Theodore Jay Gordon

Theodore Jay Gordon is a futurist and management consultant. He is an expert in several high technology fields, a graduate engineer, a specialist in planning and policy analysis, and an entrepreneur. His current professional activities include consulting on strategy for several major corporations, lecturing, serving as Senior Research Fellow of the Millennium Project of the World Federation of the United Nations Association. He was cofounder of the Millennium Project and has participated on the corporate boards of Apollo Genetics, the Institute for Global Ethics, Registry Databases, and The Futures Group, the consulting firm he formed over twenty years ago.
 
Ted formed The Futures Group in 1971. As CEO and Chairman, he led the firm for 20 years. He has been in charge of hundreds of studies for US and government agencies as well as insurance, computer, banking, communications, advertising, automobile, pharmaceutical, and chemical companies for clients that have included the US Environmental Protection Agency (designing “look-out” methodologies with the Science Advisory Board), General Electric, Motorola, Ford Motor Company, Ryder Truck Rental, DowBrands, The American Council of Life Insurance, and many other major corporations, trade associations and US government agencies.
 
His specialties in this work have involved technological innovation and forecasting, the design of analysis methodologies, market segmentation, and the development of strategies — particularly strategies that promise to be productive in conditions of high uncertainty.
 
Ted is associated with the invention and development of many methods of forecasting and planning. He was the senior author of RAND’s groundbreaking report “Long Range Forecast of Science and Technology” in 1964 which was the first external use of the Delphi technique. He developed Real Time Delphi, Trend Impact Analysis, and the State of the Future Index, a means of measuring and tracking the outlook for the future outlook.
 
He is the author of many client reports, technical articles that have appeared in the open literature, and five books dealing with topics associated with the future, space, scientific and technological developments, and issues. He is coauthor and co-editor of the annual State of the Future reports and Futures Research Methodology. His most recent technical articles have been in the field of Chaos (1994–2008), forecasting methodology (Annals of Social Science, 1992–2008), and he authored the Macmillan encyclopedia article on the future of science and technology (1995). He is currently on the editorial board of several journals including Technological Forecasting and Social Change.
 
Read Cross-Impact Method, The Delphi Method, Anti-Terrorism Scenarios, Trend Impact Analysis, and Technology Sequence Analysis. Read his innovative Amazon download Is the future getting better? How does the future look from here? The millennium project’s state of the future index helps us keep score.