hindi. He is a graduate of the University of London and resides in the U.K. with his wife Kavita and two sons Kamran and Raghav. He enjoys golf, boxing, martial arts, and traveling.

Speaker

Helga Rabl-Stadler
President Salzburg Festival

Speaker

Helmut Reisinger
CEO Orange Business Services

Dr. Helmut Reisinger was appointed CEO of Orange Business Services in May 2018 and serves on the Executive Committee for the Orange Group. Helmut is responsible for the company strategy to support the digital transformation of our enterprise customers across France and international markets. His particular focus will be on the key business growth areas that enable multinational enterprises to leverage their entire data value chain, resulting in new business models and further success.

Helmut has over 20 years of experience in enterprise markets and solutions. Prior to his appointment as CEO, he was executive vice president, International, in charge of business activities outside the home market France, including Europe, the Americas, APAC, the Middle East, Africa, Russia and Indirect business. He joined Orange in July 2007 as senior vice president, Europe.

Before joining Orange Business Services, Helmut was vice president Western Europe at Avaya Inc. Previously, Helmut was CEO of private equity owned NextiraOne Germany and a member of their European Executive Committee. Helmut also held several leadership positions during his nine-year tenure with Alcatel Austria, with his last position being managing director of Alcatel’s enterprise activities in Austria.

A native of Austria, Helmut is a graduate of Vienna University for Economics and Business, CEMS Masters Program at WU Wien with international studies at Hochschule St Gallen (Switzerland) and ESCCA Angers (France).

Helmut speaks English, French, German and Spanish.

Speaker

Megan Reitz
Professor of Leadership and Dialogue, Hult Ashridge Executive Education

I am a facilitator, teacher, speaker, executive coach, researcher and author dedicated to exploring and finding ways to improve the way we interact with one another in the workplace.

My passion and curiosity centres around the quality of how we meet, see, hear, speak, learn with and encounter one another in organisational systems and how we might encourage dialogue which is more humane and which enables us, our colleagues and our society to flourish.

Working at the intersection of leadership, change, dialogue and mindfulness, I have presented my research to audiences throughout the world and I am listed on the Thinkers50 Radar of global management thinkers and on the 2018 HR Most Influential list of Thinkers.

My recent research with John Higgins on ‘Speaking truth to Power’ – examining how perceptions of power enable and silence others – has been featured in three articles in Harvard Business Review. It is the subject of my TEDx talk and our new book, Speak Up: Say what needs to be said and hear what needs to be heard, with Financial Times Publishing.

With Michael Chaskalson I have been examining mindful leadership and our research has been published by Harvard Business Review (Nov and Dec 2016), featured in Forbes Magazine and our book, Mind Time: How Ten Mindful Minutes can enhance your work, health and happiness, (Harper Thorsons, 2018). I am also the author of Dialogue in Organizations; Developing Relational Leadership (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

As well as running my own business, I am Professor of Leadership and Dialogue at Hult International Business School, Ashridge Executive Education. I supervise students undertaking their PhD on the Executive Doctorate in Organisational Change and I also teach on a wide range of open and custom programmes. My particular interest is in action inquiry based research – research which is participatory and dedicated to initiating generative change through cycles of action, inquiry and reflection – however, my own research includes a broad range of methodological approaches.

Before joining Ashridge, I was a consultant with Deloitte; surfed the dot-com boom with boo.com; and worked in strategy consulting for The Kalchas Group, now the strategic arm of Computer Science Corporation.

I was educated at Cambridge University gaining an MA in Land Economy. I received a Masters in Change Agent Skills and Strategies at Surrey University and a Masters in Research at Cranfield School of Management where I was also awarded my PhD.

I am an accredited executive coach with Ashridge and The School of Coaching and I am qualified with the British Psychological Society. As a mindfulness teacher, I am currently studying with the Mindfulness Network and I am an Associate at Mindfulness Works.

