Meet the judges for the Operational Excellence Awards

AMERICAS

Steven Kaplan
University of Chicago Booth

Steven Neil Kaplan is the Neubauer Family Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.  His research focuses on private equity, venture capital, entrepreneurial finance, corporate governance and corporate finance. He is co-creator of the Kaplan-Schoar PME (Public Market Equivalent) private equity benchmarking approach.  Fortune called him “probably the foremost private equity scholar in the galaxy”. He co-founded the entrepreneurship programme at Booth, helping start its New Venture Challenge competition, which has created over $10 billion in value from companies like GrubHub and Braintree/Venmo.

Michael McKenna
Alvarez & Marsal

Michael McKenna is a managing director of Alvarez & Marsal’s Private Equity Performance Improvement group. He works with private equity investors across the transaction lifecycle to identify and execute transactions, accelerate portfolio company performance and provide a smooth investment exit. His primary area of focus is finance operations, driving improvements in working capital management, accounting and treasury operations, and reporting and analytics.

Joncarlo Mark 
Upwelling Capital Group

Joncarlo Mark is the founder of Upwelling Capital Group, a registered advisor that provides advisory and capital solutions to institutional investors. Prior to forming Upwelling in 2011, he was a senior portfolio manager at the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, where he was responsible for investing in global private equity partnerships and direct investments, with a portfolio that exceeded $48 billion of exposure. In addition, from 2007 to 2010, Mark served as chairman of the board for the Institutional Limited Partners Association.

EMEA

Miles Graham
Metro AG

Miles Graham is an operating partner at Metro AG, a €37 billion revenue, Frankfurt-listed food wholesale business that has adopted a private equity-style operating model. He has been in private equity for 20 years, serving as president of 3i portfolio company John Hardy, which he restructured and sold to L Catterton, and was director and head of active partnerships at 3i Group, where he oversaw improvements across a $6 billion portfolio of 100 companies. He spent five years in McKinsey & Company’s private equity practice, and is a non-executive director of Age Checked Ltd and the Operating Partners Group.

Ludovic Phalippou
University of Oxford

Ludovic Phalippou is a Professor of Financial Economics at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. He specialises in private equity funds and focuses on issues such as risk management, liquidity and measurement of returns. Phalippou’s research in this area has been published in leading academic and practitioner journals.

Katja Salovaara
Ilmarinen

Katja Salovaara has been a senior PE portfolio manager at Ilmarinen since January 2000. Ilmarinen is a mutual pension insurer based in Helsinki, managing €47 billion. Currently 6 percent of the assets are invested in private equity. Before joining Ilmarinen, she worked at the Shell UK Pension Fund in London analysing private equity funds and monitoring a global private equity portfolio with over $1 billion of commitments. Prior to that, she was an investment analyst in the European team at private equity specialists Pantheon Ventures.

Antoon Schneider
Boston Consulting Group

Antoon Schneider is a senior partner at The Boston Consulting Group and leads the Principal Investors & Private Equity practice in London. He has advised leading principal investors and more than half of the 50 largest private equity firms globally on a range of deal sourcing, due diligence and firm strategy projects. He has also worked extensively with their portfolio companies on 100-day value creation planning and operational improvement projects, and has deep experience in corporate strategy and M&A.

ASIA-PACIFIC

Veronique Lafon-Vinais
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Veronique Lafon-Vinais is associate professor of business education in the School of Business & Management of The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where she is the executive director (career development and corporate outreach), associate director of both the undergraduate and World Bachelor in Business programmes, and a project director of the MSc in Global Finance programme. Lafon-Vinais is a seasoned financial market professional with over 20 years of banking and capital markets experience.

Lian Hoon Lim
AlixPartners

Lian Hoon Lim is a managing director with AlixPartners. He has more than 25 years of experience in all aspects of operations improvement, including sales and distribution, manufacturing, procurement, product development, overall supply chain management and transportation operations. He has consulted to the automotive, electronics, consumer goods and chemicals industries and held management positions in electronics, shipping and logistics industries in South-East Asia and Greater China.

Ivo Naumann
McKinsey & Company

Ivo Naumann is a partner with McKinsey & Company where he leads the Private Equity and Institutional Investor practice as well as the RTS service line, a special unit that delivers a proven approach for transformational change, for Greater China. Naumann has more than 20 years of experience in supporting shareholders and management to restructure and improve performance of underperforming businesses in Asia. He has acted in multiple management roles and served on various boards of directors in China, Japan and South-East Asia.