George Pratt Shultz was born in New York City, December 13, 1920. He earned a B.A. in economics at Princeton (1942). During World War II, Shultz served in the U. S. Marines Corps (1942-1945). After the war, in 1949, he received a Ph.D. in industrial economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Shultz taught at MIT from 1948-1957, except for the time in 1955 when he was senior staff economist on President Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisers.

In 1962, Shultz was appointed dean of the University of Chicago's graduate business school. He later became a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (1968-1969). Under President Nixon, Shultz was Secretary of Labor (1969-1970), director of the Office of Management and Budget, Secretary of the Treasury (1972-1974), chairman of the Council on Economic Policy, and chairman of the East-West Trade Policy Commission (1973).He later became Secretary of State (1982-1989) during the Reagan administration. 

Shultz returned to Stanford University as the Jack Steele Parker Professor of International Economics at the Graduate School of Business and as a distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was a member of the board of directors of Bechtel Group, Fremont Group, Gilead Sciences, Unext.com, and Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. He was chairman of the International Council of J. P. Morgan and sat on the advisory committee of Infrastructureworld.