I am mother to two wonderful daughters who test me regularly on my powers of mindfulness and dialogue. My favourite pastimes are to hike in beautiful countryside with my family and to cycle through the forest at Ashridge. 

Moderator

Marie Ringler
Ashoka Europe Leader

Marie Ringler is leading Ashoka's work in Europe. She founded Ashoka's Austrian office in 2011 and soon took over Regional Director for Central and Eastern Europe. In 2015 she became one of Ashoka's Europe Directors, in 2018 she was appointed European Leader of Ashoka. She was born in Vienna, studied Sociology, Political Science and Women`s Studies at the University of Vienna, and holds a degree from ESADE Business School, Spain and an MBA from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.

In the late 90`s she helped build Public Netbase, an art institution dedicated to exploring the social implications of the internet and new technologies through the lens of art, and later became its managing director. She was elected into office as a Member of the Regional Parliament and City Council of Vienna in 2001, making her the youngest member.  During her time in office, she focused on developing policy to drive innovations in society, and served on the Vienna Department of Commerce Advisory Board, initiated the city’s Open Source Software Strategy and developed a federal policy program for Innovation.

After two successful terms in office, she decided against a life-long career in politics and established Ashoka`s Austrian office in Vienna.

In her role as Director of Ashoka in Central and Eastern Europe she led Ashoka’s relaunch efforts in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Israel. As Europe Leader Ringler is advancing Ashoka’s work in over 26 country offices who support more than 570 Social Entrepreneurs (“Ashoka Fellows”). Ringler serves as a 2nd Opinion Interviewer in Ashoka’s Global Fellow Selection process and has led the global selection process for more than 50 Fellows in countries such as Indonesia, Nigeria, Mexico, Colombia, and the US.  Her work has been featured extensively in international media and she is a frequent speaker at conferences and events focusing on social entrepreneurship, social innovation, cross-sectoral collaboration and policy.

She was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Austrian Broadcasting Agency (ORF), and serves on several award juries.

Ashoka is the world`s largest network of 3.600 Social Entrepreneurs, spanning across more than 90 countries, who are solving some of the world`s toughest social problems. Ashoka works to identify, elect and support leading social entrepreneurs financially and professionally. We bring communities of social entrepreneurs together to help leverage their impact, scale their ideas, and disseminate their practices. And we help to build the infrastructure, financial systems and mindsets needed to facilitate the global growth of social innovation and an Everyone a Changemaker world.

Speaker

Kevin Roberts
Founder Red Rose Consulting; former CEO Worldwide, Saatchi & Saatchi

Kevin Roberts is an international business leader, founder, and educator. His company Red Rose Consulting counsels business leaders and employees on creative thinking, marketing, and leadership.

A CEO for 22 years, Kevin has an uncompromisingly positive and inspirational leadership style, with an ability to generate ideas and emotional connections that accelerate extraordinary value. Kevin’s latest book 64 Shots: Leadership in a Crazy World (2016) offers frameworks and solutions for winning in a business world that has become volatile, complex, uncertain and ambiguous.

Born and educated in Lancaster in the north of England, Kevin Roberts started his career in the late 1960s with iconic London fashion house Mary Quant. He became a senior marketing executive for Gillette and Procter & Gamble in Europe and the Middle East. At 32, he became CEO of Pepsi-Cola Middle East; and later Pepsi’s CEO in Canada, over-taking Coke in the ‘Cola Wars.’ In 1989, Kevin moved to Auckland, New Zealand, to become Chief Operating Officer with Lion Nathan, growing the company to become the region’s leading brewer.

From 1997 to 2014 Kevin was New York-based CEO Worldwide at Saatchi & Saatchi, one of the world’s leading creative organizations, with responsibility for the effectiveness of several of the world’s leading advertising budgets including for clients Toyota and Procter & Gamble. He retired as Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi in 2016. For 16 years Kevin was a member of the Management Board of Publicis Groupe, the Paris-based global communications group active in 108 countries and employing 80,000 professionals, as it grew from the world’s seventh largest communications group to the third.

