Leading your Company in Challenging Times
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John Roberts has been Executive Director of MIT Corporate Relations (Interim) since February 2022. He obtained his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at MIT and returned to the university after a 20-year career in the pharmaceutical industry, joining the MIT Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) in 2013. Prior to his return, John worked at small, medium, and large companies, holding positions that allowed him to exploit his passions in synthetic chemistry, project leadership, and alliance management while growing his responsibilities for managing others, ultimately as a department head. As a program director at MIT, John built a portfolio of ILP member companies, mostly in the pharmaceutical industry and headquartered in Japan, connecting them to engagement opportunities in the MIT community. Soon after returning to MIT, John began to lead a group of program directors with a combined portfolio of 60-80 global companies. In his current role, John oversees MIT Corporate Relations which houses ILP and MIT Startup Exchange.
Program Director, MIT Industrial Liaison Program
Yuri Ramos brings 20 years of international experience, having worked with Information Technology for multinational companies in his native Brazil, throughout South America and in the United States. Before MIT, Yuri was with Santander Bank N.A., where he first worked as a Sr. Manager for online and mobile initiatives, and then as Chief of Staff for the CIO of Digital Channels.
Prior to Santander, Yuri was the co-founder and CEO of 2 startups in the EdTech space. In both endeavors he was responsible for strategy, business development and operations. Before this entrepreneurial period, Yuri held positions at Universo Online – Brazil’s largest Internet portal - as Director of Operations and Senior Manager; at ACISION as Engineering Manager (Latin America Operations) and Senior Project Manager; and at Nortel Networks as Project Manager.
Yuri earned his Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics at the University of Brasilia, and his MBA at MIT where he was a Sloan Fellow.
Deborah Lucas is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Director of the MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy.
Lucas's current research lies at the intersection of finance and policy, with a focus on economically meaningful cost measurement and assessment of government financial activities. Some current projects include measuring the capital subsidies to state-owned enterprises, evaluating the international fiscal and macroeconomic implications of Covid19 credit support programs, creating a world atlas of government financial institutions, and analyzing reverse mortgages.
Lucas is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Term Professor at the PBC School of Finance at Tsinghua University, and a member of the Shadow Open Market Committee. She serves on advisory boards for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Urban Institute, on the editorial board of the Annual Review of Financial Economics, and as an associate editor for the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. She is a board member of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and consultant for the OECD and the Congressional Budget Office. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Public Administration and the National Academy of Social Insurance.
Previous appointments include chief economist, and subsequently assistant and associate director at the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, member of the Social Security Technical Advisory Panel, senior staff economist for U.S. Council of Economic Advisers, Professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and coeditor of the JMCB. An expert on federal credit programs, she has testified before the U.S. Congress on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, student loans, and strategically important financial institutions.
Lucas received her BA, MA, and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.
Starting during the 2007 financial crisis and intensifying with the COVID-19 pandemic, monetary, fiscal, and regulatory policymakers around the world have rewritten and vastly expanded their policy playbooks. Those changes have fundamentally altered the mechanisms by which economic policies affect the markets and the macroeconomy, and the prospects for entrepreneurial firms. New narratives are essential for helping business leaders to think more clearly about how those policy changes will create new opportunities, but also how they give rise to new risks and challenges. Drawing on Prof. Lucas’s research on these issues, in this session we will discuss:
John Carrier is a senior lecturer in the System Dynamics Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Managing Director of 532 Partners. His expertise is in shaping the dynamics of operating environments to improve productivity, quality, safety, and morale simultaneously. He has helped companies save hundreds of millions of dollars by helping them find and eradicate the hidden systems lurking inside every operation. His current focus is to help prepare companies to compete in the new environment of Industry 4.0.
He has educated over five hundred top-level leaders in the MIT Sloan Executive Education program in Oil & Gas, petrochemicals, mining, and healthcare. When not teaching, he spends most of his time in the operating environment, working directly with the front line to deliver measurable results in less than sixty days.
Dr. Carrier holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan, a Ph.D. in Control Systems from MIT, and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
In any business cycle, some companies emerge from the crisis far stronger than their peers. Based on over 70 years of MIT research, the answer is astonishingly simple: Winning organizations have a superior understanding of their own internal dynamic capabilities.
