Conference Keynote Speakers

JOEL BARKER

Futurist, Film-Maker, Author

JULIE STRAW

Author, Trainer, and Speaker

Joel Barker will be speaking at 8:00am, on Wednesday, April 8, 2015

About Joel Barker

Joel A. Barker is one of the best-known futurists in the world.  His eleven videos on the future have been translated into 20 languages and have been seen by more than 50 million people. His book on paradigms is a standard text in more than 100 universities and has been translated into 21 languages, the most recent in Russian and Arabic.

His videos, “The Business of Paradigms”(updated in 2013), and “The Power of Vision,”  introduced important new concepts to the corporate world. His video on “Wealth, Innovation and Diversity” helped redefine and expand the importance of diversity for organizations.  Industry Week Magazine referred to his videos as one of the most influential series of programs in the business world.

His book, Five Regions of the Future, co-authored with Dr. Scott Erickson, is about how technology is beginning to cluster in technological ecosystems and what that means for our future.

His most recent video, “Innovation at the Verge”, explores a little-known place filled with new ideas. He is coupling that work with new tools for identifying the long-term implications of change.

He has developed and taught to 100’s of organizations, a set of “strategic exploration” tools including the strategy Matrix™ and the Implications Wheel®, both now in software.

Formerly Director of the Futures Studies Department of the Science Museum of Minnesota from 1975 to 1978, he has since spoken to more than one million people in North America, Europe, Asia, South America and Australia.

Joel Barker has received numerous awards including two honorary doctorates. In 2006, he was named one of the 100 most distinguished educators for the past 100 years by the University of Minnesota’s College of Education. In the last five years, he has been named one of the top 100 thought leaders in personal leadership and organizational leadership by Executive Excellence Publications. He is presently finishing his latest book, Finding the Future Faster.

Two of his favorite quotes:

For leaders: “No one will thank you for taking care of the present if you neglected to take care of the future.”

For everyone: “You can and should shape your own future, because if you don’t, someone else surely will.”

Julie Straw will be speaking at 3:30pm, on Wednesday, April 8, 2015

About Julie Straw:

Julie Straw has spent her thirty-five years in business helping trainers, coaches and consultants build successful businesses. For the last twenty years, she has worked with learning assessments focusing on improving workplace productivity. She was responsible for building, training and maintaining a thriving network of over 1800 Everything DiSC Authorized Partners in the United States and Canada. Her roles have ranged from product development, marketing, and sales, to her current position as key spokesperson for Everything DiSC. Julie’s passion for leadership led to being co-author of The Work of Leaders, summarizing six years of research and development on leadership.

Julie is currently Vice President of Wiley Workplace Learning Solutions group, which specializes in publishing research-based self-assessments designed to help people improve performance, increase job satisfaction, and value differences. Julie spends her time speaking at events and conferences, and supporting Partner events around the world to promote their offerings in leadership, management, and employee engagement.

Prior to joining Wiley in 1993, Julie worked as a marketing manager and senior instructional designer at NCR Comten. She also spent several years developing a sales channel for a start-up computer company.

Julie is a frequent speaker at national conferences and seminars. In addition to being co-author The Work of Leaders, she is author of The 4-Dimensional Manager, published by Berrett-Koehler. Julie holds a master's degree in Business Administration and Management, and bachelor’s degrees in Education.

RAMEZ NAAM

Award-Winning Author, Teacher,
and Futurist

MATT REED

Author and Educator

Ramez Naam will be speaking at 8:00am, on Thursday, April 9, 2015

About Ramez Naam:

Ramez Naam is a computer scientist, author, and futurist. He spent thirteen years at Microsoft, where he played leadership roles on early versions of Outlook, Internet Explorer, and Bing, driving work in information retrieval, high scale systems, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

He's the H.G. Wells-award and Prometheus-award winning author of four books: The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet, which charts a course to innovate our way past challenges in energy, food, water, and climate; More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancementwhich showed the promise and ethics of enhancing human abilities;  and the brain-hacking science-fiction thrillers Nexus and Crux.  Nexus was picked by NPR as one of the best books of 2013 and has been optioned as a film by Paramount.

Ramez’s work has appeared in or been quoted in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Atlantic, Slate, Business Week, Discover, Wired, and Scientific American. He teaches on innovation, environment, and energy at Singularity University at NASA Ames and is a Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He's appeared on MSNBC, on Yahoo Finance, on Reason TV, and before live audiences on four continents, from Argentina to Istanbul; from Shenzhen to Washington DC.

Follow Ramez on twitter: @ramez or visit him at http://rameznaam.com

Matt Reed will be speaking at 9:00am, on Friday, April 10, 2015

About Matt Reed:

Dr. Matthew Reed is the Vice President for Academic Affairs at Holyoke Community College.  He is also the author of the InsideHigherEd blog "Confessions of a Community College Dean," and of the book "Confessions of a Community College Administrator" (Jossey-Bass, 2013). 

Previously, he was the Division Dean of Liberal Arts at the County College of Morris, in New Jersey.  He has also worked in the for-profit sector, at DeVry, in both faculty and administrative roles.  He has taught at Rutgers, DeVry, Kean, and the County College of Morris. 

He has a doctorate in political science from Rutgers University, and a bachelor's in political science from Williams College.  He lives with his family in Feeding Hills, Massachusetts