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Daniel Burrus Profile

  • Since 1983, Burrus has had a stunning track record of predicting future trends, making him one of the most credible and in-demand futurists in the world.

  • Burrus was one of the first futurists to focus on technology, making a name for himself in 1983 with his carefully researched analysis of 20 technologies that would influence the future - a list that included the Internet, AI, and genetic engineering, among others.

  • Burrus is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers, and has over 1.3 million followers on LinkedIN.
  • The New York Times described Daniel Burrus as one of the top three most in demand business gurus in the United States. He is generally considered one of the world’s leading experts in the area of global trends and future innovations. His tried and tested methodologies for increasing revenue through the embracing of technological innovations have led to him being much in demand by many Fortune 500 companies. His seven books have included the highly regarded Technotrends as well as Flash Foresight, which made the bestseller lists of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

    At the start of the 1980s Daniel distinguished himself by being the only writer in his field accurately to identify the most important twenty technological advances which would influence the economy in the coming decades. His almost uncanny ability to predict the changes which technology will impose on business has benefited many hundreds of top end clients. Daniel is also much in demand for his views in the media, contributing to CNBC, Huffington Post, Wired magazine, Examiner.com and many others.

    Daniel has delivered more than 3000 keynote speeches in his career, every one carefully tailored to the needs of his audience. Sharing his insights with humor and motivational force, he gives his audiences the toolkit they need to exploit the opportunities inherent in rapid technological change.

    Daniel Burrus’ experience is anything but purely theoretical; in his final year of college he distinguished himself by directing a federal research grant, one of the first undergraduates ever to do so. He founded and managed six businesses, of which four swiftly became national leaders. He is the CEO of Burrus Research, a company which offers the benefits of his unparalleled knowledge of technology driven trends to clients looking for the new opportunities new technology offers.

    • View Extended/Alternate Bio

      Keynote Speaker, Business Strategist and Global Futurist

      Established Industry Expert
      Daniel Burrus is considered one of the world’s leading futurists on global trends and innovation. The New York Times has referred to him as one of the top three business gurus in the highest demand as a speaker. He is a strategic advisor to executives from Fortune 500 companies helping them to develop game-changing strategies based on his proven methodologies for capitalizing on technology innovations and their future impact. He is the author of six books, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal best seller Flash Foresight as well as the highly acclaimed Technotrends.

      Technology Futurist and Business Strategist
      Daniel Burrus’ accurate predictions date back to the early 1980s where he became the first and only technology futurist to accurately identify the twenty technologies that would become the driving forces of business and economic change for decades to come. Since then he has established a worldwide reputation for his exceptional record of predicting the future of technology driven change and its direct impact on the business world. As a business strategist, he has helped hundreds of clients profit from new opportunities and develop successful competitive business strategies based on the creative application of leading-edge technologies. He is also a contributing writer on the topics of innovation, change and the future for CNBC, Huffington Post, Wired magazine and Examiner.com to name a few.

      Keynote Speaker
      An award winning keynote speaker, Daniel has delivered more than 2,700 keynote speeches to corporations, associations, and professional organizations worldwide. In his presentations, he blends timely and provocative insights with just the right amount of humor and motivation to enable his audiences to take positive action. He is a master at customizing his presentations to his audiences as he identifies game-changing trends that will have a direct impact on his audience members and offers powerful, practical guidance for turning rapid change into a competitive advantage.

      Business, Consumer and Technology Trends Researcher
      His interest in research became apparent in his third year of college, when Burrus became one of the first undergraduates in the nation to direct a federal research grant. He went on to found and manage six businesses, four of which were national leaders in their first year. As a highly successful entrepreneur, he knows how to translate research findings into practical competitive advantages.

      He is the founder and CEO of Burrus Research, a research and consulting firm that monitors global advancements in technology driven trends to help clients profit from technological, social and business forces that are converging to create enormous untapped opportunities.

    Daniel Burrus Speaking Videos

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    Daniel Burrus's Speech Descriptions

    Daniel Burrus brings decades of experience of research into the effects of technology on business and economics, alongside his almost preternatural ability to predict the technological challenges of the future, to a series of entertaining, enthralling and motivational speeches.

    Daniel prides himself upon tailoring his speeches exactly to his audience, so he can show healthcare professionals how technology can transform their field, show educationalists how technology can accelerate learning, show specific businesses what technologies will become important in their sphere; workers in virtually any environment can benefit from Daniel’s insights.