In this presentation, we will provide a simple yet rigorous MIT-based framework for assessing the current resiliency of your organization and identifying the sequence of steps your organization needs to take in order to rapidly re-adjust its trajectory through the current crisis. In particular, we will:
Rama Ramakrishnan is a Professor of the Practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
His research and teaching interests center on the application of data science and machine learning techniques to problems in industry and in the creation of products and services made intelligent by the algorithmic use of data.
Prior to joining MIT Sloan, Rama was a data science entrepreneur and tech executive for over 20 years. He has founded or been a senior executive in four software companies that have exited to technology titans: Oracle, Salesforce, and Demandware. He is active in the startup ecosystem as an advisor, angel investor, and board member.
Most recently, Rama was senior vice president at Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) and chief data scientist for Salesforce Commerce Cloud. In this role, he led Salesforce Einstein for Commerce—the analytics/machine-learning platform that powers Salesforce Commerce Cloud—and was responsible for product management, engineering, data science, and cloud production operations. The Einstein platform uses analytics techniques to predict and influence the shopping behavior of hundreds of millions of unique shoppers monthly.
The path that led Rama to Salesforce started in July 2010 when he founded a startup, CQuotient, to build a data-science-based personalization platform for retail and e-commerce. Backed by funding from Bain Capital Ventures, Rama built and grew the company to a successful exit to Demandware (NYSE: DWRE) in October 2014. As a member of the Demandware executive team, Rama was involved in the successful sale of Demandware to Salesforce in July 2016 for $2.8 billion. CQuotient technology, now known as Salesforce Einstein for Commerce, is one of the top B2C recommendation engines in the world and influences the shopping behavior of billions of consumers annually.
Prior to founding CQuotient, Rama taught analytics at MIT Sloan, was chief scientist and VP of R&D at ProfitLogic, was chief analytics officer and VP of R&D for the retail business of Oracle, founded two analytics companies, and was a consultant at McKinsey & Company.
Rama has a BTech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai and MS and PhD degrees from MIT.
To unlock value from today’s powerful AI models, large volumes of training data are considered necessary. For the consumer internet companies where many of today’s AI models originated, this hasn’t been difficult to obtain. But for companies in other sectors - industrial companies, manufacturers, healthcare organizations, educational institutions – curating labeled data in sufficient volume can be a significant and sometimes prohibitively expensive effort, resulting in a formidable barrier to putting AI to work.
There’s good news on this front, however. AI practitioners and researchers have developed strategies over the last few years with the potential to significantly reduce the volume of labeled data needed to build accurate AI models. These approaches encompass ways to learn models with just unlabeled data, to transfer-and-adapt models across problems, as well as best practices around “iterating on data” to improve model performance. By using these approaches, it is often possible to build a good AI model with a fraction of the labeled data that might otherwise be needed.
We describe some of these strategies and offer guidelines on how they can be used in practice.
Catarina has been working with the Cambridge/Boston startup ecosystem for over 10 years and joined Corporate Relations with a solid network in the innovation and entrepreneurial community. Prior to MIT, she was part of the team that designed and launched the startup accelerator IUL MIT Portugal, which was later rebranded as Building Global Innovators. She was based in Lisbon and worked in direct relation with the Cambridge team. She held positions including Operations Coordinator, Program Manager, and Business Developer. The accelerator soon achieved steady growth in large part due to the partnerships that Catarina led with regional and global startup ecosystems. After that, she worked at NECEC, leading a program that connects cleantech startups and industry. In this role, she developed and built a pipeline of startups and forged strong relationships with both domestic and European companies. She has also held positions in Portugal and France, including at Saboaria e Perfumaria Confiança and L’Oréal as Technical Director and Pharmacist. Catarina earned her bachelor's in chemistry and pharmaceutical sciences in Portugal. She went on to earn her Master of Engineering for Health and Medicines in France.
Craig Wisneski is a Co-founder of Akkio, the no-code AI company, that makes artificialintelligence easy enough for any company to become an AI-powered business. He previously led Productat digital manufacturer Markforged and helped speaker maker Sonos grow from a startup to over $1B inrevenue in various product leadership roles. He has a SM from the MIT Media Lab and SB from MIT.
