John Polson is a partner in the Irvine, California office of Fisher & Phillips LLP where he has worked since graduating from Loyola Law School in 1991. He represents employers in all aspects of labor and employment law, including litigation, compliance, employment tax, and transactional matters. He has particular expertise representing staffing and HR outsourcing companies. John is licensed in both California and Texas. John has been listed in The Best Lawyers in America since 2007. He is a frequent lecturer and author regarding labor and employment related matters.

Toni Pilzner is an attorney with more than 15 years' experience in advising employers on creating and administering employee welfare and retirement benefit plans. Having worked as a certified public accountant and as an in-house corporate tax analyst dealing with employee benefit plan matters before becoming an attorney, she also understands the financial and practical aspects of employee benefit plan administration. Toni has shared her expertise with SHRM members by presenting concurrent sessions on employee benefits topics at a number of SHRM conferences in addition to writing SHRM Legal Alerts and contributing to SHRM Online articles on employee benefit matters. She also served on the SHRM Total Rewards Special Expertise Panel and its predecessor, the SHRM Compensation and Benefits Committee, as well as serving a three-year term on the U.S. Department of Labor's ERISA Advisory Council.

Steven L. Phillips, Ph.D. is well known for his leadership consulting focusing on strategic planning, organizational alignment, executive leadership, and the art of developing high performance teams. He is also well known for his “behind the scenes” executive coaching. Steve works one-on-one with presidents & CEOs helping them strategize for powerful and successful leadership. In addition to being a successful consultant for over 20 years working with such well known companies as Microsoft, PepsiCo, Viacom, Mattel, and many others, Dr. Phillips has extensive experience as a Senior Executive. For many years he served as a SVP Chief Talent Officer for a privately held 1B company with 10,000 employees where he implemented a full suite of human capital management programs designed to ensure a highly skilled and productive workforce.

Randy Pennington helps leaders deliver positive results in a world of accelerating uncertainty and change. His clients include many of world’s best-managed companies, associations, government agencies, and universities. Additionally, Randy serves as an adjunct instructor in the Cox Business Leadership Center at Southern Methodist University.

Randy is author of three books: Make Change Work, Results Rule!; and On My Honor, I Will . His ideas have been featured in leading media outlets including CNN, PBS, Fox News, ABC Radio Network, the BBC, Fast Company, and The New York Times. He is a contributor to CIO.com and the Huffington Post.

Deb Peluso has spent over a decade collaborating with clients in military, government, non-profit and Fortune 500 organizations to improve organizational performance and execute large scale change initiatives. She began her career studying how experts size up their environments and make quick decisions in complex, time pressured situations in fields as diverse as healthcare, government compliance, consumer products development, international peacekeeping, urban combat, and software development. Her work focused on eliciting tacit knowledge and finding the best ways to enable the transfer of knowledge and expertise to others – through the design of jobs, knowledge management systems, user interfaces, and training programs. She has also held positions as an organization development consultant in a major academic medical center and in two Fortune 100 financial services and manufacturing organizations, where she focused on individual, team, and enterprise-wide change management projects and initiatives. Deb holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from the University of Dayton and a Master of Organization Development from Bowling Green State University.

Stephen Paskoff is president and CEO of ELI®, which helps organizations activate and align their values with core organizational behaviors to build respectful, welcoming and inclusive cultures, maximize results and reduce legal and operational risks.

Paskoff has been named the highest-ranking speaker at SHRM’s national conference. The EEOC recognized ELI’s impact and quoted Paskoff in its Harassment Study. He is a nationally recognized speaker, commentator and author on workplace issues.

Before founding ELI® in 1986, Paskoff was an EEOC trial attorney and partner in a management law firm. He authored Teaching Big Shots to Behave and Civility Rules!

Ron Ozminkowski, Ph.D., is Vice President, Research and Development, in the Advanced Analytics Group at Ingenix, and Vice President, Research and Policy at UnitedHealth Group Alliances. He has been conducting health services research and evaluation projects since 1983. He is internationally recognized as an expert in the evaluation of corporate wellness and disease management programs, and has published widely on these and related issues. Dr. Ozminkowski received his Ph.D. in 1989 from the University of Michigan, School of Public Health, with an emphasis in health economics. He also holds Masters Degrees from the University of Michigan, with emphases in medical care organization and applied economics. Before joining Ingenix, Dr. Ozminkowski served as Director, Health & Productivity Research at Thomson Healthcare (Medstat) and as Associate Director of the Institute for Health and Productivity Studies, at Cornell University. He also served as Research Director at Abt Associates Inc., and taught health economics to undergraduate and graduate students at Eastern Michigan University and Mercy College of Detroit.

Lori O'Hara is speech-language pathologist, writer and public speaker. Using her clinical background as a foundation, she teaches businesses to use excellence in communication as a pathway to efficiency and unparalleled service. Lori has brought the principles of communication in business and systems development to industries from health care to manufacturing. She has also authored articles on supervision, management, clinical practice development and speech and language acquisition.

Grace A. Odums, an independent strategy consultant, has a growing consultancy spanning over fifteen years.  Her impressive client list boasts Fortune 500 and Fortune Global 500 companies including: Disney ABC Media NetWorks, Waste Management (PA/WVA Area), Fairmount Southampton Resorts, Chevron-Phillips, Siemens Medical Solutions, Wells Fargo Bank.  

A much sought after international speaker, Grace welcomes the opportunity to partner with organizations and professionals in the areas of management coaching, revenue recapture, change leadership, optimum customer care, talent performance enhancement, productivity improvement, increased efficiencies, balanced scorecard architecture, and diversity strategy creation with diversity scorecard and strategy map development and system-wide implementation.

Dr. Frank V. Nunez brings over thirty years of experience in all facets of human resources from employee relations, compensation and training & development to strategic workforce planning, leadership development and organizational change management. He has worked as a front line HRG supporting technology organizations as well as managing HR teams across multiple sites nation-wide. He completed his doctoral degree in organizational change from Pepperdine University in 2010. His dissertation broke new ground in leadership development research by linking the theories of Dr. Karen Horney (Hor-ni) to improving leadership growth. Now focusing on the human side of organizational change, Dr. Nunez helps organizations improve their leadership competence in constructing higher level mental models so that they can act on change rather than be acted upon by change.