Hans Rusinek is a management consultant, transformation researcher and award-winning author who sees himself as an optimist for the future.

His focus is on the ecological, social and economic changes that are shaping the business world. Rusinek is convinced that a disruptively changed and improved future is possible – if we choose it – and is committed to the planet, people and sustainable profit.

“Creativity and purpose is not a ‘nice to have’, but a crucial economic factor. It makes companies more creative and people happier.”– Hans Rusinek

In his role as a bridge builder, Hans Rusinek combines his academic perspective on the future of work at the University of St. Gallen with his practical experience as a strategy consultant at the Boston Consulting Group and BrightHouse, as well as his involvement in think tanks such as the Club of Rome Germany’s ThinkTank 30. He has been a speaker for eight years at events such as TEDx, the Handelsblatt Change Congress, Creative Entrepreneurship and the ZEIT Future Festival.

Hans Rusinek – How to make our working world fit for the future.

In his work on the purpose of organizations, he is concerned with the transition from isolated – and highly vulnerable – profit maximizing machines to adaptive organisms. As a consultant, he has helped companies to focus on their systemically relevant role in a time of changes, on their purpose, and to align their strategy accordingly.

In his research and consulting on the future of work, he looks at the challenges in the workplace: at crises of meaning, generational conflicts, labour shortages, and skills gaps. He shows how we can rediscover the promise of good work: the promise of conscious and creative engagement with our world. For this, he reports from his cultural transformation projects where he has turned employees into members of a movement.

Hans Rusinek: Bringing together organizational consulting, management research and social commitment to design the workplace of the future in a way that motivates people.

As a trained economist and philosopher, he stimulates both sides of the brain: He picks up the audience analytically in their real working world. And then brings them to new perspectives and possibilities for action in a visionary and unexpected way. For example, you will find out what he learned about innovation culture in an Iraqi bakery, how he persuaded an entire board of directors to put on sneakers, and what Hannah Arendt would love about LinkedIn.

Hans Rusinek Keynote Topics:

• The missing piece for future-ready organizations: How to manage time
• From Purpose to Practice: A Compass for Organizations in Challenging Waters
• Future as an Attitude: Concrete steps for a better future of work
• What work is really for: shaping meaningful culture change

Biography:

Hans Rusinek researches, publishes, and consults on the future of work. As a researcher at the University of St. Gallen, he examines the crisis of meaning in the modern world of work. At Fresenius University, he is a lecturer on “Future of Work”. As a Fellow in the ThinkTank30 of the Club of Rome, he combines this with questions of doing business within planetary boundaries. In his most recent scientific studies, he deals with work in the Anthropocene, with the management of meaning in corporations, and with hybrid work as a model for the future.

As a consultant, he guides ministries, corporations and NGOs towards a better work culture and long-term strategy in times of increased complexity. He was Associate Strategy Director and first employee of the transformation consultancy of the Boston Consulting Group, BrightHouse Berlin. He is particularly proud of the Child Growth Monitor, a Microsoft and World Food Program award-winning solution to child malnutrition.

His ideas and concepts can be read in BrandEins, Personalmagazin, Capital, DIE ZEIT or Deutschlandfunk. In 2020, he received the Ludwig Erhard Foundation’s Business Journalism Award for his work.

As a Rhinelander, humour is a serious matter to him: for all his preoccupation with the meaning and purpose of work, he finds balance in an absolutely meaningless hobby: He collects unintentionally funny quotation marks, which are curated in a viralInstagram account (@awkward_anfuehrungszeichen) and which the Seltmann publishing house brought out as a coffee-table book in July 2022 (consequently, it is called: The “Book”). 

Hans Rusinek studied economics, philosophy and politics at the London School of Economics and in Bayreuth during the euro crisis and is a design thinker trained at the d.school. He was born in Düsseldorf shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.