Jay has more than 30 years of experience as a tax attorney specializing in employee benefits.  Prior to joining World, Jay was a Sr. VP and Senior ERISA Attorney with Lockton was previously the national practice leader for the legal and research team at WT.W

Jay served as a Peace Corps volunteer and business consultant from 1979 to 1982. 

He has an LL.M.  in taxation from New York University School of Law, J.D. with distinction from the University of Arizona College of Law and a BSBA from Washington University in St. Louis.  Jay is the former Chair of the American Benefits Council, an adjunct professor of employee benefits in the LL.M. program at Washington University School of Law.

Karl Ahlrichs specializes in helping professionals make order from chaos. He is a national speaker, author, and consultant, presenting on the people issues in all industries, and is often quoted in the local and national media. 

Karl’s experience is ideally suited to times of organizational change as he pulls on risk management and organizational development theories to replace “best practices” with “next practices”. He owes much of his communications mastery to working as a writer and editor in daily media, to on-the-job writing experience and to the process of becoming a published author.

He joined Gregory & Appel in 2010 after serving as a founding partner of ExactHire, bringing his HR, operations, diversity & belonging, and learning & development skills with him. Karl’s affinity for design, composition and learning started at a very young age, by taking and examining thousands of boring pictures with the goal of improving his craft. He loves deploying that practice-to-improve approach with all manner of hobbies including writing haiku, mastering cutting-edge technology and learning Spanish.

In 2003, he was named the SHRM Human Resource Professional of the Year for the State of Indiana. He is on the Boards of several organizations, including the Maryland CPA Society.  He has lived in Scotland and Spain and lives to explore new experiences with his wife and family.

Lance J. Richards, SHRM-SCP, GPHR, SPHR, HRMP is a work force futurist and global HR strategist.  Most recently, he was vice president of Innovation for Kelly Services. Based in Detroit, Lance is one of SHRM's top rated speakers. He is a frequent speaker and writer on workplace issues, having presented at HR conferences around the globe. He is co-author of the Amazon-published book Gen Now (which is available in the SHRM Bookstore). Lance brings almost 25 years of cross-border expertise, with companies like British Telecom, Verizon, Bell Canada and Kelly Services. He is also a Visiting Professor at the Sasin Business School in Bangkok, where he teaches a graduate course in Global Human Capital.
Follow Lance on Twitter @LanceJRichards.
 

Internationally recognized as an expert in the field, Mr. Kushner is one of the nation's most sought after speakers on HR strategy and employee benefits. He has advised four U.S. Presidents on health care and has testified before the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee and the U.S. House Small Business Committee on employee benefit issues.

A frequent resource to the media, Mr. Kushner contributes to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, AP, Knight-Ridder, the Kiplinger Washington Newsletter, CNN News, Fortune, MSNBC and Good Morning America among others. More importantly, he and his wife Tamis have five children and four wonderful (and amazing!) grandchildren.

Olivia Fox Cabane has lectured at Stanford, Yale, Harvard, MIT, the Marine Corps War College and the United Nations. As keynote speaker and executive coach to the leadership of Fortune 500 companies, she helps people become more persuasive, influential, and inspiring. From a base of thorough behavioral science, Olivia extracts the most practical tools for business, applying the latest in global behavioral science to everyday leadership needs to improve her clients' productivity, effectiveness and efficiency. 

In addition to being a columnist for Forbes and The Huffington Post, Olivia is often featured in media such as The New York Times, Bloomberg or BusinessWeek. She has been profiled in The Wall Street Journal as well as NPR's Marketplace show. Olivia currently serves as Director of Innovative Leadership for Stanford's StartX program. Her course at Berkeley's Business School was so popular that university staff had to guard the entrance to ensure that only the students admitted to that course gained entrance. Her first book, The Charisma Myth, published by Penguin/ Random House, went into second printing before it even launched. 

Olivia has both French and American nationalities and is fluent in 4 languages; her books have been translated into 17 languages and she was the youngest person ever to have been appointed Foreign Trade Advisor to the French Government. Her upcoming book on the mental side of innovation is representative of her ability to take the complexities of psychological factors and transform them into immediately applicable leadership tools for individuals.

Dianna Booher, an expert in executive communications, is the author of 45 books, published in 26 countries and 20 languages, with nearly 4 million copies sold.  Her latest books include Creating Personal Presence: Look, Talk, Think, and Act Like a Leader and Communicate with Confidence, the Revised and Expanded Edition. As CEO of Booher Consultants, an executive communication training firm, Dianna and her staff travel worldwide to help organizations improve the effectiveness of their communication:  oral, written, interpersonal, and cross-functional. National media frequently feature her work and interview her on critical workplace communication issues—Good Morning America, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Bloomberg. Successful Meetings magazine has named her to its list of “21 Top Speakers for the 21st Century.”  

Follow Dianna on Twitter @diannabooher.

Richard is a Certified Master Facilitator™ and Principal with Leadership Strategies, Inc., a firm specializing in providing clients with professional facilitators to lead sessions in strategic planning, process improvement, information needs analysis, and issue resolution. The organization also focuses on teaching leadership training classes in group facilitation, consulting, strategic planning, project planning, team building and management excellence.

Prior to Leadership Strategies, Inc., Richard was an executive with software services companies where he had responsibility for the delivery, training and support of complex systems including customer relationship management, finance and human resources, and enterprise requirements planning. In these roles Richard had in-depth experience facilitating sessions with clients, vendors/partners and staff in the design, implementation and support of mission critical projects. In these roles he led the training of over 10,000 professionals and administrative support personnel.  

Earlier in his career, Richard was a consultant with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) for eight years where he worked on engagements in the area of strategic planning, profit improvement, change management and systems development. He was part of the team that developed the firm's training materials for facilitation and leadership programs as well as project management.