Soledad O'Brien

Tim Tebow

Patrick Lencioni

Marcus Buckingham

John Maxwell

Angela Ahrendts

Roland Fryer

Urban Myer

Andy Stanley

Sheena Iyengar

Tim Tebow is one of the most accomplished players in college football history. A two-­‐time winner of the NCAA National  Football Championship with the University of Florida, Tebow is also the first-­‐ever sophomore to win the Heisman Trophy. He then went on to become a two-­‐time winner of the Maxwell Award for the nation’s top football player, while also winning the Davey O’Brien Award for the nation’s best college quarterback and the James E. Sullivan Award for the most outstanding amateur athlete in any sport. He is the founder of the Tim Tebow Foundation which was started to bring faith, hope, and love to those needing a brighter day in the darkest hour of need, and in April 2010, Tebow was selected in the first round of the NFL Draft by the Denver Broncos. In 2011, Tebow authored Through My Eyes, an inspirational memoir that became a New York Times bestseller.

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Patrick Lencioni is founder and president of The Table Group, Inc., a specialized management-­‐consulting firm focused on organizational health. Lencioni is the author of nine best-­‐selling books with nearly 3 million copies sold. After several years in print, his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team continues to
be a fixture on national best-­‐seller lists. The Three Signs of a Miserable Job became an instant best-­‐ seller in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and BusinessWeek. And his latest work, Getting Naked, was released in February 2010.

The Wall Street Journal has named Lencioni one of the most in-­‐demand business speakers. He has been a keynote speaker on the same ticket with George Bush Sr., Jack Welch, Rudy Guiliani, and General Colin Powell. Lencioni's work has also been featured in numerous publications  such as Businessweek, Fast Company, INC Magazine,  USA Today, Fortune,  Drucker  Foundation’s Leader to Leader, and Harvard Business Review.

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Marcus first conquered the bestseller lists in 1999 with First, Break All the Rules. While the title may imply an iconoclastic streak, his continuing plea for managers to break with tradition has nothing to do with rebellion; instead, he argues, rules must be broken and discarded because they stifle the originality and uniqueness — the strengths — that can enable all of us to achieve our highest performance.

Following up on his highly successful debut book, Marcus continued to drive the message that people's unique personal strengths are the key to unlocking their potential. As a co-­‐author of Now, Discover Your Strengths, he helped create StrengthsFinder, the personal assessment tool that gave millions of individuals a new vocabulary to positively describe their ingrained talents, adding the phrase "Top 5" to the lexicon of managers and business people around the world. (Marcus's Top 5, for the record: Futuristic, Context, Focus, Ideation,  Intellection).

In addition to refining and reinforcing his message in subsequent books (The One Thing You Need to Know; Go Put Your Strengths to Work; The Truth About You; Find Your Strongest Life) and keynote addresses worldwide,  he founded The Marcus Buckingham Company in 2007 to create tools and training that would help managers and organizations access the untapped potential of their people's strengths.

His latest project, StandOut, is a book and strengths assessment combination that uses a new research methodology to reveal your top two "strength roles" — your areas of comparative advantage. StandOutgoes beyond description to give people practical innovations that fit their strengths, and provide managers with quick insights on how to get the best from each member of their team.

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John C. Maxwell is an internationally-­‐renowned leadership expert, coach, and author who has sold over 20 million books. Dr. Maxwell founded EQUIP and the John Maxwell Company, organizations that have trained more than 5 million leaders in 153 countries. Every year he speaks to Fortune 100 companies,international government leaders, and organizations  such as the United States Military Academy at West Point, the National Football League, and the United Nations. A New York Times, Wall StreetJournal, and BusinessWeek best-­‐selling author, Maxwell’s The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership has sold more than 2 million copies. Developing the Leader Within You and The 21 Indispensable Qualitiesof a Leader have each sold more than 1 million copies.

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Since 2006, Angela has been Chief Executive Officer of Burberry, the global luxury company distinguished by its 155-­‐year British heritage and iconic outerwear. Under the leadership of Angela and the executive team, the development of a pure brand strategy has driven the company's global growth, realized through international  retail expansion and innovation in product design and digital marketing. Over the past five years, the Group's revenues have more than doubled and Burberry is now widely regarded as one of the leading British brands in the world, with a thriving, connected corporate culture.

Today, Burberry is ranked in the FTSE 50,  with annual revenues of $2.5bn. In 2011, Burberry was named the 4th fastest-­‐growing brand in the world by both Interbrand and WPP/BrandZ, and the 13th most innovative company globally by Fast Company magazine. It has been recognized in Interbrand’s Top 100 Global Brands for the past three consecutive years, and was this year named Retailer of the Year at the Oracle World Retail Awards.

In 2008, with Chief Creative Officer Christopher Bailey, Angela established the Burberry Foundation, dedicated to helping young people realize their dreams and the power of their creativity through financial, mentoring and product support.

Angela was born and raised in a small town in Indiana. She acquired her Merchandising and Marketing degree from Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana, from where she also received an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree in 2010.

Angela is a member of the UK Prime Minister's Business Advisory Group, and features in Forbes' 100 Most Powerful Women in the World, Fortune's Businesspeople of the Year and the Financial Times' Top 50 Women in World Business

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Awarded the Mac Arthur Foundation Genius Award, Professor Roland Fryer has briskly established himself as an important player in the field of economics. Not only was Fryer named a "Rising Star" by Fortune magazine and featured in Esquire’s “Genius Issue," but also his own work has been profiled in The New York Times, WashingtonPost, and the BostonGlobe. A collaborator on the bestselling book Freakonomics, Fryer is an economist illuminating the causes and consequences of economic disparity due to race and inequality in American society.

