Spadoni joined the nearly 260-year-old Omni Homestead in 2021. He has worked in the hospitality industry for more than 40 years, working at The Westin Savannah Harbor Golf Resort & Spa in Georgia for about 20 of those years.
The Bath County resort was founded in 1766. Omni Hotels & Resorts purchased the property from KSL Capital Partners in 2013. In 2023, the resort completed $170 million in propertywide renovations, including upgrades to its 483 guest rooms, a new, 4,000-square-foot pavilion, 72,000 square feet of meeting space, new food and beverage options and a restoration of the Warm Springs Pools.
In 2020, Spadoni received the Savannah Tourism Council’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and in October 2024, the American Hotel & Lodging Association presented him with its General Manager Lifetime Achievement Award.
No stranger to community involvement, Spadoni was the first chair of Visit Bath County’s board and serves on Bath Community Hospital’s board of directors. While in Savannah, he founded the Savannah Harbor Foundation to support children’s charities, co-created the Savannah Voice Festival and its sister foundation, and served on numerous boards.
As the head of Valley Health, Nantz oversees about 6,000 employees and six hospitals, as well as more than 70 medical practices. The not-for-profit health system serves a population of more than 500,000 in the Shenandoah Valley, West Virginia and Maryland.
Before joining Valley Health in 2020, Nantz held executive roles at Bon Secours Mercy Health, including as chief administrative officer and president of the Atlantic Group, a role where he was responsible for 14 hospitals and other services in South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Florida.
Nantz has a degree in accounting from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a master’s in health administration from Pfeiffer University in North Carolina. He chairs the Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association’s board.
In May, the health system broke ground on the Valley Health Behavioral Health Pavilion on the Winchester Medical Center campus. The freestanding center will consolidate the health system’s mental health services offered in Winchester. Its expected completion is late summer 2026. In July, Nantz warned that Valley Health expects to lose more than $50 million in revenue following federal Medicaid cuts in a bill signed July 4 by President Donald Trump.
Following its mission to promote the health of its Shenandoah Valley community, Augusta Health, which Mannix has led since 2008, launched its mobile medical unit to help expand access to primary medical care in April.
Mannix oversees roughly 2,400 employees (as of 2023) who work at the community-owned hospital, family practices and other outpatient facilities. The health system has expanded over the past year, with Shenandoah Valley Orthopedics and Sports Medicine and Rockingham Family Physicians joining the Augusta Medical Group.
After beginning her career as a surgical intensive care nurse at the University of Rochester, Mannix moved to health caremanagement. She spent nearly two decades working for the Pennsylvania-based Guthrie Clinic, leaving in 2007 as president and chief operating officer of the Guthrie Robert Packer Hospital.
Mannix sits on the boards of the Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association and the Shenandoah Valley Partnership.
In July, during a congressional debate over cuts to Medicaid proposed in a federal budget bill, Mannix said in an interview with WHSV that about 70% of her health system’s patients rely on Medicare or Medicaid, which will cause a decrease in revenue for Augusta Health.
Fleet became the ninth president of the world’s largest living history museum in 2020. Prior to that, he was CEO and president of 22nd Century Group and, before that, president and CEO of Richmond-based tobacco manufacturer Philip Morris USA. He’s also an adjunct professor at William & Mary’s Raymond A. Mason School of Business.
The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation launched in 2023 a $600 million fundraising campaign to support preservation, education and civic engagement projects.
In March, the foundation and the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission hosted their third conference for officials planning events to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026, drawing participants from 40 states. And this year, Colonial Williamsburg Resorts expects to open a new nine-hole golf course.
Fleet holds four degrees from William & Mary: a law degree, an MBA, a master’s degree in history and a bachelor’s in history and religion. He is a past chair of the William & Mary Foundation and co-chair of the Hampton Roads Executive Roundtable, and he is part of the VA250 Commission.
