Verne Harnish, Co-founder and Chair, Geoversity
Verne is the founder of the world-renowned Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO), with over 14,000 members worldwide, and chaired for fifteen years EO’s premiere CEO program, the “Birthing of Giants” held at MIT, a program he still teaches today. Founder and CEO of Scaling Up, a global executive education and coaching company with over 150 partners on six continents, Verne has spent the past three decades helping companies scale up. He’s the author of the bestseller Mastering the Rockefeller Habits which is translated into 9 languages; and along with the editors of Fortune, authored The Greatest Business Decisions of All Times, for which Jim Collins wrote the foreword. His latest book Scaling Up (Rockefeller Habits 2.0) has won eight major international book awards including the prestigious International Book Award for Best General Business book. Verne also chairs the annual ScaleUp Summit in collaboration with Bloomberg and serves on several other boards including vice-chair of The Riordan Clinic. A private investor in many scaleups, Verne also enjoys piano, tennis, and magic, being a card-carrying member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians.
Educational background: Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and an MBA from Wichita State University.
David Meerman Scott
David is a Sales & Marketing Strategist, entrepreneur, and best-selling author of ten books. No one knows more about using the new Real-Time tools and strategies to spread ideas, influence minds and build a sustainable business. He has spoken on all seven continents and in 40 countries to audiences of the most respected firms and organizations. David is author and co-author of ten books, three being international bestsellers. Best known for The New Rules of Marketing & PR, now in its 6th edition and translated into 29 languages, a modern business classic with over 400,000 copies sold so far. He is a co-author of Marketing the Moon (with Rich Jurek) and Marketing Lessons from The Grateful Dead (with HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan). David is co-founder and partner in Signature Tones, a sonic branding studio, that specializes in creating sonic logos and original music for use by organizations in their branding efforts. Sonic branding includes original music that people use in videos, podcasts, products, and services, as well as, walk-on music for speaking engagements.
Educational background: BA in economics from Kenyon College.
Carolyn Kim Meenan
Carolyn is a Managing Partner at Motto Beverage Company, the first plant-based healthy soda to hit the markets back in 2012. Before joining the company, she led strategic relationship initiatives for HubSpot’s executives, and founded The Good Ones, a 4,000+ member organization of Boston’s finest. She has dedicated her adult life to supporting underprivileged groups like Horizon for Homeless Children, Boston Gives, Mass Challenge, the Center for Family Connections, Big Sisters, and the Ann Steffens rare disease research foundation for Scleroderma. Being an avid outdoors explorer and mountaineer, she joined David Meerman Scott as the guest producer of Geoversity’s historic TransContinental Expedition in February 2019.
Educational background: BA in Economics, College of the Holy Cross.
David S. Ricketts, Ph.D.
For the past decade, David, alongside his colleagues at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard University, has taught the next generation of Bill Gateses and Mark Zuckerbergs how to create disruptive innovations. His keynotes share those insights and, through entertaining real world examples, he helps leaders and front-line innovators understand how to develop disruptive innovation in their organizations. His work has been featured in ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX News as well as ESPN, and Smithsonian Innovation and Popular Science. He has held appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and North Carolina State University. His work has been recognized in numerous scientific journals and popular science outlets.
Educational background: PhD from Harvard University Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Myrna James Yoo, Co-Founder, GeoSchool
Myrna James is a Champion for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence (AI). She is a biz dev and communications consultant for geospatial and weather data as they relate to AI. As a journalist, she interprets complex innovations for broader audiences, in effect democratizing the understanding of emerging technologies such as quantum computing, blockchain, and AI.
In addition to publishing nine books, for 18 years, her company, Blueline Publishing, has owned and published 75 issues of Apogeo Spatial (www.ApogeoSpatial.com), a magazine about using data from space to study the earth for the sake of humanity. She speaks at conferences around the world. Immersed in the geospatial world, she has come to see the value of place, biodiversity, conservation, and how we as healthy humans need to connect to the living earth.
She traveled the world solo for 18 months, blogging before blogging was a word. She believes that expanding one’s worldview increases one’s consciousness, whether from traveling or seeing the earth from space (called “The Overview Effect”). This view shows the exquisite beauty of the planet without national boundaries, as it is in nature. Myrna lives in Denver with her adopted son.
Laurie Meadoff, Executive Producer, Geo 2030 and Co-Founder, GeoSchool
Laurie Meadoff is an award winning and 3 times Emmy nominated Executive Producer who has produced for MTV, VHI, ABC, Sundance Channel, National Geographic and has reached over 350 million people globally with her series, ‘Chat the Planet’ and ‘Hometown Baghdad.’ As part of the Brookings Institute on Cultural Diplomacy, she worked with global dignitaries on the use of the arts and media to build bridges between people and she has spoken at events from U.S. to Hong Kong to Bangalore. Laurie’s company, Authentik Inc, is comprised of a team of world-class producers, change agents and millennials to revolutionize meaning, message and impact for prominent C-suite clients helping them stay culturally and socially relevant for the next generation. Laurie founded The CityKids Foundation in 1985 and through her innovative youth work, she has garnered an international reputation as an ardent advocate, an innovative leader and an agent for social change.
