Blair Sheppard is the Global Leader Emeritus for Strategy and Leadership at PwC and Dean Emeritus of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. A renowned authority on global macrotrends, organizational strategy, and institutional trust, Blair has dedicated his career to advising top global leaders through complex economic and systemic disruptions.

During his decade-long tenure as Dean at Fuqua, Blair spearheaded Duke’s global expansion, establishing campuses in China, the UAE, India, Russia, and the UK. He was also responsible for founding Duke Corporate Education, the first full-service provider of customized, enterprise-wide management education to global organizations. At PwC, he led initiatives focused on helping global enterprises, governments, and civil society organizations adapt to rapid technological shifts, environmental pressures, and institutional challenges.

Blair is the author of Ten Years to Midnight: Four Urgent Global Crises and Their Strategic Solutions and his latest book, Reinventing the World: The Guide to Confronting Global Disruption and Creating Hope for Tomorrow. Drawing on decades of experience across academia and global consulting, his work delivers practical, action-oriented frameworks for leaders navigating intersecting systemic crises and driving meaningful, long-term change.

Blair holds a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Illinois and has authored over 50 books and articles on leadership, negotiation, and corporate governance. As our keynote speaker, he brings a deep, research-driven perspective on what it takes to build resilient organizations and lead with purpose in an increasingly unpredictable world.

Tom Taylor is the President and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund. Prior to this role, he retired from Amazon after 22 years as a Senior Vice President and member of the CEO’s Senior Team. During his tenure, he led some of the company’s most transformative and impactful initiatives, including global operations, e-commerce services, and artificial intelligence (Alexa).

Tom has a proven track record of growing organizations—from a small team of five engineers brainstorming around a whiteboard to overseeing P&Ls worth hundreds of billions of dollars and managing teams of over 10,000 employees. He is known for tackling complex challenges with creativity, curiosity, operational excellence, a deep focus on customers, empathy for employees, and a wry sense of humor.

He holds a dual master’s degree from the Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning both a master’s in management and a master’s in mechanical engineering. He also holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Virginia Tech. In 2022, Tom was inducted into the Academy of Engineering Excellence at Virginia Tech.

Soon after graduating from LGO, Ronak found himself working in scrap metal.  Once called the junk business, a bit of a glow-up has transformed it into the "metals recycling industry".  The USA recycles over 300 billion pounds of metal annually.  This creates new products without incurring the higher emissions and environmental costs of mining raw materials.  Ronak knew none of this, but had learned that developing product roadmaps for semiconductors was not his strength.

The next 20 years offered plenty of opportunities to put all his MIT operations and manufacturing skills to the test.  In Portland Oregon, Ronak called upon Shoji Shiba's teachings to grow a culture of continuous improvement and metrics.  In Saint Louis he overestimated his civil and mechanical engineering skills to build factories to further upcycle recycled metals. 

In 2019 Ronak raised a bunch of money from colleagues, family, and a few LGOs to build Levitated Metals.  The family moved to Houston, Texas.  Becoming a manufacturing entrepreneur was Ronak's evolution into his final form as a true LGO alum.  Now a $200M business, Levitated was acquired in 2023 and Ronak continues as President.

Prior to LGO, Ronak was a gifted programmer and software architect.  This was 20 years before AI made this well-compensated.  He holds a BS in Computer Systems Engineering from Boston University. 

Cheryl Stokes is CEO of Radiant Leadership, LLC, and co-founder and Chief Learning and Talent Officer of The R6 Collective. A sought-after strategic advisor to boards, CEOs, and executive teams, she pairs a technical background in product and process engineering with a 30-year career spanning general management, P&L oversight, CEO succession, leadership development, culture, and enterprise growth across Fortune 500 and emerging companies.

Cheryl is the former CEO of CNEXT, a leadership development and executive networking company acquired by SHRM. Earlier, she was a Partner at Heidrick & Struggles, where she led the Leadership Development practice, and Regional Managing Director, Europe, for Duke Corporate Education. She also served as Director, Organizational Capability at The Coca-Cola Company and began her career in engineering roles at Alcoa and General Motors.

