Featuring Peter Leyden, Founder, Reinvent Futures, in conversation with Tony Wessling, coFounder, Chromium Group. Produced in partnership with AMA SF.

Please join us for an evening of networking and conversation, as Peter Leyden and Tony Wessling discuss the very different but potentially better future barreling towards us, and how brand leadership will need to think and plan quite differently as well. They will talk about how to take advantage of the opportunities of what Leyden calls The Great Progression and sidestep the many pitfalls that may lie ahead too.

They will touch on how a wide range of fundamental system changes driven by AI, demographics, politics, and climate will continue to transform the expectations customers have for the brands and companies with which they align.

What is The Great Progression?

In the next 25 years, the world arguably will deal with climate change and transition the bulk of our core energy sources from carbon to clean. We will transition our transportation systems from the internal-combustion engine to electric mobility as part of an even larger process of reinventing cities. We will scale up brand new industries and build a much more environmentally and socially sustainable society.

The changes won’t stop there. AI will change how we work and how we think about ourselves as sentient beings. We very likely will reform capitalism around new economic priorities that counter the current imbalances and inequities. And we can be expected to revitalize our democracies and push back on authoritarianism around the world. People in 50, 100, or even 500 years from now may well look back on our era and marvel at the transformation that we’re about to go through.

This is the new narrative Leyden has been recently writing and speaking about, a positive narrative about progress emerging all around us, about progress that’s inexorably coming as we lay the foundations for these new systems in the next 10 years, and about how they will scale in the next 25 years to help us solve many of the great challenges that appear to stymie us today. This is the story of The Great Progression.

Agenda

530-630 Cocktail & hors d’oeuvres networking

630-715 Conversation with Peter Leyden

715-745 Q&A

745-830 Cocktail networking

Space is limited, so register today.

About Peter Leyden

Peter Leyden has spent his entire career in pursuit of the constantly evolving answers to four key questions: what’s really going on today, what’s probably coming in the next 10 years, what’s possible to achieve in the next 25 years, and what we should do now.

Leyden started his career as a journalist trying to figure out what’s really going on in America and as a foreign correspondent in Asia, traveling to 50 countries to figure out the world. He moved to San Francisco at the beginning of the digital revolution to work with the founders of WIRED and figure out what’s probably coming. He has since built up an extraordinary network of technologists and entrepreneurs, innovators and creatives, intellectuals and academics throughout Silicon Valley and the region.

He then learned the futures business with some of the key pioneers in strategic foresight including the legendary Stewart Brand and the founders of The Long Now Foundation. This helped him understand trends in a wider breadth of fields and look farther ahead on what’s possible to achieve over time.

Through all this Leyden has become a thought leader on the future, new technologies and megatrends. He does keynote talks on a monthly basis to conferences throughout America and Europe where he publicly lays out his insights into the big four questions. He’s written two influential books on the future, and many magazine pieces, including his latest: The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050.

Leyden is now founder of Reinvent Futures, a strategic foresight firm, and he’ll soon be launching a new event series in the San Francisco Ferry Building called The Great Progression Series. Come to this event to learn more.

More about Peter and REINVENT FUTURES can be found at reinvent.net

About Tony Wessling

Tony Wessling is the Founder and Managing Director of Chromium Group, a San Francisco-based strategic branding firm that is working with clients in climate tech, fintech, edtech, computer hardware, finance, insurance, real estate, and consumer goods to help them navigate the complexity of today’s business landscape to build the brands of the future.

Previously, Wessling founded the pioneering digital creative agency Wessling Creative Group, which developed some of the world’s first commercial websites and interactive advertising.

He is co-author of The Powers: Ten Factors for Building an Exponentially More Powerful Brand, and is a frequent presenter on brand and culture to businesses and organizations around the world.

More about Tony and Chromium can be found at chromium.group