NACS Women’s Leadership Program at Yale

The NACS Master of Convenience designation acknowledges the hard work and investment NACS members have made in their personal leadership development. It is awarded to convenience retailers who have attended 3 or more of the 5 NACS Executive Education programs. For questions, contact Brandi Mauro, NACS Education Program Manager: bmauro@convenience.org or (703) 518-4223.

Professor Baron’s research interests include human resources; organizational design and behavior; social stratification and inequality; work, labor markets, and careers; economic sociology; and entrepreneurial companies. Before coming to SOM in 2006, he taught at Stanford's Graduate School of Business from 1982-2006. At Stanford, he taught the MBA core course, Human Resource Management. He was co-director of the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies (SPEC), a large-scale longitudinal study of the organizational design, human resource management practices, and financial and non-financial performance measures of entrepreneurial firms in Silicon Valley. Papers based on the project appeared in leading disciplinary journals, and an overview of the project in California Management Review won the 2003 Accenture Award for making “the most important contribution to improving the practice of management.”

He is the author, with Stanford economist David M. Kreps, of a textbook, Strategic Human Resources: Frameworks for General Managers (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.). Baron is also a regular contributor to leading sociology and organization journals, such as the American Sociological Review and Administrative Science Quarterly. His research has also been published in influential journals in economics and social psychology.

Diane Bergeron, PhD received her doctorate in social-organizational psychology from Columbia University. She is currently a Senior Research Scientist at The Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, NC. Formerly, she was a business school professor at a midwestern research university. While in academia, she received several grants, honors and accolades. Her research areas include workplace listening, ‘organizational wives,’ gender and career advancement, work performance and productivity, and bereavement in the workplace. Her research has won several awards and has been published in leading academic journals. She regularly presents her work at international conferences. In her former life, Diane worked for a consulting firm in New York City and at Pfizer, Inc. She also spent two years volunteering in the Dominican Republic. From 2013-2015, she took two years off for a family sailing adventure, traveling the East coast of the U.S. and through the Caribbean. She is a member of the American Psychological Association, the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the Academy of Management.

Peter Boyd is a Lecturer at Yale School of the Environment (YSE), Lecturer in the Practice of Management for an EMBA elective at the School of Management, Resident Fellow at the Center for Business and the Environment (CBEY), and a Mentor-In-Residence at Tsai Center of Innovative Thinking (CITY). In addition to this course and the EMBA, Peter guest-lectures on a variety of topics; helps social and environmental start-ups in the early stages of growth; and advises Yale on various social and environmental initiatives.

Outside Yale he is Founder & CEO of Time4Good and for over twenty years, he has worked on, led, and advised high-growth organizations on purpose-driven leadership, strategy, marketing, climate change solutions and entrepreneurial opportunity.

Prior to Time4Good, Peter advised The B Team on their ‘Net-Zero by 2050’ initiative in the lead up to COP21 in Paris; was Launch Director and COO of Sir Richard Branson’s Carbon War Room; and served as Chair of The Energy Efficiency Deployment Office for the UK Department of Energy & Climate Change. The Charity & Government experience followed ten jobs in twelve years at the Virgin Group (including CEO of Virgin Mobile South Africa), and his first job with McKinsey & Co.

He is originally from Edinburgh, Scotland; educated at University of Oxford, and now lives in Westport, CT USA – serving as chair of Sustainable Westport and is co-warden of his local church. He is currently enjoying family life with his wife and three children under eight years old. He has completed 19 marathons, including the ultra-marathons Marathon Des Sables (‘the toughest footrace on earth’) and The Comrades (both the ‘up run’ and ‘down run’).

Heidi Brooks, Senior Lecturer in Organizational Behavior, teaches and advises on the subject of everyday leadership: the everyday micro-moments of impact that shape our lived experiences. Creating more courageous communities—especially within organizations—is a particular passion of hers. Dr. Brooks specializes in large-scale culture change projects focused on individual and collective leadership effectiveness in organizations. Interpersonal Dynamics, the MBA elective she has taught for 15 years, is one of the courses most in demand at Yale School of Management. Recently, Dr. Brooks pioneered the Everyday Leadership course at SOM, where she first taught the Principles of Everyday Leadership. She has also taught Emotional Intelligence, Power & Politics, Managing Teams and Groups, and Coaching Skills for Managers. Dr. Brooks received her doctorate in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree from Brown University. A life-long experiential learner, you can find her as a student in classrooms as far-ranging as improvisational theater and immersion language lessons.

