Jim Carroll

In my 30+ years of speaking about leadership and innovation, I’ve often shared insights with audiences about the issues people have with making decisions. Here’s what I know – simply put, our brains get tired after making too many choices. Each decision uses mental energy, and eventually, we run out of gas. When we run out of gas, we do the easiest thing possible – we stop making decisions.

Recent studies highlight just how real this problem is:

• One study suggests we spend 50% of our working day making decisions
• We make 100+ significant decisions daily, plus thousands of micro-choices (emails, word choices, etc.)
• Decision quality drops by up to 40% after making multiple back-to-back decisions
• 73% of professionals report postponing important decisions due to mental fatigue
• I’ve also noticed that decision paralysis becomes significantly worse during periods of volatility.

Back in 2002, I identified what was happening in the meetings and events industry as what I called “aggressive indecision” – people simply refusing to commit to anything due to overwhelming uncertainty.

I think that’s where we are at right now.

Your clients’ reality

By the time they’re looking at your speaker options, they’ve already made too many decisions that day. Their brain is basically saying, “Not another choice!”

Think about it:

• They’re juggling hybrid teams
• Dealing with endless emails
• Making business calls all-day
• Navigating economic uncertainty

No wonder they ghost you after initially seeming excited!

Their mental batteries are drained – particularly when they are flooded with too many speaker options, many of whom might have an uncertain track record.

They make the decision easy by deferring it, avoiding it, and not thinking about it.

How to break through

Here’s how to make it easier for mentally drained clients – make it easy for them to make decisions.

• Send options in the morning when energy is highest
• Limit choices to 3 top speakers max
• Make a clear recommendation – “This one’s perfect because…”
• Package decisions together instead of piecemeal follow-ups
• Use simple visuals that make comparisons easy

Understanding decision fatigue isn’t just interesting psychology – it’s your secret weapon for closing more deals with less hassle!

As someone who’s spent 30+ years helping organizations navigate change, I’ve seen firsthand how decision fatigue affects leadership teams.

Perhaps the most important thing is they want help from someone else to reassure them they’ve made the right decision – by reducing the risk in their decision.

That’s where experience matters.

When decision-makers are overwhelmed by options, they need someone who can:

• Deliver proven insight rather than experimental concepts
• Provide customized content that addresses their specific industry challenges
• Offer flexible formats from high-energy keynotes to interactive workshops
• Delivers insight that is based on 30+ years of experience
• Knows how to work with a CEO or senior-level event owner to align to their core message

Organizations like Disney, NASA, the World Bank, and Mercedes-Benz booked me because I helped transform complex trends into clear, actionable insights for their teams that could be implemented immediately.

For your clients suffering from decision fatigue, I think I represent one less difficult choice. My presentations are continually refreshed with emerging trends, ensuring relevance even for repeat engagements.

Let me help you give your clients the decision-making shortcut they desperately need in 2025!

There are several ways to understand the impact of AI on your company, industry, association, or profession. As the saying goes – it’s pretty certain you won’t find your job being replaced by AI, but it might be replaced by someone using AI!

That’s why strategic clarity on the impact of AI is necessary, and Jim Carroll can provide you with a highly customized keynote presentation that will examine several issues.

Top of mind is the impact of ‘Generative AI technologies’ – the fast-moving trends involving ChatGPT and other generative technologies involving voice, video, and more; the impact of productivity, workflow, and other software-based opportunities built on top of these trends; and other new tools, products and search engine technologies. All of these trends will come to change the nature of the way we search, learn, interact, and think. It’s a new era of human-knowledge augmentation that is coming about through the emergence of personalized knowledge butlers; an acceleration in just-in-time knowledge through on-demand knowledge robots; the arrival of the always-available knowledge servant.

Another way to achieve strategic clarity is to go further and consider the “AI Megatrends” – the far-reaching, transformative, and disruptive AI concepts involving such things as predictive diagnostics, autonomous technologies, and machine vision, the hyper-connectivity of intelligent devices, the integration of AI into robotics and virtualized digital twin technologies, workforce, and process augmentation technologies, real-time risk monitoring, product reinvention, and transformation through embedded AI, and so much more!

The end result of both these major developments is sweeping change in every industry such as: changing the way we diagnose and treat medical conditions; how we assess and underwrite insurance risk using sophisticated AI risk management tools; how we manage our march to precision farming using AI-driven autonomous technologies; how we are using AI throughout retail and manufacturing for deep supply chain analysis and inventory management.

