Hal Varian is chief economist at Google and the author of Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy.

Matt Miller is a senior advisor to McKinsey. This essay is adapted from his new book, The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity.

Judy Estrin is founder and CEO of consulting firm JLabs and author of Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy.

Regina E. Herzlinger is the Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. She has conducted extensive research on health care, including her early predictions of the unraveling of managed care and the rise of both consumer-driven health care and health care focused factories . She is also the author of Who Killed Health Care: America’s $2 Trillion Problem—and the Consumer-Driven Cure.

Charles Kenny, a development economist based in Washington, DC, blogs at charleskenny.blogs.com. This article is based in part on his forthcoming book, The Success of Development: Technology, Ideas and the Global Standard of Living.

Abdallah Daar is professor of public health sciences and of surgery at the University of Toronto and is senior scientist and director of the Program on Ethics and Commercialization for the McLaughlin–Rotman Centre for Global Health.

Carter Bales is managing partner emeritus of the Wicks Group, a private equity firm. From 1976 to 1996, he was head of McKinsey’s worldwide consulting practice in media and communications. He is past vice chairman and a governor emeritus of The Nature Conservancy.

Richard Duke is director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Center for Market Innovation. Prior to joining NRDC, he was an engagement manager at McKinsey, where his work included managing a global assessment of greenhouse gas reduction opportunities and developing a hedging strategy for a leading CO2 credits originator.

Their jointly-authored article, Containing Climate Change, appeared in the September-October 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs.

Mark Lewis is a managing director in commodities research and the global head of carbon research at Deutsche Bank. His global emissions’ research recently ranked number one in Energy Risk magazine’s 2008 survey of commodity markets. Mark previously served as a financial analyst covering the European utility industry and as an academic at London University.

Rex W. Tillerson is the chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil. He joined Exxon in 1975 and assumed his current position in 2006. Tillerson also serves as a committee member of the American Petroleum Institute and as a trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Matthew Kiernan is founder and CEO of Innovest Strategic Value Advisors.  He is a former senior partner with KPMG and the first director of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, based in Geneva, Switzerland.  He is the author of Investing in a Sustainable World.

Ottmar Edenhofer is deputy director and chief economist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, joint chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and personal adviser to the German foreign minister for international climate and energy policy. He is a professor of the economics of climate change at the Technical University of Berlin.

Steffen Brunner is research fellow at the Potsdam Institute, focusing on carbon markets.

Nicholas Stern is IG Patel professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is author of the Stern Report on the Economics of Climate Change, former head of the UK’s Government Economic Service, and former chief economist of the World Bank.

Carter Bales is managing partner emeritus of the Wicks Group, a private equity firm. From 1976 to 1996, he was head of McKinsey’s worldwide consulting practice in media and communications. He is past vice chairman and a governor emeritus of The Nature Conservancy.

Alberto Alessi is CEO of the eponymous Italian design firm, Alessi, known for its innovative collaboration with artists such as Salvador Dalí and Philippe Starck.

Elizabeth Economy is the C. V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Lowell Bryan and Toos Daruvala are directors in McKinsey’s New York office.

Noordin Nanji is Vice President, Strategy & Development of Ballard Power Systems and is responsible for corporate development, major business development initiatives and broader corporate strategy. He is also a principal of Black Pine Capital Group Corporation, a private equity investment firm based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Matthew Klippenstein is a senior fuel cell engineer at Ballard Power Systems. His current focus is fuel cell development for backup power markets. 

Luiz Pires is the Europe, Middle East, and Africa high-tech practice manager in McKinsey’s Munich office.

Andy Grove is the former CEO of Intel.

Moisés Naím is the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine. He has written extensively on international politics and economics and on globalization’s unexpected consequences. Dr Naím, a former economics minister in Venezuela, is also the author of eight books including Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy. His opinion columns and articles appear in many newspapers including Spain’s El Pais, Italy ‘s L’Espresso, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Newsweek, and TIME.

Harold James is professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University, and Marie Curie Professor at the European University Institute.  He studies economic and financial history and modern German history and is the author of several books including The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression.

Gareth Evans is president and CEO of the International Crisis Group, based in Brussels. A former foreign minister of Australia, he is also co-chair of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament. He is the author of several books, including Cooperating for Peace: The Global Agenda for the 1990s and The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All.

