General Session

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, Cabane 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, Cabane 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. 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. Cabane previously served as director
of Innovative Leadership for Stanford's StartX program. Her first book, The Charisma Myth, published by Penguin/Random House, went into second printing before it even launched.

Cabane 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.

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Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., SHRM-SCP, is President and Chief Executive Officer of SHRM. With nearly 340,000 members in 180 countries, SHRM impacts the lives of more than 362 million workers and their families globally.

As a global leader on the future of employment, culture and leadership, Mr. Taylor is a sought-after voice on all matters affecting work, workers and the workplace. Recognized as one of the “300 Most Influential Executives in Corporate America” for 2024 by Savoy Magazine and one of the “Most Influential People Shaping Public Policy” in our nation’s capital by Washingtonian Magazine, Mr. Taylor is frequently asked to testify before Congress on critical workforce issues and authors the weekly USA Today column, "Ask HR."

Mr. Taylor's career spans more than 20 years as a lawyer, human resources executive and CEO in both the not-for-profit and for-profit spaces. He has held senior and chief executive roles at IAC/InteractiveCorp, Viacom's Paramount Pictures, Blockbuster Entertainment Group, the McGuireWoods law firm and Compass Group USA. Most recently, Mr. Taylor was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund.

He is the author of the national bestseller, RESET: A Leader’s Guide to Work in an Age of Upheaval, which immediately upon its release in September 2021, was in the top three of The Wall Street Journal’s list of best-selling hardcover business books.

Mr. Taylor is a member of the United Way Worldwide Board of Trustees and serves on the corporate boards of XPO Logistics (NYSE: XPO), Flores & Associates, and Guild Education. He previously served on the White House American Workforce Policy Advisory Board and as chairman of the President's Advisory Board on Historically Black Colleges and Universities during the Trump Administration.

The Women Business Collaborative (WBC) named Mr. Taylor as one of its 2023 Trailblazers in Gender Equity and Diversity for his work to achieve equal position, pay and power for all women in business. In 2020, he received the Distinguished Executive of the Year Award from the Academy of Management, and he was named 2021 ALA Professional Society CEO of the Year by CEO Update.

He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources and is licensed to practice law in Florida, Illinois and Washington, D.C.

Sheryl Sandberg is chief operating officer at Facebook, overseeing the firm's business operations. She also serves on Facebook’s board of directors. Prior to Facebook, Sheryl was vice president of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google, chief of staff for the United States Treasury Department under President Clinton, a management consultant with McKinsey & Company, and an economist with the World Bank.

Sheryl received a BA summa cum laude from Harvard University and an MBA with highest distinction from Harvard Business School.

Sheryl is the co-author of Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy with Wharton professor and bestselling author Adam Grant. She is also the author of the bestsellers Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead and Lean In for Graduates. She is the founder of the Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation, a nonprofit organization that works to build a more equal and resilient world through two key initiatives, LeanIn.Org and OptionB.Org. Sheryl serves on the boards of Facebook, Women for Women International, ONE, and SurveyMonkey. 

Sheryl lives in Menlo Park with her son and daughter.

Coretha Rushing has over 30 years of corporate business and leadership experience.

She has worked in various executive roles at Equifax Inc., The Coca-Cola Co., Pepsi, IBM and Cameron Wesley LLC and also had her own human resource consulting firm. Additionally, she has provided consulting services and served on various nonprofit boards. She currently serves as a board member of 2U Inc., an educational technology platform company, and is a member of the Compensation and Succession Committee.

Coretha served the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), a 300,000-member global human resource organization, for eight years as a board member. During that period, she served as board chair and board chair emeritus. Currently, Coretha serves as an executive coach to various clients. She also provides advice and counsel to Kano Partners, a private investment partnership specializing in the acquisition, support and sale of family and founder-based businesses and startup businesses. She also serves as an advisor for Evident ID Inc., a tech company that supports companies that want to screen and contact trace employees to monitor COVID-19 status.

Coretha retired in January as the senior vice president and chief people officer for Equifax Inc., a 3B global credit and data analytics organization currently based in 24 countries. She joined the firm in May 2006 and led the global HR organization and the company’s Foundation during its greatest period of financial growth, global expansion and product innovation and during its biggest business challenge: a cybersecurity breach.

Prior to joining Equifax, Coretha served as president of Cameron Wesley LLC, a human resource strategy and executive coaching firm.

