Founder and President, The People-Centered Development Forum 

Board Member, Business Alliance for Local Living Economies

Associate, International Forum on Globalization

Member, Social Ventures Network

Member, The Club of Rome

Dr. David C. Korten has over thirty-five years of experience in preeminent business, academic, and international development institutions as well as in contemporary citizen action organizations. Trained in economics, organization theory, and business strategy with M.B.A. and Ph. D. degrees from  the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, his early career was devoted to setting up business schools in low income countries — starting with Ethiopia while still a doctoral candidate at Stanford — in the hope that creating a new class of professional business entrepreneurs would be the key to ending global poverty.  

After graduation, Korten completed his military service during the Vietnam War as a captain in the U.S. Air Force, serving in Air Force headquarters command, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency. 

He then served for five and a half years as a Visiting Associate Professor of the Harvard University Graduate School of Business where he taught in Harvard's middle management, M.B.A. and doctoral programs. He also served as the Harvard Business School advisor to the Nicaragua-based Central American Management Institute. He subsequently joined the staff of the Harvard Institute for International Development, where he headed a Ford Foundation-funded project to strengthen the organization and management of national family planning programs. 

In the late 1970s, Korten left U.S. academia and moved to Southeast Asia, where he lived for nearly fifteen years, serving first as a Ford Foundation project specialist, and later as Asia regional advisor on development management to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). His work there won him international recognition for his contributions to pioneering the development of powerful strategies for transforming public bureaucracies into responsive support systems dedicated to strengthening community control and management of land, water, and forestry resources. 

Disillusioned by the evident inability of USAID and other large official aid donors to apply the approaches that had been proven effective by the nongovernmental Ford Foundation, Korten broke with the official aid system. His last five years in Asia were devoted to working with leaders of Asian nongovernmental organizations on identifying the root causes of development failure in the region and building the capacity of civil society organizations to function as strategic catalysts of national- and global-level change. 

Korten came to realize that the crisis of deepening poverty, growing inequality, environmental devastation, and social disintegration he was observing in Asia was also being experienced in nearly every country in the world — including the United States and other "developed" countries. Furthermore he came to the conclusion that the United States was actively promoting — both at home and abroad — the very policies that were deepening the resulting global crisis. For the world to survive, the United States must change. He has since had a leading role in raising public consciousness of the political and institutional consequences of economic globalization and the expansion of corporate power at the expense of democracy, equity, and environmental health. 

In 1990 he joined with colleagues from around the world to found the People-Centered Development Forum as a support network for those who were seeking to challenge the dominant development paradigm. He has since served as the Forum's president and principal spokesperson. As his own analysis of the global crisis deepened, his Asian colleagues suggested that he might best help them in their own cause by returning to the United States to educate other Americans in the devastating consequences of U.S. policies for the rest of the world. He returned to the United States in 1992 where he lived until 1998 in the heart of Manhattan in New York City between Madison Avenue and Wall Street — a setting that provided the proper inspiration to write When Corporations Rule the World. By 1998 his attention was increasingly focused on the search for alternatives and he was becoming deeply involved in the Positive Futures Network, publishers of YES! A Journal of Positive Futures, which he co-founded and served as chair. In 1998 he moved to Bainbridge Island in Washington state, the home of YES! and the heartland of Ecotopia, where he completed writing The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism. He is a major contributor to the report of the International Forum on Globalization on Alternatives to Economic Globalization. His most recent book is The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. 

His publications are required reading in university courses around the world. He is also a popular international speaker and a regular guest on talk radio. An interview by the University of Washington Center for Communication and Civic Engagement on corporate globalization provides an overview of how his thinking has evolved and thoughts on prospects for change.