Bill Emmott is an independent author and consultant. He was editor-in-chief of The Economist from 1993-2006, and is the author of nine books, many of them on Asia. His latest book is Rivals: How the Power Struggle between China, India and Japan will Shape our Next Decade.

Francis J. Gavin is director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law and Tom Slick Professor of International Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also director of The Next Generation Project, a multi-year national initiative focused on U.S. global policy and the future of international institutions, and is the author of Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958-1971.

Dan Braga is a principal in McKinsey’s Chicago office.

Drew Erdmann is a consultant in McKinsey’s Washington office. Prior to joining McKinsey, he served in a number of US government foreign policy positions, including as the National Security Council’s director for Iran, Iraq, and strategic planning.

Yogesh Malik is an associate principal in McKinsey’s Cleveland office.

Aurobind Satpathy is a director in McKinsey’s Chicago office and one of the senior partners in McKinsey’s global industrial and operations practice. He coleads the North American purchasing and supply-management practice.

Len Nichols is director of the health policy program at the New America Foundation. He has held several positions in health care policy and reform including as the senior adviser for health policy at the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton reform efforts of 1993-94. He has testified frequently before Congress and state legislators and has published widely in a variety of health-related journals.

Michael F. Cannon is the Cato Institute’s director of health policy studies. Previously, he served as a domestic policy analyst for the US Senate Republican Policy Committee under Chairman Larry E. Craig, where he advised the Senate leadership on health, education, labor, welfare, and the Second Amendment. He is the coauthor of Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It.

Jacob S. Hacker is a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley and a fellow at the New America Foundation. He has written extensively on health care. His latest book is The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream.

John Rother is AARP’s executive vice president for policy and strategy where he is responsible for the federal and state public policies of the Association, and for formulating AARP’s overall strategic direction.

Carol Diamond is managing director at the Markle Foundation. She is also chair of Markle Connecting for Health, a public-private collaborative effort that aims to improve health and health care in the United States through the use of information technology.

Josh Lemieux is director of personal health technology at the Markle Foundation.

Robert Atkinson is the founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a Washington, DC-based technology policy think tank. He is also the author of the State New Economy Index series, and, the book, The Past And Future Of America’s Economy: Long Waves Of Innovation That Power Cycles Of Growth.

Iqbal Z. Quadir is the founder and director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which promotes bottom-up entrepreneurship in developing countries. In the 1990s, Quadir founded GrameenPhone, which provides effective telephone access throughout Bangladesh.

Jonathan Bays is a consultant in McKinsey’s New York office; and Paul Jansen is a principal in McKinsey’s San Francisco office.

Jacques Bughin is a director in McKinsey’s Brussels office, Angela Hung Byers is a consultant in McKinsey’s Seattle office, and Michael Chui is a consultant in McKinsey’s San Francisco office.

Eric Drexler, the author of Engines of Creation and Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, is an adviser and consultant on technology strategy and emerging nanotechnologies. His personal blog is at Metamodern.com

Jacques Bughin is a director in McKinsey’s Brussels office.

Mario Morino is co-founder and chairman of Venture Philanthropy Partners, a philanthropic investment organization committed to children of low-income families in the Washington, DC region. He is also the chairman of the Morino Institute, a non-profit organization that explores opportunities to leverage technology to advance social change.

Jens-Olaf Berwig is an associate principal in McKinsey’s Hamburg office, Nathan Marston is a principal in McKinsey’s London office, Lauri Pukkinen is an engagement manager in McKinsey’s Helsinki office, and Lothar Stein is a director in McKinsey’s Munich office.

Soumitra Dutta is the Roland Berger Professor of Business and Technology and founder of eLab at INSEAD. He is the author of Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom and Innovating at the Top.

Steven Brill is a founder of Journalism Online, a company aimed at creating a new business model for online journalism. He is also the founder of the American Lawyer magazine and Court TV and the author of After, a book focusing on the aftermath of the September 11th attacks.

Tom Curley is the president and chief executive officer of The Associated Press. Previously, he was the president and publisher of USA Today and also served as the senior vice president of Gannett.

Paul Steiger is the editor-in-chief, president, and chief executive of ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism. Previously, he served as the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal for 16 years. He is the chairman of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit that has fought for press freedom around the world since 1981.

James Manyika is a director in McKinsey’s San Francisco office, where Lareina Yee is an associate principal; Kara Sprague is a consultant in the Silicon Valley office.

Authors would like to thank Michael Chui, Ajit Dansingani, Minli Virdone, and Joe Newsum.

