Pros

Jean Quan, Oakland’s 49th Mayor, is both the first woman and first Asian American to hold the post in the 158 years since the city was incorporated. Quan’s ascension also represents an inspiring ending to a 104-year family saga that began with destitution brought on by the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the intense anti-Chinese racism in its aftermath.

In keeping with the eloquent can-do leadership style that Quan has cultivated during her 20 years in public life she made full use of her family history to rally a city mired in a near-hopeless financial struggle and fighting to emerge from the shadow of its famous neighbor across the Bay. The city’s plight had worsened during the bizarre term of Quan’s predecessor Ron Dellums who was oddly missing in action for most of his troubled term and even failed to show up for Quan’s inauguration pleading “family issues.”

On her first day as Mayor Quan led a ceremonial pre-inaugural walk that traced her family’s history from Oakland’s revitalizing Chinatown to its century-old City Hall.

“My story is just one of the stories in Oakland,” she declared. “Together, we’ll make an epic story in Oakland.”

With family members and a small group of supporters Quan began the walk early at the Lung Kong Tin Yee Association on Ninth Street where her grandfather sought shelter after San Francisco’s Chinatown burned in the quake’s aftermath.

Perhaps the most important stop was Lincoln Elementary School on 11th Street. During the days of segregation it had been designated for black and Asian American children, including Quan’s father. This year it became the first Oakland school to win the National Blue Ribbon award, an award for which Quan can rightly share some credit given her long focus on improving the city’s schools. Noting that the school’s success owed much to the efforts of volunteer tutors, Quan urged everyone to show up in City Hall later that night for an open house and become one of the 2,000 volunteers Quan is seeking to mentor kids as a way to help them stay in school and graduate.

“My number one priority is to put the children at the heart of the politics in Oakland,” she said.

Quan understands better than most that Oakland’s epic challenge is to reconcile and unite its disparate economic strata and racial groups to believe in a city that has struggled to free itself of the poverty- and violence-ridden image it took on during the 1960s and early ’70s. The city’s racial composition is 31% African American, 27% White, 25% Hispanic and 17% Asian American. A yawning gulf separates white and Asian professionals who tend to live in the Hills and commute to San Francisco from African American and Hispanic blue-collar workers who tend to live in the flats and labor at the Port. That gulf has only widened in recent years.

In front of the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts Quan urged “everyone to take a fresh look at Oakland. My goal is going to be to reintroduce Oakland to itself.”

Long before Quan took the oath of office she has worked out her strategy to bring the city together around kids, jobs and safer streets. In her steady, deliberate speaking style Quan communicated her readiness to execute that strategy.

“Whether you supported me for mayor or didn’t support me for mayor, we are family because we love this city,” Quan said to a standing ovation from the crowd filling the Fox Theater where she was inaugurated. They clearly saw her as the mayor Oakland has needed for a long time.

Jean Quan was born on October 21, 1949 in Livermore, some 25 miles east of Oakland. She was only five when her father died, leaving her to help make ends meet by working a variety of part-time jobs while attending junior high and Livemore’s Granada High School. Their plight was made more difficult by the fact that her mother was a recent Chinese immigrant with virtually no English skills. Quan did well enough at Granada High to win a scholarship to UC Berkeley.

Quan’s social activism began at Berkeley where she tutored kids in impoverished West Oakland. She also helped reshape the curricula of universities across America by participating in the Third World Strike of 1969. As a direct result of that strike UC Berkeley and hundreds of campuses around the nation established ethnic studies departments to raise awareness of social issues pertaining to African Americans, Chicanos, Native Americans and Asian Americans.

Quan’s public service began officially in 1990 when she won a seat on the Oakland School Board. In 2002 she was elected to represent District 4 on the Oakland City Council. In the 2010 general election Jean Quan employed an intensively grassroots campaign to narrowly defeat former state senator Don Perata under the city’s unusual new ballot system that lets voters indicate first, second and third choices for mayor. Out of a field of 10 candidates Quan, Don Perata and Rebecca Kaplan were the top 3. Perata led Quan 40,342 to 29,266 in the initial tally but lacked a majority of first-place votes. According to protocol the votes were re-tallied after allocating the votes of third-place Kaplan to Perata and Quan. The resulting tally gave Quan the victory by 51% to 49%.