Cheryl is Vice Chair of the Board of Directors for The Life Enrichment Center, a Board Director for Wake Chapel Church, and a member of the MIT Visiting Committee for the School of Materials Science & Engineering. An MIT Leaders for Global Operations alum, Class of 1996, she holds MS degrees in Materials Science & Engineering and Management from MIT and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Kettering University.

Carolyn Cade is the CEO of Cade Operations Consulting and founder of Lead Forward HQ, a leadership development platform designed to help leaders build the capabilities they need as their scope and responsibilities grow. A former senior operations leader at Amazon, Carolyn led large-scale eCommerce, fulfillment, and logistics organizations and was selected to teach and develop General Managers and senior corporate leaders globally.

Today, Carolyn advises organizations on operations, organizational design, and leadership systems and coaches executives navigating increasingly complex leadership roles. She also teaches leadership within MIT Leaders for Global Operations, where she focuses on helping technically strong operators become stronger enterprise leaders.

An MIT LGO alum herself, Carolyn is passionate about helping leaders build not only the skills to solve difficult problems, but the teams, systems, and leadership capabilities required to solve them at scale.

Teena Piccione is an accomplished executive technology leader and board advisor with over 25 years of experience scaling mission-critical platforms, modernizing enterprise architecture, and guiding digital transformation across both the Fortune 50 and public sectors. In the financial capital space, she views technology as both the primary risk factor and the greatest growth lever—bringing the technical depth and institutional governance required to perform robust technical due diligence on target investments, modernize operating platforms across partner networks, and deploy secure, AI- and cloud-enabled infrastructure that drives enterprise value.

Piccione previously served as Secretary and State Chief Information Officer for North Carolina, overseeing statewide digital infrastructure, cybersecurity resilience, and artificial intelligence governance. Her extensive private-sector executive career includes leadership tenures as Senior Managing Director and COO at Google, Senior Vice President and COO at Fidelity Investments, Global Chief Information Officer at RTI International, and Assistant Vice President of Big Data Strategy at AT&T. Across these roles, she has directed multi-billion-dollar operational portfolios, engineered large-scale cloud migrations, and built high-performing engineering organizations that bridge strategic investment with operational execution.

A recognized advocate for workforce innovation, Piccione frequently advises emerging technology ventures and serves on academic and industry advisory boards. She holds an M.S. in Information Technology Project Management from George Washington University, a B.A. from Georgia State University, and completed executive education at Harvard Business School.

Mohammad Fazel-Zarandi has been a faculty member at MIT Sloan since 2018, where his work focuses on artificial intelligence and how it is changing decision-making across organizations. His work spans the public and private sectors, including AI systems deployed in production across industries, most recently in women’s health.

His research has been published in leading journals in operations and management science and has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and other major media outlets.

At MIT, he teaches the LGO program’s core optimization course and has advised more than 20 LGO theses. He also teaches AI and analytics at Sloan and has been named MIT Sloan Teacher of the Year for three consecutive years, from 2024 to 2026. He holds a PhD from the University of Toronto.

Somesh Mohapatra, LGO '23, is Director of Analytics, Head of Data Science & AI for Caterpillar's Modern Manufacturing Digital Platform, where he leads global teams developing AI-powered manufacturing capabilities including digital twins, predictive maintenance, optimization, and industrial GenAI solutions deployed across Caterpillar's worldwide operations. In this role, he helps shape the company's strategy for applying artificial intelligence at scale across manufacturing and supply chain systems.

Somesh earned his PhD from MIT in Artificial Intelligence. His doctoral research focused on machine learning for scientific discovery, resulting in publications in leading journals and conferences including Nature Chemistry, Nature Machine Intelligence, and top AI conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR, along with patented innovations in AI-driven molecular design.

Prior to Caterpillar, Somesh conducted research at Google Accelerated Sciences (now part of Google DeepMind), where he applied machine learning to genomics and therapeutics, and was an AI/ML Fellow at Amgen through the MIT LGO program. He also co-founded MatSci AI, an industrial AI startup serving manufacturing customers, where he built and scaled a multidisciplinary team before transitioning to MIT full-time.

Having lived and worked across India, Japan, Singapore, and the United States, Somesh brings a global perspective to innovation, technology leadership, and organizational transformation. His experience spans academic research, entrepreneurship, product leadership, and enterprise AI deployment, united by a passion for translating breakthrough technologies into real-world impact.

