Charles Leadbeater

Charles Leadbeater is an ideas generator, author and adviser to leading European companies. He is reportedly Tony Blair’s favourite corporate strategist and last year published his acclaimed book entitled Up The Down Escalator. Why The Global Pessimists Are Wrong.

His previous book Living on Thin Air: The New Economy was published in 1999. The book is published in Italian, Chinese, German and Korean as well as in the US. Charles writes regularly for the Industry Standard magazine as well as contributing to the New Statesman, the Financial Times and The Guardian. In October 2002 he was listed by GQ magazine as one of the 30 Most Powerful Men in Britain and in 2003 Accenture ranked him one of the top 200 management thinkers in the world.

He spent ten years working on the Financial Times where he was Labour Editor, Industrial Editor and Tokyo Bureau Chief before becoming the paper’s Features Editor. He became Assistant Editor in charge of Features at The Independent where, with Helen Fielding, he devised Bridget Jones’s Diary.

Charles has been an adviser to the Downing Street Policy Unit and the Department of Trade and Industry on the Internet and the knowledge driven economy. He drafted the UK Government’s White Paper – Our Competitive Future: Building the Knowledge Driven Economy published in 1998, the Science White Paper published in 2000 and helped to draft the Communications White Paper also published in 2000 and the Competitiveness White Paper published in 2001.

Charles advises the European Commission, working as a special adviser on competitiveness and the New Economy. In the run up to the EU’s Lisbon summit in Spring 2000, he wrote the draft report presented at the Lisbon summit: “The New Economy: The European Model.” He brings a global perspective to innovation having researched in Silicon Valley, Sweden, Finland, China and India.