John Seely Brown (JSB) is a visiting scholar and advisor to the Provost at University of Southern California (USC) and the Independent Co-Chairman of the Deloitte’s Center for the Edge. Prior to that he was the Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)—a position he held for nearly two decades. He was a cofounder of the Institute for Research on Learning (IRL). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education.

JSB is an avid reader, traveler and motorcyclist. Part scientist, part artist and part strategist, his views are unique and distinguished by a broad view of the human contexts in which technologies operate and a healthy skepticism about whether or not change always represents genuine progress.

His unofficial title has become Chief of Confusion focusing on helping people ask the right questions and make sense out of a constantly changing world.

John Hagel III has more than 40 years’ experience as a management consultant, author, speaker and entrepreneur. After recently retiring as a partner from Deloitte, McGraw Hill published in May 2021 his latest book, The Journey Beyond Fear, that addresses the psychology of change and he is developing a series of programs to help people navigate through change at many levels. John has founded a new company, Beyond Our Edge, LLC, that works with companies and people who are seeking to anticipate the future and achieve much greater impact.

While at Deloitte, John was the founder and chairman of the Silicon Valley-based Deloitte Center for the Edge, focusing on identifying emerging business opportunities that are not yet on the CEO’s agenda. Before joining Deloitte, John was an independent consultant and writer and prior to that was a principal at McKinsey & Company and a leader of their Strategy Practice as well as the founder of their E-Commerce Practice. John has served as senior vice president of strategy at Atari, Inc., and is the founder of two Silicon Valley startups.

John is also a faculty member at Singularity University where he gives frequent talks on the mounting performance pressure created by digital technology and promising approaches to help traditional companies make the transition from a linear to an exponential world. He is also on the Board of Trustees at the Santa Fe Institute, an organization that conducts leading edge research on complex adaptive systems. He has also led a number of initiatives regarding business transformation with the World Economic Forum.

John is the author of The Power of Pull, published by Basic Books in April 2010. He is also the author of a series of best-selling business books, Net Gain, Net Worth, Out of the Box, and The Only Sustainable Edge. He is widely published and quoted in major business publications including The Economist, Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal, as well as general media like the New York Times, NBC and BBC. He has won two awards from Harvard Business Review for best articles in that publication and has been recognized as an industry thought leader by a variety of publications and institutions, including the World Economic Forum and Business Week.

John has his own website at www.johnhagel.com, and for many years wrote personal blogs at www.edgeperspectives.typepad.com as well as contributing postings on the Harvard Business Review, Fortune and Techonomy websites. He is active in social media and can be followed on Twitter at @jhagel and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jhagel/

John holds a BA from Wesleyan University, a B.Phil. from Oxford University, and a JD and MBA from Harvard University.

Lang joined McKinsey in 1994, and spent the next 13 years as a leader of the Firm's publishing group, including 4 years as editor-in-chief of the McKinsey Quarterly. During that time, he developed and edited more than two hundred articles for the Quarterly and elsewhere, including Harvard Business Review, Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal. He was the collaborating writer behind the best-selling books Net Gain and Net Worth, excerpts from which won the McKinsey Award for best article published in Harvard Business Review in 1999. After leaving the Firm in 2007, Lang co-founded the Deloitte Center for the Edge, where he designed and published primary research into digital technology’s transformation of the global business environment. Published in 2009 as The Shift Index, these “landmark” (HBR) research findings, which have been widely cited in academic and management journals, form the core of Lang’s best-selling book, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion (co-written with John Hagel III and John Seely Brown), named one of Strategy + Business magazine’s Best Business Books of 2010. Lang is also the author of more than two dozen print and digital articles for Harvard Business Review, including “Shaping Strategy in a World of Constant Disruption” (October, 2008), and “The Big Shift: Measuring the Forces of Change” (July, 2009). Lang rejoined McKinsey in 2015 as the Quarterly's executive editor. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife MJ and two children, Kiki and Keilan.