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David Andelman
Editor in Chief, World Policy Journal

David A. Andelman is Editor in Chief of the World Policy Journal, a non-partisan source of progressive global policy analysis and thought leadership. In his role, David leads the transformation of the World Policy Institute's flagship quarterly, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary in Fall 2008. In August 2010, he also took office as President of the Overseas Press Club of America. He has served as a domestic and foreign correspondent for The New York Times in various posts in New York and Washington, as Southeast Asia bureau chief, based in Bangkok, then East European bureau chief, based in Belgrade. He then moved to CBS News where he served for seven years as Paris Correspondent. He has traveled through, and reported from, more than 50 countries. There followed service as a Washington correspondent for CNBC, news editor of Bloomberg News and Business Editor of the New York Daily News before coming to Forbes. He is the author of three books: The Peacemakers, published by Harper & Row; The Fourth World War, published by William Morrow, which he co-authored with the Count de Marenches, long-time head of French intelligence; and A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today, published in October 2007 by John Wiley & Sons. Mr. Andelman has written for such publications as Harpers, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs. He is a graduate of Harvard University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, The Century Club, and the Grolier Club.

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George Ayittey
Recognized Authority on Africa and Economic Development

George Ayittey is a Ghanaian economist and widely recognized authority on political and economic development in Africa. The president of the Free Africa Foundation and former distinguished economist in residence at American University, George has championed the idea that “Africa is poor because she is not free.”  True freedom never came to much of Africa after independence from colonial rule, says his first book, Africa Betrayed, which won the H.L. Mencken Award for “Best Book in 1992.” In his most recent book, Defeating Dictators, George takes a hard look at the fight against dictatorships around the world, from Ukraine's orange revolution in 2004 to Iran's Green Revolution last year, and examines what strategies worked in the struggle to establish democracy through revolution.

In the analysis of Africa’s woes, George believes that a much greater emphasis should be placed on internal factors—bad leadership, corruption, military vandalism, and exploitation of the African people—rather than the external factors. George stresses "internal solutions" and initiatives that must come from Africa itself.  He coined the expression: “African solutions for African problems.” Crying out against the “vampire states” and dysfunctional governments that, he believes, are the bedrock of problems of many troubled Africa states, George speaks passionately about the grassroots enterprises that will enable “Africans to take back Africa – one village at a time.”

His influential book Africa Unchained boldly proposes a program of development—a way forward—for Africa, investigating how Africa can modernize, build, and improve its indigenous institutions. George argues forcefully that Africa’s salvation lies in Africa itself – not inside the corridors of the U.S. Congress or the inner sanctum of the World Bank. Africa’s salvation lies in returning to and building upon its own indigenous institutions and traditions of free village markets and free trade—rather than continuing to use alien and exploitative economic structures. The critically acclaimed book has helped unleash a new wave of activism and optimism about Africa.

His recent efforts have focused on identifying profitable enterprises for “Cheetahs” —a new breed of Africans taking their futures into their own hands instead of waiting for politicians to empower them.  His speech “Cheetahs vs. Hippos for Africa's Future" made a powerful impact at the TED Global Conference 2007 in Arusha, Tanzania.

George earned a Ph.D. from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada; an M.A. University of Western Ontario, London, Canada and a B.Sc. Univ. of  Ghana, Legon, Ghana.

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Yochai Benkler
Law Professor and Internet Scholar

Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard. Prior to coming to Harvard, he was Joseph M. Field '55 Professor of Law at Yale. He writes about the Internet and the emergence of networked economy and society. Since the 1990s he has been a major theorist of the role of commons and radically decentralized individual action and collaboration in the production of information, knowledge and culture, as well as the organization of infrastructure. In May 2011, Yochai was awarded the prestigous Ford Foundation Visionaries Award—an award given to innovators chosen for their vision, leadership, and pioneering work.

Yochai’s work traverses a wide range of disciplines and sectors. It is taught in schools of law, business, and information sciences, and in departments of communications, media studies, computer science, economics, and political science. In real world applications, his work has been widely discussed in both the business sector and civil society.

His book, The Wealth of Networks (2006), and his earlier work, have won him awards from civil rights and social movement organizations, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award for 2007 and Public Knowledge's IP3 Award in 2006, and was called a “reveille for netizens" by The Times of London and “Internet utopianism for grown-ups” by The American Prospect. At the same time, Wealth of Networks has been called “perhaps the best work yet about the fast moving, enthusiast-driven Internet” by the Financial Times, and was named the best business book about the future in 2006 by Strategy and Business. His work has been the subject of reports in The Economist, BusinessWeek, and the Wall Street Journal, as well as general publications like the New York Times and Time magazine, exploring the implications of the emergence of networked information economy.

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Stewart Brand
Author, Futurist, Activist, and Visionary

Since he emerged in the counter-culture sixties, Stewart Brand has been a force in the world for giving access to the information needed to make the planet a better place.

He is a co-founder and managing director of Global Business Network, a scenario strategy consulting business and part of the Monitor Group, where he works with leading companies and public institutions on their futures.

