Topic: Globalisation

Alexander Likhotal

Prof. Dr. Alexander Likhotal is the President of Green Cross International. He holds doctorates in Political Science from the Moscow State Institute for International Relations (1975) and in History from the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, USSR Academy of Sciences (1987).

In addition to an academic career as a Professor of Political Science and International Relations, he served as a European Security analyst for the Soviet Union leadership. In 1991, he was appointed Deputy Spokesman and Advisor to the President of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev. After Mr. Gorbachev’s resignation, Professor Likhotal served as his advisor and spokesman and worked at the Gorbachev Foundation as the International and Media Director. Having joined Green Cross International in 1996, he is actively involved in furthering sustainable development agenda.

During the wake of Gorbachev’s perestroika, being already a well-known expert in the field of European security, he received a proposal to become the chief analyst of NATO politics in the International Department of the Central Committee of the CSPU - one of the Soviet foreign policy co-ordination bodies.

He is a member of the International Council for the Earth Charter and Adviser to the Club of Madrid and has launched internationally acclaimed initiative body such as the Earth Dialogues Forum and has spearheaded Green Cross International’s global campaign for the Right to Water.

Mr Likhotal currently holds a lecture appointment at North Eastern University at Boston, where he teaches about the cultural and political implications of business management. His areas of expertise include: Developments in Russia & Eastern Europe, Russia and the New World Order, Russian Foreign Policy Today, NATO and European Security. He was born in Moscow in 1950, married, has one daughter.

Tarun Khanna

Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School. For almost three decades, he has studied entrepreneurship as a means to social and economic development in emerging markets. At HBS since 1993, after obtaining degrees from Princeton and Harvard, he has taught courses on strategy, international business and economic development to undergraduate and graduate students and senior executives.

A summary of his conceptual work on emerging markets appeared in his 2010 co-authored book, Winning in Emerging Markets.  Comparative work on entrepreneurship in China and India appeared in two books based on his personal experiences: Billions in 2008 and a sequel in 2018, Trust.  Recently, he co-edited two collections of essays, one a set of transcripts of original video interviews of iconic entrepreneurial leaders across emerging markets, Leadership to Last, the other most recently, Making Meritocracy, an inter-disciplinary exploration of the roots of meritocracy in China and India, with lessons for entrepreneurship and for much studied societal attributes like dynamism and inequality.

He was named the first director of Harvard’s university-wide Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute in the fall of 2010. The institute rapidly grew to engage over 150 faculty from across Harvard in projects embracing the pure sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, and spanning the region from Afghanistan to Myanmar. A centerpiece of the Institute’s strategy is a deep local presence, anchored through offices in New Delhi and Lahore. During the past decade, he also oversaw HBS activities across South Asia, anchored in Mumbai.

He currently teaches a popular university-wide elective course, Contemporary Developing Countries, where students work in multi-disciplinary teams to devise practical solutions to complex social problems.  The course is part of Harvard’s undergraduate general education core curriculum, and is rare in that it also attracts graduate students from across the university, engaging ‘sophomores to surgeons.’ A free online version on the edX platform, Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies, has been taken by about three quarters of a million students in over 200 countries.

In 2007, he was nominated Young Global Leader (under 40) by the World Economic Forum, in 2009, elected as a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, in 2016, recognized by the Academy of Management as Eminent Scholar for Lifetime Achievement in the field of International Management.  Between 2015 and 2019, he was appointed to several national commissions by the Government of India, including to chair the effort to frame policies for entrepreneurship in India.

Outside HBS, he serves on numerous for-profit and not-for-profit boards in the US and India. In the past decade, this included AES, a Washington DC headquartered global power company, and India-based Bharat Financial Inclusion Limited (BFIL), one of the world’s largest firms dedicated to financial inclusion for the poor.  Recently, he joined the board of inMobi, India’s first ‘unicorn,’ a global technology provider of enterprise platforms for marketers.  He is a co-founder of several entrepreneurial ventures in the developing world, spanning India, China, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. In 2015, he co-founded Axilor, a vibrant incubator in Bangalore. From 2015 to 2022, he was a Trustee of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

He lives in Newton, MA, with his wife, daughter and son.

Lech Wałęsa

Lech Wałęsa (born in 1943) is a Polish politician, trade-union organizer, philanthropist and human-rights activist. A charismatic leader, he co-founded Solidarity (Solidarność), the Soviet bloc's first independent trade union, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, and served as President of Poland from 1990 to 1995.