Nassetta is the longtime president and CEO of one of the world’s largest hospitality companies. Hilton has a portfolio of 8,600 properties and 24 brands in 139 countries and territories.
Nassetta joined Hilton in 2007 after investment firm Blackstone acquired the company in a $26 billion deal. Hilton went public again in 2013, and by the end of 2022, Nassetta had more than doubled the company’s footprint.
Hilton ranked 380th on the Fortune 500 list this year. The company reported $11.17 billion in revenue for 2024, up from $10.23 billion in 2023.
In 2024, Hilton added nearly 100,000 rooms — a record increase for the 100-plus-year-old company — and 973 hotels. It also added two lifestyle brands to its portfolio, acquiring Graduate Hotels for $210 million and a majority controlling interest in NoMad Hotels creator Sydell Group.
A University of Virginia alum, Nassetta spent 10 years at Host Hotels & Resorts, serving first as chief operating officer and then as president and CEO before taking the helm at Hilton.
Nassetta is immediate past chair of the U.S. Travel Association. He sits on the powerful board of directors for the Business Roundtable, the association of the nation’s top CEOs, with other members like Apple CEO Tim Cook and JPMorganChase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon.
Blackley founded Evolent Health in 2011 with fellow Harvard Business School alums Frank Williams and Tom Peterson with a goal of providing technology to help health systems shifting to value-based care — where payment is connected to patient outcomes.
In 2015, Evolent debuted on the New York Stock Exchange, raising $195 million. Initially serving as president of the company, Blackley, who is also on the company’s board, became CEO in 2020 when Williams stepped down.
A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Blackley started his career in 2001 as an analyst in the Washington, D.C., office of consulting firm McKinsey & Co. Later, he joined The Advisory Board, a global health care research, consulting and technology firm, where he worked with Williams and Peterson.
In August 2024, Reuters reported that Evolent was in talks with private equity firms and health care services providers for a potential sale, but the company has not announced a deal in the year since.
Evolent reported 2024 revenue of $2.55 billion, up from $1.96 billion in 2023.
An internist who has served in the federal government and as chief medical officer at WebMD, Whyte assumed leadership July 1 of the 178-year-old AMA, the nation’s major association of physicians. As of 2021, the association that advocates for physicians and works to better public health had 271,660 members.
Although Whyte travels to AMA’s Chicago headquarters, he resides in Northern Virginia.
He previously held leadership roles at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Discovery Channel, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Whyte also serves on Virginia’s Cannabis Public Health Advisory Council, which advises the governor on medical marijuana policy, and boards for the Alliance for Aging Research and the Health Systems Agency of Northern Virginia.
An author of five books, Whyte earned his medical degree from Hahnemann University School of Medicine and his master of public health from Harvard University.
INTERESTING PLACE I’VE TRAVELED: Chennai, India. I visited there while working on a documentary for Discovery Channel about the global epidemic of diabetes. People wanted to look “big” because that meant they were rich and successful. A very different mindset. ■
Kamensky started work as the head of the foundation that owns and operates Monticello, in 2024. Home of Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. president and author of the Declaration of Independence, Monticello draws more than 300,000 visitors annually.
Before coming to Albemarle County, the Yale alumna was a history professor at Harvard University and director of the university’s Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. She has authored or co-authored seven award-winning books about American history and was the chair of Brandeis University’s history department.
Among many board appointments, Kamensky serves as co-leader of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences’ America250 working group and is on the Women’s Suffrage National Monument Foundation’s Council of Advisors.
MY MOTTO: “Here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”
— Thomas Jefferson to William Roscoe, Dec. 27, 1820
BOOK I’D RECOMMEND: Rick Atkinson’s “The Fate of the Day,” which brings the middle years of the grueling American Revolution to life as the brutal war it was.
99% of marketing professionals report using AI, study finds
VCU launches AI labs and new courses, including an AI minor
Students tackle real-world business projects with AI tools
Faculty stress ethics, bias, and energy use in AI adoption
It’s the human factor that’s key to the acceptance and success of artificial intelligence in the marketplace, says Cesar Zamudio, a Virginia Commonwealth University professor who researches brand perceptions.