Mr. Brand is the president of The Long Now Foundation. Brand is well known for founding, editing and publishing the Whole Earth Catalog (1968-85), which received a National Book Award for the 1972 issue. In 1984, he founded The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), a computer teleconference system for the San Francisco Bay Area. It now has 11,000 active users worldwide and is considered a bellwether of the genre.

Brand has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary center studying the sciences of  complexity, since 1989. He received the Golden Gadfly Lifetime Achievement Award from the Media Alliance, San Francisco in the same year. He was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization which supports civil rights and responsibilities in electronic media, and is an acting advisor to Ecotrust, the Portland-based preservers of temperate rain forests from Alaska to San Francisco.

In his most recent book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, Stewart tackles controversial issues such as nuclear power, genetic engineering, and geoengineering. He has advocated nuclear power as a responsible strategy to address power demand in the face of the stark reality of global warming. His seminal essay on this topic, entitled Environmental Heresies, appeared in the MIT Technology Review in May 2005.

Brand is the author of many pioneering books including The Clock Of The Long Now in 1999, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built in 1994, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT in 1987, and Two Cybernetic Frontiers on Gregory Bateson and cutting-edge computer science in 1974. It had the first use of the term "personal computer" in print and was the first book to report on computer hackers.

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Larry Brilliant
Pioneering Physician and Philanthropist; President, Skoll Urgent Threats Fund

A self-described social change"addict," Dr. Larry Brilliant is a pioneering physician and global philanthropist. He is the President of the Skoll Global Threats Fund and Senior Adviser to Jeff Skoll. In this role, Larry develops the strategy and approach for the newly launched Fund, as well as advises Jeff Skoll on ways to leverage his various commercial and philanthropic entities to drive positive change on urgent social and environmental issues. Prior to joining Skoll, Larry served as the inaugural Executive Director of Google.org and, later, Chief Philanthropy Evangelist, working with the company’s cofounders to define the mission and strategic goals of Google’s philanthropic efforts. This included overseeing the Google Foundation, Google Grants, and the company’s other major social change initiatives.

Larry is an M.D. and M.P.H. who is board certified in preventive medicine and public health. He is a founder and director of The Seva Foundation, which works in dozens of countries around the world, primarily to eliminate preventable and curable blindness. Larry also serves as a member of strategic advisory committees for the Berkeley School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley; Omidyar Network; and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Venture Capital.

In addition to his medical career, Larry cofounded The Well, a pioneering virtual community, with Stewart Brand in 1985. He also holds a telecommunications technology patent and has served as CEO of two public companies and other venture-backed startups.

The author of two books and dozens of articles on infectious diseases, blindness and international health policy, Larry has worked at city, county, state, federal and international levels. He was recently a “first responder” for CDC’s smallpox bio-terrorism response effort, he has volunteered in Sri Lanka for tsunami relief, and he has established “Pandefense,” an interdisciplinary consultancy that aims to prepare for possible pandemic influenza. Larry lived in India while working as a United Nations medical officer for more than a decade, where he played a key role in the successful World Health Organization (WHO) smallpox eradication program. He recently worked for the WHO polio eradication effort as well. He was Associate Professor of epidemiology, global health planning and economic development at the University of Michigan.

Larry earned a Master in Public Health degree in health planning and economic development from the University of Michigan, and he received his M.D. from Wayne Medical School. He has received several awards from the Government of India and from WHO. In 2005 he received an honorary Doctor of Sciences degree from Knox College, and he was named “International Public Health Hero” by the University of California. In February 2006 he received the Sapling Foundation’s TED Prize.

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Peter Cappelli
Leading Authority on Managing Workplace Talent; Professor of Management, Wharton School

Recognized as one of the world’s most important authorities on human capital, Dr. Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at the Wharton School and Director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources. His work focuses on human resource practices, talent and performance management, and public policy related to employment. He advises to organizations on the development of managerial and executive talent by helping his clients better understand how careers and career paths have changed, how these changes require companies to think about managing talent from a more strategic perspective, and how individuals should now think about managing their own careers.

Peter's more recent research examines changes in employment relations in the U.S. and their implications. Publications on the subject matter include, The New Deal at Work: Managing the Market-Driven Workforce, which examines the decline in lifetime employment relationships, Talent Management: Managing Talent in an Uncertain Age, which outlines the strategies that employers should consider in developing and managing talent (named a "best business book" for 2008 by Booz-Allen), and his most recent publication, The India Way: How India's Top Business Leaders are Revolutionizing Management, which describes a mission-driven and employee-focused approach to strategy and competitiveness.

Peter was named one of the 25 most influential people in the field of human capital by Vault.com and one of the top 100 people in the field of recruiting by Recruiter.com. Additionally, he was elected to the National Academy of Human Resources, and—in 2004—named editor of the Academy of Management Perspectives. He currently serves on commissions for The Business Roundtable, the World Economic Forum, and the U.S. Department of Labor.

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Sir Richard Dearlove
Renowned Expert on Global Intelligence and Security

Sir Richard Dearlove has established himself as a scarce but in-demand commentator on the new century’s security threats. Only since his retirement as the Chief of British Intelligence in 2004 has he been able to dispose of his hard-won knowledge and experience for the benefit of private audiences. He still keeps an inquisitive media at arms length and refuses to write about his extraordinary career.