Kevin advises national organizations and global brands across commerce, media and sport. He has honorary appointments and doctorates at a number of universities. He is Honorary Professor of Creative Leadership at Lancaster University (England), Honorary Professor of Innovation and Creativity at the University of Auckland Business School (New Zealand), and Honorary Professor of Leadership and Innovation at the University of Victoria School of Business (Canada). With academic colleagues, he wrote Peak Performance: Business Lessons from the World’s Top Sporting Organizations, an inspiration-driven business theory and practice. In 2004, he wrote Lovemarks: the Future Beyond Brands, a ground-breaking business book published in 18 languages, showing how emotion can inspire businesses and brands to deliver sustainable value. Lovemarks was named one of the ten Ideas of the Decade by Advertising Age in 2009. His 2005 book Sisomo (for sight, sound and motion) explored the future of the screen age.

In 2013, Kevin, a New Zealand citizen, was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (CNZM) for services to business and the community. Currently, he is business ambassador for the New Zealand United States Council and Chair of the following organisations: My Food Bag (New Zealand home food delivery service); and The Herdy Company (UK homeware and accessories retailer). He sits on the board of UK grocer Booths.

He has made presentations to business audiences in 60 countries, with a San Francisco technology reviewer noting, “Kevin Roberts was arguably more entertaining and more informative than any other speaker, speaking about any other subject, anywhere. That is saying a lot, but during the hour of his speech, there was nowhere else in the world that I would have rather been than in his audience.”

Moderator

Bettina Rollow
Organisational developer, Executive coach

Bettina Rollow is a uniquely skilled and experienced organisational developer, executive coach and facilitator. Before working as an organisational developer and coach, Bettina received a master in International Business Studies and worked for several years as a senior consultant for the Volkswagen Group. As an organisational developer, Bettina is focused on complex projects, creating collaborative working models across companies and countries. Trained as a Gestalt therapist, she addresses the organisational structure as well as the individual employee. Many of the companies she works with explore radically new ways to lead and collaborate, often involving collective leadership and self-management.

In 2019 she published – together with social entrepreneur Joana Breidenbach – the book “New Work needs Inner Work – A handbook for organisations on their way to self-organisation”. The book content is also available as online video course “The Future of Work needs Inner Work”. Bettina is co-founder of the Sense-and-Do Tank Das Dach. She lives in Berlin, Germany.

Moderator

Johan Roos
Chief Academic Officer, Hult International Business School

I serve as Chief Academic Officer of HULT International Business School with campuses in London, Boston, San Francisco, Dubai and Shanghai (hult.edu). Driving quality and innovation in the dynamic HULT organization and its global higher education ecosystem is a passion. Before joining HULT in 2016, I served as leader and/or faculty member in several European business schools and a research foundation. Another passion is advancing the concept and practice of LEGO Serious Play, which I co-invented two decades ago. 

CV and publications at johanroos.se.

Speaker

Hermann Simon
Founder & Honorary Chairman, Simon-Kucher & Partners

Speaker

Simon Sinek
Optimist

Simon Sinek is an unshakable optimist. He believes in a bright future and our ability to build it together.

Described as “a visionary thinker with a rare intellect,” Simon has devoted his professional life to help advance a vision of the world that does not yet exist; a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired, feel safe at work and return home fulfilled at the end of the day.

He is the author of five books:

• Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, a global bestseller (with over a 1 million books sold in the U.S. alone)
• Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t, a New York Times andWall Street Journal bestseller
• Together is Better: A Little Book of Inspiration, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller
• Find Your Why: A Practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team
• And his latest book, The Infinite Game, also a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller

A trained ethnographer, Simon is fascinated by the people and organizations that make the greatest and longest lasting impact in the world. Over the years, he has discovered some remarkable patterns about how they think, act and communicate and the environments in which people operate at their natural best. He has devoted his life to sharing his thinking in order to help other leaders and organizations inspire action.

