COVID-19 and the Hospitality Industry

J. Bruce Tracey is a Professor of Management at Cornell University’s Nolan School of Hotel Administration. Professor Tracey has taught courses in human resources management for undergraduate, graduate, and professional audiences throughout North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, winning several awards for his efforts. He has conducted research on a wide range of strategic and operational-level HR topics, including the roles and relevance of HR flexibility, the impact of training initiatives on individual and firm performance, employee turnover, employment law, and leadership.

Professor Tracey has presented his work at numerous regional, national, and international conferences, and his research has been published in many of the top-tier discipline and applied outlets, including the Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, Journal of Management, Organizational Research Methods, Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, and the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Labor and Employment Law. Professor Tracey’s sponsors for research and consulting include Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Hilton Worldwide, Marriott International, Mövenpick Hotels and Resorts, Wynn Resorts, Hillstone Restaurant Group, and Uno Chicago Grill, and he has been cited in the New York Times, USA Today, Fast Company, and the Orlando Sentinel, among other popular press outlets.

Leslie Ferrier began her hospitality career with Hilton Hotels Corporation in their management development program. With Loews Corporation, she was on the opening teams for the Loews House of Blues, the Loews Miami Beach and the Loews Porto Fino Bay Hotel in Universal Studios. She has served as Corporate Director of HR for Linens n Things, as well as VP of HR for both ABC Carpet & Home and Aerosoles shoes.  Leslie was the founding HR leader for TxVia, a high tech start up, which sold to Google. At Atlantic Coast Media Group, Leslie was the VP of Talent Acquisition & Development. As the Head of HR for Le Pain Quotidien, she opened 15 new restaurants and was responsible for 3500 employees in 90 restaurants over 8 states. Leslie was recently nominated to the Hall of Fame for the World Association of Cooperative Education. Leslie is currently the Vice President of Human Resources for Momofuku reporting directly to world renowned chef, David Chang & President, Alex Munoz-Suarez.

Nigel Beck is CEO and founder of When Labs: artificial intelligence for augmenting management, driving compliance, employee engagement, retention, and productivity. Beck’s passion for HR and management comes from over two decades of building and managing teams from two to thousands around the globe, and led to his acquisition of Kenexa, a human-capital management company, the sixth-largest acquisition IBM had ever made. As founding CTO of Footprint Software, a fintech startup, he engineered the largest retail-banking system of its kind, building the fastest-growing startup in Canada at the time, which sold to IBM. There, he architected IBM’s entry into open source software, making IBM the first major corporation to embrace Linux and Apache, and was the founding product line manager for their most successful organic software product of the last two decades, WebSphere. Along the way, he founded one of the earliest commercial bot companies, liketribe, which used artificial intelligence and social graph data to provide personalized recommendations.

Robert Mellwig joined sbe, headquartered in New York City, as their Chief Culture Officer (head of Human Resources) in March 2019. sbe is the world leader in lifestyle hospitality, serving as an owner/operator for some of the world’s best hotels, restaurants, bars, and nightlife, including the SLS, Katsuya, Hyde, Doheny Room, and Delano. Responsible for cultivating a global tribe of talent in concert with our partner organization Accor, Mr. Mellwig thrives on building teams through a strengths-based leadership lens.