Come have lunch with the Boston Chapter of the BYU Management Society on December 4^th at Skipjack’s, 199 Clarendon Street, Boston. Tell us a little about yourself, if you like. Hear ideas for the Chapter’s future (topics and speakers for monthly lunches, annual celebrity event, industry-focused groups, Chapter membership directory), and give your feedback.

Spread the word to others who might be interested—BYU grads and others.

We’ll each pay for our own restaurant meal. Bring cash, please, because it will be a combined tab.

We’ll have lunch downtown each month on the first Wednesday (January's lunch on the 8th, not the 1st). IF YOU HAVE TROUBLE REGISTERING, EMAIL JimJ@JohnstonCompany.com immediately.

Come have lunch with us downtown on the top floor (Floor 37) of 100 Federal Street (the pregnant building!). See the beautiful view of the Charles River and Fenway Park. We are pleased to have Mark Sivers, DMD, speak and lead a discussion on “You Can’t Be Everything for Everybody Every Minute and That’s OK! Is There a Way to Combine Personal, Romantic, Family, Professional, and Spiritual Lives?”

Take the T to Park Street or Downtown Crossing and walk five minutes to 100 Federal. Or, park at the Garage at Post Office Square (it will cost $23 to $36).

Please renew your membership. Being a member is also the only way to be sure you get our announcements. Basic membership is free. Go to this link and click “Join Today” (the big green button on the right).

Please register for the lunch by 10:00 a.m. on Tue Jan 7. We will order your lunch, and put your name on the security list so you can get into the building. Your lunch will cost $10 to $15. You will need to pay our treasurer, Greg Stay, on the day of the lunch, in cash. If you register, and you are not able to come, and we we’re not able to use your meal, we'll ask you to mail the money.

The Downtown Lunch on Wed Feb 5 has been moved to Wed Feb 19.  We’ll meet as usual at Atlantic Trust, 100 Federal Street, Boston, on the 37th Floor, at 12:00 noon. Pay for lunch with cash at the door. It will be about $15.

We will meet for our usual Downtown Lunch at Caleb Sainsbury's law office.  Caleb is an member of our chapter; he and his wife Jessica also lead the Boston Chapter of the BYU Alumni Association.

Lunch will be ordered for everyone who registers by Tuesday night (March 4th).  Please bring $20 in cash for the lunch.

Speaker:  Jim Johnston

Topic:  "Job Search from both Sides of the Desk"

Why do you want to hear Jim on this topic? 

• You can think of him as being in a perpetual job search. 
• He is a self-employed advisor to CEOs with about six clients at a time.
• He has been "hired" 138 times since 1986.
• He is a search professional with 14 retained executive searches and experience in advising CEO clients on countless hiring efforts.

​The discussion will include

• Tour of his experiences being hired and fired.
• "The next Red Line train to Alewife is now arriving." (the trap and tragedy of self-absorption in a job search and the importance of conversation.)
• Browse vs. Search (two fundamentally different approaches to job seeking and to hiring.)

Come join the discussion.

How Is Your Professional Persona Perceived? Do You Know What People Really Think of You?

Our monthly downtown lunch will be on Wednesday, April 2 at Pabian & Russell, One International Place, 8th Floor, Boston. Maura Snow will lead a workshop to help you understand the subtle ways you demonstrate your true nature to others. Maura is a licensed practioner of the Insights Discovery tool. See more at www.insights.com.

After you register for the lunch, Maura will send you credentials so you can take the Insights Discovery survey (25 questions). This will be at no charge ($200 is the usual price).

Bring $20 cash to pay for your lunch.

We'll have an informal peer-to-peer discussion of work and life, and get to know each other better.  Please bring $20 cash to give to Kim for lunch.

We will gather for an informal peer-to-peer discussion of work and life, over lunch. Please bring $20 cash to give to Kim.

Please join us for a downtown for a peer-to-peer lunch. Please bring $20 cash for lunch.

Caleb Sainsbury will speak to us briefly, and host us at his firm. Caleb is a frequent attender at our Downtown Lunch series, and he and his wife Jessica are co-chairs of the Boston Chapter of the BYU Alumni Association.

Caleb will teach us the basics of estate planning and answer questions. There will also be time for friendship and camaraderie and…LUNCH. Bring $20 cash to pay Caleb. 

Please come hear Carl Nelson speak about how he started his own company and the lessons he has learned.

Lunch will be provided. Please bring $20 cash for your lunch.

Brigitte Madrian, a Professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, will speak on Behavorial Economics and Public Policy.

Downtown Lunch featuring Paul Dredge, PhD

The Boston Chapter is again doing the Downtown Lunches series the first Wednesday of each month. Our speaker on December 2 is Jason Blosil, speaking on “From Finance to Marketing: Navigating Your Career Path.” Jason will speak from personal experience. He started in finance at Ford Motor and is now senior product marketing manager at NetApp, Inc. He must have an exciting life—he emailed me his talk title today from Berlin. See more on Jason below.

Bryan Bendall has joined the Chapter’s board and will manage the Downtown Lunches from now on. He is at bbendall@hotmail.com.  See more about him in the Chapter’s networking directory, at https://boston.byums.org/networking.  

Sign up for the December 2 lunch by going to https://boston.byums.org/event?event_id=1508. The lunch will be at Atlantic Trust, 100 Federal Street, 37th Floor, Boston, MA 02110. You must register in order to be admitted by the security guard. We’ll begin at 12:00 noon.

Bring your own lunch or tell Bryan in advance (by separate email to him at bbendall@hotmail.com) that you want him to order you a lunch. If so, bring $20 cash to pay Bryan.

The Chapter is alive again! Please join us for lunch December 2.

More on Our Speaker

Jason Blosil has over 20 years of experience, including 5 years at Ford Motor Company in corporate finance, and 15 years of product marketing and product management for two technology companies. He currently works for NetApp, Inc. as a Sr. Product Marketing Manager with a focus in data protection management and alliances. He has added other voluntary responsibilities throughout his career, and loves to serve in his church. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a minor in Mathematics and an MBA from Brigham Young University. He enjoys cooking, tennis, golf, cycling, music, art, and watching college sports.

This month's speaker will be James Dillon, and the discussion is entitled, “Lessons Learned from ‘High-Potential Managers’ Seeking Career Advancement.” James will speak from his own professional and personal experiences. See more on James below.

Description: For the past several years, James has dedicated a small portion of his professional time to coaching managers designated as “high-potentials” by their companies and sent to a 7-month, part-time executive education program at Harvard. He’ll share lessons learned from walking alongside some 50 managers as they transitioned (or not!) to broader and more strategic responsibilities. The topic and conversation will be relevant for young managers and their sponsors, whether in large or small organizations.

Bio: James studied accounting at BYU and organizational behavior at Harvard. He started his career as a strategy consultant at Monitor Group in Cambridge, and has been an independent consultant since 2005. James believes the most fruitful areas for executive action lie at the intersection of strategy and organization. As a consultant, he helps senior leaders transform their organizations and develop agile strategies in the face of shifting technologies and competitive markets. His work is devoted to helping executives lead change through inspired design of teams, organizations, and strategic processes.

This month we will be privledged to hear from Carl Nelson, who will talk about his personal voyage from banker to entrepenur.

Description: Carl will talk about the personal voyage it has been to leave banking and become an entrepreneur, including what it’s like to be a team with his wife and how their personalities and roles mesh and differ. He may touch on the influence of his stepfather, who was an entrepreneur. He may also touch on what comes next for him and ASC English. There will be plenty of time for Q&A and discussion.

Carl will be interesting to you if you are an entrepreneur, or might want to be one, or need to understand entrepreneurs to succeed in your own work. Also, if you need to understand the increasing role of foreign students in American higher education, this lunch will be useful to you.

Bio: Carl grew up in Massachusetts. His career as a banker (with Bank of Boston) ended at age 38 in 1998, when he went full-time with his wife Annie running ASC English. At the time, it felt to Carl he had “bought his soul back.” ASC English is a school that allies with area colleges in order to make it easier and lower cost for these colleges to have international students. ASC has come to have a strong understanding of the needs of foreign students and focuses on helping them navigate the American educational system and succeed.

We are pleased to have Shannon Zollo as our guest speaker this month.

Description: Shannon will tell his personal story with us about how he came from BYU to have a successful career in Boston. He is also willing to share his initimate knowledge of the process behind VC, PE, and/or M&A deals. There will be plenty of time for Q&A and discussion. This is a great opportunity to learn about a field that is becoming more and more common in corporate America today.

Bio: Shannon Zollo graduated from Brigham Young University with a double major in International Business Administration and Portuguese and subsequently from Northeastern University School of Law. He is a corporate partner at Morse, Barnes-Brown & Pendleton where his practice is focused primarily in the areas of private equity, venture capital, and M&A transactions, as well as corporate governance. Shannon also spent several years as general counsel in a venture-backed telecommunications company, and leverages that experience, together with his significant years of private practice, to act as outside general counsel to a number of earlier stage to middle market clients.

