The judges 2014

LIONEL BARBER

Editor, Financial Times

Lionel Barber is the editor of the Financial Times. Since his appointment in November 2005, the FT has been pioneering the concept of the integrated newsroom, where reporters and editors work seamlessly across print and digital formats. During Mr Barber’s tenure, the FT has won numerous global awards for its quality journalism, including three newspaper of the year awards (2008), which recognised the FT’s role ‘as a 21st century news organisation.

As editor, Mr Barber has interviewed many of the world’s leaders in business and politics including: President Barack Obama, Premier Wen Jiabao of China, President-elect Demetri Medvedev of Russia, President Lula of Brazil, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India.

In depth

FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award

A panel of judges chaired by Lionel Barber will decide on the book that has provided the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues.

Mr Barber began his career in journalism in 1978 as a reporter for The Scotsman. He moved to The Sunday Times as a business correspondent in 1981. He joined the FT in 1985 as a business reporter. In 1986, he became Washington correspondent before being appointed Brussels bureau chief in 1992. He served as the news editor from 1998-2000 before taking over charge of the continental European edition between 2000 and 2002, when he became US managing editor in charge of the FT’s American editorial operations.

In 2001, Mr Barber was invited to brief George W. Bush on European affairs ahead of the president’s inaugural mission to Europe. In the same year, European Voice named him one of the 50 most influential personalities in Europe.

Mr Barber has co-written several books and has lectured widely on US foreign policy, transatlantic relations, European security and monetary union in the US and Europe and appears regularly on international TV and radio.

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. Previously, he attended high school at Dulwich College in London.

During his career, Mr Barber has received several distinguished awards. In 1981, he was named Young Journalist of the Year in the British press awards. In 1985, he was the Laurence Stern fellow at the Washington Post. In 1992, he was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1996, he was a visiting fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. In 1998, he was named one of the 101 most influential Europeans by Le Nouvel Observateur. In 2009, he was awarded the St George Society medal of honour for his contribution to journalism in the transatlantic community. In February, 2011 he was appointed to the Board of Trustees at the Tate.

STEVE COLL

Dean of the School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York
Staff writer at The New Yorker magazine

Steve Coll spent two decades at the Washington Post as a financial reporter, foreign correspondent and senior editor. He also served for five years as president of the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank. He has twice received the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of seven books, including Ghost Wars, which won the Pulitzer for general nonfiction in 2005, and Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, which in 2012 won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award.

Mr Coll joined the Post as a general assignment writer in 1985. In 1987, he moved to New York to cover the world of corporate takeovers on Wall Street, the stock market crash, the Michael Milken investigations and the SEC as the Post’s financial correspondent. In 1989, he moved to New Delhi to become the Post’s South Asia correspondent. For three years he covered India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal. In 1992, he was appointed the Post’s first international investigative correspondent, based in London, from where he traveled widely to cover emerging trans-national subjects such as terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and global economic integration.

His other professional awards include the 1992 Livingston Award for outstanding foreign reporting. He received the 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award for his coverage of the civil war in Sierra Leone, as well as the Overseas Press Club Award for international magazine writing. His 2008 book, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century, received P.E.N. America’s John Kenneth Galbraith prize.

Mr Coll graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Cum Laude, from Occidental College in 1980 with a degree in English and history. He lives in New York.

Chairman, General Atlantic LLC

Steven Denning joined General Atlantic in 1980. Prior to GA, Mr. Denning was with McKinsey & Company. He received an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1978. Mr Denning also served for six years in the US Navy, where he earned an MS degree from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He received a BS from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1970. Mr. Denning is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Stanford University. He is on the Board of Directors of The Nature Conservancy, the Council on Foreign Relations and is a director of The Thomson Reuters Corporation.

Member, Allianz International Executive Board
Chief Economic Advisor to its Management Board; Chairman, President Obama’s Global Development Council

Mohamed El-Erian has 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 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 bestseller, 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 U.S. 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 master’s 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.

HERMINIA IBARRA

Prior to 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. Thinkers50 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 programs 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.

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 2000-2005, 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.

SHRITI VADERA

Director, Shriti Vadera Ltd
Non Executive Director, BHP Billiton and AstraZeneca

Shriti Vadera advises governments, investors and companies on strategy, finance and restructuring and is a Non-Executive Director of BHP Billiton and AstraZeneca. She has undertaken a wide range of assignments in recent years, for example, advising the Korean Government on its role as Chair of the G20, European periphery countries on the Eurozone crisis, the Government of Dubai on the restructuring of Dubai World’s debt, Temasek Holdings (Singapore) on strategy and 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 and Business Departments. She worked on the government’s response to the financial crisis and was a key architect of the UK bank recapitalisation plan and 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 prior to 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 2014.