Rehn.
Professor, author, and keynote speaker. Twenty-two books, more than a thousand talks, and a working conviction that the most useful idea in the room is usually the one nobody wants to say out loud.
Turku, Finland. Now Odense, Denmark. And a fair amount of airport lounges in between.
The short version
Alf Rehn is Professor of Innovation, Design, and Management at the University of Southern Denmark, where he directs CODES, the Center for Organizational Datafication and its Ethics in Society. Years ago he was the youngest person ever appointed to a chair in management in Finland. He has been based in Denmark since 2017.
The longer version
For more than two decades Alf has worked at the awkward, productive border between rigorous scholarship and the messy reality of organizations. His research runs through creativity, innovation, power, exclusion, and, increasingly, what happens when organizations start treating everything as data. It is serious work, delivered without the solemnity that usually comes attached.
In 2016 Thinkers50, the global ranking of management thinkers, placed him on its Guru Radar as one of the thirty thinkers most likely to shape the future of how we lead and organize. He has spent the years since being difficult to categorize: academic, advisor, author, and an unapologetic enthusiast of popular culture at its trashiest.
He works in four registers, and tries to keep them talking to each other.
Keynote
Speaking
From global business conferences to boardrooms. Intellectually rigorous, consistently memorable, and, despite the depth, genuinely entertaining.
See speakingBooks &
Writing
Twenty-two books on creativity, innovation, and the stranger edges of management, plus the Creative Class Contrarian on Substack, where the conversation goes deeper.
Explore booksAdvisory
Work
Strategic counsel for executives who want honest engagement with creativity, innovation, and emerging technology, including AI and quantum.
See advisoryResearch
& CODES
Professor at SDU and Director of CODES, where academic rigor meets the questions about data and organizations that actually matter.
Research & CODESA serious case of not being serious.
Alf has advised everyone from hot new startups to Fortune 500 companies. He has chaired an advertising agency, served on boards, helped guide an artisanal, prize-winning distillery, and once appeared in a Finnish television advert for Lidl, which is to say the range is wide and the sectors are not always obvious.
He also reads a great deal more crime fiction than is strictly respectable, which is part of how his next book happened. If you want the academic version of Alf, the research page is that way. If you want the one who quotes pulp novels at leadership retreats, you have probably already booked him.
Alf Rehn 