The Sweeney Agency

About Richard Worzel - Futurist and Innovation Speaker:

Leading forecaster and futurist Richard Worzel is a Chartered Financial Analyst and best-selling author of Who Owns Tomorrow?. Richard is also a frequent media commentator on business and economic trends.

Richard challenges organizations to examine the future and plan for the dizzying changes to come. In his compelling presentations, seminars and workshops, Richard equips groups with the ability to understand the changes they will face in the years ahead, and with the tools to leverage those changes.

His highly customized Inventing the Future presentations help groups to identify the major forces that will affect their business as well as their personal lives. In order to help your group learn to leverage upcoming transformations, Richard identifies factors that will have dramatic implications for your industry in the near future, working through possible scenarios, contingencies, and the development of effective plans and strategies.

Richard Worzel is known for his professionalism and enthusiasm in preparing and presenting to a great variety of audiences. He works closely with conference planners to develop a customized presentation that is useful, thought-provoking, and entertaining.

Recent clients include: IBM, Standard Life, Investors Group, MacLean Hunter Publishing, Xerox, Merrill Lynch, 3Com, Mackenzie Financial, AIM Funds, among others.

What Richard Worzel Talks About:

How to Avoid Making Dangerous Decisions in a Crisis
Because they are inundated with information, investment professionals tend to believe that they have seen and heard it all, and worse, that they know it all. Yet, each of us knows that there is so much more that we don't know that when a crisis hits the markets, as it has now, we tend to be overly impressed with the urgency of the emergency and forget or overlook the bigger issues. In this long-term overview, Richard points out what's important, as opposed to what's urgent.

Innovation for Survival and Success
Innovation has become a corporate religion. In this era of rapid change, organizations must now innovate to survive. Unfortunately, our own natural biases often defeat innovation before it begins. Richard Worzel identifies the forces that oppose innovation, provides strategies to create an environment that encourages it, and then offers specific techniques that will allow you to arrive at new ideas, new directions, and practical new products and services. These techniques will allow you to focus on the future needs and wants of your clients and their clients, to broaden your thinking beyond the confines of your present thinking, and to develop the outlines of a game plan to bring your ideas into commercial reality. This workshop will provide you with take-aways you can use immediately in your business, as well as a tool kit of techniques that you can use over and over again. Innovation is a skill that can be learned - and this workshop teaches it explicitly.

Technology Gets Personal
Successful sales and marketing professionals know that the more you know about a client or prospect, the more likely you are to be able to serve them well, and secure their business. Now, advances in technology are making it possible to get even more personal with people than before. Those who want to build their businesses into the future need to add new tools to supplement the old, or lose out to more technically-savvy competitors. In this wide-ranging presentation, Richard Worzel looks at how technology is re-formatting the society we live in, and what this means for sales and marketing.

How the World Is Changing, and What You Need to Do About It
Most of us have accepted that change is inevitable – and yet we still get caught by surprise. Traditional advertising no longer works the way it used to, and the next generation of workers doesn’t behave like earlier ones. China and India’s booming industries pose threats to some businesses, while at the same time offering enormous opportunities. Employment prospects and required skill sets change seemingly without rhyme or reason, making it tough for professionals to stay employed, and for employers to find and retain the skilled people they need. And technology keeps lobbing grenades into the business world, with new possibilities that are untried, and either disappear without a ripple, or revolutionize the way business is done. How is an organization to cope? Richard Worzel brings clarity to these issues, identifying the crucial changes coming for corporations and non-profit organizations, offering strategies and tools to manage change.

Critical Care: The Future of Local Pharmacies in Today’s Economy
The economic environment we are facing today is dramatically different than any we have experienced in the last decade – and is, in some ways, different from the environment our society has faced in the last 80 years. This means that the ways of responding to it must also be different. In this presentation, Richard will provide a road map of the future for the local pharmacy/retailer.

Grabbing Change by the Horns: Will Transformation Mean Evolution, Revolution, or Annihilation?
Not only is the rate of technological change accelerating, but the rate of acceleration is increasing. Meanwhile, the ripple effects of technology in social, economic, political, and business affairs are making it harder to foresee and manage change. Richard Worzel, leading futurist and strategic planner, as well as a Chartered Financial Analyst and best-selling author, leads this exploration on the issues and impact of change in technology.

Future Tense: Education in Tomorrow's World
Our education system is experiencing the most radical changes in over a century, forcing educators to confront both grave threats to the integrity of the system, and offering us great opportunities for positive transformation. Change is erupting because of the varied demographic, social, economic, and technological forces at work in our society and schools. These changes, left to themselves, threaten to destroy much of the value of education as we know it, and to undermine the entire system. Yet, educators, using technology, and with an understanding of what lies ahead, can play a pivotal role in turning these changes to our advantage.

Futurist Richard Worzel will hand you a road map of what lies ahead, and illustrate how we can use the future to benefit our schools. Along the way, you will hear how these megatrends will affect your school, your job, and your life. You won't want to miss this intriguing and entertaining look at the future, which will help you identify the steps you can take to make these forces work for the benefit of the education system as a whole, your school in particular, and especially for your students.