Simon may be best known for popularizing the concept of WHY, which he described in his firstTED Talk in 2009. That talk went on to become the second most watched TED Talk of all time, and is still in the top five with nearly 50 million views. His interview on millennials in the workplace broke the internet in 2016. With over 80 million views in its first week, it has now been viewed hundreds of millions times. This led to Simon being YouTube’s fifth most searched term in 2017.

His unconventional and innovative views on business and leadership have attracted international attention. From the airline industry to the entertainment industry, from finance to fashion, from big business to entrepreneurs to police forces, Simon has been invited to meet with a broad array of leaders and organizations in nearly every industry. He has also had the honor of sharing his ideas with multiple agencies of the US government and with the senior-most leaders of the United States AirForce, Marine Corps, Navy, Army and Coast Guard. Simon is an adjunct staff member of theRAND Corporation, one of the most highly regarded think tanks in the world. He is also active in the arts and in the non-for-profit world (though Simon prefers to call it the for-impact world)

Speaker

Jeremy Snape
Managing Director of Sporting Edge, Sports Psychologist, and Former Cricketer

Jeremy has the combined experience of being a successful International cricketer and coach, providing innovative performance ideas for teams and leaders. He has the ability to draw upon real life examples from his playing and coaching career which are underpinned by his Master's Degree in Sport Psychology.

Jeremy has worked with some very successful corporate clients delivering team culture, leadership and executive coaching programmes. On the sporting front Jeremy has held roles as Performance Coach to the South African Cricket Team as well as Shane Warne's victorious Rajasthan Royals in the Indian Premier League. Jeremy supported Alan Pardew at Crystal Palace and was part of the coaching team when they reached the FA Cup Final in 2016, and also supported England Rugby under Eddie Jones during their record 18 wins in a row.

Jeremy has rapidly become one of the most recognised names in sport psychology, offering key insights to national newspapers, Sky Sports and BBC Radio 5 Live. His podcast ‘Inside the Mind of Champions’ has been a regular in the Apple Charts top 10.

In 2013 Jeremy joined the LMA as a Non-Executive Director to support their leadership and management programmes and has interviewed the likes of Sir Alex Ferguson, Jose Mourinho and Pep Guardiola.

Jeremy's unique expertise and ability to make sense of complex areas of performance is now yours to share. He is available as a keynote speaker across the globe via www.sportingedge.com

Speaker

Isabelle Spiegel
Global Leader Organization Practice, Vinci

Global head of environment with VINCI since August 2019, Isabelle Spiegel has more than 20 years of experience in environment and sustainability, both in consulting and in operational management.

Engineer, graduated from the “Mines” French high school of Douai and the Technical University of Berlin, and having started her career in the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Isabelle Spiegel has for nearly 15 years advised the clients of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), in particular Environmental compliance audits, reviews of environmental liabilities, due diligence carried out in the context of transactions, Sustainable Development strategy or responsible product strategy.

She spent 2 years in China, developing the Climate Change and Social Responsibility business of PwC. Isabelle has led international working groups leading to WBCSD (World Business Council for Sustainable Development) publications on environmental impacts in the chemical sector and well as real estate and construction.

Having joined Arcadis in 2015, Isabelle Spiegel headed the environment activities there in France, leading the expert teams in Polluted Sites and Soils and in regulatory studies. She was also in charge of the development of new service offers integrating the challenges of Sustainable Development, within the Innovation and Transformation unit of the Europe, England and Middle East region.

