Doug Sundheim is a leadership and organizational consultant with over 20 years of experience. He works with leaders and teams of Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial firms to help them maximize their effectiveness. His clients include Morgan Stanley, Harvard Management Company, The Chubb Corporation, Citigroup, University of Chicago, and Procter & Gamble among others. Prior to his work in leadership and organizational consulting, Doug spent several years in the Internet strategy field and started a 100-person catering company. Doug holds a BS from Cornell University and an MA in Adult Learning & Leadership from Columbia University. He lives in Westchester, NY with his wife and three sons.

Doug is a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and previously Fast Company.

Craig K. Collins is a San Diego-based author and executive. His first book THUNDER IN THE MOUNTAINS: A Portrait of American Gun Culture is a work of literary non-fiction that offers readers a unique and personal look at our country’s ongoing gun crisis. Collins is a master at spinning eloquent coming-of-age tales set against the majestic backdrop of the American West and in the small towns of his youth. One of the seminal events of his life occurred during a deer hunt with his father and brothers in the rugged wilderness of Northeastern Nevada. That’s when Collins, at the age of 13, accidentally shot himself in the foot with a high-powered deer rifle. It was a harrowing incident, and he uses it as a jumping-off point for his engaging and poignant memoir about the historical formation of America’s gun culture and how the effects of that culture came to reverberate daily coast-to-coast.

A native of Pocatello, Idaho, Collins attended college in San Diego, where he has lived since. He holds a BA in English and an MBA from San Diego State University. After a stint as a journalist, he served as a senior executive for Fortune 500 companies. Later, he founded a series of technology start-ups and has raised over $60m in venture capital. He currently serves as President & CEO of Boost Academy, a venture-backed educational technology firm.

Collins is well-versed in big data and analytics, and since his gun accident, has had a long and abiding interest in America’s ongoing epidemic of gun violence. This interest and expertise led him to found and serve as Executive Director of the Center for Gun Analytics. The San Diego-based non-profit is dedicated to leveraging the power of technology and big data to accurately illuminate the true nature of American gun deaths and injuries. The organization’s team of scientists, statisticians and researchers employ the latest software, analytical and algorithmic systems to glean insight from current gun violence data. The findings and data are then shared, publicized and made widely available for the public good. The CGA advocates for increased federal funding – to agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health – that’s on a level commensurate with the pervasive scope of American gun violence, an epidemic that claims over 114,000 casualties annually.

Micheline Maynard is a business journalist, author and professor who is considered one of the country’s leading experts on all forms of transportation. She is the former Detroit bureau chief for The New York Times, where she covered the bankruptcies and rebirth of General Motors and Chrysler, as well as the restructuring of the airline industry. More recently, she has been a contributor to Forbes and Time Magazine, where she has written about the bankruptcy of the city of Detroit, and its urban revival.

 Maynard is the author of THE END OF DETROIT: How The Big Three Lost Their Grip On The American Car Market, which predicted the demise of the Detroit companies and prescribed steps the companies needed to take to win back consumers. She has written three other books. In 2013, she launched Curbing Cars: Rethinking How We Get Around, a journalism project looking at how Americans are driving less and turning to other forms of transportation, including public transit, bike sharing, car sharing, and walking. The Curbing Cars eBook was published by Forbes, and the project was the subject of a cover story in the Columbia Journalism Review.

Maynard currently serves as Director of the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.Maynard is a visiting professor at the Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State. She also has taught at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, Central Michigan University, and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Maynard is a regular guest on national and international television, such as PBS NewsHour, Charlie Rose, CNBC’s Squawk Box, ABC’s 20/20, The Today Show, and BBC World News. She appears frequently on NPR programs including Here and Now, All Things Considered, Morning Edition and on public radio’s Marketplace.

She is an experienced public speaker, including appearances at Harvard, Dartmouth, Columbia, Michigan, Michigan State, The University of Nevada Reno, Wayne State and Indiana State. She has spoken to the non-profit and corporate groups including the Women In Restructuring Confederation, US-China Chamber of Commerce, Economic Club of Grand Rapids, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, and the Ann Arbor City Club, as well as many civic organizations.

Steven Fink, the nation’s leading expert in crisis management and crisis communications, has been called “the Dean of Crisis Management” for his pioneering work in the field. His seminal work on the subject, Crisis Management: Planning for the Inevitable, still the most successful and widely-read book on crisis management ever published, not only explains how to manage a crisis when one occurs, but was the first book to introduce proactive crisis management strategies designed to help businesses forecast and avert crises altogether.

A commanding speaker on very current crises, he typically addresses the crisis du jour, offering unique insight and valuable lessons into a company’s performance in a crisis.

His newest book, Crisis Communications: The Definitive Guide to Managing the Message, closely examines such topical crises as those that hobbled Penn State, BP, Toyota, Carnival Cruise Lines, Netflix, and many others. This cutting-edge book emphasizes the critical role social media should play in proactive and reactive crisis communications strategies.

During the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear crisis, the nation’s worst commercial nuclear power accident, he served on the crisis management team in the administration of then-Pennsylvania Governor (and former U.S. Attorney General) Dick Thornburgh. By its remarkably calm handling of that potentially devastating crisis, this team was widely credited with having averted a panic among the population of South Central Pennsylvania — and the rest of the nation.

Lexicon Communications Corp., the company he founded 30 years ago, was the first to specialize in crisis management and crisis communications. The firm has represented some of the world’s most prestigious companies in virtually all industry groups in both proactive crisis management training and reactive crisis management response, and he personally has consulted with various branches of government, foreign and domestic, on highly sensitive crisis issues, some involving matters of national security and international diplomacy.

He frequently is featured as an expert crisis management commentator on leading news outlets around the world, such as “Nightline,” The NBC Nightly News, The TODAY Show, CNN, ABC WorldNews Tonight, The CBS Evening News, The CBS Morning News, BBC World News, MSNBC, CNBC, FOX News, NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered”, as well as national news and business publications, including TIME, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, the Associated Press, and hundreds of others around the world.

Several years ago, he delivered the keynote commencement address to the graduating class at Penn State University.