About Maneesh

I count what nobody counts

I'm an analyst who learned to think in systems, and then discovered how much those systems depend on things organisations never count. I help boards, investors and leaders across every sector find the dependencies they can't afford to lose: the spare capacity, maintenance, natural resources and people that keep everything running. And I leave them with the first thing to fix on Monday.

My argument is simple. For decades, organisations have made themselves efficient by stripping out whatever didn't show up on a balance sheet: spare stock, spare staff, maintenance, the natural buffers around them. In a hotter, more volatile world, those are exactly the things that decide who keeps running. That's what I mean by the resilience economy: the value of protecting the systems, resources and people that businesses and economies depend on, and the opportunity in making that protection affordable.

It started on the shop floor. One of my earliest part-time jobs as a student was stacking shelves at Tesco, where I learned that you can tell a lot about a country by watching what goes into a trolley, and what doesn't. Fresh out of university, I joined Professor Sir Michael Marmot's Whitehall II team at UCL as a junior analyst, running numbers for researchers who were showing that the lower someone's grade, the higher their risk of heart disease. My name ended up on papers in the BMJ and Diabetologia, but the real prize was the lesson: the numbers people overlook decide how long they live. At 25 I was at dunnhumby, looking after the SAS copy of the Tesco Clubcard data. I'd gone from stacking the shelves to counting every purchase that came off them. Then almost a decade as an analyst at GSK, working with health records covering up to 120 million patients, where my real-world evidence fed into decisions on drug safety and drug development. The work is easy to describe and hard to do: spot the signal before it becomes the harm.

For more than a decade, when people asked what I did, I'd say "I tell stories about the future", and I took that onto stages in over twenty countries, from an opening keynote for more than 1,000 health professionals in Brisbane to Cedars-Sinai, Mayo Clinic, Health Datapalooza in Arlington, VA and the leadership of Unimed in Brazil. I've appeared on Netflix's The Future Of and given TEDx talks. When I showed on social media that Cortana answered "I'm bleeding" with "Interesting", Microsoft fixed it.

Health led me to the planet. Every health system I studied depended on things outside the hospital: power, water, food, cool air, and staff who could get to work. All of that rests on the oceans, forests, ice and soils, and once those are pushed past a tipping point, they don't bend back. When heat, floods or broken supply chains hit, they hit everything at once. So my work moved into planetary health, and then into climate adaptation.

Then my family's care needs grew, and I became the one holding things together at home. Resilience stopped being a topic. It became the question of what happens at three in the morning when the power goes off. I started small: a week of supplies, fixed energy prices, thinking through cooling and backup power, learning to bake our own bread. Small, unglamorous things, each one chosen because I'd worked out what would fail first.

Every Wednesday I write about what organisations aren't counting in Uncounted.

At a glance

  • 30+ years working with data, systems and people
  • Whitehall II at UCL · Tesco Clubcard at dunnhumby · Almost a decade at GSK
  • Keynote speaker since 2013, in 20+ countries
  • Netflix The Future Of · TEDx · Cedars-Sinai guest lecturer
  • Named co-author on papers in the BMJ, Diabetologia and other journals
  • Writes Uncounted, every Wednesday
  • British-born, of Indian heritage · based in London, speaking worldwide (travelled to 61 countries)

Selected writing

  • Avoiding War: Investing in Food, Energy and Water. Capital Club Dubai, Disruption in 2035 edition, 2025
  • Water Scarcity through the Lens of Planetary Health: A Looming Global Polycrisis (with a South African water engineer). Compass, Association of Professional Futurists, April 2025
  • Health and wellbeing chapter, Samsung UK Future in Focus: life in 50 years' time, 2019
  • Digital Health and Patient Registries: Today, Tomorrow, and the Future. Co-wrote chapter 3 of the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's Registries for Evaluating Patient Outcomes addendum
  • Robots as companions: are we ready? Republished in the journal mHealth, 2015
  • Named co-author on peer-reviewed papers in the BMJ (1998), Diabetologia (1997), British Journal of Nutrition (2001), Clinical Pediatrics (2011), Arthritis Care & Research (2015), Frontiers in Neurology (2021), Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases (2021), Neurology and Therapy (2022) and European Heart Journal Supplements (2022)

Keynote topics → · Read Uncounted → · Book a 30-minute video call →

Bios for event programmes

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Short bio (50 words)

Maneesh Juneja is a futurist and strategic advisor who counts what nobody counts. Over 30 years, from the Whitehall II study to Tesco Clubcard data to health records covering 120 million patients, he has found what others overlook. Featured on Netflix's The Future Of, he speaks worldwide on climate adaptation and the resilience economy.

Long bio (150 words)

Maneesh Juneja is a futurist and strategic advisor who has spent 30 years counting what nobody counts. He began on Sir Michael Marmot's Whitehall II study at UCL, then on loyalty-card data for UK supermarket Tesco at dunnhumby, before almost a decade at GSK, where his contributions in generating real-world evidence from health records of up to 120 million patients fed into drug safety.

In 2012 he left that career to travel the world, finding the people building the future. From 2013 he keynoted in over twenty countries on health, data and AI, for audiences and organisations including Cedars-Sinai, Mayo Clinic, Pfizer and Unimed. He has appeared on Netflix's The Future Of and given four TEDx talks.

Today he speaks on the resilience economy: how leaders prepare for a hotter, more volatile world where climate, geopolitical, cyber and supply-chain shocks land at once. He writes the weekly newsletter Uncounted.