Leading Beyond Uncertainty: Navigating a Shifting Economy
Brian Hegarty is a principal and leader for Marsh McLennan Agency's Los Angeles office. In addition to overseeing the firm's rapid growth in L.A., he specializes in employee benefits programs for mid-size to large companies. He works with clients to build employee benefits programs focused on improving the employee experience and driving retention and recruiting efforts. Since joining the firm in 2008, Hegarty has worked closely with many leading L.A. industries, such as technology, entertainment, apparel, hospitality and more.
David Park, president of Axos Commercial Bank, has over 20 years of banking leadership in Southern California. Since joining Axos in 2018, he has transformed it from a specialty finance institution into a dynamic, relationship-based bank, launching middle market, fund banking, entertainment, technology and premium finance groups. Beyond his role, he serves on boards like the Asian Business Association of Orange County and mentors future bankers as a faculty member at the Pacific Coast Banking School.
Ashley Farrell Pickett, shareholder in Greenberg Traurig, LLP's Los Angeles office defends companies in complex litigation nationwide, with an emphasis on labor and employment law. In her practice, Farrell Pickett also acts as outside general counsel and coordinating counsel for various nationwide companies – guiding their litigation as well as compliance strategy.
Dr. Imamu 'Mu' Tomlinson is a transformative leader at the forefront of healthcare innovation. As CEO of Vituity, a physician-led and -owned multispecialty partnership, he oversees care for over 11 million patients annually across more than 690 practice locations nationwide. Under his leadership, Vituity has pioneered initiatives that enhance patient-centered care and operational performance. Dr. Tomlinson also founded the Vituity Cares Foundation, which addresses healthcare inequities and fosters diversity among clinicians.
Panelists emphasized the critical need for C-suite leaders to nurture the next generation, advocating for early mentorship and adoption of emerging talent, and how remote work has changed business practices.
They discussed the economic uncertainties involving tariffs, with Pickett suggesting caution and preplanning to navigate any financial peaks or valleys. Park shifted the focus to essential leadership qualities for digital transformation and workforce changes. He pinpointed digital fluency, an entrepreneurial mindset and resilience as paramount.
The panel concluded by discussing the most essential leadership qualities today compared to a decade ago. Park stressed the heightened importance of communication across diverse generations and backgrounds. Farrell Pickett championed adaptability and clarity of purpose, emphasizing clear communication to gain buy-in, and Dr. Tomlinson offered a powerful closing thought: Leaders should forgo trying to fit into predefined 'boxes' and instead embrace their authentic selves.
David Park: You have to have an attitude, a 'failing forward' – you can't be afraid to fail. You need to make calculated risks and decisions and always ask, 'What did we learn from this, and how can we do better?' So we have a mindset of failing forward. The last thing is resilience: Change is hard. We're in a world that's constantly changing. We don't like to change. The reality is that is the business world we are in, so you need to learn how to help with change management.
Ashley Farrell Pickett: So I think remote work is here to stay, but I do think it is an employment space where policies and practices are implemented in the right way. There are obvious benefits with work-from-home or remote/hybrid, whether it's a greater employee pool or lower overall employee costs because you're able to employ people who are in lower-cost areas. There's a ton of great positives, but I think people are recognizing – especially how far removed we are now from COVID – that there are also a lot of benefits to work culture around team, productivity and collaboration.
Dr. Imamu Tomlinson: Firstly, a lot of times we want to put people in boxes. You want to say, here is the one thing or the three things or the seven things that you need to do to be a leader. But how about you be your absolute authentic self? You bring that superpower every day, all day, and you'll stop worrying about all of these different qualities that you need to be successful. The second thing I would say is share your power … share that power with the people below you, your peers, the people above you. And that way we can all make the world a better place.
Farrell Pickett: I see clients really excel internally or have a smoothest possible road when they have clarity of purpose, especially from the executive side. And it's not just that clarity, but communicating that and getting buy-in from the internal stakeholders, from the external stakeholders and everyone they need. Those are the people that really get the buy-in and end up getting from point A to point B much more quickly.
