Bhaskar Chakravorti
Dean Bhaskar Chakravorti’s expertise is in global innovation, connecting business-building in emerging markets with geopolitical issues and corporate strategy for profitable, inclusive and sustainable growth. Bhaskar Chakravorti is Senior Associate Dean of International Business & Finance at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is the founding Executive Director of Fletcher’s Institute for Business in the Global Context (where “the World of Business Meets the World”), Professor of the Practice of International Business and Chair of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Working Group for Tufts T10. He also is Chair of the Council on Emerging Market Enterprises.
A former Partner of McKinsey, Distinguished Scholar at MIT’s Legatum Center and Harvard Business School faculty, he was a leader of McKinsey’s Innovation and Global Forces practices and taught innovation and entrepreneurship at Harvard; he was also a faculty associate of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. In a 20+ year career, he has advised CEOs, Boards and senior executives at over
30 companies in the Fortune 500 and worked across the Americas, EU, Asia and Africa, and multiple industries, high tech, life sciences, renewable energies and consumer. He has also worked at Monitor Group as a partner, Bellcore (formerly Bell Labs), University of Illinois, and the Tata Group.
His Amazon best-selling book, “The Slow Pace of Fast Change: Bringing Innovations to Market in a Connected World” was chosen among the year’s best business books by multiple publications. With over 60 articles in top-tier academic journals, multiple books and articles in widely-read media, e.g., Harvard Business Review, New York Times, WSJ, Financial Times, CNN, Foreign Affairs, CNBC; his interviews feature in BusinessWeek, The Economist, Fortune, WSJ, New York Times, BBC, FT, Fast Company, CNN, New Yorker, etc.
He speaks frequently on Public Radio, has a column on Huffington Post, CNN (Fareed Zakaria’s GPS) and the Indian Express and is a regularly invited speaker at global conferences, e.g. the World Economic Forum, The Economist, Bloomberg, the Milken Institute, as well as on Capitol Hill and to a US Presidential Task Force.
Charlie Cleveland
Charlie Cleveland has more than twenty years experience as a strategic management consultant, change agent, and financial consultant. Charlie worked with Arthur D. Little, A.T. Kearney, and Booz-Allen & Hamilton. He has extensive experience consulting to corporations in Asia and the Middle East.
Charlie’s expertise includes assisting clients with strategic market planning and feasibility, portfolio allocation, financing and investor presentations and consultations, due diligence and post-deal monitoring, integration planning, and value realization, portfolio alliances, rationalizations, and supplemental acquisitions. Earlier he worked for Wells Fargo in structured finance.
Mr. Cleveland received a Master of Management in Finance and Management Policy from Kellogg Graduate School of Business, Northwestern University, and a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from Claremont McKenna.
John Collins
John Collins is a leader in technology-driven businesses with more than 25 years of international experience focused on the accelerated development and commercialization of innovative technologies in medical devices, energy and consumer products. His focus has been to form and lead high performance teams, create and manage strong intellectual property portfolios, as well as develop, structure, and drive collaborative business relationships with major corporations.
John served as Senior Vice President of Arthur D. Little, Inc. overseeing its Technology & Innovation business, and before that, leading its management consulting operations in Asia. John was President of TIAX LLC a technology development and commercialization company which was named a Technology Pioneer and Global Growth Company by the World Economic Forum. He also serves as the Chief Operating Officer of CIMIT, a consortium of the greater Boston area’s premier clinical, research and academic institutions, based at the Mass General Hospital with a mission is to catalyze the rapid development of innovative technologies.
Dr. Collins received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and an MS and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds over 20 US patents on new products and manufacturing processes.
Robert Halperin
Robert Halperin is a leading authority on building executive and management leadership and capabilities. Bob has more than twenty-five years of experience designing executive education programs for some of the world’s leading corporations. He headed executive education at Harvard Business School, at the MIT Sloan School of Management, at the Young Presidents Organization, and at Babson College.