Tamsin Woolley-Barker, Ph.D. Dean, GeoSchool and Co-Founder & Director, Borrego Institute
Dr. Tamsin Woolley-Barker is an evolutionary biologist, anthropologist, innovation and culture consultant. She is the CEO of TEEM Innovation Group, Dean of the Geoversity School for Biocultural Leadership in Panama, and the author of TEEMING—a #1 Amazon bestseller in environmental economics, animal behavior, ecology, and organizational learning, now considered the seminal work on biomimicry in business. Her work with organizations like Biomimicry 3.8 and the Biomimicry Institute has helped the world’s most innovative companies push the envelope on design for nearly a decade. Today, she helps those organizations evolve greater agility, innovation, collaboration, and resilience the same way living systems always have.
Michael A. Schmidt, Chair of Geoversity’s Resilience Medicine
Michael Schmidt is the CEO & Chief Scientific Officer, Savaris Aerospace.
Michael is an expert in human performance in extreme environments. He is the Chairman of the Human Research Program for Civilian Spaceflight, is a founding member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the NFL Players Association, and consults across the spectrum of high performing individuals and teams from NASA, to military special forces, to Olympic athletes, to corporate leaders. His focus is on using precision molecular, behavioral, and physiologic analytics to optimize human performance in all operating environments. He is the author of the forthcoming “Brain Fitness for Leaders” and “Building a Space Faring Civilization.”
Bonnie Nelson Schwartz, Producer
Bonnie Nelson Schwartz, Producer is an international producer of theatre, television, and concerts with more than 100 plays, films, television programs and concerts in Washington, DC, New York, London, and South Africa to her credit. On Broadway, she co-produced Tony-Nominated Ian McKellen: Acting Shakespeare; Pack of Lies; Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood; and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s State Fair.
Among her many concert productions are Give My Regards to Broadway: A Salute to 125 Years of Musical Theater at Carnegie Hall; and the London production of Panbeaters. Her 25 years of concerts at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC include the ADL Concert Against Hate; The Duke Ellington 90th Birthday Celebration; the Martin Luther King Birthday Celebration; and Legacy & Life: A Tribute to John F. Kennedy.
Ms. Schwartz is the founder and original producer of Washington, DC’s Helen Hayes Awards. She was a producer for NBC’s Closing Ceremonies at the Barcelona Olympic Games and co-created and produced The Olympic Woman, a multi-media exhibition and its companion book, Grace and Glory, for the Atlanta Olympic Games. She also authored the book Voices from the Federal Theatre based on her television special, Who Killed the Federal Theatre?
Recent productions include Studs Terkel: Listening to America on HBO; Galileo’s Torch at the Folger Theatre; Too Close off-Broadway in New York; the Emmy-nominated Traveling While Black, a virtual reality and transmedia project; and the 2020 One Woman, One Vote Film Festival recognizing 100 years of women achieving the vote, culminating in March 2020 at the John F. Kennedy Center with a tribute to Ava DuVernay. A Tony, Emmy, and Obie Award Nominee, she has been honored as a Woman of Vision by Women in Film and Video, and elected to the College of the Fellows of the American Theatre, and a Board Member of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts.
Marc de Swaan Arons, Marketing
Marc de Swaan Arons is a global (marketing) leadership thought-leader, coach, inspirator, author, teacher, consultant, and entrepreneur. With over 30 years of innovation and growth leadership experience, Marc co-leads the Institute for Real Growth (IRG)—a prestigious executive leadership program to help business leaders drive more humanized growth within today’s stakeholder economy.
Having learned from and collaborated with many of the world’s most prominent business leaders, Marc is a frequent keynote speaker at business schools, companies, and industry conferences. He has been quoted and appeared in The Financial Times, Fortune, Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic, Advertising Age, Fast Company, Campaign Asia, and Marketing Week. Marc co-led the Leading Global Brands study, Marketing2020, Insights2020, the IRG Growth Study, and is currently leading the Achieving Stakeholder Impact study. These learning initiatives have led to the publication of many articles as well as the The Global Brand CEO book (2010), two Harvard Business Review articles (2014 and 2017), and the creation of the Institute for Real Growth (2019).
Educated in the UK, the Netherlands, and the US, Marc holds a Master of Business Economics from Erasmus University (1990). He completed the Harvard University Higher Education Pedagogy program and the AACSB International Bridge Program in 2018, and was appointed Associate Fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School in 2022.
