Daniel Diermeier

Talk Title: Anticipating and Managing Reputational Risk

Daniel Diermeier is a faculty member at Northwestern University, holding appointments as the IBM Professor of Regulation and Competitive Practice of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at the Kellogg School of Management, as well as Professor of Political Science at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. In addition, he is the director of the Ford Motor Company Center for Global Citizenship, which is home to the Global Health Initiative (GHI), a partnership between Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Feinberg School of Medicine, Abbott Laboratories, Inverness Medical and IDEO.  Professor Diermeier also served as the founding director of the Social Enterprise at Kellogg program (SEEK) and the founding co-director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO).  He is a co-creator and academic director of the CEO Perspective Program, a joint venture between the Kellogg School of Management, the Corporate Leadership Center, and Kellogg’s most senior executive education program.

Professor Diermeier’s teaching and research focuses on political institutions, the interaction of business and politics, crisis leadership, reputation management, integrated strategy, and strategic aspects of corporate social responsibility.  His work has been published by numerous academic journals in the fields of management, economics, and political science and has been featured globally in media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Business Week, the Financial Times, Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, De Telegraaf. He has lectured globally on crisis and reputation management, integrated strategy, activists and consumer boycotts, political strategy and regulatory management. He has also led customized programs in biotechnology, energy, financial services, manufacturing, medical marketing, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, media management, regulatory management, security management, and transportation management. He has received numerous awards including the prestigious Faculty Pioneer Award from the Aspen Institute in 2007, named the “Oscar of Business Schools” by the Financial Times. In 2001, he was the recipient of the L.G. Lavengood Professor of the Year Award at Kellogg School of Management, and is a four-time recipient of Kellogg’s Sidney J. Levy Teaching Award.

Daniel Diermeier has been an advisor to some of the world’s leading companies. His clients include: Abbott Laboratories, Accenture, AHIP, Allianz , Baker & McKenzie, Baxter International, BP, Cargill, the City of Chicago (Office of the Mayor), CIBC, ConAgra, The Dallas Morning News, Exelon, the FBI, W. W. Grainger, GroupOn, Guidant, HSBC, IFCO Systems, Intercontinental Exchange, Johnson & Johnson, Kraft, McDonald’s, Metro AG, Metro Cash & Carry International, Nicor, People’s Energy, REWE Group, Roche Diagnostics, Shell, State Farm and Takeda.

In December 2004 he was appointed to the Management Board of the FBI. He has also served as a senior advisor to PricewaterhouseCoopers and as an advisory board member for Quantum Secure, a security management technology company. Professor Diermeier is a member of the Economic Club of Chicago, and author of the new book Reputation Rules: Strategies for building your company’s most valuable asset (McGraw-Hill, April 2011).

Susan Lichtenstein

Senior Vice President, Corporate Affairs and Chief Legal Officer

Talk Title: A Delicate Balance – Managing Both Legal and Reputational Risk

Susan R. Lichtenstein is Senior Vice President, Corporate Affairs and Chief Legal Officer of Hill-Rom Holdings, Inc., the world's foremost provider of patient support surfaces and other medical technical equipment for hospitals and post-acute care settings.  Ms. Lichtenstein is globally responsible for all quality assurance and regulatory affairs for the company (including operational responsibility for quality in six plants around the world), government affairs, legal affairs, corporate communications and corporate support services. 

Ms. Lichtenstein's career has spanned corporate, government, and private law practice.  Prior to joining Hill-Rom, Ms. Lichtenstein was Corporate Vice President and General Counsel of Baxter International Inc., where she had global responsibility for legal matters, corporate communications, government affairs and public policy.

Prior to joining Baxter, Ms. Lichtenstein served as General Counsel to the governor of Illinois. Previously, Ms. Lichtenstein worked in the telecommunications industry where she was Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary for both Ameritech Corporation and Tellabs, Inc. She also served as Deputy Corporation Counsel for the City of Chicago after having spent a decade with Schiff Hardin & Waite, where she was a partner working on complex litigation, corporate counseling and internal investigations, with particular emphasis on regulated industries.

Ms. Lichtenstein serves on the boards of numerous civic and philanthropic organizations, including RUSH University Medical Center, Olin-Sang-Ruby Union Institute and the Midwest Region of the Anti-Defamation League. She is a member of The Economic Club of Chicago, The Chicago Network, and is a steering committee member of the Senior Businesswomen's Forum. A frequent speaker on crisis management, women in business, corporate governance, and legal department management, Ms. Lichtenstein was co-founder and co-chair of the Women in Business, Politics and Powers symposium series.

Harlan Loeb

Global Practice Chair, Crisis & Risk Management

Talk Title: The Drivers of Strategy in Non-Market Risk Management

Harlan Loeb heads Edelman's Global Crisis & Risk Practice and is an industry expert in reputational risk and crisis preparedness. Harlan has developed a proprietary auditing tool to assess organizational crisis readiness and has lead dozens of crisis simulations and workshops. In his training work, Harlan's enterprise approach moves beyond functional preparedness to a model that embraces crisis readiness as a core capability. Concentrating on the interconnectivity between business strategy, operational, market financial, and reputational risk, Harlan takes an "inside out" approach to crisis preparedness. With over 25 years of experience, he has worked across every industry sector representing clients including: CME Group, Hangzhou Zhongce Rubber Co., Sulzon, Allstate, Gilead Sciences, Citadel, Quiznos, Enron, Nicor Gas, BASF, Encana, Burger King, Mitsubishi Corporation, Mars, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Dow Chemical Company, HSBC, General Mills, Navistar, Darden, Notre Dame, and United Airlines.

Before joining Edelman, Harlan was a founding principal of the Chicago office of FD and a member of its US Board of Directors. Licensed to the Bar in both Illinois and Wisconsin, Harlan served as Regional Counsel for the ADL covering an 18 state region, a position in which he directed the League's efforts in civil rights litigation and fact finding. During his tenure at ADL, Harlan worked closely with national and global intelligence agencies and enforcement bodies in connection with training programs on bias-based crimes and domestic terrorism. He began his legal career in private practice with the Milwaukee law firm of Godfrey & Kahn, where his focus included regulatory issues and government relations.

Harlan is also a Professor of Crisis Management & the Court of Public Opinion at Northwestern University Law School.

Russell Walker
Associate Director of the Zell Center for Risk Research

Dr. Russell Walker is the Associate Director of the Zell Center for Risk Research at Kellogg. His expertise is in the application of analytics in business, with specific emphasis to marketing and risk management decisions. He serves as the academic director for executive education in risk management offered by Kellogg through its partnership with PRMIA. His research interests include how organizations deploy analytics, the use of information in enterprise risk management, managing strategic risk, and emergence of “data creators” in the post information age. Russell worked for seven years as a corporate strategist at Capital One Financial, where he was responsible for enterprise-wise analytics.