What you need RIGHT NOW is highly relevant AI Megatrends guidance from a realistic, strategic business perspective.

Jim will help you understand:

• the AI Megatrends that are already underway, and those that are yet to come
• the disruptive and transformative context of these trends in your industry, profession, or association, based on up-to-the-minute detailed research specific to your requirements
• why the ‘era of acceleration’ with AI will now challenge all your assumptions about your future
• the strategic opportunities that exist with AI within your industry and organization, on a near, medium, and long-term basis
• the significant challenges and risks that exist for the same time frame
• what leading innovators and competitors are doing to align with these fast-moving trends
• what actionable steps you can pursue so you can prepare a concise strategic plan for your organization and team

Futurist Jim Carroll will help you cut through the noise and the hype to understand what is really happening, and the critical nature of the important trends that you must pay attention to!

Here’s what you need to know – it’s pretty certain you won’t find your job being replaced by AI, but it might be replaced by someone using AI, particularly with ChatGPT and other similar LLM (Large language model) technologies!

In this fast-moving keynote, Futurist Jim Carroll takes a look at the short-term trends sweeping the world today as ChatGPT and other technologies come to change the nature of the way we search, learn, interact, and think. It’s a new era of human-knowledge augmentation through the emergence of personalized knowledge butlers; an acceleration in just-in-time knowledge through on-demand knowledge robots; the arrival of the always-available knowledge servant. The fact is, we are in the midst of the biggest knowledge revolution in the history of mankind since the arrival of the Internet – and it is occurring at a speed that is staggering. You need to cut through the hype, filter the noise, and get a clear – and up-to-the-moment – strategic overview of what is happening in real-time

You don’t need to understand how ChatGPT and other LLM (“large language model”) systems work – you need to understand the impact they will have. Making sense of what’s real and cutting through the hype to discover real opportunities within the trends is one of the most important things you can do! This is not a time to get caught up in ‘fast FOMO’ – ‘fear of missing out’ – nor is it a time to ignore the speed of what is occurring. There are significant implications to the sudden arrival of artificial intelligence and other trends, from very real business model disruption to unique legal and copyright issues, education, knowledge, and workforce skills challenges, as well as the emergence of disruptive new industry competitors and accelerated new product development and innovation opportunities. The scope of what these technologies represent is increasing because the pace of their evolution is now moving faster than fast.

What does this mean to you and what do you need to do? Jim will provide you with actionable strategies on how to stay ahead in the AI knowledge race; insight into some of the most powerful tools emerging in this new AI knowledge universe; actionable strategies to continually enhance your just-in-time knowledge skills through AI; and how you can align your skills, attitude and personal motivation factory to align with this new era of high-velocity change.

In this highly customized keynote, prepared specifically for your company, industry, or association based on up-to-the-minute research, Jim will help you understand:

• the challenges and opportunities behind these trends within your industry and organization
• the disruptive impact on your business and operations or upon your industry or association members
• the strategies you should be thinking about to align with the new realities they present
• the key strategic action plans designed to get your team moving forward, balanced with a realistic assessment of the timing of specific trends and how they will unfold.

Futurist Jim Carroll will help you cut through the noise and the hype to understand what is really happening, and the critical nature of the important trends that you must pay attention to!

New ideas, transformative innovations, and bold thinking don’t die in periods of economic volatility – in fact, a downturn is often the starting point for big ideas and a big upturn! Companies such as Burger King, Microsoft, CNN, and FedEx all started up during economic downturns because they remained firmly focused on growth opportunities, the future and trends.

Conventional wisdom would suggest we’d better hunker down, scale back, slow down, take it easy, be cautious, reduce spending, defer our actions, wait it out, take things slow, and put things on pause. But history tells us that doesn’t work – because those who choose to relentlessly focus on growth are those who win.

How do you do this? It’s by understanding that the winners that emerge are those who battle aggressive indecision, challenge organizational sclerosis, and recommit to growth despite volatility. History teaches us that those who win are those who doubled down on innovation and transformation, and refocused on the long-term view! During the 2008-09 global economic meltdown, ‘winners’ grew at a 17% compound annual growth rate during the downturn compared to 0% among the ‘losers.’ And those ‘winners’ locked in gains of 13% CAGR in the years after the downturn compared to the ‘losers’ stalling at 1%. That’s a powerful growth lesson right there!

