The judges 2015

LIONEL BARBER

Editor, Financial Times

Lionel Barber is the editor of the Financial Times. Since his appointment in 2005, he has helped solidify the FT’s position as one of the first publishers successfully to transform itself into a multichannel news organisation. During Mr Barber’s tenure, the FT has won numerous global prizes for its journalism, including Newspaper of the Year, Overseas Press Club, Gerald Loeb and Society of Publishers in Asia awards.

Mr Barber has co-written several books and has lectured widely on foreign policy, transatlantic relations, European security and monetary union in the US and Europe and appears regularly on TV and radio around the world. As editor, he has interviewed many of the world’s leaders in business and politics, including: President Barack Obama, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and president of Iran Hassan Rouhani.

FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award

After the triumph of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century in 2014, who will win in 2015?

Mr Barber began his career in journalism in 1978 as a reporter for The Scotsman. He then moved to The Sunday Times as a business correspondent and joined the FT in 1985 as a business reporter. During his FT career, he has also served as Washington correspondent, Brussels bureau chief, news editor, European editor and US managing editor.

Mr Barber has received several distinguished awards, including the St George Society medal of honour for his contribution to journalism in the transatlantic community. He serves on the Board of Trustees at the Tate and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Mr Barber graduated in 1978 from St Edmund Hall, Oxford University with a joint honours degree in German and modern history and speaks fluent French and German.

Member, Allianz International Executive Board,
chief economic adviser to its Management Board; chairman, President Obama’s Global Development Council

Mohamed El-Erian has served as CEO and co-chief investment officer of Pimco between 2007 and 2014, and was a managing director there between 1999 and 2006. He has also served as president and CEO of the Harvard Management Company, the entity charged with managing the university’s endowment, and deputy director at the International Monetary Fund. Having been published in Fortune/CNN, Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate, Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, he is a contributing editor at the Financial Times and a Bloomberg View columnist. His first book, When Markets Collide, was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-seller, was the 2008 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year and was named a book of the year by The Economist and one of the best business books of all time by The Independent (UK). Among his many awards and recognitions, he was named to Foreign Policy’s list of Top 100 Global Thinkers for 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012.

Having served on the boards of the US Treasury’s Borrowing Advisory Committee, the New York Fed’s Investment Advisory Committee and the International Center for Research on Women, among others, he sits on the boards of Cambridge in America, the Carnegie Endowment, and the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER). He has chaired Microsoft’s Investment Advisory Committee since 2007. He holds a masters degree and doctorate in economics from Oxford university, having completed his undergraduate degree at Cambridge university. He is an Honorary Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge university.

REID HOFFMAN

Co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn;
partner at Greylock Partners

An accomplished entrepreneur, executive, and investor, Mr Hoffman has played an integral role in building many of today’s leading consumer technology businesses. He possesses a unique understanding of consumer behaviour and the dynamics of viral businesses, as well as deep experience in driving companies from the earliest stages through periods of explosive growth.

In 2009 Mr Hoffman joined Greylock Partners, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm. His areas of focus include consumer internet, enterprise 2.0, mobile, social gaming, online marketplaces, payments, and social networks. His investments include Airbnb, Edmodo, Mozilla (Firefox), Shopkick, Swipely, Wrapp, Coupons.com, Groupon, and Viki. Before joining Greylock, he personally invested in dozens of internet companies including Facebook, Flickr, and Zynga.

In 2003, Mr Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking service. LinkedIn is thriving with more than 300 million members in 200 countries around the world and a diversified revenue model that includes subscriptions, advertising, and software licensing. Mr Hoffman continues to serve as LinkedIn’s executive chairman.

Before LinkedIn, Mr Hoffman served as executive vice-president at PayPal, where he was a founding board member. At PayPal he was responsible for all external relationships, including payments infrastructure, business development, international, government, and legal. He was instrumental to PayPal’s acquisition by Ebay and responsible for partnerships with Intuit, Visa, MasterCard, and Wells Fargo.

Mr Hoffman serves on the boards of Airbnb, Swipely, Mozilla Corporation, Shopkick, Wrapp, and Edmodo. In addition, he also serves on a number of not-for-profit boards, including Kiva, Endeavor, and DoSomething.

Mr Hoffman is a co-author of two books: the New York Times bestsellers The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career, and The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age.

