Topic: Management

Gunter Pauli

Gunter Pauli was born in Antwerp, Belgium, in March 1956. In 1979 he graduated as “Licencié en Sciences Economiques” from Loyola's University (today University of Antwerp) in Belgium and obtained his masters in business administration from INSEAD in 1982 at Fontainebleau, France thanks to a scholarship from the Rotary International Foundation. During the time he was studying, he held the most diverse jobs in order “to sustain family, education and to save money, which permitted extensive traveling during the summer holidays". In 1978 he was elected as national president of the students’ union AIESEC.

He was the founder and Chairman of PPA Holding and of more than 10 other companies, founder and CEO of the European Service Industries Forum (ESIF),  Secretary General of the European Business Press Federation (UPEFE), founder and president of the Foundation “Mozarteum Belgicum“, Chairman and President of Ecover, and advisor to the Rector of the United Nations University in Tokyo (Japan).

His entrepreneurial activities span business, culture, science, politics and the environment. Under his leadership, Ecover pioneered an ecological factory in 1992, featured on CNN Prime Time News. He founded the "Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives" (ZERI) at the United Nations University in Tokyo, and subsequently established The Global ZERI Network as a foundation, redesigning production and consumption into clusters of industries inspired by natural systems.

He is dedicated to design and implement a society and industries, which respond to people’s needs using what is locally available. His visionary approach supported by dozens of projects on the ground landed him an invitation to present his cases at the World Expo 2000 in Germany. There he constructed the largest bamboo pavilion in modern days presenting 7 breakthrough initiatives. It became the most popular pavilion with 6.4 million visitors. Unfortunately, the pavilion was destroyed after the Expo. However the original built in Manizales, Colombia still stands as a symbol for the Coffee Region.

His latest initiatives include the design of a solution for the plastic soup floating in the oceans and the creation of a protective zone with islands to avert rising sea levels. He is actively involved to ensure that the largest herd of rhinos (2,400 in Kaziranga National Park in India) will be free of poachers thanks to an intensive economic and community development program in coordination with organic tea plantations.

He has been visiting lecturer and professor at universities in on all continents, and Member of the Board of NGOs and private companies in Asia, USA and Latin America. He has advised governments, entrepreneurs and industry leaders on how to implement breakthrough innovations that permits society to better respond to the basic needs of all, starting with water, food, housing, health and energy. He works with what is locally available, focuses on the generation of value.

He is a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences (San Francisco, USA), a creative Member of the Club of Budapest (Hungary), Member of the Club of Rome, moderated the Roundtable of Nobel Science Laureates hosted by HM King of Jordan State and obtained a Doctorate from the Italian Government in systems design. He has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Pécs, Hungary.

Gunter has published 20 books (written 16 - edited 4), which have been printed in +30 languages and 365 fables bringing science and emotions to children. Over 17 million copies have been distributed worldwide. One of his fables “The Strongest Tree” is available in over 100 languages. His latest  book published in April 2015 "The Blue Economy 2.0: 200 projects implemented, $4 billion invested and 3 million jobs created" is the new reality inspired the vision of his Report to the Club of Rome presented on November 2, 2009.

His next book "From Deep Ecology to Blue Economy: 21 Principles of the New Business Model" will be forthcoming in the Fall of 2016. He is father of five sons, one daughter (Adopted) and married to Katherina Bach. Fluent in seven languages and having resided on 4 continents, he is a world citizen.

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.

John Boudreau

Dr. Boudreau is recognized worldwide for breakthrough research on the bridge between superior human capital, talent and sustainable competitive advantage. His research has received the Academy of Management's Organizational Behavior New Concept and Human Resource Scholarly Contribution awards.

Dr. Boudreau consults and conducts executive development with companies worldwide that seek to maximize their employees' effectiveness by quantifying the strategic bottom-line impact of superior people and human capital strategies, including Boeing, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Corning, Citigroup, Dell, Frito-Lay, GE, The Hartford, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, Mattel, Merck, Microsoft, Novartis, Royal Dutch Shell, Sun Microsystems, Unisys, the United Nations, and Williams-Sonoma. He was an architect and the first Visiting Director of Sun Microsystems' unique Research and Development Laboratory for Human Capital.

Dr. Boudreau has published more than 50 books and articles. In addition to HR metrics, his large-scale research studies and highly focused qualitative research have addressed decision-based HR, executive mobility, HR information systems and organizational staffing and development. His research findings have been published in Management Science, Academy of Management Executive, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Personnel Psychology, Asia-Pacific Human Resource Management, Human Resource Management, Journal of Vocational Behavior, Human Relations, Industrial Relations, Journal of Human Resources Costing and Accounting, and Personnel Administrator. He co-authored a best-selling textbook on human resource management that reached its eight edition and was translated into Chinese, Czech, Spanish and others. Features on his work have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Business Week, Training, and Human Resources Management.

The recipient of the General Mills Award for teaching innovations at Cornell University, Dr. Boudreau also founded the Central Europe Human Resource Education Initiative, which links American HR professionals and academic researchers with faculty and students in the Czech and Slovak Republics. A strong proponent of corporate/academic partnerships, Dr. Boudreau has directed the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies (CAHRS), which partners executives from America's top corporations with university researchers and students to explore leading-edge HR issues. This Cornell University think tank has generated groundbreaking insights and practical solutions for the human resource challenges that affect most organizations today. Dr. Boudreau is a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources. He is a member of the board of advisors the Human Resource Planning Society, and for Brassring.com, a technology information and career portal.

He is a Trustee for the Foundation of the National Academy of Human Resources. He chaired the Academic Advisory Board of the California Strategic HR Partnership, a silicon-valley HR executive consortium, and served on the boards of advisors for the Saratoga Institute, a leading global source of human capital benchmarking and performance measures. He has also been elected to the executive committees of the Human Resources Division of the Academy of Management and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

Henry Mintzberg

After receiving his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from McGill University in Montreal (1961), Henry worked in Operational Research at the Canadian National Railways, and then received a masters and doctorate from the MIT Sloan School of Management in Boston. In 1968, Henry Mintzberg returned to McGill, where he joined what is now called the Desautels Faculty of Management. He currently holds the Cleghorn Professorship of Management Studies, having been half-time since the mid 1980’s, and has been a visiting professor at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, London Business School in the U.K., Insead in France, and H.E.C. in Montreal.

He devotes himself largely to writing and research, over the years especially about managerial work, strategy formation, and forms of organizing. In 2004, Mintzberg published Managers not MBAs, in 2007 Tracking Strategies, in 2013 Simply Managing, and in 2015 Rebalancing Society, the implications of which are now his central focus. He is also completing a monograph entitled Managing the Myths of Health Care.

He has worked for much of the past two decades, in collaboration with colleagues from Canada, England, France, India, Japan, and now China and Brazil, on developing new approaches to management education and development. Henry is teaching in both The International Masters in Practicing Management (it has been running since 1996) and the International Masters for Health Leadership (since 2006). Both are rather novel ways to help managers learn from their own experience. In 2007, CoachingOurselves.com was developed, which brings all these efforts to natural fruition, by enabling small groups of practicing managers to develop themselves and their organizations in their own workplace. A GROOC (MOOC for groups) called Social Learning for Social Impact will appear on edX in September 2015.

In all, he has published about 170 articles and 17 books. Honors have included election as an Officer of the Order of Canada and of l'Ordre national du Quebec, selection as Distinguished Scholar for the year 2000 by the Academy of Management, and two McKinsey prizes for articles in the Harvard Business Review.

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.