Adam Vernon Hartung

Even the best businesses can fail. Kodak, Hostess, Sears, GE, Sony, IBM, ToysRUs and Circuit City were all once market leaders but eventually became irrelevant.  Why? Because best practices locked them in to outdated practices in a fast changing world.

Despite what we wan to believe, excelling at what you want to do doesn't create business success. How successful is the world's best keypunch operator, horseshoer or land-line phone installer?  To succeed you must identify unmet needs then give people what they want to buy. What made your company successful five years ago very likely won't produce great results today and certainly won't in five years.You either adapt to market trends, letting go of old tactics or disappear like Polaroid. 

But even when you're willing to change, how do you decide what to do next?

Winning means thinking and acting outside the box. Adam Hartung's 25 year track record developing and implementing strategies to build on emerging trends has shown companies large (Dupont, Pepsico) and small (Smart Data Solutions, Integrys Energy) how to unleash business growth through innovation. When shifting trends and disruptive innovators threaten your core business, Adam will show you how to be an industry leader by not just asking customers what they want -  rather giving them what they need.

Adam's Background . . .

Adam's remarkably consistent track record is built on applying his two proprietary frameworks for predicting business success; The Phoenix Principle and the Status Quo Risk Management Playbook. His presentations and workshops make trends clear and help audiences chart a successful course to a more profitable future in our fast changing world.

Adam was the No. 1 Leadership columnist for Forbes.com since 2009 with over 100million readers, written the quarterly Strategy & Leadership column for CIO Magazine since 2010 and  a contributing editor for the International Journal of Innovation Science since co-founding in 2008. His columns have boldly predicted highly unexpected declines for market leaders such as Tribune Corp, Microsoft, and Research in Motion (Blackberry) years before anyone else.

For two decades, Adam's accurate forecasts about market shifting trends and his predictions for industry leading corporations has made him a frequent press interviewee regarding Apple, Microsoft, Google and other tech companies, as well as the automobile (Tesla,) media (Facebook/Meta) and retail (Amazon) industries. His insight to business growth and overcoming organizational obstacles have been featured in Inc, Adweek, Washington Times, BBC television and over 200 other publications internationally.

Since 2004, Adam has been CEO and Managing Partner of Spark Partners, a strategy and transformation consultancy. In 2010, Adam became the founding CEO of Soparfilm Energy, an early adopter of fracking for oil and gas production, and in 2012 he founded Content Laboratory one of the leading communications companies for the bio-pharmaceutical industry. 

Additionally, Adam has been on the Board of Directors at several successful privately held companies, including Crosfield Electronics and Benchmark Technologies in the U.K., Biometric Access Corp. and Apex Interactive and in the U.S. Adam provides board advisory services and is a certified Fellow in the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) where he is a regular speaker on risk management, and he is a certfied financial expert by the SEC which has allowed him to be Audit Chair for a NASDAQ traded public company.

Adam was formerly an executive with PepsiCo and DuPont and is a Boston Consulting Group alumni. Adam received his MBA from the Harvard Business School with Distinction. He now travels the globe giving keynotes and strategy workshops sharing his insights for companies and executives to succeed.

If you want to be a long-term success, selling more every year while you drive returns skyward, you need Adam Hartung to motivate your leadership and your entire organization.  He will instill a passion for growth, and leave you with the tools to achieve your goals.