James is a founding member and board chair at Directors Academy, a national not-for-profit organization with the mission of identifying, developing and advancing the next generation of diverse board members and leaders. Previously, he was Chairman, President, and CEO of Jamba Juice, which he transformed from a smoothie shop to a leading global, healthy active lifestyle brand. Prior to joining Jamba Juice, he held senior executive roles at Safeway Stores, the Gillette Company, Nestle-Purina, and Coca-Cola. James currently serves on the boards of leading brands including The Honest Company, Affirm, Medallia, Simply Good Foods, Schnuck Markets, and Bay Club. James is a passionate champion for diversity and inclusion and has been recognized with numerous awards including the American Heart Association Corporate Citizen Award (2014) and Junior Achievement’s Northern California Lifetime Achievement Award (2013). In 2010 the San Francisco Business Times named Mr. White as the Bay Area’s Most Admired CEO.

Erica Dhawan is the Founder & CEO of Contential and co-author of "Get Big Things Done." She is on a mission to advise organizations and leaders to accelerate the connectedness of your workforce, become masters of connectional intelligence, “spar” in order to reach your goals more quickly, and prepare your global workforce for the future. Through Dhawan's keynote speeches and interactive presentations, she’ll do just that.

Rick Atkinson is a best-selling author, Pulitzer Prize and George Polk Award winner, and Washington Post journalist. He is the author of the Liberation Trilogy, a history of Europe in World War II, as well as the highly-anticipated 2019 Revolution Trilogy. He is also the author of The Long Gray Line, Crusade, and In the Company of Soldiers. With incredible depth of knowledge and recall for facts and figures, Atkinson shares vivid stories about what military history (both the good and the bad) teaches us about leadership from the generals that shaped history.

Future-of-work strategist Heather E. McGowan helps leaders prepare their people and organizations for the post pandemic world. As a keynote speaker, Heather gives lucidity to complex topics through her research rich, graphic frameworks, and powerful metaphors. In 2017, LinkedIn ranked her as its #1 global voice for education and in 2020 McGowan was listed as one of the Top 50 Female Futurists in Forbes. NYT columnist Thomas Friedman describes her as “the oasis” when it comes to insights into the future of work. McGowan is the coauthor of The Adaptation Advantage (April 2020) and the Empathy Advantage (March 2023).

Dedicated to creating the conscious workplace for tomorrow, Virginia “Ginny” Clarke is a seasoned executive recruiter who has advised at the highest levels of corporate America for decades. A proven expert in driving diverse leadership, she is the former director of executive recruiting at Google, where she led the company’s diversity, non-tech recruiting, and leadership internal mobility teams – finding and hiring senior leaders across the company. She also built a scaled internal mobility program for Google’s senior leaders and designed much of the infrastructure that supports their executive recruiting function today. In speeches, Clarke draws on her unparalleled experience assessing thousands of executives inside corporate C-Suites and boardrooms to bring a unique, holistic five-dimensional approach to true leadership that is essential now more than ever. She delivers “no-holds-barred” discussions on the root causes that lead to a lack of diversity in organizations, and provides the integrated solutions that anyone can use to affect change.

Renowned psychology expert and Stanford University professor Michele Gelfand is one of the leading researchers and writers on culture and the impact of culture on behavior. Gelfand uses field, experimental, computational and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture and its multilevel consequences for human groups. Her work has been cited over 50,000 times and has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, National Public Radio, Voice of America, Fox News, NBC News, ABC News, and The Economist, among other outlets. Most recently, she is the author of "Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World."

Part journalist, part historian, and all shrewd political observer, Ronald (Ron) Brownstein explains the complexities of American politics with lucid precision. As a CNN Senior Political Analyst, Senior Editor for the Atlantic, and Contributing Editor for National Journal, he produces sharp analysis on politics, policy, the electorate, media, healthcare, energy, the press' impact on Americans, and the range of issues informed by his strong sense of American political and national history. Brownstein provides an insider’s look into politics and the media and has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is also the author of seven best-selling books, and his articles on politics, public policy, and culture have appeared in myriad of major publications and on many broadcast news outlets.

Regarded as the “CEO-Maker,” “DEI Professor,” and the “Cubicle to Corner Office Empress,” Dethra Giles is a workplace and career optimizer who advises organizations and individuals on how to chart their unique paths to success. She is a four-time TEDx speaker who has been named a “Top 100 HR Influencer” by Engagedly, and was selected by HR Gazette’s “HRchat” podcast as one of the “Top 22 Most Influential Figures in HR.” With clients including Kaiser Permanente, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), The Army Corp of Engineers, Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the Salvation Army, Giles shares a unique blend of advanced education and industry experience that has been described as “university-tested and industry-approved,” and can be implemented by organizations of any size, and across industries.

A passionate advocate for a more human way of working, Melissa Swift is a seasoned HR thought leader and consultant who serves as VP of workforce and organizational change acceleration at Capgemini Invent. Her work helping clients power their workforces for more innovative, higher-performing futures spans across industries and geographies and tackles issues ranging from attracting and retaining top talent to reshaping organizations for greater nimbleness and building futuristic capabilities among today’s employees. She leverages thoughtful data analytics, a humanist view, and a healthy dose of pragmatism to create extraordinary outcomes for organizations. She is the author of the book Work Here Now: Think Like a Human and Build a Powerhouse Workplace, which explores practical strategies to get to a more human future of work. Her research has been published in Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal, and her insights have been quoted in Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Economist, Axios, and more. She has been featured as one of Twitter’s “20 Digital Transformation Leaders to Follow” and named a “Top Influencer on the Future of Work” by Onalytica.

In an eminent career dedicated to public service and built on fighting “impossible” battles, Doug Jones has often been the voice for those who did not have one. He turned the tide in his home state of Alabama when, in 2017, he became the first Democrat from the state to win a U.S. Senate seat in 25 years — making national headlines and shocking the establishment in the process. While on Capitol Hill, he solidified his reputation as a legislative force and consensus builder who played a key role in passing more than two dozen bipartisan bills into law in just three years. During his tenure, he was a member of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee; the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and the Committee on Aging. He also served on the Homeland Security Committee for one year prior to joining the Armed Services Committee. Jones is widely respected for his commitment to common-sense “kitchen table” politics that seeks to tackle the toughest issues of the day and drive America forward.

A globally recognized leader in the field of future of work, Kelly Monahan is the mind behind some of the world’s leading companies’ efforts to bring the workplace of the future into the present. As the Managing Director of Upwork’s Future of Work Research Institute, Monahan is the architect of first-of-their-kind research programs — the findings of which are used to inspire workplace transformation at the world's top organizations and help them radically shift how they think and operate in order to unlock new avenues to success for their talent and business. 

Ashley D. Farmer is a well-known historian as well as an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. As a contributor to The Washington Post, The Independent, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Public Books, she is well-versed in making historical issues and concepts accessible to the general public.