How Will the Presidential Election Impact Your Profession?

How do presidential elections affect the markets?  How do U.S. business executives think the upcoming election will impact their company’s business?  How will the results impact your profession?  All Yale alumni are invited to join Yale SOM’s Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, Senior Associate Dean for Leadership Programs & Lester Crown Professor in the Practice of Management, Elisabeth Bumiller, P ‘16, Washington Bureau Chief at the New York Times, Grover Norquist, Founder and President, Americans for Tax Reform, Mark Penn, President and Managing Partner, Stagwell Group, and Philip Rucker ’06 B.A., National Political Correspondent at The Washington Post for an open discussion about the results of the upcoming election. Lunch will be provided.

Space is limited – register today!

Cost: $20 per person (lunch included)

Speakers

• Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld

  Senior Associate Dean for Leadership Programs & Lester Crown Professor in the Practice of Management
  Moderator
  

  Jeffrey Sonnenfeld served as full tenured professor at Emory's Goizueta Business School for a decade and a professor at the Harvard Business School for a decade, and is currently the senior associate dean of leadership programs as well as the Lester Crown Professor in the Practice of Management for the Yale School of Management, as well as founder and president of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute, a nonprofit educational and research institute focused on CEO leadership and corporate governance. Professor Sonnenfeld's related research has been published in 100 scholarly articles which appeared in the leading academic journals in management such as Administrative Sciences Quarterly, the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, the Journal of Organizational Behavior, Social Forces, Human Relations, and Human Resource Management. He has also authored eight books, including The Hero's Farewell, an award-winning study of CEO succession, and another best seller, Firing Back, a study on leadership resilience in the face of adversity.

• Elisabeth Bumiller '16 P

  Washington Bureau Chief, The New York Times
  

  Elisabeth Bumiller is Washington Bureau Chief of The New York Times, where she oversees the paper’s coverage of the nation’s capital. Previously she was The Times’ Washington Editor and deputy Washington Bureau Chief. She was a Times Pentagon correspondent from 2008 to early 2013, a period when she embedded with the American military in Afghanistan. In 2008 she covered the presidential campaign of Senator John McCain. From Sept. 10, 2001 to 2006, she was a Times White House correspondent who also wrote a weekly column, White House Letter, about the people and behind-the-scenes events of the presidency. Before moving to Washington, from 1999 to 2001, Ms. Bumiller was The Times’ City Hall Bureau chief responsible for covering Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and his Senate race against Hillary Rodham Clinton. She has also written for The New York Times magazine and the newspaper’s culture and travel pages. From 1979 to 1985, Ms. Bumiller worked for The Washington Post in Washington, New Delhi, Tokyo and New York. Ms. Bumiller is the author of three books: Condoleezza Rice: An American Life; May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India and The Secrets of Mariko: A Year in the Life of a Japanese Woman and Her Family. In 2006 and 2007, Ms. Bumiller was a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center and a Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Ms. Bumiller was born in 1956 in Aalborg, Denmark, grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. She lives in the Washington, D.C. area with her husband, Steven R. Weisman. They have two grown children.

• Mark Penn

  President and Managing Partner, Stagwell Group
  

  Mark Penn is the President and Managing Partner of The Stagwell Group, a private equity fund focused on the marketing services industry. In this role, Penn directs the acquisition process and oversees the Group’s portfolio companies. Penn has been in research, advertising, public relations, polling and consulting for nearly 40 years. Before founding The Stagwell Group, he served in senior executive positions at Microsoft where as Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, he was responsible for working on core strategic issues across Microsoft's products, value propositions and investments and leading the company's competitive research and analysis. Penn's experience in growing, building and managing agencies is well-documented. As the co-founder and CEO of Penn Schoen Berland, a global market research firm that he built and sold to WPP, he demonstrated value creation in a crowded industry serving clients with innovative techniques from being first with overnight polling to pioneering unique ad testing methods used by Presidents and Fortune 100 corporations. At WPP, he also became CEO of Burson-Marsteller, and managed the two companies to record profit growth during that period. He is also known as the strategist for and creator of well-known campaigns and ads, helping reelect President Bill Clinton and his move to the political center, devising then Senator Hillary Clinton’s successful “Upstate strategy,” creating Tony Blair's "Forward not Back" campaign in 2005 and the “3AM” ad in the 2008 Presidential primaries, and led the team on Microsoft's hugely successful 2014 Super Bowl ad when he headed advertising there. Penn has been a senior adviser to global corporate and political leaders including Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Bill Ford, U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Bill Clinton. He has helped elect over 25 heads of state around the world. Penn is also a globally recognized thought leader. He authored the Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestselling book “Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes”; and was a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Time.com, POLITICO, and The Huffington Post. In a cover story, Time Magazine called him “Master of the Message.” Penn earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and attended Columbia Law School. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the National Holocaust Museum’s Committee on Conscience, and serves on the board of Meridian International Center. Penn is also a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard College and a Professorial Lecturer at George Washington University.

• Grover Norquist

  Founder and President, Americans for Tax Reform
  

  Grover Norquist (Twitter: @GroverNorquist) is president of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), a taxpayer advocacy group he founded in 1985 at President Reagan’s request. ATR works to limit the size and cost of government and opposes higher taxes at the federal, state, and local levels and supports tax reform that moves towards taxing consumed income one time at one rate. ATR organizes the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which asks all candidates for federal and state office to commit themselves in writing to the American people to oppose all net tax increases. In the 114th Congress, 219 House members and 49 Senators have taken the pledge. On the state level, 14 governors and over 1,000 state legislators have taken the pledge. Norquist chairs the Washington, DC - based Wednesday Meeting, a weekly gathering of more than 150 elected officials, political activists, and movement leaders. The meeting started in 1993 and takes place in ATR's conference room. There are now 60 similar center-right meetings in 48 states. Mr. Norquist also: --Serves on the board of directors of the National Rifle Association of America, the American Conservative Union, the Parental Rights Organization and Center for the National Interest (formerly The Nixon Center.) --Serves as a Contributing Editor to the American Spectator Magazine. --Serves as president of the American Society of Competitiveness. --Authored four books: Rock the House; Leave Us Alone – Getting the Government’s Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives; Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future (with co-author John Lott) and End the IRS Before it Ends Us — How to Restore a Low Tax, High Growth, Wealthy America — published April 7, 2015. Previously, Mr. Norquist served as: --A commissioner on the Advisory Commission on Electronic Commerce. --A commissioner on the National Commission on Restructuring the Internal Revenue Service. --Economist and chief speech-writer, U.S. Chamber of Commerce (1983-1984.) --Campaign staff on the 1988, 1992, 1996 Republican Platform Committees. --Executive director of the National Taxpayers’ Union. --Executive director of the College Republicans. Mr. Norquist holds an MBA and a BA in Economics, both from Harvard University. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife, Samah, and two daughters.

• Philip Rucker '06 B.A.

  National Political Correspondent at The Washington Post
  

  Philip Rucker is National Political Correspondent at The Washington Post and is one of its lead reporters chronicling the 2016 presidential race. Rucker previously served as White House Correspondent and Congressional Correspondent and traveled the country covering Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. He joined The Post in 2005 and has covered an array of beats for the paper, including suburban news, Maryland state politics as well as philanthropy and non-profits. Rucker and a team of Post reporters were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news for coverage of the 2009 massacre at Fort Hood, Texas. Rucker graduated from Yale University in 2006 with a degree in History and worked as a reporter and editor at the Yale Daily News.