The Opening Plenary will take place in the Great Hall starting at 18:30. For those attending the session, please use the APP “Chat” function to ask questions of the panel (Questions will not be taken from the floor). You can do this by selecting the Plenary Panel from the Agenda and clicking on the Chat icon . You question will be relayed directly to the moderator.
Will Hutton started his career as an equity salesman for a stock broker, before leaving to study for an MBA at INSEAD. Hutton moved on to work in television and radio, spending ten years with the BBC, including working as economics correspondent for Newsnight from 1983 to 1988, where he replaced Peter Hobday. He spent four years as editor-in-chief at The Observer and director of The Guardian National Newspapers before joining the Industrial Society, now known as The Work Foundation, as chief executive in 2000. As well as a columnist, author and chief executive, Hutton is a governor of London School of Economics, a visiting professor at the Alliance Manchester Business School and the University of Bristol, a visiting fellow at Mansfield College Oxford, a shareholder of the Scott Trust Limited which owns the Guardian Media Group, rapporteur of the Kok Group and a member of the Design Council’s Millennium Commission. In 2011, he was appointed as Principal of Hertford College, Oxford. He continues to be associated with the Work Foundation as chair-designate of a major new initiative on innovation. He sits on the European Advisory Board of Princeton University Press.
Geoffrey G. Jones is the Isidor Straus Professor of Business History at the Harvard Business School. He holds BA, MA and PhD degrees from Cambridge University and Honorary Doctorates from Copenhagen Business School and the University of Helsinki. He taught previously at the London School of Economics, and Cambridge and Reading Universities in the UK, and at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He has held Visiting Professorships at Gakushuin University, Tokyo, and Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, and is an Affiliate Professor of Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. He serves on the Executive Committee of the Harvard Center for African Studies, the Faculty Committee of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and on the Policy Committee of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. His works have concentrated on the historical evolution of globalization, international banking and trading, and foreign direct investment by multinationals. He has published histories of Unilever, historical studies of industries over long time periods – including British Multinational Banking 1830-1990 and Merchants to Multinationals (awarded the Newcomen-Harvard Prize and the Wadsworth Prize), Multinationals and Global Capitalism, and Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry. His most recent book is a history of sustainable business worldwide (Profits and Sustainability. A History of Green Entrepreneurship).
Victor Mallet is a journalist, editor, commentator and author with more than three decades of experience in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. He is currently Paris bureau chief of the Financial Times. His previous posts include south Asia bureau chief in New Delhi, bureau chief in Madrid, Asia editor in Hong Kong, and Paris correspondent. He twice won the Society of Publishers in Asia Award for opinion writing. In India, he was twice awarded the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism as a foreign correspondent, first for a 2012 feature about the rise of Narendra Modi and later for a weekend magazine cover story on the Ganges. His latest book is River of Life, River of Death: The Ganges and India’s Future. His highly praised analysis of the south-east Asian industrial revolution and the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, The Trouble with Tigers (HarperCollins), was first published in 1999.
D. Eleanor Westney is Sloan Fellows Professor of Strategy and International Management Emerita at MIT Sloan School of Management. From 2007 to 2014 she was the Scotiabank Professor of International Business and Professor of Organization Studies at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto. After completing a B.A. and an M.A. in Sociology and Japanese studies at the University of Toronto, she received a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1978 from Princeton University, and began her teaching career in the Department of Sociology at Yale University. Her first book, Imitation and Innovation: The Adoption of Western Organizational Forms in Meiji Japan (Harvard University Press, 1987), explored the patterns of cross-border organizational learning, a theme that has continued to be a major focus of her interests. She has written extensively on the organization of multinational corporations, on Japanese MNCs, and on the internationalization of research and development. She has been a visiting researcher at Hitotsubashi University and the University of Tokyo in Japan, a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, a Fellow of the Academy of International Business (AIB), Chair of the International Management division of the Academy of Management, and Dean of the AIB Fellows.