William Ouchi

WILLIAM OUCHI

William G. Ouchi states "I've always felt that every major new turn in ideas begins with one person. The thought of participating in something that can change the world in some significant way just thrills me."

Hawaii-born William G. Ouchi, who comes from a family of teachers who felt stifled by out-of-touch bureaucrats, is emerging as a pivotal figure in the future of California public education and reform by bringing entrepreneurial methods to California’s 8,000 schools with Education Secretary Richard Riordan - a friend for a quarter century.

With Riordan as the official face of this two-man offensive in California’s government, the connection to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger - who as a candidate championed the idea of local school control and tapped Ouchi to write an initial draft of his education platform during his gubernatorial campaign. He is the behind-the-scenes idea man who argues for turning principals into entrepreneurs while giving campuses new control over their budgets and prodding schools to compete for students.

He is the author of three previous books on organization and management, including the bestselling Theory Z (best seller list for five months, has been published in 14 foreign editions, and ranks as the seventh most widely held book of the 12 million titles held in 4,000 U.S. libraries that tooked him from relative obscurity to a sought-after speaker and corporate consultant) and is also former chief of staff to Mayor Richard Riordan in Los Angeles.

His mother taught high school English and journalism, while his older sister taught elementary school. Their frustrations with gigantic bureaucracies that failed to motivate them to be successful prompted his great interest in education.

Active in both educational and civic affairs, Dr. Ouchi is an advisor to the Joint Senate-Assembly Committee on Preparing California for the 21st Century, a past member of the Consumer Advisory Committee of the S.E.C., and chair of the Riordan Programs, which serve minority high school and college students in Southern California. He lives in Santa Monica, California.

He serves on the boards of Williams College, KCET public television, Allegheny-Teledyne, First Federal Bank of California, California Community Foundation, LEARN, Japanese American National Museum, Sempra Energy, FirstFed Financial, Allegheny Technologies, Water-Pik Technologies, and the Advisory Board of the U.S. Commission on Presidential Debates. He is also a member of the Consumer Advisory Committee of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and of the Real Estate Advisory Committee of the Trust Company of the West.

Ouchi serves as director of the School Design Project, a twelve-person interdisciplinary effort to study the organization and the management of urban schools, including those of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Edmonton, Seattle, and Houston.

He is Co-Chair of the Los Angeles County Alliance for Student Achievement, Chair of the Nozawa Endowment at the Anderson School, and Chair of the Riordan Programs. He is a former trustee of the Harvard-Westlake School and of the California Community Foundation, former chair of the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now (LEARN), and a former member of the Consumer Advisory Committee of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He serves as Chair of the Finance Advisory Committee of the Los Angeles Unified School District and was a member of the Advisory Committee on Performance of the California State Department of Education and of the Advisory Committee on Budget, Finance and Technology of the LAUSD School Board.

	DJ Icon

DJ ICON

DJ ICON, also known as Connie Wong, has always found a way to express herself through performance. Born in Kowloon, Hong Kong and moving to the US in her early childhood, she's been a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area for most of her life except for her recent 2½ year venture to New York City.

ICON began her musical journey as a violinist during her childhood. Later, she evolved into a different kind of performer, a contortionist in a local San Francisco circus. After experimenting with these arts, she finally found her niche much later when she discovered electronic music.

ICON entered the SF underground dance culture in 1996 when the Trance scene was first starting to erupt. At the time she was an avid follower of punk rock. Nevertheless, she immediately acquired a love for electronic music and quickly became a prominent member of the "rave" scene first as a supporter, then as a DJ and Promoter.

ICON has been known for spinning a hybrid of Trance, UK Hard House, and Nu-Skool Breaks. She has a unique style of mixing these genres together to create a slamming high-energy set that gets people moving on the dance floor.

Gradually over the past few years, ICON made the transition and natural progression from Four-on-Four beats to Breakbeat fusions. Currently she focuses mostly on all forms of Breaks including Nu-Skool, Funky, Trancy/Melodic, and Electro.

In 2000, ICON began hosting her own events in San Francisco when she founded her production company, Mach 5. She has also co-produced many successful events with a plethora of other production companies.

In April 2002, ICON was featured in a twelve-part documentary series, "Disc Jockey", on Showtime™ and ShoNext™. The three-minute episode includes footage of ICON DJing, an interview, an animated segment, and an original Breaks track by ICON and Justin Johnson (Cable Recordings, Barely Legal) called "Slide".