Dr. Michael Fleder’s MIT research forms the basis for Covariance.ai: a machine learning startup thatenables near-real-time competitive and market insight with previously-impossible accuracy and depth.Michael’s work has been featured inMIT News (2021, 2019) and leading modeling conferences. Michaelhas extensive background in robotics (MIT, NASA/JPL), quantitative trading, and technology advising forthe C-Suite at retail banks. Michael earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees from MIT.
Dr. Stonebraker is a Hopara Co-founder. Hopara is a data visualization solution that allows users to navigate around and dive into their data for more detail with more context. He has been a pioneer of data base research and technology for more than forty years. He was the main architect of the INGRES relational DBMS, and the object- relational DBMS, POSTGRES. These prototypes were developed at the University of California at Berkeley where Stonebraker was a Professor of Computer Science for twenty-five years. More recently at M.I.T. he was a co-architect of the Aurora/Borealis stream processing engine, the C-Store column-oriented DBMS, the H-Store transaction processing engine, the SciDB array DBMS, and the Data Tamer data curation system. He also serves as Chief Technology Officer of Paradigm4 and Tamr, Inc. Professor Stonebraker was awarded the ACM System Software Award in 1992 for his work on INGRES. Additionally, he was awarded the first annual SIGMOD Innovation award in 1994, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997. He was awarded the IEEE John Von Neumann award in 2005 and the 2014 Turing Award, and is presently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at M.I.T, where he is co-director of the Intel Science and Technology Center focused on big data.
Sujeesh Krishnan is the Chief Executive Officer of Kinnami, and has over 20 years-experience leading strategy, sales, market development, and product management in the high-technology industry. His career spans private sector, where he has brought new technologies to optimize supply chains and solve critical data management issues to market in the aerospace, defense, oil & gas, and chemicals industries, as well as public sector organizations, including the Carbon Trust and the United Nations. Sujeesh serves on the Board of Directors for CLASP, a leading non-profit focused on improving energy efficiency globally. Sujeesh holds a M.S. in Manufacturing Systems Engineering from University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MBA from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Kirsten Lloyd is one of Modzy’s co-founders and leads all aspects of go-to-market. She has authored and contributed to numerous reports on the intersection of ethics and AI, including Assessing the Ethical Risks of Artificial Intelligence, A National Machine Intelligence Strategy for the United States, and Bias Amplification in AI Systems. She has spoken at conferences such as NVIDIA GTC DC 2019, AAAI 2018 Fall Symposium series, ISACA’s 2018 Governance, Risk, and Controls conference, and Stanford’s inaugural Digital Cities Summit in 2016. Previously, Kirsten worked in corporate strategy, identifying new business opportunities aligned to emerging technologies. Kirsten earned her B.A. in global studies, with a concentration in Latin American studies, and history from the College of William & Mary.
Jeff received his PhD his EECS from UC Berkeley as an NDSEQ fellow, was a Batelle Post-Doctoral Scholar at MIT, and is an Entrepreneurial Research Fellow at Active. Prior to Sync, he was a technical staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
Matt is the co-founder & CEO of Paragon One, a tech platform helping Fortune 500 teams launch remote student education programs around real work experiences. These programs, called Remote Externships, allow employees to engage with cohorts of students in an efficient and scalable manner. Paragon One helps companies like PwC, Meta, and National Geographic engage with underserved and underrepresented students, who often lack access to traditional internships, to provide hands-on student work experiences which elevate their employability. By allowing Paragon One to streamline and automate the application process, onboarding, project work experience and final evaluations, host companies only need one hour per week during a 7-week externship program to connect and network with up to 50 students. Matt holds both a B.S. degree in Computer Science & Engineering and a B.S. in Management Science from the MIT. Matt previously co-founded AHAlife.com, a curated luxury marketplace for discovering 1,000+ designers and artisans from 45+ countries, which successfully merged with ASX-listed Design Milk. Matt oversaw a number of operating and business development roles as Chief Financial Officer, in addition to the fundraising of over $20M in venture capital. Before launching AHAlife, Matt sourced, executed, and oversaw consumer internet investments with Technology Crossover Ventures, a $10Bn venture capital fund. Prior to TCV, Matt began his career in the Media & Telecom Investment Banking Group at Morgan Stanley, focusing on M&A, IPO, and debt issuances for new media and telecom companies.
