In Memoriam: Shirley Yoko Jackson

Chief Creative Officer, Producer & Research Director,
EuroCatalyst BV & AmeriCatalyst LLC

Shirley Jackson was a founding partner in EuroCatalyst and AmeriCatalyst and was both firms’ chief creative officer, as well as chief operations officer for 21 years. There was nothing that Shirley could not do. She was responsible for the branding and staging and production of all EuroCatalyst and AmeriCatalyst events, all graphic design, music, and multimedia. She also oversaw all of the firm research for events and private mandates. News was Shirley’s true passion, with an additional zeal for data and information in any form, digital or analogue. She was deputy managing editor and head of electronic media for The Japan Times in Tokyo for 20 years, where she held a variety of positions including the head of business and politics desk, the foreign and domestic news desks, and head of international and domestic news weeklys. She was immortalized (and mortified) as “Sophie, the newsroom ringleader” in the 1994 book “About Face,” a sociological examination of business, politics and life in Japan. Shirley’s family history was fascinating: Her Japanese mother was of Samurai nobility descent, and her father, Russ Jackson, was a famous Canadian aviation pioneer and a colleague of Amelia Earhart. Shirley literally grew up all over the world, was fluent in English, Japanese and French, and could cross all cultural borders effortlessly.

Shirley studied Middle Eastern Politics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in Political Science with a focus on Asian and Japanese history. She earned a graduate degree in International Relations, specializing in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Shirley was also passionate about music of all genres, and was an extremely talented and accomplished pianist and cellist, studying with Diana Krall at the British Columbia Conservatory of Music. 

Shirley passed away in Vancouver, Canada on March 17, 2021. Her former Japan Times colleague and BBC Producer Hugh Levinson memorialized her life in a very moving tribute on BBC Radio 4 on March 27, 2021.

Douglas Rushkoff

Advisor

Named “one of the world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the just-published Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, as well as the recent Team Human, based on his podcast, and the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. His book Coercion won the Marshall McLuhan Award, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Rushkoff is Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens, where he founded the Laboratory for Digital Humanism. He is a research fellow of the Institute for the Future, a columnist for Medium, technology and media commentator for CNN, and a lecturer on media, technology, culture and economics around the world.

Rushkoff’s work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and one another. He coined such concepts as “viral media,” “screenagers,” “fractalnoia”, “digiphrenia” and “social currency,” and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice. 

Rushkoff earned his PhD in New Media and Digital Culture from Utrecht University with a dissertation entitled Monopoly Moneys: The media environment of corporatism and the player’s way out. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University, received an MFA in Directing from California Institute of the Arts, a post-graduate fellowship (MFA) from The American Film Institute, a Fulbright award to lecture on narrative in New Zealand, and a Director’s Grant from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. His many articles, features and essays can be read here.

Tim Skeet

Advisor

Tim Skeet is a member of the Executive Management Committee and serves as the Chief Institutional Relationship Officer at the Bank of China Limited London Branch. Armed with a modern languages degree from Cambridge, Tim went on to a successful 35-year career in the City where he led teams and worked in three languages (English, French and German) across Europe and North America. He took a front row seat for the financial crises that have challenged the world since the early 1980s, including the Latin American debt crisis, Big Bang, Black Monday, the Russian Debt Crisis, the birth of the euro, the dot-com debacle, and most recently the Global Financial Crisis with its regulatory and political consequences.

Tim’s career has been marked by corporate drama. He’s endured two U.S. investment bank downfalls, a failed takeover, and the shutting down a department. As a result, Tim has seen the human fallout and the sourest of office politics in a sharp-elbowed industry. Despite all the disruption, he’s enjoyed a career rich in experience and populated by fascinating – if not always likeable – personalities. Tim has dealt extensively with regulators and served on the board of the International Capital Market Association (ICMA’) for over six years. As Chairman of ICMA’s Investor Working Group on Bail-In, Tim recently submitted comments to the CB and European Commission as to how their new regulations designed to deal with failing banks have very real impacts on investors.

Tim served as Chairman of an aviation museum, working for twenty years to ensure the preservation and flying of vintage British jet aircraft (including Europe’s biggest and most powerful privately owned jet fighter). Tim provided advice on dealing with multiple challenges including communication issues, enhanced regulation, technical breakdowns, and demanding sponsors.

A frequent speaker at industry events, conferences, seminars, and dinners, Tim has long experience of public speaking. Tim has contributed to the Financial Times, Guardian and is a frequent contributor to Financial News and other journals. Tim has done TV and radio work with multiple live appearances on CNBC and spoken on the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. He addressed a range of topics including the future of banking, regulation, communications issues and investor relations.

Tim was a speaker for Strongerln during the UK Referendum, and then interim Chairman of pressure group Britain for Europe. In 2016, Tim spoke at the IF Capital Conference and Euromoney’s Global Borrowers in London, a FinanceWatch event in Brussels, a European Covered Bond Council plenary in Dusseldorf, the SIBOS banking conference in Geneva. He chaired AMERICATALYST from 2009 to 2017 while it was held in Austin, Texas.

Tim currently teaches on the IMA Primary Markets Certificate course and has lectured for the London Stock Exchange and Henley Business School. He recently became a Visiting Fellow at Reading University. He has taught both technical issues and soft skills, addressing a range of topics including the future of banking, regulation, communications issues and investor relations.