Change happens here.

Angela Duckworth is the Co-Founder, Chief Scientist, and Board Member of Character Lab, a nonprofit whose mission is to advance scientific insights that help children thrive. She is also the Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, faculty co-director of the Penn-Wharton Behavior Change For Good Initiative, and faculty co-director of Wharton People Analytics. A 2013 MacArthur Fellow, Duckworth has advised the World Bank, NBA and NFL teams, and Fortune 500 CEOs. Prior to her career in research, Duckworth founded a summer school for underserved children that was profiled as a Harvard Kennedy School case study. She has also been a McKinsey management consultant and a math and science teacher in the public schools of New York City, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. 

Duckworth completed her undergraduate degree in Advanced Studies Neurobiology at Harvard, graduating magna cum laude. With the support of a Marshall Scholarship, she completed an MSc with Distinction in Neuroscience from Oxford University. She completed her PhD in Psychology as a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Duckworth’s TED talk is among the most-viewed of all time. Her first book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, is a #1 New York Times best seller. She is also co-host, with Stephen Dubner, of the podcast No Stupid Questions. 

Emmy-nominated writer, producer, New York Times best-selling author, director, actor, and Tony award winner, Mindy Kaling has been named one of the brightest voices of her generation. At 24, Kaling joined the eight person writing staff at NBC’s The Office. During her eight seasons at the show, she wrote twenty-three episodes (far more than any other writer) and was nominated for an Emmy—the first for a woman of color in any writing category.

Next Kaling created the The Mindy Project for Universal Television, a show that she starred in and executive produced from 2012 to 2017. Kaling wrote 24 episodes of the 117 episodes created for the six-season series.

This year, Mindy received the Producers Guild of America’s Norman Lear Achievement Award in Television, as well as a National Medal of the Arts. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) medals are the highest awards given to artists and arts patrons by the federal government. In 2022, Kaling International was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential Companies. In 2012, Kaling was named to the Time 100 Most Influential People in the World List. She was honored with the 2014 Glamour Women of the Year Award and was a 2019 ELLE Women In Hollywood honoree.

In 2020, Kaling released the critically acclaimed series, Never Have I Ever for Netflix, which recently wrapped its fourth and final season. Season 1 reached 40 million homes in its first four weeks of release.

Kaling is also the co-creator and Executive Producer of The Sex Lives of College Girls, which in 2021 had the biggest premiere of any comedy on HBOMax. It was renewed for a third season in December 2022, after the success of the show’s season two premiere.

In between all her ventures, Kaling has released two New York Times bestselling comedic memoirs: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) and Why Not Me?, and in Oct 2020 she released a new collection of essays in partnership with Amazon called Nothing Like I Imagined. Most recently, Kaling launched her imprint Mindy's Book Studio for Amazon Publishing, with the mission of publishing titles from new and emerging diverse voices.

In 1987, John O’Leary was a curious nine-year-old boy. Playing with fire and gasoline, John created a massive explosion in his home and was burned on 100% of his body. He was given less than a 1% chance to live.

This epic story of survival was first showcased in his parents’ book, Overwhelming Odds, in 2006. It was this book that first invited John to embrace his miraculous recovery and share it with the world.

Today, John inspires tens of thousands of people at more than 100 live and virtual events each year. He partners with companies and organizations across industries, such as: sales, healthcare, safety, marketing, finance, faith, education and insurance.

Consistently described as “the best speaker we’ve ever had,” John’s tireless schedule is a testament to the power of his message. His emotional storytelling, unexpected humor and authenticity make each presentation unforgettable.

John is a two-time #1 National Bestselling author. His first book ON FIRE: The 7 Choices to Ignite a Radically Inspired Life has sold 250,000+ copies and been translated into 12 languages. IN AWE: Rediscover Your Childlike Wonder to Unleash Inspiration, Meaning and Joy was published in May 2020 and was a crucial message during an unprecedented time.

His comprehensive Live Inspired Coaching program provides long-term engagement and a genuine, collaborative approach that takes his message from inspirational to transformational inside organizations. 

John’s award-winning Live Inspired Podcast has more than 5 million downloads and enjoys world-class guests like Brené Brown, Mitch Albom, Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Shawn Achor. 

Regardless the professional accomplishments, John considers his greatest success to be his marriage to his wife Beth, their four children and his relationships with friends and family.

