advisory board

Sir David Bell is the Chairman of the Financial Times.

David was a Director of Pearson from 1996 to 2009. A former Chief Executive of the Financial Times, in July 1998 he was appointed Pearson's Director for People with responsibility for the recruitment, motivation, development and reward of employees across the Pearson Group.

In addition to this, he is a Non-Executive Director of The Economist, the Vitec Group plc and The Windmill Partnership, Chairman: Common Purpose International, Chairman of Crisis, Chairman of Sadler's Wells, Chairman of the International Youth Foundation, a Patron of the Ambache Chamber Orchestra, a trustee of the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation {CSFI} and a member of the Honorary Council of the Royal National Theatre.

David was also Chairman of the Millennium Bridge Trust (1995-2002), responsible for conceiving the first new bridge across Thames in the centre of London for 100 years.

David was educated at Cambridge University and the University of Pennsylvania, is married with three children and lives in Islington.

David received his knighthood for services to industry, the arts and charity.

Mihir Bose has had a rich and varied journalistic career for more than 30 years. He was born in 1947 and was brought up in Bombay. He came to England in 1969 to study and qualified as a chartered accountant.

Almost immediately he took to his first love of journalism and writing. He has written for all the major papers in Britain, having worked for the Sunday Times for 20 years before moving to the Daily Telegraph in 1995 to specialise in investigative sports reporting, particularly the growing field of sports business and politics. In 2007 he was appointed as the first BBC Sports Editor, in which post he served until 2009.

He has won several awards for his newspaper writing including Business Columnist of the Year, Sports Reporter of the Year and Sports Story of the Year.

He has written over 22 books which have been controversial and wide-ranging. His History of Indian Cricket was the first book by an Indian writer to win the prestigious Cricket Society Literary Award in 1990. His study of sports and apartheid, Sporting Colours, was runner-up in the 1994 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award.

He served on the Budd Committee which reported to the British Home Office on the subject of gambling and provided the basis for the new United Kingdom gambling legislation

Saba Danish graduated from Birmingham University with a first class degree and was awarded the Tilbot Memorial Prize. After working for Vogue, completing a stint in a city recruitment agency, and travelling round South America, she joined ABN Amro in a communications role. She subsequently moved to Morgan Stanley’s fixed income division, where she is currently a Vice President in credit sales.

Andrew Franklin is the Publisher and Managing Director of Profile Books, one of Britain's leading independent publishers. He set the company up in 1996. Andrew’s authors at Profile include Alan Bennett, Francis Fukuyama, Wole Soyinka, Germaine Greer and Lynne Truss, whose book Eats, Shoots and Leaves has sold over 3 million copies worldwide. Unlike many independent publishers, Profile has been consistently profitable since its second year and grown every year too. This is despite its commitment to publishing original, stimulating and sometimes challenging non-fiction. Before Profile, Andrew was the Publisher of Hamish Hamilton and a director of Penguin Books.

Martin Greaves is an author and filmmaker. A graduate of the National Film and Television School, Martin’s company 3 Peach produced over 100 commercials for clients around the world in the 1990s. His most recent work can be seen at www.runningwithmum.com. Martin also holds a degree in Cybernetics from the University of Kent.

Kate has worked in financial services and management consulting, having worked in both London and New York over the last 21 years holding senior positions at JPMorgan, McKinsey & Co. and Morgan Stanley.

Kate has an MBA with honours from the Tuck School at Dartmouth, a BA with honours from Wellesley College and has studied at the London School of Economics.

She is a trustee of two medical charities: the Prader-Willi Syndrome Association of the UK and the International Prader-Willi Syndrome Association of which she is the treasurer.

Kem Ihenacho is a Partner at Clifford Chance. His areas of expertise are private equity and other mergers and acquisitions work. He acts for private clients on a wide range of UK and international transactions.

He qualified in 1998 and trained at Morgan Cole, London and Cardiff. He joined Clifford Chance in 1999 and has been a Partner since 2007.

Sandra Kerr is the National Director of the Race for Opportunity (RfO) campaign, a national business-led network of private and public sector organisations.

Before joining RfO, Sandra worked in the Cabinet Office advising Cabinet Ministers on diversity and policies on race, disability, gender, and work life balance across Whitehall. Prior to this she worked for the Department of Work and Pensions delivering frontline services to 33,000 customers whilst managing a team of 140 staff over a 5 year period.

Simon Matthews is chief executive of Fishburn Hedges. He has a particularly rounded view of the communications world. He started life working in advertising and design, as well as corporate communications, which became his love, prompting a move to Fishburn Hedges early on in the consultancy’s life. He still retains a passion for looking at a problem or an opportunity in the round, epitomised by the integrated thinking so central to Fishburn Hedges. He’s keen to see the agency push the boundaries of what traditional approaches can achieve and is a big fan of the way the digital world is breaking down barriers even further. His expertise spans the private, public and third sectors, working with corporate brands and related consumer and business issues. He has worked with some of the biggest names in UK business in sectors including telecoms, food and drink, professional services, science & technology and the environment.

