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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green-Carl.

Globalization has become a pretty controversial issue today. For some people it means progress. Other people are a

little more skeptical or even critical. And so as with any big hot button topic it's

easy to forget how individual people have made it possible. It's those people who are the subject of the book called

From Silk to Silicon, the story of globalization through 10 extraordinary lives. Here to talk about

these super-globilizers is author Jeffrey Garten.

He teaches at the Yale School of Management where he was formerly the Dean.

Jeff, thank you so much for coming on the idea cast.

I really appreciate the chance. Before I'd read the book if I had sort of

guessed where it would have started, I probably would have thought it maybe would have

started with some of the key figures in the age of exploration in the 15th century and you do talk about one of those people.

But you actually start the book earlier than that.

You start with a profile of Genghis Khan who led the Mongol Empire in the 13th and 14th century.

Why dial it back a couple hundred years earlier? Why start there?

You know, one of the things I wanted to do was to select people who did something that continues to have

residence today.

That is, they changed their world and they also continue to change ours.

So I knew Genghis Khan as a ruthless, I mean incredibly ruthless

...