Ellen McGirt is an author, podcaster, speaker, community builder, and award-winning business journalist. She is the editor-in-chief of Design Observer, an independent media company that has maintained the same clear vision for more than two decades: to expand the definition of design in service of a better world. In a previous life, Ellen established the inclusive leadership beat at Fortune in 2016 with raceAhead, an award-winning newsletter on race, culture, and business. In her nearly nine years at Fortune, she conducted in-depth interviews with more than 100 C-Suite leaders, offering real-time snapshots of how leaders were navigating the rapidly changing world. The Time, Money, and Fast Company alumna has published over twenty magazine cover stories throughout her twenty-year career, chronicling everything from the rise of social media to the new future of work. Ask her about fly fishing if you get the chance.

Anthony Capuano is President and CEO of Marriott International, Inc. In his role, Mr. Capuano presides over the world’s largest hospitality company and some of the most iconic brands in travel. The company now has nearly 8,600 properties across 139 countries and territories and over 30 brands. It also has the travel industry’s largest customer loyalty program, Marriott Bonvoy, which has more than 186 million members.

Before his appointment as CEO in February 2021, Mr. Capuano was Group President, Global Development, Design and Operations Services where he led the strategic unit growth of all of Marriott’s brands while overseeing the global design team as well as Marriott’s global operating standards and protocols for thousands of properties around the world. Mr. Capuano was also responsible for oversight of the EDITION Hotels, a unique concept in the luxury lifestyle hotel space conceived by hotelier Ian Schrager and Marriott International.

Mr. Capuano joined Marriott in 1995 and was instrumental in its steady growth over the years which included the acquisition of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide in 2016. Mr. Capuano began his Marriott career as part of the Market Planning and Feasibility team, where he helped the company assess the overall economic viability of new and existing hotels, balancing the company’s interests with the needs of hotel owners and developers, investors, lenders and operators.

That role prepared him to lead Marriott’s development efforts in the Western United States and Canada for its full-service hotel brands. Later, his responsibilities expanded to include North America, the Caribbean and Latin America. In 2009, Mr. Capuano assumed global development responsibility. He began overseeing global design in 2014 and global operations in January 2020.

Mr. Capuano earned a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in Hotel Administration. He is an active member of the Cornell Hotel Society, The Cornell School of Hotel Administration Dean’s Advisory Board, as well as the Business Roundtable and the American Hotel and Lodging Association’s IREFAC Council. Additionally, Mr. Capuano serves on the Board of Directors for McDonald's Corporation and Save Venice, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the artistic heritage of Venice, Italy. He resides in Potomac, Maryland with his wife and daughter.

Ty Breland is the Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer of Marriott International, Inc. the world’s largest hotel company with over 700,000 associates across nearly 8,600 properties and corporate offices. As the company’s senior human resources executive, Mr. Breland is responsible for creating a unique, world-class employment experience for Marriott while ensuring the company attracts and develops best-in-class talent to serve Marriott Bonvoy^® members and guests around the world.

In his role, Mr. Breland leads the company’s global HR function, inclusive of talent acquisition, learning and development, compensation and benefits, organizational capability, and HR operations across 139 countries and territories. He brings a particular focus on diversity and inclusion and employee engagement and well-being, while cultivating an innovative hospitality workforce of the future. Marriott is proud to be recognized as a Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For, the first hotel company to be ranked #1 on DiversityInc’s Top 50 Companies for Diversity and to be a member of its Hall of Fame.

Mr. Breland began his Marriott career in 2004 and has held a number of senior roles within the company. Most recently, Mr. Breland was Global HR Officer for Talent Development & Organizational Capability, where he oversaw learning and development, organizational capability, and change management, and was the senior HR business partner to the Global Development, Global Operations, and Global Design organizations. He played a prominent role in Marriott’s acquisition of Starwood Hotels & Resorts, serving as the company’s Global HR Integration Officer and pioneered the development and launch of Marriott’s Digital Learning Zone, which provided innovative global learning access to associates during and post-integration.

Prior to these roles, Mr. Breland served as Regional Vice President of Human Resources for the Eastern Region of the U.S. and held multiple HR leadership roles supporting global disciplines, including Sales, Marketing, and Revenue Management. During that time, Mr. Breland helped launch the company’s Emerging Leaders Program, a signature initiative aimed at accelerating diversity and inclusion efforts for executive and general manager ranks. He was also responsible for initiating the company’s Workforce Innovation efforts, which provided a blueprint for reshaping front-line roles at the company’s portfolio of properties worldwide.