    As well as his profound expertise in the field of technology, Daniel’s business experience has given him an unparalleled insight into marketing and sales; he uses the skills which have been in demand from companies such as Lexus, Cadbury Schweppes, Kellogg’s, Google, Toshiba and many others to show you how you can see opportunities which are invisible to all your competitors, allowing you to reinvent your business before it becomes moribund.

    The Anticipatory Organization: The Missing Competency
    Based on decades of research and experience applying his HARD TREND methodology to leading companies worldwide, he has identified the missing competency: anticipation. With the Anticipatory Organization Model, Burrus enables business leaders to identify the Hard Trends that will happen, predict disruptions before they disrupt, and capitalize on emerging opportunities.

    Daniel Burrus uses illustrative examples to teach attendees how to separate HARD TRENDS—trends that will happen—from SOFT TRENDS—trends that might happen. When you learn to analyze and perceive trends this way, it is possible to tap into what Burrus calls EVERYDAY INNOVATION, solving challenges faster, and recognizing previously invisible opportunities.

    This eye-opening and motivating presentation will teach attendees the key components of the new core competency—anticipation—and show them how to apply it to their work and life, which will accelerate both their organizations’ growth and their personal success.

    Optional Interaction: near the end of his presentation, Mr. Burrus asks the audience to take 90 seconds to write down (a) one HARD TREND that will impact their business in the next few years, and (b) the opportunity that the trend will present. Post event, Mr. Burrus personally reviews and synthesizes what the audience members have written. Two weeks after the meeting, the meeting planner sends the entire compilation of crowd-sourced HARD TRENDS and Opportunities to every participant. Daniel Burrus has assembled these valued reports from audiences ranging in number from 50 to 14,000. Sharing the insights from this collaborative effort has proven countless times that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

    Flash Foresight: Seven Radical Principles That Will Transform Your Business
    Based on his New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling book Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible, Daniel Burrus takes the concept of looking into the future and transforms it into a new paradigm for running highly successful businesses that use new tools of innovation for accelerating growth both now and in the future.

    Using seven proven innovation triggers for making invisible opportunities visible, attendees will experience what Burrus calls Flash Foresights—bursts of accurate insights about the future that reveal new and radically different ways of solving problems, crafting must-have products, creating high-demand services or building new lines of business.

    In his thought-provoking and highly motivating presentation, Burrus teaches how to:

      • Anticipate using the new science of certainty
      • Accelerate growth by increasing speed and agility
      • Innovate by looking where no one else is looking to see what no one else is seeing
      • Engage employees and customers using new tools, and
      • Transform how we sell, market, communicate, collaborate, innovate, train and educate.

    Using provocative examples, he illustrates how organizations large and small have been able to accomplish seemingly impossible things by using his seven triggers to make invisible solutions visible.

    Accelerating Growth
    Accelerating growth requires a new way of thinking about overcoming obstacles and acting on new opportunities. All too often, change comes from the outside in, forcing us to react by slipping into a crisis management mode, and putting out fires. This presentation is about opportunity management, identifying the driving forces of predictable change, driving growth strategies from the inside out, and taking control of our future.

    In this eye-opening and motivating presentation, the author of six books, including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible and the international bestseller Technotrends, takes you to the next level by sharing valuable insights into the opportunities yet to come, preparing you to capitalize on the next wave of technological change.

    Leading With Strategic Foresight and Certainty
    In times of unprecedented change and uncertainty, we need to ask ourselves what are we certain about? Strategies based on uncertainty and hope equal high levels of risk. Strategies based on certainty dramatically reduce risk and produce superior results. Hindsight always brings lament. You can never go back and change your past decisions and actions. Strategic foresight takes your vision to a new actionable level by adding the events that will happen in the future.

    Based on his revolutionary method of identifying Hard Trends from Soft Trends, and Permanent Changes from Cyclical Changes, attendees learn how to both anticipate and capitalize on new opportunities, as well as predict problems, long before they happen. In addition, they will learn how to use the new tools and rules of leadership to accelerate growth.

    Business Process Transformation: The Big Ideas That Are Changing Everything
    Based on his New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible, Daniel Burrus takes the concept of looking into the future and transforms it into a new paradigm for running highly successful businesses that use new tools of innovation for driving business process transformation designed to dramatically increase agility, speed and cost savings for accelerating growth both now and in the future.

    Virtualization and advanced cloud services are rapidly transforming the IT landscape, allowing IT to focus more on innovation versus maintenance. Virtualization is a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to customers using Internet technology. We already have virtual desktops, servers, networking, storage, and security, to name a few processes that are V-enabling the enterprise. There are public clouds, community clouds, virtual private clouds, private cloud services, and hybrid clouds that allow organizations to create infrastructure as a service to name a few.

    In his thought-provoking and highly motivating presentation, Daniel Burrus teaches how to Anticipate the evolution of virtualization, cloud services and a host of other game-changing technologies using the new science of certainty, Accelerate growth by gaining new levels of agility and speed, and Transform the underlying business processes of how we sell, market, communicate, collaborate, innovate, train and educate…because if you don’t someone else will.

    Technology-Enabled Innovation: Creating and Sustaining Competitive Advantage
    Technology is continually changing the rules of competition, rendering many traditional business strategies and processes obsolete. Emerging technologies provide opportunities for creating new, high margin products and services, as well as enable companies to gain new levels of speed, agility and cost savings. In addition, they allow us to de-commoditize current products and services. Identifying and understanding the challenges and opportunities that new technologies create has become a key business imperative.

    In this eye-opening presentation, New York Times bestselling author Daniel Burrus identifies specific technologies that will directly impact you and your industry. He will share how dematerialization, virtualization, advanced mobility, product intelligence, advanced networking, interactivity, globalization and convergence can be used to drive innovation and advantage as you develop new products, services and customer experiences.

    Transforming How We Market and Sell: See the Invisible to do the Impossible
    What if you could have the foresight to see invisible opportunities before anyone else, including your competition? What if you were certain enough about the future to re-invent and re-position your retail business now, before it’s too late? What if you could skip your biggest problems and move forward quickly? Sound impossible? It isn’t! Daniel Burrus has been helping Fortune 500 executives from companies such as Lever Brothers, Lexus, Miller Coors, Cadbury Schweppes, Kellogg’s, General Mills, GE, American Express, Google, Toshiba, Procter & Gamble, and Honda to see invisible opportunities and solve seemingly impossible problems.

    In this highly insightful and motivating presentation, Daniel Burrus will help you to see both the forces that are driving the transformation of marketing and retail and how to use those forces to drive innovation and growth.

    The Seven Pillars of Digital Marketing: How To Profit Now
    Today’s marketplace is undergoing a period of profound and accelerating transformation, with the advent of new media permanently changing consumer attitudes and behavior. The changes are in the early stages, but they are irreversible and are already disrupting entire industries. The good news is that these shifts are predictable and can be capitalized upon through the insights and tools offered by New York Times bestselling author Daniel Burrus, world-famous for his exceptional track record of accurately predicting the impact of technology-driven trends on consumer behavior and the business world.

    Transforming Healthcare with Technology-Enabled Innovation:
    Understanding New Opportunities Resulting from Technology-Driven Change
    We are standing at the base of a mountain of technology-driven change. Wireless telemedicine, point-of-care transactions, e-enabled disease management, home diagnostics, the virtual hospital, e-enabled customer choice, e-enabled assisted living, e-communities of practice, just-in-time training, and procurement service providers are just a few of the many areas that can be used to accelerate a positive transformation in healthcare. Understanding the new opportunities that will result is essential in determining a clear course of action.

    Transforming Education: Using Technology To Accelerate Learning
    In this dynamic and inspiring presentation, one of the world’s leading technology forecasters and strategists will provide educational leaders with new strategies and enabling technologies they can use to accelerate learning, increase staff performance, and shape a positive future for their schools. Understanding what these strategies and tools can do, and the opportunities they create, provides the foundation to positively transform education.

    Educational leaders will learn how to manage the perception that change is negative by learning to use certainty and new tools to strategically position their schools to thrive in the years to come. Through personal insights, practical examples, and research-based principles, attendees will learn to act on the changes that are affecting the future of education and gain a renewed excitement and passion for the contribution they can make, all while redefining their roles as 21st century educators.

    Daniel Burrus on Speaking

    I treat speaking kind of like a mini consultation and actually deliver solutions and things that they can take and use.

    SPEAKING.COM: What special preparation work do you do before a speaking engagement?

    BURRUS: Someone asked me since I’ve been keynote speaker for so many years now, “how much time do you spend working on my speech?” Truthfully, I spend very little time working on my speech and more time studying the audience. I actually customize my speeches for each audience. My wife has heard me speak more than anyone else on the planet and she’s always amazed at how different each presentation is. Now, obviously, there are things that I talk about in every speech like certain “how-to’s” but I relate that to CEOs from hospitals versus 2000 CEOs from technology companies in a very different way. I treat speaking kind of like a mini consultation and actually deliver solutions and things that they can take and use.

