Inactive

Leo Hopf, the founder and CEO of Teamhopf, works with senior executive teams to bring clarity and alignment to their most pressing strategic issues. As an independent consultant, he also coaches, guides, and trains his clients’ personnel at all levels to improve their decision making and strategic thinking capabilities. He teaches at Stanford University and at the Carlson School at the University of Minnesota where he has been named a Fellow of Executive Education.

He was the Managing Director of Strategic Decisions Group’s (SDG’s) 70-person home office in Menlo Park, CA, and served on the SDG Executive Committee. SDG, a profitable and growing management consulting firm, has been dedicated for over three decades to helping companies create superior shareholder return and achieve lasting change.

Leo has worked in a variety of business sectors from telecommunications, to mining, engineering and construction, and health care. He has led major consulting engagements in Indonesia, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and Kuwait. He has served on the Board of Directors and the Board of Advisors for numerous startups and has delivered the keynote address at a conference for raising funds for new ventures.

Leo Hopf earned a Masters of Business Administration degree with highest distinction from the Amos Tuck School, and has B.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering and in Metallurgical Engineering from the University of Minnesota. He received the Walter Jacobs Prize for inspiring confidence and enthusiasm amongst his peers at Tuck.

His book, Renovate Your Business, written with William Welter, was published by Adams Media.

Michael Mankins graduated from the University of Kentucky with a degree in economics and earned an MBA from The Wharton School, where he graduated with Highest Distinction. Michael spent the first 20 years of his consulting career with Marakon Associates and then moved to Bain Consulting where he is a partner in the™ San Francisco office. Throughout his career, he has advised business leaders on strategic and organizational initiatives to drive higher levels of performance and long-term shareholder value.  In 2006, Michael was named by Consulting magazine as one of the 25 most influential consultants worldwide.

Michael is a published and spoken authority on what it takes to turn great strategy into great performance. He is coauthor of Decide and Deliver: Five Steps to Breakthrough Performance in Your Organization published by Harvard Business Press and a co-author of The Value Imperative: Managing for Superior Shareholder Returns and is quoted in such publications as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Financial Times, the Journal of Business Strategy, Directors & Boards, and Strategy & Leadership. He has been a featured speaker at Harvard Business Review’s HR Strategy Conference, Harvard Business Review Latin America’s Strategy and Leadership Conference, Corporate Board Member€™s’ Boardroom Summit, BusinessWeek’s CFO Forum, the Association for Strategic Planning’s Annual Convention, and others.

 

In 2002, National Journal’s Hotline asked George Stephanopoulos, “Who is the most important person in Washington nobody has ever heard of?” He replied, “€œMichael Sean Winters.” At the time, Michael Sean was the manager of Kramerbooks and Afterwords Cafe, a Washington institution at the heart of the capital’s political and literary culture, where he worked for 16 years.

Michael Winters writes the daily political blog for America and is the political columnist for The Catholic World. His writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, The New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, Slate.com, City Paper, and I Tempi. In 2002, during the clergy sexual abuse scandal, he served as an expert commentator for ABC News and was interviewed on-air by Peter Jennings for an ABC News special. In late 2003, he went to work as an assistant speech writer on the presidential campaign of General Wesley K. Clark (ret.) in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Commenting upon Left at the Altar, New Yorker editor Hendrick Hertzberg wrote: “The opening decade of the twenty-first century has been marked by a stormy encounter—sometimes a confluence, sometimes a collision—between religion and politics. Michael Sean Winters, who is as at home in the library of a theological seminary as he is in the boiler room of a political campaign, is well positioned to navigate the storm. Few observers are as steeped as he is in the theory and practice of politics in both the Roman Catholic Church and the United States of America, and few are as passionately engaged in seeking a redemptive and humane common ground.”

Michael Sean Winters lives in Hampton, Connecticut and Riverdale, Maryland.

Gretchen Ritter is Harold Tanner Dean of Arts and Sciences and professor of government. A third-generation Cornellian, she is the College’s first female dean. She previously served as vice provost and professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin. She has also taught at MIT, Princeton and Harvard.Dean Ritter received her B.A. in government from Cornell and a Ph.D. in political science from MIT.

Her research focuses on the history of women’s Constitutional rights and democracy and citizenship in American politics.  She is the recipient of several fellowships and awards, including a National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship, the Radcliffe Research Partnership Award, a Liberal Arts Fellowship at Harvard Law School and an Outstanding Administrators Award from the Academic Counselors Association.

She is the author of The Constitution as Social Design, published by Stanford University Press.  Professor Ritter’s earlier work focused particularly on economic justice movements in the US and her first book, Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America was published by Cambridge University Press.