Speakers for the 2007 Symposium:
Keynote speakers:
Tom and Kate Chappell
Tom Chappell
Tom Chappell and his wife Kate left the corporate world for Kennebunk, Maine, in 1968 to "move back to the land," where they have raised their five children. Since cofounding Tom's of Maine with Kate in 1970, he has dedicated himself to creating a company that produces innovative, natural personal care products in a caring and creative work environment.
Tom hopes to set an example of ethical business standards for others. His first book, The Soul of a Business: Managing for Profit and the Common Good, set a practical yet powerful new agenda for ethical and profitable business leadership in the 1990s.
His most recent book, Managing Upside Down: Seven Intentions for Values-Centered Leadership, was released in September of 1999. It offers an insightful step-by-step guide to Tom's management philosophy: leading with one's values by integrating the organizational, financial, and social components of a business.
Along with the book's release, Tom founded The Saltwater Institute, a nonprofit organization offering innovative leadership development programs such as THE SEVEN INTENTIONS® of Values-Centered Leadership Program. These programs provide performance tools to help executives and their organizations create profitable values-centered enterprises.
Kate Chappell
As cofounder with husband Tom and Vice President of Tom's of Maine, Kate is involved in many aspects of the business with an emphasis on the research and creation of new products. Kate is a member of the Board of Directors and the Leadership Circle at Tom's of Maine.
Kate serves on the Foundations for Ministry Committee for the Episcopal Diocese of Maine and the advisory councils of the Maine Audubon Society, the Chewonki Foundation, the University of Maine Alumni Association, and Maine Businesses for Social Responsibility. She is also a past member of Hospice Volunteers of Saco Valley and a past president of Kennebunk Health Services, as well as a current member of their Ethics Committees
Frances Moore Lappé, noted author and activist
Frances Moore Lappe was born in Pendleton Oregon. A graduate of Earlham College in Indiana, she was a “26-year-old trusting her common sense” when she began the research that led to the publication of Diet for a Small Planet (1971), a book which sold over three million copies and changed forever the way people think about food.
Her little book showed that human practices, not natural disasters, cause worldwide hunger. Food scarcity results when grain, rich in nutrients and capable of supporting vast populations, is fed to livestock to produce meat which yields only a fraction of those nutrients.
In Food First; Beyond the Myth of Scarcity (written with Joseph Collins, 1977) she went on to identify other causes of starvation: centralized control of farmland and economic pressures to produce “cash” crops rather than basic food products. The authors argued that western colonization of underdeveloped countries create the conditions for waste and poor distribution of food resources that allow whole populations to go hungry. Their vision for feeding the world is one of “food self-reliance,” in which communities produce the food they consume and manufacture the tools and fertilizers that they need.
A passion for the democratic process infuses her work as a co-founder of two national organizations: the Institute for Food and Development Policy based in California and the Center for Living Democracy, a ten-year initiative which encourages “regular citizens to contribute to problem-solving in all dimensions of public life.” In 1987 Lappe became the fourth American to receive the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the “Alternative Nobel,” for her “vision and work healing our planet and uplifting humanity.” In 2002 Lappe and her daughter, Anna, published Hope’s Edge; The Next Diet for a Small Planet. Like other visionary leaders, Lappe sees hope as something to be lived not sought after: “A lot of people think we find hope by marshaling evidence and proving there is grounds for it. But hope isn’t what we find in evidence; it’s what we become in action.” It is not surprising, then, that her next book is called Choosing Courage in a Culture of Fear.
David Korten
Dr. David C. Korten has over thirty-five years of experience in preeminent business, academic, and international development institutions as well as in contemporary citizen action organizations. Trained in economics, organization theory, and business strategy with M.B.A. and Ph. D. degrees from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, his early career was devoted to setting up business schools in low income countries — starting with Ethiopia while still a doctoral candidate at Stanford — in the hope that creating a new class of professional business entrepreneurs would be the key to ending global poverty.
After graduation, Korten completed his military service during the Vietnam War as a captain in the U.S. Air Force, serving in Air Force headquarters command, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency.
He then served for five and a half years as a Visiting Associate Professor of the Harvard University Graduate School of Business where he taught in Harvard's middle management, M.B.A. and doctoral programs. He also served as the Harvard Business School advisor to the Nicaragua-based Central American Management Institute. He subsequently joined the staff of the Harvard Institute for International Development, where he headed a Ford Foundation-funded project to strengthen the organization and management of national family planning programs.
