Ryan D. Mathews

Ryan Mathews, founder and CEO of Black Monk Consulting, is a globally recognized futurist, speaker, strategist, storyteller, author, consultant, and the pioneer of the field of corporate cultural ecology. Wired magazine has called him a philosopher of e-commerce, and American Demographics named him “the futurist to watch” in a study of the 25 individuals who have made the greatest contribution to futuring. Red Herring said it was Mathews’s job “to ask the tough questions.

With Fred Crawford, he coauthored The Myth of Excellence: Why Great Companies Never Try to Be the Best at Everything, which appeared on business best-seller lists at The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek and was honored by Amazon.com as one of the top twelve best business books of 2001. Frederick W. Smith, chairman, president, and CEO of Federal Express, has called Mathews an exceptional strategic thinker. He is widely regarded as an expert on consumers and their relationships to brands, products, services, and the companies that offer them.