After graduating from vocational school, he worked as a car mechanic at a machine center from 1961 to 1965. He served in the army for two years, rose to the rank of corporal, and in 1967 was employed in the Gdansk shipyards as an electrician. During the clash in December 1970 between the workers and the government, he was one of the leaders of the shipyard workers and was briefly detained. In 1976, however, as a result of his activities as a shop steward, he was fired and had to earn his living by taking temporary jobs.

In 1978 with other activists he began to organise free non-communist trade unions and took part in many actions on the sea coast. He was kept under surveillance by the state security service and frequently detained.

In August 1980 he led the Gdansk shipyard strike which gave rise to a wave of strikes over much of the country with Walesa seen as the leader. The primary demands were for workers' rights. The authorities were forced to capitulate and to negotiate with Walesa the Gdansk Agreement of August 31, 1980, which gave the workers the right to strike and to organise their own independent union.

The Catholic Church supported the movement, and in January 1981 Walesa was cordially received by Pope John Paul II in the Vatican. Walesa himself has always regarded his Catholicism as a source of strength and inspiration. In the years 1980-81 Walesa travelled to Italy, Japan, Sweden, France and Switzerland as guest of the International Labour Organisation. In September 1981 he was elected Solidarity Chairman at the First National Solidarity Congress in Gdansk.

The country's brief enjoyment of relative freedom ended in December 1981, when General Jaruzelski, fearing Soviet armed intervention among other considerations, imposed martial law, "suspended" Solidarity, arrested many of its leaders, and interned Walesa in a country house in a remote spot.

In November 1982 Wałęsa was released and reinstated at the Gdansk shipyards. Although kept under surveillance, he managed to maintain lively contact with Solidarity leaders in the underground. While martial law was lifted in July 1983, many of the restrictions were continued in civil code. In October 1983 the announcement of Walesa's Nobel prize raised the spirits of the underground movement, but the award was attacked by the government press.

The Jaruzelski regime became even more unpopular as economic conditions worsened, and it was finally forced to negotiate with Walesa and his Solidarity colleagues. The result was the holding of parliamentary elections which, although limited, led to the establishment of a non-communist government. Under Mikhail Gorbachev the Soviet Union was no longer prepared to use military force to keep communist parties in satellite states in power.

Walesa, now head of the revived Solidarity labour union, began a series of meetings with world leaders.

In April 1990 at Solidarity's second national congress, Walesa was elected chairman with 77.5% of the votes. In December 1990 in a general ballot he was elected President of the Republic of Poland. He served until defeated in the election of November 1995. Walesa still remains active in Polish politics, although he does not hold a government office. Since the end of his presidency, Wałęsa lectured on Central European history and politics at various universities and organizations. In 1996, he founded the Lech Wałęsa Institute, a think tank whose mission is to support democracy and local governments in Poland and throughout the world.

Apart from his 1983 Nobel Peace Prize, Wałęsa has received many other international distinctions and awards. He has been named "Man of the Year" by Time (1981), the Financial Times (1980) and The Observer (1980). He was the first recipient of the Liberty Medal, on 4 July 1989 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and that same year received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He is the only Pole to have addressed a joint meeting of the United States Congress in 1989.

Walesa has been granted many honorary degrees from universities, including Harvard University and the University of Paris. Other honors include the Medal of Freedom (Philadelphia, U.S.A.); the Award of Free World (Norway); and the European Award of Human Rights.

Wałęsa has written three books: Droga nadziei (The Road of Hope, 1987), Droga do wolności (The Road to Freedom, 1991), and Wszystko, co robię, robię dla Polski (All That I Do, I Do for Poland, 1995).

Robert Tucker

Robert B. Tucker is president of The Innovation Resource, and an internationally recognized leader in the field of innovation. Formerly an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Tucker has been a consultant and keynote speaker since 1986.

His pioneering research in interviewing over 50 leading innovators was published in the book Winning the Innovation Game in l986. Since then, he has continued to publish widely on the subject, including his international bestseller Managing the Future: 10 Driving Forces of Change for the New Century, which has been translated into 13 languages. In his most recent book, Driving Growth Through Innovation describes the emerging best practices of 23 innovation vanguard companies, and was released in a revised edition in 2008. His latest book, Innovation is Everybody's Business, was just published by John Wiley in 2011.

