Charles Gancel  

  Dave Snowden  

  Leslie Johnson  

  Kirpal Singh  

  Fredricka Reisman  

  Tony Pagliaro  

  Paolo Mario Remo Martinez  

MAIN SPEAKERS


The 2006 Management Conference will feature plenary session addresses by some of the world's leading thinkers and innovators in the field, as well as numerous parallel presentations by researchers and practitioners.

Garden Conversation Sessions

Main speakers will make formal 30 minute presentations in the plenary sessions. They will also participate in 60 minute Garden Conversation sessions at the same time as the parallel sessions. The setting is a circle of chairs outdoors. These sessions are entirely unstructured - a chance to meet the plenary speaker and talk with them informally about the issues arising from their presentation.

Please return to this page for regular updates.


The Speakers


  • Charles Gancel

    • Charles Gancel is a co-founder of Inter Cultural Management Associates (ICM) and has been a Managing Director of the company since its creation in 1983.

    Before joining ICM, Charles worked six years for the advertising agency Idéodis in Paris, acquiring considerable experience in corporate communications as "Directeur de Création".

    Charles helps international companies bridge corporate cultures in post-merger / acquisition situtations. He has facilitated major culture change processes, including using client and employee surveys and communications to generate better understanding and acceptance of change. Charles also conducts cultural audits with ICM's Culture Bridging Fundamentals© diagnostic tool. He works with executive teams to finalize decisions for implementing new strategies and accompanies their implementation.

    Charles also helps executives and managers working in decentralized, remote and matrix organizations to develop innovative, clear and consistent management processes.

    Charles has worked with companies in Europe, North America and Asia. His clients include sanofi aventis, EADS, Chronopost, Union Chimique Belge, Hennessy and Faurecia. He has published numerous articles in the the field of post-merger integration and presented to various groups in these areas. Along with the two other ICM partners, he published Successful Mergers, Acquisitions and Strategic Alliances - Strategies for Culture Bridging, (McGraw Hill, London, May 2002,Beijing 2005).



  • Dave Snowden

    • Dave Snowden is Director of the Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity, United Kingdom. He has been one of the leading figures in the movement towards integration of humanistic approaches to knowledge management with appropriate technology and process design. Well known for his work on the role of narrative and sensemaking, he is an entertaining speaker and a formidable realist, and one of the few thought leaders who can bring together the academic and practitioner perspectives into a single, comprehensible purview.

    The Cynefin Centre for Organizational Complexity focuses on the development of the theory and practice of social complexity. The Centre spun off from IBM in July 2005 to allow it greater freedom to explore new transdiciplinary and participatory approaches to research and the creation of an open source approach to management consultancy. The Cynefin framework which lies at the heart of the approach has been recognized by several commentators as one of the first practical application of complexity theory to management science and builds on earlier pioneering work in Knowledge Management.

    A native of Wales, he was formerly a Director in the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management where he led programmes on complexity and narrative. He pioneered the use of narrative as a means of knowledge disclosure and cross-cultural understanding. He is a leading keynote speaker at major conferences around the world and is known for his iconoclastic style, pragmatic cynicism and extensive use of stories to communicate what would otherwise be difficult concepts. Tom Stewart, the new editor of Harvard Business Review in his latest book states in the context of tacit knowledge "Dave Snowden, the best thinker I've found on the subject ..." although by way of counter he also comments "he is Welsh and a bit mad".

    Dave Snowden has an MBA from Middlesex University and a BA in Philosophy from Lancaster University. He is adjunct Professor of Knowledge Management at the University of Canberra, an honorary fellow in knowledge management at the University of Warwick, Adjunct Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and MiNE Fellow at the Universita Cattolica Del Sacro Cuore in Italy. He teaches on various university programmes throughout the world. He regularly consults at the board level with some of the world's largest companies as well as to Government and NGOs and was recently appointed as an advisor on sense making to the Singaporean Ministry of Defence. In addition he sits on a number of advisory and other bodies including the British Standards Institute committee on standards for Knowledge Management.




  • Leslie Johnson

    • Leslie Johnson is Professor of Information and Knowledge Management and Director of University of Greenwich Business School that has nearly four thousand students and over one hundred and twenty staff with many additional part-time staff.

    Prof. Johnson holds a degree in philosophy and a Ph.D. in Cybernetics. He was a post-doctorate Sloane Scholar in Cognitive Science. He has been the Professor of Computer Science and Head of the Department of Computer Science at Brunel University; Dean of the Faculty of Science at Brunel University; Head of Research in the Computing Laboratory, University of Kent; and Director of Canterbury Business School, University of Kent.