Tomlinson: If we look at how we 'disrupt,' I think there's three tenets. One is you have to be disagreeable – meaning that everything that you think you know, you have to disagree with. And it doesn't mean that you are throwing that out, but that mindset allows you to learn. The second is being optimistic – being optimistic and disagreeable go together – the idea that I can change the world. And then lastly, I would say relentlessness – disruption doesn't work for a minute, or an hour a day. You have to just be disruptive in that mindset continuously.
Park: An important leadership quality today, I would say, is communication. I think that it's not that it became more important, but it's so vital where we are today. Communication is key. I tell my children all the time. If you can communicate well, no matter what you do in life, you'll succeed. And I think that our world is so diverse with different levels of generations and different diversity, and so we all communicate in different ways, and you have to be fluent in that.
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New York Times
10 hours ago
- New York Times
Does Your Face Need Work? She'll Tell You.
Imagine this: You are a person of a certain age who is bothered by the sagging skin on your neck. On Instagram, an image of the newly rejuvenated Kris Jenner jumps out at you. For as long as she and the Kardashians have been famous, their faces have made an argument against the idea that God created us as we should be. But now, Ms. Jenner looks dewier than her daughters. Even if you lament the family's effects on American culture, it is hard not to admire the surgical handiwork of Steven M. Levine, a famed Park Avenue doctor who Ms. Jenner readily names as the one responsible for her face-lift. Unfortunately, you cannot get a consult. An automated voice message at Dr. Levine's office states that he is accepting new patients only via referral. You might, at this point, head to Reddit and look through scores of reviews for other plastic surgeons whose patients walk away pleased with what they regard to be a similar result. Or you might schedule an appointment with Melinda Farina, a 44-year-old former dental assistant who over the last decade has become one of the most significant players on the plastic surgery scene. Unlike Dr. Levine, Ms. Farina does not perform face-lifts, tummy tucks or nose jobs. Instead, she is a consultant who calls herself the Beauty Broker and charges around $750 for an hourlong consultation, after which she connects clients to the surgeons she thinks best fit their aesthetic and can work within their budgets. (She also has a team of eight consultants who work for her; their fees start at $350 per consult.) From there, she may handle myriad tasks associated with surgery — among them translating medical jargon, soothing frayed nerves and handling aftercare. A decade ago, prime players within the beauty industry were busy selling the idea that the best way to reverse the aging process was not with invasive surgeries but with a variety of injections and laser treatments. Recently, the pendulum has swung back. Part of this, doctors say, is because of GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy, which can lead to sagging skin after weight loss that cannot be easily addressed without surgery. But it is also because of the proliferation of face-lifts, nose jobs and eyelid surgeries featured on Instagram and TikTok. With more awareness and information comes more choice and more uncertainty. Enter: Ms. Farina. She has benefited from the secrecy and shame that was once associated with plastic surgery, marketing herself as a person capable of helping clients find the best physicians. She has appeared on her client Gwyneth Paltrow's podcast, talking about her increasing antipathy toward fillers. She has spoken before scores of surgeons at some of the plastic surgery industry's biggest conferences. And she is doing everything she can to ensure that even as high-profile people begin to speak more openly about the work they've had done, her middle-person services remain in demand. Ms. Farina has also made waves by arriving at the party with her own set of knives. She has gotten into legal spats with beauty influencers. She has publicly accused two of the industry's best-known doctors of botching procedures. (One of them sued her. The case was settled out of court.) 'We sign NDAs with all our celebs — and discretion and privacy is the most important thing all the time,' Ms. Farina said on a recent afternoon, sitting at a banquette at the Surrey Hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She was clad in a white Balmain skirt with black horses, a rose gold Rolex President dangling from her wrist as she picked at an artichoke salad. At her side, a gold Prada scrunchie was attached to the gold strap of her black Hermès Kelly bag. Ms. Farina likes to say that her approach is less rather than more. 