Eric Garland is the founder and managing partner of Competitive Futures. He is a recognized expert in competitive intelligence and futures studies with over fifteen years experience in the field.

First and foremost, Garland is a futurist and competitive analyst, looking at diverse changes in the marketplace in order to help clients make more profitable decisions. He oversees all research projects for our global clientele.

As an educator, he trains executives in the skills of competitive intelligence and forecasting so they can make foresight a fundamental part of their careers and benefit their organizations immediately with new insights.

He is the author of Future Inc.: How Businesses Can Anticipate and Profit from What’s Next (AMACOM, 2006), a groundbreaking book which demonstrated his proven method for finding business opportunities using trend research, foresight, strategic thinking and scenario generation. His latest book is How to Predict the Future...and Win!!!, a satirical look at the world of strategy consulting and why most organizations fail to see the future coming.

Garland holds a bachelors degree in business administration and foreign languages from the University of Vermont, as well as a masters degree in international relations and technology policy from the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.

For more on Eric Garland's speaking and writing, see his personal author site.

Competitive Futures has a unique approach to competitive analysis we call future intelligence. We are the only consultancy in the world to combine long-term strategic forecasts with competitive intelligence to tell leaders about to turn foresight into profitable opportunities.

The backstory to this development is unique. CompFutures' Managing Partner Eric Garland was hard at work in the competitive intelligence field, providing analysis to Fortune 100 companies with a more tactical bent when he was invited to join the Washington DC think tank of Joseph Coates, a futurist who worked with Congress, government agencies and businesses the world over. That firm was one of the most venerable consultancies dedicated exclusively to analysis of longer-term trends, normally with a timeframe of five to twenty years into the future. There, Garland focused on strategic implications of trends in agriculture, information technology, construction, retail and basic scientific research.

It was there that Garland made a discovery that changed his view of the information that leaders need in order to guide a company successfully in a rapidly changing world. Competitive intelligence tends to be focused uniquely on existing competitors, on firms already cutting into the marketshare of a given company. Since the 1980s, CI had been developing into a recognizable profession, and many companies had discrete department dedicated to examining what was happening at the moment with - maybe - a view that went a couple quarters into the future.

Professonal futurists had also made their debut in the 1960s and 70s through the extraordinarily popular work of Alvin Toffler and legitimized through the scenario planning work of Peter Schwartz and company at Royal Dutch Shell. Their work tended to focus on broader strategic trends, ones that would look out years into the future, but rarely at existing competitive dynamics.

Garland, having spent time in both camps, noticed that not only were the companies sponsoring both kinds of studies the same companies, very often it was the same person at the client who was responsible for both types of information. Moreover, he noted that the individuals who achieved the most notoriety and success in their organizations were those who integrated the future and competitive present together. The departments least likely to have budget cut in the hard times were the strategic planning groups who constantly reminded senior management about what their work meant in dollars and cents. It also tended to mean survival for competitive intelligence groups that studied current competition while providing a sense of what their work meant for the larger goals of the organization.

Today, it has never been more important to combine future trends with an understanding of tactical competitive dynamics. To study individual competitors without understand the trends outside of those immediately apparent is to follow in the footsteps of the music industry, which stood by and watched while the MP3 was created, while Napster conflagrated its business model, while iTunes replaced brick-and-mortar stores, and while sales began to plummet.

On the other hand, to study the bigger picture while ignoring the competitive dynamics of short term is follow in the footsteps of every startup that understood the future while failing to put money in the cash register.

This is why Competitive Futures offers an unusual set of professional services, provided by world experts with an unusual set of skills and bona fides. We imbue every competitive study with a sense of the future, and every study of long-trends with intelligence about the reality of the short term.

Here is a quick view of how a Future Intelligence system should serve the modern leader:

You must think broadly in a complex, rapidly changing world.

