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Richard David Hames is a corporate philosopher, futurist and knowledge designer. Working at the interface between organisations and society, he is widely considered to be among the world's most influential intellectuals and business strategists.

An Australian citizen, educated in Europe and domiciled in Thailand, Hames has been honoured with numerous awards including a French Government Scholarship, a Leverhulme European Fellowship, the Mondadori Professorial Fellowship and the inaugural Lord Attlee Fellowship. He is currently Distinguished Professor and Founding Director of the Asian Foresight Institute at Dhurakij Pundit University in Bangkok. He is also President of The Hames Group (a distributed think-tank and design laboratory comprising thought leaders from all fields of human endeavour); strategist to the State of the World Forum; and an adviser on security, energy, social foresight and environmental sustainability to the Chinese Government, Singapore Power, the National Security Coordination Center, the World Health Organisation, CSIRO and World Wildlife Fund.

After early careers in medicine, computer science, academia and the arts, Richard Hames was appointed Group Chief Executive to AMI, a position that was to earn him an enviable reputation as a charismatic and highly effective leader of change through the transformation of an almost bankrupt business into one of Europe's most successful and dynamic media corporations.

His early international experience as a strategy consultant in the field of Total Quality Management was inspired by a close professional friendship with the legendary Dr W Edwards Deming. In 1993 Hames co-founded Global Business Network (Australia) and established ABN Learning - GBN's innovative consulting practice. Today, Richard works as an adviser and leadership strategist to governments, institutions and multinational corporations in the USA, France, UK, China, Japan, South Africa, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia, UAE and Thailand. He is also personal mentor to Presidents, Heads of State, and some of the world's most innovative CEOs.

Richard Hames is best known for pioneering Deep Design - a groundbreaking approach to collective wisdom based on the integral nature of complexity science and living systems. He is also admired for his passionate advocacy of real-time cybernetic and humanitarian models of governance. Hames's methodologies, including Strategic Navigation and Transformational Narrative, all apply generative learning principles to the strategic management of organizations in dynamically complex environments.

As a foresight practitioner Hames has examined topics ranging from the future of conflict to nanotechnology in everyday life, financial services, transport, urban development, terrorism, taxation, health care, social networks, political systems, energy, natural resource management, environmental and business sustainability and learning.

A dynamic public speaker and celebrated writer, Richard Hames is author of the best-selling book, The Management Myth: Exploring the Essence of Future Organizations. His second book, Burying the 20th Century - New Paths to New Futures, was published in 1997. Richard contributed a chapter entitled, 'Requiem for the Nation State in Reforming the Public Sector' (ed. C. Clark and D. Corbett, Allen & Unwin, 1999) and was a key contributor to Rewiring Organizations for the Connected Economy (Jossey-Bass Pfeiffer, Los Angeles, US. 2002). Hames completed his third book in 2007: The Five Literacies of Global Leadership (published by John Wiley & Son in April 2007) argues a case for jettisoning many of today's business orthodoxies. He is currently working on Entangled Freedom: A Complexity Primer, for the Singapore Government.

As an entrepreneur and knowledge designer, he has focused on projects ranging across all sectors of the community, business and government, focusing particularly on rethinking a number of the key concepts underpinning 250 years of industrial economism. An authority on the design of strategically relevant yet viable 'whole system' solutions for business and government in the knowledge society, Richard Hames has built an enviable reputation with a range of clients spanning the globe and in all sectors of the economy. He was recently appointed strategist to the State of the World Forum - a new ten-year global initiative endorsed by Barack Obama and intent on redesigning society's energy, environmental and economic systems.

Biography provided by the composer — current to March 2009