Summit Team

Ashley Sowers

Ashley Sowers is one of the Weatherhead School of Management AI Summit’s project- management MBA co-leads. She joins Weatherhead this fall as a full-time, first-year MBA student and Fowler Center Business as an Agent of World Benefit Fellow. Ashley began supporting the Fowler Center this summer, prior to the academic year and as a result, brings AI Summit facilitation experience as a Participant Design Catalyst (under David Cooperrider’s leadership) during the Organizational Development Network’s (ODN) Annual Conference, in North Carolina this year.

Ashley holds both of her current degrees also from Case Western Reserve University, a Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology (2013) and a Master of Science in Medical Physiology (2016). Ashley’s professional passions have always lived at the intersection of medicine and culture. However, her career aspirations quickly transitioned from practicing medicine to understanding and influencing the business and strategy behind all of it. She plans to pursue Weatherhead’s Marketing and Design and Innovation and Entrepreneurship majors during her MBA, applying all of her learnings to reach her marketing and entrepreneurship goals within the Femtech, digital wellness, space.

Cindy Stull

Cindy Stull is a Partner and Chief Revenue Officer at Dealer Tire. She has been with the company since 2006 and previously held the position of Chief People and Strategy Officer within the company. Cindy's areas of expertise include sales, corporate strategy, mobilizing large-scale change initiatives, leadership development, and organizational effectiveness. She leads a team of over 500 people who help automobile dealerships to sell tires and maintenance products as part of the auto manufacturers' programs. The team provides value-added services to enable dealerships to increase both revenue and profitability and drive customer retention.

Prior to joining Dealer Tire, Cindy was Vice President – Organizational Development, Human Resources, and Industrial Engineering at Roadway Express, Inc., one of the largest transportation providers in the world. She spent 20 years at Roadway in a variety of roles across the organization, including leading various post-acquisition integration efforts. Cindy has led over 60 Appreciative Inquiry Summits, ranging in size from 150 to 500 people in the room, both in her own organizations and other companies.

Megan Buchter

Megan Buchter is the Director of the Fowler Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit. Megan has been part of the Fowler Center for over ten years in a variety of capacities including joining the Fowler Center team full time in October 2016 as AIM2Flourish program manager. As Director she runs all of the Fowler Center’s programming and helps in advancing the strategic priorities of the Fowler Center in the areas of research, education, and applied work with local, national, and global companies.

Megan received her MBA in 2015 from the Weatherhead School of Management. She also holds a Bachelors of Arts in Economics with minors in Art History and French from Case Western Reserve University. While pursuing her MBA, Megan was one of the inaugural Fowler Family Fellowship recipients.

David Cooperrider

David L. Cooperrider, PhD, is a Distinguished University Professor at Case Western Reserve University and holds the Covia - David L. Cooperrider Professorship in Appreciative Inquiry at the Weatherhead School of Management. David is the Founder of the Fowler Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit and is also the Honorary Chairman of Champlain College's David L. Cooperrider Center for Appreciative Inquiry at the Robert P. Stiller School of Business. Recently David was placed in the Organization Development field's Hall of Fame and received "The Lifetime Achievement Award"--the highest honor in his field of Organization Development and the OD Network—for his work on Appreciative Inquiry for large group multi-stakeholder planning, and his advancement the concept of Business as an Agent of World Benefit” as the field's North Star.

David is best known for his original theoretical articulation of "AI" or Appreciative Inquiry with his mentor Suresh Srivastva. Today AI's approach to strengths-inspired, instead of problematizing change, is being practiced everywhere: the corporate world, the world of public service, of economics, of education, of faith, of philanthropy, and social science scholarship-it is affecting them all. Jane Nelson, at Harvard's Kennedy School of Leadership recently wrote “David Cooperrider is one of the outstanding scholar-practitioners of our generation."

David has served as advisor to prominent leaders in business and society, including projects with five Presidents and/or Nobel Laureates such as William Jefferson Clinton, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Kofi Annan, and Jimmy Carter. David advises a wide variety of corporations including Apple, Johnson & Johnson, Keurig Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Verizon, Hunter Douglas, Cleveland Clinic, National Grid, Smuckers, Clarke, Fairmount Minerals, McKinsey, Parker, Dealer Tire, Webasto, and Wal-Mart as well as the Navy, Red Cross, United Way of America, USAID, United Nations, the UN Global Compact, and hundreds of international private voluntary organizations (the GEM project.) David is also a founding Board Member of the International Association of Positive Psychology, the Taos Institute, and a Fellow of the World Business Academy and International Academy of Management. Early in the growth of the UN's Global Compact David was called upon by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to facilitate (using Appreciative Inquiry) the largest summit in history between business CEOs and leaders of government and civil society. It was one of the high point moments in David's career and shifted the focus of his work to the discovery and design of positive institutions and a world of full-spectrum flourishing, that is "a world where businesses can excel, all people can thrive, and nature can flourish now and across the generations."

