Thierry Grange, President of the Strategic Board, Grenoble Ecole de Management, France

Wed 10/1, 9:30am – 10am EST
Forum: Cultivating Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Prof. Thierry Grange is the President of the Strategic Board at the Grenoble Ecole de Management in France, where he has been working since its beginning in 1984. He has published more than 60 articles, books or book chapters in the field of Management & Technology. He graduated in Mechanical Engineering (Technische Univ. München), Business Administration & Political Science (Grenoble Univ.) He also completed the International Teaching Program (HEC-Harvard/Boston). Before going in the academic world, he held international project management positions in the overseas construction industry. He then founded motorcycle manufacturer BFG SA (MBK). He has been elected twice at AACSB Board of Directors and served on the main AACSB Committees : Co-Chair of the Blue Ribbon Committee on Accreditation Quality, Chair of the European Advisory Council, Member of the Committee on Issues in Management Education, of the Special Committee on Global Accreditation Strategy, of the Executive Committee, of the Initial Accreditation Committee and of Finance & Investment Committee. He is presently Special Advisor to the President of AACSB for Europe and Member of the French National Business Education Degrees Accreditation Board. He has been also Member of the EFMD/EPAS Accreditation Board. He received, in 2009, Academic Achievement Award by International Association for Management of Technology and, in 2011, the Bronze Medal for Higher Technical Teaching by French National of Education Ministry. He has been awarded the Outstanding Industrial Medal (French Society for Industrial Excellence. He is also Honorary Consul of Norway and has been awarded Officer of the Royal Order of Merit.

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Donald Graham, Chairman of the Board & Chief Executive Officer, Graham Holdings Company

Wed 10/1, 3pm – 4pm EST
Forum: Cultivating Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Donald E. Graham became chief executive officer of Graham Holdings Company (then The Washington Post Company) in May 1991 and chairman of the board in September 1993. He was publisher of The Washington Post newspaper from January 1979 until September 2000 and chairman of the paper from September 2000 to February 2008.

Graham was born on April 22, 1945, in Baltimore, Maryland, a son of Philip L. and Katharine Meyer Graham. His father was publisher of The Washington Post from 1946 until 1961 and president of The Washington Post Company from 1947 until his death in 1963. His mother, Katharine Graham, served in a variety of executive positions from 1963 until her death in 2001. Eugene Meyer, Graham’s grandfather, purchased The Washington Post at a bankruptcy sale in 1933.

After graduating in 1966 from Harvard College, where he was president of the Harvard Crimson, Graham was drafted and served as an information specialist with the 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968. He was a patrolman with the Washington Metropolitan Police Department from January 1969 to June 1970. Graham joined The Washington Post newspaper in 1971 as a reporter and subsequently held several news and business positions at the newspaper and at Newsweek. He was named executive vice president and general manager of the newspaper in 1976.

He was elected a director of The Washington Post Company in 1974 and served as president from May 1991 to September 1993.

Graham is chairman of the District of Columbia College Access Program, a private foundation which, since 1999, has helped double the number of DC public high school students going on to college and has helped triple the number graduating from college. He co-founded the program along with major local businesses and foundations. Since its inception, DC-CAP has assisted over 13,000 DC students enroll in college and has provided scholarships totaling more than $18 million. He is a co-founder of TheDream.US, a national scholarship fund for DREAMers, created to help immigrant youth get a college education.

Graham is a trustee of the Federal City Council and of the Philip L. Graham Fund, which was established in 1963 in memory of his father. He is also a director and member of the compensation committee of Facebook, The Summit Fund of Washington, the College Success Foundation and KIPP-DC. Previously, he served as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board.

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Tamara J. Erickson, Founder & CEO, Tammy Erickson Associates

Wed 10/1, 7pm – 8pm EST
Forum: Cultivating Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Tamara J. Erickson is a McKinsey Award-winning author, a leading expert on generations in the workplace, and a widely-respected authority on leadership, the changing workforce, collaboration and innovation, and the nature of work in intelligent organizations. She has three times been named one of the 50 most influential living management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50, the respected ranking of global business thinkers.

