Theodore Jay Gordon
Biography
Theodore Jay Gordon is a futurist and management consultant. He is a specialist in forecasting methodology, planning, and policy analysis, an entrepreneur, and an inventor. He is co-founder and Board member of The Millennium Project, a global think tank. The Millennium Project was placed among the top ten think tanks in the world for new ideas by the University of Pennsylvania’s GoTo Think Tank Index, and a Computerworld Honors Laureate for its contributions to collective intelligence systems. He also served as emeritus director of the Institute for Global Ethics. He is a recipient of the Ed Cornish “Futurist of the Year” award and is a recipient of the Shaping Tomorrow Lifetime Achievement Award.
He performed early research on the Delphi method at RAND Corporation where he was a consultant to their mathematics and policy department and he co-authored the first large scale Delphi study (Gordon and Helmer, 1964). He is one of the co-founders of The Institute for the Future. He also founded the Futures Group and led it for 20 years. Throughout his career he has been at the forefront of development of forecasting and analysis methodology including the development of the Cross Impact Method, Trend Impact Analysis, implications of non linear modeling (chaos) for forecasting, and the State of the Future Index (SOFI), a means for measuring and forecasting the changing outlook of the future, and in the development and application of Real Time Delphi to essentially all foresight and policy studies performed at the Millennium Project. His most recent work concerns lone wold terrorism and has been published both in book form (Lone Wolf Terrorism Prospects, Gordon, Sharan and Florescu, on Amazon) and as an e-book (www.lonewolfthreat.com).
He is the author of many client reports, peer reviewed technical articles, and five books dealing with topics associated with the future, space, and scientific and technological developments and issues. He is the author of the Macmillan encyclopedia article on the future of science and technology. He is currently on the editorial board of Technological Forecasting and Social Change.
He was also Chief Engineer of the McDonnell Douglas Saturn S-IV space vehicle (he ran a 3,000 person department); director of Advanced Space Stations and Planetary Systems, the advanced design function of the division. He was also in charge of the launch of early ballistic missiles and space vehicles from Cape Canaveral. His career at Douglas spanned a 16-year period, from 1952 to 1968.
He was Regents Professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Business (1968), and a Woodrow Wilson scholar at Bowdoin (1975). He has lectured at several other universities in business, planning, innovation, forecasting and engineering, including Columbia, University of Texas at Austin, University of Houston, Duke University, University of New Haven, Universidad Simon Bolivar University, Singularity University, and the Turku School of Economics and Business Administration (Finland). He is a Faculty Affiliate of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures of the RAND Corporation.
Mr. Gordon holds several patents in space vehicles, acoustics, automated collection of voter judgments and speech recognition. His degrees are in aeronautical engineering from Louisiana State University and Georgia Institute of Technology.
Mr. Gordon started the consulting firm, The Futures Group in 1971. As CEO, he led the firm for 20 years. The company performed contract research in economic and social development and strategy for private organizations and government agencies. Prior to forming The Futures Group, Mr. Gordon was one of the founders of the non-profit organization: The Institute for the Future. Mr. Gordon has served on the Board of several organizations including the Institute for Global Ethics, The Futures Group, Apollo BioPharmaceutics, (a start-up firm in the field of anti-aging pharmaceuticals), Rolodex Corporation, Registry Magic (a start up company in the field of speech recognition). He also served as Chairman of the Connecticut Product Development Commission Loan Board, and Acting Chairman of the Connecticut Commission on the Future.
He is a pilot and still flies his light sport airplane.