In the late 1970s, Korten left U.S. academia and moved to Southeast Asia, where he lived for nearly fifteen years, serving first as a Ford Foundation project specialist, and later as Asia regional advisor on development management to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). His work there won him international recognition for his contributions to pioneering the development of powerful strategies for transforming public bureaucracies into responsive support systems dedicated to strengthening community control and management of land, water, and forestry resources.
J. Robert Ouimet
J. Robert Ouimet is chairman and CEO of Holding O.C.B. Inc. and Ouimet-Tomasso Inc., a large food processing company based in Montreal. Ouimet inherited the business from his father, as well as the elder's belief that the human being is just as important as productivity and profits. The company's motto is Orare ad gerendum in Deo (Pray so as to Manage in God), after a prayer by Mother Teresa in 1983 on the 50th anniversary of the company's founding.
Each is loved by God. "We call it a workplace so there is work done by human beings. For me, each person has been created and loved by God. Therefore, the workplace is a precious place," said Ouimet, 71, in an interview. "As managers, we must carry in our hearts the colossal importance of what impact our management will have on our employees." His unorthodox style spills over into the company's headquarters.
Expensive wall hangings are replaced with simple posters carrying messages like Be the Light, Kindness and the Serenity Prayer. Rather than whipping his managers into a production-oriented frenzy, morning meetings begin with a quiet prayer. And each factory is equipped with a non-denominational silent room inspired by Mother Teresa for meditation and centring. "Mother Teresa used to say that the greatest enemy of God is noise and the best friend of God is silence. Through silence he can reach us."
Ouimet described the rooms as a lighthouse in the competitive world. "We do more than $110 million (a year) in volume in a very competitive industry. We are continuing to increase productivity and efficiency. But at the same time, we try to bring to our workers some beautiful and profound values that often do not reach a workplace," he said. "I challenge any leader to run an organization and to grow slowly over 20 or 30 years, the well-being as well as the productivity, without help from the spirituality of one's choice. It will eat you up."
Aaron Feuerstein 
Aaron Feuerstein is the former President and Chief Executive Officer of Malden Mills Industries, Inc. Leading the company founded by his grandfather Henry Feuerstein in 1906, and following in the footsteps of his father Samuel C. Feuerstein, Aaron Feuerstein has managed Malden Mills’ tremendous growth over the past four decades. Under Aaron Feuerstein’s leadership, the company has seen its export capacity flourish, growing from a domestic mill to an international textile supplier of Polartec® and Polarfleece® fabrics.
Today, under Aaron’s direction, Malden Mills is the largest employer in its home city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, rich in its own textile heritage, with over 2,000 employees, and annual sales of $280 million. Feuerstein’s sensitivity for the welfare of his employees preserves the family spirit that built Malden Mills into an international leader.
He has made it a cardinal principle that the employees at Malden are its most-valued asset. After fire struck Malden Mills, destroying three out of ten of the factory’s century-old buildings, Feuerstein vowed that evening to rebuild the 90-year-old business, and announced that he would pay all of his employees full pay for the next 90 days, with health benefits for 180 days. Within two months, 70 percent of the total work force was back to work, and by September of 1997 the new Malden Mills manufacturing facility was fully operational. Today, Feuerstein has rebuilt Malden Mills into the most technically advanced, environmentally-correct mills in the nation.
Linda Ferguson
Dr. Linda J. Ferguson is president and owner of New Paradigms Alliance Inc., a consulting firm specializing in organization development and personal mastery. Dr. Ferguson facilitates groups, leads retreats, and conducts workshops on personal transformation, non-defensive communication, leadership development, team building, and working with passion and purpose. She teaches the process of Transformational Empowerment TM and provides coaching for people interested in making a positive change in their life.
Dr. Ferguson earned her Ph.D. from Indiana University (I.U.-Bloomington) in Organizational Behavior with a Masters also from I.U. studying Social Psychology. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in psychology and management at colleges in Indiana and Virginia. In 1994 she traveled abroad for six months to Asia, Australia, Israel and Europe. Dr. Ferguson resides in Roanoke, Virginia. Ferguson has worked as an assistant professor of business administration at Hollins University, and is the author of The Path for Greatness - Spirituality at Work.