In addition to being Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard University, Fryer is also the founder and CEO of The Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard, which was recently described by former President Clinton as one of three new initiatives most important to improving the global problems of health and poverty.

He was recently named one of Fortune Magazine's "40 under 40 Most Influential People in Business.” In 2009, Time Magazine deemed him “one of the 100 most influential people in the world.” He also maintains offices at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the DuBois Institute. In January 2008, at age 30, he became the youngest African-­‐American to ever receive tenure at Harvard.

The New York Times ran an extensive profile of Fryer, entitled Toward a Unified Theory of Black America, in March of 2005. This portrait etched out the extensive struggles of Fryer's childhood, where he was exposed to drugs, crime and parental abandonment.

Recently, Roland Fryer has begun work on the Opportunity NYC Project, which will study how students in low-­‐performing schools respond to financial incentives.

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Former University of Florida Gators head football coach Urban Meyer, who won two BCS National Championships in six years, currently serves as college football game and studio analyst for ESPN.

In his six seasons at Florida, Meyer guided the Gators to the aforementioned pair of national championships, two Southeastern Conference Championships, three SEC Eastern Division crowns and six-­‐straight January bowl games, including three BCS bowl games. His .813 winning percentage (65-­‐15) is the second-­‐best in school history and his .750 winning percentage (36-­‐12) in SEC play is within the top five in league history among head coaches who spent five or more years in the conference.

Meyer, who was named Sporting News and Sports Illustrated “Coach of the Decade” in December of 2009, was the first coach ever to win two BCS National Championships and he is one of only two coaches in the history of the SEC to win two outright National Titles.

Prior to his tenure at Florida, Meyer coached two seasons for the Utah Utes where he earned multiple National Coach of the Year honors in 2004 after leading Utah to a perfect 12-­‐0 season, the school’s first in 75 years. With its post-­‐season bid to the Fiesta Bowl, Utah made history by becoming the first school from a non-­‐Bowl Championship Series conference to earn a berth in a BCS Bowl.

Meyer began his head coaching career at Bowling Green in 2001, where he led the Falcons to their highest national ranking in school history (No. 16 ESPN/USA Today and No. 20 Associated Press). Bowling Green spent five weeks in the national polls and finished third in the nation in scoring offense, averaging 40.8 points per game.

The Ashtabula, Ohio, native learned the coaching trade from the likes of Sonny Lubick, Lou Holtz, Earle Bruce and Bob Davie, as he apprenticed at Ohio State (1986-­‐87), Illinois State (1988-­‐89), Colorado State (1990-­‐95) and Notre Dame (1996-­‐2000) before getting the head job at Bowling Green.

Beyond his on-­‐field accomplishments, Meyer has also championed efforts in community service. He spearheaded an effort to feed needy families during Thanksgiving, and initiated a mentor program for young at-­‐risk males in the Gainesville community. A 13th-­‐round pick in the Major League Baseball Amateur Draft in 1982, Meyer played two years in the Atlanta Braves’ organization. He played as a defensive back at the University of Cincinnati before earning his degree in psychology in 1986. He went on to earn a master’s degree in sports administration from Ohio State in 1988. Meyer and his wife Shelley are the parents of two daughters, Nicole and Gigi, and a son, Nathan.

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Andy Stanley is a sought-­‐after leadership communicator, author, pastor, and the founder of North Point Ministries, Inc. (NPM). Since its inception in 1995, North Point Ministries has grown from one church to five in the Atlanta area and has helped plant over thirty strategic partner churches globally. Each Sunday, more than thirty thousand attend worship services at one of NPM'S five churches. In addition, every month, well over a million people from nearly every country in the world choose to tune in, download, and stream Stanley's teaching content via TV, radio, podcasts, and live streaming.

Stanley's books include The Next Generation Leader, Visioneering, Enemies of the Heart, and The Principle of the Path.

Stanley is married to Sandra, and they have three teenage children.

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Sheena S. Iyengar is the inaugural S.T. Lee Professor of Business in the Management Division of the Columbia Business School. She has taught on a wide variety of topics at Columbia for MBA and Executive MBA students, including leadership, decision making, creativity, and globalization, earning an Innovation in the Teaching Curriculum award along the way. Dr. Iyengar was also recently selected by Columbia University's President's Office to teach at the Global Leadership Fellows Program at the World Economics Forum in Geneva, Switzerland.

Dr. Iyengar's innovative research on choice has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Security Education Program. In 2002, she was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Social Scientists by the Executive Office of the President.

Throughout her career, her research has not only appeared in many respected academic journals but is also regularly cited in the media, including periodicals such as Fortune and Time magazines, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, on National Public Radio, and in popular books including Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz.

It is her passion for this subject matter that led Dr. Iyengar down the extraordinary path of writing The
Art of Choosing. Whether  mundane or life-­‐altering, choices define us and shape our lives. In her book, Dr. Iyengar asks the difficult questions about how and why we choose: Is the desire for choice innate or bound by culture? Why do we sometimes choose against our best interests? How much control do we really have over what we choose? Dr. Iyengar's award-­‐winning research reveals that the answers are surprising and profound.

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