Alexander Whatley is the co-founder and CEO of Vividly, which builds next-generation AI-powered workflow technology for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies. He has extensive background in software engineering and data science. He holds a bachelor's and master's degree from Harvard in Applied Mathematics.
Di Ye is founder and CEO of Zhennovate, a company that scales professional career/leadership/life coaching to help organizations unlock their people’s potential and transform organizational culture. Di brings a rich blend of technology, talent development, product development, and organizational consulting. She is an MIT alumna in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a former program manager of Microsoft Office, and an experienced professional certified executive and career coach. Her technical experiences span across digital health, enterprise software, electronic materials and human-computer interactions across startup, industry, and academia. These days, she enjoys serving as a leadership coach to help MIT equip emerging technical leaders for leading innovations at the workplace.
Sabin Thomas is the founder and CTO of Zing Data and is focused on making data engagement simple and collaborative. Sabin built and managed the teams behind the data pipeline and business intelligence platform for payment transactions at Rakuten. A serial entrepreneur, Sabin has co-founded and sold two startups making intuitive and secure products for developers, devOps teams, and for security teams.
Jon Kim joined Corporate Relations in February 2022 as Program Director.
Jon comes to Corporate Relations with extensive experience in managing business and product development, and partnership with Korean and Asian companies.
Prior to MIT, Jon worked for several technology companies (Entegris, Amazon Alexa, Brooks Automation, Nuance Communications, VoiceSignal Technologies) leading product development and partnership with Korean and Asian companies in semiconductor, AI, voice assistant, mobile, robotics industry.
Before coming to US, Jon was Commercial Specialist at the US Embassy in Seoul (US Department of Commerce, Foreign Commercial Service). There he developed market entry and business strategies for US technology, energy, and automotive companies, and conducted market research and partner alliance programs. Jon also resolved many regulatory issues working with both Korean and US government agencies, for US automotive companies to increase sales in Korea significantly.
Jon earned his B.A. in Public Administration at the Yonsei University in Seoul, and his MBA at the University of Michigan.
Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management Director, Sustainability Initiative at MIT Sloan
Jason Jay is a Senior Lecturer and Director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative. He teaches executive and masters-level courses on strategy, innovation, and leadership for sustainable business. He has helped secure MIT Sloan's position as a leader in the field of sustainability through teaching, research, and industry engagement. Dr. Jay’s publications have appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, California Management Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Greenbiz, and World Economic Forum. With Gabriel Grant, he is the author of the international bestseller Breaking Through Gridlock: The Power of Conversation in a Polarized World. Dr. Jay also works as a facilitator for companies, organizations, and business families, supporting high quality conversation and shared commitment to ambitious sustainability goals. His clients have included EFG Asset Management, Novartis, Bose, Environmental Defense Fund, BP and the World Bank.
An engaging and interactive workshop where we will use the En-ROADS climate simulation tool to jointly build a scenario for a low carbon future, and explore the transition risks and business opportunities for participating companies.
Dr. Keri Pearlson is the Executive Director of the research group Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan (CAMS). Dr. Pearlson has held positions in academia and industry including Babson College, UTexas-Austin, Gartner’s Research Board, CSC, Hughes Aircraft Company, and AT&T. Her research studies topics at the intersection of MIS, business strategy and organizational design. Her current research projects focus on how organizations build a culture of cybersecurity, how to manage the cybersecurity vulnerabilities of AI/ML systems and how organizations build trust to share mitigations for cyber breaches. She’s the lead author of the popular MIT textbook: Managing and Using Information: A Strategic Approach (7th edition published Jan.2020) and co-author of Zero Time: Providing Instant Customer Value. She has written dozens of papers and case studies, many of which included ground-breaking work which has influenced how managers and leaders think about, and manage, information. Dr. Pearlson holds a Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) in MIS from Harvard Business School and a Masters (MS) in Industrial Engineering and Bachelors (BS) in Mathematics from Stanford.
