Speakers
Kweilin Ellingrud
Kweilin Ellingrud is a senior partner and leads McKinsey’s Life Insurance and Annuities practice in North America and was the first woman to lead the Minneapolis location from 2012-16. Since joining McKinsey 20 years ago, Ellingrud has led multiple global transformations, integrating both operations and strategy to empower employees, better deliver for customers, and improve efficiency and effectiveness.
She was selected as a member of the McKinsey Global Institute Council, where she has led numerous research efforts including on the impact of COVID-19 on jobs and gender equality globally. She is a co-author of COVID-19 and jobs: Monitoring the US impact on people and places, an article on the impact of U.S. jobs by income, race, education, and geography. She is the instigator and co-author of multiple reports on how to close the global gender gap: Power of Parity: How advancing women’s equality can add $12 Trillion to global growth.
Ellingrud has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.A. in economics and political science, magna cum laude, from Harvard University. She worked at the Center for Women & Enterprise, a nonprofit to help women entrepreneurs start and grow businesses. She is a board member of @Makers and the Greater Twin Cities United Way, and is a member of C200, an organization for senior women business leaders. She lives in Minnesota with her husband and three daughters: an 8-year-old and 6-year-old twins.
Dr. Frank Magwegwe
In 1992, Frank Magwegwe was homeless, broke, unemployed and separated from his family. In 1993, through selling fruit and vegetables in downtown Johannesburg, he “beat the odds” and “escaped” homelessness. Magwegwe earned a master’s degree in financial mathematics in 2003 from the University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa. He completed the Advanced Management Programme at Harvard Business School in 2013 and in 2020 earned a doctorate in personal financial planning from Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kan.
Magwegwe has travelled an incredible journey from: being homeless to entrepreneur, social scientist and academic. He talks about overcoming obstacles, the power of choices, and the HERO within us – Hope, Efficacy, Resilience, and Optimism.
Magwegwe lectures at the Gordon Institute of Business Science; runs Frankly Speaking, a people development business; and Thrive Financial Wellness, an evidence-based financial education and wellness business that helps employers who want employee wellness to be a winning business strategy. He has more than 22 years financial services experience including executive management positions at large South African companies.
Magwegwe’s story shows the “power of the HERO within us” in overcoming obstacles, an incredible journey made possible by “hope on a fruit and vegetable stand!”
Gary Bolles
Gary A. Bolles, chair for the Future of Work at Singularity University, Santa Clara, Calif., writes and lectures around the world on the future of work, learning, and the organization. As chair for the Future of Work, he helps people understand the impact of exponential change on the worlds of work and education. As a partner in the consulting agency Charrette LLC, he helps organizations, educators and governments understand the needs of tomorrow’s workers and learners. And as co-founder of eParachute.com, he helps job-hunters and career changers with programs inspired by “What Color Is Your Parachute?”
Bolles is dedicated to helping individuals, organizations, communities and countries to collaborate on effective strategies, and to ensure that all people can have access to meaningful work and lifelong learning opportunities. He writes regularly on LinkedIn, and has nine courses on LinkedIn Learning with a total of more than 600,000 students.
Brandon Busteed
Brandon Busteed, chief partnership officer and global head of Learn-Work Innovation, leads Kaplan’s work serving U.S. colleges and universities, leveraging assets from across the company’s many educational offerings. His career spans a wide range of important work in education as an entrepreneur, researcher, speaker, writer and university trustee. His mission is to help U.S. higher education adapt, grow and thrive.
Prior to Kaplan, Busteed was most recently global head of Public Sector at Gallup – serving higher education, government and foundations. While at Gallup he also served for six years as executive director of Education and Workforce Development. In that role, Busteed led dozens of groundbreaking Gallup studies including the Gallup-Purdue Index, the Strada-Gallup Education Consumer Survey, the Gallup-Google Computer Science in K12 Education Study, and the Gallup-Knight Foundation Trust in Media Study.
Busteed has founded two companies and one nonprofit organization as a social entrepreneur. He is the founder and former CEO of Outside The Classroom, a company that pioneered adaptive online education in alcohol abuse prevention. A three-year, 30-school, national study funded by the National Institutes of Health showed that AlcoholEdu – the organization’s flagship alcohol-abuse prevention program – was effective in reducing binge drinking, drunk driving and sexual assaults. More than 10 million students have participated in the program. The company was acquired by EverFi in 2011.
An internationally known speaker and author on education and workforce development, Busteed has published more than 100 articles and blogs for Gallup, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, Trusteeship Magazine, Fast Company and other publications. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and USA Today and on NPR and the NBC
News “TODAY” show, among others. Busteed received his bachelor’s degree in public policy from Duke University and an honorary doctorate from Augustana College. He is a trustee emeritus of Duke and has served on the board of visitors of the Sanford School of Public Policy. Busteed is a current member of the Business-Higher Education Forum – the nation’s oldest membership organization of Fortune 500 CEOs, college and university presidents, and other leaders dedicated to the creation of a highly skilled future workforce. He also serves on the board of directors for the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U).
Jason Mahn
Dr. Jason Mahn is a professor of religion, the endowed Conrad Bergendoff Chair in the Humanities, and director of the Presidential Center for Faith and Learning at Augustana College in Rock Island, Ill. He works closely with the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities by editing the journal Intersections, and by helping to plan the annual Vocation of Lutheran Higher Education conference. His previous books includes “Fortunate Fallibility: Kierkegaard and the Power of Sin” (Oxford, 2011); “Becoming a Christian in Christendom: Radical Discipleship and the Way of the Cross in America’s “Christian” Culture” (Fortress, 2016), and the co-authored and edited book, “Radical Lutherans/Lutheran Radicals” (Cascade, 2017).
Mahn wrote his most recent book, “Neighbor Love through Fearful Days: Finding Purpose and Meaning in a Time of Crisis” (Fortress Press, 2021), over the summer of 2020, when COVID-19, racial violence, and climate chaos ravaged our country and world. The book is about living with purpose and finding meaningful work, even and especially in these times of crisis. According to book description from Fortress Press, “Neighbor Love” is an “evocative narrative … about living through a time when the world as we know it is being leveled by pandemics – and it is also a deeply philosophical exploration of what it means to live well … Ultimately, these reflections acknowledge the immense challenge of living a purposeful life in the middle of crisis but invite readers to the shared hope that from the ashen stillness, we may just hear new callings to imagine healing, cultivate hope, and love neighbors in creative ways.”
At Augustana, Mahn teaches courses on Christian theology, suffering and healing, eco-theology, interfaith cooperation, and God-language in the contemporary secular world. He lives a few blocks from campus with his spouse, the Rev. Laura Mahn; two gangly teenage sons, Asa and Gabe; one dog, Gracie; six chickens and more garden produce than they know what to do with.