Joel Kurtzman, President of Kurtzman Group

Joel Kurtzman is Chairman of the Kurtzman Group, a consulting and advisory firm, and is a senior advisor to Michael Milken and the Milken companies. He also advises a number of private equity firms and is co-chairman of Corporate Governance Summits. Joel was Global Lead Partner for Thought Leadership and Innovation at PricewaterhouseCoopers. He was a partner in a specialized private equity investment firm, Knowledge Universe, and president of his own advisory firm and was an alliance partner with Booz-Allen & Hamilton. For Booz-Allen, Kurtzman was the former Editor of the Harvard Business Review and a former member of the editorial board of Harvard Business School Publishing. Prior to that, he was business editor and columnist for six years at The New York Times specializing in international economics and covered the break up of the Soviet Union. He was also a columnist for Fortune Magazine. Earlier in his career, Joel was an international economist at the United Nations and World Bank where he was deputy director of the UN’s Project on the Future. His research teams produced a library of 17 volumes of books on the global economy. While at the UN, Joel was involved as a negotiator between India and the Union Carbide Corporation over the Bhopal disaster. He was awarded India’s Indira Gandhi Prize for these efforts. Joel has been author or editor of 21 books and hundreds of articles. He is a member of the editorial board of MIT’s Sloan Management Review. He has been a speaker and moderator at Microsoft’s CEO Summit, its Government Leaders Summit and its CFO Summit. He has also spoken and moderated panels at the World Economic Forum in Davos.