Cybersecurity is about resilience – not protection. Although it is impossible to avoid all cyber risk, leaders can make their companies more resilient in the face of new threats.
James Rhee is an acclaimed impact investor, founder, CEO, goodwill strategist, community connector, and educator. He empowers people, brands, and organizations by marrying capital and creativity through operationalized purpose. He is an award-winning thought leader on topics such as multidimensional transformation, the intersection of capital, race, and gender, the future of capitalism, and values-based investing and leadership. His newest venture, red helicopter, is forging systemic alliances through the principles of kindness and math to shape a more sustainable form of capitalism. His work has been featured at TED Conference, Brene Brown, and the leading global media outlets and platforms. He is a soon-to-be-published author.
Through business, James has created an impact across multiple industries and people. As an investor, chairman, and first-time CEO (from 2013-2020), James & the female leaders of Ashley Stewart led the reinvention of a company, which was facing almost certain liquidation in 2013, to a place of unprecedented success. The story of the remarkable transformation and re-imagination of Ashley Stewart, one of America’s largest clothing brands serving plus-sized Black women, offers a glimpse into the future of organizations and ecosystem behavior. The story is proof of how trust and joy, grounded in math and amplified by authentic voices and digital excellence, can overcome impossible odds and fuel individual and enterprise-wide innovation. It is a tangible example of the power of diverse ecosystems, as well as a commentary on a potential way forward for achieving multi-stakeholder goals. At its core, it is the story of an unlikely friendship between the son of Korean immigrants, who had previously spent his career managing billions of dollars of private equity capital, and a predominantly Black female employee group who placed their mutual trust in each other, learned from one another, and then proceeded to quietly shock the world.
Through red helicopter, James’ philosophies and methodologies are connecting entrepreneurs with civic leaders, students with CEOs, investors with professors. James serves as the Johnson Chair of Entrepreneurship, Professor of Entrepreneurship, and Senior Adviser to the Center for Women, Gender, and Global Leadership, at Howard University. He is also Executive-in-Residence and Strategic Advisor at the MIT Leadership Center and Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He also teaches a class at Duke Law School entitled, “The Way It All Works: Investing, Negotiating, and Operating in the Real World” a course that teaches the systems of money, life, and joy. Before all of this, James was a high school teacher and an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
James serves as a founding member of the Advisory Council of JPMorgan Chase’s Advancing Black Pathways and a member of the Governing Committee of the CEO Action for Racial Equity. He is a newly elected member of Ashoka’s Entrepreneur-to-Entrepreneur Network, which brings together high-impact entrepreneurs from the business sector with the world’s most powerful social entrepreneurs at Ashoka. James formerly served on the Board of Directors of the National Retail Federation, where he served as Chair of the Innovation Committee and earned their Power Player Award, given to the industry’s most influential CEOs. For his life work, the New York Urban League awarded him its Frederick Douglass Award.
He works with the most forward-thinking leaders and organizations to create sustainable and systemic change during inflection points.
More about James Rhee:
James Rhee’s Ted Talk: The Value of Kindness at Work
James Rhee featured on Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead Podcast
Accounting For Kindness (forbes.com)
Following the end of Day One, please join us for a 75th anniversary celebration for the MIT Industrial Liaison Program (ILP). Program Directors, ILP staff, and members of the MIT community, will commemorate the ILP’s role in connecting MIT and Industry. The reception will feature live music, and hors d’oeuvres, tapas, and cocktails.
Eduardo Garrido is a Program Director at the Office of Corporate Relations at MIT.
Eduardo Garrido has a strong multicultural and multidisciplinary background, with deep expertise in higher education, banking and management consulting, acquired in Argentina, Spain and USA. He currently serves as Program Director at the Industrial Liaison Program, Office of Corporate Relations (MIT), the largest conduit between corporations and MIT.
Before joining MIT, Eduardo was the Director of Santander Universities at Santander Bank, N.A., based in Boston, MA. In this role, he managed the institutional and business relationship with 46 universities, mainly in the northeastern US. He also served as Santander US representative at President Obama’s 100,000 Strong in the Americas initiative and the Woman for Africa Foundation, among other relevant global higher education projects, and as Member of the Global President’s Council at NYU and the Advisory Boards of the Deming Cup, ECLA (Columbia University) and Newcastle University Business School.
