Gerard Smith is a Managing Principal with the Futures Strategy Group, specializing in long-term market assessment, enterprise risk management, and scenario-based strategic planning. FSG helps organizations plan more effectively and make difficult decisions in the face of uncertainty, by exploring the forces for change that will affect their future operating environment. Clients derive great value from both the product and the process, which leaves a lasting impression on participants.
Over the last decade, much of Gerard’s scenario planning work has been focused on health care and medical sectors, where he has played leadership roles in strategic planning projects for the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, several medical certification boards and schools of medicine and nursing.
His work at FSG follows many years as a strategic planner with experience in advertising, branding and global marketing. He has an extensive background in addressing strategic marketing and communications challenges for many of the world’s best known companies.
His career began leading an operations research department, a small group devoted to the development and pioneering application of sophisticated computer-based tools and analytical methods to address advertising and marketing problems. In subsequent years his role broadened in national and global strategic leadership positions.
Over the course of his career he has advised many world-class companies – IBM, Microsoft, Ford, Mars, Heineken, Coca Cola, Procter and Gamble, Kimberly Clark, Credit Suisse, UBS, Whirlpool, and innumerable other brands and businesses in virtually every category.
Gerard has contributed articles to a variety of professional publications, was joint author of an introductory guide to econometric modeling with a professor at the London Business School, and chaired a Paris-based software user group.
He is a graduate of the Harvard Business School, and lives with his wife in Washington, Connecticut.