'I'm a shoemaker with no shoes,' is how she tried to make the point that she is not overly reconstructed, before allowing that she has had certain things done: a nose job at 19, a fat transfer to volumize her breasts at 36, a breast reduction at 41. Fillers and lip injections ('biggest regret,' she said) at some point as well. She did also have shoes; they were four-inch Jimmy Choos. Earlier that day, Ms. Farina had accompanied a client ('they're not patients; I don't have a medical degree,' she said) to a surgery. The client was from Dubai. Ms. Farina said the client was in New York for a face-lift and hair transplant. 'You gotta get them in, get them out, get them back to Dubai and make sure everything goes well and that there's no issues at all,' she said. 'So we have a whole post-op team taking care of her. She's a pretty prominent figure.' Of course, Ms. Farina could not say who she was. From the Ferry to Park Avenue 'I come from a blue-collar family, not the 1 percent, and that's at the heart of who I am,' said Ms. Farina, who grew up on Staten Island. Her mother ran a wellness center at a hospital; her father worked in construction. She said that after high school, she went to the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey but transferred after less than two years to New York University, though she did not graduate. She began working at the Upper East Side cosmetic dentistry practice of Dr. Larry Rosenthal, with the idea being that she would become a dental technician. As is the case for many people with well-tended personal brands, the details of her origin story aren't always consistent. She's in the business of self-improvement, and in telling her own story, there is a certain amount of retroactive reinvention. Her knowledge of her subject is encyclopedic; her awareness of how easy it is to check facts, occasionally less so. On her website, Ms. Farina says that she 'brings a robust educational background from N.Y.U. and Columbia University' to her work in 'the medical and dental aesthetics fields.' New York University's College of Dentistry said it had no record of her having studied there. Columbia University would not comment on whether she had taken courses there, citing privacy concerns. (Ms. Farina said she wasn't surprised that N.Y.U. couldn't find a record: 'I was there for two or three months.') As she tells it, while working for Dr. Rosenthal she realized that if she was going to be in the business of optimizing people's looks, she need not confine herself to their mouths. Encouraged in part by Dr. Rosenthal, she began to think about becoming a consultant. 'He said, 'I'll introduce you to people,' she recalled. The consultancy she formed eventually became Beauty Brokers Incorporated. She charged clients for her services and also received payment from physicians to be in her referral network in the early days. One of the first people she began referring patients to was Dr. Jonathan Sherwyn, an Upper East Side surgeon. She sent him patients seeking breast augmentations and began working out of his office. (He also performed both her breast procedures.) Another was Dr. Sam Rizk, who works on Park Avenue and gave Ms. Farina a nose job when she was 19. In Dr. Rizk's waiting room on a coffee table is a binder of testimonials from happy patients. Buried inside is a note from Ms. Farina typed up shortly after she went into consulting. 'It has been 2 years since you re-contoured my nose and the compliments continue to pour in!' she wrote to 'Sam,' ending the note by saying: 'I knew from the second I met you … that you were 'the one' ha ha. None of the others could compare!' Sitting inside his office recently, eating a danish, shortly after completing a deep-plane face-lift, Dr. Rizk explained her success by saying: 'She knows her stuff better than some doctors do. And she has balls of steel.' The Skeptics, Haters and Fans 'When you're working with surgeons on the Upper East Side and dealing with this type of clientele, it rubs off on you,' said Ms. Farina, who now lives in Weehawken, N.J., in a $2.5 million house that she rents, along with her golden retriever, Eddie Vedder. She said that the rarefied world she moves in for work has had some impact on other areas of her life. 'Everyone would say, 'She's high maintenance,'' she said. 