CEOVision Association of Quebec Technologies
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  REGISTRATION      "SGF-CEO of the Year"    FAQs    Past Events    Sports Program    Tremblant       February 19-21, 2009
 
Past Editions
2002
 
Speakers 2002
 

Debra A. Benton, Author, & Executive Coach, Benton Management Resources Inc.
Leading in Difficult Times

Leadership is difficult enough during good times much less during difficult ones.  So when the going gets tough, the tough get creative.  Creative in how they think, act, and relate to build followership and create other leaders.
Debra Benton has consulted with and spoken in front of hundreds of the most successful executives this generation has seen come into power. Her clientele list spans over seventeen countries and includes companies such as NASA, Pepsi, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Nabisco. She is an internationally acclaimed keynote speaker, a highly recognized one-on-one executive consultant and a best-selling author

Debra's work has been written about in Time magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, as well as featured on CNN, Good Morning America, The Today Show, and CBS News with Diane Sawyer. Debra has coached people to: meet and work with Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton; job interview with Donald Trump; present at the Academy Awards; testify before Congressional committee meetings and Senate hearings; give expert witness testimony in court; successfully vie for positions inside and outside of their company; and build successful professional practices.  
 

Rich Mayhew, CEO, Smart Solutions, San Diego, CA
Leadership Style:  Use your Style to Successfully Implement your Vision

Leadership style, intentionally applied, can make the difference between a high-performing group of employees and an average performing group.  Using an insightful self-assessment questionnaire Rich will help you identify your preferred leadership style.  He will then help you figure out how to use your style to align, motivate and inspire your employees around your vision and company values.  In addition you will gain information on how your style changes when things are not going well.

Rich Mayhew is the founder and C.E.O. of Smart Solutions, Inc., a leadership and team development consulting company. As an organizational consultant he specializes in coaching CEOs, building executive teams, developing leadership skills and helping organizations align their mission, vision, values and culture.
He has worked with many Fortune 500 companies both in the US and around the globe such as The Walt Disney Company, British Petroleum, Bank of America and Dow Corning.  He is also adjunct faculty with the Center for Creative Leadership and the University of California.
He has spent 15 years as a leader in an international bank, and 20 years as an organizational development practitioner.
 

Robert P. Miles  Author
The Warren Buffett CEO; Secrets of the Berkshire Hathaway Managers

 The speaker will reveal the investment and management strategies of the Berkshire Hathaway all-star management team. Much has been written about Warren Buffett and his investment philosophy; little has been made public about the inside management of Berkshire Hathaway. With a market cap exceeding 100 billion, Berkshire Hathaway has a market value surpassing those of IBM, Dell, Home Depot, AT&T, Disney, Ford, Gillette, American Express, and GM. Drawing on his personal experiences as well as those of Berkshire's Chief Executives, Officers, and Directors interviewed for his book, Berkshire insider Robert P. Miles provides a unique look at the Berkshire Hathaway culture and its management principles.

Author: 101 Reasons To Own the World’s Greatest Investment: Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway [Wiley] [2001] and The Warren Buffett CEO: Secrets From the Berkshire Hathaway Managers [Wiley] [2001] Books being translated into Japanese and Korean.
Professional Speaker. Invited to speak at the Smithsonian in Washington DC, The Toronto Investment Club.
Graduate of The University of Michigan Business School.
Featured in major media including PBS Nightly Business Report, CNN, New York Times, Investors Business Daily and USA Today.
Robert D. Austin, Professor, Harvard Business School, Technology and Operations Management Faculty
HMS Thetis and Apollo XIII

 Explores the management of technical disasters in which time plays a central role. Uses the experience of HMS Thetis and Apollo 13 to look at both successful and unsuccessful approaches...

Robert D. Austin joined the Harvard Business School faculty in 1997 and currently teaches the first year course in Technology and Operations Management.  During a recent leave of absence (2000-2001), he served as a senio executive for a new business being incubated by a leading technology company. Before joining to Harvard, Professor Austin was a technology implementation manager for the Ford Motor Company's European and Emerging Market operations.  During ten years with Ford, he was involeved in development, implementation, and aupport of IT application.