Trevor Phillips is the co-founder of the Equate Organisation, the social change consultancy, and a Director of Pepper Productions, founded in 1995.

Trevor has been a senior executive figure in the TV industry for nearly two decades, serving as Head of Current Affairs for London Weekend Television and Granada TV.

He remains a respected creative leader in the industry as a vice president of the Royal Television Society. Trevor has been a regular writer and columnist for several of the UK's principal national newspapers, writing for the Guardian, Independent, the Mail, the Telegraph amongst others. He also wrote a weekly columnist for the minority weekly, The Voice.

On 8 September 2006, Trevor was appointed chair of the new Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Trevor was previously Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) from 1 March 2003. Prior to this he had been elected as a member of the Greater London Authority in May 2000, and became chair of the Assembly later that month.

Born in London in 1953, Trevor attended secondary school in Georgetown, Guyana, and then studied chemistry at Imperial College London. Between 1978 and 1980, he was president of The National Union of Students.

At present, he is a board member of Aldeburgh Productions and The Bernie Grant Centre in Tottenham. He is a patron of The Sickle Cell Society. Between 1993 and 1998 Trevor was chair of the Runnymede Trust. From 1993 to 1997 he was Chair of the London Arts Board.

In 2007 he received the award of Chevalier de la Legion D'Honneur to add to the OBE he won in 1998. He holds several honorary degrees and fellowships.

Lord Dennis Stevenson is the President of the Employers' Forum on Age. Lord Stevenson is on the Board of the British Council. He sits on the cross-benches at the House of Lords. He has been Honorary President of St James's Place Capital plc., since 1997. Lord Stevenson has been First Chancellor of London Institute since 2000. He has been Chancellor at University of the Arts London. Lord Stevenson has been Governor of the Bank of Scotland PLC since January 2006.

Having headed the Stevenson Commission to examine the role of Information Technology in Schools, Lord Stevenson acted as the Prime Minister's Special Advisor on the application of ICT to education until September 2000.

Earlier in his career he founded and built a group of businesses; while he retains shareholdings in some of these he has no active management role.

Lord Stevenson serves as the Chairman of the House of Lords Appointments Commission and is responsible for vetting all members of the reformed House of Lords and choosing the independent members. He served as the Chairman of the National Association of Youth Clubs and the Intermediate Technology Development Group. Lord Stevenson retired in 1998 after ten years as Chairman of the Trustees of the Tate Gallery. He serves as a Trustee of the Tate Gallery Foundation and Chairman of Aldeburgh Productions. Lord Stevenson is a Non-Executive Director at Loudwater Investment Partners Limited. Lord Stevenson has been Non-Executive Director of Western Union Co. since 2006 and has been a Director of Glyndebourne, a Non-Executive Director of Manpower Inc., in the USChairman of Pearson PLCChairman of Aycliffe and Peterlee New Town Development Corporation, and Chairman of HBOS plc and Halifax plc.

Sandra Teichman is a Director in Pillsbury’s Global Technology and Sourcing Practice Group in London. Ms. Teichman is responsible for business development and also advises on outsourcing and technology related matters.

Ms. Teichman has extensive experience in outsourcing and was General Counsel and Board member at Unisys Limited, and (during her time at Unisys) negotiated and advised on all of Unisys’ UK outsourcing projects. Prior to that, Ms. Teichman was with ICL (now Fujitsu).

Ms. Teichman has spoken at several conferences (including conferences for the Bar) on IT law matters, women in business and diversity issues.

Anne Watts is Chair of the Appointments Commission, an independent body providing a full recruitment service for chair and non-executive appointments to public bodies.

She was Chair of the Independent Panel on race equality for the NHS and for the last two years has been employer’s representative on the steering group for the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights.

For over 25 years she has been a leading figure in diversity, recruitment and workplace development issues, with a strong track record across the private, public and voluntary sectors. Anne has also held executive roles relating to workforce and diversity in Business in the Community, HSBC and NatWest Bank. She currently serves on the boards of Greater London Enterprise, Opportunity Now, Race for Opportunity and the Open University and was an Equal Opportunities Commissioner from 1989 to 1995. She is a member of the School Teachers Review Body; a Trustee of the Eve Appeal, for gynaecological cancer; and Vice-Patron of Working Families and Thatu, supporting community self-help schemes in South Africa.

Yewande Sokan was born in Nigeria and moved to the UK at the age of three. She holds a degree in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she served as African-Caribbean Society President. She is currently a first year WPP Fellow and is working at OgilvyOne London. She works as an Account Executive on  Yahoo! and Zurich.
 
Yewande worked part-time for Rare during her degree and then spent a year working full-time at Rare in 2008-9.