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David Neisen
Vice President of Field HR at PetSmartDavid Neisen has spent the past 24 years working in retail. He built his skills and experience in a number of roles that spanned safety and security, investigations, recruiting & onboarding, training, facilities management, business continuity & crisis management, benefits administration, and HR generalist. This work experience coupled a variety of professional specializations, with the responsibilities of leading large teams. He currently oversees an HR organization that serves more than 40,000 employees. He is the former President of "Pride at Work," PetSmart's LGBTQ + Ally Associate Resource Group, which earned the Phoenix Pride Howard and Patricia Fleischmann Community Spirit Award in 2014.
Outside of his professional roles, David is a proud husband and father. He has lived in Arizona for the past 10 years, and despite a love for Arizona's desert climate, his is an ice hockey family. Both his daughter and son play for hockey clubs in the valley, and they are passionate fans of both the ASU Sun Devils and the Arizona Coyotes hockey teams. He was raised with an appreciation for the outdoors, and enjoys exploring many of the open and wild spaces in the Western US. He is also an amateur triathlete, having completed five Ironman Triathlons, including Ironman Arizona here in Tempe.
David holds a Bachelor's Degree of General Studies from City University of Seattle, a Master's Degree in Organizational Leadership from Gonzaga University, and a Doctor of Education in Organizational Leadership from Northeastern University. His research interests include decision making, crisis management, and servant leadership.
Rima Alameddine
Vice President & General Manager, Global Oncology at BD- Becton DickinsonRima brings over 22 years of professional dedication to making people´s lives better through leadership roles in the healthcare industry. Her multi-cultural inclusive and diverse background, her vast experience in both developed and developing markets, and a genuine passion in developing her teams led her to be a globally recognized executive in the healthcare arena. This unique combination resulted in an invitation to move from Sao Paulo to Arizona in 2019 and lead the newly formed Global Oncology business, under Becton Dickinson. In this role, she leads an organization who is relentlessly committed to research, develop and to bring to market innovative solutions to help clinicians address their patients’ needs from the diagnosis of cancer to treatment deliveries, across the world.
Rima was born in Brazil and lived in Lebanon during 3 years of the civil war, which was a transformational experience for her family.
Back in Brazil, she graduated as a Doctor in Pharmacy & Biochemistry from USP (Sao Paulo University) and got a Marketing degree from ESPM (Superior School of Marketing and Advertisement). Rima speaks 5 languages. She is happily married to Adriano and they are parents of Luana, a smart and curious 9-year-old young lady. The three of them are enjoying their new life and discoveries in Arizona.
Erika Amoako-Agyei
Business Coach at Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing EconomiesErika Amoako-Agyei is an experienced international business executive with extensive marketing, management and cross-cultural business and corporate training experience. In 2016, she was selected by Stanford University for an extended international assignment in Ghana to help advance economic opportunities across West Africa. As part of the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies (Seed), Erika brings the expertise of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Innovation of Silicon Valley to CEOs in Africa. Serving as a Business Coach, Erika has been working side by side with high-potential entrepreneurs in multiple countries to help scale and grow their business, create new jobs and expand geographically. In 2019, Stanford Seed re-engaged Erika with a new focus on East Africa, where she supports business leaders across the region while based in Kenya and Uganda. By leveraging her skills as a business leader, Erika’s role in East & West Africa supports Stanford’s larger initiative to enable business leaders in developing economies to transform their companies and lead their regions to greater prosperity.
Erika has prior experience working internationally. For nearly a decade, she worked internationally for the US tech giant, the IBM Corporation, starting in the US, and then multiple years in West Africa as an expatriate based in Ghana. As the IBM Country General Manager, she managed IBM Ghana operations and provided leadership for IBM’s re-entry and market expansion into the West African region. Upon returning to the United States, Erika became the Director of Corporate Relations for the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona. She later went into business for herself, founding Africa Intercultural Consulting, a management and cross- cultural training firm in the US that services global companies and organizations expanding into Africa. From her experience, she delivers cross-cultural training programs for executives, multicultural teams, expatriate families and international students.
As a visiting professor, she also teaches a global business course called, “Conducting Business in Africa” to graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Arkansas in the Sam Walton College of Business.
Drawing from her experience, she has authored Cross-Cultural Management and Organizational Behavior in Africa published by John Wiley & Sons (2009) for the Thunderbird International Business Review. She has also written a businessperson’s guide to the social and professional cultures in sub-Saharan Africa.
Erika currently lives with her family in Phoenix, Arizona, USA and enjoys public speaking, traveling and mentoring future leaders.
Jeffrey Cherry
Founder, CEO and Executive Director of Conscious Venture LabFor the last 34 years I have been a designer, entrepreneur, CEO, educator, mentor, consultant and investor. During this time I’ve come to believe that the skills I’ve amassed as an architect; the ability to take copious amounts of contradictory, complimentary, disparate and seemingly mutually exclusive information and through the design process, transform that information into a coherent and unique product that did not previously exist, was a skill set that could be applied to creating just about anything. Including investment products, new and innovative businesses and solutions to complex problems.
The arch of my career mimics and amplifies this application of the design process to business thinking.
In 1986 I founded Lloyd Lamont Design, Inc. (LLD) as an architectural design practice. The strategy of LLD was based on my belief that design and the design process could inform and inspire organizational culture and strategic alignment. Along with a small and dedicated original staff, we began to hire management consultants, technologists, computer engineers, and cultural anthropologists, transforming the firm into a full-service design, technology, and management consultancy to create holistic and integrated business operating environments. In 1997 LLD was named one of the fastest-growing private companies in America by Inc. Magazine. Established when I was just 26, LLD afforded me an incredible opportunity to lead and grow a multi-disciplined firm. In that 20-year span, we grew from 2 employees to more than 150 with revenues of more than $12MM. During that time I had the good fortune to work on projects as diverse as bringing a totally new mobile GPS device to market, creating a subsidiary focusing on information security in the intelligence community and performing a cultural, technological and physical analysis and designing new office space for the NY offices of the SEC after September 11th.
Late in 2006, a new opportunity presented itself. After working with authors, the late David Wolfe and Raj Sisodia, on their book Firms of Endearment, How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose, I was a Founding Member of The Concinnity Group, LP (TCG). TCG was a hedge fund management firm formed to identify and invest in companies that practice a more conscious form of capitalism. TCG was disbanded in 2008 in order for the partners to work with an already established hedge fund that allowed us to raise assets and prove the investment thesis in a real-world trading environment.
Stephanie Klocke
Vice President of Research & Development at BD- Becton Dickinson- Presenting Sponsor Welcome
- Presenting Sponsor Welcome
- Presenting Sponsor Welcome
- Presenting Sponsor Welcome
Stephanie Klocke currently serves as Vice President of Research & Development at BDPI. Stephanie has been in this role since August 2018 and is responsible for the oversight of the new product development pipeline for peripheral arterial disease, end-stage kidney disease, and oncology disease states. Stephanie has worked for BD within the Legacy Bard Peripheral Vascular segment for 14 years in various leadership roles within R&D. Prior to Bard, Stephanie worked for Guidant Corporation in both manufacturing and R&D. Stephanie holds a BS in Biomedical Engineering from Arizona State University.