Erickson is an Executive Fellow, Organisational Behaviour, at London Business School, where she has designed and co-directs the school’s premier leadership programme for senior-most executives, Leading Businesses into the Future. She is the founder and CEO of Tammy Erickson Associates, www.tammyerickson.com, a research-based firm of renowned thought leaders and senior business leaders committed to developing insights into the challenges that today’s businesses are facing and offering a specific set of services that help companies reshape their organizational practices. She has co-authored four Harvard Business Review articles: “It’s Time to Retire Retirement” (March 2004), winner of the McKinsey Award, “Managing Middlescence” (March 2006), “What It Means to Work Here,” (March 2007), and “Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams,” (November 2007), as well as the book Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent, published by Harvard Business School Press (2006). She has also co-authored an MIT Sloan Management Review article, “Bridging Faultlines in Diverse Teams,” (Summer 2007). Tammy is the author of one of Harvard Business Review’s Breakthrough Ideas for 2008, “Task, Not Time,” (February 2008), one of HBR’s Forethoughts on Unconventional Wisdom in a Downturn, “‘Give Me the Ball’ Is the Wrong Call,” (December 2008), and the HBR Case Study “Gen Y in the Workforce” (February 2009).

Tammy recently completed a trilogy of books on how individuals in specific generations can excel in today’s workplace. Retire Retirement: Career Strategies for the Boomer Generation and Plugged In: The Generation Y Guide to Thriving at Work were published by Harvard Business Press in 2008. What’s Next, Gen X? Keeping Up, Moving Ahead, and Getting the Career You Want was published in 2010. Her blog “Across the Ages” is featured weekly on HBP Online (https://discussionleader.hbsp.com/erickson/).

The research initiatives she and colleagues have undertaken include Demography is De$tiny, exploring the implications of current demographic changes on human resource practices, The New Employee/Employer Equation, developing new and powerful approaches to increasing employeeengagement through segmentation, and the Cooperative Advantage, done in collaboration with a team at London Business School, exploring the working practices of over 50 teams in 15 multi-nationals, representing the most extensive academically-grounded study of industry-based team working ever conducted. Her current research is focused on the implications of social enterprise software on the way we work.

Tammy is also a respected authority on technology and its implications for business and coauthor of the book Third Generation R&D: Managing the Link to Corporate Strategy, a widely accepted guide to making technology investments and managing innovative organizations.

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Clayton Christensen, DBA, Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

Thurs 10/2, 9am – 10am EST
Forum: Cultivating Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Professor Christensen holds a BA from Brigham Young University and an MPhil in applied econometrics from Oxford University where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He received an MBA and a DBA from the Harvard Business School, where he is currently the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration. He is regarded as one of the world’s top experts on innovation and growth.

Christensen founded a number of successful companies and organizations which use and apply this theories in various ways: Innosight, a consulting firm helping companies create new growth businesses; Rose Park Advisors, a firm that identifies and invests in disruptive companies; and Innosight Institute, a non-profit think tank whose mission is to apply his theories to vexing societal problems such as healthcare and education.

Professor Christensen is the best-selling author of nine books and more than a hundred articles, including the New York Times best-selling, How Will You Measure Your Life? He received the Global Business Book Award for The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Economist named it as one of the six most important books about business ever written. In 2011 and again in 2013, thousands of executives, consultants and business school professors were polled and named Christensen as the most influential business thinker in the world

Professor Christensen was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. He worked as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Republic of Korea from 1971 to 1973 and continues to serve in his church in as many ways as he can. He and his wife Christine live in Belmont, MA. They are the parents of five children and grandparents to five grandchildren.

See other VIP guest from Harvard Business School: David Gavin

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Anant Agarwal, PhD, CEO of edX, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT

Wed 10/1, 11am – 12pm EST
Forum: Cultivating Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Anant Agarwal is the CEO of edX, an online learning destination founded by Harvard and MIT. Anant taught the first edX course on circuits and electronics from MIT, which drew 155,000 students from 162 countries. He has served as the director of CSAIL, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. He is a successful serial entrepreneur, having co-founded several companies including Tilera Corporation, which created the Tile multicore processor, and Virtual Machine Works.

Anant won the Maurice Wilkes prize for computer architecture, and MIT’s Smullin and Jamieson prizes for teaching. He holds a Guinness World Record for the largest microphone array, and is an author of the textbook “Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits.”

Scientific American selected his work on organic computing as one of 10 World- Changing Ideas in 2011, and he was named in Forbes’ list of top 15 education innovators in 2012. Anant, a pioneer in computer architecture, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the ACM.

He hacks on WebSim, an online circuits laboratory, in his spare time. Anant holds a Ph.D. from Stanford and a bachelor’s from IIT Madras.

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