Sir Richard joined British Intelligence as a very young front-line officer in 1966 and worked extensively in Africa, behind the Iron Curtain, and in Europe. He experienced the Cold War at first hand and established his reputation quickly as a skillful spymaster. In his recent book, George Tenet describes him as the "spies spy."

Dearlove served as the British Intelligence representative in Washington during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, moving on to fill all of the key senior management roles in MI6, before his appointment in 1999 as ‘C’ (as the Chief of MI6 is known in British Government circles). He sensed early the changing nature of Intelligence work in the post-Cold War world and was radical in his approach to its restructuring, particularly in countering the growing terrorist threat.

At the center of the infamous leaked ‘Downing Street Memo,’ Sir Richard has had an insider’s view of key events and developments – 9/11, the continuing threat from Al Qaeda, Iraq, Afghanistan, the disarmament of Libya, the Iranian nuclear program—and he was of course an interlocutor of some of the leading players. His 38 years in Intelligence, and more than a decade in a leadership role, have given him a unique perspective on this closed and misinterpreted world.

Sir Richard is currently the Master of Pembroke College Cambridge, founded in 1347, one of Cambridge University’s leading teaching and research Colleges. He advises widely on risk and national security. He is a member of the International Advisory Board of AIG, senior advisor to the Monitor Group and Chairman of Ascot Underwriting at Lloyd’s of London. He was knighted by the Queen in 2001.

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Esther Dyson
Influential Venture Capitalist; Commentator, Emerging Digital Technology & Health

Esther Dyson, named by Forbes magazine as one of the most powerful women in American business, is the founder and chairman of EDventure. She is considered one of the most influential voices in the Internet industry as a board member and/or early investor in several companies that helped define tech startup success, among them Flickr, Meetup, del.icio.us, and Technorati. Over the last few years, Esther has been focusing more and more of her time and energy on private aviation and commercial space startups, as well as on health care and genetics companies.

Esther is currently on the board of directors of 23andMe, a startup with the mission to be the world's trusted source of personal genetic information, and a trustee of the Personal Genome Project. She also recently finished six months of cosmonaut training in Russia and serves on the NASA Advisory Council.

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Ben Gomes-Casseres
Strategy and Alliance Expert

Ben Gomes-Casseres is an expert on global strategy, with a focus on business combinations. Ben consults, teaches, and speaks worldwide on international business, alliance strategy, and acquisition strategy.  He has researched this topic for 20 years, taught it to MBAs and executives, and consulted with major companies in the United States and abroad. He is best known for his writings and consulting on alliance strategy, but he has also worked on international management, competitive strategy, technology policy, mergers and acquisitions, and organizational development.

Ben is currently a Professor at Brandeis International Business School, where he directs the MBA Program and the Asper Center for Global Entrepreneurship. Previously, he was a professor at the Harvard Business School and an economist at the World Bank. He is principal and owner of Alliance Strategy Consulting.

He has written or edited four books; his latest, Mastering Alliance Strategy: A Comprehensive Guide to Design, Management, and Organization, gives practical advice on how to use alliances as part of corporate strategy. His book The Alliance Revolution: The New Shape of Business Rivalry was one of the first in-depth studies of today’s high-tech alliances, and introduced the idea of competition among alliance “constellations.” His articles have appeared in Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, Strategy & Business, Sloan Management Review, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Journal of Financial Economics, and elsewhere. His work has been cited widely, including in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Harvard Management Update. He has also written numerous cases at Harvard Business School; his case on the development of Fuji Xerox in Japan is an HBS bestseller.

He holds a BA in History and Economics from Brandeis, an MPA in Economic Development from Princeton, and a DBA in International Business from Harvard. Born and raised in Curaçao (Netherlands Antilles), he speaks four languages (English, Dutch, Spanish, and Papiamentu), and is a dual citizen of the United States and the Netherlands.

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Yukon Huang
Senior Advisor and Former Director, World Bank China Program

Yukon Huang is a noted expert on financial and development issues for emerging markets, with a focus on East Asia (China in particular) as well as the Former Soviet Union.  He is currently a consultant and senior advisor to the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, various governments and private companies.

He was the World Bank’s first field based Country Director for China from 1997-2004 and from 1992-97 Director for Russia and Central Asia. As Director, he was responsible for the Bank’s two largest lending programs, which included developing, negotiating and supervising investment loans totaling over $20 billion.  These involved some 100 projects ranging from major power systems, to financial restructuring and basic education. He also supervised a program of research and policy studies covering economic and financial issues for these countries.

From 2004 to 2006, as the Senior Advisor to the East Asia Vice-President, he managed a broad range of financial and development issues for East Asia.

In previous World Bank assignments he was responsible for overseeing the Bank’s overall lending and risk assessment policies and also served as Lead Economist and Country Operations Chief for Asia.

Prior to joining the Bank, Dr. Huang worked at the US Treasury on international economic issues and taught and conducted research at various universities in the United States, Asia and Africa.

His publications have included in-depth studies on a number of key emerging markets in Asia, Europe and Africa as well as fiscal and financial policies for developing countries more generally. His recent work includes a volume of country studies on how location and spatial factors have affected growth in East Asia (Reshaping Economic Geography in East Asia) and an edited collection of papers by noted specialists on the future of East Asia (East Asia Visions: Perspectives on Economic Development).

