The 1st European Futurists Conference Lucerne will be an outstanding gathering of top futurists from all over Europe. Among them, Dr. Michael Jackson, Founding Member and Chairman of Shaping Tomorrow, Matthias Horx, Founder of Zukunftsinstitut GmbH, and Adam Gordon, Visiting Professor at INSEAD Fontainebleau.
Mike Jackson (picture), a keynote speaker at the Main Conference of the 1st European Futurists Conference Lucerne, is a Founding Member and Chairman of Shaping Tomorrow. He also advises businesses on dramatically improving their competitiveness through pioneering work on practical Sustainable Business Strategies.
Clients include a number of blue-chip, international and national companies and small to medium sized UK businesses. He is known on conference platforms speaking on business subjects including futures, sustainability, customer loyalty and retention, business process re-engineering, change management, building strategic visions and values and people motivation and communications, ethics, alliances and corporate governance.
With over 30 years´ experience in Business Management in the UK, North America and Europe, he has had significant exposure to corporate banking and consumer finance and, latterly, futuring. Mike was Chief Executive of Birmingham Midshires Building Society between 1990 and 1998, then the UK´s 4th largest. As Chief Executive of Birmingham Midshires he achieved a dramatic change for the better in the Society´s fortunes moving from near oblivion to a highly profitable, customer led and multiple-award winning business in just eight years. He was previously a Senior Vice President with Bank of America who he joined in 1986. He held several positions at the Bank which included Head of Europe, Middle East and Africa operations, based in London, Head of Consumer Loans Services and Chief Financial Officer for consumer markets, based in North America (San Francisco). He studied at Salford University, Manchester, and holds a Bachelor of Science in Electronics and a U.S. accredited MBA in Operations Research. He was conferred an Honorary Doctorate in Business Administration by the University of Wolverhampton in 1997.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the Chartered Institutes of Bankers and Marketing and the Institutes of Directors and Management Services, as well as a Companion of the Institute of Management. He is a full member of the Strategic Planning Society, the Association of Professional Futurists and the World Future Society. His current interest is in profiting from tomorrow.
Matthias Horx, a keynote speaker at the 1st conference as well, is today the most influential trend analyst and futurologist in the German-speaking world. He studied sociology in Frankfurt and in the 1980's he embarked on a career in journalism. In 1992, he and Peter Wippermann, professor of communications, founded the TRENDBÜRO Hamburg agency.
For more than 20 years, he has been avidly following the process of change in our society. He looks at how values have changed, and analyzes new technologies and the culture among today's youth. He examines changes in product aesthetics, and what people consider to be "style." Time and time again, he has to look at the major trends of our times: globalization, individualization, the information society.
Matthias Horx now works as a futurology consultant for well-known companies. He runs his own institute with offices in Frankfurt and Vienna, and is the publisher of a futurology newsletter called "2000x". His current interest is in the influence of forecasting on business, politics and minds. Matthias Horx is also member of the advisory board of the European Futurists Conference Lucerne.
Adam Gordon is currently teaching scenario planning at Europe’s leading business school, the INSEAD at Fontainebleau in France. He trains MBA-students in understanding appropriate uses and limitations of business forecasting and planning, and current best practices. He offers general exposure to the tools and methods in the future strategy toolbox, including horizon scanning, trend tracking, technology roadmaps, systems dynamics, delphi analysis, prediction markets, real options and other qualitative and quantitative methods. He teaches the uses and limits of scenarios so the students are able to use them to manage important and uncertain variables for a company or an industry.
Adam Gordon is a specialist in business future strategy and business growth planning, including market trend and emerging issues analysis, technology foresight, and management of change and growth for public and private-sector organizations.
As a Senior Associate at the Washington DC business think-tank, Coates & Jarratt from 1996, he led over 20 business foresight strategy projects helping large enterprises – US and European multinational clients and government agencies – innovate to manage technology advancement, competitive threats and changing market trends.
During this time he built up industry experience in various sectors defined by moderate-to-high uncertainty, including telecoms, financial services, health care, education and media-entertainment, and designed organizational learning and transition strategy plans for clients undergoing industry reorganization in these and other sectors.
Adam began developing content expertise in emerging issues and business future strategy as a technology-policy journalist in South Africa, where he worked for Business Report. He is the author of many published articles and business features.
He holds an MBA from INSEAD; an MS in Strategic Foresight from the University of Houston; and a BA in English & Economics from Witwatersrand. His current interests include how to critically evaluate forecasts.