'And the men felt like they could not afford dating me.' She does now have a boyfriend, who works in software development. She regularly posts photos of him on Instagram, but declined to name him. Life is busy, controversy follows, she acknowledges. 'There are skeptics, there are haters, there are people who believe I do not belong, and there are surgeons who think what I'm doing is absolutely necessary,' Ms. Farina said. Dr. Elizabeth Chance, a leading surgeon in Charlottesville, Va., credits Ms. Farina with enveloping her patients in a 'blanket of love' and 'culling her network' when surgeons fall short. Dr. Theda Kontis of Baltimore, the president of the American Board of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, calls Ms. Farina a person who takes advantage of legal 'loopholes' in a barely regulated industry, while preying upon the insecurities of potential patients. 'She creates the illusion that the doctors don't really know what you need,' Dr. Kontis said in an interview. Ms. Farina attributes this 'mishmash of feedback' to the fact that the business is still a 'old boys' club' within which she occupies a complicated niche as a person who drums up business for the doctors but, ultimately, answers to those who seek out their services and don't always walk away happy. Ms. Farina is known for going into the operating room and watching surgeries — a practice that is not illegal but is certainly unconventional — and for telling doctors when she thinks their fees are too high. That doesn't always go over well with the big egos of her industry. 'If you ask a prominent plastic surgeon to name the best three in the country, most would be hard-pressed to name the other two,' said Dr. Steven Teitelbaum, a Los Angeles plastic surgeon, to whom Ms. Farina refers many complicated 'revisions' — adjustments that enhance or correct past surgical work — but few new patients. 'She told me, 'You're too expensive,'' he said. Ms. Farina is not shy about publicly criticizing people in the field. And she has also been sued by prominent physicians. In 2013, Dr. Raffi Hovsepian, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon claimed in a lawsuit that in 2012, he paid Ms. Farina $10,200 to join her referral network. Dr. Hovsepian said that in exchange, Ms. Farina was supposed to refer him a minimum of three patients over a year. The referrals, he said in his complaint, never came to him. As Ms. Farina presents it, that was not the arrangement. She says she usually recommends three or four doctors to each client, who then picks the one she or he likes best. 'It's not my fault if you can't close the deal,' she said. The suit never made it to court, and Ms. Farina still sends patients his way. 'He's a good surgeon,' she said, showing off a cache of emails from her office to his over the past few years. 'Maybe not the nicest person. But I love his work.' ('I'm not interested in being part of your article,' said Dr. Hovsepian, when reached for comment.) In 2019, Ms. Farina was sued by Dr. Simon Ourian, a Los Angeles cosmetic dermatologist to Lady Gaga and several Kardashians. It happened after she called him a 'fraud hack' on Instagram. Dr. Ourian, who had his license revoked in 2009 by the Medical Board of California but was ultimately placed on probation until 2013, never worked directly with Ms. Farina. He claimed in his lawsuit that she was 'steering clients/patients to aesthetic and cosmetic professionals who pay 'membership fees'' to her firm, while 'disparaging other doctors.' Ultimately, Ms. Farina settled out of court. In an interview, Dr. Ourian said he could not discuss Ms. Farina because of a nondisparagement agreement. Then he called her a 'good friend and a bad enemy.' 'I agree,' she said. The Magic Potion Last year, Demi Moore starred in 'The Substance,' a sci-fi horror movie about a woman who takes a potion to restore her youth. While she was racing down red carpets on her way to a Golden Globe win and an Oscar nomination, conversation swirled over who — if anyone — was responsible for her enviable real-life face. On Instagram, a Texas beauty influencer named Dana Omari claimed without evidence that Ms. Moore had received a face-lift courtesy of Dr. Levine, Ms. Jenner's surgeon. Soon after, the Beauty Broker — who said she 'can neither confirm nor deny' that Ms. Moore is a client — pounced. She posted about the scourge of sensationalist plastic surgery claims online and cited Ms. Omari's post as a prime example. Ms. Omari replied by telling her Instagram following of 250,000 that Ms. Farina was nothing more than a 'dental hygienist who gets paid on both ends to book patients with plastic surgeons she says are in her 'little black book.' And allegedly she gets kickbacks.' ('I said allegedly,' Ms. Omari reiterated in