“Moving from Consulting to Industry, from Large Company to Start-Up” 

The pros and cons, benefits and challenges, joys, disappointments and work-life balance.

Bio: Grant Bennett is CEO of CPS Technologies Corporation, a manufacturer of metal-matrix composite components used in power electronic applications.  CPS is an MIT spin-off.  Prior to joining CPS,  Grant Bennett was a consultant at Bain & Company. 

Please note, we ask that you still register in advance to attend this event to provide us with an accurate headcount for lunch and to gauge the size of the meeting space.

Please sign up or the event using the following link at the bottom.

We are pleased to listen to Aaron McKay share his knowledge and experience as our guest speaker this month.

ABOUT AARON: Aaron is a Managing Director and a member of the Private Client Practice at Cambridge Associates. Based out of the Boston office, he focuses on private investments, including private equity, venture capital, real estate, and natural resources private partnerships. Aaron partners with families and institutions around the globe ranging in size from several hundred million dollars to over one hundred billion dollars.

Prior to joining Cambridge Associates, Aaron worked at American Express and SkyWest Airlines. In addition, Aaron established a nonprofit startup focusing on grassroots business and water technology in Mozambique.

Aaron currently serves as a counselor in the Boston, Massachusetts Mission Presidency and has previously served on the High Counsel, in a Stake YM Presidency, and as a Scoutmaster.

Education and Professional Credentials

•MBA and Global Management Certificate, Marriott School of Management, Brigham Young University

•BA in Business Administration and Latin American Studies, Weber State University

•Fluent in Portuguese and Spanish

We are pleased to listen to Bryan Ward share his knowledge and experience as our guest speaker this month.

ABOUT BRYAN: Bryan Ward is co-founder, Principal and Portfolio Manager at Westwood Global Investments where he co-manages Global Emerging Markets Equity portfolios. He has over twenty-five years of investment experience including Santander Global Advisors, Wellington Management and Putnam Investments. Prior to founding WGI, Bryan worked as a senior Portfolio Manager at Hansberger Global Investors, Inc. and has managed EAFE, Japan-only, Asia including-Japan, Asia ex-Japan and ACWI ex-US portfolios. 

Bryan was born the oldest of six children to Mel and Carole Ward, growing up in Kaysville and North Ogden, Utah. He served a mission in Sendai, Japan from 1982-1984. He received an undergraduate degree from Brigham Young University, majoring in Japanese, and an M.B.A. from Cornell University.

He met and married his wife Kathy Showley while attending BYU and they are the parents of three sons; Jon, Geoffrey and Mitchell. Jon and his wife Audrey are currently living in Guatemala, Geoffrey and Mitchell are attending BYU. Bryan lives in Medfield, Massachusetts and is currently serving as the Hingham Massachusetts stake president.

"The Future of Financial Advice: How Regulation and Technology are Changing the Way Financial Products are Bought and Sold." The emergence of robo advisors and recent regulatory rulings are causing many firms to rethink their strategies. Lincoln will lead a high-level discussion of how these two factors are impacting traditional financial services firms.

Bring your own lunch. Show your photo ID at the security desk in the lobby. When registering, select "Pay at the Door." The cost is zero.

Lincoln is Vice President of Service Strategy at Fidelity Investments. In his role, he is responsible for managing and developing the service model within Fidelity’s High Net Worth offer. This includes organizational design, business model optimization, as well as developing and defining sales and service roles and responsibilities. Prior to this role, Lincoln spent several years in strategic consulting roles at Fidelity Investments, Schwab, and Wilmington Trust Investment Advisors. Lincoln graduated from BYU in 2005, majoring in Finance. He obtained his MBA in 2011 from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, with concentrations in Finance and Strategic Management.

David Miles will introduce us to Young Investors Society (YIS)  and explain how they operate and discuss what they have learned and the challenges they face. He'll take questions. See more on YIS below, after the bio. See also www.Younginvestorssociety.org. 

David is a research analyst at Strategic Advisers, Inc. (SAI), a registered investment adviser and a Fidelity Investments company. Fidelity Investments is a leading provider of investment management, retirement planning, portfolio guidance, brokerage, benefits outsourcing and other financial products and services to more than 20 million individuals, institutions, and financial intermediaries. David is a member of the Fixed Income research team, and is responsible for asset class analysis and manager due diligence with a focus on municipal funds.

Prior to assuming his current position in January 2015, David was a research associate on the fundamental research team from 2011 to 2015. Previously, he was a senior analyst in Fidelity’s Corporate Audit group from 2008 to 2011. Before joining Fidelity in 2008, he worked as an analyst in Fixed Income trading at Wachovia from 2006 to 2008. He has been in the investments industry since 2006. He earned his bachelor's degree in management, with an emphasis on financial services, from Brigham Young University and his master's degree in investment management from Boston University. He is both a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and a Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA) charterholder.

Young Investors Society

The mission of the Young Investors Society is to prepare the next generation of outstanding investors. This will be accomplished by pursuing the following principles:

• Vision: The Young Investors Society seeks to inspire kids to think critically for themselves.  To evaluate business and the world around them with insightful, long-term perspectives.
• Real-life Experience: Youth will get actual, hands-on experience evaluating companies, building financial models, and buying and selling stocks.
• Leadership: Each local chapter of the Young Investor Society will be run by the students, recommending and investing in stocks themselves, organizing business and financial professional visits, and mentoring new members.
• Community: The Young Investors Society hopes that its members will feel a part of something greater than just themselves. They will build connections to local businesses, universities, other young investors around the country, and to members that will take their place once they graduate. Service projects and giving back will be an important part of the program each year. The Young Investors Society will make special outreach to empower low-income and minority students.
• Integrity: Society members will uphold the highest levels of ethical standards in investing, and learn to determine if a company demonstrates good or poor corporate governance practices.

Most of us think of building our professional career as an incremental process of stringing together functional roles with increasing levels of responsibility within one or two industries of focus. While this model has been well established and applied since the Industrial Revolution some 150 years ago, the business world over the past 20 years has gone through major transformations that require us to think about our career building a bit differently. Spencer will give an overview of his own career, and what he has done to "disrupt" his career trajectory, and what has happened since then. It turns out, Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation also applies to individual career building.

More About Spencer Nam

Spencer is a senior research fellow for healthcare at the Christensen Institute in Lexington, MA. His research at the Institute focuses on disruptive innovations in the healthcare industry. Spencer has over 15 years of professional experience working with U.S. and international healthcare enterprises, most recently as an equity research analyst covering more than 50 medical technology companies. He also has advised numerous privately owned medtech companies as well as the South Korean government on the future of the global telemedicine industry.

Spencer’s Wall Street career included tenures at Cowen & Company, Summer Street Research Partners where he served as Director of Research, Madison Williams and Company, ThinkEquity, and Janney Montgomery Scott. Prior to his career in equity research, he was a consultant at Bain & Company advising senior management teams of Fortune 500 technology and financial services companies. As a member of the investment team at Technology Directors, he researched early-stage venture capital financed technology and life science companies. Prior to Bain, Spencer advised Partners Healthcare System in Boston on post merger integrations.

Spencer holds a BA in mathematics from Harvard University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

ABOUT LISA

Lisa Wardle has nearly 20 years of strategic talent management and leadership development experience. In her current role she is on the Global Talent Management Leadership Team at Nike. Her current focus is working to drive the holistic Talent Management strategy for Converse through leveraging the functions of talent planning, talent acquisition and talent development to ensure Converse has the talent required to deliver on its aggressive growth goals.  

Lisa has led the design and delivery of innovative leadership development experiences for a variety of global clients including Boeing, McDonald’s, Rio Tinto, GSK, Lenovo, Norwegian Shipowners’ Association, Rolls Royce and PricewaterhouseCoopers. She has a background in organization development initiatives, strategic human capital planning, learning and development, global leadership, reward systems and performance management.  Recent roles include Principal Consultant at The RBL Group, Managing Director at Duke Corporate Education and key leadership roles in human resources for the Olympics in Athens, Greece and Salt Lake City, Utah. She holds a Master of Arts from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Science from Brigham Young University.

ABOUT CONVERSE

See http://news.nike.com/news/converse-officially-opens-world-headquartesr-in-boston-and-debuts-new-flagship-store to read about Converse's new headquarters on Lovejoy Wharf, Boston.

The Next Technology Wave: The Internet of Things

Branded products (and their retail partners) are under attack. That attack comes from technology predators, counterfeiters, and grey market diversion.

