Alvin TOFFLER Futurist, Author of Revolutionary Wealth, Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century, The Third Wave (USA) For more than four decades, Alvin Toffler has been one of the world’s most prescient, insightful and influential voices in business and intellectual life. With the publication of his seminal work, Future Shock, Toffler created an all-new discipline around the study of change and its impact on business and culture. Alvin has an unusual gift for defining the forces and trends that shape our future in ways that help a broad range of audiences, from companies to governments, shape their future in today’s knowledge-based economy. Toffler understands politics, economics, and changes in technology, society and the arts as few others do. His global impact comes not only from successfully predicting individual changes (he predicted the explosive rise of the computer in the 1960s) or simplistically projecting unrelated trends, but from identifying the newest forces behind change, synthesizing them, and setting them into a coherent, intellectual framework. Alvin is interested in the causes of change, its impacts and the rates at which different spheres of human activity change. Drawing on this study, he helps organizations make the adjustments that dynamically changing environments require and he gives them methods for supporting decision-making, transitions, and transformations in the face of complex change. While Future Shock launched the discipline of futurism, a subsequent book, The Third Wave, laid out the historical paradigm that now is the standard for understanding economic development as an evolution from agriculture, to industrialization, to knowledge and information as the primary sources for building wealth. In addition to Future Shock and The Third Wave, Alvin and Heidi Toffler (his wife and intellectual partner of 51 years) have written other significant books, notably War and Anti-War, Powershift and, most recently, Revolutionary Wealth (April 2006). His bestsellers have influenced the Clinton White House, the Republican Congress, and many global corporations. He has been described as having “set the standard by which all subsequent would-be futurists have been measured” by Time magazine. Alvin is a leading consultant to military and intelligence communities around the world, and predicted the rise of ‘asymmetric,’ non-state-sponsored warfare in his classic 1993 book, War and Anti-War. Both of the Tofflers are Distinguished Adjunct Professors at the National Defense University in Washington.