2026 Annual Conference: People

Purpose at the Speed of Change: Sustaining Trust, Engagement, and High Performance Through Transformation

Mindy Geisser, Chief People Services Officer, Savers

Purpose at the Speed of Change: Sustaining Trust, Engagement, and High Performance Through Transformation

Mindy Geisser, Chief People Services Officer, Savers

Every organization is transforming—new technology, new business models, new expectations of work itself. But transformation has a hidden cost that shows up on no project plan: it burns trust, strains engagement, and tests every promise a company has made to its people. The organizations that come through stronger aren’t the ones with the best change methodology. They’re the ones whose people still believe.

Mindy Geisser has led people strategy through nearly every kind of transformation an enterprise can face—across technology, real estate, and consumer sectors, at companies including Amazon, Philips Medical Systems, Colliers International, and now Savers Value Village, the purpose-driven thrift retailer whose mission makes reuse a force for good. Across three decades of global HR leadership, she has learned that purpose is not a poster on the wall—it’s the operating system that keeps trust, engagement, and performance alive when everything else is in motion.

In this session, Mindy will share how people leaders can anchor their organizations in purpose while everything around them changes—how to keep leaders visible and credible, keep teams connected to why the work matters, and keep performance high without burning people out. Practical, honest, and drawn from real transformations, this is a session for every leader who has to deliver change and preserve what makes their culture worth keeping.

Key Takeaways:

• How to use purpose as a practical leadership tool—not a slogan—to sustain trust and engagement when transformation puts both under pressure.
• Field-tested practices from three decades of global people leadership for keeping teams high-performing, connected, and resilient through continuous change.

Mindy Geisser

Chief People Services Officer, Savers

Mindy Geisser serves as Chief People Services Officer at Savers® Value Village®, where she leads the company’s people strategy with a focus on attracting, developing, and retaining engaged teams who are deeply connected to the organization’s purpose and impact. She partners closely with senior leaders globally to strengthen capabilities, build high‑performing teams, and enable people‑centric growth that drives strong business outcomes and long‑term value.

With more than three decades of global HR leadership experience, Mindy has held senior executive roles across technology, real estate, and consumer and industrial sectors, including positions at Amazon, Philips Medical Systems, and Colliers International. Beyond her corporate role, Mindy regularly speaks at conferences on leadership, culture, agility, and employee engagement, and is involved in nonprofit board leadership, including serving as Board President of the Stroum Jewish Community Center through 2025, and currently serving on the JCC of North America Board of Directors. Mindy earned her BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her Masters of Industrial Relations from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.

The Human Edge: Leading Your Workforce Through the Now and the Next

Becky Frankiewicz, President & Chief Strategy Officer, ManpowerGroup

The Human Edge: Leading Your Workforce Through the Now and the Next

Becky Frankiewicz, President & Chief Strategy Officer, ManpowerGroup

Seventy percent of the skills needed for the average job are expected to change by 2030—yet more than half of employees say they received no workplace training in the past year. That gap between the speed of change and the pace of preparation is the defining people challenge of this decade. And no one sees it more completely than Becky Frankiewicz.

As President and Chief Strategy Officer of ManpowerGroup, Becky views the labor market from a vantage point no single company can match—across industries, geographies, and the full spectrum of work, from the front line to the C-suite. Fresh from the World Economic Forum in Davos, where ManpowerGroup released its landmark Human Edge global research and helped launch a national initiative to prepare one million young people for the future of advanced manufacturing, Becky brings our community the view from the very front of the future of work.

In this keynote, Becky will share the forces reshaping every workforce—hybrid super teams, rapid relearning, changing norms, and the coming succession crisis—and her defining framework for leading through the Now and the Next: delivering today’s performance while building tomorrow’s capability. Most importantly, she’ll make the case that in an age of accelerating technology, the durable advantage is human.

Key Takeaways:

• The four forces reshaping the global workforce—and how to read their signals inside your own organization before they become crises.
• A practical framework for leading through the Now and the Next: balancing today’s performance with deliberate investment in tomorrow’s skills, so your people—and your business—stay future-ready.

Becky Frankiewicz

President & Chief Strategy Officer, ManpowerGroup

Becky Frankiewicz is President and Chief Strategy Officer of ManpowerGroup, the global leader in workforce solutions. In this role, she shapes the company’s long-term strategy and drives innovation, including the enterprise-wide integration of AI, to ensure ManpowerGroup’s iconic brands—Manpower, Experis, and Talent Solutions—remain future-ready.

A sought-after global spokesperson, Becky regularly speaks on the future of work, workforce transformation, and the intersection of technology and talent at events including the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and VivaTech in Paris, France. Her perspective on leading through the Now and the Next, balancing today’s performance with preparation for tomorrow, has become a defining framework for how organizations navigate disruption.

The Future Is Now: What America’s Top People Leaders Are Doing About AI, Learning, and Work

Anne Trumbore, Co-Author, The Future Is Now (Stanford) | Author, The Teacher in the Machine

The Future Is Now: What America’s Top People Leaders Are Doing About AI, Learning, and Work

Anne Trumbore, Co-Author, The Future Is Now (Stanford) | Author, The Teacher in the Machine

While pundits speculate about the future of work, the people responsible for America’s largest workforces are already building it. Over the past year, Anne Trumbore and her Stanford collaborators sat down with 15 C-level HR, learning, and technology officers at some of the country’s best-known companies—Walmart, IBM, Kroger, Workday, Koch, and S&P Global among them—to find out how AI is actually changing work, and what leading employers are doing about it. The result, The Future Is Now, is one of the clearest pictures yet of the people agenda taking shape inside major firms: AI is reshaping work and workers as much as it is replacing tasks—and the workplace itself is becoming America’s most important site of talent development.

