Rohit Bhargava

Why organisations work with Rohit Bhargava

• He brings a decade of annual trend research, distilled into the Non-Obvious and Megatrends book series, into a board or strategy off-site as a working method, not a slide deck.
• The SIFT framework gives marketing, innovation and strategy teams a shared language for separating durable shifts from passing noise, which most trend keynotes leave unresolved.
• His client list (NASA, Disney, World Bank, Intel, American Express) signals a track record with organisations that have to make capital decisions on long horizons, not just generate quarterly campaigns.
• Beyond Diversity, co-authored with Jennifer Brown, gives him a credible second register on inclusion as a commercial and cultural question, useful when a single keynote needs to cover both growth strategy and people.
• He works as a trained marketer (15 years at Ogilvy and Leo Burnett), which means innovation and trend content lands with sales, brand and customer leaders rather than staying at the level of abstract foresight.

Biography highlights

• 3-time Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author of ten books, including #1 WSJ bestseller Non-Obvious Megatrends.
• Adjunct professor of marketing and storytelling at Georgetown University.
• Co-founder of Ideapress Publishing and founder of the Non-Obvious Company.
• Co-author of Beyond Diversity with Jennifer Brown (Simon & Schuster / Ideapress); WSJ bestseller.
• Keynote and workshop work for NASA, Disney, Intel, American Express, World Bank, Coca-Cola, Microsoft.
• Featured speaker at five SXSW events; keynote at SXSW Sydney 2023, the first SXSW outside the United States.

Biography

Trend forecasting is crowded. Most of what circulates inside large organisations is a recycled version of the same six themes: AI, sustainability, hybrid work, generational change, geopolitics, the consumer. The harder question for a senior team is which of those headlines actually changes how they should allocate capital next year, and which signals further out are not yet on anyone’s deck. That gap is the work Rohit Bhargava has built a decade-long research practice around.

His Non-Obvious book series, published annually from 2015 and culminating in the WSJ and USA Today #1 bestseller Non-Obvious Megatrends in 2020, reached more than a million readers. The follow-up, The Future Normal, co-authored with Henry Coutinho-Mason and launched at SXSW in 2023, covers thirty shifts shaping the next decade, from generative AI to biophilic design. The 2024 book Non-Obvious Thinking, written with Ben duPont, formalises the SIFT method, a four-step habit for curating ideas that audiences can take into their own teams.

Before becoming a full-time author and speaker, Bhargava spent 15 years in brand strategy roles at Ogilvy and Leo Burnett, advising consumer brands on behaviour and storytelling. He teaches marketing and storytelling at Georgetown University as an adjunct professor, and writes a monthly column for Inc. on books that matter. With Jennifer Brown he co-authored Beyond Diversity, a Wall Street Journal bestseller published by Simon & Schuster and Ideapress, which examines inclusion across twelve domains including workplace, leadership and technology.

The client list, NASA, Disney, the World Bank, Intel, American Express, Microsoft, signals where the work lands hardest: organisations that need to translate cultural and technological signals into product, capital and brand decisions on multi-year horizons. The point is not to predict the future but to teach a working team to spot it earlier than the competition.

Key speaking topics

• Trend forecasting and the non-obvious method
• Innovation as a research discipline
• Marketing and brand in low-trust markets
• AI and the future of trust
• The Future Normal: thirty shifts reshaping commerce
• Inclusive growth and Beyond Diversity
• Storytelling for senior leaders
• Creative thinking and curation as a managed habit

Ideal for

• Chief marketing officers, brand teams and customer experience leads navigating attention and trust in saturated markets
• Chief strategy officers, innovation leads and corporate development teams setting multi-year direction
• Boards and executive committees commissioning a sharper view of how cultural and technological shifts will hit their category
• Sales and partner kickoffs where a strategy team wants a working method, not a trend slide

Audience outcomes

• A working knowledge of the SIFT method and how to use it inside a team
• A named set of cultural and commercial shifts that are relevant to the audience’s specific industry, not generic trend lists
• A shared vocabulary for separating durable signals from passing noise
• Practical examples of how organisations including NASA, Disney and World Bank have translated trend research into operating decisions
• Confidence that trend work can be a repeatable internal habit, not a one-off external report