Brian Deese

BRIAN DEESE is an MIT Innovation Fellow, focusing on the impact of economic policies that strengthen the United States’ industrial capacity and on accelerating climate investment and innovation. Deese was formerly the Director of the White House National Economic Council, where he advised President Biden on domestic and international economic policy and coordinated the economic agenda of the Biden‐Harris Administration. A former senior advisor to President Obama, Deese was instrumental in engineering the rescue of the U.S. auto industry and negotiating the landmark Paris Climate Agreement. Deese is a crisis‐tested advisor with broad experience in accelerating economic prosperity, empowering working Americans, and harnessing the economic opportunities that come from building a clean energy economy and combating the climate crisis. Previously, Deese also served as the global head of sustainable investing at BlackRock, where he worked to drive greater focus on climate and sustainability risk in investment portfolios and create investment strategies to help accelerate the low‐carbon transition. During the Obama‐Biden Administration, Deese served as acting director of the Office of Management and Budget and deputy director of the National Economic Council. Deese received his B.A. from Middlebury College and his JD from Yale Law School.

Rob Portman

ROB PORTMAN is a former US Senator from Ohio and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Practice of Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. Rob Portman’s career in public service spanned three decades and included service in three presidential administrations as well as two terms in the United States Senate and six terms in the United States House of Representatives. In the George W. Bush administration, he served in two cabinet-level jobs, as Director of the Office of Management and Budget as well as United States Trade Representative. Under President George H.W. Bush, he served as Associate Counsel to the President and Director, White House Office of Legislative Affairs. Known for his civility, successful bipartisan policymaking, work ethic, and grasp of a broad range of complex issues, over 220 of Portman’s bills were signed into law by Presidents Biden, Trump and Obama during his tenure in the Senate. He served as the lead Republican negotiator on the bipartisan infrastructure law that is making historic improvements to our nation’s roads, ports, rails, bridges, broadband and more. He played a key role in U.S. foreign policy through his seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as co-chair and founder of the Senate Ukraine Caucus. He made ten trips to Ukraine since the Revolution of Dignity in 2014 and is a key advocate for congressional support of Ukraine against Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression. Portman currently serves as the Founder of the Portman Center for Policy Solutions at the University of Cincinnati and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Practice of Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. Rob was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he still lives today with his wife, Jane. Together they have three adult children: Jed, Will, and Sally.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN is an award-winning journalist for The New York Times and a co- anchor of CNBC’s Squawk Box. Sorkin is also the founder and editor at large of DealBook, a news site published by the Times. He is the author of the best-selling book Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System and Themselves, which chronicled the events of the 2008 financial crisis. Sorkin co-produced an HBO adaptation of the book, which was nominated for 11 Emmy Awards. He is also co-creator of Showtime’s drama series Billions. He has won numerous journalistic honors, including two Gerald Loeb Awards, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and recently won an Emmy Award for “Outstanding Live Interview” for his interview with Adam Neumann, the founder of WeWork, at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit in 2021. He started writing for the Times in 1995, while still in high school.

Virginia “Ginni” Rometty

GINNI ROMETTY is a leader, innovator, and convener who believes that how we work and lead is as important as what we achieve. As the ninth Chairman, President, and CEO of IBM, Ginni transformed the 100-year-old company, reinventing 50 percent of its portfolio, building a $25 billion hybrid cloud business, and establishing IBM’s leadership in AI and quantum computing. She drove record results in diversity and inclusion and supported the explosive growth of an innovative high school program, P-TECH, to prepare the workforce of the future in more than twenty-eight countries. Through her work with the Business Roundtable, she helped redefine the purpose of the corporation. Today, she is a champion of SkillsFirst learning, hiring, and advancement—a movement to connect more people without college degrees with good jobs. In 2020, she co-founded OneTen, a coalition of companies and educators committed to upskilling, hiring, and promoting one million Black Americans without four-year degrees by 2030 into family-sustaining jobs and careers. She is the author of the bestselling book Good Power: Leading Positive Change in Our Lives, Work, and World (Harvard Business Review Press), a moving combination of memoir, leadership lessons, and big ideas. The book shares milestones from her life and career while redefining power as a way to drive meaningful change in positive ways for ourselves, our organizations, and for the many, not just the few—a concept she calls “good power.” Ginni serves on multiple boards, including JPMorganChase and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and was named Fortune’s #1 Most Powerful Woman three years in a row. She has been honored with the designation of Officier in the French Légion d’Honneur and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Her bestselling book, Good Power: Creating Positive Change in Our Lives, Work, and World, offers leadership lessons through the lens of her life and career. Ginni became CEO of IBM in 2012 and retired form the company on December 31, 2020. During her tenure she made bold changes to reposition IBM for the future, investing in high value segments of the IT market and optimizing the company’s portfolio. Ginni also established IBM as the model of responsible stewardship in the digital age. She was the industry’s leading voice on technology ethics and data stewardship, working relentlessly to safely usher new technologies into society. Ginni is the co-chair of OneTen, an organization that will combine the power of committed US companies to upskill, hire and promote one million Black Americans over the next 10 years into family-sustaining jobs with opportunities for advancement. She serves on the Board of Directors of JPMorgan Chase, the Board of Directors of Cargill, the Board of Trustees of Northwestern University, where she is a Vice Chair, the Board of Trustees of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the Board of Trustees of the Brookings Institute, and on the Council on Foreign Relations.  Ginni is a member of the Singapore Economic Development Board International Advisory Council, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Advisory Board and the BDT Capital Advisory Board. Ginni also serves as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Visiting Innovation Fellow. Ginni has a Bachelor of Science degree with high honors in Computer Sciences from Northwestern University, where she later was awarded an honorary degree. She also has honorary degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and North Carolina State University.