Prior to Marriott, Mr. Breland was a research consultant for the Human Resources Research Organization (HumRRO). He is a graduate of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University where he earned his Bachelor of Science, Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees, with a specialization in Industrial/Organizational Psychology. Mr. Breland sits on the Board at Virginia Tech’s Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management. He is also a member of World 50, a private community for CEOs and C-level executives at globally respected organizations that work to make a lasting impact. Mr. Breland resides in the Washington, D.C. area with his wife and two daughters.

Yolanda Friend is the Inclusion and Diversity lead for Accenture North America and a managing director. She is responsible for setting the strategic direction of Accenture’s inclusion and diversity agenda in the United States and Canada. She leads actions to increase representation of diversity, build inclusive leaders at all levels, and promote awareness around why inclusion is a critical success factor for organizational performance. She is a member of Accenture’s North America Leadership Team.

Yolanda started her career at Accenture in 2006 through Talent & Organization within Accenture Strategy, where she led numerous clients through talent and workforce transformations. Since 2016, she has applied her expertise in embedding inclusion and diversity into Accenture’s business strategy and the talent life cycle. She partners with business leaders across the organization to maintain accountability for progress. 

An advocate for change, Yolanda strongly believes that Accenture’s rich diversity of background, skills and lived experiences makes the company stronger and more innovative.

As a thought-leader, Yolanda’s previous speaking engagements, include Black Enterprise, Fair360 (DiversityInc), Great Place to Work, FairyGodboss, HRO Today, Seramount, and a multitude of culture moments and celebrations at Accenture, including International Women’s Day, Mental Health Awareness, Pride, National Disability Employment Awareness, heritage month celebrations, ERG leadership summits, and various professional development programs.

Yolanda holds a bachelor’s degree and MBA from Florida A&M University, a historically Black university. She also has an Executive Certificate in Strategic Diversity and Inclusion Management from Georgetown University. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Washington Ballet.

Yolanda is married with a blended family of four children and remains consciously grateful for the opportunity to drive meaningful change.

Alveda Williams is the Chief Inclusion Officer at Dow. In this role, she is responsible for institutionalizing inclusion, diversity, and equity as key drivers for the Company’s long-term growth and business success.

Prior to being named Chief Inclusion Officer, Williams served as Corporate Director of Inclusion and Senior HR Director for Talent Acquisition where she was responsible for driving and implementing Dow’s global ID&E strategy, ensuring fair and equitable end-to-end talent acquisition processes, and embedding inclusion into the overall employee experience for breakthrough results. This included maximizing employee resource group engagement, diversifying Dow’s talent pipeline and supplier network, and driving efforts that enable a culture of inclusion for our employees, customers and communities. Under Alveda’s leadership, Dow has delivered meaningful progress on key inclusion and diversity performance indicators, ascended to the #7 spot on the Fair360 Top 50 list, and was named for the first time to the Great Place to Work® and Fortune World’s Best Workplaces™ list.

Williams joined Dow in 2002 and has held a variety of leadership roles across Research and Development and Human Resources over her 20-year career. She is the creator of Dow’s Building Engineering & Science Talent at Dow (BEST) Symposium which introduces under-represented minority Ph.D. talent to careers in industrial research. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Open Chemistry Collaborative in Diversity Equity (OXIDE), American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Corporate Council, and the Chief Diversity Officer Board for the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4CP).

Williams earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Norfolk State University and a Ph.D. in materials chemistry from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds three patents and is the author of a number of internal and external publications, including a recent feature in Nature Chemistry magazine. She is the recipient of the NSBE Golden Torch Award for Corporate Diversity Leadership (2009), the prestigious Dow Transformation in Action Award (2012), the Council for Chemical Research Diversity Award (2013), Diversity Journal’s Women Worth Watching List (2014), and i4CP’s Board Member of the Year Award (2021).

