Mark Hurd, chief executive officer of Oracle Corporation, will headline the Sales Thought Leadership Conference at Stanford Graduate School of Business. The biennial conference, which the Sales Management Association sponsors and helps produce, features a novel format and an exclusive audience, half of whom are leading sales academics, and half senior executive leaders from global sales organizations.
This will be the fourth iteration of the event, which has been held previously at Harvard Business School, Columbia Business School, and HEC Paris. Founded by marketing professors Michael Ahearne (University of Houston) and Thomas Steenburgh (University of Virginia), the event’s goal is to cross pollinate academia and industry. “The conference brings prominent figures from academia and practice together in one room with the singular goal to advance the methods and processes through which sales forces operate,” says Ahearne.
Mark Hurd joined Oracle in 2010, and was previously chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president of HP. Prior to that, he spent 25 years at NCR Corporation, where he held a variety of management, operations, sales, and marketing roles, ultimately serving as the company’s chief executive officer and president. He’s been recognized by Fortune magazine as one of their 25 Most Powerful People in Business; featured several times in Barron‘s Best CEOs lists; and named by the San Francisco Chronicle as CEO of the Year in 2008.
Other notable speakers include renowned social scientist, negotiations expert, and Stanford Professor of Management Margaret Ann Neal, and neuroeconomics expert and Stanford Marketing Professor Baba Shiv. Sales Management Association Chairman Bob Kelly will moderate a plenary panel on sales force learning and development.
In addition to keynotes and plenary panels, academics from institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, London School of Business, Washington University’s Olin School of Business, and USC’s Marshall School of Business will give TED-style talks about their research. In the spirit of creating an interactive environment, mixed panels featuring subject matter experts from both academia and practice will comment on the ideas presented in these talks and discuss how they can be implemented in practice, along with the implications of doing so.
Learn more about the Sales Thought Leadership Conference here. At press time a small number of invitations remain to the event. Sales Management Association members are encouraged to register their interest in attending here.
