Growing up on a farm in Germany, Otto Scharmer noticed a lot of unsettling divides in society that ultimately led him to his PhD thesis titled: “Transformation of Capitalism as a Revolution From Within.” As he jokes, “No one read it, so I went on another pursuit to make such ideas more accessible to the public.” And he has surely done that.

Most famous for his best-selling books Theory U and Presence, Otto Scharmer is now a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He is co-founder of the Presencing Institute, and the founding chair of the MIT IDEAS Program, that takes leaders from civil society, government and business on a nine month action learning journey in order to co-create profound social innovation in their communities. With the German government and the Gross National Happiness Centre in Bhutan, he co-founded the Global Well-being and Gross National Happiness Lab, which brings together innovative thinkers from developing and industrialized countries to prototype new ways of measuring well-being and social progress. He has worked with governments in Africa, Asia and Europe and led leadership and innovation programs at corporations such as Daimler, Alibaba, ICBC, Eileen Fisher, Google and PwC. His latest book, Leading from the Emerging Future, focuses on transforming business, society, and self.

Through an online course, he has most recently launched U-Lab, a self-organizing platform with 27 thousand innovators from 191 countries who are collaborating with practices of co-sensing and co-creating emerging futures.

Photo and text courtesy of Awakin.org.