Shaping the Future - Milken Institute

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