Lee Robertson is a Managing Director & Partner in BCG's Raleigh-Durham office, where he joined in 2015. He is a core member of BCG's Technology and Digital Advantage team, the leader of BCG's Generative AI topic in North America, and the leader of BCG's internal AI transformation. In addition to his time in Raleigh-Durham, Lee has also spent time in BCG's Dallas and Helsinki offices.

Lee has over 10 years of case experience in digital and AI-led transformation across industries. His consulting work spans a broad range of sectors, from restaurant and retail operators to job-search platforms, engineering and construction firms, and multi-brand hospitality portfolios, where he has led AI-based product development, Generative AI transformation blueprints, digital and eCommerce platform builds, and enterprise-wide adoption of emerging technologies. Prior to joining BCG, Lee worked for Accenture, where he supported large-scale transformations in the Chemicals industry, and at JP Morgan, where he was an investment banker covering the Oil & Gas and Power & Utilities industries.

Lee holds an MBA from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, an M.S. in Commerce from the McIntire School of Commerce at UVA, and a B.S. in Foreign Affairs, also from UVA.

Yue Cathy Chang is a business executive and book author with a strong track record of leading AI, data science, and digital transformation initiatives across industries and geographies.

Fluent in navigating both centralized and decentralized organizational models, Cathy has partnered with leaders across North America, Asia, and Europe to localize product strategy while preserving global data integrity. Her cross-cultural experience is also reflected in the book she co-authored, How to Lead in Data Science, which is published in English, Japanese, Russian, and Chinese.

Cathy holds advanced degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and is an inventor with two U.S. patents. She has led high-performing teams that have embedded within organizations—from startups to Fortune 500s—to tackle critical data and AI challenges with local nuance and global scalability. 

Cathy serves on the Corporate Advisory Board of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), where she helps shape the next generation of global technology leaders. She is also a leading supporter of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and actively participates in its Leadership Board activities.

Mark Atkeson is an international business leader, investor, entrepreneur, and author. A veteran of doing business in China, Mark managed, partnered in or provided services to Chinese-based companies for more than three decades. He led businesses in a broad range of industries ranging from machine tools to semiconductors, commercial aircraft maintenance and manufacturing to diesel fuel systems, mobile internet and venture capital to digital payments, electric vehicles and lithium ion batteries to aviation asset trading. Most recently, Mark wrote and released Risky Business in Rising China: Deals, Ordeals and Lessons Learned as an American Entrepreneur in a Surging Superpower Grappling with Growing Pains, chronicling his real-life experiences managing joint ventures and startup companies in China. Now living in California, Mark continues engaging with Chinese businesses as founder and managing partner of China Aviation Partners LLC, which provides software services, aviation asset trading and other aerospace consulting for China-related businesses including Chinese airlines and aerospace engineering companies. Mark is a graduate of Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering and Business Administration.

https://www.markatkeson.com

Annabel Flores is the Vice President of Performance Excellence for Raytheon, an RTX business. In this enterprise leadership role, she drives transformative change across Raytheon, strengthening program execution, elevating operational performance, and enabling sustainable growth for the organization.

A key focus of Flores’ leadership is advancing program manager development across the business. She oversees initiatives that build future-ready program leaders—enhancing capability, strengthening accountability, and expanding skill sets in operational excellence, digital integration, and strategic decision-making. Through this work, she ensures Raytheon’s program leadership pipeline remains strong, agile, and prepared to deliver on complex customer missions.

Flores holds an MBA and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the MIT Leaders for Global Operations program, as well as a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from MIT.

Marc Gilbert is a core member of the Industrial Goods and Consumer practices at Boston Consulting Group and a leader in BCG’s Global Advantage and Operations practices. He leads the firm's work in geopolitics and trade impact within the Global Advantage practice and is the global lead of BCG’s Center for Geopolitics. He has engaged with clients in North America, Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia, helping them navigate today’s unprecedented shifts in the global business landscape. Marc spends much of his time advancing artificial intelligence (AI) in Canada, including in his role as a board member of SCALE.AI.

