Farid Tabarki

Why organisations work with Farid Tabarki

• A coherent thesis on how power, work, and value are moving away from the middle, set out in his book The End of the Middle and extended in his 2025 co-authored book The Acceleration Effect, on how organisations should navigate when change itself is speeding up.
• The vocabulary of radical transparency, radical decentralisation, and the liquid society, which gives leadership teams a shared frame for shifts they already feel but cannot yet name.
• Studio Zeitgeist’s Transformation Playground whitepaper, with seven organising principles that move the conversation from trend description to operating choice.
• Direct comparative observation from 195 countries, which gives him a working library of how different political, economic and cultural systems respond to the same structural pressures and feeds the comparisons that land with board audiences.
• A weekly column in Het Financieele Dagblad and standing on De Volkskrant‘s top 200 most influential people, which signals he is read by the same Dutch business audience clients are trying to reach.

Biography highlights

• Founding director of Studio Zeitgeist, an Amsterdam-based research and strategy practice.
• Author of The End of the Middle: What a Society of Extremes Means for People, Politics and Business (English edition, 2017) and co-author with Joey Hullegie of Het versnellingseffect (The Acceleration Effect, Atlas Contact, 2025), a Dutch business bestseller on the Managementboek Top 100.
• Trendwatcher of the Year, Netherlands, 2012-2013.
• Long-running columnist at Het Financieele Dagblad and listed in De Volkskrant‘s top 200 most influential people in the Netherlands since 2013.
• Author of the Studio Zeitgeist whitepaper The Transformation Playground, Reinventing Business Principles.
• Has travelled to 195 countries as part of an ongoing project to visit every country in the world, drawing on the comparative material for his work on institutions and structural change.
• Supervisory and advisory roles across culture, housing, health and education, including Stadgenoot, the Prince Bernhard Culture Fund, International Theatre Amsterdam, and Platform Onderwijs 2032 for the Dutch government. Named as “Minister of AI” in a hypothetical cabinet by Dutch current affairs programme WNL op Zondag.

Biography

The middle layer of modern economies is thinning out. Travel agents, retail bankers, mid-tier publishers, and many salaried roles in between have lost the ground they were built on. Power, value, and attention are moving to the edges, towards platforms, networks, and individuals.

That is the argument at the heart of The End of the Middle, Farid Tabarki’s book on what a society of extremes means for people, politics, and business. He sets out three structural shifts: the rise of online platforms that absorb intermediary work, technology that hollows out educated jobs, and the decline of the nation state as the central seat of power. The book reads as a working manual for leaders who can feel these shifts in their own businesses but lack the language to act on them.

His 2025 book Het versnellingseffect, co-authored with Joey Hullegie and published by Atlas Contact, extends the thinking. The argument is that change is no longer punctuated by single technologies but by the rate of change itself, and that authority, place, value, and the human scale are all coming under pressure as a result. It is written as a navigation guide for organisations that can no longer assume a new equilibrium will arrive.

Tabarki has been researching the European zeitgeist since 2000 through Studio Zeitgeist, the Amsterdam practice he founded. The studio’s Transformation Playground whitepaper lays out seven organising principles for companies operating in a more decentralised, more transparent, more liquid environment. He has also spent two decades travelling to 195 countries as part of a project to visit every country in the world. That comparative material, covering how different systems handle urbanisation, technology, governance, and economic pressure, sits behind the case studies he uses with boards.

He is read weekly in Het Financieele Dagblad, sits on De Volkskrant‘s top 200 most influential people in the Netherlands, and was named Dutch Trendwatcher of the Year for 2012-2013. The work that earns him a board hearing is the same work that earns him those columns: a willingness to push past the trend label and ask what the shift actually changes for the next strategic decision.

Key speaking topics

• The end of the middle and the liquid society
• The acceleration effect and strategic navigation
• Radical transparency in organisations
• Radical decentralisation of power and work
• Strategic foresight and structural shifts
• Liquid leadership
• Reinventing business principles for a post-middle economy
• Platforms, networks, and the redistribution of value

Ideal for

• Boards and executive committees confronting structural change in their sector
• Strategy and transformation leads setting medium-term direction under uncertainty
• Senior leadership conferences where the brief calls for both a sharp keynote and a credible moderator

Audience outcomes

• A clearer reading of which parts of their business sit on the disappearing middle
• A working vocabulary for shifts in transparency, decentralisation, and liquidity that staff already sense
• Specific organising principles to test against their current structure and strategy
• A sharper view of where customer and employee power is moving next