Grace A. Odums, an independent strategy consultant, has a growing consultancy spanning over fifteen years.  Her impressive client list boasts Fortune 500 and Fortune Global 500 companies including: Disney ABC Media NetWorks, Waste Management (PA/WVA Area), Fairmount Southampton Resorts, Chevron-Phillips, Siemens Medical Solutions, Wells Fargo Bank.  

A much sought after international speaker, Grace welcomes the opportunity to partner with organizations and professionals in the areas of management coaching, revenue recapture, change leadership, optimum customer care, talent performance enhancement, productivity improvement, increased efficiencies, balanced scorecard architecture, and diversity strategy creation with diversity scorecard and strategy map development and system-wide implementation.

Global Speaker Sonia Aranza has presented on the international stage from Spain to Singapore.  She brings 27+ years of experience in Diversity, Inclusion & Global Leadership. Her clients include Boeing, CIA, McDonald’s and more. The U.S. Department of Labor describes her work as “Outstanding” and was selected to execute programs for landmark cases. SHRM featured her as a Diversity & Inclusion Expert in HR Magazine and she is a LinkedIn Top Voice in Leadership. She serves on the Faculty of Howard University’s Executive Diversity Program; named “100 Most Influential Filipina Americans in the United States” and honored “100 Most Influential Filipina Women in the World.”

Dennis is the Director of Inclusion on McDonald’s Corporations’ Global Inclusion and Intercultural Management team. His responsibilities include coaching and consulting Home Office and Region leaders on multi-cultural team management; coaching and consulting leadership teams for a more inclusive workplace; coaching and consulting McDonald’s five National Employee Business Network leaders on building more viable and visible networks; and oversight of McDonald’s Global employee online Mentoring program for 10,000+ employees.

Dennis began his McDonald’s career in 1982 in Human Resources, and has been a professional in human resources management and motivation for over 30 years. His expertise and emphasis is on the strategic identification and development of diverse people talent. Dennis uses his ‘discover, design, develop and deliver’ organizational process to define value to a business or organization and has been a featured speaker at seminars and workshops throughout the United States and in several foreign countries.  He has developed several programs, including the template for the first Economic Impact Report used by McDonald’s Corporation that demonstrates the value of a business to its community, and it is still in use today throughout North America.

Additionally, Dennis is nationally recognized for his expertise in honoring and integrating ethnic differences into the workplace for mutual benefit and has produced the diversity awareness seminar “Value Difference Day.”  He is “Life Certified” as a Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) by the Human Resource Certification Institute; and he is a polished facilitator with many different Diversity education programs.  Dennis was recently selected to be a voting member on the SHRM Diversity & Inclusion National Standards taskforce to establish consistent qualifications for Top Diversity Professionals by 2013.

Dennis’ community leadership contributions include work as an Executive Coach to the Board of Trustees of the Ronald McDonald House of Durham, North Carolina; past two-term Chairman of the Board for the Greater Sacramento (CA) Urban League; he served four years on the Board of Directors of the Sacramento Asian Pacific Chamber of Commerce; he was a former Board member of the Ronald McDonald House Charities of Northern California; and a former Board member and Treasurer of the St. Louis (MO) Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.  He also served as an advisor to the Boards of People Reaching Out and the Sacramento Asian Sports Foundation; and as a four-year member of the Community Advisory Board of KVIE, TV 6 in Sacramento.

Mr. Boone is responsible for delivering investment services and other products to TD’s U.S. Mass Affluent customers.  He also has executive leadership of TD Bank USA, the nationally chartered bank that provides banking products and services to Customers of TD AMERITRADE
 
Mr. Boone joined TD Bank Financial Group as EVP, Marketing Director, TD Banknorth in 2007 and subsequently became Executive Vice President Corporate Strategy for TD Bank, America’s Most Convenient Bank. In this capacity, he built a team to lead strategic development work in retail banking, mortgages, small business and commercial banking during TD’s integration of Commerce Bancorp.  He also chairs TD’s U.S. Diversity Leadership Team, a team of senior executives championing diversity across TD by driving enterprise-wide diversity initiatives and working with businesses and support groups to embed diversity into their business plans. 

Mr. Boone’s career spans both the retail and financial services industries.  He began his career with Loblaw Companies Ltd., Canada’s largest retailer.  While at Loblaw, he drove Loblaw’s expansion into financial services, leading its successful banking joint venture, President’s Choice (PC) Financial. Mr. Boone also chartered PC Bank, one of the first retailer owned banks in Canada, specifically designed to enter the credit card and loyalty program markets.  Under his leadership, PC Financial and PC Bank grew to offer banking, mortgage, credit card and insurance products, becoming an important profit contributor to Loblaw Companies.

During his 15 years at Loblaw, he also directed its National Wholesale Division that includes its Warehouse Club and Foodservice operations. He revitalized this multi-billion dollar division in this intensively competitive market -- competing with Costco, Sam’s Club & Sysco -- by consolidating stores, driving comparable sales growth through promotional strategies and implementing margin-enhancing strategies.  Previously, he held progressive roles in Finance and Corporate Development. 