Erik Brynjolfsson

ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), and Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. He also is the Ralph Landau Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), Professor by Courtesy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Stanford Department of Economics, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

One of the most-cited authors on the economics of information, Brynjolfsson was among the first researchers to measure productivity contributions of IT and the complementary role of organizational capital and other intangibles. He has done pioneering research on digital commerce, the Long Tail, bundling and pricing models, intangible assets and the effects of IT on business strategy, productivity and performance.

Brynjolfsson speaks globally and is the author of nine books including, with co-author Andrew McAfee, best-seller The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, and Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future as well as over 100 academic articles and five patents. He holds Bachelors and Masters degrees from Harvard University in applied mathematics and decision sciences and a PhD from MIT in managerial economics.

Adena T. Friedman

ADENA FRIEDMAN became President and Chief Executive Officer of Nasdaq on January 1, 2017, and has served as Chair of the Board of Directors since January 2023. She brings more than 20 years of industry leadership and expertise, and is credited with significantly shaping Nasdaq’s transformation into a leading global exchange and technology solutions company with operations across six continents. Prior to being named CEO, Adena served as President and Chief Operating Officer throughout 2016 and was responsible for overseeing all of the company’s business segments with a focus on driving efficiency, product development, growth and expansion. She rejoined Nasdaq in 2014, after serving as Chief Financial Officer and Managing Director of The Carlyle Group from March 2011 to June 2014 and playing a critical role in taking the company public in May 2012. Before Carlyle, Adena was a key member of Nasdaq’s management team for over a decade, serving in a variety of roles, including head of the company’s data products business, head of corporate strategy and Chief Financial Officer. She played an instrumental role in Nasdaq’s acquisition strategy, overseeing the acquisitions of INET, OMX, and the Philadelphia and Boston Exchanges. She originally joined Nasdaq in 1993 as an intern. Since December 2018, Adena has served as a Class B director to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. She was elected to the Board of Directors of FCLTGlobal, a non-profit organization that researches tools to encourage long-term investing, in January 2020. Adena began her term as a member of the Vanderbilt University Board of Trust on July 1, 2020. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Williams College in Massachusetts and a Master of Business Administration from Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management.

Brad Smith

BRAD SMITH, as Microsoft’s vice chair and president, is responsible for spearheading the company’s work and representing it publicly on a wide variety of critical issues involving the intersection of technology and society, including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, privacy, environmental sustainability, human rights, digital safety, immigration, philanthropy, and products and business for non-profit customers. He leads a team of roughly 2,000 business, legal and corporate affairs professionals located in 54 countries and operating in more than 120 nations. In Smith’s bestselling book, coauthored with Microsoft’s Carol Ann Browne, Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age, he urges the tech sector to assume more responsibility and calls for governments to move faster to address the challenges that new technologies are creating. In his podcast by the same name, Smith and his guests expand on the themes in the book, exploring potential solutions to the digital issues shaping the world today. The New York Times has called Smith “a de facto ambassador for the technology industry at large” and The Australian Financial Review has described him as “one of the technology industry’s most respected figures.” He has testified numerous times before the U.S. Congress and other governments on these key policy issues. Smith joined Microsoft in 1993, first spending three years in Paris leading the legal and corporate affairs team in Europe. In 2002, he was named Microsoft’s general counsel and spent the following decade leading work to resolve the company’s antitrust controversies with governments around the world and companies across the tech sector. Smith grew up in Appleton, Wisconsin. He attended Princeton University, where he met his wife, Kathy. He earned his J.D. from Columbia University Law School and studied international law and economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn and find the Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith podcast wherever you like to listen.

 

Darius Adamczyk

Darius Adamczyk is Executive Chairman of Honeywell. In this role, Darius is focused on supporting customer relationships, business development, enterprise strategic planning, portfolio shaping, and global government relations. He was first elected Honeywell Chairman in April 2018. Darius also served as Chief Executive Officer from March 2017 to June 2023. Under his leadership, the company streamlined its portfolio and end markets, simplified and digitized functional operations, and outperformed the market and company’s peer group. Prior to his CEO position, he was President and Chief Operating Officer for one year. He originally joined the company in 2008 when Metrologic, where he was serving as Chief Executive Officer, was acquired by Honeywell. He served as President of Honeywell’s Scanning and Mobility business for four years, doubling the size of the business, before leading a turnaround over two years as President of Process Solutions. In 2014, Darius was promoted to President and Chief Executive Officer of Honeywell Performance Materials and Technologies. Before joining Honeywell, Darius held several leadership positions with Ingersoll Rand and Booz Allen Hamilton. He began his career as an electrical engineer at General Electric in 1988. He earned his MBA from Harvard University, a master’s degree in computer engineering from Syracuse University, and a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from Michigan State University. In 2023, Darius was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He received the Legend of Leadership Awards from Yale School of Management in 2022. He is Vice Chair of the U.S.-China Business Council, a member of the Business Roundtable Board of Directors and a member of the Business Council and Aspen Economic Strategy Group. In addition, he was elected to the Board of Directors for Johnson & Johnson in 2022.

Karen Dynan

KAREN DYNAN is a Professor of the Practice in the Harvard University Department of Economics and at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is also a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the chair of the American Economic Association Committee on Economic Statistics. She previously served as Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of the Treasury from 2014 to 2017. From 2009 to 2013, Dynan was vice president and co-director of the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. Before that, she was on the staff of the Federal Reserve Board, leading work in macroeconomic forecasting, household finances, and the Fed’s response to the financial crisis. Dynan has also served as a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers (2003-2004) and as a visiting assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University (1998). Her current research focuses on macroeconomic policy, consumer behavior, and household finances. Dynan received her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and her A.B. from Brown University.