In addition, Marc is a core member of BCG’s Centre for Canada’s Future. In that role, he helps move Canada forward by providing insight and expertise on the country’s most important issues. The Centre also aims to convene leaders from the business, government, and nonprofit sectors to work together to achieve impact.

Since joining the firm in 1997, Marc has driven and implemented large transformations and global change efforts across all major sectors in North America and Europe. Marc’s project work includes large-scale change, growth, organizational redesign, operational effectiveness, competitive benchmarking, and post-merger integration.

Prior to joining BCG, Marc worked at Merck & Co. in its manufacturing division, in process and new product engineering, and in new plant design. He also worked for Merck’s specialty chemicals division.

Andy Louis is Vice President of Operations at Carpe, the Durham-based sweatcare brand, where he has spent the last five and a half years building the operation behind one of the fastest-growing brands in the category. He owns the physical side of the business end-to-end: product development, a global supply chain feeding a network of domestic manufacturers, and the e-commerce and retail fulfillment operations that get product to customers.

Before Carpe, Andy spent his career leading large operating organizations. He was Chief Operating Officer of Implus Footcare, a private-equity-owned consumer goods company, where he oversaw fulfillment, supply chain, and IT across a multi-site network and integrated a series of acquisitions onto a single platform. Prior to that, he spent over eight years at Amazon, rising from front-line manager to General Manager and leading fulfillment teams of several hundred people through the launch of many new facilities and entirely new types of operations. Andy holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a BA in mathematics from Dartmouth College.

CARYL BROWN, MBA, MS ENG – President / General Manager. Proven global manufacturing business executive P&L leader with a multi-disciplinary background and extensive international leadership experience within global technical manufacturing companies primarily in the Industrial, Automotive, and Aerospace/Defense sectors. Functional leadership experience spans General Management, Operations, Sales/Business Development, Program Management, Engineering, and Quality. He has lived on three continents and held worldwide leadership roles for the past 14 years. His cross-functional and international background helps him to assess challenges from a broad perspective and allows him and the organizations he leads to impact and contribute to both the top and bottom lines, especially in multi-regional or complex situations. He has led within public, PE-owned, and family-owned companies. 

During his career, Caryl has driven consecutive record-setting years for sales, profit and margin, broke into several segment-leading customers, reduced total direct labor by 7% in one year, overseen winning yearly $6-7B lifetime revenue of new business, increased year-over-year material cost reduction by 50%, and launched next generation products on next generation production lines. He has ramped up revenue at a plant by 50% in three months while simultaneously improving five-fold the acceptance rate of external customers’ product inspection audits. Caryl brings extensive C-Suite and BOD-level interaction experience, as well as experience with M&A organization integration and related synergy achievement. He seeks his next global executive P&L / General Management role leading a mid- to large fast-paced technical manufacturing company or division.

Gregory Dibb is head of the "Dig Sites" Innovation program at Google Labs.  Over the years, he was cut from every high school sport and collected rejection letters from MIT, Nissan, Google, and even his wife, Melinda--but they all eventually worked out.  His LGO thesis focused on the Toyota Production system, which he applied at Harley Davidson, then as a night shift manager on the Pathfinder assembly line, and later as co-founder of Nissan's Autonomous Vehicle Lab before joining Google.  Greg is a father of four and claims his greatest management success was leading his Little League team to win the tournament as a first time coach (using AI).  He lives in the Bay Area, and drives a 2012 Nissan LEAF with 28 miles of range.

Isabella Loaiza is a senior economist at Revelio Labs. Her research focuses on understanding the human capabilities that complement AI, as well as the opportunities for worker augmentation and education for the AI economy. 

Before joining Revelio, she earned her master's degree (2019) and PhD (2023) from the MIT Media Lab, where she worked with Professor Sandy Pentland. She then served as a Postdoctoral Researcher at MIT Sloan School of Management, working with Professor Roberto Rigobon.

Her research has informed corporate strategy and public policy on the future of work. She has advised the Spanish Presidential Office on its HispanIA 2025 labor force report and the Inter-American Development Bank on the role of public employment services during the Venezuelan migration crisis. She is currently collaborating with the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) to study the impact of AI on emerging labor markets. Her work has also been cited by the International Labour Organization (ILO), the OECD, and the European Commission.