She is now working on her second book "Staying Grounded in Shifting Sand" while she leads classes and workshops throughout the country.
"Dr. Ferguson succeeds in advancing significantly our understanding of how to bring the spiritual side of our lives to the offi ce on a daily basis. She shows, irrespective of one's particular religious credo, how to tap that often neglected side of one's persona and how to be a complete person. Her objective, besides increasing one's personal fulfillment, is to craft organizations with higher consciousness-firms that attend to all those they reach (customers, employees, stockholders, etc.) as people, not as objects. Dr. Ferguson lays out practical steps to achieve this." Francis D. Tuggle, Ph. D., Dean of School of Business at Chapman University
I wish all my staff and I had this book as a guide during my 30 years as CEO of a human service organization. This book should be in the hands of every person in the workplace including every CEO (especially every CEO). It has the power to transform a dreary and unsatisfying place of employment into a more vibrant arena promoting greater productivity as well as individual satisfaction and spiritual growth. Ferguson has created a new paradigm which employers and employees can use to change their workplace into an environment promoting a happier and more productive workplace." Dick Hawkins Retired Executive Director Health and Human Services Agency
MEET OUR SPONSORS:
Alan and Harriet Lewis
Alan E. Lewis
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer Over the past 20 years, Alan Lewis’s vision has transformed Grand Circle Corporationfrom a $23-million-a-year travel company into a $700- million-a-year,fast-moving, global enterprise serving American travelers over 50.
Alan and his wife Harriet purchased Grand Circle Travel in 1985 with a vision to“help change people’s lives.” To do so, they established a unique, values-based corporate culture to foster personal and professional growth for associates, culturally rich international vacations forcustomers, and, in 1992, to benefit the communities where Grand Circle works and travels, the GrandCircle Foundation, a comprehensive philanthropic program that today is critical to the company’s success and profitability.
Under Alan’s leadership, Grand Circlehas expanded from one office in Bostonin 1997 to 45offices with 3,000 employees on six continents today. Brands include GrandCircle Travel, Overseas Adventure Travel, and a fleet of 45 small ships that in the past two years have been cited by Conde Nast Traveler as among the best in the world.
A strong believer in experiential learning, Alan established Grand Circle’s PinnacleLeadership Centerin Kensington, NH in 1992. The center hosts Grand Circle’s annual outdoor retreat, during which associates engage in a series of hands-on, Outward Bound-style challenge activities. This retreat, as well as several year-round employee development programs, promote the values that Lewis has instituted to guide the company’s business practice: open and courageous communications, risk taking, teamwork, speed, quality, and thriving in change.
Harriet R. Lewis
Vice Chair, Board of Directors, Grand Circle Corporation
Chair, The Grand Circle Foundation
Grand Circle Corporation’s Vice Chair Harriet Lewis has shared the vision to “help change people’s lives” with her husband, Alan, since 1985, when they acquired Grand Circle Travel in 1985. Today, $700 million Grand Circle offers myriad programs in support of its global workforce, aged 50-plus travelers, and the communities in which it works and travels. In her role as chair of the Grand Circle Foundation, the company’s nonprofit, charitable organization, Harriet extends that mission to the communities Grand Circletouches at home and abroad.
The company has expanded from its Boston headquarters to more than 45 regional offices and employs more than 3,000 people worldwide. Both Harriet and her husband Alan’s commitment to creating a supportive work environment has led toone of the most generous and comprehensive benefits programs in the nation,highlighted by employee sabbaticals and tuition reimbursement for coursespromoting both professional and personal growth. In 1995 she created the company’s Women’s Development Network, which has evolved into a leadership program for men and women at all levels of management. And she helped establish Grand Circle’s Pinnacle LeadershipCenter, an outdoor facility in New Hampshire, which uses a hands-on, experiential learning model to train employeesin teamwork, risk taking, and leadership building.
In 1992, Harriet and Alan set up the nonprofit Grand Circle Foundation to support the communities in which Grand Circle works and travels. The Foundation has donated more than $28 million to humanitarian, cultural, and environmental endeavors in Boston and around the world. In the last 11 years, the Foundation’s Community Service Team, which is led by Grand Circle employees, donated more than 25,000 hours of service to local non-profitorganizations. The Foundation has received several honors, among them the Hero of Philanthropy Award from the National Society of Fundraising Executives and designation as the first member of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre Partners in Conservation.
