Six Disruptors Who Are Changing the World

John Hunter and the World Peace Game

John Hunter, an African American public school teacher from Virginia, who spent time in India in Ashrams in the 1970’s, has come up with the World Peace Game designed to develop thinking and judgment of fourth graders. In the game, the students become leaders of four countries represented on a four foot wide, four feet high, four level Plexiglas board game. Each country has a Prime Minister, a Defense Minister, and CFO. There is also a Weather Goddess ruling natural disasters and stock market fluctuations. There are over 100 plastic pieces on the board, including politicians, generals, tanks, and oil rigs. To win the game, the students have to solve 50 interconnected problems and every country’s asset value must increase from its starting value. The problems include war and peace, oil spills, financial crisis, ethnic tensions and global warming. In one game, a 9-year old girl, the defense minister of the poorest nation, decided to attack her richer neighbor’s oil fields. She sent her tanks in and without firing a shot surrounded and secured them. Everyone asked: “What are you doing?” Early on she realized that the country she attacked was militarily aggressive, but poor in oil. Further, there were signs they were planning to start a war to dominate the entire world, and if they had fuel supplies, they would have. By starting a small war, she reasoned, she could prevent a larger one.

Ahn Cheol-Soo: College Professor with Plain Talk Rocks South Korea’s Mayoral Race

Two days before the election for mayor in the end of October 2011, Ahn Cheol-Soo, a soft spoken and unassuming university dean and expert on computer viruses, slipped into the campaign headquarters of independent candidate, Park Won-soon, and amid flashing cameras said he would support him. He made a statement that struck a chord in a country where resentment of social and economic inequality is on the rise, and where many believe that their government serves the privileged rather than the common good. Nearly 30 percent of the voters who backed Park on Oct. 26, resulting in his election victory, did so because of Ahn, according to an exit poll. Ahn’s interviews and lectures on campuses across South Korea, reveal him to be not only a mentor who has inspired younger Koreans, but a social critic whose pointed comments are rocking Korea. “Bill Gates wouldn’t have become Bill Gates if he were born in South Korea,” Ahn says, accusing Samsung, LG, and Hyundai of creating “zoos” where colorful and talented people are locked up in cages to be gawked at. He also says they have created “a realm of predators and lawlessness,” shackling small entrepreneurs with slavery-like contracts. Polls say if new Presidential elections were held today, Ahn would be the odds on winner.

Howard Shultz: Starbucks to Save the USA from Its Politicians

He disrupted the coffee chain when he returned as CEO in 2008. Now the CEO is on a campaign to disrupt Washington. It was a warm day in Washington in early November 2011. Schultz was on the President’s mind because the iconic entrepreneurial CEO had suddenly become a political activist and stopped writing checks to his campaign. Schultz had announced that, due to his disgust with Washington’s dysfunction, he would stop writing campaign checks to incumbents in either party. He was fed up with a political process that had “chosen to put partisan and ideological purity over the well-being of the people.” Schultz asked fellow corporate executives to join him in a boycott. More than 140 quickly did, including the CEOs at Pepsi, Disney, Intuit, Whole Foods, J. Crew, AOL The New York Stock Exchange, and Nasdaq. The President got on the phone and called Shultz without any warning, “Howard,” said the President, “I’d like to talk to you about a number of things, including your campaign initiative, as well as your thoughts on the economy and job creation.”

Maryam Banikarim: Acting from a Purpose

When Maryam Banikarim was a marketing VP at NBC, she helped pull together a program entitled, Day One, a term of art in the world of mergers and acquisitions. Day One was supposed to hail the merger of NBC with Comcast. According to an article in Fast Company, “[My bosses] were like, ‘We need a gift for employees. We can make 30,000 folders with notepads in them.’ But I didn’t want to give a meaningless tchotchke.” Maryam came up with a purpose line—that NBC Universal was in the business of big ideas—and provided all 30,000 employees with a gift to match it. Everyone got Moleskine notebooks that had sketches of great ideas. One showed the back of a napkin that was the origin of SNL. Another showed a sketch of the cable transponder that became Comcast’s business. The accompany note said, ‘All great ideas were created by somebody,’ and encouraged employees to submit their own. People told her the project wouldn’t get approved, that it was way too ethereal. But it was a mega hit

Mark Orsmond’s All-SEA Group is rare in the world of maritime repairs.

The Canadian company has technology that allows workers to fix the propellers of huge container ships while they are still underwater. “If you want to go to dry dock you’ve got maybe a two-year wait,” Orsmond says. “What we offer can mean the difference between a repair bill of a few hundred thousand dollars and millions of dollars.”Two years ago, South Korean businessmen asked the All-SEA Group to establish a company in Busan, a city that handles 30,000 ships a year. (By contrast, Vancouver’s port sees 3,000). Orsmond liked what he saw in Seoul and Busan. “We’re doing at least two or three jobs a week now,” he said. “There’s a lot going on in Korea.”

Jared Cohen Disrupted State Department Heads For Google

On Thursday Sept. 2, 2011, Jared Cohen, 29, walked out the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff meeting for the last time to take up a new job as the head of Google’s Think Do Tank, designed to solve some of the world’s most intractable problems using technology. A close advisor to Condalisa Rice and Hillary Clinton, he was pivotal in shifting the mindset at State from “We are in the business of diplomacy and negotiations” to “We are in the business of disruption, (dispersing power) by making connections.” In early December, Jared will be honored by Harvard University as one of 7 Game Changing Leaders for: leading delegations of technology executives (like Google’s Eric Schmidt) to troubleshoot problems in post war Iraq; setting up internships for Iraqi students in Silicon Valley to introduce them to the garage culture; calling his friend Jack Dorsey to keep Twitter from going through with a scheduled maintenance shutdown during the heady days of the Iranian election last summer. He was a player in the Arab Spring, helping leaders in Egypt, Libya, and Syria use social networking tools to bring about revolution without violence.