Valmarc® Total Vision™ enables brands to increase supply chain visibility, protect their brand, and engage with consumers. With Valmarc Total Vision, each branded product becomes a node on the internet of things. In the future virtually any branded product will become the eyes, ears, and spokesperson for the brand.  Find out how the non-powered products you own will become the source of valuable and unique information every day.

More About Our Speaker

Gordon Low has 35 years of business experience in management consulting, new venture development, and engineering. He is currently a member of the board of directors at Valmarc Corporation. Valmarc has invented technology which brings the internet-of-things to life for about a billion manufactured items. Gordon is also a retired Deloitte principal and a McKinsey and Company alumnus.  As a management consultant, he helped organizations to navigate change, to develop strategies that create competitive advantage, to identify improvement opportunities, to implement change, and to improve profitability. Gordon has line experience in professional services sales, client development, practice management, cost reduction, engineering, project management, and information technology. Gordon has a B.Sc. from BYU where he the Valedictorian of the Engineering College. He also has a Master of Science from the Sloan School at MIT, where his thesis was on the commercialization of innovative technology. He was recently released as the Cambridge stake president. Gordon and his wife Laurie are the parents of 4, and the grandparents of 10.

The Role of the Board of Directors in Today's Corporate Governance
Crisis and change can thrust a passive caretaker board of directors into an active, crucial role. But the best boards have a large positive impact in both good times and bad: it doesn’t take a crisis to get them engaged. An engaged board is different from a passive board, and also different from a board that intervenes deeply, actually taking away the role of the CEO and management team. Joe will bring us up to speed on the best—and worst—of corporate governance today and the role of the board of directors, drawing from his long experience with public and private companies and their boards.

More about Joe Apke
Joe is an audit partner at Deloitte and has more than 25 years of public accounting experience. He graduated from Eastern Illinois University and began his career with Deloitte in Illinois and St. Louis.  He arrived in Boston in 2000 after a two-year international assignment in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where he worked exclusively on publicly traded companies and assisted foreign companies in registering securities to be traded on U.S. and international exchanges.   Joe is a member of Deloitte’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications practice and spends a significant portion of his client service time working with clients in high-tech industries.  He has extensive experience working with international companies and assisting them with their accounting and financial reporting needs.  Additionally, Joe has had extensive experience in providing accounting and advisory services related to mergers and acquisitions, offerings of securities, income taxes, complex accounting issues and public company reporting.  He currently serves as a leader in Deloitte’s professional practice network.

Joe lives in Ashland, MA along with his wife, Sara, and four children.  He currently serves as the bishop of the Framingham 1^st Ward.

Derek Christensen will teach us how emerging trends in the technology industry are spreading to impact all industries, and how viewing the world through the lens of new technology can enhance our careers.

These days, every company is a technology company, and every employee is a technologist. Technology is advancing at an exponential rate, and keeping current can be daunting. In this talk, Derek Christensen will walk through four key emerging technology trends, and how they impact us in our workplaces. Derek will also discuss experience and opportunities which have arisen in his own career, and how he has harnessed these trends and concepts.

MORE ABOUT DEREK

Derek was born and raised outside Chicago and lived in the northern suburbs until heading off to school at BYU. After his freshman year, Derek served a mission in Los Angeles (Compton, South Central, and Malibu). He received his BS and MS in Management Information Systems from BYU in 2008. While working on his masters, Derek skied or rock climbed 3 days per week.

After BYU, Derek moved to Boston to work in Accenture's Technology Consulting practice, where he remains today. He is the Emerging Technology Lead in the Boston Electronics & High-Tech practice, and spends considerable time tinkering with empowering technologies (3D printers, Raspberry PI's, arduinos) and analyzing industry impacts.

Derek is an avid reader, averaging over a book each week for the past 5+ years. He primarily reads business, sociology, science fiction, and fantasy. His "superpower" is connecting disparate ideas between books and disciplines.

About Our Speaker
Chris Boyce is an accomplished technology entrepreneur with over 20 years of consumer loyalty, enterprise, and software experience. He joined Virgin Pulse in 2006 as EVP of Product, Marketing, and Business Development. Soon after, Chris became CEO and joined the company’s board. Leveraging Virgin’s philosophy that business should be a force for good, Chris’s has been instrumental in the development of market-leading, technology-based products that help employers improve workforce health, boost employee engagement, and enhance corporate culture. Chris was co-founder and former VP of Business Development at Upromise, a 13-million-member online loyalty coalition and college savings account business. Chris has an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Messae From Chris About His Topic
"Our discussion will center on the events, phases of development, and partnerships I have encountered in my career as an entrepreneur, and where I have made good decisions and where I have made suboptimal decisions. We will also discuss who to include along the way to optimize your chances for better the outcomes, and how to include them."

How Boston transformed hundreds of acres of reeking tidal mudflats and created America’s first metropolitan park system, told by Karl Haglund as we gaze from our perch on the 37^th floor through floor-to-ceiling windows onto the Charles River. (This a change; Michael Christensen was previously scheduled for March 1 and is now scheduled for April 5.)

More About the Charles River
From the Amazon page where Karl’s book is available: “The Charles River Basin, extending nine miles upstream from the harbor, has been called Boston's “Central Park.” Yet few realize that this apparently natural landscape is a totally fabricated public space. Two hundred years ago the Charles was a tidal river, edged by hundreds of acres of salt marshes and mudflats. Inventing the Charles River describes how, before the creation of the basin could begin, the river first had to be imagined as a single public space. The new esplanades along the river changed the way Bostonians perceived their city; and the basin, with its expansive views of Boston and Cambridge, became an iconic image of the metropolis.”

More About Our Speaker
Karl Haglund was raised in Iowa and served a mission in Sweden. As the architectural historian for the Utah State Historical Society, he co-authored The Avenues of Salt Lake City, a history of the American West’s first suburb.

He and his wife Karen moved to Boston in 1972 for “a few years of graduate school” for both of them. Following a master’s degree in landscape architecture at Harvard, he completed a PhD in architectural history at MIT. His dissertation, Inventing the Charles River, was published by MIT Press in 2003 and is available as a gorgeous 512-page book.

As the project manager for the New Charles River Basin at the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) since 1990, he collaborated with the staff of Central Artery project. The 97-million-dollar project has developed over thirty acres of new parks and pathways around the Zakim Bridge and links Charlestown and the North End with the esplanades in Boston and Cambridge. In 2014 the New Basin project completed the largest skate park in New England in North Point Park, East Cambridge.

His consulting includes a number of museum research and design projects with the American History Workshop, and three years managing a week-long program for middle managers at Chrysler for the Center for Executive Development.

Topic:  3 Key Strategies to Develop your Personal Brand

Presenter: Matt Probst - PhD, MBA  -  Director of Engineering @ Federated Wireless

Where: Longfellow Park LDS Building, Elders Quorum Room

Recommended for: Current professionals as well as students (including those not graduating soon)

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The Boston Chapter of the BYU Management Society is starting a series of monthly career workshops to help both students and professionals build and refine the skills necessary to compete in today's talent marketplace.  BYU Management Society members include Boston area executives and managers with extensive experience recruiting, hiring, and negotiating.   

The Boston BYU MS Career Workshops are monthly meetings to learn, discuss, & practice:

In academic and managerial circles there is little consensus about what role(s) customers play in shaping firm strategy and what type(s) of value firms can generate from engaging with their customers.  We'll sort through these big questions and talk about what we do and don't know and what it means for each of our businesses.

About Michael Christensen
Michael Christensen is a Doctoral Student at Harvard Business School.  He holds an A.B., with honors, in History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University, and an MBA, with High Distinction, from Harvard Business School, where he graduated as a George F. Baker Scholar.  His research has been covered in publications including The Wall Street Journal and The Academy of Management Journal.  Previous to his academic pursuits, Michael has also worked for a number of leading strategy and innovation consulting firms, including Monitor Group (now part of Deloitte), Innosight, and IDEO.  He also serves on the board of the Asia America New Music Institute and currently lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Building and Maintaining High Energy Work Teams
The data is in: positive “group norms” lead to high-energy, innovative work teams in organizations. As leaders, how do we create a culture that raises the collective intelligence and performance of the teams we work in? What are the barriers and common pitfalls that can stall our success? Bring your most challenging “people problems” to this interactive session, where we’ll discover how to get past interpersonal roadblocks and achieve maximum team performance.

More About Margaret Moore
Margaret is a partner at Organizations Unlimited, where she teaches leadership development courses, works as a 1:1 executive coach, and facilitates team building and strategic planning sessions with clients across the globe. She received an MBA from the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, where she was awarded the Edgar F. Huse Memorial Award for Outstanding Achievement in Organizational Studies. She studied English literature, piano, and voice at Oberlin College and Conservatory and began her career as a management fellow with the League of American Orchestras. She held leadership positions at the Utah Symphony for five years before returning to Boston for graduate school. Prior to joining Organizations Unlimited she worked as a consultant and team lead at the Social Innovation Forum, a social impact agency that runs accelerators for nonprofit organizations and start-up businesses. Margaret has also taught arts administration and music history at Simmons College.

