JOHN MATTONE was recently named by Thinkers50.com as one of the fastest rising stars in the field of leadership development. The Thinkers50, a biennial list of the world’s top business thinkers, identifies people who are making a real difference in the world of business. John was ranked as one of the "World’s Emergent Thought Leaders" and appears on the 2011 Thinkers 50 “Guru Radar” list. He is recognized globally as an inspiring keynote speaker, prolific author, and highly sought-after executive coach. John is President of JohnMattonePartners (JMP), a global leadership consulting firm that specializes in executive assessment, development, and coaching. John has over 30 years’ experience in the fields of executive development and human capital management, an entrepreneur who has built two successful human capital consulting firms, and as executive of a multi-million dollar leadership consulting firm, as a leading author known throughout the Fortune 500 for his extraordinary speaking ability. His newest books, entitled “Stealth Leadership: Using Assessment & Coaching to Propel Your Leaders and Organization to Greatness” and “Unlocking & Unleashing Your Leadership Potential”, are being heralded by leading experts, CEO’s and HR leaders as “groundbreaking and innovative”.

LUCY P. MARCUS won the Thinkers 50 Future Thinker Award which recognises "A Thinker who has emerged over the last two years with the potential to change the world of theory and practice” Challenging conventional wisdom both inside and out of the boardroom, Lucy has been recognized for setting the agenda on future proofing boardrooms and companies around the world. She speaks and writes about corporate governance, ethics and leadership in her own column for Reuters, as well as in The Harvard Business Review, Business Week, and Huffington Post.. The founder of Marcus Venture Consulting, she is committed to fostering sustainable success for funding organisations, working with venture capital and private equity funds, institutions and corporations to build strong funding businesses. As Professor of Leadership and Governance at IE Business School she teaches on their flagship International MBA program and is also a Cambridge Associate at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for International Business and Management (CIBAM). Recognized for her ground breaking work in leadership and governance she was the recipient of the 2011 Yale University "Rising Star of Corporate Governance" Award, and was selected for one of the 2011 National Association Corporate Directors (NACD) Directorship 100 lists for promoting boardroom excellence. She was also recently voted one of 6 of "Britain's Best Connected Women" in the UK Institute of Directors' Director Magazine. The founder of Marcus Venture Consulting, she is committed to fostering sustainable success for funding organisations, working with venture capital and private equity funds, institutions and corporations to build strong funding businesses. As Professor of Leadership and Governance at IE Business School she teaches their flagship International MBA program and is also a Cambridge Associate at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for International Business and Management (CIBAM).

No Straight Lines – the new read/write book from Alan Moore – argues that we have reached the nadir of the adaptive range of an industrialised world, in fact we are now faced with a trilemma of social, organisational and economic complexity, tensions and questions. And therefore face a design problem. No Straight Lines presents a new logic and inspiring plea for a more human centric world that describes an entirely new way for true social, economic and organisational innovation to happen. http://www.no-straight-lines.com/

UMAIR HAQUE is a consultant, author & economist. He is also a columnist and blogger for the Harvard Business Review and is ranked #49 in the "Thinkers 50" List. He is director of "The Havas Media Lab" which is a platform for a new kind of strategic advisor that helps investors and entrepreneurs experiment with radical management business models and strategic innovation. His latest book, "The New Capitalist Manifesto:"Building a Disruptively Better Business published in 201, contends that companies must orient their business models around: “Renewal in order to maximize efficiency; equity in order to maximize productivity; meaning in order to maximize effectiveness; democracy in order to maximize agility; and peace in order to maximize evolvability.” Previously he founded Bubblegeneration, an agenda-setting advisory boutique that shaped strategies across media and consumer industries. He has been ranked the 5th most influential Twitterer in the UK by the Independent, his various media appearances and citations include the FT, the New York Times, Wired, Forbes, the Guardian, MSNBC, and CNN. Umair studied neuroscience at McGill, did his MBA and research with Gary Hamel at London Business School, and more postgraduate work in economics, strategy, and innovation at Oxford.

2011 Ranking: #1 Winner: 2011 Thinkers50 Innovation Award Clayton M. Christensen is the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts on innovation and growth. Christensen is the bestselling author of a number of books: his seminal work, The Innovator's Dilemma (1997) which received the Global Business Book Award for the best business book of the year; The Innovator’s Solution (2003); Seeing What’s Next (2004); Disrupting Class (2008) looks at the root causes of why schools struggle and offers solutions; The Innovator's Prescription (2009) examines how to fix the US healthcare system; The Innovators’ DNA (2011); and The Innovative University (2011). Christensen and his writings have won a number of awards, including five McKinsey Awards for articles published in the Harvard Business Review. Christensen became a faculty member at the Harvard Business School in 1992, and was awarded a full professorship with tenure in 1998, becoming the first professor in the school’s modern history to achieve tenure at such an accelerated pace. In 2000, Christensen founded Innosight, a consulting firm that uses his theories to help companies create new growth businesses. Christensen is also the founder of Innosight Institute, a non-profit think tank whose mission is to apply his theories to vexing societal problems such as healthcare and education. Christensen has advised the executives of many of the world’s major corporations. They generate tens of billions of dollars in revenues every year from product and service innovations that were inspired by his research.

