James Martin, Technology Consultant and Author, Dies at 79

James Martin, a British technology expert, author and prognosticator who viewed mankind’s onrushing future with alarm and excitement and used his considerable fortune to address his concerns, died on June 24 near his home in Bermuda. He was 79.

He drowned after having a heart attack while swimming off his private island, his stepdaughter Leila Larijani said.

Mr. Martin began his career working with first-generation computers at I.B.M. in the 1950s, became influential in the field of information technology through his prodigious writing, and established a school at Oxford to study the problems and opportunities confronting the 21st-century world.

His personal Web site lists more than 100 titles, ranging from 1960s primers on teleprocessing and designing and programming systems, to works of informed soothsaying, like “The Wired Society: A Challenge for Tomorrow,” (1978), which foresaw a world plugged into a computer network.

He was a widely known information technology consultant, whose London business became an international company known as Headstrong, which caters to the financial services industry. He conducted hundreds of five-day seminars for executives on the link between technology and business.

More recently his interest was in identifying global problems — climate change, overpopulation, environmental withering — that have been worsened by past technologies and that he asserted could be addressed by new ones.

In a book, “The Meaning of the 21st Century,” and a film he made in conjunction with it, Mr. Martin argued that the human race had only a short time to change its wasteful ways before the planet was irreparably harmed. The technology to solve the problems is either available or developing; what is missing is broad education and political will, he said.

“A naïve view of the past is that technology gives us mastery over nature,” he said in the film. “A more appropriate view is that advanced technology causes us to need even more advanced technology in order to survive.”

In 2005, Mr. Martin gave $100 million to the University of Oxford, his alma mater, to establish what was then called the James Martin 21st Century School, aimed at promoting interdisciplinary research on global issues. In 2009, Mr. Martin, the single most generous benefactor in the university’s history, agreed to give as much as $50 million more if the sum were matched by outside donations; by the next year, it was. The school, now known as the Oxford Martin School, focuses on four areas: health and medicine, energy and the environment, technology and society, and ethics and governance.

He also was a benefactor of the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California, which is affiliated with Middlebury College in Vermont. At his death, he had finished a book about weapons of mass destruction, “The War and Peace of the Nuclear Age,” which his wife, Lillian, said she would publish on the Internet and make accessible at no charge.

“He really, really wanted to make things better,” Ms. Martin said in an interview on Monday. “Going into a village and feeding people wasn’t his thing. He wanted to make an impact from the top.”

James Thomas Martin was born on Oct. 19, 1933, in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, England, northeast of Birmingham. His father was a Civil Service clerk. He earned a full scholarship to Oxford, where he studied physics and pursued his interests in writing and philosophy. He served in the British Army in Cyprus before beginning his business career at I.B.M., which sent him to New York. He worked on developing an airline reservations system and other computing projects.

Mr. Martin’s first two marriages, to Charity Anders and Carma McClure, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, the former Lillian Casey, whom he met in the 1980s and married in 2004, and his stepdaughter Ms. Larijani, he is survived by a daughter he had with Ms. Anders, Corinthia Richards; three other stepchildren, David and Jayron Larijani and Sheida Matern; and two grandchildren.

Known for being shy, he studied public speaking while at I.B.M. and “became dynamic on stage,” his wife said. He loved Manhattan, where he had a home, but in the 1990s, seeking a quieter retreat, he bought Agar’s Island in Bermuda, she said. He also had a home in Waitsfield, Vt.

“I’d like it known that he had a good sense of humor; it was very British, but he loved slapstick,” Ms. Martin said. “And he loved having a big family around him, a lot of people talking around the dinner table. At first he didn’t; no one had ever interrupted him before. But he grew to love it.”

Sheryl Sandberg, ‘Lean In’ Author, Hopes to Spur Movement

Before Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, started to write “Lean In,” her book-slash-manifesto on women in the workplace, she reread Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique.” Like the homemaker turned activist who helped start a revolution 50 years ago, Ms. Sandberg wanted to do far more than sell books.

Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, is trying to create her own version of consciousness-raising groups.

Fifty years after "The Feminine Mystique" was first published, women still face professional and lifestyle issues. What should the feminist movement focus on next and why?

Ms. Sandberg, whose ideas about working women have prompted both enthusiasm and criticism, is attempting nothing less than a Friedan-like feat: a national discussion of a gender-problem-that-has-no-name, this time in the workplace, and a movement to address it.

When her book is published on March 11, accompanied by a carefully orchestrated media campaign, she hopes to create her own version of the consciousness-raising groups of yore: “Lean In Circles,” as she calls them, in which women can share experiences and follow a Sandberg-crafted curriculum for career success. (First assignment: a video on how to command more authority at work by changing how they speak and even sit.)

“I always thought I would run a social movement,” Ms. Sandberg, 43, said in an interview for “Makers,” a new documentary on feminist history.

And yet no one knows whether women will show up for Ms. Sandberg’s revolution, a top-down affair propelled by a fortune worth hundreds of millions on paper, or whether the social media executive can form a women’s network of her own. Only a single test “Lean In Circle” exists. With less than three weeks until launch — which will include a spread in Time magazine and splashy events like a book party at Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s home — organizers cannot say how many more groups may sprout up.

Even her advisers acknowledge the awkwardness of a woman with double Harvard degrees, dual stock riches (from Facebook and Google, where she also worked), a 9,000-square-foot house and a small army of household help urging less fortunate women to look inward and work harder. Will more earthbound women, struggling with cash flow and child care, embrace the advice of a Silicon Valley executive whose book acknowledgments include thanks to her wealth adviser and Oprah Winfrey?

“I don’t think anyone has ever tried to do this from anywhere even close to her perch,” said Debora L. Spar, president of Barnard College, who invited Ms. Sandberg to deliver a May 2011 commencement address about gender in the workplace that caught fire online. (Ms. Sandberg, who will grant her first book interview to the CBS program “60 Minutes,” declined to comment for this article.)

Despite decades of efforts, and some visible exceptions, the number of top women leaders in many fields remains stubbornly low: for example, 21 of the current Fortune 500 chief executives are women. In her book, to be published by Knopf, Ms. Sandberg argues that is because women face invisible, even subconscious, barriers in the workplace, and not just from bosses. In her view, women are also sabotaging themselves. “We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in,” she writes, and the result is that “men still run the world.”

Ms. Sandberg wants to take women through a collective self-awareness exercise. In her book, she urges them to absorb the social science showing they are judged more harshly and paid less than men; resist slowing down in mere anticipation of having children; insist that their husbands split housework equally; draft short- and long-term career plans; and join a “Lean In Circle,” which is half business school and half book club.

The project has the feel of a social experiment: what if women at major corporations could review research on how to overcome gender barriers, along with instruction on skills like negotiation and communication? Will working women, already stretched thin, attend nighttime video lectures on “Unconditional Responsibility” and “Using Stories Powerfully”? The instructions for the gatherings, provided to The New York Times by an outside adviser to the project, are precise, down to membership requirements (participants can miss no more than two monthly meetings per year) and the format (15-minute check-in, 3 minutes each for personal updates, a 90-minute presentation, then discussion).