Adam Gordon
Adam Gordon is a futurist and professional speaker, specialising in industry foresight and strategic vision for business and public-sector organisations.
Adam Gordon has been an analyst, consultant, facilitator, author, and lecturer in industry foresight field for over 15 years. With an MSc in Strategic Foresight, and an MBA, he is particularly known as an analyst who integrates both future studies and conventional business strategy tools to create real-world industry foresight: helping institutions introducing stretch-thinking, anticipate and evaluate opportunities, and innovate and transform to exploit them. He has equivalent experience in public-sector issues management and policy innovation, negotiating the interplay of current interests and future opportunities or threats.
Adam is a regular speaker at industry conferences and planning retreats. Ongoing sample keynotes and presentations include at the European Futures Conference, Lucerne; Generant Futur, Barcelona; Future Matters, Cardiff; London Futures Symposium, London; and World Future Society, Washington DC. Adam has also appeared on NPR’s (USA) Morning Edition, and CNN World Report, has written dozens of op-ed pieces, and has been featured or serialized in various newspapers, including, most recently, The Times (London). He is an Editorial Board Member of World Future Review: Journal of Strategic Foresight, Washington DC.
Adam Gordon also serves as invited business-school faculty, and has taught industry foresight in many MBA, Executive MBA, and Executive Education programmes, including at INSEAD and Cedep, France; Copenhagen Business School, Denmark; Monash Graduate School of Business and La Trobe School of Management, Australia. He is in South Africa at least twice a year to teach at Wits Business School and UCT Graduate School of Business.
As Director of The Future Studio, an executive leadership and future strategy development firm, Adam has developed extensive foresight “content” expertise and thought-leadership experience across a wide range of industries, and across government, military, civic and non-profit sectors. He has extensive front-of-client briefing and seminar management experience, leading product-innovation, organisation planning, scenario-building and change-management workshops at executive level. He is a practiced facilitator of company planning retreats – managing fluid people-oriented development processes, challenging ideas, aligning creative inputs, and driving big-picture insights into measurable solutions and to-do’s.
Previously Adam was a Senior Associate at Coates & Jarratt, Inc., a future strategy consulting think tank in Washington, DC, where he led numerous trend research and innovation projects, using an array of specialist forecasting, planning, and uncertainty management tools to help enterprises manage social change and technology advancement, avoid competitive threats, and implement future-wise solutions. He also co-led a multi-client information technology and biotechnology horizon scanning project which advised on emerging opportunities and risk management to clients including Whirlpool, Nokia, BT, BP-Amoco, Siemens, General Motors, Boehringer-Ingelheim, Weyerhaeuser, Coca-Cola, IBM, DuPont, Ch2MHill, Pfizer, and Kellogg.
Adam’s new book Future Savvy is published by The American Management Association (Amacom Press, New York, 2009). He is also the author of various future strategy articles and white papers, and maintains an industry foresight blog at www.futuresavvy.net
Adam Gordon is Johannesburg-born and has lived abroad since 1995, in the United States, Europe, and currently the UK where he is married with three children. He is in South Africa twice a year – in March/April and in October – and may also be booked at other times by special arrangement.