Joel Allen Kurtzman (June 25, 1947 – April 6, 2016) was an American economist.
Kurtzman was a Senior Fellow at the Milken Institute, a non-profit, non-partisan think tank. His research focused on globalization and its risks and has been published widely. He was also Executive Director of the Milken Institute's SAVE Project which focuses on energy security, climate change and alternative energy.
Kurtzman was a member of the Board of Directors of Revolution Prep, and a member of the Editorial Board of MIT Sloan Management Review. He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Wharton School's SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management and to the Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of California, Davis.
Kurtzman was the Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Business Review and a member of the editorial board of Harvard Business School Publishing. He was founding Editor-in-Chief of Strategy + Business magazine, where he first coined the term "Thought Leader". Kurtzman is Editor-in-Chief of Korn Ferry's Briefings on Talent & Leadership magazine.
Kurtzman was also a business editor and columnist at The New York Times.
Best known for his work on the intersection between economics and business, Kurtzman authored, co-authored or edited 20 books and hundreds of general and scholarly articles. His widely cited book, The Death Of Money, was made into television documentaries in the U.S., (PBS) and in Japan (NHK).
Before forming the Kurtzman Group, Kurtzman was Global Lead Partner for Thought Leadership and Innovation at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the world's largest professional services firm, where he was responsible for developing new ideas in areas such as strategy, financial reporting, technology, the capital markets and business policy. He was also responsible for PricewaterhouseCoopers' Menlo Park Technology Centre, its technology forecasts, its innovative R&D programs and its global publishing activities.
Earlier in his career, Kurtzman was an international economist at the United Nations where he was deputy director of the U.N.'s Project on the Future. Kurtzman's economic modeling teams were among the first to warn of the impending Latin America debt crisis, in the 1990s. His research teams produced a library of 17 volumes of books on the global economy (The NIEO Library, Pergamon Press, Elsmford, New York).