The panel members

View the judges in session in our picture gallery

Lionel Barber, editor, Financial Times

Lionel Barber is the editor of the Financial Times, appointed in November 2005. Previously, he was the newspaper’s US managing editor, based in New York, responsible for the US edition and all US news on FT.com.

Joining the FT in 1985, he was the editor of the continental European edition between 2000 and 2002 and from 1998 till 2000, he was the news editor. He has also been the Brussels bureau chief, US editor and Washington correspondent.

In 2001, Barber was invited to brief George W. Bush on European affairs ahead of the president’s inaugural mission to Europe. In the same year, European Voice named him one of the 50 most influential personalities in Europe.

Barber began his career in journalism in 1978 as a reporter for The Scotsman. He moved to The Sunday Timesto becomea business correspondent in 1981.

He has written several books and has lectured widely on US foreign policy, transatlantic relations, European security and monetary union in the US and Europe. He appears regularly on national and international TV and radio.

Barber graduated from Oxford University with a joint honours degree in German and modern history and speaks fluent French and German.

Lloyd C. Blankfein, president and chief operating officer, The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.

Lloyd is president and chief operating officer of The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. and a director of the firm. He is also a member of the firm’s Management, Risk, Finance, and Diversity Committees.

Prior to assuming his current responsibilities, Lloyd served as vice chairman of Goldman Sachs, with management responsibility for the Equities and Fixed Income, Currency Commodities Divisions. He was co-head of the FICC division from its formation in 1997 and was based in London in 1998 and 1999 in this capacity. Lloyd was named co-head of the J. Aron Currency and Commodities division in 1994. He became a partner in 1988 and a managing director in1996.

Lloyd joined the firm in 1982 after working as an attorney in a private law firm. He received a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1978 and an A.B. from Harvard College in 1975.

Lloyd is a director of the Robin Hood Foundation and chairman of the Financial Aid Task Force at Harvard University. He serves as a member of the Board of Trustees of the New-York Historical Society as well as the Board of Overseers of the Weill Medical College of Cornell University and the Board of Directors of the Partnership for New York City. He resides in New York City with his wife, Laura, and their three children.

John Gapper, chief business commentator and associate editor, Financial Times

John Gapper writes a weekly column, appearing on the FT’s comment page, about business trends and strategy. He also contributes leaders and other articles.

Before taking up this role, he was assistant editor in charge of the Comment Analysis pages of the FT, as well as features.

He has worked for the FT since 1987, covering labour relations, banking and the media. Before that, he worked as a reporter for a variety of newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Daily Mirror.

In 1991-92, he was a Harkness fellow of the Commonwealth Fund of New York, and studied US education and training at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is co-author, with Nicholas Denton, of All That Glitters, an account of the collapse of Barings in 1995.

Jeffrey Garten, Juan Trippe Professor of International Trade, Finance and Business, Yale School of Management

Jeffrey E. Garten, Juan Trippe Professor of International Trade, Finance and Business, was dean of the Yale School of Management from November 1995 to June 2005. During his tenure at Yale, which began in November 1995, the School has established the International Center for Finance at Yale; the International Institute for Corporate Governance; the Sachem Venture Capital Fund for Projects in New Haven; and the Yale SOM - The Goldman Sachs Foundation Partnership on Nonprofit Ventures. The number of student applications has increased 75%, and the size of the faculty has grown by 42%.

Garten serves on the boards of directors of the Aetna Corporation, the Calpine Corporation, CarMax, and Credit Suisse Asset Management. He writes a monthly column for Business Week on major challenges facing global business leaders.

Prior to coming to Yale, he was the undersecretary of commerce for international trade in the first Clinton administration, where he focused on promoting American business interests in Japan, Europe and many big emerging markets like China, India, and Brazil.

From 1979 to 1992, he worked on Wall Street as a managing director of Lehman Brothers and the Blackstone Group. During this time, he specialized in debt restructuring in Latin America, built up and directed the Asian investment banking business for Lehman from Tokyo, and restructured some of the world’s largest shipping companies in Hong Kong.

From 1973 to 1978 he served on the White House Council on International Economic Policy in the Nixon administration and on the policy planning staffs of Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance in the Ford and Carter administrations.

He is the author of A Cold Peace: America, Japan, Germany and the Struggle for Supremacy (1992), The Big Ten: The Big Emerging Markets and How They Will Change Our Lives (1997), The Mind of the CEO (2001), and The Politics of Fortune: A New Agenda For Business Leaders (2002). He has also edited and contributed to the anthology, World View: Global Strategies for the New Economy (2000).

Garten holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College, 1968, where his focus was government and economics, and a Ph.D. from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, 1980, where he specialized in international economics and international organizations. From 1968 to 1972 he served as a lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne Division and a captain in the U.S. Army Special Forces.

Andrew Gowers, former editor, Financial Times

Andrew Gowers was appointed editor of the Financial Times in October 2001.

After graduating from Cambridge University, Andrew began his journalistic career in 1980 when he joined Reuters as a graduate trainee. In 1981, he was appointed Brussels correspondent and in 1982 he became Zurich correspondent.

He joined the FT in 1983 on the foreign desk in London. In 1984, he became agriculture correspondent and in 1985 he was appointed commodities editor. In 1987, he became Middle East editor, in 1990 features editor, and in 1992, foreign editor. In 1994, he was appointed deputy editor.

