Joel Kurtzman

Joel Kurtzman is Chairman of the Kurtzman Group, a consulting and advisory firm. Through the Kurtzman Group, he is Senior Advisor to the leadership of PricewaterhouseCoopers, the world's largest professional services equity firm. He also advises a number of private equity firms and is co-chairman, with Peter Ueberroth, of the Global Growth Summit at Pebble Beach, a meeting limited exclusively to CEOs. Joel is currently completing his 19th book, Startups That Work, based on his study of successful, venture-funded companies.

By being the Global Lead Partner for Thought Leadership and Innovation at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Kurtzman was responsible for developing new ideas in such areas as strategy, technology, the capital markets, the New Economy, metrics and business policy. He was also responsible for the firm's Menlo Park Technology Centre, its technology forecasts and its innovative R&D. In that role, he developed the "Opacity Index," which tracks the cost of capital globally and "Paths to Value," which examines how value is created in early stage companies. 

Joel Kurtzman was a partner in a specialized private equity investment firm, Knowledge Universe, and president of his own advisory firm and was an alliance partner with Booz-Allen & Hamilton. For Booz-Allen, Joel created Strategy & Business, and its related book program and was a member of that firm's core knowledge team. Among his other clients were several high tech firms, professional services firms and private equity firms.

While in private equity, Kurtzman led a team on a $4.2 billion leveraged buyout of a global publishing company. Joel Kurtzman was the former Editor of the Harvard Business Review and a former member of the editorial board of Harvard Business School Publishing. In addition, he was business editor and columnist for six years at The New York Times specializing in international economics and covered the break up of the Soviet Union. He was a columnist for Fortune. Kurtzman is the author or editor of 19 books and hundreds of articles and also serves as a member of the editorial board of MIT's Sloan Management Review. To add to his list of experience, Joel is the on-air business book reviewer on CNN.