John Gerzema

CEO

John Gerzema is a New York Times Bestselling Author and pioneer in the use of data to identify social change and help companies anticipate and adapt to new trends and demands. An author, strategist, speaker and consultant, his books have appeared on the best seller lists of The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, The Washington Post, Bloomberg Business Week and others. A frequent analyst on TV, his TED talks have been viewed worldwide. John has written for The Harvard Business Review, McKinsey, WIRED among others and was named among “The Fifty Classic Management Articles of The Decade” by Strategy & Business. A Fellow with The Athena Center for Leadership at Barnard and an advocate for women and girls, John’s latest book with Pulitzer-Prize winner Michael D’Antonio–––The Athena Doctrine, explores the rise of feminine values on leadership, policy and innovation. Tom Peters says of John, “The Athena Doctrine is a powerful book. Extraordinary research. Great storytelling. A message both timely and of monumental importance.” A board member to several non-profits; University of The People, The National Kidney Foundation and The U.N.’s Girl Up Campaign, John was named among “The Top 100 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business” and “Must-Follow Marketing Minds on Twitter” by Forbes Magazine. His research on nation branding and the role governments play in creating a better global society was presented at Davos in 2016. John’s research on Gender Equality for Unilever was be presented by CEO Paul Polman at Davos in 2017.

Will Johnson

CEO

Will Johnson is CEO of The Harris Poll, a company of Harris Insights & Analytics, one of the world’s leading public opinion, market research and strategy firms. Johnson previously served as President of BAV Consulting, a Young & Rubicam Group Company, and Chief Strategist of BrandAsset Valuator, the world’s largest study of brands and model of consumer/brand behavior. Will is a frequent contributor to Forbes, NPR, CNN, Politico among others. He presented at the World Economic Forum in 2016, releasing “Best Countries” a rating of eighty nations against twenty-thousand elites, business people and citizens in partnership with U.S. News & World Report and The Wharton School. Will holds a Masters in Business Administrations from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. He graduated magna cum laude from Lafayette College.

Mark Penn

Chairman

Mark Penn’s career spans 40 years in market-research, advertising, public relations, polling and consulting, and he has advised top world leaders, led companies, and written a bestselling book. Currently, Penn is the President and Managing Partner of The Stagwell Group, a private equity fund that invests in marketing services companies and reinvents the traditional holding company model.

Before founding The Stagwell Group, he served in senior executive positions at Microsoft, where as Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, he was responsible for working on core strategic issues across the company, blending data-analytics with creativity to help set the company on a new course.

Penn’s experience in growing, building, and managing agencies is well documented. As the co-founder and CEO of Penn Schoen Berland, a market research firm that he built and sold to communications behemoth WPP, he demonstrated value-creation in a crowded industry, serving clients with innovative techniques from being first with overnight polling to unique ad testing methods used by presidents and major corporations. At WPP, he also became CEO of Burson Marsteller, and managed the two companies to record profit growth during that period.

A globally recognized strategist, Mark has advised corporate and political leaders, both in the United States and internationally. For six years, he served as White House Pollster to President Bill Clinton and was a key adviser in his 1996 re-election, identifying “Soccer Moms” as the key swing vote needed for victory. The Washington Post remarked that no other pollster had ever become “So thoroughly integrated into the policymaking operation” of a presidential administration.
Penn later served as chief strategist to Hillary Clinton in her Senate campaigns and 2008 Presidential campaign, devising her successful NY “upstate strategy” and creating the “3 AM” ad in the 2008 primaries. Internationally, he helped elect more than 25 leaders in the Asia, Latin America, and Europe, including Tony Blair and Menachem Begin.
Penn is also an internationally known thought leader. He is the author of forthcoming book “Microtrend Squared: The New Small Forces Driving the Big Disruptions Today” ten years after his bestseller “Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes,” and was a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Time.com, POLITICO, The Hill, and the Huffington Post. In a cover story, Time Magazine called him “Master of the Message.”
Penn earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and attended Columbia Law School. He is a visiting lecturer at Harvard College, where he teaches courses on Public Opinion.