Mr Hoffman earned a masters degree in philosophy from Oxford university, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a bachelors degree with distinction in symbolic systems from Stanford University. In 2010 he was the recipient of an SD Forum Visionary Award and named a Henry Crown fellow by The Aspen Institute.

HERMINIA IBARRA

Cora Chaired Professor of Leadership and Learning Professor of Organizational Behavior, Insead

Before joining Insead, Herminia Ibarra served on the Harvard Business School faculty for 13 years. She is vice-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Women’s Empowerment and Chairs the Visiting Committee of the Harvard Business School. Thinkers 50 ranked Prof Ibarra ninth among the most influential business gurus in the world.

Prof Ibarra is an expert on professional and leadership development. Her book Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career (Harvard Business School Press, 2003) documents how people reinvent themselves at work. Her numerous articles are published in leading journals including the Harvard Business Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, and Organization Science. Her research has been profiled in a wide range of media including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and The Economist. She teaches in a variety of Insead programmes and consults internationally on talent management, leadership development, and women’s careers. A native of Cuba, Prof Ibarra received her MA and PhD from Yale University, where she was a National Science Fellow. Her latest book is Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015).

Partner and director of publishing McKinsey & Company

Rik Kirkland has led McKinsey’s global print and online activities since 2008. These include the McKinsey Quarterly, mckinsey.com (with some 2 million registered users), the McKinsey Insights iPad and Android apps and numerous leading business books, such as Resource Revolution (Amazon, 2014) and Reimagining India (Simon & Schuster, 2013). From 2000 to 2005, he was the editor of Fortune magazine, which under his leadership was three times nominated as a finalist for general excellence by the American Society of Magazine Editors and won numerous other awards. During more than two decades at Fortune, he served as Washington editor, Europe editor, international editor and deputy editor. He has been a frequent guest on CNN and CNBC and served as a moderator at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Fortune’s Global Forum, the Global Infrastructure Initiative and the Microsoft CEO Summit. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, serves on the board of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and the International Center for Journalists and plays guitar in a rock band, The Prowlers.

DAMBISA MOYO

Global economist and author, non-executive director Barclays, SABMiller, Barrick Gold

Dambisa Moyo is a global economist and author who analyses the macroeconomy and international affairs. Her work has taken her to more than 70 countries over the last decade, during which time she has developed a unique knowledge on the inherent conflicts facing developed economies, as well as the interaction between politics, international finance and developing markets.

In particular, her work examines the interplay of international business and the global economy, while highlighting the key opportunities for investment; capitalising on her rare ability to translate trends in markets, politics, regulatory matters and economics into their likely impact on global business.

Dambisa Moyo serves on the boards of Barclays, the financial services group, SABMiller, the global brewer, and Barrick Gold, the global miner. She was an economist at Goldman Sachs and a consultant to the World Bank in Washington. Dambisa was named by Time as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” and to the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders Forum.

She was awarded the 2013 Hayek Lifetime Achievement Award, named for the Nobel Prize winner and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Friedrich Hayek. She has been a participant at the Bilderberg Conference and the US Federal Reserve Jackson Hole Conference. In addition, she serves on the World Economic Forum’s Network of Global Agenda Councils on Global Imbalances, and is a member of the Atlantic Council.

She is the author of the New York Times best-sellers Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa and How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly and the Stark Choices Ahead. Her third book was Winner Take All: China’s Race for Resources and What it Means for the World.

She completed a PhD in economics at Oxford university and holds a Masters degree from Harvard University. She completed an undergraduate degree in chemistry and an MBA in finance at American University in Washington.

SHRITI VADERA

Chairman, Santander UK

Shriti Vadera is chairman of Santander UK and non executive director of BHP Billiton and AstraZeneca. From 2009 to 2014 she advised governments, investors and companies ranging from the chair of the G20, European periphery countries on the eurozone crisis, the Government of Dubai on the restructuring of Dubai World’s debt and Temasek Holdings (Singapore) on strategy to the African Development Bank on raising finance for pan-African infrastructure.

She was a minister in the UK government from June 2007 to September 2009 in the Cabinet Office, Business Department and International Development Department. She worked on the government’s response to the financial crisis and was a key architect of the 2008 UK bank recapitalisation plan and 2009 G20 London summit. She was on the Council of Economic Advisers at the UK Treasury from 1999 to 2007, where she worked on business, productivity and international finance issues, and before that was an investment banker for 14 years with SG Warburg / UBS, with a particular focus on emerging markets.

See more on the FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award