A New York Times bestselling author who penned tech thrillers involving bitcoin and Facebook and a preeminent biographer and business journalist are among the featured speakers that will be appearing at FreightWaves LIVE in Chicago this November.
Ben Mezrich, author of the New York Times bestseller Bringing Down the House: the Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, will be part of a keynote fireside chat with FreightWaves founder Craig Fuller on Tuesday, November 12. Mezrich also wrote The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal, which debuted on the New York Times bestseller list and was adapted into the film The Social Network.
Award-winning broadcast journalist Howard Green, who wrote Railroader: The Unfiltered Genius and Controversy of Four-Time CEO Hunter Harrison, will be part of a keynote fireside chat with FreightWaves news director and anchor Emily Szink on Wednesday, November 13.
FreightWaves LIVE is a bi-annual event that seeks to capture the best ideas and practices of next-generation freight transportation and logistics. The fall iteration will take place on November 12-13, 2019, at McCormick Place in Chicago, and it will feature TED-style talks, fireside chats, technology demonstrations and toe-tapping entertainment.
More than 1,500 attendees are expected to be at FreightWaves LIVE Chicago this November.
Event highlights include the Global TradeTech Forum and opportunities to learn about FreightWaves’ SONAR platform at the SONAR Summit and about freight futures at the Futures Forum.
The keynote fireside chats are an opportunity for event-goers to hear unfiltered discussions about how technological innovations and new ideas disrupt the traditional ways of going about business in freight transportation and logistics. These innovations, brought about to fulfill the need to adapt an ever-shifting marketplace, often end up transforming the industry and become part of the best practices within the industry.
“What I know about the industry through Hunter Harrison’s story is that the shift toward technology has been gradual, since the 1980s when computerization began to spread. But now, in all areas of the economy, data analytics and artificial intelligence are rapidly washing over everything and every industry. Things tend to come slowly at first, then very quickly,” said Green on Hunter Harrison, who served as chief executive officer at Canadian National, Canadian Pacific and CSX before he died in December 2017.
While Harrison wasn’t a tech guru, his thought process as one of the founding champions of precision scheduled railroading was innovative and disruptive – and continues to be disruptive to this day, some would say.
“Hunter wasn’t big on personal technology like email and personal computers. He preferred getting on the phone and talking,” Green said. “But he was very big on data. That started in the 1980s when he was at Burlington Northern [BN] and continued when he ran Illinois Central after his time at BN. Data has been an important component in precision scheduled railroading which puts great emphasis on measurement.”
To hear more about Hunter Harrison as well as take in all the discussions and debates about technology’s role in freight transportation and logistics, register to attend FreightWaves LIVE Chicago. Visit the event home page: https://www.freightwaves.com/live-chi/register.
