Hospitality & Design Summit 2009 - 4

- Speaker Biographies Thomas Homer-Dixon Thomas Homer-Dixon holds the Centre for International Governance Innovation Chair of Global Systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada, and is a professor in the Centre for Environment and Business in the Faculty of Environment, University of Waterloo. He was born in Victoria, British Columbia in 1956 and grew up in a rural area outside the city. In 1980 he received his B.A. in political science from Carleton University in Ottawa. After completing his Ph.D. in political science in 1989 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts—where he studied international relations, defense and arms control policy, cognitive science, and conﬂict theory—he moved to the University of Toronto and, in the subsequent eight years, led several international research projects examining the links between environmental stress and violence in developing countries. Recently, his research has focused on threats to global security in the 21st century and on how societies adapt to complex economic, ecological, and technological change. His work is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on political science, economics, environmental studies, geography, cognitive science, social psychology, and complex systems theory. Homer-Dixon teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on environmental security; causes of war, revolution, and ethnic conﬂict; international relations; and complexity theory. In 1999 he received the University of Toronto’s Northrop Frye Teaching Award for integrating teaching and research. His writings have appeared in leading scholarly journals, popular magazines, and newspapers, including International Studies Quarterly, International Security, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Scientiﬁc American, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Financial Times. His books include The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (Knopf, Island Press, 2006); The Ingenuity Gap (Knopf, Jonathan Cape, 2000), which won the 2001 Governor General’s Non-ﬁction Award; Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (Princeton, 1999), which received the 2000 Lynton Keith Caldwell Prize from the American Political Science Association; and Ecoviolence: Links among Environment, Population, and Security (Rowman & Littleﬁeld, 1998,) coedited with Jessica Blitt. He has been invited to speak about his research at Yale University, Harvard University, Princeton University, Stanford University, Cornell University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Chicago, MIT, United States Military Academy at West Point, Oxford and Cambridge Universities, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Homer-Dixon has also provided brieﬁngs to the Privy Council Ofﬁce, the Department of Foreign Affairs, and the Department of Defence in Canada; and to the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, the State Department, the Agency for International Development, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States. He created the highly successful Strategic Leadership Program for senior executives at the Australian Graduate School of Management. He has taught in executive education programs in Mexico, Finland, England, France, Italy, Poland, China, and Vietnam, as well as throughout the United States. He holds degrees from Concordia University and the London School of Economics; he received his Ph.D. at Columbia University. He is the author of Why Smart Executives Fail and What You Can Learn From Their Mistakes (Portfolio, 2003) and the recently released Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep It From Happening to You (Harvard Business School Press, 2009). Both books explore corporate mistakes—what they are, why they occur, and what managers, leaders, and investors can do about them. Widely published, Finkelstein has authored articles in the Harvard Business Review, Strategic Management Journal, Organizational Dynamics, Journal of Business Strategy, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, and other leading business journals. He received the Academy of Management’s Executive Award for Best Article of the Year (1997), and an award from McKinsey for an article on boards of directors (2002). Every year, Finkelstein gives talks throughout America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. He is able to address a wide range of audiences in an entertaining fashion, but is prized, above all, for the depth and authority he brings to the subject of learning from corporate mistakes and failures. Jill Hellman Jill Hellman has extensive experience in the areas of innovation, strategy, and organizational development. She has done consulting work for organizations such as Microsoft, Pﬁzer, Royal Bank of Scotland, Johnson & Johnson, and the National Safety Council. In addition to her work in the United States, she has addressed audiences in the U.K., Guatemala, and Dubai (United Arab Emirates). She currently serves as chief innovator for The Innovation Network, a ground breaking program being launched by the Leland C. and Mary M. Pillsbury Institute for Hospitality Entrepreneurship at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration. Prior to her consulting work, she was the director of strategy at AutoNation, Inc., a $19 billion company known for innovation in automotive retailing. In that role, she was responsible for executing strategic initiatives by diffusing innovation across the enterprise. She also led the integration of more than $1 billion in acquisitions. Before joining AutoNation, she held training positions with The Associates (Citigroup) and Tandy Corporation (RadioShack). Hellman co-founded the Strategy Learning Forums for heads of strategy at companies over $1 billion. She is a guest speaker for senior executive groups, such as TEC/Vistage, in the areas of innovation, strategy, and community building. She is also active in the community and has served on the boards of nonproﬁts such as Gilda’s Club, an organization named after Gilda Radner for families touched by cancer. She received her undergraduate degree in psychology from Florida Atlantic University. She received her M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Sydney Finkelstein Sydney Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. He is widely known as one of the top authorities on strategy and leadership. His group is one of the highest rated at Tuck, and it has helped to propel Dartmouth’s Tuck School to the top of recent business school ratings—including the number one spot in the most recent Wall Street Journal ranking. Finkelstein is director of the Tuck Executive Program and a leading ﬁgure in worldwide executive education. hospi tal i ty des i g n su m m i t 2009

Hospitality & Design Summit 2009

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