Speakers

Insightful, Motivating, Engaging

These are some of the words attendees used to describe speakers at last year’s conference and this year will be no different. Vision:08 will provide you with insight from leading experts who mould and shape the performance management industry. You will be taken deep inside the minds of these strategists as they share their innovative ideas, groundbreaking concepts and vision for where corporate performance management is going.

Nigel Rayner is a research vice president in Gartner Research, where he covers financial management systems and how finance systems impact the role of the CFO and the finance function. As part of this research, Mr. Rayner covers financial application deployment strategies as part of an ERP strategy and the implementation of shared services of finance. Mr. Rayner also covers corporate performance management, which includes such areas as budgeting and planning, financial consolidation and activity-based costing.

Prior to joining Gartner, Mr. Rayner worked in the ERP/financial applications vendor community in a variety of roles, including product marketing, product management and business development. He also has extensive experience in accounting and financial management gained in the oil industry, where he was European Controller for a large multinational exploration and production company.

Jeff Henderson is an award-winning chef, bestselling author and popular public speaker—and an ex-convict, having served nearly a decade in prison for drug trafficking. Having run kitchens as Executive Chef at the renowned Bellagio Hotel and Casino and Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, he has become one of the most influential African-American chefs in the country. In 2000, Henderson made history in Las Vegas, when he became the first African-American named Chef de Cuisine at Caesars Palace. Promotion to Executive Chef positions followed, and he’s held that position at several top restaurants, including taking the helm at the Café Bellagio in 2003.

Chef Jeff’s remarkable story of finding his passion for cooking while incarcerated and turning his life around was captured in his New York Times Bestseller COOKED (published by William Morrow, February 2007). His story is now being turned into a major motion picture by the team that made “The Pursuit of Happyness” a huge hit: Will Smith and his Overbrook Entertainment, Escape Artists and Columbia Pictures.

Tony Dimnik is a top-ranked professor at some of the best business schools in the world and one of the most respected management educators in Canada. He is an authority on strategic control systems and the relationship between capital budgeting and strategy and he has contributed to the understanding and practice of Activity Based Costing and the Balanced Scorecard. His current research is on Open Book Management.

He has worked with organizations such as Microsoft, Financial Executives International, Alcan, VIA Rail, Canada Post, Royal Bank, Johnson & Johnson, Nortel, Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., Campbell Soup, Canadian National Railway, Canadian Forces College, WCB-Alberta, Cirque du Soleil, Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, Lilydale Foods, and PPX (Performance and Planning Exchange).

Steve Player, Managing Partner
The Player Group

Steve founded the Player Group to help clients improve cost and productivity management. Additionally, The Player Group manages leading edge best practices research in to advanced ABM implementations and beyond budgeting applications. Steve serves as the founder and program director for the ABM Advanced Implementation Group and as Program Director for the Beyond Budgeting Round Table in North America. Key clients include the American Productivity & Quality Center, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Industrial Design and Construction.

Steve has helped companies worldwide to evaluate not only what things cost, but also how they can change and improve those costs. Additionally, he assists Fortune 500 companies in improving current quality practices. Many of his engagements have focused on using cost information to grow revenues and profits. Steve has also worked with many emerging organizations including members of the INC 500 fastest growing companies. Steve has found ways to link many improvements techniques thereby leveraging their results.