Bob helps companies with strategic and market assessment of executive education business opportunities, design and delivery of leadership development programs, teaching and facilitation services, benchmarking and best practice assessments of corporate education programs, and design and management of forums and networks.
Bob is a frequent speaker on leadership development, organizational change, and information technology topics to executive and academic audiences in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. He currently teaches in Northeastern University’s Graduate Program in Leadership.
Mr. Halperin received an MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.A. in economics from Brandeis University, and is an Eisenhower Fellow.
Gerald Hillman
Gerald Hillman was formerly a Partner of McKinsey & Company and the founder of Hillman Capital.
At McKinsey, Mr. Hillman helped create the firm’s government practice and developed a strong background in industrial policy, corporate strategy and finance.
As an economist, he was a member of a team that assessed the competitiveness of U.S. industry, sector by sector, reporting to the Secretary of Commerce. He led a team responsible for revising the funding of the U.S. Farm Credit System (including the Federal Home Loan Bank, the Intermediate Credit Bank, and the Bank for Cooperatives). Later he also contributed to studies on U.S. productivity. He advised the Department of Commerce on the impact of various military and other government programs on the aerospace industry.
Mr. Hillman consulted at the Cabinet and sub-Cabinet level to governments in England, France, Sweden and Holland on industrial policy and subsidies to industry and trade. Industries he evaluated included oil and gas, mining, forestry, pulp and paper manufacturing, specialty chemicals, and steel-making. He defined policy for and planned the reorganization of the British Steel Corporation for the British Cabinet: at the time, this company was the largest employer in England. He later helped plan the reorganization of the steel industry in Belgium and Luxembourg: at the time, this industry represented 45 percent of the GDP of these countries.
Mr. Hillman has engaged in several national economic development projects. He was one of the thought leaders of the Bechtel team that designed the development of the Eastern Coast of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He also developed worldwide agricultural strategies for such companies as HJ Heinz and agricultural value-adding strategies for countries like Morocco and Ireland. In 2006, he worked on evaluating water resource technologies for private and public entities.
Mr. Hillman formed Hillman Capital Corporation, a merchant banking firm that provided financial advice to, and invested in, emerging high tech companies. He was U.S. Chairman and Chief Strategist for Berol Kemi, a Swedish specialty chemical company which in three years went from a history of loss-making to generating one of the highest returns on assets in Sweden: the company was sold and is now part of Akzo Nobel. Hillman Capital provided executive leadership to DASI Corporation, a company with advanced ultra-pasteurization technology. Hillman Capital helped take DASI private, after which the company was refinanced, grown through project financing and acquisitions, and sold in 1998. In 1999, Hillman Capital led a syndicate that acquired Cambridge Display Technology in a competitive UK public tender; the company was sold to Sumitomo in 2006. From 2001 to 2003, Mr. Hillman was a member of the Defense Policy Board, which advised the U.S. Secretary of Defense.
He became a member of a strategy committee for the Boeing Company, advising on its response to Airbus (regarding subsidies to the commercial aircraft industry), and on homeland security initiatives and programs related to protecting airplanes, air travel, and airports.
Mr. Hillman is currently on the Board of Directors of Universal Display Technology, a joint venture supported by the China Development Bank: this joint venture owns OLED Technology of Eindhoven, the Netherlands for which Mr. Hillman serves as Chief Executive Officer.
Both as an operating executive, a principal and as an investment banker, Mr. Hillman has engaged in a number of diverse national and international transactions, including but not limited to a wide range of commercial transactions, start-ups, joint ventures, acquisitions and mergers, asset sales, divestitures, private and public financings, reorganizations, recapitalizations and tender offers. He has engaged in negotiating terms for, and the re-packaging of, bank loans. He has worked in many countries, and in recent years has engaged in forming both high tech and essential industry joint ventures in China.
Mr. Hillman received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Harvard University in 1965. Harvard awarded him a Henry Russell Shaw Traveling Fellowship and, from 1965 to 1966, he traveled in Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, studying political and economic developments. He received a second Bachelor of Arts (and later a Masters) degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Balliol College, Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar from 1966 to 1968.