David has published 25 books and authored over 100 articles and book chapters. He has served as editor of both the Journal of Corporate Citizenship with Ron Fry and the current academic research 4-volume series on Advances for Appreciative Inquiry, with Michel Avital. In 2010 David was honored with the Peter F. Drucker Distinguished Fellow award. David's books include Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change (with Diana Whitney); The Organization Dimensions of Global Change (with Jane Dutton); Handbook of Transformative Cooperation (Stanford Press) Organizational Courage and Executive Wisdom (with Suresh Srivastva); and The Strengths-based Leadership Handbook (with Brun & Ejsing.) David's work has received numerous awards including Distinguished Contribution to Workplace Learning by ASTD; the Porter Award for Best writing in the field of Organization Development and the Aspen Institute Faculty Pioneer Award in the domain of Sustainable Development. In 2016 David was named as one of the nation's top thought leaders by Trust Across America, and honored as one of "AACSB's Most Influential Leaders in the Field of Management." He was recently named Distinguished University Professor at Case Western Reserve University.

In perhaps the highest recognition of his thought leadership, Champlain College's Stiller School of Business honored David's impact with an academic center in his name. Opened in 2014 it is called the David L. Cooperrider Center for Appreciative Inquiry, and David serves as its Honorary Chair. For the center's dedication Professor Marty Seligman, the father of the positive psychology movement wrote: "David Cooperrider is a giant: a giant of discovery, a giant of dissemination, and a giant of generosity." Likewise, Jane Dutton, University of Michigan thought leader and former President of the Academy of Management said:

"David Cooperrider is changing the world with his ideas and who he is as a person. There are few who combine such insight, inspiration and energy."

David is the founder of the Global Forum for Business as an Agent of World Benefit—it was launched in partnership with the UN Global Compact and with the Academy of Management. David's most recent book, co-authored with Audrey Selian and others, is called The Business of Building a Better World: The Leadership Revolution That is Changing Everything.

Beth Gibson

Vice President, People Culture and Strategy

Dealer Tire, LLC.

Through my vast years of experience within the People profession, I have learned that all the work we do is encapsulated in the wellness of our associates. We partner to actively pursue opportunities that will engage, coach and help our associates in all facets of wellness – physical, mental, emotional and financial. When organizations view it from this lens, the partnership between them and their associates will flourish.

My path to my current role was flooded with failures, disappointments, highs and accomplishments. I have been lucky enough to partner with an amazing organization who places associates and their value systems at the forefront of their decisions. I have held various roles throughout my career which brought me to my current role as Vice President, People Culture and Strategy.

One of my largest and proudest accomplishments was when I graduated with my Masters of Positive Organizational Development and Change from Case Western Reserve University in 2014. This experience gave me the unique opportunity to learn from the creators of many of the methodologies we use in Human Resources/Organizational Development on a regular basis. As an avid Appreciative Inquiry practitioner and facilitator, I have had the opportunity to leverage AI through its many forms; large scale summits, full restructuring of organizations, performance management/coaching conversations, process improvements and through the creative work we did around diversity, equity, and inclusion. This work was centered around leveraging the virtual environment to discover the core strengths and created our strategic DEandI roadmap. In November 2022, the work was featured in an article of the "AI Practitioner".

Ronald Fry received his B.S. in Engineering from U.C.L.A. and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Organization Studies from M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management. He is the B. Charles Ames Professor of Management at Case Western Reserve University where he has directed the E.M.B.A. and M.P.O.D. degree programs to national prominence and served as the Organizational Behavior Department Chair. He is currently the Faculty Chair of the Fowler Center for Business as Agent for World Benefit.

Ron's research in the areas of team development, functioning of the executive, organization change, appreciative inquiry, and adult learning and development has resulted in 11 books and over 60 published articles and book chapters.

As one of the co-creators of the Appreciative Inquiry theory and method, Ron works with organizations all over the world to understand how to engage whole systems in strategic change and transformation. His research continues to develop insights on large group dynamics, appreciative leadership, and businesses as agents for world benefit. Ron launched a global inquiry for the Fowler Center that has now surfaced over 4000 stories of transformative innovations that create mutual benefit for business and society, now known as Aim2flourish.

Contact: Professor Ronald Fry, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, 11090 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44106. Email: rxf5@case.edu