SPEAKERS
CEO PERSPECTIVE
PURPOSE-LED PERFORMANCE: DOING WELL BY DOING GOOD
Lawrence Kurzius is the Chairman, President and CEO of McCormick & Company, a global leader in flavor with over 11,000 employees around the world. He will discuss McCormick’s Purpose-Led Performance approach to corporate social responsibility and sustainability, which outlines ambitious 2025 goals and programs that will positively impact people, communities and our planet. His presentation will speak to the company’s dual commitment to delivering industry leading financial performance while doing the right thing, and will address the broader importance of corporate social responsibility and its related value to the flavor industry.
Lawrence E. Kurzius
Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, McCormick & Company
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Lawrence Kurzius is Chairman, President and CEO of McCormick & Company and has served in several leadership positions throughout his tenure, including President and Chief Operating Officer (COO), President and Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), President US Consumer and President of International including Europe, Middle East, Africa, China and Asia Pacific. Mr. Kurzius was promoted to CEO in February 2016 and was elected Chairman of the Board, effective February 2017..
Since joining McCormick in 2003, Mr. Kurzius has held many executive management roles, including President – U.S. Consumer Foods; President – Europe, Middle East and Africa; President - International Businesses; President – Global Consumer and Chief Administrative Officer; and President and Chief Operating Officer.
Mr. Kurzius joined McCormick through the acquisition of Zatarain’s, where he spent 12 years and was President and CEO. He also served as a marketing executive with the Quaker Oats Company and Mars Inc.’s Uncle Ben’s Company.
Mr. Kurzius graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Science in Economics. He is currently a trustee of Jacksonville University.
Mr. Kurzius serves on the Board of Directors for the Grocery Manufacturers Association, National Association of Manufacturers, Greater Baltimore Committee, and National Sporting Library and Museum.
MAIN STREET TO WALL STREET: HOW ARE WE DOING?
Counter to what the experts predicted, stocks sold off only briefly on election night and since then, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has made a succession of new all-time highs. So, what is Wall Street telling us about Washington and how will Washington, or a Trump presidency, affect Wall Street? (and even Main Street?) If, indeed, the President rolls back 70% of all federal regulations, as promised, the first beneficiaries will be financials and pharma, banks and bio-tech. If tax rates are slashed, wealthy individuals and U.S. corporations will benefit big-league!
But there will be downsides to a Trump presidency, as well. A trade war with Mexico and China could lead to a deep recession and intense pain for companies that either do business in those countries or rely on the international supply chain to obtain goods and services from around the world. There will likely be faster growth, but more inflation. There may be higher rates and a new head of the Fed. The short-run reaction on Wall Street has been positive, but what about the long-run implications for Wall Street, Main Street and Washington?
Ron Insana does a deep dive into uncharted waters to help you navigate a new economy that may have islands of prosperity in what may well be very turbulent waters.
Ron Insana
Senior Analyst, CNBC and Financial Industry Expert
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Ron Insana is a contributor to CNBC and MSNBC, where he discusses the most pressing economic and market issues of the day. He also delivers The Market Scoreboard Report to radio stations around the country.
He has written for Money magazine and USA Today and has hosted two nationally syndicated radio programs.
In addition to his work as a business journalist, Insana was the CEO of Insana Capital Partners, from 2006-2008, which, at its peak, managed the $125 million Insana Capital Partners "Legends Fund."
For nearly three decades, Insana has been a highly respected business journalist and money manager, who began his career at the Financial News Network in 1984 and joined CNBC when FNN and CNBC merged in 1991.
Insana is well-known for his high-profile interviews, which included Presidents Clinton and Bush; billionaire investors Warren Buffett, George Soros and Julian Robertson, among others: captains of industry from Bill Gates to Jack Welch and to the late Steve Jobs, top economists, analysts and global heads of state, from Former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to Jordan's current Queen, Rania.
Insana was named one of the "Top 100 Business News Journalists of the 20th Century" and was nominated for a news and documentary Emmy for his role in NBC's coverage of 9/11.
Ron is the editor of “Insana’s Market Intelligence,” a subscription-based newsletter. He has authored four books on Wall Street and is a highly regarded lecturer on domestic and global economics, financial markets and economic policy issues.
WHY CULTURE AND TEAMS ARE TOMORROW'S KILLER APPS
The old way of creating a sustainable competitive advantage in the market was to build moats and barriers to entry. But smart phones and digital commerce have proven they can tunnel under the moats and fly over the barriers with ease – and often with astonishingly little invested capital. What can smart companies do to “future proof” their businesses against such disruption?
Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes magazine and author of its Innovation Rules column, has identified culture and teamwork as pillars of sustainable competitive advantage in a fast-changing world.
In this presentation, Karlgaard draws upon his recent books, The Soft Edge: Where Great Companies Find Lasting Success and Team Genius – The New Science of High-Performing Organizations, to explain how great organizations put culture and teamwork at the core of their operating principles. In a world where the workforce is becoming more transient, and ideas can come to market in record times, building and maintaining a strong organizational culture centered around trust, learning and teamwork has never been a more timely topic.
