Keynote Speaker — Dov Seidman
Named one of the "Top 60 Global Thinkers of the Last Decade" by the Economic Times and "the hottest advisor on the corporate virtue circuit" by Fortune Magazine, CEO, author and thought leader Dov Seidman has built a career, and pioneered an industry, around the idea that the most principled businesses are the most profitable and sustainable.
Sixteen years ago, Seidman founded LRN with a powerful vision that the world would be a better place if more people did the right thing. From that basic notion, he has grown a successful business that has helped to shape the ways millions of employees, managers and leaders behave and interact all over the globe. LRN helps more than 500 leading companies worldwide — including Apple, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Viacom, DuPont, Rolls-Royce, 3M and the Dow Chemical Company — develop ethical corporate cultures and inspire principled performance in business. In 2008, LRN acquired leading green strategy firm, GreenOrder.
Seidman maintains that in today's connected and transparent world, people and organizations stand to gain by dedicating new thought and energy to how they do what they do. That's the inspiration behind his award-winning book, HOW: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything. Now updated and expanded, HOW includes a new foreword from President Bill Clinton and a new preface from Seidman on why how we behave, lead, govern, operate, consume, engender trust in our relationships and relate to others matters more than ever and in ways it never has before. Since 2007, HOW has been published in the U.S., Germany, China, Korea, Brazil, India and will soon be published in France and Israel.
Seidman's views on business behavior, success and corporate culture have been quoted in hundreds of media, including an in-depth profile in FORTUNE Magazine and in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, and on the Charlie Rose Show and ABC's Good Morning America. Each month, Seidman shares his views on human behavior as the ultimate source of competitive advantage in a Sentencing Commission arguing that corporations must move from a check-the-box, compliance-only approach to instead focus on fostering ethical cultures and behaviors. His proposals were adopted and today are the very standards by which companies, cultures and programs are judged.
Led by a lifelong pursuit and passion for ethical leadership, he and his company LRN became the exclusive corporate sponsors of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity Prize in Ethics in 2008, as the institution was in its 20th year of celebrating ethical decision-making among America's youth.
Seidman earned simultaneous bachelor's and master's degrees, summa cum laude, in philosophy from UCLA. He later earned a B.A. with honors in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University. He graduated with honors from Harvard Law School. He, his wife Maria and their son live in New York City.