James Manyika is a director of the McKinsey Global Institute, McKinsey & Company's business and economics research arm, and one of its three global co-leaders. James has led research on business and on global economic trends, including the digital economy, globalization, growth and productivity, innovation and competitiveness, and labor markets. James is also a director (senior partner) at McKinsey, where he is one of the leaders of McKinsey's Global High Tech, Media and Telecom Practice. Based in Silicon Valley for 20 years, he has worked with many of the world's leading technology companies on a variety of issues. He has published a book on distributed networks and robotics, and another on globalization as well as numerous academic and business papers and reports. James was appointed by President Obama in 2012 to serve on of the U.S. President's Global Development Council and in 2013 to serve as the vice chairman of the Council. In 2011, James was appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce to serve on the Innovation Advisory Board as part of the Competes ACT. James serves on the boards of the Aspen Institute, the Oxford Internet Institute, UC Berkeley's School of Information, Harvard's Hutchins Center, including the Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research, and the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the American University in Cairo. James is a non-resident senior fellow of the Brookings Institution, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the Bretton Woods Committee. James was on the engineering faculty at Oxford University and a fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, a visiting scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a faculty exchange fellow at MIT. A Rhodes Scholar, James holds DPhil, M.Sc. and M.A. degrees from Oxford in engineering, mathematics, and computer science and a BSc in electrical engineering from the University of Zimbabwe.