ICON has teamed up with MC Linzee, Siren, Lejla and Winter to form the NYC chapter of the original and infamous all-female DJ Collective from San Francisco, SISTER. ICON also joined forces with Sleeveless, a drum & bass and Breaks DJ crew from San Francisco. Sleeveless consists of ICON, Femmes Fatales, Ultraviolet, Donna Matrix, Buna, Sinseer, Chaostica, and MCAudio Angel.

In 2003, ICON starred as the DJ on a new show called "The Wade Robson Project", a freestyle dance competition hosted by super-choreographer, Wade Robson.

In 2004, she was one of the artists performing at Coachella 2004 that included Radiohead, The Cure, Kraftwerk, The Pixies, The Flaming Lips, Air, Paul Van Dyk, Basement, Jaxx, Bright Eyes, The Crystal Method, Hieroglyphics, Future Sound of London and others. L.A. Times stated that DJ Icon's energetic two-hour set, a nice mix of showmanship and large synthesizer-laden grooves, got the party started early on.

Coachella Music Festival's fifth edition featured nearly 100 top-grade artists at every level of popularity, from stadium-fillers to niche club bands and cult DJs. Coachella has survived numersous obstacles to become one of the premier large-scale event on today's U.S. rock landscape.
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	Arthur Liu

ARTHUR LIU

A native of China and longtime resident of Taiwan, Arthur Liu (and his wife is Yvonne) graduated from the Newhouse School with a master's degree in public communications in 1966. Starting from nothing, he built a media empire that now includes more than 30 radio stations, three cable networks and a weekly publication. Liu's Multicultural Radio Broadcasting, Inc. broadcasts daily in dozens of languages and has stations across the U.S., including major cities such as New York, Dallas, Los Angeles and Seattle.

Arthur Liu, whose Western pop music radio shows were a big hit back in 1960s Taiwan, bought 30 radio stations in the United States in the 1990s, becoming a mogul in Chinese-language media there, and writing an amazing page in broadcasting history. As a result, he created a Chinese radio empire in America as the natin’s top owner of small AM stations in big markets.

On these stations he sells brokered time, mostly to Latino and Asian programmers. If he has enough buyers in one language, he'll devote a station to that one language all day, so that in NYC 1470 WZRC is Cantonese all day. 930 WPAT is mostly Korean, although overnight Mr. Liu sells time to a DJ who programs a standards/big bands show. He provides a valuable service for immigrants who'd otherwise have no broadcast media if they had to buy and support a 24/7 radio station.

He bought most of the Radio Unica stations for $150M when that Spanish Talk network closed shop last year, leaving behind a dozen AM stations in large Latino markets. The combined company will have 43 radio stations after select divestitures, making it the 18th largest radio broadcasting company in the country based on the number of stations owned.

Liu's one shot at actually programming and running a station in English came a few years ago when NYC was left with no adult standards station. (ABC made a deal with the NY Times to broker Radio Disney 24/7 on 1560 WQEW, knocking off that station's standards format.) Liu took a 5000 watt station in nearby Newark NJ, 1430 WNSW and made it a locally programmed adult standards station (his personally favorite).

Liu Foundation Board - The Liu Multicultural Scholarships will encourage graduate students at the Newhouse School to engage in the exploration of other cultures, and to use their communications skills to educate a media audience desperately in need of a worldwide perspective. It is no exaggeration to say that our future depends on it."

In 2001, the American Advertising Federation named Liu as an inaugural honoree of its Mosaic Awards. The awards were created to recognize industry trailblazers who have contributed significantly to the evolution of multicultural marketing and advertising, as well as celebrating extraordinary achievements in diversity.

In the 1960’s, for eight years he hosted trendsetting programs in Taiwan featuring Western pop music on Youth Radio, the police radio network, and the Broadcasting Corporation of China that did more than anyone to bring this type of music to the radio listeners.

Arthur was born into the Chinese journalism aristocracy. His father was a well-known reporter for the Central News Agency in mainland China in the 1930s and 40s, who also, together with a number of other important first-generation reporters, founded the well-known journal Newsdom.

Liu attended National Taiwan Normal University Affiliated High School and fell in love with English and Western music. He also got hooked on broadcasts of Western pop music from Australia and the Philippines. While at school, he found an opportunity to host a Western music program at Youth radio station, which became a hit among its radio listeners that also received a great deal of fan mail.

After graduation and completion of his military obligations, Liu hosted pop music programs for a total of eight years at three different radio stations. When he turned 30, he decided to go to the United States to pursue courses in media studies.