Dr. Huang received his B.A. in Economics from Yale University.  His Masters and Ph.D. in Economics are from Princeton University.

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Joel Kurtzman
Leading Champion of Better Management Practice

Joel Kurtzman is a noted author and advisor to leading organizations around the world in the areas of leadership, social capital, governance, and assessing and managing global risk. His expertise is highlighted by his long, successful career forecasting global events, from oil-price shocks to the dollar’s ups and downs. Joel’s vantage point in understanding and relating business implications comes from the fact that he has held both positions of senior strategic business leader and journalist responsible for reporting and translating business issues. Whether presenting to business leaders or government officials, Joel presents his ideas with one overarching concept in mind: provide thought leadership that creates value and sustainable growth.

Joel Kurtzman is a senior fellow, executive director of the Center for a Sustainable Energy Future, and publisher of The Milken Institute Review. Previously, he was global lead partner for Thought Leadership and Innovation at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he was responsible for developing new, marketable ideas in strategy, technology, the capital markets and business policy. He was also responsible for the firm's Menlo Park Technology Research Centre, its technology forecasting teams and its innovative R&D.

Joel is the former editor of the Harvard Business Review and a former member of the editorial board of Harvard Business School Publishing. He was also business editor and columnist at The New York Times. He was a columnist for Fortune, Chief Executive and the European Business Forum, and was an on-air book reviewer at CNN.

 

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Robert Litan
Leading Voice on the Economy

Robert E. Litan is the Vice President for Research and Policy at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City and a Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. At Kauffman, Dr. Litan oversees a multi-million dollar budget for academic research relating to entrepreneurship and writes extensively about topics related to entrepreneurship, innovation and economic growth (including the legal environment conducive to all of these). At Brookings, Litan pursues a wide-ranging research agenda, which includes topics in regulation, financial institutions, telecommunications, and general economic policy.

During his career, Dr. Litan has authored or co-authored over 25 books, edited another 14, and authored or co-authored over 200 articles in journals, magazines and newspapers on a broad range of public policy issues. His latest books are Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity and Competitive Equity: Developing a Lower Cost Alternative for Mutual Funds. Other recently published books include Worldwide Financial Reporting; Financial Statecraft; and Follow The Money: The Enron Failure and the State of Corporate Disclosure.

Dr. Litan has been a lecturer in banking law at the Yale Law School, has taught various economics and law subjects to over 1,000 state judges (as part of the Judicial Education Program, first at the Brookings Institution and now at Northwestern Law School), co-taught a course in economic growth in post-conflict situations at the Command General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, has consulted for numerous organizationspublic and private, and testified as an expert witness in a variety of legal and regulatory proceedings involving domestic (banking, antitrust) and international (primarily trade) issues. He also consulted for private sector firms and the Department of Justice on antitrust matters.

Among his various assignments, he has written a number of influential federal reports. He co-authored two Congressionally-mandated studies for the Treasury Department on the role of the Community Reinvestment Act after the Financial Modernization Act of 1999. During 1996-97 he served as a consultant to the Treasury Department and was the lead author of its report to Congress on the future of the financial services industry (American Finance in the 21st Century), and in 1998-99 he was the main author of the Report of President’s Commission to Study Capital Budgeting. In 1998, he also chaired the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Assessing the Costs of Natural Disasters, which produced a report The Impacts of Natural Disasters: A Framework for Loss Estimation.

Dr. Litan also has served in several capacities in the federal government.  During 1995 and 1996, he was Associate Director of the Office of Management and Budget where he was responsible for overseeing budgetary and other policies of six cabinet agencies.  From 1993 to 1995, he was Deputy Assistant Attorney General in charge of civil antitrust litigation and regulatory issues at the Department of Justice where among other matters, he supervised the first Microsoft investigation, which resulted in a consent decree; and the investigation against NASDAQ.  From 1977 to 1979, he was the regulatory and legal staff specialist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.  In the early 1990s, Dr. Litan was a Member of the Commission on the Causes of the Savings and Loan Crisis.

Dr. Litan received his B.S. in Economics (summa cum laude) from the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania; his J.D. from Yale Law School; and both his M. Phil. and Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University.

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Rebecca MacKinnon
Journalist and Policy Activist on Internet and Digital Rights

Rebecca MacKinnon is a leading voice on issues of privacy, free expression and governance (or lack of) in the digital networks, platforms and services on which we are all increasingly dependent. She is a Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, where she conducts research, writing and advocacy on global Internet policy, free expression, and the impact of digital technologies on human rights. She is author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (Basic Books, January 2012). MacKinnon is also cofounder of Global Voices, an international citizen media network.

MacKinnon’s 2011 TED Talk on the struggle for freedom and control in cyberspace was chosen by the Huffington Post and TED as one of 18 “groundbreaking ideas that will reshape the world in 2012.” The Columbia Journalism School selected her as the graduate school’s 2012 Hearst Professional-in-Residence in further recognition of her achievements. She has testified in Congress several times on matters related to global Internet freedom and U.S. policy, is quoted regularly by the world’s most influential newspapers, and appears frequently as a commentator about Internet issues on radio and television.

Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, MacKinnon worked as a journalist for CNN in Beijing for nine years and was Beijing Bureau Chief and Correspondent from 1998-2001, then served as CNN’s Tokyo Bureau Chief and Correspondent from 2001-03. From 2004-06 she was a Research Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where she began her ongoing research and writing about the Chinese Internet in addition to launching Global Voices with colleague Ethan Zuckerman. In 2007-08 she taught online journalism at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre. In 2009 she conducted research and writing as an Open Society Fellow, and in the Spring of 2010 she was a Visiting Fellow at Princeton’s Center or Information Technology Policy. She also serves on the Boards of Directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder organization dedicated to promoting and upholding respect for free expression and privacy in the Internet and telecommunications sectors.

MacKinnon received her AB magna cum laude from Harvard University and was a Fullbright scholar in Taiwan in 1991-92. She currently lives in Washington DC.

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Christopher Meyer
Innovator, Business Builder, and Author on the Future of the Global Economy

Christopher Meyer is a Founder of Monitor Talent. Chris's mission is to anticipate and shape the future of business. He has pursued this goal as entrepreneur, executive, consultant, author, and as leader of a think tank.

Chris' fourth book, Standing on the Sun, will be published by Harvard Business School Press and will be available in early 2012. His previous books include the BusinessWeek Best Seller Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy and Future Wealth— the book on which Monitor Talent is based. He blogs on the Harvard Business Review site, and has contributed to publications including Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Fast Company, TIME, The Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek.

From 2004 to 2009 he was the Chief Executive of Monitor Networks, a Monitor Group company. Prior to joining Monitor Group, Chris was the Director of the Center for Business Innovation at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, from 1995 until its closing in December 2002. The Center fostered the conversation of leading issues among the business community, developed public conferences, established new services and businesses, and shared what it learned with business practitioners. At the CBI, he founded and served on the Board of the Bios Group, a venture that invested in applications of complexity theory to business.

Earlier, he was a Vice President and Group Head at Mercer Management Consulting, where from 1984 to 1995 he founded and built the firm’s practice in the information industries, comprising telecommunications, hardware, software, and information services and media.

Chris holds BAs in both Mathematics and Economics from Brandeis University and a M.B.A. (with Distinction) from The Harvard Business School. In addition, he held a University Predoctoral Fellowship in Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

He serves on the Boards of Icosystem, the Bankinter Foundation for Innovation, the Business Innovation Factory, and the New Rep Theater, and the Advisory Boards of Innocentive and LaunchCyte.

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Michael Porter
Seminal Authority on Competitive Strategy

Michael E. Porter is indisputably the foremost authority on modern competitive strategy.

Generally recognized as the father of the modern strategy field, Professor Porter has been identified in a variety of rankings and surveys as the world’s most influential thinker on management and competitiveness. His expertise spans competitive strategy, the competitiveness and economic development of nations, states, and regions, and the application of competitive principles to social problems such as health care, the environment, and corporate responsibility.

He is the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor, based at Harvard Business School. A University professorship is the highest professional recognition that can be awarded to a Harvard faculty member. In 2001, Harvard Business School and Harvard University jointly created the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, dedicated to furthering Professor Porter’s work.

He is the author of 17 books and over 125 articles, including his seminal works: “The Competitive Advantage of Nations,” which has guided economic policy in countless nations and regions; and “Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors,” in its 63rd printing and which has been translated into 19 languages. His book "Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results" (2006; Harvard Business Press) is influencing thinking and practice not only in the United States but numerous other countries.  "On Competition" (Harvard Business Press) was re-issued with new and expanded content in October 2008. Professor Porter has received six McKinsey Awards for the best Harvard Business Review article of the year, including an unprecedented four first-place awards.

Professor Porter has served as a strategy advisor to top management in numerous leading U.S. and international companies, among them Caterpillar, DuPont, Procter & Gamble, Royal Dutch Shell, Scotts Miracle-Gro, SYSCO, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. He currently serves on the board of directors of Thermo Fisher Scientific Corporation and Parametric Technology Corporation, and is senior strategy advisor to the Boston Red Sox.

He has also been involved in assisting governments and advising national leaders in the U.S. and abroad, including Armenia, Ireland, India, Kazakhstan, Libya, Nicaragua, Portugal, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand.
The Latin American Center for Competitiveness and Sustainable Development is based on his thinking about economic development for groups of neighboring countries.

Extending his work on competitiveness to states, provinces, and other sub-national regions, Professor Porter led the Clusters of Innovation project, which developed a framework for economic policy in U.S. regions. In addition, he is dedicated to addressing the relationship between competition and important social issues such as poverty, health care delivery and the natural environment. He has devoted growing attention toward economically distressed communities and poor and developing countries.

Professor Porter founded three major non-profit organizations: The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC), the Center for Effective Philanthropy, and FSG-Social Impact Advisors. He also currently serves on the Princeton University Board of Trustees.

He received a B.S.E. with high honors in aerospace and mechanical engineering from Princeton University in 1969, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He received an M.B.A. with high distinction in 1971 from the Harvard Business School, where he was a George F. Baker Scholar, and a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University in 1973.

Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Professor Porter lived and traveled throughout the world as the son of a career Army officer. At Princeton, he played intercollegiate golf and was the New England champion. He was named to the 1968 NCAA Golf All-American Team. After graduating from college, Professor Porter served through the rank of captain in the U.S. Army Reserve. He maintains a long-time interest in the esthetics and business of music and art, having worked on the problems of strategy with arts organizations and aspiring musicians. Professor Porter has two daughters and resides in Brookline, Massachusetts.

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Iqbal Quadir
Entrepreneur, Founder of GrameenPhone, Philanthropist

Iqbal Z. Quadir is the founder and director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which promotes bottom-up entrepreneurship in developing countries.

Quadir is an accomplished entrepreneur who writes about the critical roles of entrepreneurship and innovations in improving the economic and political conditions in low-income countries. Quadir is often credited as having been the earliest observer of the potential for mobile phones to transform low-income countries. His work has been recognized by leaders and organizations worldwide as a new and successful approach to sustainable poverty alleviation.

For four years, Quadir taught at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, focusing on the impact of technologies in the politics and economics of developing countries. In 2005, he moved to MIT. His particular research interest is in the democratizing effects of technologies in developing countries with some of his initial thoughts published in the Summer/Fall 2002 issue of The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs.

In 2006, Quadir co-founded the journal Innovations, published by MIT Press, which highlights private efforts in public service. Quadir spent most of the 1990s founding and building GrameenPhone Ltd., which has now become Bangladesh’s largest telephone company, with net income of $250 million in 2006. His childhood exposure to the conditions in rural Bangladesh combined with his later venture capital experience in New York led Quadir to recognize that the ensuing digital revolution could facilitate the introduction of telephony to 100 million people living in rural Bangladesh. In 1994, he formally launched this effort by convincing angel investors to establish a New York based company, Gonofone Development Corp (meaning “phones for the masses”) to help him organize what subsequently became known as GrameenPhone.

Quadir’s vision of a large-scale, commercial project that could serve all urban areas and 68,000 villages in Bangladesh led him to organize a global consortium including Telenor AS, the primary telephone company in Norway and an affiliate of micro-credit pioneer Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. He attracted these investors by complementing his vision with a practical distribution scheme whereby small entrepreneurs, backed by loans from Grameen Bank, could retail telephone services to their surrounding communities. With the support of these investors, GrameenPhone, established in late 1996, started building a new cellular network and providing services to the public soon thereafter. To date, it has built the largest cellular network in the country with investments of nearly $2 billion and a subscriber base of nearly 20 million. Its rural program is already available in more than 60,000 villages, providing telephone access to more than 100 million people, while helping to create 250,000 micro-entrepreneurs in these villages.

Quadir appeared on CBC, CNN and PBS and was profiled in feature articles in The Economist, Boston Globe, Financial Times and The New York Times, and in several books. The World Economic Forum, based in Geneva, Switzerland, selected him as a “Global Leader for Tomorrow.” In 2006, Quadir was awarded the prestigious Science, Education and Economic Development (SEED) award in Bangladesh. In spring 2007, Wharton Alumni Magazine selected Quadir for its list of 125 Influential People and Ideas on the occasion of the 125-year celebration of the Wharton School. His work is referred to in 20 books and is prominently featured in the 2007 book, You Can Hear Me Now, by Nicholas Sullivan (Jossey-Bass).

Earlier in his career, Quadir served as a vice president of Atrium Capital Corp., an associate of Security Pacific Merchant Bank, both in New York, and a consultant to the World Bank in Washington DC. He received an MBA and an MA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and a BS with honors from Swarthmore College.

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AnnaLee Saxenian
Authority on Technology Clusters and Global Innovation; Dean, School of Information, UC Berkeley

AnnaLee Saxenian has made a career of studying regional economics and the conditions under which people, ideas, and geographies combine and connect into hubs of economic activity. Her latest book, The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy (Harvard University Press, 2006) explores how and why immigrant engineers from Silicon Valley have transferred the institutions of  technology entrepreneurship to emerging regions in their home countries—Taiwan, Israel, China and India in particular—and launching companies far from established centers of skill and technology. The “brain drain,” she argues, has now become “brain circulation”— a powerful economic force for the development of formerly peripheral regions that is sparking profound transformations in the global economy.

AnnaLee is dean and professor at the U.C. Berkeley School of Information and a professor in Berkeley’s department of city and regional planning. Her prior publications include Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Harvard, 1994), Silicon Valley's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs (Public Policy Institute of California, 1999), and Local and Global Networks of Immigrant Professionals in Silicon Valley (PPIC, 2002). She holds a PhD in political science from MIT, a master's in regional planning from U.C. Berkeley, and a BA in economics from Williams College.

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Peter Schwartz
World-Renowned Futurist and Strategist

Peter Schwartz is Senior Vice President for Global Relations and Strategic Planning for Salesforce.com. He is co-founder and former chairman of the Global Business Network (GBN), the world’s preeminent member organization focused on scenario thinking and planning, where he lead programs for corporations, governments, and non-profit institutions. His research and scenario work encompassed energy resources and the environment, technology, life sciences, telecommunications, media and entertainment, aerospace, and national security. A prolific author, Peter’s book, Inevitable Surprises, offers a provocative look at the complex forces at play in the world today and their implications for business and society. His first book, The Art of the Long View, is considered a seminal publication on scenario planning and has been translated into multiple languages. Peter addresses many different audiences in corporate board rooms, at conferences on issues such as global warming and human life extension, and at the World Economic Forum. He led the scenario team at Royal Dutch/Shell in the 1980s, where many of the scenario tools were pioneered. He has even lent his futurist skills to Hollywood as a script consultant on such films as The Minority Report, Deep Impact, Sneakers, and War Games.