Dave deBronkart, better known on the internet as “e-Patient Dave,” is the leading spokesperson for the e-Patient movement. E-patients are empowered, engaged, equipped and enabled. A high tech executive and online community leader for many years, he was diagnosed in 2007 with Stage IV kidney cancer, with a median survival of just 24 weeks. He used the internet in every way possible to partner with his care team and beat this unbeatable disease. Today he is well. In 2008 he discovered the "e-patient movement", and began studying, blogging, and speaking at conferences, and in 2009 was elected founding co-chair of the new Society for Participatory Medicine. He was a leading voice in Washington for new federal regulations to require that patients and families have access to their electronic medical records, and is now engaged full time in speaking and advocating for patient engagement. A year after the diagnosis Dave was invited to join the annual retreat of the e-Patient Scholars Working Group. Founded by the late Tom Ferguson MD, a true visionary, the group consists of pioneers, both medical and lay, who have been quietly altering the balance of power in healthcare, demonstrating that as the internet brings patients together with information and with each other, a new world of Participatory Medicine is evolving, in which patients become potent agents in creating and managing their own health, in partnership with physicians. An accomplished speaker and writer in his professional life before his illness, today Dave is an advocate and activist engaged in opening health care information directly to patients on an unprecedented level, thus creating a new dynamic in how information is delivered, accessed and used by the patient. This is revolutionizing the relationship between patient and health care providers, which in turn will impact insurance, careers/jobs, quality of life and the distribution of finances across the entire spectrum of health care. He's appeared in Time, U.S. News, and the Health Leaders magazine cover story "Patient of Future". In December 2009 Health Leaders named him to their annual list of "20 people who make Healthcare Better" and in 2010 he released his first book: "Laugh, Sing and Eat Like A Pig "How an empowered patient beat Stage IV Cancer (and what we can learn from it)

Carmen M. Reinhart is the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. She was previously Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Reinhart held positions as Chief Economist and Vice President at the investment bank Bear Stearns in the 1980s, where she became interested in financial crises, international contagion and commodity price cycles. Subsequently, she spent several years at the International Monetary Fund. She is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Reinhart has served on numerous editorial boards, panels, and has testified before congress. She has written and published on a variety of topics in macroeconomics and international finance and trade including: international capital flows, exchange rates, inflation and commodity prices, banking and sovereign debt crises, currency crashes, and contagion.

Dear Diane: You contributed everything I had hoped for and more. I know the journey to prepare for the talk and travel such a long distance is quite arduous. But having a perspective on America from across the pond is more likely to influence our exclusively American audience than our own chatter in the US with one another. In other words, you were superb and made us think. David Braddock University of Colorado

Watch the amazing Niall Ferguson deliver his fascinating talk to TED on the "Six killer Apps of prosperity". He is one of the world's leading historians on the global economy. Called “the most talented British historian of his generation,” his recent book "Civilisation" The west and the rest" is an international bestseller and the basis for a multi-part television documentary. Controversial, expansive and eloquent, he writes and speaks about the costs and benefits of globalisation, the relations between finance and politics, the lessons to be learned from the British experience of empire, and the strengths and limitations of American global power. A contributing editor at the Financial Times, Ferguson brings unique historical perspective to contemporary economic and political issues. Ferguson is author of several other internationally-acclaimed works, including The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus, Empire, The War of the World, and The World’s Banker. He currently is writing a biography of Henry Kissinger. He is a regular contributor to television and radio on both sides of the Atlantic and several of his books have been made into television documentaries, including Empire, Colossus, The War of the World, and The Ascent of Money.

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. His latest book "A Call for Judgment" Sensible Finance for a Dynamic Economy clearly explains how bad theories and mis-regulation have caused a dangerous divergence between the real economy and finance. In simple language Bhidé takes apart the so-called advances in modern finance, showing how backward-looking, top-down models were used to mass-produce toxic products. Thanks to excessively tight securities laws and loose banking laws, anonymous transactions have displaced relationship-based finance. And Bhidé offers, tough simple rules for restoring relationships and case-by-case judgment: limit banks-and all deposit taking institutions-to basic lending and nothing else. A Call for Judgment is both a primer on the role of finance in a dynamic modern economy, and a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of banks functioning as highly centralized, mechanistic entities. It is essential reading for anyone interested in bringing the economy back to a point at which decisions can be made that foster organic economic growth without the potentially disastrous risks currently accepted by modern finance