Miriam Meckel

Meet Miriam Meckel

Miriam is the Co-founder and CEO of ada Learning GmbH, whose mission is to accelerate change in organizations by identifying, transforming, and uniting leaders who amplify innovation from within. She is also a Professor of Communication Management at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland and Director at the Institute for Media and Communication Management.

From 2014 until 2019, Miriam Meckel was editor-in-chief and publisher of WirtschaftsWoche, Germany’s leading weekly business magazine. She has a biweekly column in Handelsblatt, Germany’s foremost business daily, and regularly publishes in several outlets about emerging technologies, economic developments, and political trends.

Previously, Meckel served for one term as State Secretary without party affiliation in the Chancellery of the Minister President of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, first as Government Spokesperson, then as State Secretary for Europe, International Affairs and Media. And from 2006 to 2007, she hosted the business talk show “Miriam Meckel – Standpunkte” (“points of view”) on the German news channel n-tv.

For several years, she was a member of the supervisory boards of Commerzbank International, Luxembourg, SES Astra, Luxembourg, and École hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL). She is currently a member of the Board of Directors of Switzerland’s leading media company Tamedia AG.

For several years, Meckel was a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and a Visiting Professor at Fordham University in New York, Singapore Management University, the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, the University of Vienna and the Université de Neuchâtel.

She received numerous accolades for her work, among them the Ernst Schneider Prize for Innovation in the Media and the Cicero Speaker’s Prize in the category of Science. Meckel has published numerous books, scientific journal articles, and journalistic pieces. Her autobiographical book “Letter to my Life” inspired an award-winning eponymous film released in 2016.

A passionate advocate of international exchange, Meckel was part of the Herbert Quandt Foundation’s “European Asian Young Leaders Forum” and was awarded the Eisenhower Fellowship of the USA as well as the John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellowship at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. She studied journalism and communication studies, sinology, political science and law at the Universities of Münster and Taipei, Taiwan.

Miriam’s latest book will be published on 13th February 2024.

Everything everywhere at once – How artificial intelligence is changing our world and what we can gain from it (currently in German only)

Artificial intelligence is now available to everyone for the first time. With programs like ChatGPT, we are at a crucial threshold in our cultural evolution. Everything changes everywhere at once. Miriam Meckel and her co-author, Léa Steinacker, show the opportunities that step over this threshold offers. But how do we steer development in the right direction and where are risks or ethical dilemmas lurking? If we want to keep up in an increasingly complex world, then we also have to expand our human intelligence – artificial intelligence can even help us with this.