Former diplomat, author, and advisor on emerging markets, Anja Manuel is Co-Founder and Principal along with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in Rice, Hadley, Gates & Manuel LLC, a strategic consulting firm that helps US companies navigate international markets.
She is the author of the critically acclaimed This Brave New World: India, China and the United States, published by Simon and Schuster in 2016. From 2005-2007, she served as an official at the U.S. Department of State, responsible for South Asia Policy.
Earlier in her career, Ms. Manuel was an attorney at WilmerHale working on corporate governance, international and Supreme Court cases, and represented special committees of major corporate boards before the US Congress, Department of Justice and the SEC. She was also an investment banker at Salomon Brothers in London.
A graduate of Harvard Law School and Stanford University, Manuel now also lectures and is a Research Affiliate at Stanford University.
She currently serves on two corporate boards: Overseas Shipping Group, Inc., a NYSE listed energy transportation company (risk committee chair, and audit comm. member), and Ripple Labs Inc., a leading blockchain payments company (governance committee). Manuel also serves on advisory boards of Flexport Inc., Synapse Inc., Center for a New American Security, and the boards of CARE, the American Ditchley Foundation, Natl. Comm. on US-China Relations, and Former Governor Brown’s California Export Council.
She is a frequent commentator on foreign policy and technology policy, for tv and radio (NBC/MSNBC, Fox Business, BBC, Bloomberg, Charlie Rose, NPR, etc.) and writes for publications ranging from the New York Times, to the Financial Times, Fortune, the Atlantic, and Newsweek, among others.
She is the Director of the Aspen Strategy Group and Aspen Security Forum — the premier bi-partisan forum on foreign policy in the U.S. — and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Ms. Manuel lives in San Francisco with her husband and two children.