From 1996 to 2004, Coretha held progressively senior roles at The Coca-Cola Co. She was promoted in 2000 as the first woman and Black EVP, chief people officer, for the company. During her tenure as the chief people officer, she played an instrumental role in the resolution of the largest U.S. racial discrimination lawsuit, working with the board of directors and a court-appointed board chaired by Alexis Herman, a former U.S. secretary of labor. Coretha also led the development of leading-edge people programs and initiatives that serve as the foundation for the company's current leadership and employee programs designed to ensure business success and leading-edge diversity, inclusion and equity programs. Other experiences include working as the vice president, human resources, for the Midwest division of Pizza Hut, a division of PepsiCo.

She began her global HR career at IBM where she held several roles during her 10 years across all HR disciplines, supporting diverse businesses in various major IBM US locations.

A native of Virginia, Coretha received her undergraduate degree in education from East Carolina University and holds a Master of Education with an emphasis in human resources and counseling from The George Washington University.

She is active in several professional and community organizations and has served as a panelist and keynote speaker at various business, university, women and human resource conferences. She has received numerous community awards and has been recognized for four consecutive years (2016-2019) for outstanding business achievements by Black Enterprise.

She currently resides in Atlanta and St. Petersburg, Fla., with her husband, Howard Smith.

Veteran Democratic political strategist Donna Brazile is a Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. She is the former interim Chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, and the author of the upcoming book Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House. She is a former syndicated newspaper and magazine columnist, and the former Vice-Chair for civic engagement and voter participation at the DNC as well as the former Chair of the DNC’s Voting Rights Institute. Brazile is the founder and managing director of Brazile and Associates, LLC, a consulting, grassroots advocacy and training firm based in Washington, D.C. She was a fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics in 2001 and has lectured at more than 200 colleges and universities in the United States and abroad. While at the Shorenstein Center, Brazile will conduct research and write about understanding American democracy after the cyber-attack on the 2016 election. In her presentations, she addresses our current political environment, hot-topic legislation, campaigns, and voting.

Brazile was named to O magazine’s first-ever list of 20 “remarkable visionaries.” Washingtonian magazine named her among its “100 Most Powerful Women,” while Essence magazine listed her as one of the “Top 50 Women in America.” The author of the best-selling memoir Cooking with Grease: Stirring the Pots in American Politics, she is also an on-air contributor to ABC, regularly appearing on This Week. She contributed to Essence magazine’s 2016 presidential coverage and to O, The Oprah magazine. Brazile has made three cameo appearances on CBS’s The Good Wife, appeared twice on Netflix’s House of Cards and, most recently, on BET’s Being Mary Jane. She received the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s highest award for political achievement and, in 2017, was a recipient of Harvard University’s prestigious W. E. B. Du Bois Medal—the university’s highest honor in the field of African and African American Studies.

Brazile began her political career at the age of nine when she worked to elect a City Council candidate who had promised to build a playground in her neighborhood. The candidate won, the swing sets was installed, and a lifelong passion for politics was ignited. Four decades and innumerable state and local campaigns later, Brazile has worked on every presidential campaign from 1976 through 2000, when she served as campaign manager for former Vice President Al Gore, becoming the first African-American woman to manage a presidential campaign.

She is currently on the board of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, the National Democratic Institute, the National Institute for Civil Discourse, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the BlackAmericaWeb.com Relief Fund, Inc. She also serves as co-chair for Democrats for Public Education.

A native of New Orleans, Brazile was appointed by former Governor Kathleen Blanco to serve on the Louisiana Recovery Board to work for the rebuilding of the state and to advocate for the Gulf recovery on the national stage. Brazile was recently appointed by New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu to serve on the Tricenntinal Commission. Aside from working for the full recovery of her native New Orleans, Brazile’s passion is encouraging young people to vote, working within the political system in order to strengthen it, and running for public office.

She is the proud recipient of honorary doctorate degrees from Louisiana State University, North Carolina A&T State University, Grambling State University, Morehouse School of Medicine, Northeastern Illinois University, Thomas Jefferson University, and Xavier University of Louisiana. 

Gretchen Rubin is the author of several books, including the blockbuster New York Times bestsellers, The Happiness Project and Happier at Home, and most recently, Better Than Before. She has an enormous readership, both in print and online, and her books have sold more than two million copies worldwide, in more than thirty languages. On her weekly podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin, she discusses good habits and happiness with her sister Elizabeth Craft. Rubin started her career in law and was clerking for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor when she realized she wanted to be a writer. She lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.