For consumers to buy in, he explains, “there always has to be a strong human element. The mileage may vary, [but] no human in the loop is wrong.”
As most people in the workplace are aware, generative AI adoption is on the rise in nearly every industry. But for those in the marketing field, artificial intelligence tools are all but inescapable.
The 2024 State of Marketing AI Report, which surveyed 1,800 marketing professionals, reported that 99% say they’re personally using AI in some fashion, “and the level of AI usage is rising significantly. Thirty-six percent of respondents say that AI is now infused into their daily workflows,” up from 29% who said the same in 2023, according to the report.
Brian P. Brown, dean of the VCU School of Business and a marketing expert, says that the speed with which AI-powered tools are developed and updated means that he and his faculty colleagues have to work hard to stay on top of the innovations.
“Almost by the day there’s a new technology, a new application,” he says. “We’ve been aggressive. We have new courses, a new AI minor. We have a number of labs.”
But also, faculty members are excited about new opportunities and information to pass along to their students, Brown says.
“They love learning new things. They love experimenting with it.”
Of course, AI is also making many people nervous, especially those who are concerned about being replaced by Claude or Copilot in their jobs.
Brown gets it. A VCU marketing professor who was named interim business dean in 2024 and permanent dean in April, Brown worked in marketing for The Coca-Cola Co. and Snapper Power Equipment before entering academia.
Years in the corporate world helped prepare him for the AI explosion, he says. “I was in the dotcom space. AI reminds me of that boom. That has allowed me to realize that change is inevitable. You have to embrace it.”
VCU School of Business Dean Brian Brown compares today’s generative AI era to the dotcom boom. Photo by Caroline Martin
‘Everywhere, like electricity’
Since the advent of ChatGPT in 2022, AI has become “a general-purpose technology. It shows up everywhere, like electricity,” says Carol Scotese, the business school‘s interim associate dean of academic and faculty affairs. An associate professor of economics, Scotese says that the newness of the technology gives her and her colleagues a great deal to think about in terms of what to teach their students.
“A lot is in the experimentation stage,” she says. “We’re a business school, so we want to prepare our students for how AI is being used in the workplace” and give them the skills they most need in the future.
That means developing multiple programs and labs, like VCU’s Human-AI ColLab, which opened in September 2024. The lab’s focus, says director Victoria Yoon, is on finding solutions in cybersecurity, health care data, digital transformation and AI ethics.
Inside the lab, faculty and students are working on complex national security challenges that require AI to collect and process vast amounts of data, while others are figuring out ways to use chatbots and generative AI for health care services.
The AI for Transformative Business research program takes on larger questions about using machine learning, social media and other analytics to reshape business models, and participants in the ethics program are working to eliminate bias and untrustworthy results in AI tools.
Another goal, says Yoon, an information systems professor, is “to show students what they can do by themselves, how they can excel beyond the AI system. We want to give them a sense of accomplishment.”
Associate marketing professor Zamudio agrees that student buy-in hinges on showing them that “you have given them a valuable tool. Our curriculum has evolved to not just show how to use AI, but how to enhance your work. It’s not just knowing the tool but knowing when and how to use it.”
Scotese notes that respecting their students’ time is important as well. “We try not to duplicate what’s being done at the university level. You didn’t hear me say we have introductory classes on the basics [because] the university provides basics on AI.”
Seeking better jobs
Alejandro Porrata is a student in VCU’s decision analytics master’s program, which he pursued after earning his bachelor’s degree in information systems at the university. He says he was ready to “to dig a little deeper.”
The information systems department, home of the decision analytics master’s program, is where “we produce people who serve as bridges between technical expertise and business acumen,” says professor and department chair Paul Brooks.
Faculty prepare students to understand a wide variety of tools and “to decide which tools are appropriate for the problem and the job,” Brooks says. Student teams, under faculty supervision, get experience in real-life projects, like using AI to analyze trends and recommend investments or sports bets.
