Forecasting the Future

Many students based their speeches on their professional experiences. Full-Time MBA student Romell Lewis, who is also a general surgery resident at the University of Chicago Medical Center, argued that by 2040, healthcare will globalize through telehealth and other technological advancement, giving patients more access to care that will cost less. “I can already perform robotic surgery on patients without even being in the same room,” he said in his speech.

Lewis came up with his idea while considering a problem he’s encountered in his medical career: insurance issues hindering patients from receiving care. “You have a patient come in and they need this procedure, but it’s an outpatient procedure and they have to be sent to another hospital,” Lewis said afterward. “But if everything lined up, they could be getting their care from anywhere in the world.”

Full-Time MBA student Ude Adekunle claimed that while artificial intelligence will make fraud more prevalent by 2040, it will also make fraud detection more sophisticated. “The same AI that can imitate a face can also detect a lie,” she said during her presentation. “And the same AI that makes deception scalable can also make detection intelligent.”

Adekunle wanted to present a specific application for AI in her speech, so she drew on her previous roles in the banking and payments fields. “It’s already happening,” she later said of her forecast. “There are already models detecting anomalies at scale. They are continuously learning and becoming more precise with every transaction.”

VonEschen, however, wanted to choose a less typical business topic, so he focused on one of his off-hours interests. He started trail running when he was stationed in San Diego as a Navy SEAL, and that community introduced him to ultramarathons. Last year, he attended the Western States Endurance Run, the oldest 100-mile race in the US, which he referenced in his speech.

“Sport is something we all understand to some extent,” said VonEschen, who wants to develop an outdoor sports brand. “It’s something simple that humans have been doing for a long time, and that’s why I was interested in thinking about changes to it.”

The World in 2040 project was also an opportunity for the students to practice a quarter’s worth of public-speaking coaching from Weitzman and his coaches.

“Personally, I had to work on slowing down a lot and not mumbling,” VonEschen said. “So being very aware of how I talk. It’s all those little skills that maybe weren’t seen by the audience but we were all working on.”

Lewis, who often has to present at research conferences, appreciated being coached on his speaking as well. But the course also helped him sharpen the content of his presentations. For one recent conference, days before his World in 2040 speech, Lewis organized his slides around meaning-making, projection, and connection.

“It changed the way I thought about presentations,” said Lewis, who eventually wants to hold an administrative role in academic surgery.

Adekunle would recommend Voice of a Leader to any Booth student because it’s both fun and practical—and teaches skills far beyond communication. “We learned how to have clarity of thought,” she said. “If you’re looking to develop into a confident leader—into that person who knows how to draw meaning out of things and connect with your audience—then you will learn a lot.”