Jean Quan is married to Floyd Huen whom she met while both were attending UC Berkeley. Huen was president of the Chinese Students Association on campus. He was also active in the Third World Strike. More recently, Huen, a doctor, served as physician for the 1999 UC Berkeley hunger strikers who successfully won their demand for a stronger Ethnic Studies department. The couple have two children.

Ray Young’s fortunes took a steep fall when GM declared bankruptcy in June of 2009 at the height of the Great Recession.

At 47, the boy-wonder CFO had intimately linked his fortunes with the world’s biggest carmaker, having joined the firm in 1986 when he was fresh out of an obscure Candian business college. His rise to the top of the finance side of a company that collapsed after groaning for years under the weight of onerous labor contracts and diminishing market share led to the inevitable shakeup at the top. At the end of 2009 Young was sent to Shanghai to the newly created position of VP of International Operations. Many saw that as a form of exile that would put Young’s career on the skids.

Instead Young surfaced back in the States in October of 2010 as a senior vice president of Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world’s biggest agribusinesses. It took less than two months for him to be promoted to CFO. With that promotion Ray Young had re-established himself as the boy wonder of corporate finance.

The fast-track seems to have been Young’s path since his family immigrated to Canada from Guangzhou, China. In high school he set academic records which have yet to be broken. Between studies and helping parents at their restaurant, dates were scarce. Passing up admissions from top universities, he chose the University of Western Ontario for its business program, considered Canada’s best. Upon graduation Young rejected tempting job offers to attend business school at the University of Chicago.

With an MBA in hand, Young turned down many high-salaried positions at banks and investment firms to start as an entry-level financial analyst for GM in 1986. His goals required that he work for a large corporation. The gamble paid off within two years when he was promoted and transferred to GM’s financial headquarters in New York.

“I often worked until 2 in the morning,” Young recalls of those early years, “because I worried that if I slowed down a pace, I’d fall behind.”

Four years later, Young was rewarded again with a promotion to director of capital markets and foreign exchange services. A year later, at the age of 31, he was sent to Belgium to become treasurer for GM Europe. Three years later, he was named vice president of finances for CAMI, a Canadian joint venture between GM and Suzuki. In 1998 Young was tapped to serve as GM’s liaison at Suzuki, a company in which GM had taken a 10% stake as part of its strategy to build its Asia-Pacific presence. It was a sensitive post that challenged and proved out Young’s interpersonal skills.

In 2001 Young was rewarded with the post of GM North America’s vice president and chief financial officer, along with a seat on the North American Strategy Board. At 39, Young was the youngest executive ever to control the financial strategy of the $120 billion giant. It required overseeing a staff of 1,000 finance professionals. In less than three years Young was named President and Managing Director of GM do Brasil, at that time GM’s third-largest manufacturing operation.

Young attributes his remarkable success to good personal relations, networking, luck and perpetual hard work. In his free time he enjoys cooking, dining and traveling with his English-born wife.

Peter S. Kim took over as President of Merck Research Laboratories (MRL) just as the pharmaceutical industry’s venerated giant went into precipitous decline. In 2004 the blockbuster arthritis drug Vioxx had been withdrawn on evidence it was causing heart attacks, facing Merck with upwards of $30 billion worth of damages liability from victims’ families. Worse, as of 2005 Merck had only 11 drug candidates in the pipeline, too few to make up up for big-selling drugs whose patents were expiring.

“A quote I heard a lot was: ‘Well, that’s not how we do things at Merck,’ “ Kim recalled. “My answer would be: ‘OK, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the best way to do things.’”

But it wouldn’t do for the new research chief to be seen as the source of such negativity about his new colleagues. Kim commissioned a survey. Not surprisingly, the survey found that Merck was seen as an arrogant giant with no respect for the small innovative biotech firms with which it needed to partner to create new drugs. It gave Kim just the ammunition he needed to shake things up.

MRL began retraining their research executives to become more sensitive and respectful toward counterparts at the small biotechs. Kim also shook things up by bringing in fresh blood to shed the deathgrip of complacency when he saw that MRL had walled itself off from outside input.