The master of decision analytics program takes place on weekends and attracts experienced professionals who are looking to make career changes.
“They’re in class on the weekend. Then they go into work on Monday and use what they learned,” says Brooks, who specializes in machine learning and decision analytics. The program, for example, has been popular with nurses who want to learn to analyze health data.
Porrata has had the opportunity to use tools like LangChain, an open-source framework for building applications based on large language models, and Hightouch, a data and AI platform for marketing and personalization.
As part of the program, students work directly with businesses on live projects. Porrata’s team has been building a chatbot for a car repair business, he says. “It’s a tool operator mechanics can use for unplanned maintenance. It’s a tool they use as a first line of defense before having to escalate the issue.”
The team is doing testing and development this fall, and Porrata expects to deliver the product to the company’s executives before he graduates in December.
With degree in hand, Porrata hopes to parlay his analytical skills into a new job at the bank where he works.
“I’m looking for something in the data science and the machine learning space,” he says. “I want to provide business value.”
Students also take part in the annual Business Analytics and AI Challenge, sponsored by Altria Group and hosted by VCU’s departments of information systems and supply chain management and analytics.
Now in its sixth year, the challenge asks students to leverage analytics and AI tools to solve real-world business problems. More than 160 students signed up for this year’s semester-long challenge, forming 50 teams. Of those, 38 submitted final proposals.
Altria’s judges selected three finalists to visit the company’s Richmond headquarters for a day of workshops, networking and final presentations. The winning student team took home $3,500 in prize money.
Ups and downs of AI
With Brown’s expertise in branding and marketing, as well as Zamudio’s deep research into AI-based ad design, VCU’s business school and its award-winning Brandcenter, where the school’s graduate programs in advertising are based, are well positioned for students entering the AI marketing economy.
Zamudio, who helped develop VCU’s AI Ad Design Lab, says that these tools help businesses advertise without spending much of their own capital.
“If you want to put an ad in social media and you don’t have the design skills, you can look around and create your own ad. It costs from nothing to $20,” he says. “There are easy-to-follow instructions and tutorials for small businesses.”
Users can even get ChatGPT to help, Zamudio adds. “It can be used as a sounding board to critique your ideas.”
But Zamudio and his colleagues are not 100% rah-rah about the technology. The use of artificial intelligence raises several ethical red flags regarding data privacy, cybersecurity, fairness and bias, as well as cheating at the university level, Scotese says. “It’s a real challenge all over.”
The American Civil Liberties Union has warned that AI tools perpetuate housing discrimination in tenant selection and mortgage qualifications, as well as hiring and financial lending discrimination.
The Washington Post reported on police departments using AI-powered facial recognition to make arrests that often lead to prosecution, even though the results are less accurate than traditional detective work. And AI résumé-screening programs sometimes discriminate against Black male names, a 2024 University of Washington study found.
It comes down to societal bias that seeps into the training data for such tools, UW’s researcher said.
Zamudio acknowledges that he hears a lot of concern about AI algorithms that “carry some of the biases” that humans have, and “we don’t have a good way to remove them,” he notes.
There’s also the environmental impact of AI and the hyperscale data centers being built to support increased data usage.
According to projections published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory last year, by 2028 more than half of the electricity going to data centers will be used for artificial intelligence. At that point, AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all U.S. households, which means more data centers and water used to keep them cool.
Power demand is expected to grow 5.5% annually over the next decade in Virginia and North Carolina, and double by 2039, according to a regional forecast by PJM, which runs the electrical grid in Virginia.
Ed Baine, president of Dominion Energy Virginia, said last fall that the state is currently experiencing “the largest growth in power demand since the years following World War II,” partly fueled by increased use of artificial intelligence.
All of these issues must be raised during discussions about AI training and use at VCU and other institutions, Scotese says. “We’re working on the guardrails.”
