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The McIntire
School of Commerce and UVa LEAD Present
High-Impact
Leadership
The Seventh
Annual Spring Symposium
Co-sponsored by McIntire’s Center for Financial Innovation, Center for
Growth Enterprises, and Center for the Management of Information
Technology
University of
Virginia
Old Cabell Hall on the Lawn
April 13, 2007
Participant Biographies
Simon Robertson
Chairman
Rolls-Royce plc
Simon Robertson was
appointed Chairman of Rolls-Royce plc Jan. 1, 2005, while President
of Goldman Sachs Europe Limited, having joined Goldman Sachs as Managing
Director in September 1997.
After retiring from
Goldman Sachs in August 2005, he started his own company, Simon
Robertson Associates LLP, offering financial advice to a limited number
of international corporate clients.
Mr. Robertson was born
in England March 4, 1941, and was educated at Eton.
In 1961 and 1962 he
trained with Banque de Neuflize, Schlumberger, Mallet in Paris,
Kredietbank N.V. in Brussels, Bankhaus Merck Finck in Munich, and Munchmeyer & Co. in Hamburg.
He joined the Kleinwort
Benson group in 1963 and worked there until his resignation in February
1997. During that time, he worked in most of the businesses of the
Kleinwort Benson group before joining the Corporate Finance Division in
1968. In 1967, he worked on secondment from Kleinwort Benson in the
Corporate Finance Department of Goldman, Sachs & Co. in New York.
He was made a Director of
Kleinwort Benson Limited in 1976 and Deputy Chairman of Kleinwort Benson
Group Plc in 1992, before which he was head of Corporate Finance. He
became Chairman of Kleinwort Benson Group Plc in March 1996. He resigned
from the Group in February 1997.
Mr. Robertson is a non-executive
Director of Berry Bros & Rudd Ltd, HSBC Holdings plc, and the Economist
Newspaper Ltd. He is also Chairman of Trustees of the Royal Academy
Trust, a Director of the Royal Opera House, a trustee of the Royal Opera
House Endowment Fund, and a trustee of the Eden Project.
Judith
McHale
Former President and CEO
Discovery Communications Inc.
As President and CEO of Discovery Communications Inc. (DCI), Judith McHale
was responsible for the overall strategic direction, business
development and operations of all DCI resources and properties in the
United States and around the world. Ms. McHale was named President and CEO in June 2004.
She had previously been President and
COO, a post she held since 1995. Under her
leadership, DCI grew from its core property, the Discovery Channel,
first launched in 1985, to become the leading global real-world media
and entertainment company. DCI now operates in more than 165 countries
and territories reaching over one billion total subscribers.
Ms. McHale led DCI’s
development in television, advanced media, education, and online and retail
services. Her leadership in expanding DCI’s television services has
included the acquisitions of TLC in 1991 and the Travel Channel in 1997 and the
launches of Animal Planet in 1996 and the Discovery Health Channel in
1999. She developed strategic partnerships around the world,
including DCI’s global alliance with the BBC and a major joint venture
with The New York Times Company to co-own the Discovery Times Channel.
Ms. McHale also expanded DCI’s retail services by acquiring The Nature
Company stores in 1996, creating a nationwide chain of 120 Discovery
Channel Stores. Under her leadership, Discovery enhanced its
strategic position in the education business by acquiring United
Learning Inc., a leading producer and distributor of educational
products and services, in 2003 and forming Discovery Education in 2004.
Ms. McHale is committed to
building a workplace that helps employees combine work and personal
life. In 1999, she created the company’s work/life initiative designed
to provide better opportunities to strike that balance. Due to such
innovative approaches, DCI has been selected as one of the 100 Best
Companies for Working Mothers by Working Mother magazine for five
consecutive years. In 2004, the magazine named Ms. McHale “National Family
Champion” for her leadership in building a family friendly workplace. DCI has been selected by
Fortune, Health, and Washingtonian magazines as
a great place to work.
Ms. McHale created the
Discovery Channel Global Education Partnership in 1997, which provides
advanced satellite technology to deliver free educational programming to
over 330,000 students and their communities in ten countries across
Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.
She is a member of the
boards of directors of Polo Ralph Lauren and the Host Marriott
Corporation. She also serves on the boards
of directors of Cable in the Classroom, Vital Voices Global Partnership,
The Africa Society, Africare, Sister-to-Sister Everyone Has a Heart
Foundation, the Character Education Partnership Inc., and the National
Democratic Institute.
Before joining Discovery
in 1987 as its General Counsel, Ms. McHale served as General Counsel for MTV
Networks, where she was responsible for legal affairs for MTV,
Nickelodeon, and VH-1. She began her career as an attorney at the New
York law firm of Battle, Fowler. McHale graduated from Fordham Law
School and earned her undergraduate degree in politics from the
University of Nottingham in England.
Douglas
Brinkley
Author, The Great Deluge
Dr. Douglas Brinkley
currently serves as director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center for
American Civilization and Professor of History at Tulane University. He
completed his bachelor’s degree at Ohio State University and received
his doctorate in U.S. Diplomatic History from Georgetown University in
1989. He then spent a year at both the U.S. Naval Academy and Princeton
University teaching history. While a professor at Hofstra University,
Dr. Brinkley spearheaded the American Odyssey course, in which he took
students on numerous cross-country treks where they visited historic
sites and met seminal figures in politics and literature. Dr. Brinkley’s
1994 book, The Majic Bus: An American Odyssey, chronicled his first
experience teaching this innovative on-the-road class that became the
progenitor of C-SPAN’s "Yellow School Bus."
