Diversified Search Launches Second Year of "Lunches with Leaders"

One of Hollywood’s hottest television producers, the co-CEO of one of the world’s largest investment firms, and the man who helped spark the Internet revolution are among the headliners for the second year of “Lunches With Leaders,” the speaker series from retained executive search firm Diversified Search that features top executives sharing lessons and insights with business leaders around the nation in intimate, invitation-only luncheons.

“We feel that our 2018 slate shows that in only one year, ‘Lunches With Leaders’ has become the preeminent speaker series within the entire search industry,” said Diversified Search President and CEO Dale E. Jones. “The remarkable response to our initial season showed us there was a huge hunger for the opportunity to hear, up close, wisdom from the nation’s top executives."

This year’s program will kick off in Philadelphia on May 23rd with a program featuring Courtney A. Kemp, the creator and showrunner of the Starz premium cable drama Power, who will discuss the changing face of “power” in Hollywood, and the impact of everything from tech disruption to the #metoo movement on the entertainment industry. A former supervising producer of CBS’s Emmy-winning drama The Good Wife, Kemp is currently producing a remake of the cult 1970s crime drama Get Christie Love for ABC. Power, co-produced by Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson (who also co-stars), is the highest-rated program on Starz and will enter its fifth season in July; earlier this year the show won the Best Drama Award at the prestigious NAACP Image Awards.

The following month, on June 12th in Chicago, Glenn A. Youngkin, the co-CEO of The Carlyle Group, the global alternative asset manager with more than $170 billion in total assets, will tackle the outlook for the roaring American economy heading into what promises to be a tumultuous midterm election season. Youngkin joined the Washington, D.C.-based Carlyle Group in 1995, and over the past quarter century has steadily risen through its ranks, including leading the firm’s buyout activities in the U.K., and serving as President and Chief Operating Officer. A former Baker Scholar at the Harvard Business School, where he earned his MBA, Youngkin was named Co-Chief Executive Officer in October.

In the fall, Steve Case, the pioneering founder of AOL, will headline a LWL lunch in Washington, D.C. Case, of course, was the brains behind America Online, which ushered in the Internet Age with 200,000 members in 1992 and had 17 million members by 1999. The following year AOL purchased Time Warner, Inc., the parent company of CNN, HBO, and such legendary magazines as Time and Sports Illustrated, in what was then the biggest merger in U.S. history. Since then, Case and his wife, Jean, through their Case Foundation, have dedicated themselves to charitable initiatives throughout the world, including several notable large-scale efforts in Africa. In 2011, President Barack Obama selected Case to chair the Startup America Partnership, dedicated to launching tech start-ups in the U.S.

A fourth speaker to conclude the 2018 series will be announced shortly.

Diversified Search launched its “Lunches With Leaders” series with a pilot program in December 2016, featuring a speech by Stuart E. Jones, the former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and Jordan. That was followed by three successful lunches in 2017, featuring Randall Lane, the editor of Forbes magazine, in Philadelphia; Rajiv Shah, the new CEO of The Rockefeller Foundation, in New York; and Indra Nooyi, the CEO and Chairman of Pepsico, in Miami.