Deadlines
2017 Annual Marriott School OB/HR Conference
Keynote speakers
Roger Connors is cofounder of Partners In Leadership (PIL), an international management consulting and training company. He is a four-time New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. He has co-authored the most extensive body of knowledge on workplace accountability ever written and is recognized as a leading though leader on the topic. Roger brings over 30 years of extensive expertise in assisting senior management teams all over the world in successfully facilitating large-scale cultural transformation. While CEO of Partners In Leadership, his company was recognized with industry-leading awards from Chief Learning Officer magazine, receiving Gold for Excellence in Social Learning (2015) and Gold for Excellence in Content (2014). During that time, the company was also named to the Inc. 5000 fastest-growing privately held companies in America for two consecutive years, 2014 and 2015.
As a pioneer on the subjects of workplace culture and accountability, Roger has developed #1 award-winning content and has published and interviewed extensively with the following magazines: Forbes, Chief Learning Officer, Workforce, Success, Training, TD, Energy Digital, and Clinical Laboratory News. His radio, television, and webcast appearances include Business Radio (powered by Wharton School), Soundview Live, Fortune 100 Executive Teleconference, CNBC’s Power Lunch, KWHY-TV Market Talk, and numerous other broadcasts. In addition, he was a featured speaker at the Executive Office of the President of the United States in Washington, D.C. Roger has conducted keynotes, consulting engagements, and workshops throughout the world with some of the most successful and prestigious companies. He is a highly-respected facilitator of senior executive groups and management teams and has partnered with his clients to help them produce billions of dollars in improved profitability and shareholder value using the Partners In Leadership methodologies he and his business partner, Tom Smith, created. Partners In Leadership clients include 25% of the “Most admired companies in the world,” almost half of the Dow Jones Industrial Average Companies, all 13 of the top 13 most admired pharmaceutical companies, and nearly half of the Fortune 50 largest companies in the United States, along with many other well-known and highly regarded organizations.
Roger co-authored the classic New York Times Bestselling book The Oz Principle: Getting Results Through Individual and Organizational Accountability, ranked year after year as one of the top five bestselling business books in the leadership and performance categories. He also co-authored the New York Times bestsellers Change the Culture, Change the Game: The Breakthrough Strategy for Energizing Your Organization and Creating Accountability for Results; How Did That Happen? Holding People Accountable for Results the Positive, Principled Way; and The Wisdom of Oz: Using Personal Accountability to Succeed in Everything, as well as the bestselling book Journey to the Emerald City: Achieve a Competitive Edge by Creating a Culture of Accountability. He was most recently the lead author on, Fix It: Getting Accountability Right.
After successfully leading PIL through a majority recapitalization with a private equity company, Roger taught an MBA course (MGMT 6500) on managing individuals and groups as an adjunct at Utah Valley University. Roger holds an MBA, with distinction, from The Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University and a bachelor of science from the School of Accountancy at Brigham Young University, ranked in the top 5 accounting schools in the nation.
In his church service with the LDS Church, Roger as served in a number of voluntary capacitates, including stake president in Murrieta California, mission president of the Washington Kennewick Mission and branch president in the MTC working with English, Russian and Polynesian language missionaries. He and his wife, Gwen, have 5 children and 4 grandchildren.
Drucker’s keen insight about the power of questions has long been a guiding inspiration for Hal Gregersen. An innovation and leadership guru, Hal is Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center and Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. While Hal’s expertise expands across all areas of innovative leadership, asking the right questions cuts deeply across all of his work. He challenges organizations and individuals to question the way we think and act to build a better, more creative world.
Hal’s most recent book, The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, flows from a path-breaking international research project (with Jeff Dyer & Clayton Christensen). They explored where disruptive innovations come from by interviewing founder entrepreneurs and CEOs at 100+ of the most innovative companies in the world and by assessing how 15,000+ leaders leverage five key innovation skills to create valuable new products, services, processes, and businesses.
To grasp how leaders find and ask the right questions – ones that disrupt the world – Hal is now studying 200+ renowned business and government leaders. This question-centric project is surfacing insights into how leaders build better questions to unlock game-changing solutions. The first article from the project -“Bursting the CEO Bubble” (March/April 2017 Harvard Business Review) – explores how senior leaders can ask better questions to unlock what they don’t know they don’t know – before it’s too late. Hal is also 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 the creator of a unique executive development experience “Leadership and the Lens: Learning at the Intersection of Innovation and Image-Making.” The course draws on Hal’s two passions – photography and innovation–to teach participants how to ask radically better questions and change their impact as leaders. Ranked as one of the world’s most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50, Hal regularly delivers inspirational keynote speeches, motivational executive seminars and transformational coaching experiences. He also works with a diverse set of companies to help them master the challenges of innovation and change, from Chanel to IBM to the World Economic Forum.
NJ Pesci is President and Founder of The Ovid Groupe, a strategic consultancy that enables organizations and executives to transform their business through innovation, focus and execution. The Ovid Groupe creates long-term value through sustained partnerships that address the fundamental issues and opportunities faced by our clients, turning ideas into actions.
NV served as chief human resources officer at Scripps Networks Interactive from 2015 to 2017. In this role, Pesci oversaw the company’s human resource operations with a focus on aligning recruiting, talent management and organizational design with the company’s operating objectives and long-term strategic growth priorities.
Preceding his new role, Pesci served as Scripps Networks’ executive vice president of human resources and lead human resources business partner for all of Scripps Networks’ domestic and international businesses, including its networks, sales organizations, operations, corporate functions, international, and digital operations. He was responsible for the development and execution of the HR strategies in support of these units.
Pesci joined Scripps Networks Interactive in 2010 after 19 years as a global human resources leader for The Procter & Gamble Company in Cincinnati, Ohio. While at P&G, Pesci served in a number of line and HR roles with progressing responsibilities. In his final role at P&G, Pesci led the HR team that supports P&G’s largest organizational unit, global supply chain and labor relations.
Pesci’s international experience comes from completing a three-year assignment in Frankfurt, Germany where he played an important role in the integration of the Wella Professional acquisition.
Preceding his HR career, Pesci worked as an analyst for the United States Department of Defense in Washington, D.C. Fluent in Italian, Pesci has also spent considerable time working as a missionary in southern Italy and Sicily.
Pesci earned a master’s degree in organizational behavior from Brigham Young University and serves as a member of that program’s advisory board. He serves on local boards for the Webb School of Knoxville and the Department of Management Advisory Board at the College of Business Administration for the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Melissa Valentine is an Assistant Professor at Stanford University in the Management Science and Engineering Department, and a core faculty member of the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization. She studies groups and teams in organizations. Recent projects include flash teams and flash organizations and synchronized group learning in cancer care.
Prof. Valentine has won awards for both research and teaching. She won the Outstanding Paper with Practical Implications award from the Organizational Behavior division of the Academy of Management, and the Organization Science/INFORMS dissertation proposal competition. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2013.