Four of Dr. Brinkley’s
biographies have been selected as New York Times "Notable Books of the
Year": Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years (1992), Driven Patriot: The Life
and Times of James Forrestal, with Townsend Hoopes (1992), The
Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey beyond the White House
(1998), and Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company and a Century
of Progress (2003). And his three most recent publications have become
New York Times best-sellers: The Boys of Pointe du Hoc: Ronald Reagan,
D-Day and the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion (2005); Tour of Duty: John
Kerry and the Vietnam War (2004); and Parish Priest: Father McGivney and
American Catholicism (2006).
Before coming to Tulane,
Dr. Brinkley served as Stephen E. Ambrose Professor of History and
Director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University
of New Orleans. During his tenure there, he wrote two books with the late
Professor Ambrose: Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938
(1997) and The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation: From the
Louisiana Purchase to Today (2002). On the literature front, Dr.
Brinkley has edited Jack Kerouac’s diaries, Hunter S. Thompson’s
letters, and Theodore Dreiser’s travelogue. His work on civil rights
includes Rosa Parks (2000) and the forthcoming Portable Civil Rights
Reader with Julian Bond.
He won the Benjamin
Franklin Award for The American Heritage History of the United States
(1998), was awarded the BusinessWeek Book of the Year Award for
Wheels
for the World, and was also named 2004 Humanist of the Year by the
Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. He has received honorary
doctorates from Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.,
and Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.
Dr. Brinkley is
contributing editor for Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Times Book Review, and
American Heritage. A frequent contributor to The New York Times,
The Boston
Globe, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic Monthly, he is also a member of
the Council on Foreign Relations and Century Club. In a recent profile,
the Chicago Tribune deemed him "America’s new past master."
Forthcoming publications
include a two-volume edition of Ronald Reagan’s unpublished White House
diaries and Cowboy Conservationist: Theodore Roosevelt and the
Wilderness.
He lives in New Orleans
with his wife, Anne, and two children, Benton and Johnny.
Dr.
Charles W. Sydnor Jr.
Former President & CEO
Commonwealth Public Broadcasting Corporation
Dr.
Charles W. Sydnor Jr. is the former President and CEO of Commonwealth
Public Broadcasting Corporation, a position he held for 15 years.
Commonwealth Public Broadcasting owns and operates five public
television stations (WCVE Richmond PBS, WCVW Richmond PBS, WHTJ
Charlottesville PBS, and WNVT and WNVC in Fairfax) and one public radio
station (88.9FM WCVE). During Dr. Sydnor’s tenure, he hosted For the
Record, one of the many programs produced by WCVE and WHTJ.
Before
coming to Commonwealth Public Broadcasting, Dr. Sydnor served as
president of Emory and Henry College for eight years. Prior to that he
was executive assistant to and speechwriter for Virginia Gov. Charles S.
Robb. He has also served as assistant to the president of Hampden-Sydney
College and as assistant to the associate professor with tenure at
Longwood College, where he taught courses in Western civilization, the
Enlightenment, the French Revolution, 19th century Europe, and the
history of Germany. He has been visiting associate professor in history
at Vanderbilt and instructor in history at Ohio State University. In the
late 1970s, he also produced two award-winning documentaries for WCVE,
"Adolf Hitler 1889-1945" and "Occupied Germany: The American
Legacy." Both were seen on PBS stations across the system.
His
broadcasting experience also includes a stint as host of WCVE’s heralded
36-part series, "The World At War," originally broadcast in
1979-1980 and rebroadcast in 1996-1997, as well as "Behind The Lines,"
a weekly news program for middle and high school students that is the
station’s longest-running local program. He has also been a panelist on
public television’s "The Editors," and a commentator on the History
Channel.
As host
of the weekly public affairs series "For The Record," Dr. Sydnor
has interviewed Middle East peace negotiator Dennis Ross, White House
press corps veteran Helen Thomas, PBS’ Jim Lehrer, Washington Post
reporter Bob Woodward, former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger,
historian Arthur Schlesinger, journalist John Siegenthaler, New York
Times reporter and terrorism expert Judith Miller, former White
House chief of staff Leon Panetta, former National Security Advisor
Sandy Berger, the late Katharine Graham, and others.
Dr.
Sydnor earned his M.A. (1967) and Ph.D. (1971) in modern European and
modern German history from Vanderbilt University. He also studied as a
Fulbright Fellow at Albert-Ludwigs Universität at Freiburg im Breisgau
in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1968 and 1969.
An
internationally known and widely published scholar specializing in the
history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, Dr. Sydnor has also worked
with the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in the Criminal Division
of the U.S. Department of Justice since 1981. With OSI, he has
served as an adviser and expert witness in researching Nazi documents,
preparing historical reports on conditions in German concentration camps
and wartime extermination complexes, and in testifying in
denaturalization and/or deportation trials of former SS concentration
camp guards and Nazi death camp collaborators who managed to enter the
United States illegally.
Dr.
Sydnor serves on numerous boards. He is chairman of the Board of
Trustees of the Library of Virginia in Richmond, as well as a member of
the Library of Virginia Foundation Board, and also serves as a trustee
and chairman of the World Affairs Council of Greater Richmond.
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