PER OSTBERG
In a world that never stands still, Per helps leaders and organizations to think differently about the future, enabling them to chart a course through uncertainty and constant change.
Over the past 30+ years, he has worked across Europe, Asia, and Africa, both in executive roles at multinationals and as a serial entrepreneur. Per has lived, worked, and travelled in over 90 countries, led multicultural teams, managed multi-million-dollar projects, steered organizations through crises and transformations, delivered keynotes globally, and he has been evacuated from war zones — and learned to thrive in environments where tomorrow never looks like today.
Per is a certified futurist from Stellenbosch Business School in South Africa, a graduate from IMD’s Executive MBA program in Switzerland and has a MSc in Computer Science from University of Linkoping, Sweden. He has written and published over 40 mini future scenarios and delivers keynotes and workshops across different industries in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.
In addition to the keynotes outlined below, Per also delivers future focused keynotes that are designed for and aligned with your organisation’s specific needs and requirements, he talks about humans’ role in a world run by AI and robots, how we can apply different foresight thinking tools to decode the future, what the future of success and education might look like, and how to cope and thrive in a multi-cultural environment.
Future Focused Topics:
1. The Future in Numbers: How inevitable numbers impact our lives
Many of tomorrow’s events and future development are hidden in plain sight, hiding behind numbers that we don’t realise the importance or impact of. In this presentation, we will explore the numbers that drive demographic and climate change, changes in education and work and we will explore how these numbers impact the future of society and geopolitics.
2. Demographic Imbalance: Can Africa’s population explosion save the shrinking populations of Europe and Asia?
Not long ago, the headlines talked about over population, and we were concerned about how to feed many billion more people. Today the picture is different: Only Africa has a young growing population while the rest of the world is shrinking and getting older. The obvious solutions are simple yet hard to implement. This keynote will analyse the demographic differences and solutions, and their effect on world politics, infrastructure, education, business, and society.
Intercultural Management Topics:
1. Diversity Creates Creativity! How to build effective multicultural teams
How do you get 20 people from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and countries to gel into a homogeneous and effective team? In this talk I draw on my experiences of having built effective project teams in Southeast Asia and Africa. We will address basic intercultural theory and look at techniques to build trust, respect, understanding, and most of all, making cultural differences fun.
2. Essential Business Lessons from Unexpected Places – What we can learn from evacuations and coup d’états
The overseas postings are coveted jobs, providing status, monetary gains, future opportunities, and memories for life. Sometimes though, life throws you a curveball, and these material gains mean very little for your survival. In this talk, we will explore 5 lessons I learnt from the civil unrest in Indonesia in ’98, the civil war in Sierra Leone in ’00, and getting stuck in a coup d’état in Ivory Coast in ’00. We will explore each of the five lessons (Communication, Transparency, Flexibility, Keep Calm, and Cash is King) through real life events.
For the future / Foresight focused talks: Audiences will get a view of a set of possible futures (depending on what subject/industry/business we focus on), how those manifest today, and what actions we can take to day to remain relevant in the future. During the talks, I’ll use a couple of foresight tools to build up the possible future events and thus I show how the tools work, enabling the audiences to apply the same thinking in their daily work.
For the Intercultural Management Talks: I use events and experiences from my own life and career, couple this with basic intercultural theory and explain what I’ve learnt and how I solved tricky situations. This delivers a practical guide on how to manage intercultural teams.
