Good Business Scents

Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld

Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is the Senior Associate Dean for Leadership Studies and Lester Crown Professor in Management Practice at the Yale School of Management, as well as founder and president of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute, a nonprofit educational and research institute focused on CEO leadership and corporate governance. He previously served as full tenured professor at Emory's Goizueta Business School for a decade and a professor at the Harvard Business School for a decade.

Professor Sonnenfeld has informally advised 5 US presidents - 3 Democrats and 2 Republicans - and thousands of CEOs. He helped advise the development of the Abraham Accords; helped catalyze the exit of over 1,000 companies from Russia; and helped catalyze collective action from CEOs on safeguarding democracy and voting rights.

Professor Sonnenfeld's related research has been published in 100 scholarly articles which appeared in the leading academic journals in management such as Administrative Sciences Quarterly, the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, the Journal of Organizational Behavior, Social Forces, Human Relations, and Human Resource Management. He has also authored eight books, including The Hero's Farewell, an award-winning study of CEO succession, and another best seller, Firing Back, a study on leadership resilience in the face of adversity.

Professor Sonnenfeld's work is regularly cited by the general media in such outlets as: BusinessWeek, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, the Economist, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, FOX, NBC, ABC as well as PBS, and he is a staff contributor for CNBC and a staff columnist for FORTUNE, TIME, Chief Executive, and Corporate Board Member.

Professor Sonnenfeld was recognized by Poets & Quants Magazine as the 2022 Professor of the Year in recognition of his high-profile efforts to catalyze the historic exits from Russia of over 1,000+ global businesses after the invasion of Ukraine, and was named to Worth Magazine's "Worthy 100 Leaders", an annual global listing of the most influential leaders across society. Professor Sonnenfeld received the 2023 Greatest Impact on Corporate Boards award by Corporate Board Member magazine, and received the Academy of Management's 2023 Distinguished Scholar Practitioner Award.

Professor Sonnenfeld has advised the White House, U.S. State Department, U.S. Treasury Department, and Council of Economic Advisers on Russian economic sanctions and business retreats and has testified to the U.S. Congress; in addition, he has been profiled by various media outlets including TIME, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Washington Post, and Business Insider. BusinessWeek listed Professor Sonnenfeld as one of the world's 10 most influential business school professors and Directorship magazine has listed him among the 100 most influential figures in corporate governance.

He is the first academician to have rung the opening bells of both the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq Stock Exchange having done so ten times. Professor Sonnenfeld earned the 2018 Ellis Island award from the US Ellis Island Foundation. He was Harvard's first John Whitehead Faculty Fellow and won outstanding educator awards at Yale, Emory and the American Society for Training and Development.

He is now a member of the board of Lennar, the leading American homebuilder, as well as IEX, Atlas Merchant Capital, and the Ellis Island Honor Society. Professor Sonnenfeld was appointed by Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont to serve as co-chair of Advance CT, where he helped lead the state's economic development, including attracting and retaining leading global businesses and developing the state's workforce. Professor Sonnenfeld also serves on the Board of Directors of Connecticut Innovations, which is focused on building the innovation and business ecosystem within the state of Connecticut.

Bethany McLean

Bethany McLean is a business journalist and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. She was the editor-at-large for thirteen years at Fortune before joining Vanity Fair in July 2008 and Slate as a columnist in October 2010. In early 2001, McLean was one of the first reporters to raise questions about Enron, with her story "Is Enron Overpriced?" She and fellow Fortune senior writer Peter Elkind exposed Enron, noticing the irregularities in Enron's financial documents that were available to the public and suggesting the company's then-record high stock price was unjustified. When Enron collapsed in 2001, she and Elkind drew froma wide range of unique sources and provides a definitive account Enron's rise from obscurity to the top of the business world to its disastrous demise. This national bestseller The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron went on to become an Oscar-nominated documentary.

McLean also co-wrote All the Devils Are Here, where she and co-author Joe Nocera go back several decades to weave the hidden history of the 2008 financial crisis. They explore the motivations of everyone from famous CEOs, cabinet secretaries, and politicians to anonymous lenders, borrowers, analysts, and Wall Street traders. All the Devils Are Here provides a detailed account of how the financial crisis bubbled up from a volatile, and bipartisan, mixture of government meddling and laissez-faire.

In her upcoming book, The Big Fail (October 2023), McLean partners with Nocera again to take a deep dive into America's catastrophically enormous failure to respond to the coronavirus pandemic. In this page-turning exposé, McLean and Nocera explores how American capitalism left us brutally unprepared for a global pandemic.

McLean has also written in-depth pieces about the credit rating agencies, Goldman Sachs, President Clinton's global philanthropy, Australia's Macquarie Bank, and more. Before joining Fortune, she spent three years as an analyst at Goldman Sachs. She graduated from Williams College in 1992 with a double major in mathematics and English.