an interview.) So Ms. Farina sued Ms. Omari for defamation. In response, lawyers for Ms. Omari produced a 2019 email apparently sent by Ms. Farina to doctors within her network proposing a compensation system of sorts for referrals: 'Going forward, our clients (the patients) will pay us directly 10 percent of the overall surgical fee. All we ask is that our surgeons grant our clients a 10 percent discount as a courtesy.' Ms. Farina said that she sent that email to four people 'testing the waters for a new business model' but that it never came to fruition. She also said that it has been several years since she received any payment from doctors. Also introduced into evidence by Ms. Omari's lawyer were photographs of numerous Christmas gifts that Ms. Farina had posted on Instagram from various doctors. One example: 'So pretty! Thank You So Much Dr. L,' she captioned a story that contained a photograph of a black quilted Dior handbag that generally retails for north of $3,000. The suit is ongoing. Dr. Scott Hollenbeck, the president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, who does not know Ms. Farina, said that he didn't have much issue with a consultant providing what amounts to marketing services for doctors. 'Merely recommending a doctor doesn't feel quite as wrong as saying 'You should get a lower blepharoplasty.'' But as it happens, that was exactly what Ms. Farina was recommending on a recent Wednesday afternoon. She was sitting in front of her laptop, talking over Zoom to Nancy, a 44-year-old small business owner from St. Paul. Nancy agreed to let a reporter watch her consultation with Ms. Farina on the condition that her last name not be used. Nancy had sharp, angular features and a sample-size waist. She looked a lot like Bethenny Frankel. She was upset about a hollowing out that she believed was taking place below her eyes. 'You don't need a face-lift, so that's the good news,' Ms. Farina said. 'I'm not ready for that,' Nancy replied, nodding. 'No, you look great. But I do notice there's some hollowing going on,' Ms. Farina said. Gesturing at Nancy, she focused on the 'area beneath her eyes. 'That needs to be re-draped and repositioned,' she said. Then she got technical: 'So we do what's called a transconjunctival blepharoplasty, which is a procedure where they go under the lid and they make a little incision and lift that fat pad up and reposition it.' Within minutes, Ms. Farina had a list of plastic surgeons, and was dispensing information about their prices, though she noted her ability to negotiate lower ones. Of course, as much of this information becomes available on the internet, some of Ms. Farina's detractors argue that the same platform that has enabled her rise may ultimately be her undoing. But so far, she sees little evidence for this being true. 'Kris Jenner is not even my client,' she said later. 'And when she came out about her face-lift, my inbox blew up. We got over 700 inquiries that day.' Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Yahoo
18 hours ago
- Yahoo
'A deal Villa would have preferred not to have done'
The sale of Jacob Ramsey to Newcastle is a deal Aston Villa and Unai Emery would have preferred not to have done in an ideal world. However, this is not that world but one in which teams must abide by profit and sustainability rules - and finances are tight at Villa Park. A youth product like Ramsey would always be an asset to sell to generate pure profit and £40m will undoubtedly help Villa comply with the rules. It was the same last year when they had to sell Douglas Luiz despite qualifying for the Champions League. It would be churlish to call Villa purely a selling club now, but they are not immune to financial pressures, as has been obvious over the past 18 months, and the failure to reach the Champions League this season will naturally have an effect. Emery was a fan of Ramsey - he would have liked to have kept him - but the manager is living in reality. He knows the landscape Villa must navigate, even if it may seem rocky. Striker Evann Guessand has joined from Nice and there are likely to be more arrivals, perhaps even the return of Marco Asensio after his successful loan last season, but Villa must continue to out-think the bigger spenders. What do you make of Ramsey leaving Villa Park? Tell us here
Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Los Angeles Times
A blind Bay Area woman conquered snowboarding and the Boston Marathon. Now she's taking on Kilimanjaro