Michael Jaliman
Michael Jaliman assists clients with business strategy, organizational development and executive coaching. Michael has served as Senior Managing Director at Fujitsu Consulting and as the regional head of its financial services practice. At McKinsey & Company, he developed transformational leadership training and worked on corporate strategy. As Director of Strategic Planning at KPMG Asia Pacific, Michael developed strategy for building KPMG’s consulting practice in Asia and served as an adviser to business and government leaders. As Executive Vice President of Twenty First Century Venture Partners, Michael invested in and advised early stage technology companies.
Michael advised the major political parties in Taiwan, and organized and moderated that nation’s first election debate. He was a major party candidate for the United States Congress from New York. Michael has worked with several notable visionaries including Buckminster Fuller and Dr. Jonas Salk, and has provided policy advice to U.S. political and economic leaders during the recent near collapse of the financial sector.
Mr. Jaliman was awarded a B.A. with honors in economics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he was the President of the Student Government. He also has an MBA from Harvard Business School.
John Milton May
John Milton May is a Senior Adviser at True North Advisers. His expertise is in whole systems approaches to developing the mindsets, quality of thinking, systems and structures to achieve high performance through collaborative cross-functional teams.
During a distinguished career at DuPont, Mr. May had outstanding success in improving performance at four multi-product manufacturing plants where he was the plant manager. He was later an internal organizational consultant for manufacturing. He worked on the regeneration of the Nylon business globally. He also developed and implemented an integrated approach using safety, and other core qualities, core processes and core purposes as a means of improving business performance while simultaneous improving safety performance and the capacity of the organization to adapt to change. He worked with the CEO of Dupont and with his management team to develop frameworks for leadership. Earlier in his career he performed a range of roles in production, technical and maintenance functions at Dupont.
Mr. May has a BS in chemistry from Acadia University. He has studied extensively and worked with Charles Krone in using open systems approaches to build human and organizational capacity to run high performance organizations.
Gregory McBowman
Greg McBowman is a Senior Adviser in True North’s investment opportunities practice with over 30 years in entertainment and new media.
Greg is a renowned consultant in the entertainment arena. He has performed royalty audits at EMI, Universal, Warner, Univision and Sony Music. He is regularly called upon to prepare valuations of publishing catalogs and record masters as well as to represent clients in the sale of music assets. Additionally, he has provided consultation to attorneys in their negotiations of artists and publishing agreements and litigation support, having settled claims in excess of $7 million. Greg specializes in negotiating and administering joint venture agreements, label agreements, artists recording agreements, purchases of catalog master recordings, licensing agreements, pressing and distribution agreements.
Prior to his fifteen years as a consultant, Greg served as VP of Business Affairs and Business Administration at Sony Music. He also held the position of Senior Director of Royalties, overseeing the auditing of Sony Music artists in the US and more than fifty countries, including the Rolling Stones, Julio Iglesias, Mariah Carey, Michael Jackson and Billy Joel, among others. Greg began his career as an accountant at Price Waterhouse and joined CBS records in 1977, which was later purchased by Sony.
Mr. McBowman graduated from the Peter J. Tobin College of Business at St. John’s University.
Mike McGaughey
Mike McGaughey has over 30 years experience helping many of the world’s leading companies address their most critical strategic, marketing, business development, partnering and operational challenges, issues such as developing new strategies, entering new markets, organization restructuring, segmenting markets, customers, and alliance partners, managing strategic customers, crafting more effective value propositions, building organizational capability, and sales and marketing effectiveness.
