Meeting Speaker for Sept. 24, 2012 - Dan Sharp of the Eisenhower Foundation
Posted
on Sep 19, 2012
The Eisenhower Foundation co-chairs, Anne and David Eisenhower, announced that their board named Dan Sharp as its CEO.
The Eisenhower Foundation was created in 1945 to focus on the relevance today of the life and legacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower, emphasizing his leadership style and accomplishments. The Foundation will continue the interests of President Eisenhower in program areas that are of vital importance to our nation and the world, and that are a model for current and future leaders. This Foundation mission is being accomplished through its support of the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum in Abilene, Kansas, and its expansion of programs throughout the United States, and eventually abroad. Dan has been charged with a two-year goal of rebooting the Foundation from primarily a Kansas-based institution towards one of truly national scope, while expanding and strengthening its strong Kansas presence.
Sharp has played key roles for a variety of global and national non-profits, corporations, and government. He served for 15 years as CEO/President of The American Assembly, which was created by President Eisenhower as part of Columbia University while he was its president. At The Assembly, Dan designed and lead dozens of domestic and foreign policy projects that produced consensus and action plans to deal with many of America's and the world's most difficult issues. He designed and directed global conferences where he adapted the Eisenhower consensus model to help world leaders not only find consensus on controversial issues, but also launch projects to achieve that consensus. For example, he worked with King Juan Carlos of Spain and Mikhail Gorbachev in designing and directing the founding conference of the Club of Madrid, which now has more than 75 former democratically elected presidents and prime ministers as its members. Dan played a similar leadership role for the Rule of Law Forum of the World Justice Project, in which 500 world leaders from more than 100 countries have designed and completed more than 100 projects around the world.
Dan was the founding CEO/President of the Royal Institution World Science Assembly (RiSci), the global affiliate of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 14 of whose resident scientists won Nobel Prizes. Under Dan's leadership, RiSci helped lead global recognition of the threat of infectious disease pandemics and identified action plans that helped increase global readiness.
In government service Dan was Deputy Attorney-General of California; while serving with the US delegation to the UN, he negotiated the first treaties to start the US Peace Corps, which he then served as an overseas director and later on its senior staff. In the private sector, Dan held key international roles with Xerox, BP, and Unisys for which he created and directed business resilience processes. In Academia, he had positions at the University of Chicago, Columbia, and was a visiting lecturer at many other major universities and business schools in the US and abroad, and was on the faculty of the Aspen Institute. Dan has a B.A. from the University of California and a JD from Harvard Law School.