Topic: Business

Tomas Sedlacek

Tomas Sedlacek is a Czech economist and university lecturer. He is the Chief Macroeconomic Strategist at ČSOB, a former member of the National Economic Council of the Czech Republic and an economic advisor to former President Václav Havel.

Sedlacek is a member of Yale University World Fellowship, selected as one of “The Five Hot Minds in Economics” by Yale Economic Journal in 2006 and co-author of various case studies for Harvard and Georgetown. He is a lecturer and PhDr. graduate at Charles University in Prague, one of the oldest universities in Europe. In his recent book, The Economics of Good and Evil, (which became a number one bestseller in Switzerland and Germany after 2 weeks of its release) Sedlacek radically rethinks his field, challenging our assumptions about the world.

He was an advisor on macroeconomic issues dealing with the general economic part of the Presidential responsibilities. The main areas of responsibility were affairs with the Czech National Bank, Securities and Exchange Commission, Ministry of Finance and EU related economic issues. Also he was a non-political advisor to the Minister of Finance, responsible for macroeconomic issues, fiscal consolidation, European affairs and communication with The World Bank. He participated at the first historical Czech Sovereign Eurobond Emission, and represented the country at the World Bank and IMF meetings in Washington DC.

Tomas is also a recognised specialist on fiscal policy, Euro and European affairs in the leading Czech bank CSOB, a unit of multinational financial group KBC. He is a regular weekly columnist of the top Czech business newspaper Hospodarske noviny since 2006 and a frequent commentator of public affairs and frequent panelist with over three hundred speeches since 2009.

Marshall Goldsmith

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith is a world authority in helping successful leaders get even better – by achieving positive, lasting change in behavior: for themselves, their people and their teams.

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There is a New York Times best seller, Wall Street Journal #1 business book and winner of the Harold Longman award for Best Business Book of the Year. It has been translated into 23 languages and is a listed best seller in six different countries.

The American Management Association named Dr. Goldsmith as one of 50 great thinkers and leaders who have influenced the field of management over the past 80 years. Major business press acknowledgments include:

Business Week – most influential practitioners in the history of leadership development,
The Times (UK) – 50 greatest living business thinkers,
Wall Street Journal - top ten executive educators,
Forbes - five most-respected executive coaches,
Leadership Excellence – top five thinkers on leadership,
Economic Times (India) – five rajgurus of America,
Economist (UK) - most credible executive advisors in the new era of business and
Fast Company - America’s preeminent executive coach.

Dr. Goldsmith’s Ph.D. is from UCLA. He teaches executive education at Dartmouth’s Tuck School and frequently speaks at leading business schools. He is a Fellow in the National Academy of Human Resources (America’s top HR honor) and his work has been recognized by almost every professional organization in his field. In 2006 Alliant International University honored Marshall by naming their schools of business and organizational studies - the Marshall Goldsmith School of Management.

Marshall is one of a select few advisors who have been asked to work with over 100 major CEOs and their management teams. He is co-founder of Marshall Goldsmith Partners, a network of top-level executive coaches. He served as a member of the Board of the Peter Drucker Foundation for ten years. He has been a volunteer teacher for US Army Generals, Navy Admirals, Girl Scout executives, International and American Red Cross leaders – where he was a National Volunteer of the Year.

Marshall’s 31 books include: The Leader of the Future (a Business Week best-seller), Coaching for Leadership and the upcoming Succession: Are You Ready? (in the Harvard Business Memo to the CEO series). Over two hundred of his articles, interviews, columns and videos are available for viewing and sharing online (for no charge) at www.MarshallGoldsmithLibrary.com. Visitors to this site have come from 195 countries and have viewed over 5.2 million resources.

Peter Keen

Peter Keen works globally as a professor, advisor to senior management in business and government organizations, author, executive educator and public speaker.

Keen has held faculty positions at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Duke, Fordham, Wharton and The London Business School.

He has been awarded honorary doctoral degrees by Marist College and Abo Akademi University (Finland) for his career-long "pioneering contributions and key theory work in the interface between information technology, management theory and the managerial use of information systems."

Peter Keen was named as one of the top 100 business "gurus" in the world - thought leaders with impact - in a 2003 survey. This ranking is based on objective measures of citations of his work in the scholarly literature (influence as a thought leader), Google search engine "hits" on his name (public impact and interest), and media references on Lexis/Nexus (newsworthiness). He is also regularly ranked in the top ten consultants in the world in the IT field, but the business guru rating indicates the extent to which his work is more general than just IT.

Keen is first of all a thinker, teacher and adviser in the area of business innovation, with IT as a core enabler, but only that. His strengths in IT add to his other strengths in organization (especially competing via business processes), international business, and corporate finance. Peter's consulting focuses on helping private and public sector organizations make the management difference in exploiting technology and process capabilities to build a sustainable innovation advantage. His executive education programs are centered on leadership in practice rather than theory and good intentions, through an "imperatives" and "beachhead" approach to accelerating change and reducing its risks.

Peter Keen is a prolific writer and the author of close to 30 books, including Shaping the Future: Business Design through Information Technology, The Process Edge, The eProcess Edge, Every Manager's Guide to IT, Trust by Design, The Freedom Economy, Competing in Time, and Decision Support Systems: an Organizational Perspective. Mr. Keen's view on business effectiveness and innovation is that they rest on a fusion of people, process, technology and economics; the role of leadership is to ensure that fusion.

A major area of his current research and consulting centers on the opportunities and challenges of mobile technology: building the business models for a new generation of mobile value services, knowledge mobilization as organizational advantage, mobile supply chain management, and the use of mobile for social and economic development.

Peter Keen regards himself as a "voyager" between many worlds, a translator and an integrator. He is a European who lives in the United States, holds a senior professorship position in Europe and works across the world bringing insights and experiences from and to each of the regions and nations he works in. Peter is a consultant with a distinguished academic track record, and is actively involved in both the public and private sectors.