David Houle

David Houle is a futurist, author, and speaker who has spent his career helping organizations and individuals understand and prepare for the massive transformations reshaping our world. His concept of the Shift Age has become a widely referenced framework for understanding the era of accelerating change we are living through.

A Futurist Forged in Media Innovation

Houle spent over 20 years in media and entertainment, serving in leadership roles at NBC and CBS and as part of the senior executive team that created and launched MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1, and CNN Headline News. That front-row seat to media disruption gave him a deep understanding of how technology transforms industries and cultures. He has since delivered over 600 speeches on all six inhabited continents and in 12 countries, and is the author of multiple books including The Shift Age, Entering the Shift Age, and Brand Shift.

Helping Organizations Navigate the Shift Age

Houle’s ability to identify the mega-trends reshaping business, education, and society makes him a valued advisor to executives, educators, and government leaders. His futurist insights are grounded in decades of real-world experience navigating industry transformation. His keynotes deliver compelling insights on the forces driving the Shift Age, how technology is transforming business and society, preparing organizations for accelerating change, and the trends that will shape the next decade of disruption and opportunity.

Entering The Shift Age

This is Houle’s most requested and most delivered speech, based upon the 2013 #1 Amazon best-seller in the category of business planning and forecasting. Futurist Houle identifies and explains the new age we have entered. He looks at the three forces of the Shift Age, the Five Contexts of the Shift Age and how they will affect us as individuals, business people and leaders. He takes a look at the future of generations, women, technology, energy, education, IP, big data and other topics and provides the audience with eye opening transformations dead ahead. The Shift Age is one of, if not the most, transformative and exciting times in human history. Houle leaves us with suggestions for how to prepare for and adapt to this new age. A big picture presentation that is pertinent for any group or organization. It can be customized for any industry or business sector.

Brand Shift: The Future of Brands & Marketing

A brand new presentation for 2015! Based upon the just published and already highly acclaimed book of the same name, Houle first takes a quick look at the history of branding, then the current and future trends that are and will disrupt brand marketing in the years ahead. The presentation ends with concepts and prescriptions for the marketing of brands for the next decade. A high level and high-powered presentation for any marketing conference, corporation or entity concerned about the future of their brand.

The New Health Age

This presentation provides a large, contextual and conceptual understanding of the huge forces and changes that are and will completely transform the health care and medical landscape in America and around the world in the next ten years. This presentation is based upon the #1 Amazon best-seller of the same name. Houle has spoken to and been booked by numerous associations and health care companies, providing them with the vision and understanding of the huge changes that are inevitable. This is a presentation for any health care or medical meeting.

Is Privacy Dead? The Future of Privacy in the Digital Age

This presentation, based in part on Houle’s eBook of the same name, takes a new look at privacy today and in the future. After a quick look back at the history of privacy, Houle presents why we have lost so much of our privacy in the past decades and years and why those dynamics will continue to eviscerate personal privacy in the future. Incorporating a look at technological innovation, accelerating electronic connectedness, Big Data freedom versus convenience and the loss of the Concept of Place, this is a powerful presentation about one of the most important and topical subjects of our time.

Shift Ed: A Call to Action for Transforming K-12 Education

This presentation is based upon Houle’s acclaimed book of the same name. As a futurist involved in education, Houle calls for nothing less than the transformation of K-12 education for the twenty-first century. He frames this transformation in both the history of education and the future of this new century and the Shift Age. In the three years it has been delivered, this presentation has been widely praised by educators as a needed vision of the future of education.