Archives: Ambassadors

Darby Hobbs is a visionary, social innovator, motivational presenter, educator, author, and strategic marketeer. Focused on Relationship to LIFE, Oneself and Mankind and building the bridge between what individuals value through understanding their LivingWell^TM Model and their whole life plan including investments.

It’s about connecting the heart, to the mind, to the wallet.

Working with company business leaders, investment firms and financial advisory groups to develop a deeper understanding of how to apply ESG/SRI and Impact Investing criteria into business decisions and to understand the value drivers of individuals ready for being part of the new investment experience – fusing brand and sustainability principles for asset growth.

Darby has also developed programs geared towards academia; targeting social entrepreneurship and innovation as well as student-led impact investing funds.

Through SOCIAL3 ‘Telling the Story’ – Conscious Business Show – becomes paramount as she produces this through various mediums to educate, build brand awareness and engagement with the marketplace.

Her passion in creating positive change, along with the belief that businesses exist for profit and purpose, and that the financial system and the value drivers connected to this today is both a key challenge and opportunity to unlock.

Forbes calls Jon Lukomnik one of the pioneers of modern corporate governance.  Jon serves as executive director of the IRRC Institute, whose research has been widely praised for objectively examining fundamental corporate governance and capital market issues.

He is also the managing partner of Sinclair Capital LLC, a strategic consultancy to asset owners and asset managers. He co-founded the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN) and GovernanceMetrics International (now part of MSCI), and served as interim chair of the Council of Institutional Investors’ executive committee.

Jon served as investment advisor for New York City’s pension funds in the 1990s and has invested or overseen more than $100 billion in institutional assets during his career. He has been a director for various public companies, private companies, not-for-profit corporations and litigation trusts. He has consulted to major institutional investors with aggregate assets of more than half a trillion dollars including the New York State Common Retirement Fund, Maryland State Retirement and Pension System, Nikko Asset Management, International Finance Corporation, Legg Mason, and Savings Bank Life Insurance USA.

Jon currently serves as a trustee for the Van Eck mutual fund complex in the United States and related investment trusts in Ireland, as a member of the Standing Advisory Committee for the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, and on Deloitte’s Audit Quality Advisory Committee. He was a member of the official creditors committee which rehabilitated WorldCom following its fraud and bankruptcy.

Mr. Lukomnik has been honored by the International Corporate Governance Association, National Association of Corporate Directors, Ethisphere and Global Proxy Watch.

More than 200 of Jon’s articles have been published in academic and practitioner journals. His most recent book, What They Do With Your Money: How the Financial System Fails Us and How To Fix It, has been praised by legendary investors including Yale CIO David Swensen and Vanguard Founder Jack Bogle.

Stephen Davis, Ph.D. is associate director of the Harvard Law School Programs on Corporate Governance and Institutional Investors, and a senior fellow at the Program on Corporate Governance.

He has also been a nonresident senior fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution. From 2007-2012 he was executive director of the Yale School of Management’s Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance and Lecturer on the SOM faculty.

Davis served on the US SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee. He is a trustee of ShareAction and was for nine years chair and a board member of Hermes EOS, the shareowner engagement arm of Hermes Pensions Management. Davis was also co-director of the Brookings’ World Forum on Governance.

Winner of the 2011 ICGN Award for Excellence in Corporate Governance, Davis is co-author of What They Do With Your Money: How the Financial System Fails Us and How to Fix It (Yale University Press, 2016) and The New Capitalists: How Citizen Investors are Reshaping the Corporate Agenda (Harvard Business School Press, 2006).

His Shareholder Rights Abroad: A Handbook for the Global Investor (1989) was the first study comparing corporate governance practices in top markets. Davis is a co-founder of the International Corporate Governance Network and co-author of the UN Principles for Responsible Investment. Davis earned his doctorate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and completed undergraduate studies at Tufts and the London School of Economics.

In January 2017, Matthew Murray completed his second assignment for the Obama Administration – as a Senior Advisor on Governance and Rule of Law at the Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights and Governance at the U.S. Agency for International Development.  As a Senior Advisor, Mr. Murray helped the Center develop strategies and design development assistance programs to counter systemic corruption in critical nations.

From 2012-2015, Mr. Murray served the Administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa at the U.S. Department of Commerce.  Mr. Murray led the Department’s efforts to apply commercial diplomacy, strengthen the rule of law and build mutual prosperity with 117 countries in the EMEA region as well as the European Union and African Union.  Mr. Murray developed innovative programs to build good governance and champion entrepreneurship in Ukraine, Romania, Moldova, Tunisia, Kenya, and Nigeria.

Throughout his career, Mr. Murray has worked at the intersection of U.S. foreign policy, international law, commerce, and political economy.  Upon graduating from Tufts in 1979, he was selected in a national competition as a Research Assistant to Dr. Leslie Gelb at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He subsequently served as Legislative Assistant for National Security to Senator Edward Kennedy, focused on nuclear arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union and diplomacy towards the Middle East and Northern Ireland.

In 1984, he was awarded a scholarship as an International Fellow at the Columbia University School of Public and International Affairs; he graduated in 1988 with an MIA and JD from the Law School.

From 1988-91, Mr. Murray was as an Associate Attorney at the international law firm of Baker & McKenzie, where he helped the firm launch a Russia law practice and establish one of the first western legal offices in Moscow. In 1991, Matthew Murray founded Sovereign Ventures, Inc., a management consulting firm that advised Fortune 100 companies, government agencies and multilateral organizations in Russia/Eurasia on how to counter corruption risk and engage in dispute resolution.  In 2000, Mr. Murray co-founded the Center for Business Ethics and Corporate Governance, a non-profit dedicated to building rule-based markets in the region.

Between 2007 and 2009, Mr. Murray served as Corruption Risk Manager at TNK-BP Management Ltd., then the third largest producer of oil and gas in Russia, leading a corporate task force to establish a new system of compliance with anti-corruption laws and ethics performance throughout the 65,000 person workforce.

Mr. Murray’s work in the field of political economy includes writing, teaching, speeches and testimony on the importance of voluntarily adopting best practices of ethics, corporate governance, and social responsibility.  In 2011, he was invited by the Brookings Institution to help launch the World Forum on Governance and to co-write a research paper, “Freedom from Official Corruption as a Human Right”, published in 2015.

The Seven Pillars Institute is the world’s only independent think tank for research, education, and promotion of financial ethics. The Institute was shortlisted in the Prospect Think Tank Awards 2016.

Kara has over twenty-three years in global finance and is lead author of International Investment Management: Theory, Ethics and Practice, one of the first books to provide a comprehensive understanding of investment principles, synthesize three theories of finance, and apply ethics in financial practice focusing on Asian cases.

She was named by Ingram’s as one of the “50 Kansans You Should Know”. Kara has five degrees across three disciplines and has lived in London, Oxford, Singapore, Hong Kong, New York, and Washington, D.C.

Prior to joining Style Research, Bernie held positions as Head of Risk and Head of Quantitative Analysis at Scottish Widows Investment Partnership, then the asset management arm of Lloyds TSB and one of Europe’s largest asset managers. He was responsible for developing portfolio risk management and integrating quantitative techniques into a fundamentally based investment process.