As one of the thought leaders in the growing Innovation Movement, Tucker is a frequent contributor to publications such as the Journal of Business Strategy, Strategy & Leadership, and Harvard Management Update. He has appeared on PBS, CBS News, and was a featured guest on the CNBC series The Business of Innovation.

The Innovation Resource, based in Santa Barbara, California, is a consulting firm devoted exclusively to assisting companies seeking to improve top and bottom line performance via systematic innovation.

Tucker is a much sought after keynote speaker at conventions, company management meetings, and industry conferences. Clients include over 200 of the Fortune 500 companies as well as clients in Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Australia.

Joseph Stiglitz

Joseph E. Stiglitz was born in Gary, Indiana in 1943. A graduate of Amherst College, he received his PHD from MIT in 1967, became a full professor at Yale in 1970, and in 1979 was awarded the John Bates Clark Award, given biennially by the American Economic Association to the economist under 40 who has made the most significant contribution to the field. He has taught at Princeton, Stanford, MIT and was the Drummond Professor and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He served in the Clinton administration as the chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisors (1995 – 1997). At the World Bank, he served as senior vice-president and chief economist (1997 – 2000).

In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information, and he was a lead author of the 1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Stiglitz was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1993-95, during the Clinton administration, and served as CEA chairman from 1995-97. He then became Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank from 1997-2000. In 2008, he was appointed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to chair a Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Economic Progress.

Stiglitz was the president of the International Economic Association from 2011 to 2014.

Stiglitz is now a professor at Columbia University, with appointments at the Business School, the Department of Economics and the School of International and Public Affairs, and is editor of The Economists' Voice journal with J. Bradford DeLong and Aaron Edlin. He also gives classes for a double-degree program between Sciences Po Paris and École Polytechnique in 'Economics and Public Policy'. He has chaired The Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester since 2005. Stiglitz is a New-Keynesian economist.

Stiglitz helped create a new branch of economics, “The Economics of Information,” exploring the consequences of information asymmetries and pioneering such pivotal concepts as adverse selection and moral hazard, which have now become standard tools not only of theorists, but of policy analysts. He has made major contributions to macro-economics and monetary theory, to development economics and trade theory, to public and corporate finance, to the theories of industrial organization and rural organization, and to the theories of welfare economics and of income and wealth distribution. In the 1980s, he helped revive interest in the economics of R&D.

His work has helped explain the circumstances in which markets do not work well, and how selective government intervention can improve their performance.

Recognized around the world as a leading economic educator, he has written textbooks that have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He founded one of the leading economics journals, The Journal of Economic Perspectives. His book Globalization and Its Discontents (2001) has been translated into 35 languages, besides at least two pirated editions, and in the non-pir

ated editions has sold more than one million copies worldwide. Other books include The Roaring Nineties, Towards a New Paradigm in Monetary Economics with Bruce Greenwald, Fair Trade for All, with Andrew Charlton, and Making Globalization Work, (2006), The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, with Linda Bilmes, (2008). The latest book became the best seller, The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them (2015).

Stiglitz is the 4th most influential economist in the world today, and in 2011 he was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Anthony Giddens

Anthony Giddens, Baron Giddens (born in 1938) is a British sociologist who is renowned for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. He is considered to be one of the most prominent modern contributors in the field of sociology.

The author of at least 34 books, published in at least 29 languages, issuing on average more than one book every year.

He has been described as Britain's best known social scientist since John Maynard Keynes. Three notable stages can be identified in his academic life. The first one involved outlining a new vision of what sociology is, presenting a theoretical and methodological understanding of that field, based on a critical reinterpretation of the classics.

His major publications of that era include Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971) and New Rules of Sociological Method (1976). In the second stage Giddens developed the theory of structuration, an analysis of agency and structure, in which primacy is granted to neither. His works of that period, like Central Problems in Social Theory (1979) and The Constitution of Society (1984) brought him international fame on the sociological arena. The most recent stage concerns modernity, globalization and politics, especially the impact of modernity on social and personal life. This stage is reflected by his critique of postmodernity, and discussions of a new "utopian-realist"[2] third way in politics, visible in the Consequence of Modernity (1990), Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), The Transformation of Intimacy (1992), Beyond Left and Right (1994) and The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (1998). Giddens' ambition is both to recast social theory and to re-examine our understanding of the development and trajectory of modernity.

Currently Giddens serves as Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics.