Gabor George Burt

Global Authority on Re-imagining Boundaries

Gabor George Burt

Creator of the Slingshot Framework, which is at the forefront of global innovation. The framework enables individuals and organizations to overstep perceived limitations in pursuit of high growth, expanded relevance, and strong customer attachment. The foundation for Slingshot is Gabor's work as one of the original, top experts of Blue Ocean Strategy, the new millennium’s most influential business leadership approach. He contributed case study material to the worldwide bestselling book of the same name, and originated its most popular blog.

Gabor is actively involved in shaping high-impact strategy for a diverse group of international organizations, ranging from top multinationals & governments to start-ups, academic institutions & NGOs, and leads by example through his own market-driving initiatives.

Featured speaker at high-profile events: e.g. delivered opening presentation at the World Marketing Forum, was the architect and host of the First Arab Innovation Summit and the Forum for Partnership of the Americas – a gathering of business and government leaders; spoke twice at Forum One, one of Europe's biggest leadership conferences, alongside Sir Richard Branson and Seth Godin.

219 articles · Page 6 of 10

Official Launch of Stand-Up Strategist!
Strategy1 min read

Official Launch of Stand-Up Strategist!

Top winners for 2018 include Swiss-based Logitech Business-Speak for BS Detection, US-based Life Storage with Howie the AI Bot, and Australia-based ME Bank’s debut of disposable credit cards.

Gabor George Burt · 29 April 2025

My interview in EIT magazine
Culture1 min read

My interview in EIT magazine

The EIT is all about championing innovation and entrepreneurship with the aim of increasing Europe’s competitiveness on a global level, and growth as well.

Gabor George Burt · 29 April 2025

Most Affordable Car
Culture1 min read

Most Affordable Car

On May 19th Tata launched the first major upgrade of the Nano under the name GenX, with high expectations.

Gabor George Burt · 29 April 2025

Moscow in Winter
Culture1 min read

Moscow in Winter

ReForum is the top, annual event in Russia on organizational motivation and leadership, leveraging human capital and creating happiness in business.

Gabor George Burt · 29 April 2025

More Heart. Less Head. Making Feedback Matter.
Practice2 min read

More Heart. Less Head. Making Feedback Matter.

We spend so much of our lives at work. Can’t we use our peers, leaders, and those who report to us as mirrors of what legacy we leave behind, of what gets really learned and valued?

Gabor George Burt · 29 April 2025

ManU the world allover
Strategy1 min read

ManU the world allover

The fun, interactive BBC feature entitled ‘Are Man Utd about to rule the world?

Gabor George Burt · 29 April 2025

Look, I can skateboard on air!
Culture1 min read

Look, I can skateboard on air!

The hover board is part skateboard, part jetpack – and looks like pure blast! If you are interested in trying one, get in line behind me!

Gabor George Burt · 29 April 2025

Let’s Go Freeriding
Strategy1 min read

Let’s Go Freeriding

The Let’s Go Freeriding summit took place in Obergurgl, Austria, bringing together a group of 25 accomplished entrepreneurs and future shapers

Gabor George Burt · 29 April 2025

Launch of The Slingshot Awards
Culture1 min read

Launch of The Slingshot Awards

The awards represent a new approach to drive social advancement, has the involvement of a prominent group of global thought-leaders, and is already generating strong media & corporate partnership interest.

Gabor George Burt · 29 April 2025

John Madden Was More Important Than You Know
Culture9 min read

John Madden Was More Important Than You Know

That John Madden, who died yesterday at the age of 85, was enormously popular was easy to see while he was alive, and has been even easier to see now that he’s gone. But what may not be quite as obvious about Madden is that he was more than a beloved, avuncular figure. He was, in his way, a visionary, someone who had his finger on the proverbial pulse of modern pop culture, someone with deep sense of what people wanted, sometimes even before they knew it. And he was able to take that understanding of what people wanted, and use it to transform sports video games and sports television in a way that no other single figure has. Madden was an exceptional explainer, both when he was a football coach and when he was a television announcer, and one of the things that makes someone a great explainer is the ability to understand their audience, to grasp where the audience is and where you can move it to. And what Madden grasped about football fans is that they had an unslaked appetite for insider knowledge of the game. He recognized that you could talk about the nitty-gritty details of a football game, including things like offensive-line play, without people losing interest, as long as you were able to make those details intelligible to the average fan. He brought the same approach to the video game series that truly made him a legend. The famous origin story of EA’s Madden series is that when EA first talked to him about putting his name on a football video game, the company wanted to make the game 7v7, because that would make it easier to produce a workable game, given the limits of processing power and computer memory at the time. Madden rejected that idea out of hand, saying it had to be 11v11, just like real football, or nothing. When he was told that that could take years, he said, in effect, “Then it’ll take years.” And so it did. It was that same ethos that led him to argue for having the game include NFL playbooks that were as big and as realistic as possible, and, for years, to personally review player ratings. Even if the goal wasn’t to make a perfectly accurate simulation (a typical game of Madden is likely to have more big plays than a typical NFL game), Madden recognized that fans would want something that at least felt real. Where previous sports games had tried to keep things simple in the interests of making games as playable as possible, Madden saw that, done right, complexity was something to lean into rather than away from. That understanding of fans’ willingness to embrace analytical complexity and depth also led Madden to reshape the way NFL broadcasts were prepared for and the way they looked. Before Madden, announcers didn’t go to practices before games, and didn’t get to watch the game film that coaches did. When he became a broadcaster, he said immediately that this made no sense — if he was going to add value as a commentator, he needed to be able to do the work that would let him understand, in a deep sense, what he was seeing on the field, so that he could then translate that for the people at home. So he insisted on having access to game films, and going to practices in the days ahead of Sunday games. In effect, he prepared for each game he broadcast the way he would have prepared for a Sunday game as coach (with the added advantage of getting to watch both teams practice). And within a short period of time, all broadcasters were preparing for games this way. Madden was also a pioneer in the use of technology. He was, famously, the first sports broadcaster to use a Telestrator, which he did during the 1982 Super Bowl. Back then Telestrator technology was much cruder than it is today, and one might well have been skeptical that audiences would want to watch someone draw lines all over their TV screen. But Madden recognized that the Telestrator could help, in a sense, bring order out of the seeming chaos of a football play. It could help viewers see what they were watching. Madden was also, perhaps unsurprisingly, the first person to suggest that TV networks put a yellow line across the field at the first-down marker, to make it easy for people to see how far the offense had to go to get a new set of downs. He was told it was impossible, and that people wouldn’t like having this big line cluttering up the screen anyway. But he was, of course, right, and a few years later, the yellow line made its first appearance — though it was ESPN, and not Fox, where Madden then worked, that first introduced. Today, it’s one of those innovations that’s so integral to the way a football game looks on TV that you barely notice it. There are lots of reasons the NFL has, over the last forty years, become one of the few unstoppable forces in American culture, and one of the few things in popular culture that transcends partisan and geographic and demographic differences. John Madden is one of those reasons — and not a small one. Football — as I’ve realized from trying to explain to my little boys how the game works — is a very complicated game, much more so than baseball or basketball. What Madden did was make the game comprehensible to people, not by dumbing it down, but by breaking it down into explainable parts. He had the knack for making things as simple as they needed to be, but no simpler. People did not love Madden just because he was a big, jovial guy. They loved him because he helped them understand the game, and in the process helped them appreciate it more deeply (and feel a little smarter, too). He was, in that sense, a kind of genius, and pretty much anyone involved with the NFL today owes him a big debt.

Gabor George Burt · 29 April 2025

It’s Amore: Slingshot Dinner Experience
Culture1 min read

It’s Amore: Slingshot Dinner Experience

The dinner was hosted by Hylant, one of the largest privately held insurance brokerage firms in the U.S, and attended by 12 senior executives from diverse organizations, alongside the President and three executives from Hylant.

Gabor George Burt · 29 April 2025

Is your brand relevant?
Strategy1 min read

Is your brand relevant?

the Grand Mercure Mei Jue, which attempts to combine Chinese tradition with French elegance specifically for Chinese travelers.

Gabor George Burt · 29 April 2025

Interesting Piece of Historic Trivia
Culture1 min read

Interesting Piece of Historic Trivia

‘Coach’ comes from the name of the Hungarian village ‘Kocs’, which produced a horse carriage so innovative in the Middle Ages, that its design was copied internationally.

Gabor George Burt · 29 April 2025

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