Rich Karlgaard
Publisher and Columnist for Forbes, Entrepreneur & Author
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Rich Karlgaard is the publisher and global futurist of Forbes Media. In each issue of Forbes magazine, he conducts a featured CEO interview, known for its keen assessment of technology, economic, business and leadership issues.
For nearly three decades, Insana has been a highly respected business journalist and money manager, who began his career at the Financial News Network in 1984 and joined CNBC when FNN and CNBC merged in 1991.
He has been a regular panelist on one of cable news' most popular business shows, Forbes on FOX, since the show’s inception in 2001. He is a co-founder of Upside magazine, Garage Technology Partners (with Guy Kawasaki) and Silicon Valley’s premier public business forum, the 7,500-member Churchill Club. For the latter, Karlgaard won an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
Karlgaard’s 2014 book on innovation culture, The Soft Edge: Where Great Companies Find Lasting Success, rapidly became Amazon’s top seller in the category of Strategy and Competition. Management guru, Tom Peters wrote: “The Soft Edge is brilliantly organized and written—and its peerless message is right on the money for our chaotic times.” Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, wrote: “Rich Karlgaard is a navigator for the rest of us.” The Soft Edge made the lists of top business books of 2014 for Inc., Time.com, Value Walk, 800-CEO-READ, Huffington Post, and Forbes India.
His book, Team Genius: The New Science of High Performing Organizations, was published in 2015. It was endorsed by Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft and Fred Smith, CEO of FedEx.
Karlgaard is an active investor and board participant. His past board affiliations include Stanford’s Hoover Institution and Silicon Valley’s Churchill Club. He is currently a board advisory member of C3IoT, a leading Internet of Things platform company founded and run by Tom Siebel. Karlgaard holds a B.A. from Stanford University.
INDUSTRIES OF THE FUTURE
The next ten years are going to be even more disruptive than the last ten. What are the industries and innovations that are going to shake the marketplace? Drawing on his New York Times bestseller The Industries of the Future and his experience in government and industry, Alec Ross describes the next big drivers of change from artificial intelligence and robotics to cybersecurity and cybercrime. Ross describes the changes which are going to impact our future, for good and ill, and the geographic and cultural contexts out of which they are emerging.
Alec Ross
New York Times Best-Selling Author & Former Senior Advisor for Technology and Innovation at the State Department
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After graduating from Northwestern University, Ross started his career as a sixth-grade teacher with Teach for America in inner-city Baltimore. In 2000, he and three colleagues co-founded the nonprofit organization One Economy and grew it from modest origins in a basement into a global organization serving millions of low-income people, with programs on four continents.
During his time at the State Department, Ross led an effort to increase the diversity and level of problem-solving abilities in the foreign service. He managed a large-scale process for making the U.S. Department of State a more innovative institution. A 2012 study by Deloitte and the Partnership for Public Service scored the State Department as having the most innovation-friendly culture of any cabinet-level agency.
An advocate for Internet Freedom, he established a global Internet Freedom agenda that became the first distinctly 21st century human rights agenda, deploying $100M in funds for cutting-edge projects that keep the internet open and help protect citizens and activists in authoritarian environments.
Understanding the growing importance of social media, Ross conceived a system of public diplomacy through social media that now reaches 15 million people a day. He is largely responsible for creating the system of using text messaging codes to donate to relief funds. Ross also served as Convener for the Technology, Media & Telecommunications Policy Committee on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and served on the Obama-Biden Presidential Transition Team.
Ross was named one of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” by Foreign Policy Magazine, as well as one of Huffington Post’s “10 Game Changers in Politics.” In 2010, he was named Middle East/North Africa Technology Person of the Year by the Union of Arab ICT organizations and also received the Department of State Distinguished Honor Award.
Ross has served as a guest lecturer at numerous institutions, including the United Nations, Harvard Law School, and the London School of Economics His writing has appeared in publications including the Johns Hopkins SAIS Review of International Affairs and the NATO Review.
Ross currently serves as a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and sits on the board of directors or advisors for companies in the fields of technology, media, telecommunications, education, health care and cybersecurity.
Ross lives in Baltimore with his wife and their three young children.
TRADE SECRET PROTECTION IN THE MODERN FLAVOR AND FOOD INDUSTRY
Flavor formulas and food product recipes are critical intellectual property for flavor and food manufacturers respectively. As flavor and food manufacturers navigate an increasingly innovative marketplace, balancing the need to establish internal processes and external approaches to protect these trade secrets with the desire to meet customer transparency demands are essential legal and business functions. Join Joanna Drake, FEMA’s General Counsel to help you make sense of it all. Learn more about the protections and limitations of current US trade secrets law and consider how modern case law can help us identify potential strategies to address challenging trade secret protection considerations in the modern flavor industry.
Joanna Drake, JD
FEMA General Counsel
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Joanna Drake serves as General Counsel to FEMA. With more than a decade of flavor industry experience, her work with the association has covered a variety of regulatory and legal issues, including flavor and finished product labeling. Ms. Drake has given presentations to FEMA and other organizations on the current labeling implications of flavor, anticipated federal administrative action regarding “natural” labeling and the litigation landscape involving ingredient and food labeling. Prior to joining FEMA, she served as Assistant Counsel to WILD Flavors, Inc., where she worked on a variety of transactional issues and provided strategic legal counsel on product labeling and compliance matters.