Alexander Bard
Having made a habit of always lecturing dressed in wildlife-trekking shorts and characteristic Nietzschean moustache, scribbling his notes on huge whiteboards rather than parading another predictable power-point presentation, Bard's simultaneously entertaining and eye-opening lectures have consistently topped the ratings at major business and management conferences around the world. As any good speaker does, Bard takes pride in practicing the very message that he preaches.
Alexander Bard, born in 1961 and residing in Stockholm and Berlin, is a writer, philosopher, artist, record producer and a highly sought after lecturer. Bard studied economic geography at The Stockholm School of Economics in the 1980's. In 1992, Bard co-founded Stockholm Records, which has since grown to become Scandinavia's biggest independent record company. He is currently also well-known as a member of the internationally platinum-selling electronica band BWO. In 1998, Bard sold his shares in Stockholm Records to the global giant Universal Music and co-founded the internet incubator area26.com, which went on to house and nurture eight different successful companies, including the business improvement marketplace www.interesting.org, Scandinavia's biggest youth culture website www.bomben.nu, and the music management company Bullgod. Bard has given lectures on the new economy and the sociological implications of the interactive media revolution at The Stockholm School of Economics and other institutions worldwide since 1996. A series of lectures on history seen through a cybernetics perspective in 1999 caused a sensation and led to a bidding war between publishers for Alexander's first book "Netocracy - The New Power Elite And Life After Capitalism", based on the lectures and co-written with media theorist Jan Söderqvist. Merging Nietzsche and Darwin with French poststructuralists and cybernetics, "Netocracy" was Number 1 for four consecutive months in the Swedish non-fiction bestseller list before being picked up by Reuters/Pearson in London in 2001 for international release. There has since been more than a dozen translations of "Netocracy" published worldwide. A second book, also co-written with Jan Söderqvist, and titled "The Global Empire", deals with the political ramifications of the current information technology revolution. Already a major hit in Sweden, this second book is currently in translation to English. Bard was a fundamental force in creating the Swedish music export sensation - making his small native country the world's third biggest exporter of music - and promoting the information technology revolution. He is also a front figure for the new export of radical Scandinavian thinkers and was voted one of Sweden's ten brightest minds in 2005.
Among the topics Alexander speaks on are:
The Ethics of Interactivity / The Ethics of The Network Society
History as the History of Information Technologies
Netocrats vs Consumtarians - The Class Struggles of the Interactive Age
The Global Empire: Local vs global politics in the age of globalization
Medialization - The Paradigm Shift from Mass Media to Interactivity
Networksociety - the social aspects an effects of live dominated by technologies
How network dynamics changes business as we know it forever!!!