Learn how to re-think your future vision
Learn how to re-think your future vision
USA
Recognized futurist and successful author preparing people for the changes and trends that they will see in the future
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About Glen
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In case you ever had any doubt that our speaker Glen Hiemstra was a talented futurist, take a look at his many impressive predictions and discoveries. Even before the Internet was a public network, Glen Hiemstra, studied how it would change human and organizational communication.
During the mid-1980`s he was describing the coming economic growth of the Pacific Rim countries. By 1987 he told audiences about global warming and climate change. He previewed nanotechnology…in 1989, and described genomic science and biotechnology even earlier. Glen was writing about the age wave and the end of classic retirement…in 1995.
By 2001 Glen described the coming energy transformation as the greatest economic opportunity of the next half-century. As early as 2006 Glen listed the reasons as to why the debt bubble would burst, as it did more than a year later. Before the Internet was popular Glen Hiemstra had the foresight to register Futurist.com and become Founder and CEO of a website that is now visited by people from 120 nations each month.
The keynote speaker Glen Hiemstra helps large and small companies, educational institutions, government agencies and communities re-think their future vision and deal with breakthrough trends like these. This is why audience members and clients testify things like, “Once you hear Glen Hiemstra speak, the future will never look the same.”
Glen is also the successful author of Turning the Future into Revenue: What Businesses and Individuals Need to Know to Shape Their Future (Wiley & Sons 2006). Previously he co-authored Strategic Leadership: Achieving Your Preferred Future and he has also served as a technical advisor for several futuristic television shows. His new book, with Dennis Walsh, Millennial City, debuts in 2013.
Guided by visionary sernses, our speaker Glen Hiemstra has worked with many leading organizations and government agencies across a wide variety of domains. These include international clients like Sonae of Portugal, Ambrosetti of Italy, The World Future Forum-The Hague, GHD Engineering of Australia, Russian Railroad, and others like Microsoft, John Deere, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Regence, Novartis, The Home Depot, Adobe, Ernst & Young, Novo Nordisk, U.S./Mexico JWC, APAX Partners, Atlanta 2060, Procter & Gamble, ACE Hardware, IHOP, Lexis Nexus, and others.
As a recognized expert in preferred future planning, Glen is a popular keynote speaker, capable of focusing on emerging trends in a variety of fields. Glen goes beyond simple trend analysis to discuss the opportunities that we all have to shape the preferred future.
Each day visitors come to Futurist.com and Glen’s blog for provocative snapshots of emerging ideas, trends, and technologies. Glen can be followed at twitter.com/glenhiemstra.
In a first career, Glen was an award-winning educator; he has served as a Visiting Scholar at the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington, which worked on virtual and augmented reality technology. Glen is also a founding Associate of The Futures Agency, Basel Switzerland.
The idealistic speaker Glen Hiemstra was educated at Whitworth University, the University of Oregon, and the University of Washington. He currently lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife Tracie and they have three adult children.
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Keynote by Speaker Glen Hiemstra
Keynote by Speaker Glen Hiemstra
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What is your most popular keynote?
The most popular is Beyond 2020: Lessons from the Future. This keynote is first a wide-ranging look at future trends across several domains – society and demographics, technology, economy, environment, and the industry I am addressing – and then an inspirational challenge to get engaged in creating or shaping the future. A core idea is that if you “listen to the future” it is trying to tell us what to get ready for, what is needed, what we need to do to shape a preferred future.
Audiences like this speech as a kick-off to a conference or event, or as closing to send people home on a high note. The most common comments are that “you really stretched out thinking,” “you really challenged us,” to “the future will never look the same after that program,” to “we could have listened to Glen all day.”
How do you usually go about making your predictions for the future?
The process is one of wide and constant reading and research, studying other forecasts, watching for events, trends and developments that seem like indicators of the future, and then engaging in pattern recognition and both rational and intuitive thinking about what it all means. The future is not as mysterious as we think, if we but pay attention.
What types of clients benefit most from your talks?
The clients who are ready to look at the future more deeply, widely and with a longer time horizon. They often say, ‘we routinely do strategic planning, but this time help us look further ahead than we usually do.” For conferences and conventions the clients who benefit are those who want a content-rich yet entertaining look at the future, and who want to be associated with knowledge leadership.
What types of issues should companies be particularly aware of over the next few years?
People (employees and customers) are becoming older, younger, and more diverse. The Millennial generation is going to create some important cultural shifts, and the age wave is here and impacting all industries. Technology acceleration will continue. While we will use technology for increased productivity and collaboration, there are weak signals that a shift back to human-to-human interaction is coming.
At the same time stunning developments are coming in nanotech, biotech and medicine, and robotics or machine intelligence. Economically the greatest challenge is re-igniting middle class wage growth, and that will require re-thinking corporate incentives and social policy.
Environmentally there is no escaping wild weather, and resilience and next era energy are the waves to watch. The shift to cities and metro areas continues, as does competition for the creative class. Building sustainable cities will capture much of our attention in coming decades. Global economic growth will continue and we will be re-defining global economic terms continuously. And watch for the next moves toward the human race moving into space.
What do audiences gain from your Beyond 2020 talk?
Deeper knowledge of future trends, surprises, an enhanced skill set or mental framework for seeing the future, and inspiration to create the future rather than just waiting for it to happen.
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