VCU at a glance
Founded
Virginia Commonwealth University was founded in 1838 as the Medical College of Hampden-Sydney and was later renamed the Medical College of Virginia. In 1968, MCV merged with Richmond Professional Institute to form VCU.
Campus
VCU has two campuses in downtown Richmond covering a total of 198 acres. The Monroe Park Campus houses most undergraduate students and classes. VCU’s five health sciences schools, the College of Health Professions, VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center and VCU Health are located on the MCV campus.
Faculty
Full-time faculty: 2,441
Full-time university and academic professionals: 3,841
Tuition and fees
In-state tuition and fees: $17,240*
Tuition and fees (out of state): $40,404*
Room and board and other fees: $15,128**
Average financial aid awarded to full-time freshmen seeking assistance: $19,919
*Based on 15 credit hours per semester and 30 credit hours for the 2025-26 year. This does not include program fees, which vary based on a student’s major. **Room charge is based on a double occupancy in Rhoads Hall, and the dining rate is for the 200 swipes with $225 dining dollars meal plan for the 2025-26 year.
Honestly, this job would be a breeze if it weren’t for the people part.”
A regional sales director said that after recounting missed targets, two resignations and a turf war between product and marketing. The room laughed — tired laughter, the kind that comes when you recognize a hard truth. Plans obey Gantt charts; people do not. People bring worries, ambitions, and moods into every meeting. And that unpredictability? It’s both your biggest headache and your greatest leverage point.
Most companies react in two ways: tighten the screws with dashboards and compliance modules or slap on another “culture initiative” poster. Neither works because they ignore the real issue: managers lack a reliable method for turning human potential into performance. They know better collaboration and faster problem-solving would change everything — they just don’t have a repeatable path to get there.
The costs hide in plain sight. A quarter delayed because two teams argue definitions. A launch postponed while stakeholders haggle. High performers leave quietly, and replacing one costs up to 2x their salary once you add recruitment, lost productivity and training. Those numbers swallow budgets — even R&D. Yet our P&Ls list “labor market pressure,” not “managerial unpreparedness.”
Here’s what the data show: Identical teams — same pay, same tools — routinely perform 10% to 20% better under managers who systematically build trust, clarity and growth. They get ideas, overtime and cost-saving fixes that no Six Sigma project ever uncovered. Meanwhile, teams led by unchecked command-and-control churn at the first better offer.
Managing people is a discipline, not a personality trait. No one would let an accountant close the books without training. Yet we promote top performers into supervision and hand them a policy handbook. Then we wonder why they learn on the job — at everyone else’s expense.
Consider risk management: a $10 million capital project gets pilots, approvals and contingency plans. But your manager controls a similar sum annually in wages and benefits, with zero oversight of how that investment is activated. If managerial interactions dampen initiative by just 10%, you quietly forfeit a million dollars — every year.
Some companies get it. They assign internal coaches. They pair new supervisors with veterans. They treat one-on-ones as the core production unit of engagement. Others run workshops that translate research into daily habits. Our Management Fundamentals Bootcamp condenses two decades of field data into “observe, reflect, act, repeat” — a framework you can apply tomorrow morning. And believe me, because
I’m the one delivering the bootcamp: it evolves managers overnight.
The very thing leaders wish away is the same thing that makes an operation exceptional. Invite it in. Give it direction. And suddenly, the breeze you crave isn’t because the people part vanished — it’s because it finally has a path to follow.
Want to learn how our bootcamp can level up your managers? Reach out to me at [email protected] to set up a time to talk.
Jaime Raul Zepeda is EVP, Principal Consultant for Best Companies Group and COLOR Magazine, part of BridgeTower Media.
Wondering whether your organization is on the right path to win? Talk to us at Best Companies Group so we can analyze your organization’s health, your team dynamics, and your leadership’s effectiveness. We’ve helped over 10,000 companies understand and improve their workplace using data-driven strategies. Send me a note at[email protected].
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