After acquiring a master's degree in communications from Syracuse University, he went to work at ABC, one of the US's three major broadcast television and radio networks for $400.00 (US).

In 1972, Arthur Liu, now familiar with the corporate culture of American television, established Sino TV Incorporated in New York. Four years later he founded the Sino Radio Broadcast Corporation, and began producing original Chinese language programming. At the same time he came out with Sino Daily Express and started to established extensive contacts in the media world from the world of American TV and radio.

In 1982, he applied to purchase a radio station whose license had been suspended: 105.9 FM in New York. In 1992, after the Federal Communications Commission announced a new law designed to stop frivolous bids (the law forbade those who acquired licenses from giving compensation to other competitors), he completed the purchase. At the radio station, he found program hosts who could really make minority listeners feel at home, and the station became immediately popular with the many minority groups that exist in New York City.

From 1993 to 1995, Liu purchased his second New York radio station, as well as three AM stations (KAZN 1300, KMRB 1430, and KMNY 1600) in Los Angeles.

In 1998, a FCC rule change (FCC limit on the number of radio stations that could be owned by an individual or corporation) provided the opportunity for a nationwide Spanish-language network to acquire a station in New York for $100 million (US) from his company.

As Liu explains: "When you buy media, you have to look at the operations multiple. You can sell a television station for about ten times operations value, and a newspaper for seven to eight times, but a radio station you can sell for 14 times the value!"

At the present time, he and his wife own stations in New York, Washington, Virginia, Maryland, Florida, Atlanta, Dallas, Seattle, San Jose, San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and other cities and states. Moreover, through satellite links and alliances, Liu's Multicultural Broadcasting Corporation has created a nationwide network of minority-market radio stations, broadcasting daily in dozens of languages. He also has three Chinese language TV stations in New York.

His future includes crossing over into cable and satellite television and establishing a one-hour long Chinese-language program that will be broadcast on a nationwide network.

He has also invested nearly US$1 million to purchase a radio station on Long Island where students can practice producing programs of their own, to develop "loyal professionals" for years to come. There he sows and nurtures the seeds for the medium he loves so much, and waits for the future harvest.

	Jung Chang

JUNG CHANG

Born in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China in 1952, Jung Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen and then worked as a peasant, a "barefoot" doctor, a steelworker and an electrician before becoming an English Language student and, later, an assistant lecturer at Sichuan University.

She left China for Britain in 1978 and was subsequently awarded a scholarship by York University, where she obtained a PhD in Linguistics in 1982 - the first person from the People's Republic of China to receive a doctorate from a British University. She has since also been awarded honorary doctorates from the universities of Buckingham, York, Warwick and the Open University. Dr. Chang currently is working on a biography of Mao Zedong.

Her spellbinding lectures charting the dramatic developments in 20th century China, provide a truly unique, inspiring and uplifting experience and help to understand the challenge of 21st Century globalization.

Jung Chang's book "Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China" has been translated into 30 languages and has sold over 9 million copies world-wide, reaching no. 1 in over a dozen countries, including Japan, Britain, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Holland and Scandinavia.

"Wild Swans" has won many awards, including the NCR Book Award UK (1992), UK Writers' Guild Best Non-Fiction (1992) and Book of the Year UK (1993). It is the most widely read book about China this century.

Jude Chang has turned down BBC’s request to make a $15.6 million television drama out of the best-selling book Wild Swans (which documents the travails of three generations of women in the writer's family against the backdrop of recent Chinese history) because of her insistence on using mainland Chinese actors and on filming the series in Mandarin with English sub-titles.

Her ability as a brilliant and tender writer provided her the ability to write with such clarity the story of her own family’s life and hardships faced in China during the Communist rule.

Chang's grandmother, Yu-fang, had her feet bound at age two and in 1924 was sold as a concubine to Beijing's police chief. Yu-fang escaped slavery in a brothel by fleeing her "husband" with her infant daughter. The free-spirited Bao Qin chose the man she would marry, a Communist Party official slavishly devoted to the revolution. In 1949, Bao Qin walked 1,000 miles alongside the vehicle, sick and pregnant. Chang, born in 1952, saw her mother put into a detention camp in the Cultural Revolution and later "rehabilitated." Her father was denounced and publicly humiliated; his mind snapped, and he died a broken man in 1975. Working as a "barefoot doctor" with no training, Chang saw the oppressive, inhuman side of communism. She left China in 1978 and is now director of Chinese studies at London University.