Speaker

Léa Steinacker
Chief Strategy Officer, ada - a learning initiative focused on the future of work and socio-technological change

Léa Steinacker is the Chief Strategy Officer and a member of the founding team of ada, a learning initiative focused on the future of work and socio-technological change. She oversees strategy, develops live experiences, and shapes content curation for the platform. Before this post, Léa served as the Chief Innovation Officer of WirtschaftsWoche, Germany's leading business magazine, where she wrote a bi-weekly column about the interplay of artificial intelligence, markets, and democracy. Previously, she worked with social justice NGOs in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She was selected as a 2020 “Future Thinker” by the Boston Consulting Group and Handelsblatt Media Group, a 2018 “Forbes 30 Under 30” list-maker, one of Medium Magazine’s “Top 30 Under 30 journalists”, and a 2016 Atlantik Bruecke “Young Leader”. Léa holds a BA from Princeton University, an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and is a PhD candidate at the University of St. Gallen.

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. Over the past decade, he and his wife Ilse have built up the 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. This is reflected in strategic partnerships with the likes of the Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times and the City of Vienna. In recognition of the impact and reputation of the Drucker Forum, Richard Straub was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honor for the Republic of Austria in early 2019.

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

Erich Vad
Former General of the Bundeswehr; Founder, Erich Vad Consulting

Dr. Erich E. Vad is a strategic consultant based in Grünwald near Munich.

He specializes in strategic industrial consulting, international security, risk assessment and business development. He also administers workshops for top-level executives and government officials in Germany and abroad.

Erich Vad is a former General of the Bundeswehr and served as German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Military Policy Advisor from 2006 until 2013. In this role, he was also the Director of Security Policy in the Federal Chancellery and Secretary of the Federal Security Council, Germany’s highest-ranking security body in Germany.

Additionally, Erich Vad served as Senior Advisor for the Conservative Party ( CDU/CSU)  in the German Parliament in Berlin from 2000 to 2005.

Prior to and during his time in the German Parliament and Federal Chancellery, Erich Vad served as an officer in the German Bundeswehr. His previous assignments include positions in the German Defense Ministry, German Foreign Ministry, the German Bundestag and NATO / WEU in Brussels.

Erich Vad has extensive experience in international cooperation and possesses a vast understanding of the interplay between the Federal Chancellery, German Ministries, the Parliament in Berlin and International Organizations in Brussels.

Erich Vad is a frequent guest and commentator for German and international media. He publishes regularly in a variety of German and English language journals and newspapers.

Erich Vad lives with his family in Grünwald near Munich. In addition to consulting, he has lectured at a variety of universities in Germany and abroad including The Geschwister Scholl Institute at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, the National Defense University, and Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

For further information please contact: info@erichvad-consulting.de

Speaker

Ricardo Vargas
Executive Director Brightline Initiative

Ricardo Viana Vargas is a specialist in project management and strategy implementation. Over the past 20 years, he has been responsible for more than 80 major transformation projects in several countries, covering an investment portfolio of over 20 billion USD.

He is currently the Executive Director of the Brightline Initiative™, a coalition of leading global organizations from business, government and not for profit sectors, dedicated to provide a knowledge and networking platform that delivers insights and solutions to successfully bridge the gap between strategy development and strategy implementation.

From 2012 to 2016, Ricardo Global Director of the Infrastructure and Project Management Group with the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS).

Vargas has written fifteen books on the subject of project management, and also host one of the most relevant podcasts in the field, the 5 Minutes PM Podcast, with more than 4 millions views.

See full Biography here

Speaker

Bart Weetjens
Social entrepreneur; Zen priest

Bart is a Zen priest and celebrated social entrepreneur. In 1995 he founded the organisation APOPO, which saves human lives from disaster and disease by training HeroRATs. Based on the shared vision that inner wellbeing is a prerequisite to do sustainably well in society, he joined The Wellbeing Project in 2015, to shift the culture in the field of social change to a more caring and compassionate one.  In 2017 he co-founded lagrandeterre.org, a permaculture/wellbeing center in the French Ardennes. Bart has been elected an ASHOKA fellow and a SCHWAB fellow to the World Economic Forum. He won the Skoll Award for social Entrepreneurship in 2009.  Bart holds a Masters in Product Design from Antwerp University, Belgium.

