2008 Keynote Speakers

  • Steve Black Photo

    Steve Black

    CEO, J.P. Morgan Investment Bank

    Steve Black is co-head of J.P. Morgan's Investment Bank and a member of the firm's Executive and Operating Committees. He shares responsibility for the Investment Bank with Bill Winters, co-CEO.

    In March of 2004, Steve and Bill became co-CEOs of the Investment Bank. They had previously been deputy co-CEOs since 2003. Steve had previously been global head of the firm's Equities division since joining the firm in the spring of 2000, following a career with Citigroup and its predecessor firms.

    Steve began his career at Smith Barney in 1974 as a trainee. After trading and managing trading businesses for a number of years, he became head of the Tax Exempt Securities Group in 1988. In 1991, he became head of Global Capital Markets and, in 1993, was elected Vice Chairman. In 1996, he was promoted to Chief Operating Officer of the company. After the Smith Barney merger with Salomon Brothers, Steve was named Vice Chairman, responsible for Global Equities, Tax Exempt Securities and Securities Lending. He continued to hold these responsibilities at the time of the Citigroup merger with Salomon Smith Barney in 1998. He was a member of the Salomon Smith Barney Executive Committee and the Travelers and Citigroup Planning Committee.

    Steve graduated from Duke University with a B.A. in political science.

  • Speaker photo

    Mary Gentile

    Independent Consultant, The Aspen Institute

    Mary C. Gentile, Ph.D., is an independent consultant based in Arlington, MA. A prior faculty member, researcher, and administrator at the Harvard Business School, Gentile has been an independent consultant since 1995. Gentile works with corporate, non-profit and academic institutions on executive coaching, training and curriculum development, issue definition and strategy design on issues of social impact management, ethics, business education and diversity. Clients have included: Harvard Business School, Columbia University Business School, Pfizer Corporation, Dana Corporation, The United Nations Global Compact Learning Forum, University of Texas-Austin Business School, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, the Ford Foundation, the Aspen Institute and more.

    In her executive coaching, Gentile has worked extensively with Fine Line Consulting, a firm that specializes in providing strategic thinking partners for senior women executives (i.e., EVP, COO, VP) in Fortune 500 firms. With The Aspen Institute's Business and Society Program(Aspen BSP), Gentile has been a key consultant from the organization's inception, focusing on strategy and mission definition; research and networking; program design; writing of position papers and articles; and general executive coaching.

    While a Senior Manager at Arthur Andersen (1998), Gentile served as project manager for a global consulting project to produce a benchmarking study of corporate best practices on ethics and responsible business practices programs, and she did both internal and external executive coaching and training on professional development, case teaching and presentation skills. While at Harvard Business School (1985-95), Gentile developed the School's first and very highly rated course on managing diversity. She served as Vice Chair of the School's Diversity Task Force and was a member of the core design and planning committees for Harvard's MBA Leadership and Learning, a comprehensive review and re-visioning of the MBA program. Gentile was one of the principal architects of Harvard's innovative educational program, Leadership, Ethics and Corporate Responsibility, which served to integrate business ethics into graduate management curriculum.

    Gentile co-authored a book detailing the history, philosophy and implementation of this ethics initiative, Can Ethics Be Taught? Perspectives, Challenges, and Approaches at Harvard Business School (co-authored with Thomas R. Piper and Sharon Parks, Harvard Business School Press, 1993, translated into Japanese and Hungarian). Her other publications include Differences That Work: Organizational

    Excellence through Diversity (Harvard Business Review, 1994: paper 1996); Managing Diversity: Making Differences Work (Harvard Business School Publishing, 1995); Managerial Excellence Through Diversity: Text and Cases (Richard D. Irwin, Inc., 1995: reissued by Waveland Press, 1998), as well as numerous articles, cases, and book reviews in publications such as Academy of Management Learning and Education, Harvard Business Review, Risk Management, CFO, The Journal of Human Values, New Academy Review, etc.

    Gentile also served as the Content Expert for the award-winning multi-media interactive CD-ROM, Managing Across Differences (Harvard Business School Publishing New Media Group, 1996). This corporate training tool has been adopted by numerous major corporations as a core component in their professional development initiatives.

    Gentile holds a bachelor's degree from The College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, VA) and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

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