These winners chose to opt out of the common narrative – it’s a recession, cut back, hunker down and make sure you ride it out – and by choosing instead to go into the future full throttle, they emerged much better positioned for that future.

Futurist and innovation expert Jim Carroll shares these and other critical lessons, along with specific strategic guidance on how to double down on growth during times of volatility. It’s battle-tested, stage-proven insight developed through previous periods of economic volatility. You will come away with clear leadership insight on the growth oriented insight you need to pursue.

We will see more change in every industry in the next 10 years than we have seen in the last 100 as transformation and disruption sweeps the world.

Every company is faced with the rapid emergence of new competitors, significant new business models, more challenging consumers, the acceleration of science, and a transition to the speed of innovation that will define its future.

How do you manage this complex new world and get ahead? By turning on your innovation engine, firing your creativity thrusters, and strapping in for a rocket ride into your faster future. You need to accelerate your ability to generate radical new ideas and transformative concepts. You need innovation and creativity!

In this keynote, futurist and innovation expert Jim Carroll shares the innovation and creativity insight that he has gained through three decades of a relentless focus on what turns organizations into high-velocity innovation and creativity heroes. None other than NASA has invited Jim in – twice – to share his insight on innovation strategies. Disney – a creativity superhero – invited him in for a keynote on the opportunities that come from rethinking creativity. The World Bank engaged him for a talk that linked fast-moving future trends to the need for accelerated innovation and fast thinking.

Jim’s keynote will share with you the key elements of his imaginary but powerful “Masters in Business Imagination” curriculum – a structure of 10 key leadership strategies, actions and structures that will help you envision opportunity, think differently, and act quickly.

Launch yourself into the faster future with this unique, high energy creativity focused keynote from global futurist, trends & innovation expert Jim Carroll!

We live in a time of massive challenge, and yet one of massive opportunity. We’re faced with deep and complex issues involving the environment, health care, water and food. At the same time, every industry is faced with upheaval and disruption.

In this context, every industry is being redefined at blinding speed by technology, globalization, the rapid emergence of new competitors, new forms of collaborative global R&D, and countless other challenges! The speed with which these changes occur are now running up against the traditional culture, organizational structure and leadership methodologies that once worked well in the past – but don’t align to today’s fast moving realities.

Most organizations are bound up in tradition, process, certain defined ways of doing things — rules — that have helped them succeed in the past. Over time, they have developed a corporate culture which might have worked at the slower paced world of the past — but now has them on the sick-bed, suffering from an organizational sclerosis that clogs up their ability to try to do anything new. Those very things which worked for them in the past might be the anchors that could now hold them back as the future rushes at them with ever increasing speed. They are being challenged in a fundamental way by those who think big, and by some really big, transformative trends.

You need to align yourself to the big opportunities of today through bold, transformative thinking; take the small scale steps today to align yourself to this future, and focusing on a culture of speed and agility that can help you to get there at the right time! You need to think transformation, not just innovation!

In this keynote, Jim outlines his simple but transformative structure with deep insight on what it takes to master the new, complex volatile world, by embracing the chaos, thinking transformation not innovation, mastering the timing of trends, and accelerating forward oriented growth opportunities. The new model for going forward in the era of accelerating change: Think big, start small and scale fast!

The future demands that you think BIG, be bold and pursue opportunities.

The only way to do this is to understand the “megatrends” that are defining our future, the disruptive opportunities they present, and the industry, skills, and business model opportunities they provide.

We are now seeing so much change that our new reality is this: companies that do not yet exist will build products not yet conceived, with materials not yet in existence, using methodologies not yet developed – and these will be sold to consumers who do not yet know that these new products and services will become a critical part of their life!

Are you ready to pursue a BIG future? Do you understand what comes next and what you need to do about it? Based on his BIG Trends series featured on his Web site, Jim takes you into a dramatic new future involving accelerating scientific discovery, rapid knowledge sharing, accelerated methodologies, and dramatic industry transformations.

You will come away with new strategic leadership insight that will help you see disruptive trends, focus on opportunities, unlock creativity, enhance your speed, accelerate innovation and deliver on growth opportunities!

