Mauro Guillén

Guillén maps where people are being born, where they are aging, and where they are moving, then follows the money those people will have. The answer runs two ways at once: growth is moving toward emerging markets, and inside a given market it is moving up the age curve. He builds three or four jolts into the hour, because in his words a room needs one before it starts thinking. One is the currency call. He predicted the world would end up with more currencies than countries, and it happened, though not as anyone assumed. Bitcoin became an investment asset class rather than a payment method. The payoff is a map of where growth is going, by region and by age, that a planning committee can actually defend.

When the pandemic hit, Guillén built a course on its business consequences in a matter of weeks and roughly 2,400 students enrolled. He has kept at that work since, including a study of how airlines rebuilt strategy after two shocks landed back to back, the financial crisis and the pandemic. He reads tariffs, sanctions, and political risk the same way, separating what is genuinely reversing in global trade from what is simply rerouting. The two call for different responses and get confused constantly. The takeaway is a working test for telling a structural break from a passing one.

Guillén does not give an AI talk. He runs AI through his own questions instead, which is the version a company planning past next quarter can use. Does AI raise birth rates or lower them? Does it extend what an aging workforce can do, or displace it? What does it do to purchasing power in the markets a company counts on for growth? He added this because clients asked for it, and the argument is not new for him. The Platform Paradox, his 2021 book, is about digital businesses that scale beautifully in theory and run into demographics, regulation, and local preference in practice. Attendees walk out with a harder set of questions for their own AI plan, aimed at their customers and their workforce rather than their software.

The largest consumer segment in the world is becoming people over sixty, and the crossover is right about now. Guillén points out that most brands still aim their advertising at people in their thirties and forties. Fixing that is harder than spotting it, because an older customer rejects anything that signals it was built for old people. He also attacks the categories themselves, because generations, in his words, exist only in our imagination. Two women born the same year can live entirely different lives. One finished graduate school and had a first child at thirty-one; the other finished high school and had four children starting at eighteen. Their birth year predicts nothing about either of them, and companies now hold real-time behavioral data that predicts plenty. He has made this case for years to Estée Lauder, and says someone in the room still starts talking about millennials. The payoff is a name for the customer the advertising keeps missing, and the signals worth reading instead of birth year.

A career model assumes a sequence: school, then work, then retirement. In The Perennials, Guillén takes that sequence apart, because people now live and stay sharp long past the point where that model made sense. His argument is that a skill set will go obsolete inside a single career, more than once. The answer is going back to school rather than aging out of relevance. He names what the old assumptions leave on the table: the older worker written off, the younger one not trusted yet, and the person whose strongest years arrive late. The payoff is a list of the people their development plans skip, and an argument for training that would reach them.

A company tracks its trends in separate departments, and the thing worth knowing sits between several of them. Guillén has spent a career making those connections. One study tracked more than 20,000 managers across 980 organizations in 36 countries to examine how leadership behavior changed in response to the 2008 financial crisis. The answer reversed what he expected. His forthcoming book, Lateral Thinking: The Art and Science of Connecting the Dots, turns the habit into a method. He not only shows the connections; he makes the room attempt them, which is what turns an hour into a skill. The payoff is a shortlist of multiple-trend connections a company is not tracking, and a repeatable way to keep finding more.