Described as endlessly optimistic, Nancy is a strategic futurist and bestselling author with a drive to help enterprise organizations and visionary leaders transform to meet the escalating expectations ahead. Recognized as one of the world’s top female futurists, she has spent her career building, shaping and evolving a portfolio of $60+ billion worth of major global brands. With growing conviction of what will (and needs to) shift, executives value her unique abilities to sense and synthesize the terrain ahead and guide those ready to build more relevant and sustainable solutions.
With a career at three of the top global advertising agencies and as founder of her own strategic inspiration company, Play Big Inc, Nancy has a rich history of advising and learning with some of the top companies in the world, including Nestle, Brinker International, The Coca Cola Company, Sprint and Acumen. In 2015 she took a leap to help shape a company of the future: artificial intelligence start-up, Lucid and later went on to build a leadership summit designed to encourage c-suite executives to explore seven of the most disruptive emergent technologies for business. Two years ago, Nancy joined Austin-based artificial intelligence services company, Kungfu.AI, to help visionary enterprise leaders better understand and harness the transformative effects of AI applications. She is also championing the work of Riane Eisler to create a movement around Partnerism, a socio-economic system that is built on partnership versus the domination models of Capitalism and Socialism.
A 10-year TEDx curator (and world’s first licensee), Nancy is a Singularity University guest lecturer, frequent panelist at South by Southwest (SXSW), creator of the first Career Fair For the Future event for college + high school students, recent co-founder of the Femme Futurists Society (a growing collection of interviews with leading futurists around the world) and she remains an active strategist. She has served on the board of retail trade association GMDC, on the advisory council for both Retail Tomorrow and Future Frontiers, co-designed + produced a fintech conference to strengthen community banking and is helping move forward two brands poised to weave a more human, distributed internet: Holochain + Holo hosting.
Ranked #1 on Amazon for both Business Ethics and Organization Strategy, her first book, titled Leadering: The Ways Visionary Leaders Play Bigger, defines and makes visible the dynamic, inclusive and audacious mindset leaders must cultivate in order to stay relevant and help build a better next. A techno-optimist, Nancy is committed to advancing societal structures and the new mindsets necessary to effectively harness the significant technology innovations heading our way and ensure a safe and thriving future for us all.
How can I better lead and prepare myself and my teams for success? What opportunities will this create? How will this be measured?
It has been forecast that we are sitting on the brink of as many as fourteen internet-sized revolutions, enabling an unprecedented ability to solve complex problems and build more relevant structures, but these advances can sound overwhelming when our thinking and incentive structures haven’t kept up with the exponential pace of change.
Everyday it’s becoming clear that we need to quickly ditch outdated industrial era processes, metrics and beliefs focused on efficiency, growth and scale and instead cultivate a set of dynamic practices, systemic yardsticks and deep alignment in order to empower much faster and more humane decision-making.
What is the mindset we need to create the future we want?
• How transitioning from 20th Century LeaderSHIP to 21st Century LeaderING generates more sustainable, continuous value.
• From IQ to EQ to AQ… the importance of developing your adaptability quotient.
• The enterprise and societal scaffolding needed to make the most of the huge productivity leap ahead.
• The shifting metrics of success.
What does it take to build an AI-led organization, career or outlook? How radically will things really change? How do you jump in?
We can now see how advancing AI-enabled tools and applications will help us drive huge gains and restructure everything from medicine to education, from food to finance, and to a deeper understanding of ourselves. Those led by curiosity and a deep sense of caring will increasingly see that as technology advances, we can actually become more human. More whole. More impactful than ever.
So how do you jump in? How do you build AI-first strategies and determine which applications drive productivity for you? What are the new business models and societal structures needed to support this exponential expansion of potential? And how can you personally level up?
• The stages of AI-readiness.
• What it means to be AI-led as an enterprise and as a human.
• How to build and scale these innovations safely and ethically.
• What it takes to support organization adoption.
• What this means for the future of work and reskilling-inside and out of your organization.
As new tools give us new powers, the question is to what end? What is the role of business in building a safe, thriving and equitable future?
We are moving out of the Industrial Revolution and entering an entirely new “Exponential Productivity Transformation” (XPT). In this moment of technological transformation, we are simultaneously being granted a massive opportunity to redesign and rebuild structures that empower much faster and more humane decision-making. For that to be possible we must cultivate networked intelligence focused on economical, ecological and sociological systems that generate sustainable, regenerative value for mutual benefit.
As the world becomes more technologically advanced and enhanced, are we open to the emerging socio-economic frameworks that offer more than they extract to provide a safe, just and thriving future for us all?
•How Web3 and other distributed systems are reshaping models of productivity and economic structures.
•How living systems and biological intelligence will reshape our organizations.
•The new yardsticks and measurements needed to track and incentivize societal wellbeing and true wealth.
•What this all means for the future of Work and Working.
•The economic benefits of caring vs winning at all costs.
Uncover expert insights from economic futurist Andrew Busch on using AI to transform your career and drive innovation in an ever-changing world.
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