Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is a resident faculty member of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. He is also a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is most recently the author of the books The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006) and Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (2004).
Peter Schwartz is cofounder and chairman of Global Business Network (GBN), a unique membership organization and worldwide network of strategists, business executives, scientists, and artists based in California. GBN specializes in corporate scenario planning and research on the future of the business environment. Schwartz is the co-author of both the 1999 books The Long Boom, and When Good Companies Do Bad Things: Responsibility and Risk in an Age of Globalization, and is the author of the 1991 book, The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World.