Partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers, UAE
Visiting Fellow, Cranfield School of Management, UK
Adjunct Professor, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS, Singapore
Advisor, Harvard International Negotiation Initiative, Harvard University
Yasar leads the PwC ME Government and Public Sector Group. Prior to joining PwC, Yasar was the Executive Dean of Dubai School of Government and a Fellow at John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Yasar also served as the Strategy Advisor at The Executive Office of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum in Dubai (UAE).
Yasar worked as the Director of the Government Performance Directorate in the Prime Ministry of Jordan, and previously as the Head of Policy and Strategy in the Executive Council of the Dubai Government. Prior to moving to Dubai, Yasar worked as a Research Fellow in Cranfield School of Management in the UK. He is the author of numerous reports and papers on strategy and performance management.

Nicolas Gorjestani is a former Chief Knowledge & Learning Officer at the World Bank. An economist by training, Mr Gorjestani had held a variety of senior staff and management positions at the World Bank for more than three decades, before retiring in July 2007. A global thought leader on organizational knowledge and learning themes Mr. Gorjestani now devotes his time to advising, lecturing and writing on development strategy, knowledge-based development, organizational knowledge sharing and learning, and leadership development issues. Mr Gorjestani is currently a Senior Adviser/Consultant at the World Bank; an Adjunct Professor in Knowledge Ecology at the Polytechnic University in Hong Kong; and has been Executive Director, Secretariat, Global Indigenous Knowledge and Innovation Partnership. He was one of the pioneers of knowledge sharing, learning and innovation at the World Bank, having designed and managed several cutting edge and award winning programs and approaches to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the way to do business in development. Mr. Gorjestani was also Program Director of the World Bank’s Indigenous Knowledge for Development Program. He has also been a member of the Learning Innovation Laboratory (LILA) at Harvard University, and a member of the New Club of Paris, a think tank focused on issues of the global knowledge economy. Mr. Gorjestani has published extensively on knowledge and development topics and keynoted at major international conferences. The World Bank is five-time MAKE Award winner and six-time winner of AQPC Best Practice Partner Awards.

Prof. James Guthrie, Distinguished Professor of Accounting, Department of Accounting & Corporate Governance, Macquarie University. Also is  Head of Academic Relations at the Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand. Joint founding editor of Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal ranked in the top 10 in the world by Goggle Scholar, member of 20 editorial boards. Current fractional professor at Macquarie and Bologna universities. Visiting Professor in Sweden, Italy, New Zealand, Scotland and England. James has published 180 articles and 45 chapters in books. He has over 15,000 citations to his work as measured by Goggle Scholar.
In the international arena on this topic area, Professor Guthrie has been actively involved with the OECD, European and wider academic communities. From advisory work for the OECD dating back to 1998.

Professor Andy Neely is widely recognised as one of the world’s leading authorities on organisational performance measurement and management. He holds joint posts at Cambridge University and Cranfield School of Management. In addition he is Deputy Director of the Advanced Institute of Management Research, the UK’s management research initiative. Previously he has held appointments at London Business School, Cambridge University, where he was a Fellow of Churchill College, Nottingham University, where he completed his PhD and British Aerospace. He was elected a Fellow of the Sunningdale Institute in 2005, a Fellow of the British Academy of Management in 2007 and an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2008.

JC Spender – www.jcspender.com
BA MA (Engineering) Oxford UK; PhD (Corp Strategy) Manchester Bus. Sch. UK
Served in experimental submarines before Oxford. After graduation, did reactor design and development work with Rolls-Royce & Associates on the UK nuclear submarine program. Moved to IBM as large account salesman and team leader, and then into strategy consulting.
Next to a career in investment banking – but quit commerce in 1971 to enter the Manchester PhD program. Thesis awarded the US Academy of Management AT Kearney Prize in 1980 and published as Industry Recipes (Blackwell 1989).
Served on the faculties of City University (London), York University (Toronto), UCLA, University of Glasgow, and the Chair of Entrepreneurship and Small Business at Rutgers (New Jersey).
After a year’s sabbatical with the Advanced Technology Program (US Department of Commerce) appointed Dean, School of Management, New York Institute of Technology and then Dean, School of Business and Technology, Fashion Institute of Technology (SUNY), New York. Retired April 2003.
Awarded, jointly with Robert Grant, the Strategic Management Society’s 2007 Best SMJ Paper Prize for the 1996 Special Issue on Knowledge.
Currently Svenska Handelsbanken Visiting Professor at the School of Economics and Management, Lund University (Sweden), Visiting Professor ESADE/Universitat Ramon Llull (Spain), Visiting Professor Cranfield School of Management, and Visiting Professor Open University Business School.