    SPEAKING.COM: What would you like people to take away from your presentations? And what kind of audiences do you think would best benefit from your message?

    BURRUS: The biggest takeaway is that you can indeed anticipate disruptions before they disrupt, and become anticipatory as a leader and as an organization. You don’t have to be disrupted by all of this incoming change; rather, you can learn to make disruption and change your biggest competitive advantage. You’re either going to be the disruptor or the disrupted, and I want people to learn to be positive disruptors. I want to empower people to become active shapers of the future and create better futures for themselves and for others.

    The best audiences for my message are leaders and innovators. My audiences tend to be C-suite executives, managers, leaders from all over the world, or people that are trying to do something very innovative. I tend to talk to leaders rather than the people that are trying to get to the basics of just learning how to do something.

    Within a couple of years, they were in over 30 countries doing exactly what I talked about. It was a huge success, and they actually helped lead the way to bringing Africa technically into the future.

    SPEAKING.COM: Have you had any particularly memorable speaking engagements or unusual situations arise while you’re on the road?

    BURRUS: When you have given 3000 keynotes around the world, you do experience a lot. I had an event not long ago in China where I had 12,000 people with 35 different languages being translated. It was a real thrill to be able to really engage them and to get them all reacting and laughing at the same time, because there’s an art and a science to doing international humor that translates well into all of those different languages.

    Another one that stands out was the first time I gave a speech in Moscow to the top 200 business people from all over Russia and of course, it was being translated. When I finished speaking, the first question that came to me was, “Are you of Russian heritage? You know us so well.” That was exactly what I wanted to hear because as I said earlier, I really take the time to get to know the audience so that I become one with them, no matter where they are from around the world.

    One final memorable one is when I traveled to South Africa around 2001 or 2002 to give a 30-minute speech. I was only going to be there for 18 hours, because I had to get back for some other speeches, but I said, “Yes,” to that 30-minute speech in South Africa because I felt the opportunity was there to make a big difference. The client was a cellphone company that wanted to expand through the continent of Africa.

    Remember, this was before the iPhone, so when I spoke to them, I said, “Stop thinking of yourself as a telecommunication cellphone company and start thinking of yourself as an economic empowerment company because you’ll make a bigger difference. If you look at where the cellphone is going to evolve based on hard trends, it will eliminate the problems that we have based on infrastructure in Africa.

    “We don’t have good highways, we don’t have many banks all around Africa and we don’t even have electricity in many places. What you have to realize is the phone is going to become a powerful tool, very quickly. It’s going to become the bank, it’s going to become your GPS, it’s going to become not just your phone, but your multimedia computer.

    “So here’s what you do as a strategy, as an economic empowerment company. The first thing you do is you start a foundation in every African country. You do is you go into a community that, for example, has no electricity. and you use either solar, if they have a lot of sun, or you use bio-degradable if they have a lot of plants, and you bring electricity to that community through that foundation. In other words, you’re going to help them get water out of the well without having to use a crank.

    “Now that they have electricity, you can help them with cellphones and start communicating and lifting themselves economically out of the poverty that they probably are in, in some form, because now they can communicate, collaborate, and innovate. As they start growing, competition will come in, but when it does you’ll be beyond the competition because they will remember you helped them get water out of the well.”

    That was the essence of the 30-minute speech, and within a couple of years, they were in over 30 countries doing exactly what I talked about. It was a huge success, and they actually helped lead the way to bringing Africa technically into the future.

    SPEAKING.com Exclusive Interview with Daniel Burrus
    How to Predict the Future, with Daniel Burrus
    In this exclusive interview with SPEAKING.COM, futurist and technology speaker, Daniel Burrus discusses:
  • The science of anticipating the future.
  • How distinguishing between hard and soft trends can turn your company into a disruptor.
  • Learning to "skip" your organization's biggest problems. Read the Full Interview
  • "It is commonly said that we can only be certain of death and taxes, but the reality is there are thousands of things that we can be certain of."
    - Daniel Burrus

    What People are Saying about Seeing Daniel Speak

    Rating Entries

    “A ‘must-hear’ presentation.”
        Steven A. Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft

    “By applying the principles of Flash Foresight to our business, in less than a year we have been able to double our revenues and increase the value of our company by a factor of four, and we feel the biggest impact is yet to come.”
        Arni Bellini, CEO, Connectwise

    “I don’t know any other speaker that could present after Bill Gates and ‘wow’ an audience of CEOs like you did! You were the perfect choice.”
        Steve Morrison, Policy Management Systems Corp.

