Topic: Business Strategy

Daymond John

An entrepreneur in every sense of the word, Daymond John has come a long way from taking out a $100,000 mortgage on his mother’s house and moving his operation into the basement. John is CEO and Founder of FUBU, a much-celebrated global lifestyle brand, and a pioneer in the fashion industry with over $6 billion in product sales. He is an award-winning entrepreneur, and he has received over 35 awards including the Brandweek Marketer of the Year, Advertising Age Marketing 1000 Award for Outstanding Ad Campaign, Ernst & Young’s New York Entrepreneur of the Year Award and, most recently, was named #4 on LinkedIn’s Top 20 Voices, a list of the top influencers in the U.S. worth following to get inspired and stay informed!

His marketing strategies and ability to build successful brands has made him a highly influential consultant and motivational speaker today. His marketing firm The Shark Group offers advice on how to effectively communicate to consumers through innovative means and connects brands with the world’s top celebrities for everything from endorsements to product extensions. John is also an author of four best-selling books including his New York Timesbest-selling books, The Power of Broke (2016) andRise and Grind (2018). In March 2020, John will release his sixth book, Powershift, that walks through his tried and true process of how to transform any situation, close any deal and achieve any outcome through his own experience and vast network of industry leaders.

Finally, he’s celebrating his 11thseason on ABC’s hit business show Shark Tank by acclaimed producer Mark Burnett. It has now gone on to win four Emmys and millions of weekly viewers tune into the show as John demonstrates his marketing prowess and entrepreneurial insights.

Peter Senge

Peter Senge is a Senior Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also Founding Chair of the Society for Organizational Learning, a global community of corporations, researchers, and consultants committed “to increase our capacity to collectively realize our highest aspirations and productively resolve our differences” through the mutual development of people and institutions.

The Journal of Business Strategy named him a “Strategist of the Century”, one of twenty-four men and women who have “had the greatest impact on the way we conduct business today” (1999). His special interest is on decentralizing the role of leadership in organizations so as to enhance the capacity of all people to work productively toward common goals. Senge’s work places human values at the cornerstone of the workplace, proposing that vision, purpose, reflectiveness, and systems thinking are essential for organizations to realize their potentials.

Senge is the author of several books, including the widely acclaimed, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990). This book, which provides the knowledge for organizations to transform rigid hierarchies into more fluid and responsive systems, is widely credited with creating a revolution in the business world. Since its publication, more than a million copies have been sold, and in 1997, Harvard Business Review identified it as one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years. His co-authored book, Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future (2004), documents the authors’ development of a new theory about change and learning. Their journey of discovery articulates a new way of seeing the world and of understanding our part in creating it—as it is and as it might be.

Senge has lectured extensively throughout the world, translating the abstract ideas of systems theory into tools to create economic and organizational change. He has worked with leaders in business, education, health care and government.

Senge holds a BS in engineering from Stanford University as well as an SM in social systems modeling and a PhD in management from MIT.

He lives with his wife and children in eastern Massachusetts.

Henry Mintzberg

After receiving his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from McGill University in Montreal (1961), Henry worked in Operational Research at the Canadian National Railways, and then received a masters and doctorate from the MIT Sloan School of Management in Boston. In 1968, Henry Mintzberg returned to McGill, where he joined what is now called the Desautels Faculty of Management. He currently holds the Cleghorn Professorship of Management Studies, having been half-time since the mid 1980’s, and has been a visiting professor at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, London Business School in the U.K., Insead in France, and H.E.C. in Montreal.

He devotes himself largely to writing and research, over the years especially about managerial work, strategy formation, and forms of organizing. In 2004, Mintzberg published Managers not MBAs, in 2007 Tracking Strategies, in 2013 Simply Managing, and in 2015 Rebalancing Society, the implications of which are now his central focus. He is also completing a monograph entitled Managing the Myths of Health Care.

He has worked for much of the past two decades, in collaboration with colleagues from Canada, England, France, India, Japan, and now China and Brazil, on developing new approaches to management education and development. Henry is teaching in both The International Masters in Practicing Management (it has been running since 1996) and the International Masters for Health Leadership (since 2006). Both are rather novel ways to help managers learn from their own experience. In 2007, CoachingOurselves.com was developed, which brings all these efforts to natural fruition, by enabling small groups of practicing managers to develop themselves and their organizations in their own workplace. A GROOC (MOOC for groups) called Social Learning for Social Impact will appear on edX in September 2015.

In all, he has published about 170 articles and 17 books. Honors have included election as an Officer of the Order of Canada and of l'Ordre national du Quebec, selection as Distinguished Scholar for the year 2000 by the Academy of Management, and two McKinsey prizes for articles in the Harvard Business Review.

Garry Kasparov

Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, in the Soviet Union in 1963, Garry Kasparov became the under-18 chess champion of the USSR at the age of 12 and the world under-20 champion at 17. He came to international fame at the age of 22 as the youngest world chess champion in history in 1985. He defended his title five times, including a legendary series of matches against arch-rival Anatoly Karpov. Kasparov broke Bobby Fischer’s rating record in 1990 and his own peak rating record remained unbroken until 2013. His famous matches against the IBM super-computer Deep Blue in 1996-97 were key to bringing artificial intelligence, and chess, into the mainstream.

Kasparov’s outspoken nature did not endear him to the Soviet authorities, giving him an early taste of opposition politics. He became one of the first prominent Soviets to call for democratic and market reforms and was an early supporter of Boris Yeltsin’s push to break up the Soviet Union. In 1990, he and his family escaped ethnic violence in his native Baku as the USSR collapsed. His refusal that year to play the World Championship under the Soviet flag caused an international sensation. In 2005, Kasparov, in his 20th year as the world’s top-ranked player, abruptly retired from competitive chess to join the vanguard of the Russian pro-democracy movement. He founded the United Civil Front and organized the Marches of Dissent to protest the repressive policies of Vladimir Putin. In 2012, Kasparov was named chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, succeeding Vaclav Havel. Facing imminent arrest during Putin’s crackdown, Kasparov moved from Moscow to New York City in 2013.

The US-based Kasparov Chess Foundation non-profit promotes the teaching of chess in education systems around the world. Its program already in use in schools across the United States, KCF also has centers in Brussels, Johannesburg, Singapore, and Mexico City. Garry and his wife Daria travel frequently to promote the proven benefits of chess in education and have toured Africa extensively.

Kasparov has been a contributing editor to the Wall Street Journal since 1991 and is a regular commentator on politics and human rights. He speaks frequently to business and political audiences around the world on innovation, strategy, individual freedom, and achieving peak mental performance. He is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Oxford-Martin School with a focus on human-machine collaboration. Kasparov’s book How Life Imitates Chess on decision-making is available in over 20 languages. He is the author of two acclaimed series of chess books, My Great Predecessors and Modern Chess.

Kasparov’s new book, Winter Is Coming: Why Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped, was released by PublicAffairs in October 2015. He describes the book as a mix of “one part history of the rise and fall of Russian democracy and the West’s role in both, from Gorbachev’s retreat from Eastern Europe to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014; one part current events with an analysis of the current security crisis and how and why the countries of the free world must unite to fight back against thugs and dictators; and one part personal memoir of my life as a citizen, witness, and activist in the USSR, democratic Russia, and Putin’s Russia.”