Joi Ito is the CEO of Creative Commons and a venture capitalist and early-stage investor in consumer Internet companies. He has been involved in the creation of several Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage, and Infoseek Japan.

Scott Griffith is chairman and CEO of Zipcar, the world’s largest car-sharing company.

Mark Helprin is a writer and novelist. His commentaries on politics and culture have appeared in several publications including the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Winter’s Tale, A Soldier of the Great War, and Freddy and Fredericka, among other novels. A senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, his latest book is Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto.

Jeffrey E. Garten is the Juan Trippe Professor of International Trade and Finance at the Yale School of Management and was formally dean from 1996 to 2005. Prior to that, he was undersecretary of commerce for international trade in the Clinton administration and managing director of the Blackstone Group.

Stephen Grenville is a visiting fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, in Sydney, Australia.

Norbert Walter is chief economist of Deutsche Bank Group and head of Deutsche Bank Research.

Richard Dobbs is a director of the McKinsey Global Institute and a director in McKinsey’s Seoul office. David Skilling is a senior fellow with the McKinsey Global Institute, based in Singapore.

Rakesh Mohan recently completed a consulting professorship at the Stanford Center for International Development at Stanford University. He also served as the deputy governor for the Reserve Bank of India. His book Monetary Policy in a Globalized Economy: A Practitioner’s View focuses on issues relating to the evolution of banking and finance, the conduct of monetary policy, the management of the financial sector, and the role of central banking.

Michael Mandel, former chief economist at Business Week, writes about innovation at southmountaineconomics.com. He is also starting up a venture that combines economic/financial journalism and education.

Richard Dobbs—a director at the McKinsey Global Institute, based in Seoul—and David Skilling—a senior MGI fellow, based in Singapore—led led the research effort, along with San Francisco-based MGI fellow Wayne Hu. Susan Lund, MGI’s head of research, is based in McKinsey’s Washington, DC, office; James Manyika is a director in the San Francisco office; and Charles Roxburgh is a director in the London office.

Al Ehrbar is chief executive of EVA Advisers, a registered investment adviser. Earlier in his career, Mr. Ehrbar spent more than 20 years as a financial journalist at Fortune, the Wall Street Journal and Corporate Finance. He is the author of EVA: The Real Key to Creating Wealth (John Wiley & Sons, 1998) and has an MBA in finance and economics from the University of Rochester and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from Northwestern University.

David A. Levy is managing partner of the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center. He is the coauthor, with S. Jay Levy, of Profits and the Future of American Society, published by HarperCollins. Mr. Levy graduated from Williams College Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in mathematics and received an MBA from the Columbia University School of Business.

Dr Gerard Lyons is Chief Economist at Standard Chartered Bank in London.

Tim Adams is managing director of the Lindsey Group. Previously, he served as under secretary of Treasury for international affairs in the second Bush administration, where he was point person on international financial and economic issues.

Charles Wyplosz is a professor of economics at the Graduate Institute of Geneva and the director of the International Center for Monetary and Banking Studies.

Martin Gilman is Professor of Economics and Director of the Centre for Advanced Studies at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Prior to 2006, Gilman was with the International Monetary Fund for 24 years, where he was assistant director in the IMF’s policy department and its representative to the Paris Club. In addition to earning his PhD from the London School of Economics, Gilman attended the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

Dr. Benn Steil is director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, author of the special report Lessons of the Financial Crisis (Counsel on Foreign Relations Press, 2009), and coauthor of Money, Markets, and Sovereignty (Yale University Press, 2009).

Geng Xiao is director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

André Andonian is a director in McKinsey’s Munich office and leader of the Europe, Middle East, and Africa high-tech practice; Christoph Loos is an associate principal in the Frankfurt office; and Luiz Pires is the EMEA high-tech practice manager in the Munich office.

Robert Atkinson is the founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a Washington, DC–based technology policy think tank. He is also the author of the State New Economy Index series.

Stephen Ezell is a senior analyst with ITIF and came to the foundation from Peer Insight, an innovation research and consulting firm he cofounded in 2003.

Eric Beinhocker is a senior fellow with the McKinsey Global Institute.

Jeremy Oppenheim is director of McKinsey’s Climate Change Special Initiative.

Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School and faculty codirector of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. His works include The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom and “Coase’s penguin, or Linux and the nature of the firm,” published in the Yale Law Journal.