Zoë Chance loves helping kind, smart people become more influential. She researches and teaches interpersonal influence here at Yale, publishes in academic journals and trade pubs like Harvard Business Review and Psychology Today, and speaks on influence around the world and on TV. Google uses Zoë’s behavioral economics framework as the basis for their global food policy, and Zoë has been named one of the top 50 management thinkers to watch. Prior to Yale, Zoë managed a 200-million-dollar segment of the Barbie brand at Mattel, and earned a doctorate from Harvard. Currently, she’s finishing up a book on influence to be published by Random House as one of their lead titles for next year.

Professor Taly Reich's research interests fall at the intersection of behavioral decision theory and social psychology. Within these general domains, a great deal of her work explores issues related to the value of unintentionality in consumer choice and the unorthodox choices that people make in the face of threats to their personal identity. In exploring these issues, she strives to answer both theoretical and practical questions, with a fundamental goal of advancing basic insight in consumer psychology and shedding light on strategic actions that can subsequently be generated. Taly Reich has published articles in leading journals such as Nature, Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the Journal of Consumer Research. Taly Reich holds a PhD in Marketing from Stanford Graduate School of Business and an M.Sc. in Industrial Psychology from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

Emma Seppälä, Ph.D, is Science Director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education and author of The Happiness Track (HarperOne, 2016). She is Co-Director of the Yale College Emotional Intelligence Project at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and Faculty Director of the Yale School of Management’s Women’s Leadership Program.

She regularly consults with and speaks at companies around the world on positive organizations, happiness at work and social connection. She has addressed companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Bain & Co, and Ernst & Young. She was an invited speaker at a United States Congressional Hearing and has also spoken at TedX Sacramento and TEDx Hayward.

She writes for Harvard Business Review, The Washington Post, TIME, QUARTZ, Business Insider, Stanford Medicine, Psychology Today, Fast Company, Forbes, Huffington Post, MindBodyGreen, Greater Good Science Center, Scientific American Mind and Spirituality & Health.

Her work and research have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, VOGUE, ELLE, CBSNews, Oprah Magazine, Fast Company, U.S. World and News Report, Forbes, Cosmopolitan, Inc, Huffington Post, ABC News, Business Insider, SELF, GLAMOUR, and the World Economic Forum.

She is a repeat guest on Good Morning America and has also been featured in ABC News, Fox News, Huffington Post Live and TIME/MONEY and is featured in the documentary film The Altruism Revolution and What You Do Matters.

Her research focuses on well-being, compassion, social connection, complementary and alternative practices, and trauma resilience. Her research on yoga-based breathing for military veterans returning from war in Iraq and Afghanistan was highlighted in the documentary Free the Mind.

She is the recipient of a number of research grants and service awards including the James W. Lyons Award from Stanford University for founding Stanford’s first academic class on the psychology of happiness and teaching well-being programs for Stanford students.

She graduated from Yale (BA), Columbia (MA), and Stanford (PhD). Originally from Paris, France, she is a native speaker of French, English, and German and conversant in Spanish and Mandarin Chinese.

David C. Tate is a licensed clinical psychologist and an Assistant Clinical Professor in Psychiatry at Yale University. His areas of practice in organizational consulting include coaching and leadership development, conflict resolution, team-building, succession planning and promoting healthy organizational development. In his clinical practice, he sees individuals, families and groups around issues concerning health, relationships, and dealing effectively with life transitions.

Dr. Tate is a co-author of Sink or Swim: How Lessons from the Titanic Can Save Your Family Business. He earned a certificate in family business advising from the Family Firm Institute, and serves as the facilitator for the National Association of Corporate Directors Connecticut Chapter’s Family Business Roundtable. He also is the co-founder of the Connecticut Consulting Psychology Group.

Dr. Tate received his B.S. at Cornell University and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Virginia. He completed pre- and post-doctoral fellowships at Yale University before joining the faculty.