    Over the course of his career he has held several major research grants (£2·5 millions). He has been a Director of four companies including a research exploitation software house. He has published extensively in computer science, cognitive science, and systems research. He is the author, or author, of several books. Currently his team is working on Knowledge Management and Organizational Complexity.

    Amongst his other interests are ethics and the philosophy of management and leadership.




  • Kirpal Singh

    • Dr Kirpal Singh is internationally recognised as one of the most powerful voices to emerge from Southeast Asia in recent years, especially in the areas of socio-cultural discussions. An acclaimed poet and fictionist, Dr Kirpal’s latest book, Thinking Hats & Coloured Turbans (Prentice-Hall, 2004) deals with the ways in which cultural contexts appear dominant in any exploration of Creativity/Innovation.

    As the Founding Director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies at the Singapore Management University (where he teaches a course called “Creative Thinking”) Kirpal has gained international reputation in the complex field of cross-cultural understanding/relations. He is a much sought-after Keynote Speaker and Workshop Leader, having addressed meetings in the UK, USA, Australia, Philippines, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, Fiji, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, etc.

    Kirpal Singh is the first Asian to be on the Board of the ACA(American Creativity Association). He sits on several other Boards and has been a consultant for firms such as IBM, Singapore Airlines, Lo-Oreal, AMEX, and several government and quasi-government bodies in many countries. His latest project is a book on Leadership Across Cultures.




  • Fredricka K. Reisman

    • Fredricka K. Reisman, Ph.D. is professor and founder of Drexel’s School of Education. She is also a tenured professor in the Goodwin College of Professional Studies. Additionally, Dr Reisman serves as Assistant Provost for Assessment and Evaluation and Director of the Drexel/Torrance Center for Creative Studies which is the umbrella for the Center for Global Creativity. Prior to coming to Philadelphia, Dr Reisman served as Professor and Chair of the Division of Elementary Education at the University of Georgia and as an elementary, middle school, high school mathematics teacher in New York State, and mathematics education instructor at Syracuse University.

    Dr Reisman has an impressive record of external funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the US Department of Education, the PA Department of Education, and foundation support such as the Wallace Funds and the Anna E. Casey Foundation, to assist pre-and in-service teachers in developing their mathematics and technology skills both in regular and charter public schools including national projects. She also collaborates on Drexel funded projects in the Colleges of Engineering and Business. In 1984, Dr Reisman headed the Drexel project management team for the Computer Applications in Teaching Program which was the first major effort to integrate computing into instruction in the Philadelphia high schools.

    She is the author of several books with subjects that include, diagnostic teaching, teaching mathematics to children with special needs, elementary education pedagogy, and mathematics pedagogy. She also has co-authored a trilogy of books with world-renowned creativity scholar and researcher, E. Paul Torrance, on teaching mathematics creatively.

    Dr Reisman is currently creating a Grade 1 through 8 Diagnostic Mathematics Assessment that incorporates creativity theory to be published in 2007 by Scholastic Testing Service, publisher of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Dr Reisman was awarded the national 2002 Champion of Creativity Award by the American Creativity Association and was appointed to the ACA national Board.




  • Tony Pagliaro

    • Tony Pagliaro is Senior Lecturer in Italian in the Italian Program at La Trobe University. He has published on various aspects of Italian literature between the fourteenth and twentieth century and on Italians in Australia (Raffaello Carboni, Swiss-Italians at Daylesford during the gold rush).

    He is currently working with Carolyn James (Monash University) on an English-language edition of the letters written by Margherita Datini to her husband between 1384 and 1410. It will form part of the series The Other Voice (General Editor: Albert Rabil, Chicago UP).




  • Paolo Mario Remo Martinez

  • Paolo Mario Remo Martinez (sociologist and geographer) is the manager of Interactive Innovation and participatory methodologies at Firenze Tecnologia, the special agency of Florence Chamber of Commerce. He is a researcher on participatory methodologies and is currently working forpublic and private organisations to stimulate innovation through interaction and creativity. He has applied participatory methodologies to areas where it is fundamental to engage all stakeholders for awareness and decision making processes: innovation, internal organisational strategies, competence development, sustainability,Agenda21, Corporate Social Responsibility, local development plans,cooperation, health, learning, knowledge management, clusters and networks. As process consultant, facilitator and group moderator of several interactive methods he has been working since 1986 in industry and service organisations (large and sme, profit and non- profit),coordinating and researching in EU projects on innovation methodologies and the social dimension of innovation, scenarios, future centers and regional knowledge management.