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Paul Van Zyl
Global Leader and Advisor on Transitional Justice & Human Rights

Paul van Zyl co-founded and was most recently the Executive Vice-President of the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), an organization which assists countries pursuing accountability for past mass atrocity or human rights abuse. The ICTJ was founded in 2001 in response to a growing recognition that facing legacies of past abuse and injustice is crucial to promoting human rights around the world. By helping to address past crimes, transitional justice can help to break vicious cycles of violence and reduce the likelihood of future conflict.

Mr. van Zyl has acted as an adviser and consultant to human rights organizations, governments, international organizations, and foundations on transitional justice issues in numerous countries. From 1995 to 1998, he served as Executive Secretary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, helping to establish the Commission, develop its structure and modus operandi and manage its operations. He has also worked as a researcher for the Goldstone Commission, as a department head at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in Johannesburg, and as an associate at Davis Polk and Wardwell in New York.

Throughout his career, Mr. van Zyl has received a number of academic and professional honors. He has been selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, joining a group of extraordinary leaders under 40 who dedicate their time and energy to working towards a better global future. He was also selected as a TED Fellow, and was named as one of New York’s “Top 15 Lawyers Under 40” by New York Lawyer Magazine.

Mr. van Zyl also currently serves as director of New York University School of Law’s Transitional Justice Program, and teaches law both in New York and Singapore. He obtained a BA and an LLB from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and an LLM in International Law from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Following these studies, he was accepted into the prestigious Hauser Global Scholars Program at New York University School of Law, where he completed a LLM in Corporate Law.

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Ruth Wasserman Lande
Expert on Middle East and Foreign Policy

Ruth Wasserman Lande's personal history, education, and impressive professional experience make her uniquely qualified to advise governments, corporations, and NGOs on Middle East-related issues. Formerly, the advisor to Israel President, Mr. Shimon Peres, Ruth is currently working on her Ph.D. on Middle East issues, specifically "Israeli-Egyptian Relations 1979-2009: The Palestinian Dimension," at the University of Oxford. She is also Founder and Director of Public Relations and Media pro bono positionsfor the Lod Community Foundation which strives to develop one of the poorest, mixed Jewish-Arab cities in Israel.

The focus of Ruth’s work spans a broad spectrum including Arab-Israeli relations, US-Israeli strategic alliances, cross-cultural negotiation, and counterterrorism and nonproliferation. She is also passionate about the role women must play in the quest for peace in the Middle East. Ruth is committed to closing the gaps in the global religious and cultural divide. Her approach may help others better understand the myriad of interconnected issues that impact business, economics, culture, and politics in the region.

Ruth was born in Israel and raised in Cape Town, South Africa. She returned to Israel as a teenager and graduated, Cum Laude, from Bar Ilan University with a degree in International Relations and Communications. After completing her studies, she served as a political analyst in the Israeli Defense Force intelligence, rising to the rank of Captain.

Following military service, Ruth joined the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where she served as the desk officer for the UK, Ireland, and Scandinavia. She was promoted to Advisor to the Deputy Director General for Strategic Affairs in the Foreign Ministry, dealing with counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation issues. During this time, she earned a Master of Arts (Cum Laude) in International Relations from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She received the “Simcha Pratt Prize” for excellence on a paper analyzing the Oslo Negotiations, and her reputation led to a three-year appointment as the political and economic advisor in the Israeli embassy in Cairo. She completed her service there as the acting Deputy Chief of Mission.

In 2006, Ruth was awarded a Wexner Fellowship to study at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where she earned another master’s degree before assuming her position with President Peres’s office.

Ruth speaks fluent Hebrew, English, Russian, and Arabic, as well as conversational French.

 

Ruth Lande with President Peres 

Ruth with the President of the State of Israel, Mr. Shimon Peres

 

Lande with President Obama 

Ruth with the President of the United States, Mr. Barack Obama

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Steve Weber
Political Economist and Critically Acclaimed Author

Steven Weber works at the intersection of technology markets, intellectual property regimes, and international politics.  Steve is Professor of Political Science and Professor of The Information School at UC Berkeley, and Visiting Professor of Management and Senior Research Fellow at Moscow School of Management - Skolkovo.  His research, teaching, and advisory work for the last decade have focused on the political economy of knowledge intensive industries, with special attention to health care, information technology, software, and global political economy issues relating to competitiveness.  He is also a frequent contributor to scholarly and public debates on international relations and US foreign policy.

Steve went to medical school at Stanford then did his Ph.D. in the political science department at Stanford. He served as special consultant to the president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and has held academic fellowships with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and was Director of the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley from 2003 to 2009.