At the basis of our competitive analysis is the application of a tool called STEEP Analysis. Used by futurists, this mnemonic device reminds us to consider a wide variety of trends outside of our own industry, specifically:

• Social trends: aging populations, urbanization, mixed families, increased prevalence of diabetes, hypertension, and kidney failure
• Technology trends: increased distribution of GPS, IPv6 networking, decreasing price and increase application of robotics in the home, genomic medicine, electric automobiles, nanotechnology
• Economic trends: Real estate occupancy rates, unemployment rates, sovereign debt, household debt, corporate debt, government intervention in markets, corporate merger and acquisition activity, energy factors, raw material availability
• Ecological trends: Water availability, biodiversity, soil health, wetlands integrity, climate change
• Political trends: Legislation, regulation, political parties, authoritarianism versus liberal democracy

You may notice that only a few of these factors show up on the radar of many strategic planning tools. A "Balanced Scorecard" approach might deal with external market factors in a general sense, such as interest rates, unemployment (talent availability), M&A activity and energy costs as it attempts to evaluate "risk." The rest of the data collected focuses on internal factors, which is the focus ofthe vast majority of managerial activities. This is a reasonable approach in a time of relative growth and stability.

Clearly, we are no longer living in a time that warranty such assumptions about stability. As such, leaders need to redouble the resources they provide to the external factors explored in the STEEP methedology. We cannot stress enough - we know how much this flies in the face of modern management. Very few people are in the "nanotechnology" business, or the "aging populations" business. As such, there will little space in quantitative management for a proper understanding the of the risk - AND OPPORTUNITY - that such strategic shifts indeed promise. Leaders need to make space, incorporating such broad analysis into all of their other activities, such as marketing, supply chain management, sales, finance, and product development. In this day and age, strategic shifts are not optional and not frivolous wastes of intellectual time. Modern strategic management requires not only understanding STEEP trends, but more importantly, understanding their implications for the organization.

Competitive Futures specializes not only in a the collection and analysis of STEEP trends, but also in the distillation of implications so our clients can benefit from major change.

All foresight must start with hard data from reliable sources.

Competitive Futures has a unique methodology when it comes to guiding its clients into the future - we actually provide data on how the world is changing in the coming five to twenty years to help clients understand what they should do in the short-term.

This may seem like an incredibly obvious activity. Naturally, if you are planning for anything you should get the best data. The interesting thing about the future is that the majority of executives don't do this.

A simple exercise - ask a colleague "What are the top three strategic trends impacting your organization?" Could it be fluctuating raw material prices? Rapidly shifting customer demographics? Tectonically important technological shifts due to mobile communications? Water shortage?

After more than a decade of providing insight to leaders of business and government, we have discovered than less than 2% of managers at major organizations are able to name important strategic trends off the top of their heads. This isn't purely negligence; there are strong motivations for keeping people focused uniquely on the next quarter. An economy in rapid fluctuation is likely to make managers focus on what is right in front of them to assure survival. Of course, there is also the perennial concern of publicly-traded company basing compensation on quarterly performance as a proxy for making the stock price improve. Still, the future doesn't especially care whether you have time to study its trends - it is coming to change your business model for good and for bad regardless of whether your compensation package is attuned to this longer-range perspective.

This is why, simply put, we get the data about future trends for our clients. Competitive Futures provides custom research about where our clients' markets are heading so they can make better decisions, faster than their competitors. After years of doing this very specific type of strategic research, we are best in the world at finding superior, reliable sources of insight about how the world is changing. In many cases, we have personal relationships with the top researchers and analysts in their respective fields of expertise. This is why we deliver more reliable information in shorter time frames on future trends such as:

• Customer demographics
• Human resources talent pool availability
• Economic indicators
• Raw material supply and demand
• Science and technology research and development
• Import and export
• International risk
• Global lifestyles

After more than ten years in the business, Competitive Futures maintains a constantly updated database of trends that form the basis of many of our successful research projects for the world's most innovative organizations.