From July 1997, he spent 15 months as acting editor while the editor, Richard Lambert, was in New York to launch the new US edition of the Financial Times. In January 1999, Andrew Gowers was appointed founding editor of a new German language business newspaper, Financial Times Deutschland, a joint venture between the Financial Times Group and Gruner + Jahr, one of Germany’s leading newspaper and magazine publishers. FT Deutschland launched in February 2000.

Andrew Gowers is co-author of a biography of Yasser Arafat published in 1990 and republished in an updated version in 2003. He is married with two children.

Rachel Lomax, deputy governor for monetary policy, Bank of England

Rachel Lomax became Deputy Governor on 1 July 2003. In addition to her membership of the Monetary Policy Committee, she has specific responsibility within the Bank for Monetary Policy, including monetary assessment and money market operations.

Before joining the Bank, she was Permanent Secretary of the Department for Transport. Between 1999 and 2002 she held the same position at the Department for Work and Pensions (previously the Department of Social Security) and, from 1996 to 1999, at the Welsh Office. She was a Vice President and Chief of Staff to the President of the World Bank in Washington in 1995-6.

Her earlier career was spent at HM Treasury, which she joined in 1968 and where she worked on a wide range of macro economic, monetary, and financial issues. She was Principal Private Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Rt Hon Nigel Lawson, in the mid 1980s, and Deputy Chief Economic Adviser in the early 1990s. She was Head of the Economic and Domestic Secretariat at the UK Cabinet Office in 1994.

Rachel Lomax is on the Board of the Royal National Theatre and of DeMontfort University. She graduated from Girton College Cambridge in 1966 and obtained an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics in 1968. She has two grown up sons and two granddaughters.

N.R. Narayana Murthy, chairman and chief mentor, Infosys Technologies

N.R. Narayana Murthy is the Chairman and Chief Mentor of Infosys Technologies Limited, a global Information Technology (IT) consulting and software services provider, headquartered at Bangalore, India. He served as CEO of Infosys for twenty years, handing over the reins to a fellow co-founder in March 2002. In 1999, Infosys was listed on NASDAQ (INFY).

Mr. Murthy is the chairman of the governing body of both the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, and the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. In addition, he is a member of the Board of Overseers of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Cornell University Board of Trustees, Singapore Management University Board of Trustees, the Board of Advisors for the William F. Achtmeyer Center for Global Leadership at the Tuck School of Business, the Advisory Council of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Yale University President’s Council on International Activities.

Mr. Murthy has led the corporate governance initiatives in India. He was the Chairman of the recent committee on Corporate Governance appointed by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI).

Mr. Murthy serves as an independent director on the board of the DBS Bank, Singapore, the largest government-owned bank in Singapore. He also serves as a director on the Central Board of the Reserve Bank of India, as the co-chairman of the Indo-British Partnership, as a member of the Prime Minister’s Council on Trade and Industry, as a member of the Asia Pacific Advisory Board of British Telecommunications plc., and as a member of the Board of New Delhi Television Ltd. (NDTV), India. He is an IT advisor to several Asian countries.

Mr. Murthy has been the recipient of numerous awards and honours. The TIME magazine “Global Tech Influentials” list (August 2004) identified Mr. Murthy as one of the ten leaders who are helping shape the future of technology.He was the first recipient of the Indo-French Forum Medal (in the year 2003), awarded by the Indo-French Forum, in recognition of his role in promoting Indo-French ties. He was voted the World Entrepreneur of the Year – 2003 by Ernst and Young. He was one of the two people named as Asia’s Businessmen of the Year for 2003 by Fortune magazine. In 2001, he was named by TIME/CNN as one of the twenty-five, most influential global executives, a group selected for their lasting influence in creating new industries and reshaping markets. He was awarded the Max Schmidheiny Liberty 2001 prize (Switzerland), in recognition of his promotion of individual responsibility and liberty. In 1999, BusinessWeek named him one of the nine entrepreneurs of the year and he was also featured in the BusinessWeek’s ‘The Stars of Asia’ (for three successive years – 1998, 1999 and 2000). He has been conferred Honorary Doctorate by nine universities in India. In 1998, the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, one of the premier institutes of higher learning in India, conferred on him the Distinguished Alumnus Award, and in 1996-97, he was awarded the JRD Tata Corporate Leadership Award.

Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive, WPP

Martin Sorrell is chief executive and architect of WPP, one of the world’s largest communications services groups.

WPP companies provide clients with advertising; media investment management; information; insight consultancy; public relations public affairs; branding identity, healthcare and specialist communications. Collectively, WPP employs 84,000 people in more than 2,000 offices in 106 countries.

WPP’s major brands include advertising agencies JWT, Ogilvy Mather Worldwide, Y&R, Grey Worldwide and Red Cell Network;global media investment management companies MindShare, Mediaedge:cia and MediaCom; market research companies Millward Brown, Research International, KMR Group and proprietary diagnostic tools for managing brands, BrandAsset® Valuator and BRANDZ; the direct, customer relationship and interactive marketing networks OgilvyOne Worldwide, Wunderman,

141Worldwide and Grey Direct; public relations public affairs firms Hill Knowlton, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, Burson-Marsteller, Cohn Wolfe and GCI; global healthcare companies CommonHealth, Sudler Hennessey,Ogilvy Healthworld and Grey Healthcare Group; and global branding and identity firms Landor, Enterprise IG, Fitch and G2 Worldwide. WPP’s specialist communications group includes firms that provide sales promotions, web communications and hi-tech marketing.

Clients include more than 330 of the Fortune Global 500, over half of the NASDAQ 100 and over 30 of the Fortune e-50.