FES 2007-2008 Season Speakers

JON LUTHER    MORE
CEO of Dunkin Brands

November 

Jon L. Luther joined us November 8, 2007.
Jon L. Luther was named chief executive officer of Dunkin' Brands in January 2003 and chairman in March 2006.  A veteran of the food-service industry, Jon is a proven leader at creative brand development and at satisfying consumers who seek quality, convenience, and value in a quick service restaurant setting. 
[See Event Photos]

From February 1997 until December 2002, Jon was president of Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits, a division of AFC Enterprises. During his term, the company's store count grew 67 percent to 1,672 units, while average annual unit volume grew to over $1 million, the highest in the chicken QSR category. With Jon at the helm, Popeyes won industry awards for menu strategy, store re-design, and customer satisfaction.

Prior to Popeyes, Jon was president of CA One Services, a subsidiary of Delaware North Companies, Inc.  He has also held leadership positions in the contract foodservice division of the Marriott Corporation and at ARAMARK in Philadelphia, PA., where he rose from vending sales director to become president of Davre’s, ARAMARK’s luxury restaurant subsidiary.  Jon also founded Benchmark Services, Inc., a foodservice management firm specializing in business dining for corporations, growing the business into a strong regional competitor.

Jon holds a degree in hotel and restaurant management from Paul Smith’s College, and honorary doctorate degrees from Bentley College and Johnson & Wales University.  He supports culinary and foodservice programs at a variety of institutions, including serving on the Board of Directors for The Elliot Leadership Institute and the Board of Trustees for the Culinary Institute of America.  In addition, Jon is on the Board of Trustees at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Mass., and on the Executive Board of Directors for the Companions in Courage Foundation, which builds interactive playrooms in children's hospitals throughout North America.

In 2005, Jon was the recipient of the Nation’s Restaurant News Golden Chain award, and in 2006, he received the Chain Leadership award from Chain Leader magazine.  This year, Jon was awarded the 2007 Gold Plate Award from the International Foodservice Manufacturers Association, IFMA

January 

Rod Beckstrom joined us January 9, 2008.
Rod Beckström is an entrepreneur and catalyst who has successfully created new businesses and changed established ones through his creative ideas, powerful concepts and passion. He co-authored the bestseller The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations that presents a new model for analyzing organizations, leadership style and competitive strategy. 
[See Event Photos]

Rod has been a successful entrepreneur and stimulating catalyst in many different environments. He started his first company when he was 24 in a garage apartment and grew it into a global enterprise with offices in New York, London, Tokyo, Geneva, Sydney, Palo Alto, Los Angeles and Hong Kong. That company, CAT•S Software Inc., went public and was later sold successfully.

He has helped to start more than a half dozen non-profit groups and initiatives including Global Peace Networks which seeded a peace network of CEO’s that now has more than 4,000 participants, SV2 (Silicon Valley Social Venture), the Environmental Markets Network, and the Miracle Wine Fund for Micro-lending which has helped move more than $20 million into micro-lending projects globally.

Rod is currently fascinated with wikis, a new collaborative software technology, and how they fundamentally transform teamwork and productivity inside companies and across society. He is Chairman, Co-Founder and Chief Catalyst of TWIKI.NET, the industry leading open source enterprise Wiki. Rod also serves as Chairman of Global Peace Networks, Trustee of Environmental Defense, and Director of Jamii Bora Africa Ltd., a micro-lending group with 140,000 members.

Rod graduated from Stanford with an MBA and a BA with Honors and Distinction. He served as President of the combined Stanford student body and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.

He lives with his wife and two children in Palo Alto and Santa Cruz California.

March 

Mark Thompson joined us March 6, 2008.
Mark Thompson is an Executive Coach, Investor, Management Advisor, and former Board Member of Fortune 500 Companies.  As best-selling coauthor of Success Built to Last, the sequel to Built to Last with over one million copies sold, Mark is also producer of programs with Richard Branson, Jack Welch, Bill Gates, and hundreds of CEOs and entrepreneurs for the Leaders of the New Century Series, which covered dozens of industries, including technology companies, retailing, manufacturing, customer service organizations, media, real estate, medical services products, and more.
[See Event Photos]

Cofounder of the Stanford Realtime Venture Design Lab and a visiting scholar at Stanford, Mark serves as faculty at the prestigious World Economic Forum & John F. Kennedy University.  Forbes Magazine honored him on its list of America’s leading venture investors with the “Midas” touch in 2004.

As an executive coach, producer of leadership programs and former operating executive, Mark is passionate about unlocking the unique insights and skills of hundreds of remarkable people around the world from executives, entrepreneurs, nonprofit leaders and billionaires, to the presidents of nations and the CEOs of small and large international organizations.  His audiobook productions have won Audie and Columbia/duPont awards, and he produced the audiobooks for the Peabody award–winning Lost & Found Sound series on National Public Radio.

Mark is a former member of the board of Best Buy Enterprises, Korn Ferry International, Interwoven and Teletech.  He has been an investor and chairman of many technology and media startups. He served as Chairman of Rioport, Inc., which popularized the MP3 player; he was Chairman of Integration, Inc., a communications semiconductor company; and Chairman of VMAX, which was the exclusive distributor of Micron PCs in China. Mark served on the board of the National Investor Relations Institute and Seniornet.com.  In 1996 he accepted an appointment to Chairman Arthur Levitt’s U.S. SEC Consumer Advisory Council.

May 

Anne Mulcahy will join us May 1, 2008.
A 30-year veteran of Xerox who began her career selling copiers, Anne Mulcahy has led the company through a massive transformation over the last few years - reinventing Xerox into an innovative technology and services enterprise that helps businesses deploy Smarter Document Management™ strategies and find better ways to work. Building on Xerox's rich heritage of social responsibility, Anne ensures that the company's business decisions and actions are aligned with a clear set of corporate values.

Anne and her team are responsible for an aggressive, multibillion-dollar turnaround plan that returned Xerox to profitability - significantly improving the company’s financial position and expanding its portfolio of systems and services.  By maintaining an investment in innovation, Xerox has completely overhauled its product line, winning share in key segments of the market.  In addition, the company launched Xerox Global Services, offering content management, imaging and consulting services. The combination of innovative technology and value-added services has delivered strong results, prompting MONEY Magazine to dub Xerox "the great turnaround story of the post-crash era – an IBM for the 2000s."

Anne Mulcahy was named CEO of Xerox on Aug. 1, 2001, and chairman on Jan. 1, 2002.  Anne most recently was Xerox president and chief operating officer from May 2000 through July 2001.  She began her Xerox career as a field sales representative in 1976 and assumed increasingly responsible sales and senior management positions.  In addition to the Xerox board, Anne is a board director of Citigroup Inc., Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd., Target Corporation, and is the chairman of the corporate governance task force of the Business Roundtable.  She is also a board member of Catalyst, a nonprofit organization supporting women in business.

• Professor C.K. Prahalad
• Carly Fiorina
• Michael Treacy
• Richard Teerlink