STEVEN RATTNER is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Willett Advisors LLC, which manages the personal and philanthropic investment assets of Michael R. Bloomberg. In addition, he is a Contributing Writer for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times and the Economic Analyst for MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Previously, Mr. Rattner served as Counselor to the Secretary of the Treasury and led the Obama Administration’s successful effort to restructure the automobile industry, which he chronicled in his book, Overhaul: An Insider’s Account of the Obama Administration’s Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry. Until February 2009, Mr. Rattner was Managing Principal of Quadrangle Group LLC, a private investment firm that under his leadership, had more than $6 billion of assets under management. Before forming Quadrangle in 2000, Mr. Rattner was with Lazard Frères & Co., where he served as Deputy Chairman and Deputy Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Rattner joined Lazard Frères in 1989 as a General Partner from Morgan Stanley, where he was a Managing Director. Before beginning his investment banking career in 1982 with Lehman Brothers, Mr. Rattner was employed by The New York Times for nearly nine years, principally as an economic correspondent in New York, Washington and London. Mr. Rattner has served as a board member or trustee of a number of public and philanthropic organizations including the Educational Broadcasting Corporation (Chairman), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brown University (Fellow), Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City (Chairman), Brookings Institution and the New America Foundation. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Rattner graduated in 1974 from Brown University with honors in economics and was awarded the Harvey Baker Fellowship. Mr. Rattner is married to Maureen White, who is a Senior Fellow at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and they have four children.
Archives: Team Members
These are Members of the AIESG Team
Luke Pardue
LUKE PARDUE is Policy Director at the Aspen Institute’s Economic Strategy Group (AESG). He obtained his PhD in economics from the University of Maryland and, before joining AESG, worked as an economist at Gusto, a small business payroll platform. Before Gusto, Luke held research positions at the US Census Bureau and Federal Reserve Board. His research focuses on finding policies and practices that help businesses, workers, and families thrive. His work and commentary have been featured in outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. Luke currently lives in Washington, DC.
Brian Deese
BRIAN DEESE is the Institute Innovation Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he focuses on U.S. economic policy, industrial capacity, clean energy, and innovation. Deese was previously Director of the White House National Economic Council, where he coordinated the economic agenda of the Biden‐Harris Administration and advised President Biden on domestic and international economic policy. Deese was President Biden’s primary policy negotiator for the infrastructure, semiconductor, and clean energy legislation passed in 2021 and 2022.
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. 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.
From 2017-2020, Deese was the global head of sustainable investing at BlackRock, where he worked to drive greater focus on climate and sustainability risk in investment portfolios and created investment strategies to help accelerate the low‐carbon transition. Deese also worked at the Center for Global Development, where he co-wrote the book Delivering on Debt Relief. His writings have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs.
Deese received his B.A. from Middlebury College and his JD from Yale Law School.
Rob Portman
ROB PORTMAN’S career in public service has 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 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.
Portman currently serves as the Founder and Chair of the Portman Center for Policy Solutions at the University of Cincinnati and is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Practice of Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. He also serves on the Board of Directors of The Procter and Gamble Company, the Bechtel Group, Inc. and The Atlantic Council, and as an advisory board member of other non-profits.
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 JPMorgan Chase 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.
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.