Plenary Speakers

The International Conference on Knowledge, Culture and Change in Organizations will feature plenary sessions by some of the world’s leading thinkers and innovators in the field, as well as numerous parallel presentations by researchers and practitioners.

Garden Conversations

Plenary speakers will make formal 30-minute presentations. They will also participate in 60-minute Garden Conversations – unstructured sessions that allow delegates a chance to meet the speakers and talk with them informally about the issues arising from their presentation.

Please return to this page for regular updates.

The Speakers

Al Gini

Al Gini is a Professor of Business Ethics and Chair of the Department of Management in the School of Business Administration at Loyola University Chicago. He is also the co-founder and long-time Associate Editor of Business Ethics Quarterly, the journal of the Society for Business Ethics. For over twenty-five years he has been the Resident Philosopher on National Public Radio’s Chicago affiliate, WBEZ-FM, and he regularly lectures to community and professional organizations on issues of business and ethics. His books include: My Job My Self: Work and the Creation of the Modern Individual (Routledge, 2000); The Importance of Being Lazy: In Praise of Play, Leisure and Vacations (Routledge, 2003); Why It’s Hard to Be Good (Routledge, 2006); Seeking The Truth of Things (ACTA, 2010); The Ethics of Business with Alexei Marcoux (Rowan & Littlefield, 2012).

Ronald L. Jacobs

Ronald L. Jacobs is professor of human resource development and director of international programs in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ron’s current research topics of interest include formal learning in the work setting, employee competence, and adapting HRD practices to the societal level. Ron has written over 100 journal articles and book chapters, and has authored or edited six books that address a broad range of topics in the human resource development field.

Ron is particularly known for his research and development work on structured on-the-job training (S-OJT), a training approach that he first introduced to the HRD literature in 1987. He is the author of the book, Structured On-the-Job Training: Unleashing Employee Expertise in the Workplace (Berrett-Koehler, 2nd edition), which has become the standard guide to help managers and national policy officials to implement this training approach. There are now Chinese-Complex, Chinese-Simplified, Korean, and Arabic language editions of the book. Much of his research on this topic has been on determining the financial benefits of using S-OJT, information that has been critical for making more informed training decisions. He is also known for his writing and perspectives on the HRD research process, system theory applied to HRD, performance consulting, and introducing the ISO 10015 training guideline to the field.

Since 1980, Ron has been responsible for the graduate training of over 300 HRD professionals. More than 30 of his Ph.D. graduates now teach HRD and HRM-related subjects in universities globally. Ron has been an invited professor at numerous international universities, including the University of Utrecht, National Taiwan Normal University, and he was the Shaw Distinguished Professor of Human Resource Management at Nanyang University, Singapore. He currently holds an adjunct professorship in human resource development at East China Normal University, Shanghai. He is professor emeritus of workforce development and education at the Ohio State University.

Ron has extensive consulting experience in global organizations including General Motors, KLM Airlines, Abbott Laboratories, Seagate, Morton Salt, Rohm and Haas, Kuwait National Petroleum Company, Biomet, ARAMCO, Hyundai Motors, among others. Common across all projects is the goal to help develop and improve workplace performance systems that respond to changing demands on employee competence. Dr. Jacobs actively integrates information from these various projects into his scholarship through partnership research projects and to his university instruction.

Anne H. Reilly

Anne H. Reilly is Professor of Management in the School of Business Administration at Loyola University Chicago. Before her current role as Loyola’s Assistant Provost for Faculty Administration, she served as Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Business, and she is returning to the business school in July as Associate Dean for Faculty and Research. Dr. Reilly’s academic background includes a Ph.D. in organizational behavior (Northwestern University), an M.B.A. in finance (University of Iowa), and a B.A. in economics, summa cum laude (Knox College). Prior to her doctoral work, she worked as a commercial lending officer and an assistant vice president at two global banking organizations.

An award-winning teacher, Dr. Reilly has taught at Loyola’s campuses in Chicago, Rome, and Beijing, and she is a frequent speaker at academic, business, and non-profit events. Professor Reilly’s research interests include organizational change, sustainability, gender & career issues, and classroom instructional development, and she has published extensively on these topics for both academic and managerial journals.

Dr. Reilly’s plenary session at the conference will focus on her ongoing research about sustainability initiatives in business organizations. Examples of her recent work on this topic include: “Sustainability Initiatives, Social Media Activity, and Organizational Culture,” Journal of Sustainability and Green Business, 2010 (with A.R. Weirup); “Adopting a Sustainability Initiative: The Role of Organizational Culture and Strategy,” 10^th International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations, HEC Montreal, 2010; “Responsible Leadership and Corporate Sustainability,” 13^th Colleagues in Jesuit Business Education Conference, 2010; and “Communicating Sustainability Initiatives in Corporate Reports,” Society for Advancement of Management Journal, 2009.

Patricia H. Werhane

Patricia H. Werhane is the Wicklander Chair of Business Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and Executive Director of the Institute for Business and Professional Ethics at DePaul University with a joint appointment as the Peter and Adeline Ruffin Professor of Business Ethics and Senior Fellow at of the Olsson Center for Applied Ethics in the Darden School at the University of Virginia. She was formerly the Wirtenberger Professor of Business Ethics at Loyola University Chicago. Professor Werhane graduated from Wellesley College, and received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Northwestern University. She has been a Rockefeller Fellow at Dartmouth, Arthur Andersen Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge, and Erskine Visiting Fellow at the University of Canterbury (New Zealand).

Professor Werhane has published numerous articles and is the author or editor of over twenty books including Ethical Issues in Business (with T. Donaldson, eighth edition), Persons, Rights and Corporations, Adam Smith and His Legacy for Modern Capitalism, Organization Ethics for Health Care, and Moral Imagination and Managerial Decision-Making with Oxford University Press, and Employment and Employee Rights (with Tara J. Radin and Norman Bowie) with Blackwell’s. She has written numerous cases in business ethics. She is the founder and former Editor-in-Chief of Business Ethics Quarterly, the Journal of the Society for Business Ethics. Professor Werhane is currently a member of the academic advisory team for the Business Roundtable Ethics Institute housed at the University of Virginia. Her current research projects focus on feminism in business and poverty reduction through for-profit initiatives.