Marc Leathers is President of Leathers & Associates. The 30-year old company is a family-owned business and the leader in the field of community-built playgrounds. Leathers & Associates is based in Ithaca, N.Y.
Diane Brush has extensive professional experience in design. After graduating college, Brush took a position designing children's wear in Manhattan for nine years. She then moved to San Francisco to work on Esprit's children's wear line for five years. As her career in children's wear moved forward, Brush also became interested in home furnishings. She moved to Wisconsin for two years to design Lands' End's home and children's wear lines. After leaving her position there, she moved to Garnet Hill in New Hampshire and revamped the catalog company into a design house. Brush became co-president of the company and executed a new design focus for the brand.
Brush has since left Garnet Hill and is now the design director at MacKenzie-Childs, a ceramics and home furnishings design firm in Aurora, New York.
Diane Brush is a graduate of Parsons School of Design in New York City.
Barbara Novick is a member of BlackRock's Global Executive and Global Operating Committees and Chairs the Government Relations Steering Committee.
From the inception of the firm in 1988 to 2008, Ms. Novick headed the Global Client Group and oversaw global business development, marketing and client service across equity, fixed income, liquidity, alternative investment and real estate products for institutional and individual investors and their intermediaries worldwide. In her current role, Ms. Novick heads the firm's efforts globally on Government Relations and Public Policy.
Prior to founding BlackRock in 1988, Ms. Novick was a Vice President in the Mortgage Products Group at The First Boston Corporation. Ms. Novick joined First Boston in 1985 where she became head of the Portfolio Products Team. From 1982 to 1985, Ms. Novick was with Morgan Stanley.
Barbara Novick earned a BA degree, cum laude, in economics from Cornell University in 1981.
Amy Siskind is a national spokesperson, writer and expert on helping women and girls advance and succeed. A highly successful Wall Street executive, she's Co-founder and President of The New Agenda, a national organization working on issues including economic independence and advancement, gender representation and bias, sexual assault and domestic violence.
A pioneer in the distressed debt trading market, she has a lifetime of experience with failure and remarkable success and knows what it takes to win. She became the first female Managing Director at Wasserstein Perella at the age of 31, and later ran trading departments at Morgan Stanley and Imperial Capital, where she was also a partner.
Amy Siskind received a BA in Economics from Cornell University and an MBA in Finance from The NYU Stern School of Business.
Valisha Graves is an executive director in the institutional securities technology group at Morgan Stanley. She is the product manager for IRIS (Interactive Derivatives Investment Strategies), a Flex data visualization application that allows users to model and analyze equity derivatives strategies. At Morgan Stanley, Valisha has worked with the ModelWare team, responsible for the development and delivery of Web-based applications including intrinsic value (valuation), food chain, profitability analysis, clustering, nearest neighbor and correlation. She was also responsible for improving the efficacy of Workbench, an Excel-based application and managed the Cross Asset Class (CAC)/LBO application. Additionally, Valisha led a team responsible for screening investment ideas, valuation, and due diligence on behalf of the financial sponsors (private equity) and strategic investment groups. In this initiative, the ModelWare framework was used to conduct fundamental, 'bottoms up' investment and capital structure analysis and screen investment ideas across multiple asset classes. Prior to joining Morgan Stanley, Valisha was a senior analyst with RateFinancials, a private, independent equity research firm that ranks and rates the financial reporting, quality of earnings and corporate governance of S&P 500 companies. Valisha was part of a four-person deal team at Accordia, a $100 MM early stage, quasi private equity e-commerce technology fund. She was a vice president in the finance division of Lehman Brothers, responsible for financial modeling, academic research and data analysis for a global risk equity allocation project. She was a manager in Ernst & Young's financial services consulting practice. She spent 10 years at National Westminster Bank in roles including asset/liability management in the treasury group, where she identified interest rate hedging strategies, recommended proprietary trading strategies using financial futures and options and marketed fixed income, derivative and foreign exchange products. Valisha Graves received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University and her MBA from Columbia University.
Sarah McDonald is currently the Chief of Staff to the president of eBay marketplaces. Over her ten year career at eBay, she has held several operational roles including global policy manager, manager for cross border trade, and director of seller development which included management of eBay's Daily Deal program. Prior to eBay, McDonald worked as a strategy consultant at Accenture in Boston working in the High Tech practice - but eventually made her way to the Bay Area and eBay in the Fall of 2004. Sarah McDonald received her undergraduate degree from Occidental College and her MBA from Cornell University Johnson School of Business.
Diane Sakach is Executive Director of Corporate Leadership Center (CLC), a partnership between major corporations and academic institutions, which advances top corporate leaders and leadership practices. CEO Perspectives, CLC's flagship program, has been offered since 2006 with the Kellogg School of Management. In 2008, Diane joined Corporate Leadership Center to co-develop its second program, Leading Women Executives, which focuses exclusively on high-potential women executives and their companies in order to strengthen and sustain female advancement in business. She is responsible for the program's strategic direction, marketing, relationship management, and delivery. Previously, Diane was an independent consultant focused on enhancing the effectiveness of investment sales and client servicing organizations.
From 1996-2002, Diane was Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Northern Trust Global Investments (NTGI), the institutional investment division of Northern Trust Corporation. Diane was a member of its executive management team accountable for market strategy of the $180+ billion institutional business. Diane developed and ran the business model that provided client and regulatory support for all NASD regulated investment sales and servicing functions. She led key initiatives to build cross functional business management systems and web-based client reporting, which improved communication flow and servicing capability. Diane designed and facilitated an ongoing training and development program for the division's investment professionals and collaborated with third party specialists to capture client satisfaction metrics and competitive positioning criteria to grow NTGI's market share.
Prior to this leadership role, Diane was an Investment Relationship Consultant and advised Fortune 500 firms on their institutional tax-advantaged plans. Diane began her career with Northern Trust Corporation in 1987 as a portfolio investment manager and is a Chartered Financial Analyst.
Diane Sakach received her undergraduate degree from the College of St. Benedict and her M.B.A. from Loyola University of Chicago.
Charlotte Dieroff works in the area of Business Development at the International Food Network (IFN)in Ithaca, NY.
Her early career at IFN included product development in the areas of frozen desserts, weight-loss and dry mix beverages. She later joined Tastemaker (acquired by Givaudan) and worked in food flavor applications. Upon returning to IFN Charlotte's efforts morphed into the areas of business development including sales and behind the scenes marketing.
Charlotte Dieroff holds a B.S. in Food Science from Cornell University and an MBA from Xavier University.
Eric Allyn is one of the owners of Welch Allyn, Inc, a company founded in 1915 when Allyn's great-grandfather invented the ophthalmoscope.
Today, Welch Allyn is a 100% family-owned company,employing some 2,800 people worldwide. Welch Allyn is a recognized leader in Medical devices, producing instruments ranging from blood pressure gauges and stethoscopes to wireless cardiac monitoring equipment.
Allyn began his career at Welch Allyn in 1982, and worked in a variety of functions through the company, including US and international sales, marketing, business development, product management and executive management. He spent more than five years abroad running various businesses, with responsibilities in both Europe and Asia. He now serves on Welch Allyn's board of directors, and is chairman of the company's voting trust. He chairs the investment committee at the Allyn Foundation, serves on the board of the Gifford Foundation, is chairman of the board of Auburn Memorial Hospital, and is a board member of the Hospital Trustees of New York State. In addition, Allyn is the managing partner of several private investment funds. He is a former board member of Hand Held Products, Inc. (eventually sold to Honeywell) and Everest-VIT (eventually sold to GE).
Allyn attended Dartmouth College, and earned an MBA from University of Virginia. He lives in Skaneateles with his wife Meg O'Connell and their three daughters.