More on Our Topic
Negotiation is just a fancy word for making decisions with other people. We all negotiate regularly at work and at home, but most of us act on instinct or out of habit and we don't always see how our methods affect the outcomes.  In this one-hour session you will learn a simple framework for being more deliberate in your approach to making decisions with others so you can get more of what you desire while maintaining or improving your relationships with others.

More on Our Speaker, Carri Hulet
Carri Hulet is a Senior Associate at the Consensus Building Institute and on the faculty at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School where she teaches the course "Negotiation and Dispute Resolution." Carri works primarily as a facilitator and mediator helping collaborative groups make decisions that have public or widespread impact on issues related to climate change, energy, water, and transportation. Carri has a particular interest in research and practice at the intersection of negotiation and gender. Carri has a masters degree from MIT in urban planning, and a bachelors from Tufts University in Political Science. Carri and her husband, Justin Larson, have two young daughters.

Matt had business travel come up and is unable to speak. We have asked several people to speak but have not found anyone able to do it on short notice. Please join us for other upcoming events instead.

For those returning to work after a time away, those who have hit a career rut, or even those going through a major life transition, this talk and discussion will encourage you to tap into your natural gifts and long-held wishes to create a life that makes you want to jump out of bed in the morning.

More about Our Speaker
Janika Isakson Dillon graduated from the Marriott School in 1998 with a joint masters degree in organizational behavior (MOB) and international development. Her masters thesis about Korean women in the workplace, came from interviews, observations and experiences while interning in Seoul, Korea at a small manufacturing company and in the HR department of LG's Chairman's Office. As a returned missionary from the Korea Pusan Mission, she was glad she could maintain ties with Korea and coordinate Marriott School executive education programs for Korean executives from some of the top Korean conglomerates (Hyundai, LG, Tong Yang, etc.).

Just days before beginning the MBA core, Janika married James Dillon, who also returned to Korea with her to teach in an English and leadership training program sponsored by BYU. Their first daughter, Emmaline, was born two months before Janika graduated, and James cared for newborn Emma for several hours a day so Janika could complete her thesis. In 2000 they moved to Boston for James' work, and it has been home ever since.

After 16 years raising four children (including a set of twins!), Janika has returned to professional pursuits. For the past year she has worked as a Scribe at Harvard Business School, where she observes and documents all the first-year MBA classes. Janika is also a research fellow for the Utah Women & Leadership Project, a local coordinator for international students attending high school in Boston, and an instructor for the Au Pair Weekend program. The exciting and daunting transition from years at home to the workplace has been a process of learning and personal growth.

About Our Speaker
Deborah has spent 15 years developing and deploying automation solutions to the health care sector both domestically and internationally.  As the co-founder of Vecna, a leader in healthcare information technology and robotics, Deborah has positively impacted millions of peoples' lives through innovative new technologies that improve access to quality care. Deborah has brought to market QC PathFinder for electronic outbreak surveillance of HAIs and Patient Self Service Kiosk, Portal, and Mobile solutions.  Vecna's DOD funded BEAR (Battlefield Extraction and Recovery), the QC Bot Hospital Logisitcs Robots and Vgo Telepresences robots are among a number of robotic tools and products providing better technology for a better world.

In 2009, Deborah established the Vecna Cares Charitable Trust to extend Vecna resources in intellectual property, engineering capacity, and programmatic expertise to developing countries and under-served areas. Vecna Cares supports ongoing Initiatives in Haiti, East Africa, and Nigeria, as well as underserved U.S. communities. Deborah is actively engaged in forging new community partnerships around the world with the goal of improving quality and access to health care through the establishment of local, point-of-care patient data tools to regional information technology infrastructures.

Deborah obtained her SB in Aerospace Engineering from MIT and her Master's with an emphasis in space robotics from University of Maryland's Space Systems Lab. Her thesis included a video-based comparative study of human posture in Earth gravity, an underwater simulated space environment, and in a simulated micro-gravity environment on NASA's KC-135 micro-gravity simulator, the Vomit Comet. Deborah is also a certified SCUBA Diver Instructor and mother of five.

A Message from Our Speaker, Steve Wheelwright
Life has been and continues to be a thrilling ride. My wife and I could never have imagined how exciting, challenging, and rewarding it would be. Clearly the Lord’s plan for us was far beyond anything we might have planned or sought for ourselves. Through life’s experiences we have come to see career planning and goal setting in a very different light than do many of those I work with in the business world.

I will use a couple of handouts to discuss the key choice points and vagaries of our career and life path, and then focus on what I’ve learned about personal goal setting and career planning from both my professional work and my personal experience.  There will be time for questions and comments. I hope this will be a thought-provoking and practical discussion with at least some new ideas and principles for consideration by all who attend.

More About Our Speaker
Steven C. Wheelwright is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus at Harvard Business School.  From June of 2007 through July of 2015 he served as the President of Brigham Young University - Hawaii, a part of the Church Education System of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Since Nov. 1, 2015, he and his wife, Margaret, have presided over the Boston Temple.

From 2003-2006, Professor Wheelwright was a Baker Foundation Professor and Senior Associate Dean, Director of HBS Publication Activities at the Harvard Business School. In that role, he was Board Chairman of HBS Publishing Company (including HBR, HBS Press books, HBS cases, e-Learning products, and newsletters/conferences). He also oversaw the major HBS construction projects. From 2000-2003, after retiring from the faculty, he and Margaret fulfilled a full-time voluntary assignment as the President of the London, England Mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. From 1995-1999, Professor Wheelwright served as Senior Associate Dean responsible for the HBS MBA Program. He then served as Senior Associate Dean and Director of Faculty Hiring and Planning and had oversight responsibility for distance learning. Professor Wheelwright had taught the required MBA course in Technology and Operations Management, a number of HBS elective courses, and courses in Executive Education.

Professor Wheelwright first taught at Harvard from 1971-1979 and was the Thomas Henry Carroll-Ford Foundation Visiting Professor from 1985-1986. He rejoined the Harvard faculty in 1988. In his years away from Harvard, he was the Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers Professor of Management at Stanford University Graduate School of Business. In his position at Stanford, he directed the strategic management program. In his most recent research, he has examined product and process development as a source of competitive advantage. He has authored over a dozen books and numerous articles and case studies on Forecasting, Manufacturing Strategy, and New Product Development.

Professor Wheelwright has a B.S. degree in Mathematics (with minors in physics and chemistry) from the University of Utah and an M.B.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. In addition to his Harvard and Stanford positions, Professor Wheelwright served on the faculty of INSEAD (European Institute of Management) in Fontainebleau, France. He has also served on numerous corporate boards including Zions Bancorp, Allegheny Technologies, and O.C. Tanner.

In addition to serving as a mission president and temple president, he has served as an elders' quorum president, a bishop, in a stake presidency, as a stake Young Men’s president, as a scoutmaster and as a temple sealer.  As a young man he served in the North Scottish Mission. He and his wife, Margaret, have five children and 20 grandchildren.

Chapter president Jim Johnston will interview Kimberly Dwyer. 

About Kimberly Dwyer

Kim has been working in the trust and investment management business for almost 30 years. She began her career at State Street Bank and Trust Company where she was a trust officer and portfolio manager. She has been at CIBC Atlantic Trust Company (formerly Pell Rudman) since 2000. Kim is a Managing Director with $800 million under management for high net worth families across the US.

Kim is a graduate of BYU. She was a Financial Times Top 100 Women Financial Advisers in 2014 and she was awarded the Women in Wealth Management (Individual-Wealth Management Organizations) Highly Commended by the Family Wealth Report in 2018. Most recently, she was again recognized, in 2018, as one of the Top 100 Women Advisors by Barron’s.

She and her husband, Dane, live in Hingham, MA.

Interview Topics
Chapter President Jim Johnston will interview a special guest: Collin Beecroft. The interview will be personal, informal, and revealing. Topics will include Collin's decision to come to Massachusetts, his decision to stay, his experience raising children and serving in the Church, his life as a partner in an elite law firm, his leap into working for a small hedge fund that has since become enormous, what makes Baupost and its leader Seth Klarman distinct, the current status and trends in hedge funds and deals, and Collin's thoughts on his future. Collin will also take your questions.

Collin Beecroft's Story
Collin Beecroft was born in San Diego and grew up there. He served an LDS mission in Chile. He graduated from BYU in 1987 in economics and international relations. He came to Massachusetts for law school and received his J.D. from Harvard Law in 1990. He’s lived here ever since.

He worked at Ropes & Gray for 16 years, where he became a partner in the firm’s corporate department. Ropes & Gray is a global law firm with 11 offices located in the United States, Asia, and Europe. The firm has over 1,150 lawyers worldwide, including 475 in Massachusetts, the most of any law firm. The firm was founded in 1865 in Boston by John Codman Ropes and John Chipman Gray.

Collin’s legal work includes mergers and acquisitions, leveraged buyouts, restructurings, and bank, mezzanine, and venture capital financings. In 2006, Collin left Ropes to go to work for a client, Baupost Group. At Baupost, he is senior investment counsel. His glamorous life there includes frequent quick trips to Europe. Baupost was founded in 1982 by Harvard Business School professor William Poorvu and three other partners. Baupost had $31B of assets under management at the end of 2016. The firm invests in a very wide variety of assets, publicly traded and not, and is known for favoring assets that are out of favor, following a “value investing” approach. Baupost continues to have a strong relationship with Ropes & Gray.

Collin married Melinda Kay of Hawaii in 1993. They live in Belmont and have three children. Collin was bishop of his ward in Belmont 2005 to 2010 and then an early morning seminary teacher for five years. Since November 2016 he has been first counselor in the stake presidency of the Cambridge Stake.

Our Speaker, Brandon White
Brandon White joined Harvard Private Capital Group, the predecessor to Charlesbank, in 1997. He is currently a Managing Director and one of twenty investment processionals managing over $6 billion of private equity investments in management buyouts, leveraged recapitalizations, and later-stage growth equity.

As a managing director, Brandon focuses on sourcing and executing new investments, leading financing efforts for new and existing investments, and serving as a director of portfolio companies. Brandon has been on the board of 14 different companies in his 21 years at Charlesbank. He is currently on the board of Ascensus Chemical, Optomi, Plaskolite, Tecomet, Trojan Battery, Varsity Brands, and Vestcom.

Previously Brandon worked at McKinsey & Company where he focused on corporate strategy in the oil and gas and telecommunications industries.  Brandon holds a BA in economics from Brigham Young University, where he graduated summa cum laude and was first in his class.  Brandon and his wife Amanda live in Weston, MA with their four children.

More on Charlesbank Capital Partners
Charlesbank Capital Partners is a private equity investment firm focusing on management-led buyouts and growth capital financing of middle-market companies. The firm typically invests $50 million to $250 million of equity per transaction in companies with enterprise values of $150 million to $1.5 billion. Charlesbank's strategy emphasizes investing across a broad range of industries, transaction types, and levels of the capital structure. With the addition of a credit strategy in 2016, the firm also engages in opportunistic or special situations credit investing.

The founders of Charlesbank came together in 1991 as Harvard Private Capital Group to manage the private equity investment portfolio for Harvard Management Company. In 1998, the founders launched Charlesbank Capital Partners, an independent firm also based in Boston, Massachusetts.

In 2000, the firm raised ~$600 million for Charlesbank Equity Fund V, its first fund to include outside institutional investors. The firm’s founders include co-chairmen Michael R. Eisenson and Kim Davis as well as Tim Palmer, Mark Rosen and Michael Thonis, who now serve as Senior Advisors. Charlesbank is currently led by managing directors Sam Bartlett, Joshua Beer, Ryan Carroll, Michael Choe (CEO), Sandor Hau, Andrew Janower, Joshua Klevens, Jason Pike and Brandon White. The firm employs more than 50 people between its Boston and New York City offices and has over $5 billion of capital under management.

[This information on Charlesbank is excerpted from the Wikipedia article.]

Scott will give us a start-up lawyer’s perspective on doing business with entrepreneurs and doing business in Japan.

More About Our Speaker
Scott Earnshaw grew up in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. He graduated from BYU (with a bachelor’s in Political Science) and Columbia Law School. After graduation he clerked on the D.C. District Court and then joined the U.S. Department of Justice. When Japan opened to foreign lawyers in 1987, Scott shifted to private practice in preparation for moving to Tokyo to work in mergers and acquisitions there. His family enjoyed Tokyo so much that he went back to head up Morgan Stanley’s law and compliance group in Japan. Scott led the department through eight years of significant transitions in the regulatory environment, with no significant negative findings by government auditors. He also played a key role in setting up the Japanese Investor Protection Fund.

In 2001, Scott relocated his family back to his hometown of Bedford, New Hampshire, where he still lives, next door to his parents. Since then he’s been working with various start-ups, including his most successful client, Cobalt Speech and Language, Inc. Cobalt is a custom software development company for difficult speech technology projects. Cobalt has been involved in:

• Using speech to diagnose Alzheimer’s.
• Building voice command mechanisms for drones.
• Using holograms to show organ condition during surgery.
• Developing stuffed animals that can talk with their childish owners.
• Enabling interactive virtual assistants.
• Using pronunciation feedback for foreign language learners.

Cobalt is constantly alert for domain experts with whom to partner to bring disruptive products to market. Cobalt already has spun off affiliated companies for the call center market and the medical diagnostic market.

Keith Dionne will be our speaker. He got his start on an Idaho farm and has become a serial biotech CEO. On May 3 Third Rock Ventures announced the launch of Casma Therapeutics and Series A funding of $53.5M, with Keith named as CEO. Previously Keith was entrepreneur-in-residence at Third Rock.

More on Keith’s Topic
From Cows to Cow Paths: A Journey from Idaho to Cambridge Biotech

Keith will tell us how his boyhood spent driving tractors and keeping livestock alive led to a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at MIT and a career in some of Cambridge’s leading biotechnology companies. He’ll talk about

• Working at the benchtop to create a bioartificial pancreas.
• Helping to drive the genomics revolution that sequenced the human genome.
• Taking over as CEO of an international biotech company focused on treating osteoarthritis and diabetes.
• Starting up a new biotech, Casma Therapeutics, dedicated to developing autophagy “self-eating” to treat rare genetic diseases and common neurodegeneration of aging.

Along the way, he’ll share some stories from the trenches, including:

• How a chicken launched a treatment for prostate cancer.
• Putting a $500,000 milestone on agreeing to not look at a contract.
• The midnight phone call that killed (almost) a $300M deal.

Strange, true, and hopefully interesting stories of 30 years in biotech.

More on Keith Dionne, Ph.D.
Keith is Chief Executive Officer of Casma Therapeutics, Inc. He is an industry veteran with over 20 years of experience leading U.S. and international biotechnology companies. Most recently prior to Casma, he was president and CEO of Constellation Pharmaceuticals, an oncology-focused epigenetics company. Prior to joining Constellation, he was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Third Rock Ventures. Before that, he served as the CEO at Surface Logix, Inc., which was acquired by Nano Terra, Inc. Keith was the president and CEO of Alantos Pharmaceuticals, leading the company’s sale to Amgen for more than $300 million in 2007.

Prior to joining Alantos, Keith was with Millennium Pharmaceuticals (now Takeda) where he held positions of increasing responsibility, concluding his seven-year tenure there as vice president of business development and general manager, technology business. Prior to Millennium, Keith led implantable drug delivery research at ALZA Pharmaceuticals, where he spearheaded the development of Viadur™, a 12-month implantable treatment for prostate cancer. He was one of four original scientists at CytoTherapeutics, a cell transplantation company.

Keith has also served as an adjunct professor in the biomedical department at Brown University. Keith received both his Ph.D. in chemical engineering and his M.S. in the program for technology policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is an assistant wrestling coach at Belmont High school, where his son Max wrestles at 145 lbs.

More on Casma Therapeutics
Human health depends on the careful movement of millions of protein molecules around each cell in the human body. Autophagy is the natural process that facilitates this orderly trafficking and is also essential for recycling old proteins and mitochondria. Although the human body boosts autophagy in response to exercise or reduced nutrient intake, only recently have we begun to understand how in certain diseases this quality control process goes awry and is detrimental.

These recent discoveries have created a vast new opportunity in medicine. For the first time, we can begin to design treatment strategies to boost autophagy and arrest or reverse disease progression. Casma sees the emerging understanding of autophagy and lysosomal function as the key to opening up novel ways of treating a host of diseases that are neglected or inadequately treated today.

[Based on text from Casma’s website.]

Pain: Is It All in Our Heads?
The Case for a Peripherally Restricted Opioid Narcotic that Does Not Cause Addiction
The opioid crisis is in the news almost every day. It is a particularly huge crisis here in Massachusetts. Tim will tell the story of the development of an exciting new product that flies in the face of conventional wisdom. It has now been tested in over 2,000 patients. The NDA (New Drug Application) has been filed with the FDA. The product has Fast Track status with the FDA. This is a story of how determination overcomes failure for a product that will change pain treatment.