“I have assisted hundreds of CEOs of global organizations to deliver a message of transformation, innovation, and disruption at their global leadership meeting with a highly customized leadership-oriented keynote” – Futurist Jim Carroll

In the post-pandemic economy, CEO/CxO’s are managing multiple priorities: business model disruption; the rapid emergence of new competitors; products that are almost out of date by the time they are brought to market; the digitization of everything; and the acceleration of industries. The transformation of everything is around them.

All of these trends — and more — require that organizations pick up the pace when it comes to their strategies, actions, and innovation efforts. Many CEO/CxO’s are finding it necessary to bring their leadership teams together for a corporate offsite event in order to discuss, strategize and align to a faster, transformative future.

In an increasing number of these events, the CEO/CxO or other senior executive has selected Jim Carroll to open or participate in such a meeting with an in-depth, customized leadership-oriented keynote that sets the tone from the start.  They have selected Jim for his proven global track record of providing a keynote that is based on extensive consultation, customized research, and very detailed, specific insight. Keynotes have included looking at the big future, disruption and transformation, accelerating creativity, the fast future, and many more topics. Clients who have arranged for Jim at these sessions have included Disney, Chemours, Dupont, Rich Foods, NASA, Mercedes Benz, New York Life, Volvo, Nestle, Black & Veach, and many more.

Learn why Jim is your valuable, trusted partner in aligning your organization to a faster, transformative future!

In 2023, this is ALL about how to innovate despite volatility, relentlessly pursuing opportunity despite uncertainty, and accelerating creativity despite lingering complexity.

“I have assisted hundreds of hi-tech companies, legal and accounting firms, medical and healthcare organizations in achieving their message of industry, product, and service transformation at their customer and client meetings with a highly customized leadership-oriented keynote” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Mindshare matters. In a complex and fast competitive landscape, positioning your product or service offerings to your customer or client has become more of a challenge than ever before.

That’s why organizations continue to invest in large-scale or intimate customer client events. It’s an opportunity to tell your story, position your products, put in perspective your value proposition, and build relationships.

Countless numbers of organizations, including hi-tech firms, professional services firms including financial and legal organizations, telecom companies, and manufacturing organizations have engaged Jim to provide an opening keynote message for their event that is carefully aligned to their key message.

Companies like Microsoft, SAP, Cisco, Oracle, Toshiba and many more have had Jim provide his insight on the future and disruption with a highly customized keynote that aligns to their overall customer event message.   Professional service firms like KPMG, Ernst Young and Baker McKenzie have arranged for Jim to speak at critical client events on topics ranging for the acceleration of business to the emergence of new legal risk issues. Zurich Insurance recently arranged for Jim to share his thoughts on the future of risk at a global risk management summit in Switzerland.  Schneider Electric engaged Jim to open a user group conference, with a message focused on the future of manufacturing including the impact of the Industrial Internet of Things.

Whatever your message and however specific your topics, Futurist Jim Carroll has proven to be a reliable event partner with a keynote message that is based on customized  research, extensive consultation, and detailed trends insight backed by a compelling stage presence.

As soon as the global Covid-19 crisis and economic meltdown began Jim focused on ramping up the sophistication of his existing home broadcast studio.

Clients focused on transitioning into our new complex world are already arranging for his live-streamed events. He provides leadership talks, panel discussions, professionally produced event videos, and more – with full virtual audience interactivity and participation!

Are you structured for slow in a fast world?

The global pandemic has changed the axis of our universe. What was disruptive before is now massively transformative. Do you have a strategy to keep up?

History tells us that every global crisis shifts the axis of the future of our universe, and every crisis offers an opportunity to improve. In the harsh reality of our post-pandemic world, leadership strategies that worked yesterday are exposed as being irrelevant tomorrow even while they are being actively considered today.

Pre-pandemic, CEOs and organizations were dealing with a world of business model disruption, the acceleration of technology, the faster evolution of key skills, and other critical issues. Now, in the harsh light of our new world, one thing is clear – the future is even more complex than it was before. And a simple fact has emerged – there is a massive and growing gap between the speed of change and the ability of organizations to keep up. Bridging this gap is critical to future success – and the significance of your inability to bridge the gap is even bigger than it was before.

Bridge the gap! What worked yesterday will not work tomorrow! You are on a guaranteed path to failure if you don’t align with our new reality – by mastering the disconnect between speed and structure. The acceleration gap is very real, and it’s growing larger all the time. Successful organizations will be those who can shrink the gap, minimize its impact, and turn it into an opportunity rather than a threat.