“Merck has outstanding science and scientists — and it did when I came,” Kim said. “I knew that there were some scientists on the outside who were better.” Kim tried to bring in breakthrough AIDS researcher David Ho to oversee Emilio Emini, Merck’s senior vice president of vaccine research. That precipitated Emini’s defection to Wyeth. Undeterred, Kim went on to hire many other outsiders for key research posts.

Kim also led by example. Showing the kind of dynamism more common in much smaller companies, Kim didn’t hesitate to hop on the corporate jet to meet with the heads of smaller rivals who had drugs Merck needed.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen the head of research at a big pharmaceutical company take a plane and show up in a matter of days,” recalled Jean-Paul Clozel, CEO of the Swiss drug company Actelion. “Usually, what you hear is: ‘I have a window of availability for an appointment in a few months.’ Kim and Clozel closed the deal over dinner at a Basel restaurant.

“If Peter Kim hadn’t made that trip, we would have gone with the other offer,” Clozel says.

With this strategy of renewal Kim not only quashed Merck’s prevailing culture of arrogance but also produced solid results on the new drug front. In 1999 Merck had formed only 10 biotech deals. During the first three years after Kim became Merck’s research chief in 2003 the company inked 141 deals. By February of 2006 Merck had 52 new drug candidates in human testing against only 16 in December of 2002.

The investment community seconded Kim’s efforts. By early 2006 Merck’s market value had slipped below that of Amgen, the relative newcomer then seen as leading the way toward a brave new era of gene-based therapies. Today Amgen’s market cap has slipped to $54 bil. while Merck’s has risen to $114 billion. Granted that about $55 bil. of that is attributable to the 2009 merger with Schering-Plough. The balance still represents a hefty gain over Merck’s languishing market cap when Kim took over as chief of MRL. In 2006 Merck was number 123 on the Forbes Global 2000. In 2010 it had risen to number 72. Kim has been rewarded with over $4 mil. in annual compensation, including stock options and various non-equity incentives.

Peter S. Kim was born in 1959 in Korea. He received a B.S. in chemistry from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Stanford University. While at Stanford he was a Medical Scientist Training Program Fellow and was simultaneously working toward an M.D. Upon completing his Ph.D. work in 1985 Kim dropped out of medical school and became a research fellow at MIT’s Whitehead Institute. His obvious brilliance in the field of structural biology quickly got him promoted from research assistant to a full professorship.

At MIT Kim focused his efforts on discovering how proteins cause membranes to fuse as that is the mechanism by which viruses infect cells. In particular, Kim has devoted much of efforts on a coil-shaped protein used by the AIDS virus to pierce a cell it is about to infect. So far neither he nor anyone else has been able to design a drug to deliver a compound that can disable that protein though Kim did create some new compounds that prevent the AIDS virus from fusing to cell walls.

Kim was at work on that strategy for developing an HIV vaccine with his Whitehead lab staff of 35 when he was recruited by Merck’s research chief in 2001. When he was promoted to the presidency of Merck’s Research Laboratories on January 1, 2003, he was put in charge of a research staff of 4,500 which expanded to 8,000 after the 2009 Schering-Plough acquisition. Yet Kim continued to publish papers in conjunction with some of his key researchers. To date Kim’s name appears of 13 patents involving protein structures, of which 7 were issued after he became Merck’s research chief.

“I don’t think I’ll be buying any three-piece suits,” Kim has said. Yet at Merck he has not been able to don his research smock as often as the suits he wears when meeting biotech entrepreneurs who may be onto the rare compounds that can lead to another blockbuster drug.

At one extreme of U.S. foreign policy are those who say, “Nuke ‘em back to the stone age.” At the other are those who want a principled, restrained U.S. to shame enemies into submission by marshaling international clucking against them.

According to his critics at least, State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh embodies the latter position.

Koh may disagree with that assessment, but he has sometimes let his professorial taste for provocative phrasing supply detractors with ammunition for painting him as a man eager to subordinate the U.S. Constitution to vague, unenforceable notions of human rights and international law.