Peter Bernstein is founder and president of Peter L. Bernstein, Inc., a global economic consultancy started in 1973. He has written nine books on risk management and finance, including Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk and Capital Ideas.

Ian Bremmer is president of Eurasia Group, a political-risk consultancy. His books include the forthcoming The Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge for Strategic Investing, with Preston Keat. He is a regular contributor to the International Herald Tribune and a contributing editor at the National Interest and Survival.

Horace Wood Brock is president of Strategic Economic Decisions, which he founded in 1985 with the sponsorship of institutions including Fidelity Investments, GE Capital, and the IBM Pension Fund. His advisory service focuses on forecasting and analyzing market risks, specializing in the application of the economics of uncertainty model developed by economist and Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow.

Jacques Bughin is a director in McKinsey’s Brussels office and works in media, telecommunications, and high tech and leads two McKinsey digital-transformation initiatives.

James Manyika, a director in the San Francisco office, leads the high-tech strategy practice and McKinsey’s technology initiative.

Roger Roberts is a principal in the Silicon Valley office and leads the North American IT strategy practice.

Colin Campbell is founder and chairman of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas. He joined the oil industry as an exploration geologist and served in executive positions with Amoco, Fina, and Shenandoah Oil and was chairman of the Nordic American Oil Company. He has also consulted to several organizations and has written five books, the latest being Oil Crisis.

Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and previously served as senior adviser on employment policy to the Kingdom of Bahrain.

Robert Carlson is a principal at Biodesic, a biological engineering, consulting, and design firm in Seattle. He earned a doctorate in physics from Princeton University and is interested in the future role of biology as a human technology. He is the author of Biology Is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and Inevitability of Engineering Life, to be published in late 2009.

Nayan Chanda is director of publications at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization and the editor of YaleGlobal Online. He is the author of Brother Enemy: The War After the War and, most recently, Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization. Before joining Yale, he spent nearly 30 years at the Far Eastern Economic Review, based in Hong Kong.

Steven Chu was appointed as US energy secretary by President Barack Obama. Prior to this, he was director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics and molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley.  In 1997, he won the Nobel Prize in physics.

Steve Clemons is director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and publishes the political blog the Washington Note.

Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He is the author of Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures and writes frequently for the New York Times, Forbes, and other publications. He cowrites a blog at marginalrevolution.com. He can be reached at tcowen@gmu.edu.

Janamitra Devan is director of Asia for the McKinsey Global Institute, based in Shanghai. He has published extensively and currently works with consulting teams on new thinking in a range of topics, from macroeconomics to the complex implications of rural–urban development in India and China and how these countries are likely to evolve over the next 20 years.

Thomas Doorley is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Sage Partners, a management consultancy. He is also the founder of the Technology Empowerment Network and served as the inaugural chair of the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers.

Gregg Easterbrook is a fellow of the Brookings Institution and author, most recently, of The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. He is also a contributing editor at the Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, and the Washington Monthly and is currently completing a book about the acceleration of global change.

Richard Elman is the founder and CEO of Noble Group, a global supply-chain-management company based in Hong Kong.

Juan Enriquez is a Managing Director of Excel Medical Ventures. He previously served as founding director of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School and is the author of As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth.

Alain Enthoven is the Marriner S. Eccles Professor of Public and Private Management (Emeritus) in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. A member of the research advisory board for the Committee for Economic Development (CED), he served as project director for the CED report Quality, Affordable Health Care for All.

Diana Farrell joined US President Obama’s administration as deputy director of the National Economic Council and deputy economic adviser to the president.  Prior to her appointment, she was director of the McKinsey Global Institute, McKinsey’s economics research arm.

Richard Foster is a managing partner of Millbrook Management. He is a former McKinsey director and co-leader of the private-equity practice.

Juan Ocampo is the president of Trajectory Asset Management and a former partner at McKinsey.

Phyllis Frosst is the head of Policy and Program Analysis at the National Human Genome Research Institute and a contractor for the National Institutes of Health. This piece represents her personal and professional views, not necessarily those of the US government.

Leslie Gelb is the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Council Board senior fellow. He was formerly a New York Times columnist and senior official in the US State and Defense Departments and is the author of the forthcoming Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy.

Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, teaches a seminar on strategy at Stanford Business School, with Professor Robert Burgelman. They enlisted the students in their fall 2008 Bass seminar to help develop “An electric plan for energy resilience.”

