Featured Speakers
Paul DePodesta, San Diego Padres’ Special Assistant for Baseball Operations and former Los Angeles Dodgers GM
San Diego Padres’ Special Assistant for Baseball Operations and former Los Angeles Dodgers GM Paul DePodesta has made a career of evaluating, measuring and assigning value to talent.
“Paul has one of the most insightful and creative minds in baseball,” said Sandy Alderson, Padres CEO.
Los Angeles Dodgers GM during the 2004/05 seasons, DePodesta was the third-youngest person ever to assume the role of Major League GM. Assigned the task of turning around a team that had not won a postseason game since 1988, DePodesta guided Los Angeles to a playoff berth in his first season at the helm. Prior to joining the Dodgers, DePodesta served as Assistant General Manager of the Oakland Athletics from 1999 to 2003 – a tenure during which the A’s tied for the best winning percentage in baseball (392-255).
At the time of his hire, Oakland was one of the worst teams in the league, coming off of six losing seasons while posting one of the lowest payrolls in baseball. The conventional wisdom in Major League Baseball at that time was that wealthy teams – who spend three times as much on talent as poor teams – will win out. But in DePodesta’s four seasons in Oakland, the A’s won more regular season games than the New York Yankees, who during the same period spent $350 million more on player payroll than did the Athletics. In rethinking how the system works by asking what DePodesta calls the naive question: “If we weren’t already doing it this way, is this the way we would start?” He helped revolutionize the way baseball teams are built.
Guy Garcia, award-winning journalist, novelist and Internet entrepreneur
The New Mainstream: How the Multicultural Consumer is Transforming American Busines
Award-winning journalist, novelist and Internet entrepreneur Guy Garcia is an award-winning speaker, consultant, author and multimedia entrepreneur. His book, “The New Mainstream: How the Multicultural Consumer is Transforming American Business,” explains how Americans will eat, work, play, learn and spend money in the 21st century – and why any organization that ignores the lessons of the new mainstream is doomed to fail.
Garcia is the founder and CEO of Mentametrix, Inc., a multicultural research and marketing firm based in New York City. Mentametrix is licensed to use the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a software developed by psychology professors from Harvard, the University of Washington at Seattle and UVA, for multicultural research, marketing and product development. As a consultant and lecturer, Garcia has worked with major corporations and organizations, including Clorox, Coke, Astra Zeneca, Bayer Healthcare, McKinsey & Co., Nissan Motors, 20th Century Fox Studios and Colorado Ski Country USA, to name a few.
As an executive at America Online, he worked on the development of AOL International, AOL Broadband, and launched the first iteration of AOL Latino, a bilingual site for AOL’s two million Latino subscribers. A former Time magazine staff writer, three-time National Magazine Awards judge and frequent contributor to the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and other publications, Garcia has appeared on ABC, Univision, NPR, CNBC and PBS.
Jamie Clarke, Canadian Adventurer
Speaker Jamie Clarke became the ninth Canadian to summit Mount Everest in 1997. A dedicated adventurer and speaker, he custom-tailors each presentation he delivers. By integrating various company ideals into his speeches, he demonstrates how the life lessons he learned during his Mt. Everest expeditions may be directly applied to every organization’s challenges.
As the co-organizer of two Everest expeditions, Clarke, who bills himself as an entrepreneur in the business of adventure, oversaw project budgets in excess of $1 million. In 1991, he was part of an Everest team that was forced to turn back 3,000 feet from the summit during one of the mountain’s deadly storms. In 1994, his team of 10 climbers made a courageous effort to reach the summit, only to have to turn back less than 500 feet from the top. In a true demonstration of teamwork, they performed a high-altitude rescue to save the life of their lead climber.
In 1997, through sheer determination, Clarke finally reached the summit, and, along with his re-engineered team of five climbers, he performed two more high-altitude rescues. He incorporates breathtaking images and recordings from Everest into his speech. A three-time Canadian Junior Cross-Country Ski Champion, Clarke draws from his 20 years of mountain experience in presenting dozens of motivational seminars each year.
Recharging audience enthusiasm and morale, Clarke relates the importance of overcoming the fear of rejection as a major factor in the process of reaching your goals. He suggests that we must face and conquer the internal battle of self-awareness so that we may then become a supportive member of any team that faces challenges together, whether it be our companies, our marriages or our families.
As he states: “Real winning has nothing to do with beating someone else, or crossing the finish line first, or standing on top. Winning isn’t anything external at all. It is an internal satisfaction, a deep inner sense of pride and joy.”