One famous example has Koh naming the U.S. in his “Axis of Disobedience” along with North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Another is Koh’s assertion that sharia, the Muslim holy law, may on occasion be applied to govern legal decisions in American courts.

Koh would protest that these statements were taken out of context. What is indisputable is that the Korean American who served for five years as Dean of Yale Law School has been harsh and vocal in his criticisms of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and subsequent efforts to justify waterboarding and other physical interrogation techniques used against al Qaida detainees at Abu Ghraib Prison.

“We should resist the claim that a War on Terror permits the commander in chief’s power to be expanded into a wanton power to act as torturer in chief,” Koh writes in an article published in Indiana Law Journal — showing again his weakness for flamboyant phrasing that is uncommon in an eminent Yale legal scholar, much less one who served for three years as an Assistant Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration.

At bottom Koh has been an insistent advocate of a U.S. that not only “obeys global norms” and submits to “transnational legal process”, but makes itself into a shining example and the most powerful global exponent of human rights and international law.

“Adhering to international standards strengthens those who do and isolates those who don’t,” is a quote from Obama’s Nobel Prize speech that sums up Koh’s belief in the national security advantage of working through a system of international law rather than taking a unilateral approach. This internationalist approach, Koh argues, is founded on nothing more liberal than the vision of universal rights and rule of law on which the founding fathers based the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Koh also echoes his other famous boss and client, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in arguing that “a commitment to human rights starts with universal standards and with holding everyone accountable to those standards, including ourselves.”

What worries critics is that the post of State Department Legal Adviser holds Koh out to the world as the top U.S. lawyer in the international legal system.

“This is not a desk job,” groused conservative commentator Steven Gross when Koh was nominated for the post by President Obama in March of 2009. “This guy will be the face of American international law around the world. The top legal adviser at State travels extensively and is involved in international legal negotiations, treaties and in major United Nations conferences.

“The president should have the right to choose the most conservative or liberal legal advisers to give them advice, but this is much more than that. The concern is that he cares as much about — if not more about — international law and integrating that into the American judicial system than he does about protecting American prerogatives and American sovereignty.”

Notwithstanding Koh’s penchant for raising red flags with provocative phraseology, his impeccable credentials and the high respect he enjoys in international law circles ensured confirmation by a largely partisan vote of 62-35 on June 25, 2009, three months after his nomination. As the Obama Administration’s top voice in matters pertaining to U.S. interests under international law, in March 2010 Koh surprised critics by arguing eloquently for the legality of using missiles fired from drones to target al Qaida officials in Pakistan. More recently, Koh took the lead in using the force of international law to bring about the imprisonment of Julian Assange in Britain after WikiLeaks facilitated the publication of tens of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables.

Harold Hongju Koh was born in Boston, Massachusetts on December 8, 1954 to Korean parents who, together, became the first Asian Americans to teach at Yale. At the time Harold was born his father was a S. Korean diplomat serving Korea’s first democratic government. When that regime quickly collapsed the elder Koh won asylum in the U.S., allowing the family to stay in the U.S. The family moved to New Haven where both parents were hired to teach at Yale through the efforts of then deputy National Security Adviser Walt Rostow and his brother Eugene, then dean of the law school. The elder Koh and wife Hesung Chun Koh taught a course on East Asian law and society for three years. Harold was six then, one of six Koh siblings. ‘‘It was my first experience with American goodness,’‘ Koh told the New York Times.

At around that time Harold was afflicted with polio and was forced to have two operations. Despite leg braces and a lengthy course of physical therapy, Koh still walks with a limp.

Koh graduated from New Haven’s Hopkins School in 1971. He majored in government at Harvard where he graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1975. He took advantage of a scholarship to study at Oxford for two years before entering Harvard Law School in 1980. He did well enough there to earn a clerkship with Supreme Court Associate Justice Harry Blackmun and spend two years as an associate at the D.C. office of the prestigious international law firm of Covington & Burling.

In 1983 Koh began a two-year stint as attorney-adviser to the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the United States Department of Justice under Reagan, then joined the Yale Law School faculty in 1985 where he distinguished himself as a brilliant legal scholar, an admired professor and an effective human rights advocate. In 1992 he led a group of Yale students and human rights lawyers in litigation against the United States government to free Haitian refugees interned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The suit ended in 1994 with the refugees’ release. It also caught the eye of President Clinton who nominated Koh the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights. Koh was confirmed unanimously on October 21, 1998. He left the post at the end of Clinton’s second term in January of 2001 and returned to teach at Yale where he was named dean in 2004.

Despite Koh’s clear political leanings on the issue of the role international law should play in U.S. foreign policy, he won respect for being politically impartial as Dean. When critics accused him of having politicized Yale Law School during his term, the Yale Conservative Law Students organization came to his defense. “Dean Koh has been very supportive of conservative students and conservative student organizations,” they said, adding, “Dean Koh is one of the brightest legal minds of his generation, a credit to the profession we look forward to joining, and an able and effective public servant.”

Harold Koh’s achievement is practically commonplace in his distinguished family. Brother Howard Kyongju Koh is currently the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Health after a career as a Harvard University public health professor and Massachusetts Public Health Commissioner. Sister Jean Koh Peters also teaches at Yale Law School. Wife Mary-Christy Fisher, with whom Koh has two children, is an attorney for the New Haven Legal Assistance Association.

Jenny Ming fell into the GAP in 1985. The rest is history, one powered mostly by Ming’s uncanny ability to sense what kind of value fashion propositions could be made irresistible to young female shoppers.

“How you create the ‘want’ is a mystery to many people – it’s genuinely puzzling,” explains Ming. “I learned how you can create that emotion, how you can tap into the psyche of the customer. In fact, it’s relatively easy to do at a high-end designer-level – if you have great designers, of course. But to do it for the mass market is a much harder proposition – and it’s what can set you apart from the competition in a saturated marketplace.”

Jenny Ming (front right) poses at her family’s Sonoma County vineyard with husband Mitchell (right rear) and their children Korbin, Kristin and Kameron (center).

Ming’s rise to the upper reaches of fashion retailing began in 1985 as a GAP activewear buyer. It didn’t take long for the company to spot her knack for forecasting hits and duds. Within three years she was promoted to vice president. In 1994 she was picked to spearhead the birth of the Old Navy division. That led to her impressive success in building Old Navy into a major retail brand from scratch. By 1999 she was named president of the chain. By the time she stepped down from that position, Old Navy had grown larger than its parent GAP, with 950 stores in North America, $6.7 billion in revenues and 45,000 employees.

Along the way Ming has garnered both acclaim and vilification. In 1999 BusinessWeek magazine named her one of the year’s Top 25 Managers. Fortune listed her among its “50 Most Powerful Women in American Business” in 2003 and 2004.

Many Asian Americans are more likely to remember Ming as the culprit behind an Old Navy commercial that aired in 2000. It featured Chinese American TV journalist Lisa Ling cavorting with five shirtless men. Her tagline was, “I like my men strong and good-looking.” The problem — in the minds of irate Asian Americans — was that none of the men was Asian. Chinese American Ming may have been enough of a hardened marketer that she secretly welcomed the vocal protests against Old Navy staged by Asian American activists as yet more free publicity for the brand. If she ever regretted the commercial, Ming never made that fact public.

Ming claims to have left Old Navy in 2006 with no plans but to take time off to travel for pleasure. She had barely begun to enjoy the luxury of being able to contemplate the world from a non-business perspective when she got a call from David Mussafer, CEO of Advent International, a global private equity fund that invests money for institutions like pension funds, universities and other investment funds. She declined Mussafer’s initial offer for Ming to sit on the board of Lululemon Athletica, one of the companies in Advent’s portfolio. But when Mussafer called again later to offer her the chance to become an operating partner for a fashion retailer to be acquired, Ming was ready to jump back into the business.

“During my travels, particularly in Asia, which was a real inspiration, I started to get creative again,” she recalls. “Sometimes, when you’re in the midst of running a business, it’s hard to see what’s going on around you – you’re under a lot of pressure to deliver. When you step away, you can start to imagine more possibilities. I got excited about retail again. I was refreshed and I realized how much I loved the business.”

