"When I get to lead off a conference, I always test with this: Listen carefully to everything these next couple days and when you get back to the day-to-day, really try to reimagine the future,” Jared Weiner, executive vice president and chief strategy officer for Future Hunters, told an SIIA audience in November.

Voice interfaces. Self-driving vehicles. Digital currencies. Cybersecurity.

Jared Weiner, executive vice president and chief strategy officer for Future Hunters, opened last Monday's Business Information & Media Summit (BIMS) with a bit of a magic trick. He gave the audience a sequence of seemingly open-ended questions—pick a number between 1 and 10; pick a country...an animal—and then nailed the final answer visually for about 80% of the people.

"Try to differentiate between innovation and true imagination," said Jared Weiner, executive vice president and chief strategy officer for Future Hunters, in Monday's wow-inducing, thought-provoking opening keynote at the third annual Business Information & Media Summit (BIMS) here in sunny Fort Lauderdale.

The future will increasingly be about new methods of individualized learning. It will be important to learn how to learn. It will be important to be adaptive. These are the skills that will be most useful—and most prized by employers—in the workplace of tomorrow. Work will be far more about intelligence (the ability to apply novel thinking to never-before-seen challenges) and less about smarts (the ability to memorize, retain and apply information)."  —Jared Weiner, executive vice president and chief strategy officer, Future Hunters, a leading futurist consulting firm