Rohit Bhargava
About
Rohit talks about what it takes to bring more innovative thinking into your organization, and how leaders can harness the power of innovation to drive performance.
Audience participants will learn the five essential principles of leading transformation and building a team that sees the world differently.
Guest lecturer at Stanford and Wharton, Bestselling author of 6 books including, Non Obvious.
Past clients include: AT&T, Coca-Cola, Disney, Ford Motor Company, Prudential Financial, PwC, Under Armour
Click Here to Watch Rohit's Virtual Presentation
About Rohit Bhargava - Expert on Marketing, Branding, Trends & Disruption, Innovation, Storytelling:
Rohit Bhargava is on a mission to inspire more non-obvious thinking in the world. He is the 3-time Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author of 10 books and is widely considered one of the most entertaining and original speakers on trends, innovation and marketing in the world.
Rohit has been invited to deliver sold-out keynotes and workshops in 32 countries around the world to change the way teams and leaders think at the World Bank, NASA, Intel, Novartis, Coldwell Banker, MetLife, American Express, Pizza Hut, Schwab, Disney and hundreds of other well-known organizations. He has been a Featured Speaker at 5 previous SXSW events and also did a keynote at SXSW Sydney in 2023 (the first SXSW outside of America!).
Prior to becoming an entrepreneur and founding two companies, he spent 15 years leading brand strategy at Ogilvy (Global) and Leo Burnett (Australia) where he advised global brands on human behavior, marketing, and storytelling.
Outside his speaking and consulting, Rohit has taught persuasive speaking and global marketing as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, is frequently quoted in the global media and writes a monthly column for Inc Magazine about Non-Obvious books, hosts a podcast, and has been writing his award-winning email newsletter for the past six years. At the end of every year, he also leads a program called the Inc Non-Obvious Book Awards where he selects the most fascinating books of the year for business people.
He is a lifelong fan of anything having to do with the Olympics (he’s been to five so far), and actively hates cauliflower (yuck!). Outside of work, Rohit believes that the most entertaining and impactful job he will ever have is being a great dad and teaching his two boys to be kind when no one expects it, curious about the things others take for granted, and confident enough to change the world.
Topics
What Rohit Bhargava Talks About:
Non-Obvious Thinking: How To See What Others Miss
What if you could learn to think like a futurist? Unlike most talks about the future, this generous and inspiring keynote will reveal how anyone can learn to anticipate what is coming next. Using his signature fast-paced “non-boring” presentation style, trend curator Rohit Bhargava will take the audience behind-the-scenes of more than a decade of research to illustrate how his award-winning “Haystack Method” can help anyone be more innovative using the four specific habits of non-obvious thinkers. Based on his #1 WSJ bestselling Non-Obvious Book Series that has been shared by more than 1 million readers and his
latest book Non-Obvious Thinking, this keynote will also include all-new insights from his latest trend research along with stealable ideas for how to put those insights to work. The world needs more non-obvious thinkers. This talk will give you a roadmap to being one of them.
This program will help leaders and teams:
- Understand their future customer and how they can prepare their business to serve needs those customers haven’t demanded yet, but will one day.
- Broaden their perspective outside their industry and embrace a mindset that truly allows them to take ideas from many sectors and expertly apply them to their own roles and business.
The audience will leave with:
- Four actionable and immediately usable habits they can integrate into their daily lives to broaden their perspective, be more creative and see the world differently.
- A better understanding of what trends are, what they aren’t, why they matter and how they can start to identify trends and patterns of behavior for themselves.
7 Non-Obvious Trends Shaping the Future Normal
What does it take to identify world changing trends that will actually last? For the past decade, Rohit Bhargava and Henry Coutinho-Mason have been on the front lines of the future—going into cutting-edge labs, private testing facilities, and invite-only showcases around the world. Now for the first time ever, this exclusive talk will reveal the most powerful stories and instigators that are already shaping humanity’s next decade. From biophilic skyscrapers to generative AI to haptic interfaces, this keynote will offer a clear-eyed overview of not only the technology changing our world, but also explore the deeply human questions all this advancement will raise. Rather than offering “futurist theater” with obvious forgettable examples, this talk is updated with new stories (sometimes pulled from that morning’s news!), a charismatic delivery style, and interactive exercises to deliver a memorable experience for any size audience. This is not a boring academic talk. Instead, it’s a pull-no-punches, always entertaining, constantly surprising, highly actionable (and deeply non-obvious!) glimpse into what the future will look like … and how each of us can train ourselves to anticipate big shifts before they happen.
This program will help leaders and teams:
- Create a strategy to take their organization into the future and navigate significant change or disruption either through industry shifts, restructures, pandemic effects and/or new leadership.
- Gain exposure to cutting edge ideas and technologies (as well as the innovators behind them) that can help inform new initiatives and products.
The audience will leave with:
- A greater understanding of the fundamental forces of disruption that are shifting consumer behavior and beliefs across industries and what this means for them.
- A roadmap of relevant innovations and advances that can help to shape strategic planning and current efforts around building products and services for existing and future potential customers.
The Art and Science of Non-Obvious Marketing (In a Skeptical World)
We are living in a time when it is harder to earn trust than ever before. People skip ads, mistrust brands and demand transparency from the companies they buy from or work for. What does it take for any organization to be more believable? To win in a low-trust world, you need to be more human. This funny and insightful keynote from award-winning marketing expert Rohit Bhargava will reveal the five keys to earning attention in a world filled with distractions. Whether you are looking to shift perceptions, improve sales or simply inject more breakthrough thinking in your current efforts, this talk will help. Through a digestible collection of entertaining case studies and unusual observations, Rohit will shine a spotlight on what actually works to command attention, build loyalty and generate real results. Most importantly, the audience will leave with some real practical advice they can use immediately to put the power of non-obvious thinking to work every day.
This program will help leaders and teams:
- Align a team across departments with a shared understanding of branding, positioning, marketing, storytelling and what part everyone plays in shaping the organization’s perception in the marketplace.
- Articulate why storytelling matters and make the task of storytelling more approachable and realistic for everyone to engage with in their daily roles.
- Build a culture of trust within the organization and improve employee retention by inspiring a team to have more belief in the work they do and the leaders who lead them.
The audience will leave with:
- Understanding the key principles of storytelling and how to apply them in a business context to improve communications and be more persuasive.
- Insights on how trust is earned and lost in the middle of our modern “believability crisis” and techniques anyone can use to be more trustworthy and believable.
- A leadership model for establishing more authenticity and trust among teams that can be replicated at all levels of the organization.
Recent Publications
Rohit’s presentation was one of the most successful in our chapter’s history - his presentation drew rave reviews for delivering real content in an entertaining and easily accessible style.