She joined Advent in September of 2008 and took on the challenge of picking a fashion retailer of sufficient scale that was underperforming its potential. Ming persuaded Advent to buy Charlotte Russe, Inc, a troubled chain of 500 stores with over $800 million in sales, mostly to young adult women. Advent took the company private in 2009 and placed Ming in charge of guiding its turnaround.

“Charlotte Russe was at the top of my wishlist,” Ming explains. “It was trending well — focused on ‘fast fashion’, good value products, a brand with young adults and some good retail space. Those customers are fickle – they tend to have little loyalty. If you can get the proposition right, they’ll come right into your store immediately. It wasn’t broken, but it was in need of new strategies, new people and new ideas. It basically was the “C-” student in its competitive set.”

But the biggest challenge Ming faced was persuading Charlotte Russe to agree to be acquired in a leveraged buyout.

“Just because you have the money, that doesn’t mean you can just walk in and buy a business!” she says. “As experienced business leaders, Operating Partners tend to be action-oriented, so sometimes having to wait around for things to happen is just not normal. The process took longer and involved much more back and forth than I expected—but for private equity, the deal actually went pretty quickly.

“But I enjoyed learning about it as we went along — areas like due diligence and valuations, for example. During the deal, I would go along and sit in on meetings so I could learn about the business of buying a company. It gave me a chance to do a lot of planning and strategizing, so I could hit the ground running in the first 100 days.”

To help bring about the cultural and image transformation Ming felt Charlotte Russe needed, she divided the chain’s management offices between its original one in San Diego and a small San Francisco office staffed with former colleagues she recruited. Ming divides her time between the two offices.

Ming had some difficulty getting used to the fact that, unlike at Old Navy, she isn’t the executive who actually runs Charlotte Russe.

“As an OP, you’re on the board of directors, but you’re often not the person who’s doing everything — you’re advising them and guiding them. You do have to be careful about your role. I’m a real doer by instinct. I have to be conscious about that. I can be strategic; I can be a supporter offering advice, expertise and experience — but I had to learn that.”

Jenny Ming was born in Canton, China, in 1955. She was three months old when her parents decided to flee the country’s communist regime. Her family walked most of the few miles that separated their hometown from Macao, then a Portuguese colony. Her parents carried Jenny. Her sister, 4, and her brother, 2, walked.

In 1964 the family moved to America. Jenny was nine then, the middle child of five. The family settled in San Francisco’s North Beach district. Ming recalled her first years as an immigrant quite clearly, even forty years later.

Ming’s uncanny feel for the aspirational factor driving the fashion purchases of young women may have been acquired in those first years in America.

“I wanted to be American so badly,” she told New York Times. “I loved the food. I loved Halloween: I couldn’t believe there was a holiday where they gave out candy. I didn’t have a costume, only a mask. Early in the evening I tripped, fell and cut my chin. The blood dripped down my neck. No one noticed.”

From an early age Ming translated her hopes into hard work. While in high school she worked as a bank teller and a Macy’s salesperson to earn her own spending money. She also sewed her own clothes and became skillful enough to take out a newspaper ad as a seamstress.

Her mother discouraged Jenny’s interest in fashion and pushed her toward a career as a pharmacist. At San Jose State University Ming majored in home economics. As she explained in an interview conducted by her daughter Kameron for CosmoGIRL, the turning point came when her college boyfriend Mitchell Ming — whom she later married — told her, “You love clothes. You should be a retail buyer. You should take some business classes.”

Jenny Ming graduated in 1978 with a bachelor of arts in clothing merchandising and a minor in marketing. Her first job was assistant manager of the hosiery department at a Mervyn’s department store in Colma, California. A promotion to manager of the linens department forced Ming to confront her own inability to assert her authority. “You’re never going to make it in this business because you’re such a pushover,” the store manager told Ming.

“I was heartbroken,” Ming recalls. “I’d only been in the business nine months and already someone was saying I wasn’t going to make it!” Her husband advised her to simply tell the workers what kind of performance she expected of them. That advice seemed to have done the trick. Ming was soon recognized as an excellent manager who merited a promotion to the more important junior wear department. It was from that position that she was recruited by Gap CEO Millard S. Drexler.

