Dr. Michelle R. Weise is the author of Long-Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet (Wiley, 2021). Her book was awarded the 2021 Phillip E. Frandson Award for Literature by UPCEA (University Professional and Continuing Education Association), recognizing the author and publisher of an outstanding work of continuing higher education literature. Thinkers50 named her one of 30 management and leadership thinkers in the world to watch in 2021.

Dr. Weise leads Rise & Design, an advisory service tailored for organizations seeking to design education and workforce strategies that will prepare working-age adults for the jobs of today and tomorrow. In the past, she has served as Vice Chancellor of Strategy and Innovation at National University System, Senior Advisor at Imaginable Futures, a venture of The Omidyar Group. She was also the Chief Innovation Officer of Strada Education Network as well as of Southern New Hampshire University. With Clayton Christensen, she co-authored Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution (2014) while leading the higher education practice at Christensen’s Institute for Disruptive Innovation.

Her service work includes advising BrightHive, a data collaboration platform, the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), the SkillUp Coalition, Basta, Hitch, Bayes Impact, Clayton Christensen Institute Social Capital R&D Project, and World Education’s Personal and Workplace Success Skills Library. She has also served as a commissioner for Massachusetts Governor Baker’s Commission on Digital Innovation and Lifelong Learning, Harvard University’s Task Force on Skills and Employability, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education.

Her commentaries on redesigning higher education and developing more innovative workforce and talent pipeline strategies have been featured in The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review and on PBS NewsHour.

Michelle is a former Fulbright Scholar and a graduate of Harvard and Stanford.

Paul Leinwand is an Adjunct Professor of Strategy at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, and Global Managing Director, leading the Firm's approach to Capabilities Driven Strategy and Growth for Strategy&, PwC's strategy consulting business (previously Booz & Company where he was a senior partner).   
 
Mr. Leinwand has co-authored a series of books with Harvard, including Beyond Digital: How Great Leaders Transform Their Organizations and Shape the Future (Harvard Business Press, 2022), Strategy That Works: How Winning Companies Close the Strategy through Execution Gap (Harvard Business Press, 2016), The Essential Advantage: How to Win with a Capabilities-Driven Strategy (Harvard Business Press, 2010) and Cut Costs & Grow Stronger (Harvard Business Press, 2009).   He has also co-authored many articles on purpose, identity, strategy and leadership with HBR, including Why Are We Here?, The Coherence Premium, Digitizing isn't the same as Digital Transformation, 6 Leadership Paradoxes for the Post-Pandemic Era, The Cure for the Non-For-Profit Crisis, Ask an Expert: How Do I Become a CEO?, Your Whole Company Needs to Be Distinctive, Not Just Your Product, as well as articles with the Wall Street Journal and Strategy + Business. 
 
Mr. Leinwand sits on the board of the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, the Goodman Theatre, The Adirondack Mountain Club, and The Genuine Scooter Company, and has served as an advisor to many non profits.   Mr. Leinwand has spoken about topics of purpose, identity, strategy at numerous events and forums, and also served on the World Economic Forum's Global Future Councils.     
 
Mr. Leinwand has a Masters in Management from Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis.

Martin Ford is a futurist and author focusing on artificial intelligence and robotics, and the impact of these technologies on the job market, economy and society.

He has written four books on technology. His 2015 book, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, was a New York Times bestseller and won the £30,000 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.

In Ford's most recent book, Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything (2021), he argues that AI is a systemic, general purpose technology that will ultimately compare to electricity in terms of its impact on the economy and society. Ford argues that AI will be one of humanity's most consequential technologies, transforming virtually every industry and aspect of civilization, and that it will be critical driver of increased innovation and creativity that will lead to future advances across a broad range of fields in science, engineering and medicine.

Ford's previous book, Architects of Intelligence: The Truth about AI from the People Building It (2018) consists of conversations with the most prominent research scientists and entrepreneurs working in the field of artificial intelligence, including Demis Hassabis, Geoffrey Hinton, Ray Kurzweil, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, Nick Bostrom, Fei-Fei Li, Rodney Brooks, Andrew Ng, Stuart J. Russell and many others. The conversations recorded in the book delve into the future of artificial intelligence, the path to human-level AI (or artificial general intelligence), and the risks associated with progress in AI.

His first book, The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future (2009) also dealt with the effects of automation resulting from advances in artificial intelligence, and the potential for structural unemployment and dramatically increasing inequality.

Ford earned a BSE in computer engineering, magna cum laude, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a graduate business degree from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.