Kate Vitasek

Author, educator and business consultant Kate Vitasek is an internationally recognized innovator in the practice of supply chain management and outsourcing. She is the founder and lead researcher in the concept of Vested Outsourcing, which was developed in conjunction with the University of Tennessee. Vitasek is also a faculty member at the University of Tennessee’s Center for Executive Education and is author of the popular book Vested Outsourcing: Five Rules that will Transform Outsourcing, along with Mike Ledyard and Karl Mandrodt.

Unlike conventional outsourcing by which companies purchase services for fees, Vested Outsourcing is a business model under which companies and service providers work collaboratively.

“Together, companies and vendors using the vested approach develop performance-based solutions in which both parties’ interests are aligned, and thus they are vested in each others’ success,” Vitasek explained. “After experiencing how well the vested formula works, companies regard traditional outsourcing as old-school, impersonal and outmoded.”

In Vested Outsourcing, Vitasek has created a model that will improve outsourcing procedures much the way Six Sigma and Lean improved production processes in the 1980s and ’90s. Based on a research study with the University of Tennessee and the United States Air force, Vitasek has identified the top 10 flaws in most outsourced business models and then shows organizations how to rethink their outsourcing relationships in a way that will lower costs, improve service and increase innovation.

Donna Kelley

Donna Kelley is an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at Babson College and holds the Frederic C. Hamilton Chair of Free Enterprise. She teaches courses at Babson in entrepreneurship, corporate entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship in Asia. In addition, she has made speeches for executives and taught for top universities in China and Korea. Kelley has conducted research on innovation in startups and established corporations in the U.S. and Korea and on entrepreneurship education in China. Her research has been published in the Journal of Business Venturing, Entrepreneurship: Theory & Practice, Journal of Product Innovation Management, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Human Resource Management, and others.

Donna received her Ph.D. in Management from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her early career involved work as a chemist in the graphics and industrial and consumer cleaning products industries. Her entrepreneurship experience includes businesses in the health and fitness, computer hardware, and education fields. She is on the board of the Global Entrepreneurship Research Association (GERA), the oversight board of the GEM project and leader of the GEM U.S. team. She co-authored the 2008 GEM Korea Report, the 2008 GEM Education and Training Report, the 2010 and 2011 GEM Global Reports, and the 2010 GEM Global Women’s Report.

Marty Nemko

Marty Nemko’s mother claims that he could read the New York Times at age 3 and that his reading comprehension in the first grade was at the 12th grade level. That’s either the exaggerations of a Jewish mother or the first sign of what was to come.

Today, Nemko is among the nation’s most sought-after experts on both career and education issues. He has been interviewed by hundreds of major media, including “The Today Show,”  NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Time magazine, and Cosmopolitan.

Described as a “career coach extraordinaire” by U.S. News,  Nemko has just published his sixth book How to Do Life: What they didn’t teach you in school. More than 1,000 of his published columns and articles are free on www.martynemko.com.

Joel Garfinkle

Joel Garfinkle is recognized as one of the top 50 coaches in the U.S., having worked with many of the world’s leading companies. He has worked as a consultant for two of the top consulting firms in the world: Ernst & Young in Hong Kong and Accenture in San Francisco. His clientele comprises a distinguished and diverse international client base, including Oracle, Google, Amazon, Deloitte, Ritz-Carlton, Bank of America, Starbucks, and many others. He is regularly featured in the national media, including ABC News, NPR, the New York Times, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek. He has delivered more than one thousand workshops, speeches, and keynote addresses.

He is the author of seven books, including Getting Ahead: Three Steps to Take Your Career to the Next Level. View his books and FREE articles at his Leadership Coaching website.  You can also subscribe to his Leadership Development newsletter and receive the FREE e-book, 40 Proven Strategies to Get Promoted Now!”

Gerard H. “Gerry” Langeler

Gerry is a Managing Director with OVP Venture Partners, which is in its 28^th year, having raised its seventh fund (OVP VII) at $250 million. OVP has over $750 million of capital under management.

From 1981 to 1992, Gerry served as president of Mentor Graphics Corporation (NASDAQ:MENT), a company he co-founded. The company grew to over $400 million in sales and $1 billion in market capitalization.  Today, at approximately $1 billion in revenues, it is still the second largest software company in the Pacific Northwest.

Gerry is the author of The Vision Trap (Harvard Business Review), which is widely used in business schools and corporate training forums. He also authored a chapter in Great Patents (Logos Books, 2011). He holds a BA in chemistry from Cornell University and an MBA from Harvard.  He currently serves on the board of directors of Collaborative Software Initiative, CradlePoint, EnerG2 and Max-Viz. He is back-up OVP partner on DataSphere, Serus and Tigo Energy.

Gina Rudan

Gina Rudan is the President of Genuine Insights Inc., a contemporary professional development and training practice whose mission is to leverage the genius within every individual and organization. She spoke on the subject of genius at the 2010 TED Global conference at Oxford University and is the author of PRACTICAL GENIUS: The Real Smarts You Need to Get Your Passions and Talents Working for You, published by Touchstone/Simon & Schuster in the fall of 2011.

Gina has been a guest lecturer, trainer and strategist for organizations such as Merck Co., the BETNetwork, the Interpublic Group, the United States Department of Agriculture and the Stern School of Business at New York University among many others. She is the founder of TEDxMIA, an independent movement to spread genius in southern Florida. Before launching her own practice, Gina held management positions at Fortune 500 companies including Avon Products and PR Newswire, where she was responsible for spearheading multicultural and international marketing efforts.

In 2010, Gina was selected as one of Poder Magazine’s top “20 Under 40” Hispanics in the United States. A native New Yorker, Gina graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Binghamton University and is a National Urban Fellow holding a master’s degree in public administration from Baruch College in New York City. She now lives in Miami with her husband and son.

Daniel Burrus

Daniel Burrus is considered one of the world’s leading technology forecasters and business strategists, and is the founder and CEO of Burrus Research, a research and consulting firm that monitors global advancements in technology driven trends to help clients understand how technological, social and business forces are converging to create enormous untapped opportunities. He is a strategic advisor to leaders from Fortune 500 companies helping them to see invisible opportunities and solve seemingly impossible problems. He is the author of six books, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal best seller “Flash Foresight” as well as the highly acclaimed “Technotrends.”

Kevin Maney

Kevin Maney joined consulting and design firm VSA Partners in 2011 to build a practice that can marry business to big-think journalism in a way that helps both prosper. The first example of his collaboration with VSA is a book commissioned by IBM and co-authored by Maney and veteran tech journalists Steve Hamm and Jeff O’Brien. That book, Making the World Work Better, was published in June 2011. More than 500,000 copies are in print in seven languages.

In 2009, Broadway Books published Maney’s book  Trade Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don’t. It ranked No. 1 for innovation on Amazon.com, broke into the top 500 of all Amazon’s books and has enjoyed notable success in Japan.

Maney also authored The Maverick and His Machine: Thomas Watson Sr. and the Making of IBM (John Wiley & Sons, 2003). It received positive reviews in The Economist, BusinessWeek, The New York Times and other publications around the world. The BBC made it into a documentary. In 1995, Maney penned the BusinessWeek bestseller Megamedia Shakeout.

In addition to writing books, Maney has contributed to Fortune, Fast Company, and other major business and technology publications. He was a contributing editor at Conde Nast Portfolio, joining the magazine prior to its launch in 2007 and working there until its demise in April 2009. He has appeared on CBS Sunday Morning, PBS, NPR, CNBC, and other broadcast outlets, and is frequently a keynote speaker and on-stage interviewer at events and conferences.