Event Presenters

• Harlan Mason

  Vice President of Shared Operations, PSS World Medical

• Chris Sperry

  Vice President - Distribution Operations, W. W. Grainger
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  Jade West

  Senior Vice President-Government Relations, NAW

  Jade West is Senior Vice President-Government Relations for the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors. She also serves as Executive Director of the Wholesaler-Distributor Political Action Committee. Jade is the senior lobbyist for NAW, advocating the interests of the wholesale distribution industry in Washington both on Capitol Hill and with executive branch departments and agencies. In addition, she is Executive Secretariat of the 1,000-member Tax Relief Coalition, of the Coalition for Affordable American Energy and of the LIFO Coalition; a Steering Committee member of the Alliance for Tax Fairness and Growth; and on the Management Committee of the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace (CDW), which leads the opposition to organized labor’s effort to remove secret ballot elections from union certification elections and force employers into binding “interest arbitration” in negotiating contracts.
  
  Jade is also a Director of the Business Industry Political Action Committee (BIPAC) and a founder and director of the trade association Get Out the Vote Best Practices Group, both working to maximize the turnout of pro-business voters in Federal elections.
  
  Before joining NAW in 2002, Jade was a senior aide on Capitol Hill for more than 20 years. She served first as Executive Director of the U.S. Senate Steering Committee, directing the activities of a small staff that provided legislative and policy assistance to approximately 25 senators and their staffs.
  
  She was then named Staff Director for the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee, the 4th ranking Republican Leadership position in the Senate. In that capacity, she served as an adviser to the Republican leadership on legislative and technical procedural matters, and managed a staff of approximately 20, including 10 policy experts who provided policy analysis, research papers and talking points, and detailed legislative summaries to Republican senators and their staffs.
  

• Matt Wilkerson

  Principal, Tompkins Associates