St. Bonaventure University will welcome Mark Sickles, an accomplished corporate leader, board director and management consultant, to campus as the second Lenna Visiting Professor of the spring semester.
St. Bonaventure University will welcome Mark W. Sickles, an accomplished corporate leader, board director and management consultant, to campus as the second Lenna Visiting Professor of the spring semester.
Sickles will share his multidisciplinary professional and personal experiences in a public presentation and classroom discussions during his visit. Sickles is CEO of SuperOrg, Inc., and chair of the Chief Capital Officer Institute. In both roles, he works with corporate leaders to develop interdisciplinary approaches to governance, leadership and management.
The public is invited to Sickles’ talk, “Creating the Right Conditions for Sustainable Shareholder and Stakeholder Value,” at 4 p.m. Tuesday, March 29, in the Doyle Conference Center at St. Bonaventure. During his two-week visit, Sickles will speak in a number of business, writing, and leadership classes at St. Bonaventure and Jamestown Community College. He also will give the luncheon address at the April 9 Leadership and Authentic Community conference at SBU.
“St. Bonaventure is fortunate to have Mark Sickles share his knowledge and expertise with students, faculty and staff. His ethics, morals and integrity embody the Franciscan values on which our university was founded,” said Dr. Rich Lee, an associate professor in the Jandoli School of Communication.
Sickles has authored books and numerous articles and has taught in Rutgers University’s Business School and School of Management and Labor Relations, as well as at the Singapore Institute of Management and AT&T.
In his work with businesses, Sickles stresses the need to create sustainable financial value for shareholders in ways that make a positive impact on economic, environmental, and social sustainability on behalf of all other stakeholders, and vice versa.
Sickles also has a long record of leadership in diversity, equity and inclusion, with a special emphasis on gender equity. As founding CEO and board director of the Jersey Chapter of the National Association of Corporate Directors, he built and led a gender diverse board. As a faculty member with DirectWomen, he has educated female attorneys on how to gain appointments to boards and how to succeed as directors, and he served as a director of the Thirty Percent Coalition, working to increase gender diversity on boards.
Sickles and Lee were classmates at St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark, New Jersey. They reconnected during the pandemic, and their conversations gave Lee the idea to nominate Sickles for the Lenna professorship.
The Lenna Endowed Visiting Professorship, established in 1990, is funded through gifts from the late Betty S. Lenna Fairbank and Reginald A. Lenna of Jamestown. It is designed to bring scholars of stature in their field to St. Bonaventure and Jamestown Community College for public lectures.
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About the University: The nation’s first Franciscan university, St. Bonaventure University is a community committed to transforming the lives of our students inside and outside the classroom, inspiring in them a lifelong commitment to service and citizenship. St. Bonaventure was named the #5 regional university value in the North in U.S. News and World Report’s 2022 college rankings edition.