Walter Wriston TOPICS: Business Future Management Finance / Tax FEE CATEGORY:* Contact for fee schedule TRAVELS FROM: New York Profile Request This Speaker

Walter Wriston: Profile

During his seventeen year reign as Chairman and CEO of Citicorp/Citibank, Walter Wriston was widely-regarded as the most powerful banker in the world. Wriston is also recognized as being among the most innovative and technologically savvy financiers of our time. Want to know about the future of money? Talk to Walter Wriston.

Wriston was there at the creation of the modern wired economy, when money began turning itself into bits and bytes and started flowing around the world through satellite transponders and fiber-optic cables. At the time of Wriston's retirement, Citibank had become the world's largest bank, and its investment in computers and software surpassed $1.75 billion.

Wriston says the basis for wealth has evolved from land to labor to information. "Information about money has become almost as important as money itself," he said -- a famous remark now inscribed in the lobby of New York Library of Science, Industry, and Business.

Mr. Wriston is also the author of several best-selling books including In The Twilight of Sovereignty, in which he lucidly reveals the vast geopolitical implications of the massive information revolution in progress around the globe. It reaffirms Wriston's stature as one of the most cogent thinkers of our time: "Walter Wriston stimulates, educates, and excites in this original and perceptive exposition of the information and knowledge age and its profound impact on our daily lives and our traditional notions of sovereignty and the wealth of nations," wrote George Schultz.

According to Henry Kissenger, "The instantaneous transmission of information will affect every aspect of life in the twenty-first century, not the least of which will be the conduct of foreign policy. Walter Wriston has written a fascinating and important book that no decision maker can afford to miss."

Human intelligence and intellectual resources are now the world's prime capital, Wriston shows. Instant global communication--the marriage of satellites, television, fax, cellular telephones, and most importantly, worldwide computer networks--has had and will continue to have world-shaking consequences. The effect of this revolution, says Wriston, is the formation of a new global democratic order: "No matter what political leaders do or say, the screens will continue to light up, traders will trade, and the currency value will continue to be set, not only by sovereign governments but by global plebiscite," he writes. Today, there can be no more unreported Chernobyl disasters. There can be no more Pearl Harbor-like surprises.

Wriston stresses that in the information revolution, technology itself is of secondary importance. His larger vision is the transformation of our public and private institutions. Within the corporation, too, the twilight of sovereignty is near.

The immediate and simultaneous availability of data to those at every level of authority within the enterprise means that in today's business world, traditional executive power is changing. Looking to the future, Wriston outlines the new management philosophies and radically changed managerial structures that will follow the end of corporate centralization. He is currently at work on his next book, The Quick and the Dead, focusing on new accounting standards for the global economy.

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