www.bartweetjens.be
Mail: hello@bartweetjens.be

Speaker

Falco Weidemeyer
Partner, Head of EYParthenon EMEIA

Profile

• Partner, Head of EYParthenon EMEIA
• Previously at Roland Berger GmbH as a Member of the European Board and Head of Corporate Performance & Transformation
• Special situations ranging from performance improvement to restructuring and turnaround
• CRO experience
• stakeholder communication and negotiation, esp. in the case of large scale hr measures
• Relevant experience in Consumer Goods, Retail, Automotive, Advanced Manufacturing
• Covering medium sized, family owned businesses as well as listed companies
• Leading EY Parthenon in EMEIA (> 220 Partners, 2.500 professionals)

Relevant experience

• Performance programs for large scale family owned businesses
• Refinancing programs
• Distressed M&A transactions
• Efficiency and transformation programs for various listed companies
• CRO assignments
• Management buy ins

Education and memberships

• European Business School (EBS)
• Universidad Argentina de la Empresa (UADE)
• San Diego State University (SDSU)
• Guest Lecturer at the Frankfurt School of Finance

Speaker

David Weinberger
Senior researcher, Harvard’s Klein Center for Internet & Society

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.

Moderator

Ania G. Wieckowski
Executive Editor, Harvard Business Review

Ania G. Wieckowski is an Executive Editor at Harvard Business Review, where she focuses on organizational behavior, people management, and psychology. In previous roles, including Managing Editor of HBR Press, she led efforts around HBR’s content curation and digital transformation. She is an avid hiker and choral singer.

Speaker

John Mark Williams
CEO Institute for Leadership and Management

Speaker

Peter Williamson
Professor of International Management, University of Cambridge & Judge Business School

Professor Peter Williamson is Professor of International Management at the University of Cambridge, Judge Business School and Fellow of Jesus College Cambridge. He has held professorships at London Business School, Harvard Business School and INSEAD (in Fontainebleau and Singapore). Formerly with Merrill Lynch and The Boston Consulting Group, he earned his PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University. He has served as non-executive director and chairman of companies spanning renewable energy, textiles, hedge funds, whisky (Glenmorangie), and software.

Peter has been visiting China regularly since 1983, assisting numerous multinationals and Chinese joint ventures as well as advising foreign companies on several acquisitions in China. More recently he has been assisting Chinese companies venturing abroad to develop their international strategies and organisations and to integrate foreign acquisitions. Peter has also assisted a number of major companies, including Alibaba Group, in building powerful business ecosystems to enhance and magnify their competitive advantage. He has travelled extensively in many of China’s provinces and regions for both business and leisure.

His books include: The Competitive Advantage of Emerging Market Multinationals; Dragons at Your Door; Winning in Asia; and From Global to Metanational. His new book, Ecosystem Edge: Sustaining Competitiveness In the Face of Disruption, will be published in 2019.

Recent articles include: “The New Mission for Multinationals”, “Accelerated Innovation”, “Strategies for Competing in a Changed China” and “Is Your Innovation Process Global?” (all in the MIT-Sloan Management Review) -- The latter received a Sloan-Pricewaterhouse Coopers Award honouring those articles that have contributed most to the enhancement of management practice; “How China Re-Set Its Global Acquisition Agenda”, “China’s Hidden Dragons” (all in Harvard Business Review). His more than 50 other articles include: “Ecosystem Advantage: How to successfully harness the power of partners”, and “Diversification, Core Competences and Corporate Performance”.

Moderator

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox
CEO of 20-first

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is CEO of 20-first, a leading international gender-balance consultancy. 20-first works with top management at some of the world’s best-known companies to identify the business opportunities of gender balance and how to achieve them. She has written a number of best-sellers in the field, including One Key to Gender Balance, Four Phases to Women’s Careers, Seven Steps to Leading Gender-Balanced Businesses, How Women Mean Business, and Why Women Mean Business: Understanding the Emergence of Our Next Economic Revolution, which won the Manpower Business Book of the Year award. Her most recent book is a more personal take on the consequences of gender balance at home: Late Love: Mating in Maturity.