    “This is the third time you’ve addressed this conference and each presentation has been better than the last…and I wouldn’t hesitate inviting you back to a future conference!”
        John E. Burkey, First Data Resources

    “You were fabulous! You received rave reviews from our participants for the relevancy, insight and expertise of your presentation material and style. You are the only keynote speaker we have invited back numerous times. I am convinced the extraordinary success of your continued contribution is due in no small part to the enormous amount of time you put into each presentation by customizing it to fit the unique and challenging needs of our CMO audience each year.”
        Stephanie Fischer, CEO, Global Retail Marketing Association

    “Our people, without exception, felt that your ideas were provocative, original, and timely. Your entertaining style captured the audience and compelled them to listen, think, and apply your thoughts to their own professional and personal lives. You truly made a memorable impression on the audience.”
        Mark McNutt, Xerox Corporation

    “It came as no surprise that you were rated the top speaker in our audience evaluations. Your unique blend of wit and insight awakened all of us to the need to develop the knowledge network necessary to move to a 21st century mind set.”
        Robert Howe, IBM Corporation

    “Your thoughts on how to create an opportunity for change through a customer focus is the excellence our team is striving for. The framework you provided on innovation, creativity and customer value will be instituted as a management practice to enable the technology infrastructure group to take Wells Fargo to the next stage.”
        Victor Nichols, Wells Fargo

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    Books by Daniel Burrus:

    The Anticipatory Organization: Turn Disruption and Change into Opportunity and Advantage

    Technology-driven change is accelerating at an exponential rate, but moving fast in the wrong direction will only get you into trouble faster! Reacting to problems and digital disruptions, no matter how agile you and your organization are, is no longer good enough.

    The Anticipatory Organization teaches you how to separate the Hard Trends that will happen, from the Soft Trends that might happen, allowing you to jump ahead with low risk and the confidence certainty can provide. Accelerate innovation and actively shape the future—before someone else does it for you!

    Digital transformation has divided us all into two camps: the disruptor and the disrupted. The Anticipatory Organization gives you the tools you need to see disruption before it happens, allowing you to turn change into advantage. In The Anticipatory Organization, Burrus shows us that the future is far more certain than we realize, and finding certainty in an uncertain world provides a big advantage for those who know how and where to look for it.

    Inspired by the dramatic results that organizations are experiencing from his award-winning learning system, The Anticipatory Organization offers a comprehensive way to identify game-changing opportunities. Using the principles of this proven model, you will learn how to elevate planning, accelerate innovation, and transform results by pinpointing and acting upon enormous opportunities waiting to be discovered.


    Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible
    Today we all face more impossible challenges than ever before. But flash foresight lets you transform the impossible into the possible, revealing hidden opportunities and allowing you to solve your biggest problems—before they happen.

    Daniel Burrus is one of the world’s leading forecasters, corporate strategists, and visionaries. Over the past quarter century, he has established a reputation worldwide for his exceptional record of accurately predicting the future of technological change and its direct impact on the business world.

    “Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could predict the future—and be right?” writes Burrus. “You can: all you have to do is leave out the parts you could be wrong about! And the amazing thing is, when you know where to look, there’s more than enough you can be right about to make all the difference.”

    From small businesses to multinationals, individual careers to entire industries, Flash Foresight looks at how Burrus’s seven radical flash foresight “triggers” have transformed dozens of careers, fortunes, and lives. Both engaging and enlightening, Flash Foresight provides an easy-to-implement blueprint for applying the same strategies to your own business, enabling you to see the invisible and do the impossible.

    In the past, flash foresight was useful. Today, as the pace of technological change accelerates almost beyond the point of comprehension, it’s an imperative.



    Technotrends: How to Use Technology to Go Beyond Your Competition
    Burrus, technology futurist, and Gittines (What Men Won’t Tell You But Women Need to Know) begin this intriguing book by rejecting the widespread notion that the U.S. has completely lost its competitive edge in the global marketplace. They argue that the time has come for America to once again play by its own rules, new rules that will take us beyond the competition.

    Employing a dramatic mode of inquiry, they describe the “techno-education” of seven fictional characters who play cards under Burrus’s guidance. This framework enables the characters to identify and analyze a plethora of technical trends from “electronic data interchange” to “fuzzy logic”—software that can deal with conflicts and contradictory commands. The authors also offer stimulating perspectives on core technologies, management and marketing theories, education, training and changing American industries. The card-playing strategem, however, limits the authors’ effectiveness in developing their major themes.

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