George Halvorson is chairman and CEO of Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California, and author of Health Care Co-ops in Uganda, Strong Medicine, and, most recently, Health Care Reform Now! He is president of the International Federation of Health Plans and chairman of the Governors’ Meeting for Health Care at the 2009 World Economic Forum.

Gary Hamel is a management expert whose most recent book is The Future of Management. He is leading an effort to build the world’s first Management Lab, a setting in which executives and scholars co-create “tomorrow’s best practices” today. Hamel is a visiting professor at the London Business School.

William Haseltine is founder of Human Genome Sciences and served as its chairman and CEO until 2004. He is president of the William A. Haseltine Foundation for Medical Sciences and the Arts, which supports access to high-quality health care in developing countries, primarily India. He was a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health from 1976 to 1993.

Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs (International), was a “sherpa” for the first eight G-7 economic summits, during the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations. A former assistant secretary of state and deputy US trade representative, he is the author of the recent book The Price of Liberty: Paying for America’s Wars from the Revolution to the War on Terror.

Arianna Huffington is cofounder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, an online news site and blog launched in May 2005. She is a nationally syndicated columnist and the author of 12 books, including Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe. She is also cohost of Left, Right & Center, a public-radio political-roundtable program.

Richard Jones is a professor of physics at the University of Sheffield and is the senior strategic adviser for nanotechnology for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the UK’s physical sciences funding agency. He is the author of Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life.

Calestous Juma is a professor of the practice of international development at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He is also director of the school’s Science, Technology, and Globalization Project and lead author of Innovation: Applying Knowledge in Development.

John Kelly is a senior vice president at IBM and the director of IBM Research. He oversees eight laboratories across the globe and helps guide the company’s overall technical strategy. Dr. Kelly also leads IBM’s worldwide intellectual property business, as well as the company’s open-source and open-standards strategies and practices.

Parag Khanna is director of the Global Governance Initiative and senior research fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. He is the author of The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order. He previously served as a senior geopolitical adviser to US Special Operations Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Vinod Khosla, a founder of Sun Microsystems, former partner at Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and now head of Khosla Ventures, has become an influential investor in green technology.

Tommy Koh is ambassador-at-large at Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and chairman of the Institute of Policy Studies and the National Heritage Board in Singapore. He has served as Singapore’s permanent representative to the United Nations and ambassador to Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

M. James Kondo is president of the Health Policy Institute in Japan and cochairman of Table for Two, a program launched by the Forum of Young Global Leaders and the World Economic Forum. He also serves as codirector of the Healthcare and Social Policy Leadership Programme at the University of Tokyo.

Philippe Legrain is the author of Open World: The Truth About Globalisation and, most recently, Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them. He was previously a trade and economics writer for the Economist and special adviser to the director general of the
World Trade Organization. He is currently a visiting fellow at the European Institute of the London School of Economics.

Bjorn Lomborg is an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School and the organizer of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which brings together top economists to set priorities for the world. He is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and, most recently, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming.

Kishore Mahbubani is dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and has just published a book titled The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. He previously served as Singapore’s ambassador to the United Nations and as president of the UN Security Council.

Sebastian Mallaby directs the Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a columnist and former editorial board member at the Washington Post. Before that, he served as the Washington, DC, and Tokyo bureau chief
for the Economist.

Thomas Malone is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and founding director of its Center for Collective Intelligence. He is also a founding codirector of MIT’s Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century initiative and author of The Future of Work.

Paul Mango is a director in McKinsey’s Pittsburgh office, where he leads the North American health care payers and providers practice.

Nicolaus Henke is a director in the London office and leads the European health care payers and providers practice.

William McDonough is an architect and the founding principal of design firm William McDonough + Partners, which focuses on ecological and socially intelligent architecture. Stephan Dolezalek has spent 23 years in Silicon Valley working exclusively with technology-driven companies. He joined VantagePoint Venture Partners in 1999 and currently heads up VantagePoint’s CleanTech practice.

Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books about the environment, including the first account of global warming for a general audience, The End of Nature. A scholar in residence at Middlebury College, he is a cofounder of 350.org and has organized 1,400 demonstrations across the United States to demand action on climate change.

Andrew Nathan is the Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and a specialist in Chinese foreign policy. He is coauthor of The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress: China’s Search for Security and coeditor of How East Asians View Democracy.

Craig Newmark is a senior Web-oriented software engineer with more than 25 years of experience (including 18 years at IBM). In 1995, he started Craigslist, an online community bulletin board with classifieds and discussion forums. Craigslist sites—represented in all 50 US states and in over 50 countries—generate more than 12 billion page views per month.

