Conference Co-Chairs and Co-Convenors

Gautam Mahajan (President Customer Value Foundation and Founder Editor of the Journal of Creating Value)

Gautam Mahajan, Founder Editor of the Journal of Creating Value and President of Customer Value Foundation is the leading global thought leader in Total Customer Value Management. Mr Mahajan worked for a Fortune 50 company in the USA for 17 years and had hand-on experience in consulting, training of leaders, professionals, managers and CEOs from numerous MNCs and local conglomerates like Tata, Birla and Godrej groups. He is also the author of widely acclaimed books “Customer Value Investment: Formula for Sustained Business Success”, “Total Customer Value Management: Transforming Business Thinking” and "Value Creation: The Definitive Guide for Business Leaders". He was President, of the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce, and was Chairman, PlastIndia Committee, Vice President All India Plastics Manufacturers Association, Trustee Plastics Institute of America. He was a member of the US India think tank. He was Chairman of the US India Economics Relations Forum. Among his honours is a Fellowship from Harvard Business School and Illinois Institute of Technology. He also has 18 US patents. He was honoured by the Illinois Institute of Technology with its Distinguished Alumni award in 2001. Recently, he spoke at the Center for American and International Law in Dallas to an audience of 35 countries on India, and at Berlin in 2006 at the European Fine Chemicals Conference, and in 2011 in New York, Akron, Columbus, Denver, Chicago and California. He spoke to CEO’s from 26 European companies in 2008. He was written up in the Wall Street Journal. He also gave the first Distinguished Engineering lecture at Illinois followed by a Distinguished Management lecture. In September 2011, he spent time in the US talking about Indo-US relations and how to improve them. Mr Mahajan is a graduate of IIT Madras, where he was an Institute Merit Scholar, has a Master’s degree in Mechanics and has completed his PhD coursework from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and an MBA from Suffolk University.

Email: gautam.mahajan@gmail.com

Professor Peter Stokes (Professor of Leadership and Professional Development, Leicester Castle Business School)

Peter Stokes is Professor of Leadership and Professional Development. Previously he was a professor in the University of Chester Business School where, in addition to successfully completing faculty-wide Deputy Dean (2012-2015), Acting Executive Dean (2012-2014), Director of Research and Knowledge Transfer (2014-2015) assignments he played a leading role in national and international research and knowledge transfer projects.

He has taught, researched, published and reviewed extensively in world-class journals in the areas of, among others: Human Resource Management; Leadership Values and Behaviours; Business Ethics; Management Philosophy; Organizational Design, Critical Management Studies, and Research Methodology. His work has appeared in leading journals such as, for example: Human Resource Management; Organization; Studies in Higher Education; Journal of Organizational Change Management; Employee Relations; Entrepreneurship and Regional Development and Thunderbird International Business Review. In addition, he has published books on research methods, postgraduate research, critical management studies and organizational management. He is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Organizational Analysis and serves on a number of international journal boards including the EuroMed Journal of Business and the Journal of Value Creation. He has been visiting professor and academic advisor in businesses and university business schools in a number of countries including: France, Holland, Spain, Ireland, Germany, Senegal (West Africa),Vietnam, Morocco, Hong Kong, China, India and Dubai. 

 He has applied his work through national and international knowledge transfer and consultancy projects across a range of business sectors encompassing utilities, construction, publishing, aerospace, diplomatic, emergency services and local government. He currently hold a number of positions on major international bodies including: Vice-President-Business Relations and UK Country Director for the EuroMed Research Business Institute (EMBRI); UK Ambassador for the Association Francophone de Gestion des Ressources Humaines (French Academic HR Association); Organizing Committee of the Research Methodology SIG – British Academy of Management; member of the British Standards Institute (BSI) Human Capital Standards Committee; member of the Steering Committee of the Spiritual Capital Development Company, Institute of Directors, and Associate of the MBRF Foundation (Dubai).

Email: peter.stokes@dmu.ac.uk/peterstokesmail@gmail.com

 

Professor Dana Brown (Pro-Vice Chancellor, Enterprise and Principal Leicester Castle Business School, DMU)

Raised by her mother in America with her father in England, Dana’s life and career has spanned the two countries and beyond. While completing her BA in Political Science and Slavic Languages at Rutgers University in New Jersey, she spent a year at Exeter University and a further year on Exeter’s Russian language programme in Moscow. After completing her BA, Dana was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study for the MPhil in Russian and East European Studies at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University. She later earned her PhD in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), completing a dissertation on the intersection of market and social reform in former Soviet countries.

Dana has worked in and closely with business, starting in high school when she had the opportunity work alongside a former chief executive of F.W. Woolworth during the launch a new start-up retail venture. She was also amongst the first employees of Amazon.com, where she worked as Senior Manager of Operations in the period leading up to the company’s IPO. At MIT, she was part of an initiative of Sloan School of Management that invited executives from the global clothing and footwear industries to participate in emerging discussions about labour issues in global supply chains. She has worked with several companies in executive education and has supervised a number of student entrepreneurship projects, many of which have been launched into successful businesses.

In higher education, Dana served as Director of the Trenton Academic Centre at Rutgers University, facilitating early experiments in distance learning. After her Ph.D. she was appointed as University Lecturer in International Business at Said Business School and Clore Fellow of Management at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University. At Oxford, Dana sat on the LMH Governing Body, Development and Strategic Planning Committees, and led the college’s student exchange programme. At Said Business School, she co-directed an interdisciplinary forum on Corporate Social Responsibility, the Oxford-Achilles Working Group on CSR. She moved to France in 2010 to take up a Professorship of Strategy at EM-LYON Business School, where she was also the Academic Director of the Doctorate in Business Administration run jointly with Sun-Yat sen University. In 2013, she returned to Oxford as the Director of the MBA at Said Business School and oversaw a curricular reform and significant growth and internationalisation of the programme. Dana has also taught executive education and MBA courses at Oxford, EMLYON, IE Business School and the American University in Cairo.  

In 2014, Dana completed certification as an Executive Coach with Meyler-Campbell in London and practices informally. She has worked for eight years as a selector for the Alfa Fellowship Programme, which sends young professionals from America, the UK and Germany on a ten month professional development programme in Moscow. Dana is also involved with Warm Heart, a social enterprise providing opportunities for children and their communities in the Phrao region of Thailand.                     

Email: dana.brown@dmu.ac.uk