Greg Lindsay is a journalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker. He is the director of applied research at NewCities and director of strategy at its mobility offshoot CoMotion. He is also a non-resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Foresight, Strategy, and Risks Initiative, a senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, and a visiting scholar at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management.
Latest speech topic – Greg Lindsay: COVID-19 Digital Keynote
Inoculating the Planet: Life After COVID-19
While the world awaits a vaccine, how will we inoculate our cities, workplaces, homes, and families against another pandemic? For example, how will fluid organizations balance the mental- and physical health of employees with new remote/office work hybrids? Will social distancing kill mass transit and ridehailing in favor of driving alone — or will cities turn streets over to cyclists, scooters, and pedestrians? How will deliveries, “dark kitchen,” and automation threaten to turn retailing and restaurants inside-out, threatening main streets, mom-and-pops, and real estate as we know it? And where will millennials — now the victims of a second financial crash — choose to raise their children, “Generation C?”
Drawing on his research and foresight work for NewCities, the Atlantic Council, MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, the Bloomberg Philanthropies, and dozens of recent interviews, Greg Lindsay delivers a sweeping view of how the pandemic and resulting economic crash will alter the trajectory of our lives for decades to come.
What are the core subjects of your keynote speeches?
My talks invariably come back to cities, whether that has to do with the future of work, mobility, real estate, or technology. How will people choose to live after this catastrophic pandemic? Which trends will accelerate — increased deliveries and automation; the death of physical retailers — and which would we prefer? The majority of humanity lives in cities; their future is our future.
Which audience or which branch do you reach with your speech?
I speak frequently to companies (McKinsey, Microsoft, Intel, KPMG, Deloitte, AECOM, RE/MAX, BMW MINI, Ford, Starbucks), organizations (the OECD, U.S. State Department, U.S. Department of Energy, U.K. Treasury, Canada Council for the Arts), member associations (CoreNet, Urban Land Institute, National Association of Home Builders, Federation Internationale de l’Automobile) and universities (Harvard Business School, the MIT Media Lab, Columbia, Princeton, the Royal College of Art, the London School of Economics).
Why are you a Premium Speaker? Where do you get your insights from?
I’m a premium speaker because I combine my skills of pattern recognition — realizing what’s important or emerging before anyone else — storytelling, and performance. I am frequently engaged to be the entertaining (but informative) counterpart to an economist or the like — they’re quantitative, I’m qualitative. I get my insights from engagements with my various organizations, interviews, and frequent workshops and other visioning experts with my fellow foresight experts.
What will be in the future? Does 'time' play an important role in your work?
The future looms large over my work, but it’s less about time — 10 years? 20 years? — than „which“ future or „whose“ future? Who are we creating the future for, and who’s doing the creation? I reject the idea that the future is „inevitable“ and invite my audiences to think about which future they want — and how they can play a part in inventing it.
What is your life motto? What would you like to give your listeners on the way?
My motto is borrowed from Marshall McLuhan: „You don’t like my ideas? I have others.“ It’s a joke, but it also speaks to my method that rather than sell you a prepackaged „future,“ I’m presenting an array of possibilities, and hopefully deliver value to wide range of listeners in doing so.