Jacqueline Novogratz is the founder and CEO of Acumen Fund, a nonprofit global-venture fund managing more than $30 million in investments in South Asia and East Africa, all focused on delivering affordable health care, water, housing, and energy. Her book The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World will be published in March 2009.

Joseph Nye Jr. is the University Distinguished Service Professor and former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He has served as chair of the National Intelligence Council and as deputy under secretary of state. His most recent books include Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, The Power Game: A Washington Novel, and The Powers to Lead.

Gordon Orr is a director in McKinsey’s Shanghai office. He was responsible for opening McKinsey’s practice in China in the early 1990s, led the Greater China practice for many years, and has helped many local companies to innovate their way to success. Initially, much of this work focused on helping them succeed domestically; today the emphasis is on globalization.

Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He has written extensively in the fields of organizational theory and human-resource management and is the author of 12 books, including his latest, tentatively titled Power Rules: An Organizational Survival Guide.

Uwe Reinhardt is a professor at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where his work focuses primarily on health care economics. He has served as a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences since 1978 and is coauthor of The Future U.S. Healthcare System: Who Will Care for the Poor and Uninsured?

Stephen Roach is chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. He formerly served as Morgan Stanley’s chief economist and has been with the firm since 1982.

Kim Stanley Robinson is a science fiction writer whose work has received multiple awards, including science fiction’s Hugo and Nebula awards for his Mars trilogy and The Blind Geometer. In addition to 14 novels and 4 story collections, his writings have appeared in several publications, including Nature, the New York Times, Newsweek, and Wired.

Matt Rogers is a director in McKinsey’s San Francisco office and the leader of McKinsey’s North American petroleum practice. In his ten years at McKinsey, he has consulted primarily in the fields of electric power, oil and gas, and aerospace.

Kenneth Roth is executive director of Human Rights Watch. He has conducted human-rights investigations worldwide, devoting particular attention to issues of justice and accountability for human-rights violations, standards governing military conduct during war, and the responsibilities of multinational businesses. He has written extensively on a range of human-rights topics.

Jeffrey Sachs is a professor of sustainable development and health at Columbia University, as well as director of the school’s Earth Institute. From 2002 to 2006, he served as director of the UN Millennium Project and as special adviser to then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals. He is now special adviser to the current UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon.

Paul Saffo is a technology forecaster based in Silicon Valley. He is currently a consulting associate professor at Stanford University and a visiting scholar in the Stanford Media X research network.

Orville Schell is Arthur Ross Director of the Asia Society Center on US–China Relations and former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written 14 books, 9 of them about China, including Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders.

Carl Schramm is president and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a philanthropic organization based in Kansas City, Missouri, that focuses on fostering entrepreneurship as well as childhood education.

Dane Stangler is a senior research analyst at the foundation.

Clay Shirky is an associate new-media professor in the graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. His writings on Internet technology have been published in the Wall Street Journal and Wired, among others. He is the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

Stan Slap is president and founder of the eponymous management consulting firm, slap, based in San Francisco, and author of a forthcoming book on the need to foster emotional commitment among managers, Bury My Heart At Conference Room B.

Don Tapscott is chairman of nGenera Insight and an adjunct professor at the Rotman School of Management, at the University of Toronto. He has written or cowritten more than a dozen books on technology in business, including Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation and a sequel, Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World.

John Thackara, author of In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World, is director of Doors of Perception, a small production company that teams grassroots innovators in Europe and India with designers to develop a sustainable future. He is also a senior adviser on sustainability to the UK Design Council and commissioner of City Eco Lab in St. Etienne, France.

Rick Wagoner has been the chairman and CEO of GM since 2003. He is leading the automaker through one of the worst downturns in the industry’s history. Developing alternative-fuel cars is a part of that effort. As the leading US automaker, GM will share in the $17 billion government bailout.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger is chairman emeritus of the IBM Academy of Technology. This essay comes from his personal blog.

Jonathan Woetzel is a director in McKinsey’s Shanghai office and the leader of its Asia-Pacific energy and materials practice. He is also director of the McKinsey Global Institute in Asia. His expertise is in corporate finance and strategy, particularly for industrial and consumer companies in China.

Adrian Wooldridge is Washington bureau chief and Lexington columnist at the Economist. He previously served as the magazine’s management correspondent and is coauthor of The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea.