CEO Blogs – Contributors

CEO Blogging is a centre within Rewiring Business. In this centre, we look to bring together some of the world’s leading Chief Executive Officers and Chairpersons to share their insights into the business world. Our Contributors for this centre include:

Nadine B. Hack

Nadine B. Hack is CEO and President of beCause Global Consulting and Executive-in-Residence at IMD, an internationally renowned Business School. Hack was recently chosen as one of the 100 Top Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behavior. One of the world’s most influential business leaders, Hack’s reputation affords her the respect of some of the world’s most famous global executives and political leaders.

She has provided innovative guidance to, imparted tactical direction for and created crucial partnerships with institutions from multiple sectors for decades. Promoting good deeds as great investments, her trademark process mobilizing Highly Relational Engagement (HRE™) of internal and external stakeholders is designed to advance organizations’ missions and values.

Hack has worked on HRE™ projects with national and multi-national corporations throughout the world including Coca-Cola, Chevron Texaco, Deutsche Telecom, AOL/Time Warner, Aprica Kassai Industries, Fujitsu Siemens, Levi Straus & Company, Reebok International, and Volkswagen; global foundations including Bill and Melinda Gates, Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, OSI and MacArthur; and International Development Agencies including USAID and GTZ. She has served on official delegations and fact-finding missions globally, with a particular emphasis on southern Africa.

Her service on for- and not-for-profit governance boards includes World Policy Institute, Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation (Chair through 2005), Africa-America Institute (Vice Chair through 2009), Synergos Institute (Executive Committee through 2009), Xechem International Inc., Amnesty International USA, and United Nations Association of New York. She’s been a keynote speaker at myriad conferences and had numerous articles written about or published by her including in The New York Times, Boston Globe, USA Today and UN Chronicle.

Her specialties include Strategic Action Planning, Creative problem Solving, Policy Analysis and Politically Sensitive Negotiations. Her work at IMD is focussed around Leadership and Highly Relational Engagement of Internal and External Stakeholders. She is a graduate of Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.

Visit Nadine’s Latest Blog: Here

Chris Bones

Chris Bones is one of the UK’s most influential thinkers in People and Organisation Strategy.

In a 30 year career he has worked in Energy, Retailing, FMCG and Business Education holding down senior leadership positions in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. He led the integration of the UK’s first pub real estate venture following the Courage/Grand Met ‘pubs for breweries’ swap in the early 1990s. He led the integration of Diageo’s European business following the Guinness/GrandMet merger from 1997-1999 and did the same for Cadbury’s global business following the acquisition of Adams Inc. in 2003/4 which created the world’s largest confectionery company. In 2004 he was appointed the first non-academic Principal of Henley Management College and led its successful merger with the University of Reading becoming Dean of Henley Business School: one of the biggest in Europe with a world top 20 MBA programme. He is now Dean Emeritus at Henley, Professor of Creativity and Leadership at Manchester Business School and a Visiting Professor at the University of Aberdeen.

Chris is an organisation and change strategist whose expertise has consistently seen him ranked by his peers as one of the most influential thinkers of his generation. He has written extensively for professional journals and for major newspapers such as the Financial Times, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Economist. He published his first book, ‘The Self-Reliant Manager’ in 1994 and was one of only three international writers to be asked to contribute forewords to the republished works of Peter Drucker. He wrote the foreword to ‘Innovation & Entrepreneurship’. His latest book, ‘The Cult of the Leader’ has been applauded by practitioners and reviewers alike and has attracted international media attention as it addresses the reasons behind the malaise in leadership over the last 30 years and what could be done by business and policy makers alike to restore trust in business.

Chris’s work in organisations over the past 30 years has convinced him that at the heart of poor and underperformance in all three sectors of the economy are organisations that have lost the connection with those they are there to serve, be they customers, taxpayers or donors. He is so passionate about this that he has teamed up with entrepreneur and sales strategist, James Hammersley, to launch a new business that rebuilds performance through connecting organisations with their customers using the power of online technology. Hammersley & Bones is a unique proposition that has attracted a great deal of attention from major organisations both commercial and non-profit.

Chris has advised both this and the last government on key issues such as mergers and acquisitions policy, fair pay (he was an expert advisor to the Hutton Commission on Fair Pay in the Public Sector) and engagement (he contributed to the MacLeod Report). He was a member of the Budd Commission on Impartiality of business coverage on the BBC and Chaired the Reform Commission of the Liberal Democrat Party. He is a non-executive director of The Working Manager Ltd, an independent director of the Agricultural and Horticultural Development Board (where he chairs the audit committee) and a trustee of the Terrance Higgins Trust. He is the global Chair of the Supervisory Board of AIESEC International: the world’s largest student-run organization.

Chris is married with two children at University. He was educated at Dulwich College and Aberdeen University and attended Manchester Business School’s part-time MBA Programme in the late 1980s. He is listed in Who’s Who, is a fellow of the CIPD a fellow of the RSA and a Companion of the CMI.

A truly inspiring leader, you can read his articles here

Joi Ito

Joichi Ito is the Director of the MIT Media Lab. He is also is General Manager of Neoteny Labs, an startup fund and the Chairman of Creative Commons, co-founder and board member of Digital Garage (JSD:4819), and on the boards of CCC (TYO:4756) and Tucows (AMEX:TCX). He is a Sr. Visiting Researcher of Keio Research Institute and the Internet & Society Lab  at Shonan Fujisawa Campus in Japan and an adjunct professor at the Keio Graduate School of Media Design. He is an affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He is on board of non-profit organizations including The Mozilla Foundation, WITNESS and Global Voices. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and was an early stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Wikia, Flickr, Dopplr, Last.fm, Rupture, Kongregate, Kickstarter and other Internet companies. He is an adviser to Twitter, Zynga and DeNA.

He maintains a weblog where he regularly shares his thoughts with the online community. He is the Guild Custodian of the World of Warcraft guild, We Know. He is a PADI Divemaster, an Emergency First Responder instructor and a Divers Alert Network instructor.

Ito was listed by Time Magazine as a member of the “Cyber-Elite” in 1997. Ito was listed as one of the 50 “Stars of Asia” by BusinessWeek and commended by the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications in 2000. He was selected by the World Economic Forum in 2001 as one of the “Global Leaders for Tomorrow”, chosen by Newsweek as a member of the “Leaders of The Pack” in 2005, and listed by Vanity Fair as a member of “The Next Establishment” in 2007. Ito was also named by Businessweek as one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web in 2008.

Joi is a contributor to the Rewiring Business CEO Blogging Centre on various business related topics and his page can be found here.

Valerie Keller

An entrepreneur, consultant and public policy advocate, Valerie Keller’s work focuses on bridging sectors and industries. As CEO of a social enterprise she piloted models for economic development in impoverished regions along the U.S. Gulf Coast, raised $100M USD and established healthcare facilities and real estate developments for urban revitalization. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina she co-founded two coalitions focused on federal and state systemic reform in housing and healthcare to stimulate public-private partnerships. She has provided expert testimony before U.S. Senate and House Committees and has served on more than a dozen advisory boards and governmental task forces.

Valerie is an Associate Fellow of University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School and is founder and CEO of Veritas, a boutique advisory working in the Americas and Europe to scale companies with social & environmental impact. She holds an MBA with Distinction from the University of Oxford and is a recipient of various private and public sector awards including JP Morgan Chase 20 Under 40, Change Agent Network’s Humanitarian of the Year award and Women Who Mean Business.

Are you a leading CEO or Chairman? – Would you like to join our CEO Blogging Centre? – please email us to begin your blogging journey