Anne comes to this work as a convener of the Learning Society project anchored at Stanford and as Chief Digital Learning Officer at the Sands Institute for Lifelong Learning at UVA’s Darden School of Business, where she partners directly with employers to build learning that reaches people at every level of the organization—including a five-year partnership with Wisconsin’s own Kohler Co. She is the author of The Teacher in the Machine: A Human History of Education Technology (Princeton University Press), and she has been building the future of learning since before it was fashionable—from Stanford’s earliest online programs, to the founding team at Coursera, to launching Wharton Online.

In this session, Anne will share what those 15 executives revealed—where degrees are giving way to skills, how companies from manufacturing to retail are becoming education providers in their own right, and why continual investment across lengthening working lives is moving from experiment to standard practice—and translate it into moves people leaders at any company can make. For our community, this is the rare session that pairs a big idea—the shift from a schooled society to a learning society—with field evidence of how leading employers are making it real.

Key Takeaways:

• The four shifts America’s top HR, learning, and technology executives say are already underway—AI transforming demand for human capability, workplaces becoming primary sites of talent development, employers looking beyond degrees, and continual investment over longer working lives—and how to benchmark your own talent strategy against them.
• Practical models for making learning part of the work itself: skills-based signals that complement degrees, university partnerships that reach your whole workforce rather than a fancy few, and financing and credentialing approaches that make talent development a shared responsibility.

Anne Trumbore

Co-Author, The Future Is Now (Stanford) | Author, The Teacher in the Machine

Anne Trumbore is an education business and transformation leader working at the intersection of academia, technology, and the market. Her work focuses on digital learning, AI, innovation, and growth, with an emphasis on expanding access to high-quality learning and rethinking how education can meet the needs of learners throughout their lives.

She formerly served as Chief Digital Learning Officer at the Sands Institute for Lifelong Learning at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, where she led digital and open enrollment programs and helped expand access to world-class business education. Anne has also been a leader in the Learning Society project anchored at Stanford, an initiative exploring a shift from education models that end early in life to lifelong approaches that develop human talent across the full arc of people’s lives.

Anne is co-author, with Stanford’s Mitchell Stevens, of The Future Is Now: America’s Human Resources and Talent Leads on AI and Learning at Work (2026), a study of how C-level HR, learning, and technology officers at 15 of America’s best-known companies are responding to AI’s transformation of work. Her book, The Teacher in the Machine: A Human History of Education Technology, was published by Princeton University Press in 2025 and traces seventy years of technology’s promises to remake education—from the first teaching machines to MOOCs to AI.

Anne helped build online learning from its beginnings: designing pioneering programs at Stanford, joining Coursera in its earliest days, and founding Wharton Online.

Architecting Agility: Building Leadership Platforms that Actually Move the Needle

Antonia Turnquist, Director of Talent Strategy & Acceleration, Zendesk

Architecting Agility: Building Leadership Platforms that Actually Move the Needle

Antonia Turnquist, Director of Talent Strategy & Acceleration, Zendesk

Every transformation plan assumes your leaders can lead it. Few organizations actually prepare them to. As AI reshapes how work gets done, the difference between companies that transform and companies that stall comes down to one question: can you mobilize and activate your leaders fast enough to carry the change?

Antonia Turnquist has spent nearly twenty years answering that question inside high-stakes business transformations—scaling emerging businesses and steering large enterprises through complex change as a trusted advisor to CEOs and executive teams. At Zendesk, she designs the leadership platforms—the systems, capabilities, and activation strategies—that turn a company’s leaders from bystanders of transformation into its engine. Her approach is intentional and data-driven, bridging human behavior and business strategy to deliver outsized impact.

In this fast-moving session, Antonia keeps it refreshingly practical: what a leadership platform actually is, how to build one that moves the needle, and the lessons she’s learned mobilizing leaders through AI transformation—including what didn’t work and why. You’ll leave with tips and tools you can take back and run with at your own organization, whatever transformation you’re facing next.

Key Takeaways:

• How to design a leadership platform—the capabilities, systems, and activation strategies that equip leaders to successfully carry AI (or any other) transformation through your organization.
• Practical, field-tested tips and lessons learned for mobilizing and activating leaders at every level—simple enough to start applying the week you return.

Antonia Turnquist

Director of Talent Strategy & Acceleration, Zendesk

Antonia Turnquist is the Director of Talent Strategy & Acceleration at Zendesk, where she specializes in driving business growth through innovative talent strategy design. With nearly 20 years of experience leading high-stakes business transformations, Antonia has earned a reputation as a trusted advisor to CEOs and executive teams.

Her approach is uniquely intentional and data-driven, bridging the gap between human behavior and business-aligned solutions to deliver outsized impact. Whether scaling emerging businesses or navigating large enterprises through complex transformations, Antonia leverages deep market insights and human capital analytics to connect the “what” and the “how,” bringing organizational visions to life.

A recognized thought leader, her insights on return-to-office strategies and employee engagement have been featured in InBusiness Madison magazine. Beyond the boardroom, Antonia is a passionate advocate for social impact, dedicating her time to empowering women and giving back to her community. She is driven by a singular mission: creating sustainable, thriving workplaces where both people and businesses excel.