Professor  Austin earned his Ph.D  in Management and Decision Sciences from Carnegie Mellon University, where his dissertation received the Herbert A. simon Award and was a finalist in the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management's National Dissertation competition.  He holds an M.S. in Industrial Engineering from Northwestern University and bachelors degrees in Engineering and English Literature from Swarthmore College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. Professor Austin's research focuses on information technology management, and more generally on management of knowledge intensive activities.  He has written on these subjects in two books, Creating Business Advantage in the Information Age  (co-authored with Lynda Applegate and Warren McFarlan), and Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, as well as in academic and trade journals

 

Ian Patrick Sobieski, Ph.D.,  Managing Director, Band of Angels,  San Francisco , CA
Building Value not Valuation

 The boom-bust cycle recently experience in the Silicon Valley was based in part upon entrepreneur's focus on managing toward the increasing market value of their company. Those companies that survived the bust were those that practiced the contrarian principal of focussing on value creation, capital efficiency, and sustainibility. Those are principals that will work today and tomorrow.
Ian Sobieski is a founder and managing director of the Band of Angels Fund, L.P.; he has been with the Band of Angels since 1997. Prior to joining the Band, Ian served in technical and business roles at a variety of startups in the electronic design, enterprise software, and internet spaces. Ian serves on the Board of Directors of three privately held companies and is an active advisor to several others. He has a Ph.D. in Aeronautics from Stanford University, a B.A. degree in Philosophy from Virginia Tech, and is the author of several technical publications

 

Martin S. Gerstel, Co-Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (Retired), ALZA Corporation, Paolo Alto, CA
Leadership Through Strategic Changes: a Case History  Co-Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (Retired) ALZA Corporation, Palo Alto, California

 The development of the California based pharmaceutical company, ALZA Corporation, from a concept to a substantial player in the world-wide pharmaceutical industry will be discussed with a special focus on critical time points when internal and external events required significant reassessment of it’s focus and strategies. By the mid-1990’s, ALZA was a very profitable company listed on the New York Stock Exchange with a multi-billion dollar market value. In addition, the Company’s technologies and the products derived from them were well recognized throughout the world as adding significant value to many areas of health-care. However, the more than two decades pathway from start-up to success required a number of critical opportunity reassessments and resulting corporate twists and turns as ALZA attempted to build its infrastructure and   technology base, develop its initial products, and of course, continue to obtain the substantial resources necessary to survive.
Martin Gerstel participated in the founding of ALZA Corporation in 1968, a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical company based on controlled drug delivery.  Initially Chief Financial Officer, Martin subsequently held a series of management positions, retiring as Co-Chairman and Chief Executive Officer in 1993 when he relocated to Israel.

Martin is currently Chairman of Compugen, Ltd, Co-Founder/Co-Chairman of Itamar Medical, a Director of Teva Pharmaceuticals, Symyx Technologies, Burrill & Company, and the U.S. Foundation for the National Medals of Science and Technology, a member of the Board of Governors and the Executive Committee of the Weizmann Institute of Science, and an Advisor to the Board of the Israel-U.S. Binational Industrial Research and Development (“BIRD”) Foundation

Martin is a graduate of Yale University (B.Sc-1964) and the Stanford Graduate School of Business (MBA-1968).

Jehane Noujaim, President, Noujaim Films Inc. New York, NY
The Making of Startup.com
As an ailing economy reduces high-flying Internet companies around the country to bankruptcy, acclaimed documentary team Chris Hegedus, D A Pennebaker and newcomer Jehane Noujaim take a behind-the-scenes look at the volatile start-up phenomenon, chronicling the turbulent development of govWorks.com, an award-winning Internet site that facilitates interaction between local government, citizens and businesses.  Turning a familiar headline story into a high-pressure personal odyssey, Startup.com follows the trials of partners Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman, best friends since childhood, as they progress from being rookies with only a business plan to assuming the leadership of a nationally recognized Internet company struggling to survive an inhospitable economy.
At 25, Jehane Noujaim left her producing job at MTV to create Noujaim Films.  Her first project was to produce and direct STARTUP.COM. Noujaim began as a photographer and filmmaker in Cairo, Egypt, where she grew up. She moved to Boston in 1990, where she attended Harvard University and graduated magna cum laude in Visual Arts and Philosophy. In 1996, Noujaim was awarded the Gardiner fellowship (which paid for the camera used to film STARTUP.COM). She has since worked in both the Middle East and the U.S. as a filmmaker and photographer, directing several short documentaries, most recently Mokattam, an Arabic film about an Egyptian garbage collecting village. Back in the U.S., she worked as a producer, a director and a cinematographer.  Since teaming with Pennebaker Hegedus Films in 1999, she has worked on  Only The Strong Survive (an upcoming film from Miramax) and Down From the Mountain, produced by the Coen brothers. STARTUP.COM is her debut feature film.

 
 
CEO Vision is an Association of Quebec Technologies' initiative. AQT is Quebec's most important technology
association. Its mission is to contribute to the prosperity of the technology industry.
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