Richard Hames is a futurist, best-selling author and knowledge designer. Recently declared by Forbes Asia as one of the smartest people on the planet he is considered to be among the world's most influential thought leaders and change strategists. Richard is Founder and President of The Hames Group (a globally distributed think-tank and strategic design laboratory comprising thought leaders from all fields of human endeavour), Director of the Asian Foresight Institute in Bangkok, and a member of the elite consultant group "The Constellation." He is also a Fellow of the World Academy of Art & Science.Richard’s work as strategic adviser to multinational corporations and governments ranges across issues as diverse as the future of energy, conflict, food security, the economy, regional development, terrorism, taxation, health care, technology and social inclusion.An authority on the design of strategically relevant yet viable 'whole system' solutions for business and government in a globalised world, Richard has built an enviable reputation as a strategic change agent with a range of clients spanning the world and in all sectors of the economy. "It is a rare person who is able to transform our thinking by creating a fundamentally new 
vision of how things could work better. Richard Hames is one of those people."
  Sir Norman Joyce, Chairman, AMI

Parag Khanna is the leading next-generation voice on the future of global affairs. Named one of Esquire magazine's 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century and at the top of Wired magazine's Smart List, Khanna was a foreign policy advisor to President Barack Obama during his historic presidential campaign. He is currently a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, the country's most innovative think tank, where he directs the Roundtable on the Future of the World Economy and advises the US National Intelligence Council's Global Trends 2030 program. He is also co-director of the Hybrid Reality Institute, a global advisory firm providing insight into the implications of emerging technologies.

Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. He  is one of the world's leading historians on the global economy.  Controversial, expansive and eloquent, he writes and speaks about the costs and benefits of globalisation and the relations between finance and politics.

DIANE COYLE (OBE)  former economist at the U.K Treasury, European Editor of Investors Chronicle and Economics Editor of The Independent.  Presently she is Director of “Enlightenment Economics”, the consultancy company she founded in 2001, specialising in global and technological issues.

Amar Bhidé is Thomas Schmidheiny Professor at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Previously he was Professor of Business at Columbia University. He is a founding member of the Center on Capitalism and editor of its journal, Capitalism and Society.

Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), resident in FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, effective July 2010.  He joined Stanford from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University, where he was the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy and director of SAIS' International Development program.

“Modern management theory….treats managers…as individuals driven by isolated gain-maximizing strategies. It is diametrically opposed to the traditional German and perhaps European vision of a company as an embodiment of some over-arching value system, in which a corporation is a microcosm of a general social equilibrium.” Harold James is a renowned historian, specializing in the history of Germany and European economic history. James is a prolific author, having published dozens of books and articles in his field. He is currently a Professor of History at Princeton University as well as a Professor of International Affairs at the University's Woodrow Wilson School. He was educated at Cambridge University and was a Fellow of Peterhouse for eight years before joining Princeton University in 1986.