Shaping the Future - Milken Institute
Shaping the Future - Milken Institute
Shaping the Future - Milken Institute
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panelists<br />
Adam Lashinsky is a Senior Editor at Large for Fortune, covering Silicon Valley and Wall Street. He has been on<br />
<strong>the</strong> magazine’s staff since 2001 and, for two previous years, was a contributing columnist. He is a weekly panelist on<br />
<strong>the</strong> Fox News Channel’s “Cavuto on Business” and appears on o<strong>the</strong>r Fox News and Fox Business Network programs. He<br />
co-chairs Fortune’s annual technology conference, Fortune Brainstorm Tech. Prior to joining Fortune, Lashinsky was a<br />
columnist for The San Jose Mercury News and TheStreet.com. Before moving to California, he was a reporter and editor<br />
for Crain’s Chicago Business. As a Henry Luce Scholar, he worked for a year in Tokyo as a reporter for <strong>the</strong> Nikkei Weekly, <strong>the</strong><br />
English-language version of Japan’s main economic daily. He began his career in <strong>the</strong> Washington, D.C., bureau of Crain<br />
Communications. Lashinsky received a B.A. from <strong>the</strong> University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.<br />
Marc Lasry is Chairman and CEO of Avenue Capital Group, which he co-founded. He is also co-founder of Amroc<br />
Investments. Distressed investing has been <strong>the</strong> focus of his career for more than two decades. Prior to operating Amroc<br />
as an independent entity, Lasry managed capital for Amroc Investments LP, which was affiliated with Acadia Partners LP.<br />
Lasry was previously co-director of <strong>the</strong> Bankruptcy and Corporate Reorganization Department at Cowen & Company<br />
and director of <strong>the</strong> Private Debt Department at Smith Vasiliou Management Company. He also clerked for <strong>the</strong> Hon.<br />
Edward Ryan, former chief bankruptcy judge of <strong>the</strong> Sou<strong>the</strong>rn District of New York. Lasry received a bachelor’s degree<br />
from Clark University and a J.D. from New York Law School.<br />
Rich Lechner is Vice President of Energy and Environment at IBM, leading efforts to help clients improve <strong>the</strong><br />
efficiency of <strong>the</strong>ir infrastructure, focusing on energy, carbon, water, and waste. He heads up IBM’s work in <strong>the</strong> Green &<br />
Beyond effort, part of <strong>the</strong> Smarter Planet initiative. Previously, he was vice president for enterprise systems, addressing<br />
IBM’s large enterprise customer base by bringing to market a unified set of systems, software and services designed to<br />
optimize large-scale IT infrastructures. He has held a number of o<strong>the</strong>r senior leadership positions at IBM in <strong>the</strong> United<br />
States and Europe across <strong>the</strong> hardware, software and services organizations, including storage systems, mainframes,<br />
software strategy and systems management. Lechner holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from <strong>the</strong><br />
University of California, Los Angeles.<br />
Richard LeFrak is Chairman, President and CEO of <strong>the</strong> LeFrak Organization, a diversified, privately held firm active<br />
in major residential and commercial real estate development, oil and gas exploration, and financial investments.<br />
LeFrak is perhaps best known as one of <strong>the</strong> most prolific and iconic real estate developers of all time. In addition to<br />
building hundreds of distinctive residential buildings (containing tens of thousands of apartments) throughout <strong>the</strong><br />
New York metropolitan region, <strong>the</strong> company’s real estate holdings include millions of square feet of class A office, retail<br />
and mixed-use developments from Manhattan to Los Angeles. Currently LeFrak is directing <strong>the</strong> development of <strong>the</strong><br />
Newport in Jersey City; this mixed-use, master-planned community on <strong>the</strong> Hudson River waterfront will encompass<br />
thousands of apartments and millions of square feet of commercial, retail, hotel and community facilities.<br />
Jack Leslie is Chairman of <strong>the</strong> public relations/public affairs firm Weber Shandwick. He specializes in helping<br />
corporations, public institutions and prominent individuals to drive strategic campaigns. Leslie has advised many<br />
leading national and international figures of <strong>the</strong> last two decades; for example, he served as a communications crisis<br />
advisor to <strong>the</strong> N.Y.–N.J. Port Authority after <strong>the</strong> 1993 World Trade Center bombing and to American Airlines after <strong>the</strong><br />
attacks of September 11; to <strong>the</strong> Government of Colombia on narco-trafficking and terrorism; to <strong>the</strong> state of Florida<br />
on <strong>the</strong> shootings of foreign tourists. In 2009, President Obama appointed Leslie to serve as chairman of <strong>the</strong> board of<br />
directors of <strong>the</strong> U.S. African Development Foundation. He is a member of <strong>the</strong> Council on Foreign Relations and <strong>the</strong><br />
Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid of <strong>the</strong> U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), among<br />
o<strong>the</strong>rs. Leslie is a graduate of <strong>the</strong> Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.<br />
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