DeShaun N. Wise Porter is the Global Head of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Recognition in the Travel & Tourism sector. She serves as a strategic thought leader and internal consultant responsible for developing and executing holistic and integrated strategies that are aligned with Hilton’s shared values and contribute to the building of a diverse, engaged, and high-performing organization. Prior to this appointment, she served as the VP, HR Consulting partnering with C-Suite leaders to drive and implement transformational talent initiatives focused on attracting, developing and retaining high potentials and top performers.

She is a passionate leader with extensive experience in driving culture change and creating opportunities that accelerate the growth of talent through differentiated talent models and scalable development programs. Her work has centered on leading global transformation initiatives, managing merger and acquisition processes, overseeing the implementation of core technologies, and developing teams across the globe. She served as an advisor on the integration of market-based compensation, implementation of an advanced HR Information Systems, as well, was a key architect in designing the high-performing learning organization at Kimberly-Clark, which included the first global learning management system and language-learning program. Her global business acumen paired with her cultural dexterity led her to complete short-term assignments in Seoul, South Korea; Istanbul, Turkey, and Medellin, Colombia.

DeShaun is a graduate of Florida State University, where she studied Multinational Business Operations and Finance. She holds a Professional in Human Resources (PHR) Certification from the HR Certificate Institute, a SHRM-Certified Professional (SHRM-CP) from the Society for Human Resource Management, and a Human Capital Strategist Certification from the Human Capital Institute. She is currently on the Board of Directors for FAIR Girls, Inc. and an active member of the Society for Human Resources Management, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated, and The Links, Incorporated. She is active throughout her community and serves as a mentor and advocate for underserved youth.

DeShaun resides in Washington, D.C with her husband, Dr. Fernando A. Porter, sons Princeton Antonio and Braylon Alexander, as well as furbaby Marley. When she is not spending time with family and friends or participating in civic activities, she enjoys shopping, reading and embracing other cultures through travel. In June 2023, she published her first book co-authored by her father called, The Book of Daddy-isms: Words from the Wise. This collection of wisdom is designed to inspire, influence, encourage and unlock the greatness within through reminding readers of lessons passed down through generations.

Divya Ghatak is the Chief People Officer of SentinelOne, leading the People, Talent, Foundation and Workplace functions. She has enabled the company’s hypergrowth and expansion plans while strengthening the amazing company culture.

Divya joined SentinelOne in 2019 to grow and scale the company when there were 350 Sentinels. After 585% growth, we have grown to 2,400+ globally through purposeful hiring, prioritizing culture fit for all candidates along with talent, experience and diversity.

Prior to SentinelOne, Divya was Global VP of People at Nevro. Before that, she was CPO at GoodData and held global HR leadership roles in a variety of tech companies, including Cisco and Tavant. Divya received her Master’s in Human Resources Management/Personnel Administration from Tata Institute of Social Science and her Bachelor of Arts in Economics with Honors from Delhi University.

Bob Ferrell, a retired Army Lieutenant General, serves as Executive Vice President (EVP) of Global Human Resources at World Wide Technology (WWT), a privately held global technology solution provider with $20B in annual revenue and over 10,000 employees.

In this role, Bob is responsible for leading WWT’s overall human resources strategy, global talent acquisition, leadership development, organizational design, employee development, DEIB, compensation and benefits, HR operations and technology, and employee relations. Bob embraces a “people first” approach to the workforce experience that ultimately supports WWT's ability to achieve its strategic growth and business goals and sustains the company’s world class culture and long-standing reputation as a Great Place to Work.  

Prior to his role in HR, Bob served as EVP of Public Sector Strategy for WWT, where he was responsible for developing and maintaining relationships and revenue-generating strategy for engagements with federal, state, and local government and education organizations.

In addition to his Public Sector role, in 2020 Bob became EVP of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging, where he was responsible for developing and implementing programs that promote a thriving diverse, equitable, ethical, and inclusive organization where all employees can succeed.

Bob is a proven people leader with over 38 years of demonstrated success in both operational environments and on an enterprise scale. He matriculated through the enlisted ranks of the United States Army, from Private to Sergeant, and was later commissioned as an officer and climbed the officer ranks from Lieutenant to Lieutenant General.  

Bob’s culminating military assignment was in the Pentagon, serving as the Army’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) and G6. He holds a bachelor's degree in marketing from Hampton University, a master's degree in administration from Central Michigan University, and a master’s degree in Strategy from the U.S. Army War College.

Bob also serves as Board Director, AFCEA International and Board Director, World Wide Technology.