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For a period of 8 years (from 1999 until 2007), I was CEO of Crowe Chizek & Company, which today is called Crowe Horwath LLP and is the 9th largest CPA firm in the US. Prior to starting in the CEO position, I was asked to spend some time reorganizing the firm. As part of that reorganization effort I created a Visioning Committee whose purpose was to identify important future trends that could have a dramatic impact on our firm, and to determine how those trends should have an influence on our strategic planning going forward. To assist the Visioning Committee in their work we hired The Future Hunters. As part of The Future Hunters’ engagement with us we participated in their Whiteboard Program, which was designed to help us identify relevant social, economic, political, technical, demographic and environmental trends. The Visioning Committee was exposed to many of those trends as part of our work with The Future Hunters. Based upon a thorough discussion and evaluation of these, our Visioning Committee then narrowed them down to 9 theme-based white papers. These were then developed into key strategic initiatives that were sponsored, managed and owned by our Management Committee. The specific changes that resulted in our services and solutions are too numerous to mention here, but I am confident in saying that at least 75% of the ideas had a significant impact on the growth and profitability of our firm. In 1999 when I started as CEO the firm’s revenue was $145 million and by the end of 2006 the company had grown to $423 million – or slightly over a 190% growth rate during the 8 year period. I do not believe this level of performance would have been possible without the assistance we received from The Future Hunters in helping us understand the significant trends impacting our clients and our firm.
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The Future Hunters – they don’t claim to tell the future…but you’d bet they did. NACS has been a member of The Future Hunters’ Whiteboard Program for over 20 years and the results of their research have been spot on helping our industry better understand what the future looks like and what the implications are to our members’ businesses. With the next generation of the firm’s futurists now involved, we expect to rely on their vision and interpretations of the future for some time to come.
Vice President, Member Services | NACS -
Two explicit objectives of the Advanced Strategic Art Program at the US Army War College are: help the students (Lieutenant Colonels, Colonels and government civilians) build frameworks for evaluation and; understand the environment external to the Department of Defense. The Future Hunters’ white papers provide a superb forum for both objectives and are used in class each year. The students analyze these well written, superbly documented and thought provoking papers to determine how The Future Hunters’ view of the future could affect the United States armed forces.
United States Army War College
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One of the breakthroughs we made will add approximately $25million to our bottom line next year! This was done by starting a workshop off with a discussion around The Future Hunters’ concept of “Educated Incapacity” and then addressing a major placement issue we have with one of our products.
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The best example of our relationship with The Future Hunters was the integration of their “Thinking Technologies” to our Western European Fabric Care team back in 2005. We created an “Alien Eyes” workshop, based on The Future Hunters’ book “FutureThink,” which greatly influenced the thinking of the team and its leadership. This contributed to the "Power of Water" insight that led to the launch of Ariel Excel Gel – one of the biggest launches in Fabric Care History. "Seeing with Alien Eyes" has now become part of the vernacular at P&G.
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Our relationship with the Future Hunters helped launch our innovations efforts at Costa Farms. It was through the Whiteboard program that we were able to obtain best practices from corporations that were more advanced in their innovation initiatives than we were.