David Boone serves on the Board of Advisors for Catalyst Inc. (NY), which is dedicated to expanding opportunities for women and Business.  He also serves on the Board of The Boys & Girls Club of Philadelphia and has served as a Director on the Mastercard Canada Region Board.

Mr. Boone holds a Bachelor of Commerce from McMaster University (Hamilton, Ont.), and an Executive MBA from the joint program between Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management (Chicago, IL), and the Schulich School of Business at York University (Toronto, Ont.).

Candi Castleberry-Singleton is the chief inclusion and diversity officer at UPMC, a $10 billion, 20-hospital global health system and health plan. She is responsible for developing UPMC’s inclusion strategy, including its Dignity & Respect Campaign and Cultural Competency Initiative, as well as for overseeing progress toward system-wide goals involving 55,000 employees. In 2008, she launched the UPMC Center for Inclusion.

An experienced strategist, Castleberry-Singleton created The Integrated Inclusion Model, a systems integration model that helps companies transition from compliance-driven processes led by human resources, to integrated activities that shift the responsibility for achieving an inclusive culture to every employee. The model is featured in Crossing the Divide: Intergroup Leadership in a World of Difference (Harvard Business School Press, August 2009). Her inclusion initiatives have been implemented at Motorola, where she was vice president of global inclusion and diversity, and at Sun Microsystems, where she led the Global Inclusion Center of Expertise.

Recently, Castleberry-Singleton was named a 2010 Top Woman of Substance in Healthcare by Heart & Soul Magazine, one of the 25 Influential Black Women by The Network Journal, Top 100 African Americans in Corporate America by Savoy Magazine and a Woman of Humility by Point Park University in Pittsburgh. In 2009, Castleberry-Singleton was named one of the 50 Women of Excellence by The New Pittsburgh Courier and recognized by Diversity MBA Magazine as a Top 50 under 50 Executive Leader.

Anika K. Warren, Ph.D., leads and supports research and consulting projects focused on organizational change and effectiveness, diversity and inclusion, human capital management, career coaching and counseling, and women in leadership at Catalyst Inc. She serves as an active member of the Women of Color/Diverse Women and Inclusion Issue Specialty Team and a former member and current advisor to the Catalyst Diversity and Inclusion Action Council. Prior to joining Catalyst, Dr. Warren was a full-time Adjunct Assistant Professor at Teachers College of Columbia University, where she continued to teach until September 2010. She also consults to professional service firms, bioscience corporations, and telecommunication companies, provides career coaching, and publishes research articles and book chapters on issues related to diversity and inclusion, organizational change and effectiveness, and counseling psychology. She has served as an educator, consultant, and counselor to numerous Fortune 500 and multinational companies, universities, non-profit organizations, government agencies, and community health organizations. Dr. Warren also develops training videos catering to the unique needs of multicultural clients and their individual and organizational challenges.

Prior to graduate school, Dr. Warren worked in finance at Gap Inc. and The Charles Schwab Corporation and was involved in recruitment and career development efforts at both corporations. She received her B.B.A. in Finance from Howard University and earned her M.A. and M.Ed. in Psychological Counseling at Columbia University, focusing on organizational, multicultural, and school psychology. She completed her Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology at Boston College.

Professor Lisa Hisae Nishii joined the ILR School as an Assistant Professor in July of 2003. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from the University of Maryland and her B.A. in Economics from Wellesley College. She won the Best Dissertation Award from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) for her work on the attributions that employees make about management's motivations underlying HR practices.

Professor Nishii's research focuses on three main areas: (1) Cross-cultural/international; (2) organizational diversity and inclusion; and (3) employee perceptions of organizational practices, or climate.  Her research on culture focuses on theories about, and measurements of, dimensions of cultural variation. She has worked with colleagues to advance theory and application of individualism and collectivism and cultural tightness-looseness. In her ongoing research, she is examining how the cultural context influences the effectiveness of HR "best practices." Her work on diversity and inclusion focuses primarily on investigating climate for inclusion as well as other moderators of the diversity to performance relationship. She has been working most recently on multi-level research funded by the SHRM Foundation and the Department of Labor that examines the interplay of organizational practices and climate, leader characteristics, group processes, and experiences in shaping the engagement of workers in general, as well as of aging workers and workers with disabilities in particular. In her third stream of research, Nishii focuses on employees' perceptions and experiences of organizational practices. She is particularly interested in the role of employee perceptions, attitudes and behavior in driving unit and organizational performance.

Professor Nishii regularly presents her research at conferences for SIOP and the Academy of Management, and her research has been published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Academy of Management Review, and Personnel Psychology. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Management. Professor Nishii has also worked as an organizational consultant for several organizations on a variety of topics, with the bulk of this work focusing on diversity and inclusion in organizations.