Mike has broad industry, functional and geographic experience. He has been a senior executive with P&L management experience, and launched and built several professional services businesses in the U.S. and Asia. In prior roles he was Senior Vice President and Managing Director for Asia-Pacific Operations for Arthur D. Little, and Vice President, Southeast Asia & India, for A.T. Kearney, where Mike spent a decade working and living in Asia assisting Western multinationals, large Asian groups, and governments. He has also been a Senior Advisor for Vantage Partners, assisting Fortune 500 clients with their strategic partnering relationships, capabilities, and initiatives. Most recently Mike has been an angel investor and Director of Market Operations of BYNDL, Inc., a mobile payments and marketing start-up.
Mike has an MBA (honors) in Finance and International Business and a B.S. degree in Business Economics from Indiana University’s E.W. Kelley School of Business.
Susan Mitchell
Susan Mitchell has more than 25 years of experience in many aspects of Global Corporate Finance as an investment banker and corporate treasurer. She was a Managing Director at West LB in New York where she established the firm’s global mining practice, worked for ten years on project finance for mining companies at CIBC and was Treasurer of Cyprus Amax Minerals. She has been Director of Financial Risk Management at a Fortune 400 company and Director of Risk Solutions at Standard & Poors.
Susan has expertise in managing the risks of financial structures. She structured and closed numerous multicurrency cross-border transactions worth hundreds of million dollars, such as acquisitions, multi-sponsor project finance and corporate and financial restructurings, pricing in consideration of all strategic, regulatory, credit, market, financial, operating, and other risks. She also developed and implemented a complete Enterprise Risk Management program for an $8 billion global company. Susan has served on the Boards of McGill University and the Professional Risk Managers’ International Association (PRMIA).
She holds a B.A. in International Economics from McGill University and a Master of International Management degree from Thunderbird.
Nick Palmer
Nick Palmer is a Senior Adviser at True North. He brings over twenty years of strategy consulting experience to help clients plan, implement, and manage major organizational change and complex inter-firm collaboration. While he specializes in strategic alliances and joint ventures, his work includes pre- and post-merger planning and execution, and large-scale corporate transformation. He has served clients in a broad range of industries including pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, telecommunications, software, healthcare, consumer packaged goods, banking, chemicals and petroleum, airlines, high technology, and theme parks.
Prior to joining True North, Nick was a Principal at Vantage Partners and a Partner in Accenture’s Organization Strategy practice. He led the alliance-management consulting practice at Accenture from 1999 to 2001. He began his consulting career with McKinsey & Company in its Munich and Cleveland offices. Nick is a frequent speaker at conferences and has appeared on CNN, and been published and quoted in business publications including Forbes, CIO Magazine, Business 2.0 online, Cisco’s IQ Magazine, The Australian, and The Journal of Commerce.
Mr. Palmer has sat on the Global Board of Directors of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (A.S.A.P.) since 2000. He is a member of the Executive Committee and Finance & Administration Committee, and is Chairman of its Annual Alliance-Excellence Awards Committee. He graduated as a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School, and engaged in further study at Harvard as a Dean’s Doctoral Fellow focused on Business Economics and Industrial Organization. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Timothy Schantz
Timothy Schantz has more than 35 years of experience in finance and asset management. He was President of ING Capital, President of ING Furman Selz, Managing Director of Deutsche Bank (where he headed structured lending) and Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Genworth Financial, where he headed alternative investing.
Timothy is an expert in numerous areas of finance including: investment banking, commercial banking, wealth management, structured finance, asset management, and alternative assets. He has managed portfolios with up to $20 billion of assets. He is highly accomplished in corporate turnarounds, with strong skills in building trust and motivating organizations. He is highly skilled at formulating and implementing effective investment and financial strategies. He has extensive overseas experience. Mr. Schantz is a Director and Chairman of the Capital Campaign for the Museum of American Finance.
Mr. Schantz earned a B.A. in European History at Brown University.
Allan Scherr
Allan Scherr is a Senior Adviser at True North.
