David Houle

FUTURIST. THINKER. SPEAKER.

 

David Houle is a futurist, thinker and keynote speaker.  He has keynoted numerous conferences across the country and internationally. In the last fourteen years he has delivered 1200+ presentations and keynotes on 6 continents and 16 countries.He is regularly invited to speak at corporate management retreats.

 

Houle won a Speaker of the Year award from Vistage International, the leading organization of CEOs in the world. He is often called the “CEOs’ futurist” having spoken to or advised 4,000+ CEOs and business owners in the past eleven years. 

 

Houle spent more than 20 years in media and entertainment. He has worked at NBC, CBS and was part of the senior executive team that launched MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1 and CNN Headline News. .

 

Houle has won a number of awards. He won two Emmys as co-executive Producer for a nationally syndicated children’s program, “Energy Express”. He won the prestigious George Foster Peabody award and the Heartland award for Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream and was nominated for an Academy Award.

 

Houle writes a popular and respected newsletter, Evolutionshift.Substack.com. During 2010 ,Houle was a featured contributor on Oprah.com. 

 

He has been speaking about the future for 11 years and his influential first book The Shift Age was published in 2007. His second book, Shift Ed: A Call to Action for Transforming K-12 Education, written with Jeff Cobb was published in March 2011. The New Health Age: the Future of Health Care in America, co-authored with Jonathan Fleece, was  published by Sourcebooks in January 2012. and became a #1 best seller on Amazon in the categories of Medicine and Future of Health Care.  “Entering the Shift Age” was published by Sourcebooks in January of 2013. It is also a #1 Amazon best seller in the category of Business Planning and Forecasting. Houle published the eBook  “Is Privacy Dead:  The Future of Privacy in the Digital Age” in November 2013.  His sixth book “Brand Shift:  The Future of Brands and Marketing” with co-author Owen Shapiro was published in August 2014 and was named one of the top five marketing books published in the world in 2014.

 

In December 2015 he published “This Spaceship Earth” with co-author Tim Rumage.  This book became the basis for Houle to found the global non-profit This Spaceship Earth, Inc. in April 2016.  The goal of this non-profit is to create “crew consciousness” as we face Climate Change.

 

In 2019 Houle published “Moving to a Finite Earth Economy-Crew Manual” written with Bob Leonard.  This book answers the question : how can humanity successfully face climate change and do so by 2030.

 

In 2020, Houle published the first of a series of high-level, short books on the decade of the 2020s.  This first book is “The 2020s:The Most Disruptive Decade in History” . 

This was followed by “2021: A Look Ahead – Acceleration / Collapse / Rebound  published on 1/1/21 and “The 2020s: A Decade of Cognitive Dissonance” in June of 2021.

In December 2021 “The 2020s: The Golden Age of Design and Redesign” co-authored with James Fathers was published to great acclaim from the global design community.  Shortly thereafter, on 1/4/22 “A Look Into 2022 – A Split-Screen Year”

 

Houle has delivered speeches to scientists at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden CO, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and at Burning Man.

 

He has delivered 5 TEDx talks in the last 10 years

 

Houle is Futurist in Residence and Guest Lecturer at the Ringling College of Art + Design in Sarasota, Florida.   He is Honorary President and Futurist of the Future Business School of China. 

 Houle has served as futurist in residence and high-level strategic advisor to b-labs, a new, 21st century form of incubator/think tank for more than a decade.