Jonathan Tepperman, managing editor of Foreign Affairs magazine and the author of the No.1 Amazon bestseller, The Fix: How Countries Use Crises to Solve the World’s Worst Problems joins us at the Forum this year.
Known for his deep understanding of international affairs, Tepperman makes a ‘data-driven case for optimism at a moment of gathering darkness’ by showing how leaders in countries from South Korea and Indonesia to Brazil and Canada have taken on – and triumphed over – some of the world’s biggest challenges.
The Fix was long-listed for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. To write it, Tepperman travelled the world, conducting more than 100 interviews with the people behind the big ideas and creative policies that have solved seemingly insurmountable problems.
From economic stagnation, inequality, and immigration to political gridlock, corruption, and Islamic extremism, Tepperman shares the surprising success stories of 10 countries – and the practical lessons we can apply elsewhere, from boardrooms to banks to community centres.
Tepperman has interviewed more than a dozen world leaders, including Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Japan’s Shinzo Abe, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Mexico’s Enrique Peña Nieto, Indonesia’s Joko Widodo and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame.
Tepperman has a BA in English from Yale, an MA in law from Oxford and an LLM from NYU. He began his career in foreign policy in the mid-1990s as a speechwriter for US Ambassador Morris Abram in Geneva, Switzerland. Today he helps run Foreign Affairs, which is published by the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations and considered one of the world’s most influential magazines covering foreign-policy and economics. He is co-editor of the books The US vs al Qaeda, Iran and the Bomb, and The Clash of Ideas.