Allan was Senior VP, Software Engineering at EMC Corporation and responsible for the development of storage management products. During a distinguished career at IBM he was an IBM fellow and Vice President. He led a series of major projects to create what is today the core of IBM’s large systems software. He was the lead designer and development manager for MVS, IBM’s main frame operating system, managing thousands of developers in twelve different locations. Allan also managed key products in networking, distributed processing, computer applications, hardware development, and business automation tools. He served as a Vice President in application software development. He was named an IBM Fellow in recognition of world-class technical achievements in operating Systems, distributed processing, and data communications. Alan participated in the creation of cache memory. He is a recognized expert in software design, parallel, multi-site engineering management, and computer system performance. He is an expert in project management techniques and the automation of business processes. He co-invented techniques to improve team productivity by a factor of 2.5. He has consistently demonstrated the ability to bring projects in on time and on budget.
Mr. Scherr developed, with Harvard Business School Professor Michael Jensen, a transformational leadership program taught at the University of Rochester business school. He holds numerous patents.
Mr. Scherr earned a B.S and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from M.I.T. His thesis won the prestigious ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award.
Herma Schmitz
Herma Schmitz is a Senior Adviser at True North. She has helped executives and management teams of multinational companies and Wall Street firms produce unprecedented business results for more than 20 years. She is a dynamic and passionate consultant, whose commitment to making a difference in every aspect of her clients lives inspires them and has them excel beyond their expectations.
Herma has worked with organizations in The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, the U.K., Eastern Europe, South Africa and the U.S. Her clients include JPMorgan Chase, Marsh, Duff & Phelps and Deutsche Bank. Her work has been featured in a recent WSJ Bestseller, The Three Laws of Performance. Herma was previously an executive in the commercial real estate and shipping industries. Herma was educated in Germany where she earned an MBA.
Rajan Srikanth
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Ed Steinberg
Ed Steinberg is a Senior Adviser in True North’s investment opportunities practice who uses his unparalleled experience to find entertainment and new media opportunities.
Ed is a pioneering music video producer and director with over 30 years of experience in the entertainment industry. He founded RockAmerica, the first company to offer music videos on a subscription basis before MTV. He sold his company to the Schottenstein organization. Ed made Madonna’s first music video in 1982. He has produced and directed over 100 music videos and live concerts for artists such as U2, LeAnn Rimes, Gipsy Kings, Kelis, Donna Summer, Queen Latifah, Cheap Trick, Britney Spears, Yello, Eve, Alicia Keys, Won-G, Gizille and Paris Hilton. Ed has produced TV programs for MTV, PBS and Bravo. His videos are in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum. Ed is a Voting Member of The Recording Academy, which selects the GRAMMY Awards.
Mr. Steinberg completed programs in art, film and video programs at the British Film Institute, the School of Visual Arts, and Hampshire College. He holds a BA in Political Science and Art from Stony Brook University.
Derek Stevens
Derek Stevens has more than twenty-five years experience in operational performance, technology delivery, and project management for major corporations across a range of industries. He was formally a Director with Fujitsu Consulting and a consultant with Arthur Andersen Business Consulting. Derek’s expertise includes IT Portfolio Management, IT Governance and PMO Program/Project Management, Earned Value Management, Strategy, Organizational Change, Business Process Reengineering, Enterprise Architecture, Customer Relationship Management Systems Development Lifecycle Methods, and Activity Based Costing.
Mr. Stevens is a Senior Fellow at the Performance Institute. He co-authored The Relationship Based Enterprise: Powering Business Success through Customer Relationship Management, McGraw Hill, 2001. Derek holds Bachelor degrees in Psychology and Computer Science from Concordia University in Montreal.
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Susan Weber
Susan Weber specializes in serving the financial services industry and providing corporate financial advisory services. She has spent more than 25 years in the financial services industry. Prior experience includes Goldman Sachs (in corporate finance), McKinsey & Co., and Sumitomo Bank, where she was head of mergers and acquisitions.
Susan has written for publications in the United States and Australia, including The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Slate, The Conference Board Review, Institutional Investor, The Daily Deal, and the Australian Financial Review.
Susan is a graduate of Harvard College and the Harvard Business School.