One of her earlier successes was persuading Gap to sell their basic T-shirts all year instead of just in the spring/summer months and to expand the line from six colors to dozens of trendy hues.

Jenny and husband Mitchell have three children Kristin, Korbin and Kameron. Mitchell heads up Korbin Kameron Winery. Son Korbin is the winery’s sales & marketing manager. The Vineyard sites on 180 acres on Sonoma County’s Mount Veeder. In her spare time Jenny enjoys tennis and cooking.

Stephen Liu has played a key role in the emergence of young Asian American professionals as a highly networked part of California’s business and social landscape. As Founder and Chairman of APEX, Liu has built and guided an organization devoted to helping each professional appreciate what his success means to the Asian community at large.

While working as a successful Wells Fargo private banker, Liu founded the Asian Professional Exchange (APEX) in 1993. He served as the organization’s founding President from 1993 to 1997. Today its 10,000 members make APEX one of the handful of America’s biggest, most active Asian professional organizations.

“I really believe that Asian Americans play an increasingly important role in the social, political and economic landscape of America,” says Liu. “We will shatter this relatively thin, sometimes imaginary glass ceiling, but we will do [it] together.”

Liu takes pride in his success at conceiving and building innovative enterprises. His most recent venture is Privy, a private global network and travel resource targeted at a select group of influential executives with an Asia focus.

Liu’s contribution to the Asian American and general business communities have been recognized by KCET/Union Bank, Asian Pacific Community Fund, the Boy Scouts of America and the Asian Pacific American Studies School at Loyola Marymount University.

“It is my vision to create a unified sense of community among all Asian Americans here in L.A. as well as across the U.S.,” says Liu.

Liu received his MBA from the Marshall School at the University of Southern California. He lives in Hermosa Beach, California.

Some might say David Eun deserted a mighty ocean liner to jump aboard a sinking tramp steamer.

David Eun was in charge of content partnerships for Google until leaving to become AOL’s President of Media and Studios as of March 1, 2010. His departure may have had something to do with the fact that he found himself devoting most of his energies to making deals for YouTube when he had opposed buying the video-sharing site for $1.65 bil. in the first place. His reason? The site was likely to be more trouble than it was worth due to the many copyright issues implicated in YouTube’s very raison d’etre.

So far Eun’s assessment seems on the mark. YouTube remains a big money-loser struggling to create a viable business model. And its owner Google is the defendant in media giant Viacom’s $1 bil. copyright infringement suit. In fact, Eun’s dim view of the YouTube acquisition came to light through documents turned over to Viacom in that lawsuit. The fact that Eun was in charge of the business activity that is the focus of Viacom’s lawsuit may have added to his impetus to leave.

The other reason appears to have been a sense of personal loyalty to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong who had left Google in March of 2009. Under Armstrong Eun is the leading champion for AOL becoming a major proprietary content creator after its recent divorce from its disastrous marriage to Time-Warner.

But AOL is not in a strong position to dominate the internet content sphere. Its revenues shrank 17% in 2009. Armstrong has been overseeing a spate of layoffs that may claim over a third of all AOL employees. And despite its multifarious stable of 200 online content properties, AOL doesn’t enjoy the kind of dominance in any area as the likes of YouTube or even Hulu.

“David brings an impressive breadth of media experience to AOL at an exciting juncture as AOL forges a new future as a high-scale producer and partner in the content space,” is AOL’s spin articulated in a memo circulated by Armstrong.

Like Armstrong, Eun is hopeful that AOL can return to being a one-stop online media empire, the status it enjoyed during its heydays of the 1990s which culminated in its $164 billion acquisition of Time-Warner in 2000.

“AOL has a unique opportunity to bring together its core strengths in the key areas of content and journalism, distribution, and advertising,” Eun told the press. “These three elements will be fundamental to success as the media and technology industries evolve and converge.”

Before joining Google Korean American David Eun worked in Time Warner’s content licensing area. Prior to that he was a partner at a venture capital firm specializing in digital media and information technology. He began his media career at NBC where he led merchandising efforts involving TV shows and the internet. His first job was management consultant at Bain & Co. He graduated from Harvard University magna cum laude in government, then from Harvard Law School.