Her work has been featured in PwC's 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, NPR's Planet Money, ABC News, Gartner research reports, Forbes, Inc., and Telemundo.

Aaron Raphel (LGO ’05) joined Apple in 2005 in Worldwide Operations to manage global supply for iPod mechanical components (metal, plastic, and glass parts). In 2006, he was whisked into a dark corner and asked if he wanted to work on “something new” which turned out to be the first generation iPhone, and he continued to lead enclosure global supply management for the first nine generations of iPhones. In late 2013, he transitioned to join the faculty of Apple University where he now develops and teaches courses to employees on topics such as culture, leadership, organizational theory, the intersection of AI and work, and social sciences. Aaron is originally from Boston and also attended MIT as an undergraduate studying materials science and engineering before LGO.

Steve Spear DBA MS MS is an MIT Sloan School Senior Lecturer, Institute for Healthcare Improvement Senior Fellow, and founder of the business process software firm, See to Solve.    He has a long connection to the LGO (nee LFM) program, having been funded by LFM for his Course II MS, as instructor in the Summer program since 2005, and as advisor to 50+ LFM/LGO theses.

Steve’s work, spanning three decades, focuses on why “all else is equal but for outcomes”. Across most every sector, there’s level field competition with contenders vying in the same markets, relying the same core science and technology, depending on similar vendors, and subject to the same rules and regulations. Yet, there’s always the select few who generate and deliver value out of bounds with what is typical, reaping outsize rewards for all stakeholders.  The differences between best and the rest can be enormous on multiple dimensions of performance. 

Of course, there is something unequal that drives such different outcomes. It is how leaders manage those for whom they are responsible.  At the very best, leaders are deliberate in creating outstanding conditions for people to apply their intelligence and ingenuity, curiosity and creativity towards seeing and solving problems so they're delivering solutions into use others cannot match in terms of quality, breadth, depth, frequency, and speed. 

In particular, such leaders do what others cannot. They apply their unique authorities to shape the “social circuitry" of  process, procedures and reporting relationships to unleash this energetic dynamic to compete on the intelligence distributed across the enterprise. Those trailing are less deliberate and capable at this, so struggle as a result.

Steve’s work has found inspiration and expression across many sectors, including defense and defense contracting, healthcare, pharma and bio-tech, heavy industry and high-tech.  His award winning publications include Wiring the Winning Organization and The High Velocity Edge, and articles in Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Academic Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, and US Naval Institute’s Proceedings.  

Christopher Wigley leads talent strategy and leadership development for frontline manager through vice president roles across Amazon’s global operations organization. Since joining Amazon in 2018 to build the company's first ops executive academy, Chris has designed and scaled leadership solutions spanning high-potential pipeline programs, executive assessment and coaching practices, and leadership development products that accelerate talent upskilling at scale. 

Today, Chris focuses on the intersection of leadership, talent, and technology, including enterprise efforts to build generative AI capabilities among senior operations leaders. His work explores how organizations can rethink leadership development as technology changes the nature of work, decision-making, and the skills leaders need to be successful in the future of operations. 

Before joining Amazon, Chris served as a Captain in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, where he led supply chain logistics, engineering operations, and large-scale public works planning. He supervised the Enterprise PMO for U.S. Army Headquarters during the departure of forces from Iraq - the largest military movement of troops and equipment since World War II - before transitioning to his last military assignment as Chief Planning Officer for the Army's Leadership Development and Assessments Course. Chris holds an MBA from the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business.

Aimee Constantine is the Senior Director, Growth - eCommerce at Symbotic, where she drives expansion strategies and scale for next-generation warehouse automation.

With deep operational expertise spanning enterprise fulfillment, supply chain strategy, and process optimization, Aimee has spent her career leading transformative growth initiatives across retail, e-commerce, and logistics. Prior to joining Symbotic, she served as Senior Director of eCommerce Fulfillment Optimization at Albertsons Companies and held senior operations roles at Amazon and Walmart.

Aimee holds an S.M. in Engineering Systems and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management through the Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) program. She is passionate about leveraging advanced technology and automation to solve complex operational challenges and enable high-performing teams.