Over the last 20 years Weber has consulted with multinational companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations on risk analysis, strategy, and business forecasting in the areas of international political risk, technology, and global economic change, in part through Monitor Group in San Francisco and The Glover Park Group in Washington DC.  Some recent clients include IBM, AMD, Dupont, Xstrata, Singtel, Visa, SK Group, PhRMA, Merck, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, ACLU, Governments of Singapore, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United States, Microsoft, CEMEX, Motorola, American Banking Association.

Steve’s 2004 book, The Success of Open Source, is the leading study of the political economy of the open source software community.  He is the also the author of Cooperation and Discord in US – Soviet Arms Control, the editor of Globalization and the European Political Economy, and has written and co-written numerous articles in academic and popular publications about international political economy, globalization, emerging security issues, etc. (including “How Globalization Went Bad,” in Foreign Policy 2007, “A World Without the West,” The National Interest summer 2007, and "America's Hard Sell", Foreign Policy 2008).  His most recent book, The End of Arrogance:  America in the Global Competition of Ideas (2010), with co-author Bruce Jentleson of Duke, proposes terms of global leadership for an emerging era of ideological competition.  Forthcoming in March 2011, co-edited with Nils Gilman and Jesse Goldhammer, is Deviant Globalization:  Black Market Economy in the 21st Century.

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Terry F. Yosie
Thought Leader on Sustainable Business Practice

Terry Yosie joined the World Environment Center in October 2006 as the President & CEO. In this capacity, he develops and implements strategies to achieve this global non-profit organization’s mission to implement sustainable development through the business strategies and operations of global companies in partnership with government agencies, non-governmental organizations, universities and other stakeholders.  WEC’s principal areas of focus have included climate change and energy efficiency, enterprise development, greening the supply chain and technological innovation.  Dr. Yosie leads WEC’s global initiatives and frequently meets with business, government and other leaders to develop solutions to a variety of environmental, economic and social issues.

Dr. Yosie has held senior-level management positions in government, corporate and consulting organizations. He served as Vice President at the American Chemistry Council from 1999-2005, providing leadership to upgrade the chemical industry’s environmental, health, safety and security performance. He managed a global CEO Task Force in 2004-2005 to develop the Responsible Care Global Charter to improve chemical industry performance in 52 countries.  He represented the industry as a delegate to the 2002 U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.

As the Executive Vice President of Ruder Finn Washington from 1992-1999, Dr. Yosie led the environmental management and communications practices of the firm for a wide range of clients such as BASF, British Petroleum, Pfizer, and Philips Electronics. At BP, he advised the company on climate change issues that led to a new strategy announced in 1997 by the CEO John Browne.

Dr. Yosie served as Vice President for Health and Environment at the American Petroleum Institute from 1988-1992. In this capacity, he successfully led the industry’s effort to negotiate cleaner fuel standards with EPA, state and local agencies and environmental organizations that impacted over $40 billion dollars in refining investments.

From 1978-1988, Dr. Yosie was employed at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board where he also served as Director from 1981-1988, In this role, he advised EPA Administrators and the U.S. Congress on the scientific basis of public health and environmental decisions, and he instituted policies and procedures to improve the technical basis for EPA-wide policy decisions and risk assessments.  He was a member of the U.S. delegation for the bilateral environmental program with the Soviet Union and negotiated diverse agreements with that country.

Dr. Yosie has recently served as a member of the National Research Council Committee that published a major study, Science and Decisions (December 2008).  He is the author of more than sixty professional publications and co-editor of a book entitled, Sustainable Environmental Management.  He received his doctorate degree in Humanities and Social Sciences from Carnegie Mellon University in 1981 and has been designated by the University as one of its Most Notable Alumni.

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Ethan Zuckerman
Fellow, The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law; Founder, Global Voices

Ethan Zuckerman is an activist and scholar whose work focuses on the global blogosphere, free expression and social translation in the developing world. He is the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media. In this role, Ethan contributes both to the understanding of the role and power of civic media in the broader media ecosystem, and builds tools that help communities around the world share their perspectives and stories.

Prior to joining MIT, Ethan was a longtime fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society where he focused his research on the impact of technology on the developing world. His projects included a study of global media attention, research on the use of weblogs and other social software in the developing world, and the use of web 2.0 technologies by activists.

In 2004, he co-founded Global Voices, an award-winning international citizen media network. Global Voices maintains an online newsroom, which reports from over 100 nations via weblogs and a translation network that publishes content in 12 languages. Global Voices offers trainings in citizen medium podcasting and videocasting throughout the developing world, and runs an advocacy project that supports free speech online.

Ethan has also been involved with founding several internet start-ups including: Tripod, an early pioneer in the web community space; and Geekcorps, a non profit group that provided technology assistance to governments and companies in the developing world.

Ethan graduated from Williams College with a BA in Philosophy in 1993. In 1993-4, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Legon, Ghana and the National Theatre of Ghana, studying ethnomusicology and percussion.

Ethan was given the 2002 Technology in Service of Humanity Award by MIT's Technology Review Magazine and named to the TR100, TR's list of innovators under the age of 35. In 2004, Ethan was named a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum.

He lives the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts with his wife Rachel. He serves on the boards of regional and international organizations that focus on technology and education, including on the sub-boards of the Open Society Institute's Information Program and US Program.

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