More about Timothy A. Riley, Ph.D.
Tim was educated at BYU where he earned his BS and Ph.D. in Chemistry and Organic Chemistry respectively. He had the privilege of working with Dr. Roland K. Robins, the grandfather of the chemistry of nucleosides, which are the building blocks of DNA and RNA. He is an entrepreneurial executive in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry with multiple drugs approved and approaching approval. These products are projected to be multi-billion dollar products and have created over $6 billion in market capitalization. He has built and led successful teams in pharmaceutical research and development with over three decades of experience. His leadership positions include Associate Vice-Chancellor for business development at UMass Medical School and a decade-long tenure as Executive Committee member of a publicly traded company, Nektar Therapeutics.  He has also served as SVP of Global Research, and SVP of Quality. He has directed internal and external international relationships with companies such as Baxter. He has worked in many therapeutic areas including rare diseases, hemophilia, pain, oncology, and antivirals. His areas of technical expertise include large molecules such as oligonucleotides, peptides and proteins; small molecules including heterocycles, nucleosides, and carbohydrates; as well as retooling or rescue of existing drugs with lipid and PEG technologies. He co-founded a target validation company, linking genes to their importance in disease. He has shown he can influence investors to make financial commitments to new entities. 

Our guest will be Jeff Whatcott, of Onshape, Inc. Our chapter president, Jim Johnston, will interview Jeff and moderate as you ask your questions.  See more on Jeff, below. His company, Onshape, is the first and only full-cloud 3D CAD system that lets everyone on a design team work together using any web browser, phone, or tablet.

Onshape was built from scratch for the way today’s engineers, designers and manufacturers really work, giving them secure and simultaneous access to a single master version of their CAD data without the hassles of software licenses or copying files.

Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Onshape is a new venture-backed company that includes key members of the original SolidWorks team plus elite engineers from the cloud, data security and mobile industries.

More on Jeff Whatcott

Jeff Whatcott has provided strategy, product, and go-to-market leadership for many category-defining technology businesses including early stage venture-backed startups, mid-size public companies, and established global super-brands. A veteran of Brightcove, Acquia, and Adobe, Jeff has co-founded one venture-backed startup, launched multiple companies and new products, supported multiple successful IPOs and acquisitions, and led international expansion initiatives across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), Asia-Pacific countries (APAC), and Japan.

Jeff is currently chief marketing officer (CMO) of Onshape. Onshape is the first and only full-cloud 3D computer-aided design (CAD) system that lets everyone on a hardware product design team work together using any web browser, phone, or tablet. As CMO, Jeff is responsible for worldwide brand development and demand generation, customer success, training, consulting, technical sales, strategic account sales, and alliances.

Jeff started his career in technology at Compaq Computer Corporation in Houston, Texas. Jeff worked in the corporate development organization supporting corporate venture investments, internal strategy consulting projects, and Compaq’s acquisition of Digital Equipment Corporation. Jeff’s work contributed to the formation of Compaq’s Internet Division and supported the company’s forays into rack-mounted servers, blade servers, and server appliances.

Jeff left Compaq in 1999 to join several former colleagues at Ashford.com, a Benchmark-backed online retail venture selling luxury watches, diamonds, jewelry, sunglasses, and other luxury accessories products online. Jeff negotiating major advertising deals and led the restructuring and relaunch of the diamonds division. He pioneered the use of interactive configurators to help site visitors visualize diamonds in their setting and to select neckwear to match jacket/shirt combinations.

Jeff left Ashford.com in the wake of the 2000 dotcom meltdown and moved to Boston to join Allaire Corporation, the makers of several popular web application development tools and platforms. Jeff briefly worked in strategic alliances before joining the product marketing team. Macromedia acquired Allaire in 2001 and Jeff rose to vice president of product management, responsible for product marketing, product management, and technical evangelism across multiple product lines. Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005 and Jeff became vice president of marketing and business development in Adobe’s Enterprise and Developer business unit.

In 2007 Jeff left Adobe to join Acquia, the North Bridge-backed leader in managed cloud hosting environment for the open source Drupal web content management system (WCMS). As vice president of marketing, Jeff led launches the company did and the introduction of the company’s flagship product and service offerings.

Jeff left Acquia in 2008 to join former Allaire colleagues at Brightcove, a General Catalyst-backed provider of premium video hosting for media companies and marketers. Jeff served as CMO, responsible for marketing worldwide and for sales, consulting, and support in the Japan and APAC regions. Jeff led many major product and international expansion launches at Brightcove and spent significant time overseas supporting regional sales efforts across Europe, the Middle East, Japan, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand.                                                                                     

In 2014 Jeff left Brightcove to found his own company, Outlearn. Outlearn created a unique learning publishing platform and learning content catalog focused on professional developer learning in the workplace. The company was backed by General Catalyst Partners and was acquired by Qwiklabs in June 2016. Google subsequently acquired Qwiklabs in November 2016. Jeff left shortly thereafter and joined Onshape.

Jeff grew up in Rexburg, Idaho and served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Sapporo, Japan. He and his wife, Alyson Keenan Whatcott, have four adult children and currently reside in Acton, Massachusetts. They have lived previously in Utah, Japan, and Texas. Jeff currently serves as bishop of the Acton Ward of the Church and has served previously in several other leadership, teaching, and youth ministry roles in his faith.                                 

Jeff holds a bachelor of science degree in economics and an MBA degree from Brigham Young University. He speaks and reads Japanese and relaxes through cycling, hiking, and nature photography.

Building and Maintaining High Energy Work Teams
The data is in: positive “group norms” lead to high-energy, innovative work teams in organizations. As leaders, how do we create a culture that raises the collective intelligence and performance of the teams we work in? What are the barriers and common pitfalls that can stall our success? Bring your most challenging “people problems” to this interactive session, where we’ll discover how to get past interpersonal roadblocks and achieve maximum team performance.

More About Margaret Moore
Margaret is a partner at Organizations Unlimited, where she teaches leadership development courses, works as a 1:1 executive coach, and facilitates team building and strategic planning sessions with clients across the globe. She received an MBA from the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, where she was awarded the Edgar F. Huse Memorial Award for Outstanding Achievement in Organizational Studies. She studied English literature, piano, and voice at Oberlin College and Conservatory and began her career as a management fellow with the League of American Orchestras. She held leadership positions at the Utah Symphony for five years before returning to Boston for graduate school. Prior to joining Organizations Unlimited she worked as a consultant and team lead at the Social Innovation Forum, a social impact agency that runs accelerators for nonprofit organizations and start-up businesses. Margaret has also taught arts administration and music history at Simmons College.

Our Topic
You want to start making money from your hobby or a skill but how do you start? How do you find the time being a stay-at-home parent or a full-time employee? You'll ask yourself, "Do I need to tell my boss? Do I need to create a company?"

Husband and wife duo Nate and Maryn have started two different companies together, and independently started multiple side-gigs, all while being either a stay-at-home mom or a full-time employee. Maryn and Nate will walk you through their journey, things they've learned along the way, and many tips on how you can start making money from your skills and hobbies immediately.

More on Nate and Maryn Coughran
Maryn and Nate are the co-founders of Wisdify, an online training provider that teaches young professionals today's most in-demand skills. Prior to Wisdify, they founded BostonExcel, a Microsoft Excel training and consulting company that worked with 60+ companies. BostonExcel was started while Nate was working full-time and Maryn was at home with their first, second, and then third kid. Maryn graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in Economics and Nate graduated from Boston College with a masters in Finance and BYU-Idaho with a degree in business.

Presentation Overview: The Art of Being Expert
The primary source of social and economic progress in the world is the expert. Experts bring us improved health, beautiful music, safe transportation, and instant communications. Experts bring us running water, airplanes, and electricity. Our highest professional objective should be to become an expert in our chosen field. And once we become experts, we should change the world by wielding that expertise effectively.

The most effective experts are not just sages of knowledge. It turns out that the best experts, the truly influential and life altering ones, are always three-dimensional. They are masters in knowledge, masters in performance, and masters in persuasion.

After decades of study and observation, Alan Berrey has assembled the essential ingredients of powerful and influential expert performance. Whether you are a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or carpenter, there is a talent to expertise. Being an expert is a craft.

In his presentation, Alan will discuss his study of experts, how people become experts, the problems that many experts face, and how experts can maximize their impact. In short, Alan will discuss the art of being expert.

More on Alan Berrey
Alan Berrey is a serial entrepreneur, constantly searching for ways to disrupt the mobile landscape. He was the founder, president, and CEO of Scratch Wireless, Inc., America’s first free mobile telephone service and the birth place of WiFi First mobile technology. Scratch Wireless was sold in 2016 to Evolve Cellular, where Alan is currently working as VP of Business Development.

In 2003 Alan founded Mobile Collect, Inc., a SaaS solution for text messaging and wireless solutions for businesses. He introduced text messages into many banking, commerce, and retail enterprises. Mobile Collect was sold in 2008 to SoundBite Communications, which is now part of Genesis.

