Advisory Council

Over his more than 30 years at Vanguard, William McNabb led each of the famed investment manager’s client-facing business divisions before serving as CEO from 2008 to 2017. He currently serves on the boards of UnitedHealth Group, IBM, and Axiom, as well as CEOs for Corporate Purpose. McNabb is a senior fellow at the Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management.

Prasad Setty spent 15 years at Google, where he founded the company’s renowned people analytics team. He led Projects Oxygen and Aristotle while at Google, which established the role that managers play in preventing attrition and improving employee performance, as well as best practices for cultivating stronger teams. He now advises companies such as Roblox and DataStax on evidence-based performance and teaches a course on the future of work at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

Diane Gherson is the former Chief Human Resources Officer at IBM and a key figure in reinventing the HR profession for the digital age. At IBM, she oversaw the digitization of the 360,000-person company’s human resources division, incorporating the groundbreaking Watson AI into IBM’s leadership training program. Gherson is now a senior advisor to the Boston Consulting Group and a board member at the Kraft Heinz Company.

Hein Knaapen is an executive with over 35 years of experience in the human resources field, including leadership roles at Unilever, KPN Telecom, and ING. He is now managing partner for Europe at CEO.works, where he specializes in precision talent solutions and helping companies apply rigorous investment strategies to people management.

Lindsay Pattison will join Valence’s CXO Advisory Network in an official capacity in June of 2025. As Chief People Officer at WPP, she led the company’s global people strategy and operations, having previously served as WPP’s Chief Client Officer. She has also held leadership roles at GroupM and served as Global CEO of Maxus, where she launched the award-winning “Walk The Talk” program to support senior women in leadership.

Lucien Alziari has spent 21 years as a CHRO at some of the world’s best companies, including Avon, A.P. Moller-Maersk, and most recently Prudential, where he served as Executive Vice President and CHRO for over 8 years. He previously held senior roles with Mars and PepsiCo and served as a non-executive director at C&J Clarks International. He is a fellow and director of the National Academy of Human Resources and a founding member of HR50.

Jennifer Garvey Berger is the founder of Cultivating Leadership, which trains leadership coaches to guide the future of business. Her clients include Google, Microsoft, Novartis, and Oxfam International. She is also the author of four acclaimed books on leadership, including Unleash Your Complexity Genius: Growing Your Inner Capacity to Lead, with Carolyn Coughlin, and Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders for a Complex World.

Dr. Anna Tavis leads NYU's Human Capital Management Department, where she has worked to incubate new approaches to talent and organizational development. She is also a senior editor of People+Strategy Journal and the co-author of Humans at Work, a book about the corporate pivot toward human-centered organizations. Prior to her role as NYU faculty, Tavis held talent leadership roles at Motorola, Nokia, and AIG Investment.

Since keynoting Valence’s first AI & the Workforce Summit in 2024, Geoffrey Hinton has been an informal advisor to our leadership team. Known as the “Godfather of AI,” Hinton laid the foundations for the field of deep learning as a researcher at the University of Toronto. A visionary computer scientist, he nurtured a generation of AI innovators who now lead top tech companies and research institutions worldwide. He received a Turing Award in 2018, for his work on deep learning, and a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024.