Terry Leadership Speaker Series

Sam Williams is one of the nation’s leading experts on urban competitiveness. He ran the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce for 17 years and Central Atlanta Progress for two years. He continues to work at the intersection of business, government and academia through his consulting firm, Business City Partnerships, and as a professor at Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. Formerly he served as a partner and COO with Portman Properties, a global architect-development company, and as president of America’s Mart for 13 years. He has been named as one of Georgia Trend’s Most Influential Georgians every year from 1990­2014, and has received the Governor’s International Lifetime Achievement Award. A native of Tennessee, he is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Harvard Business School.