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Globalization benefits have been distributed unevenly. International commerce has consequences that are not always positive—many people have been excluded from global trade networks, and the very act of trade puts a burden on limited natural resources and the climate. Despite unprecedented growth in world economic output and advances in medicine and technology, there are still billions of people who do not have access to clean water, quality healthcare, a good education, or the opportunity to participate in the institutions that will dramatically affect their lives and futures. These problems can be surmounted, we fervently believe, by global leaders of the type documented in this book. But we need more of them if we are not to let our global inheritance to slip away.

Economists since David Ricardo (who first articulated the theory of comparative advantage in 1817) have documented how market connections can bring enormous benefits, often in the form of economic growth and technological innovation. International trade can bring about advances in personal productivity, health, the efficient use of energy and resources, and food production, just to name a few, by allocating work to places where it can be carried out comparatively better, faster, or cheaper. International investments can help expand markets for existing products, optimize the use of existing capital, and transfer innovations and technologies to locations where they can be best leveraged.

Economic expansion and integration also bring challenges, however. Many of those challenges are more extreme today than any we've faced in the past, expressly because we are much more interconnected than we've ever been (even more than during the often-cited nineteenth-century wave of British-led globalization). The global financial crisis that began in 2007 offers a case in point for how seemingly local issues like increased personal savings in China and rising U.S. home values, low interest rates, and a large third-party market for securitized loan packages could lead to a gargantuan speculative bubble that, upon bursting, could reverberate around the world to affect economies as distant as Iceland and Belgium. In 2011, we are confronting a possible double-dip global recession and a repeat of the global credit freeze, as European leaders fail to contain the contagion of a crisis that started with the public finances of tiny Greece and that has put the very euro on the brink.

Our natural environment is another global system taxed by increased connectivity and growth. We have put severe pressure on our supplies of resources and energy, resulting in dangerous levels of greenhouse gas emissions that are altering established climate patterns. To sate our hunger for more, and more affordable, fuel, we have assumed massive risks, made visible in the Deepwater Horizon oil rig catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico and the escape of radioactivity from the Fukushima nuclear reactor following the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of early 2011.

Global pressures extend beyond energy. Increases in disposable income push demand for animal protein, in turn driving demand for grains, commodities, and water. Mass urbanization stresses the supply of fresh water, energy, and open space. HIV/AIDS, bird flu, swine flu, and other infectious diseases can now spread at the speed of commercial aviation, turning local epidemics into regional or even global pandemics. Poverty and hunger, security, universal education, affordable public health care, equality, and human rights are at once global and local. They are also interlinked, multifaceted, and hugely complex.

The world needs leaders to capture global opportunities and solve global problems—sometimes with the same vision. We need global leaders to engage with businesses, governments, and nongovernmental organizations, to bridge the distance between these disparate players, all of which have something to contribute on the path to shared prosperity and sustainability.