Stan Davis

Visionary Business Thinker

BIG IDEAS

• My Web, Oh My! How Companies Will Adapt to the Connected World of the Consumer
  Stan Davis has made a career out of looking deeply at the future of science, technology, business and their effect on people. In this provocative talk, Stan begins with the perspective that businesses are still scrambling to catch up with new ways of working, playing, talking and sharing information as they ripple out in the world of the connected consumer.
  
  Decision-making over the past quarter-century has continually moved from the center to periphery, down hierarchies to where decisions are carried out. Current technologies, especially of the Web 2.0 world, have moved that decision-making even further, overwhelmingly beyond firms' boundaries and into the physical and mental space of the customer.
  
  The differences between the two worlds are striking. Whereas information is still hoarded and protected in companies, it is freely shared and reused in the connected Web 2.0 world. Hierarchy and command still rule the day in most organizations, while individuals are self-organizing, loose and flat. Other shifts are from command & control to adapt & evolve, from provider-generated to consumer-generated content, from vertical to horizontal organization, and from an 'audience-' to a 'community-' approach to customers.
  
  Stan lays out a simple but powerful frame for looking at all the major impacts of Web 2.0 and beyond on leadership, business strategy and organization. By gleaning the ways consumers interact with technology, he puts forward a roadmap for companies to grow and innovate, rather than calcify and stagnate.
• The Molecular Economy
  How the convergence of information and biology are shifting business away from top-down, command and control organizations toward bottoms-up, adapt and evolve entities.
• The Art of Business
  Finding a place for the arts in business has never been more important. Stan talks about the power of an aesthetic point of view in business, and its impact on people and organizations.

SNAPSHOT BIO

Stan Davis is a prominent author, consultant, and speaker on the future of business. For more than 40 years, he has researched and documented the big shifts in science, technology, markets, and organization as they play out on business strategy and implementation. He has 13 books under his belt, with collective sales of more than 1 million copies in 15 languages. He coined the term “mass customization” in the 1980s in his bestseller, Future Perfect (recipient of Tom Peters's "Book of the Decade" Award). Other books include the bestselling Blur (with Chris Meyer), as well as 2020 Vision (will Bill Davidson), Future Wealth (with Chris Meyer), It’s Alive: The Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business (with Chris Meyer), and The Art of Business. His early career as an academic was spent primarily at the Harvard Business School. Stan is active with corporations and institutions as an advisor, educator, and guest presenter, having worked with Apple, AT&T, Bank of America, Citibank, Ernst & Young, Ford, JPMorgan Chase, Mercedes-Benz, and Sun Microsystems. He is longtime advisor to the board of the Massachusetts Medical Society, which publishes the New England Journal of Medicine, the world's most prestigious medical journal.