Before coming to the US, Eduardo had several roles at Banco Santander Rio (Argentina). As Director of Santander Universities, he started the first entrepreneurship initiative at Grupo Santander worldwide, including the launching of a business plan competition, the Technology Innovation Venture Capital Fund, and a national competitiveness development initiative. He also sponsored the first edition of MIT 50K in Argentina. As Director of Organization and Quality at Banco Santander Rio, he led the team that obtained the first Global ISO 9001:2000 certificate for a financial institution in Latin America, certifying all main processes and areas of the bank. He also steered the business process reengineering project for the whole Bank, partnering with Ernst & Young and McKinsey and Co and implemented the Retail Banking new operating model.
Before joining Banco Santander Rio, Eduardo was Senior Manager of the Financial Services and Capital Markets Group at Price Waterhouse Management Consultants in Madrid, Spain. He was the Practice Leader of Business Process Reengineering, Financial Risk Management and Risk Adjusted Profitability Measurement.
Before his assignment at Price Waterhouse he served as Director of Consulting Services at MSA International, Inc. and as Financial Control Manager at Citibank España, S.A.
Eduardo graduated as Industrial Engineer at Universidad de Buenos Aires and has a MBA degree from IE Business School.
Globalization has made organizations build efficient networks of stakeholders, such as suppliers, customers, carriers, and distributors, called supply chains, to gain competitive advantages. However, supply chains have become more complex due to abundant data, various operations, dynamic consumer behavior, and poor data-driven decision- and policy-making processes.
This workshop will discuss the impact of global macro trends such as socioeconomic crises, geopolitical changes, climate change, and other externalities, which increase uncertainty. We will analyze how supply chains have suffered from supply and demand shocks and how companies have created innovative strategies to build agility, adaptability, alignment, resilience, and flexibility. The workshop is enriched with testimonials and good practices shared by three global organizations.
A panel of academic experts and a select group of practitioners will address the following relevant questions:
Christopher Mejía Argueta is a Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. He develops applied research on retailing operations and food supply chains for multiple stakeholders including consumer packaged goods manufacturers, carriers and retailers in the Food and Retail Operations Lab (FaROL). His research focuses on improving the efficiency, flexibility of operations in multiple stakeholders, designing route-to-market and logistics strategies to address changing purchasing patterns, coupling these dynamic consumer profiles with the retail landscape, and reducing undesired socioeconomic and health problems related to income disparity, social backwardness, food malnutrition, food waste by proposing sustainable policies, business models to help vulnerable population segments.
Dr. Chris Mejía is also the Director of the MIT Supply Chain and Global Logistics Excellence (SCALE) Network for Latin America. This initiative, conducted by the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics in the region, aims to lead impactful research and education projects for all companies, public sector and society together with Latin American top universities and the support of the Center for Latin-American Logistics Innovation (CLI). In addition, Dr. Chris Mejía serves as the Director of the MIT Graduate Certificate in Logistics & Supply Chain Management (GCLOG), an elite program from the MIT SCALE Network, geared towards outstanding graduate students from Latin America.
He holds a M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering with focus on supply chain management and multicriteria optimization, and a PhD in Industrial Engineering with focus on Humanitarian Operations. Dr. Mejía got both degrees with summa cum laude honors (best grade, top 1% students) in both classes at Monterrey Tech, Mexico. In 2013, Dr. Mejía was the academic leader at CLI, where he developed dozens of projects with industry and other academic partners related to disaster response, green logistics, packaging and last-mile distribution in emerging markets. Prior to joining MIT CTL, Dr. Mejía Argueta was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Eindhoven University of Technology (TUe), the Netherlands, where he investigated retailing operations for emerging markets and formulated estimation models to analyze the prevalence of nanostores in emerging markets. He is author and editor of the books: 1) Reaching 50 Million Nanostores: Retail Distribution in Emerging Megacities, 2) Supply Chain Management and Logistics in Latin America: A multi-country perspective and 3) Supply Chain Management and Logistics in Emerging Markets.