Prior to creating Mobile Collect, Alan was the Vice President of Business Development for Logica, a global mobile consulting company with headquarters in London, England. Prior to working at Logica, Alan spent time at Ford Motor Company and IBM.

Alan is a thought leader on mobile technologies and markets. His writings on the topic have been featured in outlets such as Wired, FierceWireless, FierceCable, Light Reading, and Multichannel News. Additionally, Alan has spoken on the future of mobile communications in multiple venues.

Alan received a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Brigham Young University and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University.

More on Our Topic
Whether it’s listed on your job description or not, everyone is involved at some level in marketing. It carries over in business, home, and even church responsibilities. However, personal biases, abundance of money, and watching the Super Bowl can result in poor results and throwing wads of cash into a theoretical fireplace. Hearing professional examples combined with humorous personal stories, expect to come away possessing a higher level of marketing nirvana than ever before.

More on Our Speaker
Raised in Idaho, Alex became very interested in advertising and marketing promotions from an early age. He worked seven years as a landscaper and tree care specialist—this actually has nothing to do with marketing. However, after realizing there was more to life than waking up at 5:30 AM, Alex began working for Klim, a Gore-Tex motorcycle and snowmobile clothing manufacture—now a sister company of Polaris. His Klim marketing ideas, however ludicrous, were adopted by over 200 retail shops throughout the continental United States. Alex then took on a job with Sophos, a publicly traded British cybersecurity company, marketing antivirus products and doing brand promotions. Alex is a BYU graduate with a BS in Business Management—Marketing Emphasis and a BA in Russian. Alex served as a missionary in the Russia Moscow West Mission. Alex is married and he and his lovely wife are expecting a baby boy in March. 

More About Our Speaker
Melanie Reed received a J.D. (law) degree from Brigham Young University, summa cum laude, in 2003 and a Ph.D. in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, in 2017. After obtaining her law degree, Melanie clerked for Judge Timothy Tymkovich on the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and then practiced law at Covington & Burling in Washington, DC. Her law practice focused on white collar crime, particularly foreign bribery, fraud, and government ethics issues. She then went to the Anti-Corruption Division of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris, France, where she assisted countries of the OECD Working Group on Bribery to improve their enforcement of laws prohibiting bribery in connection with international business. She returned to the United States in 2012 to begin her doctoral work, which focused on international norms regarding foreign bribery.

Melanie currently works as a consultant on issues of anti-corruption, development, and international law. Her clients have included international organizations such as the OECD, research institutes such as the Chr. Michelsen Institute and International Law and Policy Institute (both in Norway), civil society groups such as Transparency International (London) and the Natural Resource Governance Institute (New York), and private firms, including GAN Integrity (New York), GES Investment (Stockholm), and Ankura Consulting (New York). Melanie also avidly enjoys teaching. She recently returned from spending a month in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where she taught international human rights law at Dar Al-Hekma University. She is currently a Girls on the Run Coach for third grade girls.

More on Melanie Reed's Topic
Enforcement of laws that prohibit bribery in connection with international business has been on the rise since the early 2000s, and firms not just in the United States, but also elsewhere in the world, are beginning to take note. How does the home country culture of international firms influence how they approach the risk of corruption when they operate abroad? The presentation will focus on the United States, Norway, and Italy, in particular.

More on Our Topic
Healthcare expenditures in the U.S. have reached nearly 20% of GDP, a level about 30% higher than comparable advanced economies, with little to show in the way of superior outcomes. While the U.S. does subsidize innovation breakthroughs for the world, there are many inefficiencies in the healthcare system that technology and innovative value-based delivery models can help address à la Clay Christensen's book The Innovator's Prescription. Funding and commercializing these technologies has become an urgent need as the cost of healthcare has crowded out other important areas of investment. 

More on Our Speaker
Austin Walters grew up in a ranching community in northern Wyoming, served a mission in eastern Ukraine, studied International Relations and Russian at BYU, and came to Cambridge, MA nine years ago to study at Harvard Business School. His interest in healthcare began at Innosight, where he helped Fortune 500 healthcare companies navigate disruptive threats and opportunities. He's since authored a research blog on disruptive medical devices from India, and has helped to commercialize Jana Care's diabetes management solutions, Harvard Medical School's online learning platform HMX, and EchoNous's handheld ultrasound devices. He's currently raising a new healthcare venture fund called SpringTide Investments. Austin currently serves as the Cambridge Stake Young Men's secretary. He and his wife Rachel are members of the Cambridge 1st Ward.

Seeking Balance in Life
In a harried world with many priorities, how do we seek spiritual peace through a balanced life?

More on Our Speaker Kevin Rollins
Kevin Rollins has served as a senior advisor to TPG since August 2007, focusing on investment strategies in global technology, as well as the consumer, commercial, and service sectors, and worldwide operations. 

Prior to joining TPG, Mr. Rollins was President of Dell Americas 1996-1998, Vice Chairman and President of Dell 1998-2004, and CEO of Dell 2004-2007. He developed strategies that propelled Dell into a commanding position in the direct selling of computer systems in the United States. Before his time at Dell, he was a partner and director at Bain & Company, where he advised Dell for several years before joining the company. Mr. Rollins joined Bain in 1984 and specialized in strategies and management for high-technology and consumer-products clients. 

He earned his MBA and BA degrees from Brigham Young University, and previously co-chaired BYU’s President’s Leadership Council. He is a member of the Marriott School’s National Advisory Council. Mr. Rollins has served as Chairman of the Board of The American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, and as a board member of station KRLU in Austin and the Austin Symphony Orchestra.

He is presently serving as stake president of the Boston Massachusetts Stake.

Time: Thursday, June 21st @ 7:30pm
Location: Johnston Company, 78 Bedford St. Lexington, MA 
Note: Navigate to 80 Bedford Street, then go up the driveway to the coach house in the rear, which is 78 Bedford.

More on Our Panelists

Paul Dredge is a consultant and trainer with over 25 years' experience assisting individuals and business organizations in moving beyond their assumed limits. Trained as a cultural anthropologist (Ph.D., Harvard University) and experienced in working in other countries and cultures, he approaches business leadership and organizational issues from a broad, multicultural understanding of what motivates and inspires people.  In recent years his practice has centered on conducting intensely introspective leadership workshops for people in science and engineering—helping those clients add a people-centered dimension to getting the job done.

Jordan Swanson is a digital media buying expert and the Founder/CEO of ReachFire LLC. Jordan began advertising online in 2005. After executing numerous digital campaigns across search and display he created an innovative media buying agency focused on Programmatic Native Advertising.  His proprietary methodology, called “Panoptic Stacking,” helps identify and resolve the many challenges found in running native campaigns in today’s environment.

Jared Bulloch discovered his entrepreneurial passion in business school and co-founded an architecture firm, Renovation Design Group, in Utah. After spending 12 years as co-Founder and president, he worked as an independent management consultant for Exelon, a Fortune 100 company. At Exelon, he managed a $15M patented software product for which he is a named inventor. Shortly after moving to Boston for a new job, Jared was laid off. He’s currently bouncing back as he builds a business that offers custom tech solutions to optimize startups and small businesses.

Lori Bulloch, Our Moderator
Lori Bulloch graduated from Weber State University in 1999 with an associate’s degree in dental hygiene and a bachelor’s of science degree. She has been practicing as a dental hygienist for 19 years. Lori enjoys writing and helped organize the 2015 and 2016 NF4NF (non-fiction for new folks) Writing Conferences in Houston, Texas. Her passion for yoga, music, and the great outdoors are second only to her love of her family. After serving as Primary, Young Women, and Relief Society president in Utah and Texas, she is thrilled to have just accepted a call to serve as Relief Society president in Massachusetts.

Note that this lunch is on Thursday, not the usual Wednesday.

Deep Learning in Healthcare

The topic of machine learning and artificial intelligence is everywhere, it seems. This may be partly hype, but there definitely have been some real breakthroughs in recent years. My presentation will review some of the recent advances in deep learning and their application to medicine, and discuss in detail the specific example of potential benefits in screening x-ray mammography, on which more than $10 billion is spent each year in the USA.

More About Our Speaker
Gregory Sorensen M.D., is Executive Chairman of IMRIS, and Chairman of Fusion Healthcare Staffing, and serves on the supervisory board of Siemens Healthineers AG and on other public and private boards of directors. Dr. Sorensen is a board-certified neuroradiologist, and from 2011 to 2015 he served as President and CEO of Siemens Healthcare North America, the world’s largest provider of hospital infrastructure including active businesses in diagnostic imaging, in-vitro diagnostics, and healthcare IT. Prior to his service at Siemens, he was a full professor at Harvard Medical School with additional appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Oxford University, and an accomplished physician-scientist, based at Massachusetts General Hospital. His scientific career focused on developing new imaging methods to understand cancer of the brain, stroke, and migraine. 

