Registration
Register Online
At times, we need to upgrade the room size to accommodate you so registering in advance helps makes things go smoother.
Deadline: 4/17/2008
Program
6:00 PM-6:30 PM: networking
6:30 PM-8:00 PM: presentation
8:00 PM-9:00 PM: drinks at The Midway Club, Fifth Floor
Speaker Profiles
Paul O'Connor (Speaker)
Civic Leader and past Executive Director, World Business Chicago
Paul O’Connor is a city-builder with roots deep in Chicago’s mud. His great grandfather Patrick had a house at Taylor and Halsted, and mastered schooners rafting logs down the treacherous lakes to rebuild after the Fire. His grandfather John J. got as high as a Catholic could at the First National Bank of Chicago in his 47 years there. His father Len wore large his love for the city in 20 years of nightly TV news commentary. His mother Jane was an arts and culture builder. Paul spent a good deal of his life trying to escape Chicago for other cities, but….
Eventually he took a spot at the end of a colorful line of windy Chicago boosters, founding for Rich Daley economic-development nonprofit World Business Chicago whose data-based approach to urban marketing landed Boeing and led all U.S. metros in corporate capital investment for six of the past seven years. Financial Times’ worldwide fDi magazine ranked WBC the best city investment promotion operation in the U.S., and then for all North America.
Paul came to WBC, which he left last December, by a circuitous route through advertising, corporate communications, global economic development, and state government service in Washington State and Illinois. His core craft is journalism. As legman, he called columnist Mike Royko “boss.” He was John Callaway’s first hire to create a nightly news show on WTTW. And he was urban affairs writer (and restaurant critic) for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
He is on the board of CEOs for Cities; is a founding board member of the Global Chicago Center; served on the executive committee for the Chicago Central Area Plan, and on the Mexican-American Economic Integration task force; and was co-founder of the City of Chicago’s Shanghai office.
His undergraduate studies were in Classics at the University of Chicago. Followed by Czech at the Defense Language Institute; then color at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His hobbies are cosmology and his wife's cooking.
Questions
Karl Buschmann
847 310 0412