Avivah speaks on leadership, marketing and talent management, and dual career issues across the globe, writes for FORBES and Harvard Business Review and lectures at HEC Business School. She is Founder and Honorary President of GlobalPWN.net, an international professional women’s network. Canadian, French and Swiss, she has been recognized by ELLE Magazine as one of the TOP 40 Women Leading Change. She lives in London with her sculptor husband and is occasionally visited by her two, globe-trotting, gender-balanced children, a son and daughter.

Speaker

Adrian Wooldridge
Political editor and 'Bagehot' columnist, The Economist

Adrian Wooldridge is The Economist’s political editor and writes the Bagehof column. He was previously based in Washington, DC, as the Washington bureau chief where he also wrote the Lexington column. Previously he has been The Economist’s West Coast correspondent, management correspondent and Britain correspondent.

He is the co-author of “The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea”, “A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalisation”, “Witch Doctors”, a critical examination of management theory, “The Right Nation”, a study of conservatism in America and “Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and their Ideas have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse”. His most recent book is “The Fourth Revolution - The Race to Reinvent the State”

Speaker

Howard Yu
LEGO professor of management and innovation, IMD Business School and director of IMD’s signature Advanced Management Program

Howard Yu is the LEGO Professor of Management and Innovation as well as the director of IMD’s signature program, Advanced Management Program (AMP). He is the author of the award-winning book “LEAP: How to Thrive in a World Where Everything Can Be Copied”.

His work has been featured by CNBC, BBC, Fast Company Magazine, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Quartz at Work, MarketWatch, and numerous international outlets. Check out his latest thinking at https://www.howardyu.org/blog.

In 2015, Yu was selected by Poets&Quants as one of “The World’s Top 40 Business Professors Under 40,” and in 2018, he appeared on the Thinkers50 Radar list of 30 management thinkers “most likely to shape the future of how organizations are managed and led.” He has delivered customized training programs to leading organizations, including LEGO, Mars, Maersk, Bosch, and Electrolux. Yu received his doctoral degree from Harvard Business School. Prior to his beginning his doctorate, he worked in the banking industry in Hong Kong. He lives in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Speaker

Michele Zanini
Co-founder, Management Lab

Michele Zanini is the co-founder of the Management Lab. Together with Gary Hamel, Zanini helps forward-thinking organizations become more resilient, innovative and engaging places to work. Zanini was previously an Associate Partner at McKinsey and Company and a leader in the firm’s organization, strategy and financial services practices. Zanini also spent five years as a policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, where he conducted pioneering research on how terrorist and other insurgent groups were harnessing information-age technologies to operate as nimble networks. Zanini’s work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Zanini holds degrees from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Pardee RAND Graduate School. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Speaker

Ya-Qin Zhang
Founder and Chairman of Blue Entropy LLC.; former President of Baidu Inc.

Dr. Ya-Qin Zhang is a renowned scientist, technologist and business executive. He is the founder and Chairman of Blue Entropy LLC, a Seattle-based technology consulting firm. He joined Tsinghua University as the Chair Professor of AI Science in 2020, starting the Tsinghua Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR). Zhang was President of Baidu Inc. from September 2014 to October 2019. Prior to joining Baidu, Zhang was previously a key executive of Microsoft for almost 16 years, including Corporate Vice President, Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia, and Chairman of Microsoft China. Dr. Ya-Qin Zhang has made outstanding contributions to the digital media, Internet technology and AI industry through his 550 publications, 68 US Patents and 11 monographs. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019, and was inducted to Australia National Academy of Engineeing as the only foreign fellow in 2017. He became an IEEE Fellow in 1997 at the age of 31, making him the youngest scientist winning this honor in the 100+ year history of the organization. Dr.Zhang received his Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from George Washington University.