Association of Research Libraries (ARL®)

http://www.arl.org/rtl/plan/scenarios/provoc_bios.shtml

Planning and Visioning

Envisioning Research Library Futures: A Scenario Thinking Project

ARL Scenarios Project Provocateurs

ARL Scenarios Project Provocateur Biographies

Steven Weber
Jaron Lanier
Michael Dalby
Jay Ogilvy


Steven Weber – Steven Weber is a professor of political science and in the UC Berkeley School of Information, and an expert in international and national security; the impact of technology on national systems of innovation, defense, and deterrence; and the political economy of knowledge-intensive industries particularly software and pharmaceuticals.

Trained in history and international development at Washington University, and medicine and political science at Stanford, Weber joined the Berkeley faculty in 1989. In 1992, he served as special consultant to the president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London. He has held academic fellowships with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is Senior Policy Advisor with the Glover Park Group in Washington, DC, and actively advises government agencies, private multinational firms, and international non-governmental organizations on issues of foreign policy, risk analysis, strategy, and forecasting.

Weber’s major publications include The Success of Open Source, Cooperation and Discord in U.S.-Soviet Arms Control, and the edited book Globalization and the European Political Economy; and numerous articles and chapters in the areas of U.S. foreign policy, the political economy of trade and technology, politics of the post-Cold War world, and European integration. His next book, with co-author Jonathan Sallet, extends the analysis of the political economy of open source software to other technology sectors in the world economy and maps the consequences for economic growth and innovation. With colleague and co-author Bruce Jentleson at Duke, Weber directs the "New Era Foreign Policy Project" and is completing a book manuscript on "The New Age of Ideology" in world politics.


Jaron Lanier – Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, a composer, visual artist, and an author with a book that's just recently come out, "You Are Not a Gadget." His scientific interests include biomimetic information architectures, user interfaces, heterogeneous scientific simulations, advanced information systems for medicine, and computational approaches to the fundamentals of physics. He collaborates with a wide range of scientists in fields related to these interests. Lanier's name is also often associated with Virtual Reality research. He either coined or popularized the term 'Virtual Reality' and in the early 1980s founded VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products.

From 1997 to 2001, Lanier was the Chief Scientist of Advanced Network and Services, which contained the Engineering Office of Internet2, and served as the Lead Scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative, a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet2. The Initiative demonstrated the first prototypes of tele-immersion in 2000 after a three-year development period. From 2001 to 2004 he was Visiting Scientist at Silicon Graphics Inc., where he developed solutions to core problems in telepresence and tele-immersion. He was Scholar at Large for Microsoft from 2006 to 2009, and Partner Architect there from 2009 forward.

As a musician, Lanier has been active in the world of new "classical" music since the late seventies. He is a pianist and a specialist in unusual musical instruments, especially the wind and string instruments of Asia. He maintains one of the largest and most varied collections of actively played rare instruments in the world.


Michael Dalby – Michael Dalby is a general management consultant and Professor of Management and Senior Research Fellow at the Moscow School of Management / Skolkovo.

In the year 2000 Michael founded a management consulting firm combining advisory work in the fields of education, healthcare, family businesses and financial services with research into organizational behavior, governance and strategy implementation. During the decade since he has worked in the US, Mexico, Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He also founded a studio devoted to the professional origination and production of 3D animation, focusing on scientific and business topics.

During the 1990s Michael was Corporate Vice President for Strategy, Business Development and Mergers and Acquisitions at McKesson Corporation, a Fortune-20 healthcare company in San Francisco. Between 1983 and 1994 he was a member of McKinsey & Company, the preeminent global management-consulting firm. Serving clients across a broad range of industries, Michael was a co-founder of McKinsey’s modern healthcare (provider-payer) practice, working intensively in the western United States, Europe and Japan. Elected a partner in 1988, he helped lead the Hong Kong office and in 1990 opened the McKinsey office in Seoul.

A graduate of Yale, Michael later received the PhD degree from Harvard University in Chinese History and East Asian Languages and was a member of the Society of Fellows, as well as an affiliate of the Institute for Humanistic Sciences at Kyoto University. From 1975 to 1983 he was a professor of the history of China and Far Eastern Languages at the University of Chicago.

For 30 years Michael has held leadership roles in community and not-for-profit circles, including serving as Chair of the Board of Directors of the East Bay Community Foundation in Oakland, California, and as Chair for a dozen years of the Crowden Music Center in Berkeley. He was also a member of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford, and Partners in School Innovation. He currently serves on the boards of The Cordes Foundation and ChinaDialogue.


Jay Ogilvy – Jay Oglivy is a cofounder of Global Business Network. His research has focused primarily on the role that human values and changing motivations play in business decision-making and strategy. He has pursued these interests in collaboration with Peter Schwartz since 1979, when he joined SRI International, and from 1987-2009 with GBN/Monitor. Many of the scenario projects he led at GBN for both public and private sector clients addressed "public goods" such as telecommunications, health care, and education. While at SRI, Jay split his time between developing future scenarios for strategic planning and serving as director of research for the Values and Lifestyles (VALS) Program, a consumer segmentation system used in market research. He also authored monographs on social, political, and demographic trends affecting the values of American consumers.

Jay's work builds on his background as a philosopher. He taught at the University of Texas, Williams College, and for seven years at Yale, where he received his PhD in 1968. He is the author of Creating Better Futures: Scenario Planning as a Tool for a Better Tomorrow (2002), Living Without a Goal (1995), Many Dimensional Man (1977); co-author of China's Futures (2001) and Seven Tomorrows (1980); and editor of Self and World (1971, 1980) and Revisioning Philosophy (1991). He is currently at work on a book on emergent systems, e.g., consciousness, leadership, and wealth.