A Bay Area woman with degenerative blindness is set to ascend Mount Kilimanjaro with her closest friends as guides in October. The strenuous feat is expected to be just the latest accomplishment for the never-say-quit Harvard graduate who has learned to snowboard and completed the Boston Marathon At age 9, Kristie Colton was diagnosed with Stargardt disease — a genetic condition that affects the central portion of the retina and leads to gradual vision loss. School teachers noticed that she was resigned and unresponsive in class as she concealed her vision symptoms as best she could. What began as a subsequent visit to the eye doctor for a pair of glasses ended up becoming a life-altering diagnosis. 'I put a lot of mental energy into trying to hide it, but it did become harder and harder to hide,' said Colton, now a 28-year-old Mountain View resident. 'The hard part about degenerative eye disease is you don't wake up one day and realize 'Oh, I should use my cane now for the rest of my life.'' Colton, however, was attracted to athletics from a young age. She joined the National Ability Center in Utah, which specialized in adaptive sports, so that she could learn to snowboard with accommodations. She would later attend Harvard, where she met Jungyeon Park and Grace Eysenbach, who both participated in the Boston athletic scene. Colton and Park were running partners, and the former trained the latter as a guide for longer routes, with Park acting as a responsive set of eyes. The pair ran the Boston Marathon last year. 'Kristie was the first person that I had met who was blind,' Park said. 'She spent like two weeks teaching me how to snowboard, and I became proficient enough to become a guide… We started guiding each other, and then running.' Colton and Park would later help to establish the Vorden Initiative, a nonprofit organization that seeks to educate sighted individuals to assist those who are blind, including teaching them to become an athletic guide and offering educational resources to bolster partnerships between blind and sighted people. 'Resources are rather limited on the internet,' Park said. 'There's a lot of nonprofits and resources for blind people to do things a certain way or to learn new things, but there really isn't a resource for sighted people to become allies.' At an adaptive sports session early this year, the group made contact with Walt Raineri, a former paralympian in sailing with retitnitus pigmentosa — a hereditary disease that attacks the retinas. A few months later, Raineri invited Colton — and her two friends as guides — to a treacherous weeklong hike up Mount Kilimanjaro. 'My immediate gut reaction was, 'No,'' Colton said. 'He was just telling us more about the trip, and he gave all these details, and it kind of dawned on us that this is going to be a really once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.' Eleven blind climbers, each accompanied by one sighted individual — aside from Colton, who has two guides in Park and Eysenbach — will hike to the near-20,000-feet peak of Mount Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania on Raineri's exhibition. Before the pandemic, around 30,000 people attempted the hike each year with a 66% success rate, including several visually impaired climbers. To prepare for the climb, Colton and her guides have focused on heavy cardio training. They recently began their first practice hikes. 'I'm still working out how to use my hiking poles to sort of feel the ground, and I think guiding looks really different going uphill versus downhill for me with all the different lighting conditions on the trail,' Colton said. 'Grace and I have been working out the kinks there… I'll be going pretty much every weekend.' The trip will not only be personally significant, but will also be an opportunity to educate on the condition of blindness, both Park and Eysenbach said. 'One of the things that I have really enjoyed about being a part of guiding Kristie is meeting people who have a spectrum of visual impairments, and encouraging other people to realize that it is such a wide spectrum, and how it affects people is very different,' Eysenbach said. The group will begin their trip in late September and begin their ascent on Oct. 1, Park said. Colton said she could not have imagined such a possibility when she sat in school, feigning that she had no answers to teachers' questions simply because she could not see the board. 'When I was younger, I really didn't know what my disease was going to lead to in my life… I didn't know what my life was going to amount to,' Colton said. 'I am a 28 -year-old woman who lost her eyesight and yet I get to live independently with some of my best friends… Now these best friends get to go on all kinds of adventures with me, from backpacking the Grand Canyon to running the Boston Marathon, and now Kilimanjaro.'