He has over 12 years of experience and his work in over 10 countries in three different continents has been focused on improving the efficiency of operations across the supply chains. He is co-editor of a variety of special issues in recognized journals, author of scientific papers published in top journals. He has developed dozens of industry projects focus on the reality of emerging markets regarding transportation, logistics, retailing and supply chain management.
Elenna Dugundji shapes Supply Chain futures by bringing expertise in demand forecasting, machine learning and AI to research in mainport logistics, involving Network analytics, Optimization of operational processes, Tactical planning and Strategic asset management.
Jim Rice is the Director of the Integrated Supply Chain Management (ISCM) Program at the Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL), having joined CTL in 1995. The ISCM Program is a consortium that enables companies from industry to interact with faculty and researchers across MIT on education and research in the supply chain domain.
Rice’s research is on organization and supply chain design, recently focusing on how supply chains respond to disruptions (e.g. terrorism), supply chain security and creating competitive advantage through supply chain design and management. Jim also serves as project manager for the Supply Chain Response, and teaches a graduate course (“Supply Chain Context”) in supply chain management.
Prior to joining MIT, Rice managed manufacturing and distribution operations at Procter & Gamble, and served as a sales and market manager at General Electric Company. Jim earned his MBA in Operations and Finance from the Harvard Business School, and a Bachelors Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame.
Gita Rao is a Senior Lecturer in Finance, and Associate Faculty Director of the Master of Finance program at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
She joined the MIT Sloan finance faculty with over two decades of experience in global investing, asset allocation and serving major institutional clients. Rao has deep expertise in ESG and impact investing, particularly the integration of ESG into investment portfolios. She managed the first global ESG portfolio in the United States, developed and teaches a course on impact investing at MIT Sloan, and is Faculty Director for the MIT Sloan Impact Investing Initiative. She has been a portfolio manager responsible for over $15 billion in assets and director of quantitative equity research at two major investment firms: MFS Investment Management and Wellington Management Company, both in Boston. Prior to managing portfolios, she was a senior research analyst at Fidelity Management & Research Company and vice president at Kidder, Peabody & Co. in New York.
She has published in the Review of Accounting Studies and appeared in media including Bloomberg, CNN, and Foreign Affairs among others. Rao has been a president of the Society of Quantitative Analysts, on the editorial board of the Financial Analysts Journal, on the board of trustees of the Research Foundation of the CFA Institute, and an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
She holds a PhD in finance from the University of Rochester, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and a BA in economics (Honors) from Delhi University’s St. Stephen’s College in India. She was born in New Delhi, India and lives in Brookline, MA.
Companies are doubling down on ESG. And yet, as the sector grows in complexity, concerns about accountability and reporting are on the rise. A company can say it’s committed to ESG, but how is it doing so? Is it disclosing the metrics of its carbon footprint, increasing board diversity, or revealing the inner workings of its supply chain? The stated purpose of ESG is building sustainable businesses for the long run with a stakeholder perspective. My talk will focus on three important issues:
David Robertson is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he teaches Innovation and Product Management. From 2002 through 2009 David was the LEGO Professor of Innovation and Technology Management at the Swiss business school IMD. While at IMD, David was given inside access to The LEGO Group, and wrote his award-winning book ‘Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry’. David's latest book ‘The Power of Little Ideas: A Low-Risk, High-Reward Approach to Innovation’ was published in 2017 by Harvard Business School Press. From 2010 through 2017, David was a Professor of Practice at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania where he taught Innovation and Product Design.
David currently runs MIT’s largest executive program, the Executive Program in General Management. He teaches in MIT’s MBA and executive programs, consults with global Fortune 1000 companies on Innovation and Product Management issues, and is a frequent speaker at corporate events and industry trade shows. David holds an MBA and PhD from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois. David and his two children are members of the Cherokee Nation.
No innovation lasts forever – a new product or service may get you a few years of growth, but over time competitors catch up and growth slows down. Companies are challenged to continually come up with new ways to innovate. In this talk, David Robertson will discuss the inspiring case study of LEGO, a company with some almost-deadly innovation failures and some stunning successes. At three different periods in its recent history, growth stopped at the company and it had to find new opportunities for growth. In this talk Robertson will talk about LEGO’s history of innovation, and why this new growth period may be the company’s greatest.