Peter Senge
Senior Lecturer, Leadership and Sustainability, MIT Sloan
The Journal of Business Strategy (September/October 1999) named Peter M. Senge one of the 24 people who has had the greatest influence on business strategy over the last 100 years. The Financial Times (2000) named him one of the world’s “top management gurus.” Business Week (October 2001) rated Senge one of the Top Ten Management Gurus.
Senge has lectured extensively throughout the world, translating the abstract ideas of systems theory into tools for better understanding of economic and organizational change. He studies decentralizing the role of leadership in organizations so as to enhance the ability of employees to work productively toward common goals, and the managerial and institutional changes needed to build more sustainable enterprises, which are businesses that foster social and natural as well as economic well being. Senge’s work articulates a cornerstone position of human values in the workplace: namely, that vision, purpose, reflectiveness, and systems thinking are essential if organizations are to realize their potential. He has worked with leaders in business, education, civil society, health care, and government.
Senge is the founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), a global community of corporations, researchers, and consultants dedicated to the “interdependent development of people and their institutions.” He is the author of the widely acclaimed book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization (1990) and, with colleagues Charlotte Roberts, Rick Ross, Bryan Smith and Art Kleiner, co-author of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization (1994) and a second fieldbook The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations (March 1999), also co-authored by George Roth. In September 2000, Senge co-authored a fieldbook on education, the award-winning Schools That Learn: A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents, and Everyone Who Cares About Education (2000). The Fifth Discipline hit a nerve within the business and education community by introducing the theory of learning organizations. Since its publication, more than a million copies have been sold worldwide. In 1997, Harvard Business Review identified it as one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years.

Paulo Renato Souza
Former Brazilian Minister of Education – 1995 – 2002
Paulo Renato Souza is a Brazilian economist and politician. He was one of the founding members of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party in 1988 and served as Minister of Education for Brazil from 1995 – 2002 under the administration of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. During his time in office, Souza oversaw the implementation of the Enem exam system.
In November 2006, Souza was elected to the Chamber of Deputies of Brazil representing São Paulo. He has twice served as Secretary of Education in São Paulo. From 1986-1990, he was rector of UNICAMP, his former university. After finishing his term, he became the operations manager and vice president of the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, D.C. from 1991-1994.
Souza received a degree in economics from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in 1967 and a master’s degree from the University of Chile in 1970. He was the deputy director of the International Labour Organization’s Regional Program for Employment in Latin America and the Caribbean from 1971–1974, and later worked as a consultant for a number of UN agencies active in Latin America. He completed his doctorate at Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) in 1980.