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Companies and other institutions are facing change and potential for disruption at ever increasing rates. As the French poet Paul Valery said, “The future is not what it used to be."  To address all the challenges of today but also plan for an uncertain future, companies today need to be ever prepared to transform as their environment transforms. That ability to transform starts with the process of visioning. In this talk, Mark will discuss what visioning really means and what gets in the way of most leaders effectively doing it. He will offer a process for making it happen in organizations large and small.

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Mark W. Johnson is co-founder of Innosight, a strategy and innovation consulting firm that advises corporations on how to envision the future, create new growth, and manage transformation. Mark co-founded Innosight in 2000 with Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen. The firm was acquired by Huron Consulting in 2017.

Mark advises CEOs and leaders of Fortune 100 companies in a wide range of industries and has advised Singapore’s government on innovation and entrepreneurship. He is the author of the book Reinvent Your Business Model (2018), coauthor of the book Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today’s Business While Creating the Future (2017). He has written several Harvard Business Review articles, including “Reinventing Your Business Model" in 2008. It won the HBR McKinsey Award. 

Mark received an MBA from Harvard Business School, a master’s degree in civil engineering and engineering mechanics from Columbia University, and a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the United States Naval Academy. He served eight years in the U.S. Navy and as a nuclear-trained Surface Warfare Officer in the first Gulf War. He and his wife Jane Clayson Johnson are the parents of five children and the grandparents of three.

Our Topic
Brett will speak about his investment beliefs and the process he uses to manage uncertainty in global capital markets. He will also cover his views on the most important cyclical (short term) and secular (long-term) themes that investors face today.

Our Speaker
Brett Sumsion is a portfolio manager in the Global Asset Allocation (GAA) group at Fidelity Investments. In this role he is responsible for the active management of over $300 billion in global multi-asset investment portfolios including Fidelity’s target-date strategies.

Prior to joining Fidelity in 2014, Brett spent nine years at DuPont Capital Management as a portfolio manager and managing director of asset allocation. While at DuPont, he managed a global tactical asset allocation strategy that was implemented for institutional investors in stock, bond, currency, and commodity derivatives.

Brett earned his bachelor of arts degree in economics from Brigham Young University and his master of business administration degree in finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a CFA® charterholder.

Brett lives with his wife, Jill, and their six children (ages 16, 14, 11, 8, 5, 2) in Weston, Massachusetts. He is currently serving as the Young Men’s president in the Weston 1st Ward.

Accounting: More Than Just Debits and Credits
Accounting is stereotypically portrayed as a boring field filled with equally unexciting people who look at numbers all day. Accountants may use a lot of numbers, but as Parker Moffat will show us at this Lexington Evening, there is much more than meets the eye to accounting. Come join us while he leads a discussion on fraud: what it is, famous stories of fraud (some of which you may not know!), and learning some basic fraud prevention tips.

Parker Moffat is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) who works at Fidelity Investments, where he writes accounting policy and performs technical accounting research. He has previously worked for both PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he was an auditor of asset managers, and Ernst & Young, where he worked in M&A due diligence. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University, where he received both his BS and MS in Accountancy. At BYU Parker was the President of the BYU Triathlon Club and he completed an Ironman triathlon.  Parker lives in Medford with his wife Carolyn, a native of Detroit and a family and newborn photographer. Parker served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mozambique, where he learned to speak Portuguese. 

Running for Public Office in Our Hyper-Polarized World 

All of us are continually bombarded by the news of more name calling and government dysfunction. Indeed trust in our government is at an all time low, and even more disturbingly, trust in our fellow Americans is at an all time low, according to the Pew Research Center and the General Social Survey. 

It’s this statistic that was the clincher for Margaret Busse to step up to run for State Senate in the Middlesex & Worcester District. She lost to incumbent James Eldridge. 

And what is it like running for office in such a politically polarized time in our country? Margaret will discuss how she honed her message of bringing people together around common ground, how that message has been received, and what’s it was like to be on the campaign trail. 

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Margaret Busse lives in Acton with her husband Franz and their five children.  Margaret is passionate about public service:  she brings people together to solve problems and build a better future for all. She has an MBA from Harvard Business School and degrees in economics and public policy from Brigham Young University.  

Margaret brings public and economic policy experience to the table. She has served in Acton’s town government for the past eight years. Most recently, she chaired Acton’s Finance Committee, where she collaborated with the Board of Selectmen and the School Committee to negotiate annual budgets that accomplished town goals while delivering fiscal restraint and accountability to Acton’s taxpayers.

Earlier Margaret led a comprehensive community planning process as chair of the Acton 2020 Committee, bringing a wide and diverse set of constituents together to guide Acton’s future. In addition, she served for four years on Acton's Planning Board, deliberating town zoning and planning issues in order to ensure that Acton remains a vibrant community for both residents and businesses. 

Margaret’s professional career includes service with the U.S. Treasury Department as a Presidential Management Fellow. There she developed policy for financial institutions as well as approved low-interest loans and grants to community development financial institutions. She later worked as a nonprofit strategy consultant at both The Bridgespan Group and the Social Innovation Forum.  Margaret now leads a series of programs at Harvard Business School designed to increase alumni’s effectiveness in the nonprofit and public sectors.  Her husband Franz serves as the Chief Technology Officer of a humanitarian technology company.

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Jeff Adams, founder and CEO of Cobalt Speech & Language, will speak about the future of speech technology. Conversational assistants like Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and OK Google have transformed the way people interact with their homes and phones. They have also changed our perceptions of the role of speech and natural language in  human-computer interaction. While these services take up the limelight, they may also blind us to the other ways that speech and language technologies are poised to impact our lives. Jeff has a unique perspective on interesting developments yet to come.

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Jeff Adams is a leading figure in the world of commercial speech technology. He has been managing top-level speech and language technology research for more than 20 years. Before founding Cobalt Speech & Language, he was at Kurzweil AI, Nuance/Dragon, Yap, and Amazon. He led the teams that developed the core technology for Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Yap Voicemail, and Amazon Alexa. At Cobalt, Jeff has assembled a team of elite speech scientists and engineers to build custom applications to meet the needs of their clients. Jeff is the author of 25 patents and several published research papers. He serves on the boards of several companies.

September 2018 Interview
The podcast of an interview with Jeff is at https://voicebot.ai/2018/09/03/jeff-adams-ceo-of-cobalt-speech-language-and-former-alexa-asr-and-nlu-teams-voicebot-podcast-ep-59/. Here is a summary of the interview. 

Jeff Adams has spent more than two decades in the voice industry. During that time he worked for well recognized industry names that include Scansoft, Nuance and Amazon. At Nuance, he worked on the famous Dragon Naturally Speaking dictation software. He left Nuance to take the VP of Research position at Yap which became a leader in voicemail transcription and was eventually acquired by Amazon. But, no one had any idea why the acquisition happened. Jeff walks through the initial secrecy around Amazon’s expectations of him and his team and his first visit to Seattle where the plans for Alexa were first revealed. His initial reaction was that voice recognition at a distance (far-field voice) wasn’t possible. Previous attempts had been unsuccessful.

At Amazon, Jeff led the original automated speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU) teams for Alexa where he is also listed as the author on 21 patents. Just before Alexa’s launch, he left Amazon to start Cobalt Speech & Language which helps companies solve the biggest technical challenges in voice technology. And, he shares why he doesn’t regret leaving before Amazon Echo started shipping to consumers. Jeff has undergraduate and graduated degrees in Math from Brigham Young, Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz and the University of Oregon.

Our speaker, Matt Probst, is in the big data business. He leads engineering for McKinsey’s cloud-based analytics services. He is aware of the dangers posed to all of us. He’ll tell us five key steps to protect ourselves from online threats.

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Matt Probst grew up in the Washington DC area building and programing computers. He attended a high school for geeks and then went to BYU to study computer science. On his full-time LDS mission in South America, he spent most of his time programming.

For the first decade of his career, Matt led engineering of a variety of public cloud services for NTT. He then went on to lead engineering of public cloud services at VMWare and later Federated Wireless. Today Matt leads engineering at McKinsey for cloud-based analytics services.

Matt holds a bachelor’s in computer science from BYU, an MBA from BYU, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Utah, with a specialty in security in distributed systems.

Matt, his wife, and their four boys live in Southborough, Massachusetts. In addition to computers, his hobbies also include playing in his family bluegrass band and DJing.

More on Matt’s Topic
More and more, our interactions with the world around us are being conducted electronically. We are living in the age of big data and analytics. A growing number of entities are able to monitor, analyze, exploit, and at times spoof (forge or hijack) our electronic interactions. This talk will share five key steps that can be followed to help protect ourselves and our families from current online threats.