WE WON THE GLOBAL RECOGNITION AWARD – TIME TO CELEBRATE!

What a wonderful surprise: Your favorite futurist keynote speakers and consulting experts woke up to find that we’ve won the Global Recognition Award for Leadership, Service and Innovation! It’s a tremendous honor coming on the back of new #1 bestselling book The Shape of the Future’s recent launch!  

Word on the street is it’s for: “Extraordinary contributions as a futurist, strategic consultant, and keynote speaker.” (More details below.)

And here we thought we were just too stubborn to quit…!

But seriously: Out of 15,000 entrants each year, only 5% or so are selected, so we’re humbled and honored to be included.

Suffice it to say that it’s a heck of a way to celebrate over 25 years of late nights and longshots. Equally cool: Along the way, it’s been our pleasure to advise 3,000+ partners from Fortune 500 companies to startups, and help creative innovators in every field solve difficult, real-world challenges.

Long story short: The team here at FutureProof Strategies is hugely grateful to all the clients, colleagues, and communities that we’ve had the chance to work with over the years. Your trust and partnership have made all the difference. More to come soon… 

Onwards. Upwards. Excelsior!

What They Say

Background

Scott Steinberg has been recognized with a 2026 Global Recognition Award for his extraordinary and measurable contributions as a futurist, strategic consultant, bestselling author, and keynote speaker, achievements that place him firmly at the summit of Leadership, Service, and Innovation.

Few professionals in the consulting and strategic advisory world have built a body of work as broad, as durable, and as independently verified as Steinberg’s. Named the World’s Leading Business Strategist and Fortune magazine’s Master of Innovation, he has advised more than 3,000 brands, ranging from Fortune 500 corporations to government defense agencies, over a career of more than 25 years. His clients include IBM, PwC, and the U.S. Department of Defense, organizations that do not engage consultants without rigorous vetting, underscoring the caliber of expertise Steinberg brings to every engagement.

Steinberg also serves as CEO of BIZDEV: The International Association for Business Development and Strategic Partnerships, and leads FutureProof Strategies, a management consulting and market research firm whose work has shaped products and services now found in hundreds of millions of homes worldwide. Consulting magazine named him one of its Top 25 Consultants for Excellence in Leadership. The BBC has recognized him as one of America’s top futurists, a distinction that reflects the depth and the reach of his professional influence. Google has independently ranked him the number-one technology expert globally, with his work reaching more than 1 billion people across 700+ media outlets, including CNN, NPR, USA Today, and The Today Show.

A Record Built on Measurable Impact

Steinberg scored the maximum rating of 5 across all evaluated criteria, covering vision and strategy implementation, ability to inspire and motivate others, ethical decision-making and integrity, and building innovation and creativity within his field, a result that reflects consistent and verifiable performance rather than self-assessment alone. His scores in the service and innovation categories were equally strong, with perfect ratings in market impact, technological advancement, addressing global challenges, and disruption of existing paradigms.

The breadth of Steinberg’s service record is difficult to overstate, given that his strategic frameworks have been deployed across the private sector, government institutions, and nonprofit organizations, demonstrating scale and sustainability. His volunteerism and civic engagement extend to his roles as a judge for the App Developer Awards, the GSMA Mobile Awards, and the University of Southern California Global Consulting Challenge, reflecting a consistent commitment to contributing expertise beyond the commercial sphere. These engagements reinforce his scores in community impact and innovative approaches to societal needs, confirming that his contributions carry weight far beyond the organizations he has formally advised.

Innovation as a Sustained Practice

Steinberg’s innovation credentials are anchored not by a single breakthrough but by more than two decades of anticipating and interpreting disruption before it arrives. This pattern has made his counsel indispensable to the organizations that have repeatedly engaged him. His POP FUTURE training methodology has been adopted by organizations seeking to operationalize foresight. His authorship of more than 30 books, including his most recent title, The Shape of the Future, which introduces a new framework for strategic and design thinking, demonstrates an unbroken commitment to generating original intellectual work. The Fortune 500’s repeated engagement of Steinberg as a strategic adviser confirms that his work carries genuine market utility, grounded in rigor rather than theoretical novelty alone.

Over more than 500 keynote addresses and virtual presentations delivered worldwide, Steinberg has consistently translated complex foresight into actionable strategy for audiences ranging from C-suite executives to senior military officials, a scope of reach that few consultants have matched. His work on change management, digital advancement, and leadership development has helped organizations not merely understand disruption but also build the internal capacity to respond to it, a distinction evaluators cited as central to his exceptional ratings across the disruption and paradigm-shift criteria. This adoption rate, measured across industries, geographies, and organizational types, stands as one of the clearest indicators of innovation that has moved beyond concept and into consequence.

Final Words

Steinberg’s recognition under the Leadership, Service, and Innovation categories reflects the full scope of a career that has operated at an international scale with measurable outcomes, supported by accolades that are independently verified rather than self-reported. His strategic work has influenced billions of people through media, direct consulting, and written work, while his leadership philosophy, grounded in ethical decision-making and integrity, has guided organizations through some of the most turbulent periods of technological and economic change in recent decades. That combination of reach, rigor, and results is precisely what the Global Recognition Awards framework is designed to identify and honor.