William E. Halal

Thought Leader and Professor Emeritus

William E. Halal, PhD, is professor emeritus at George Washington University, Washington, DC, with degrees from Purdue and UC Berkeley. He has published eight books and hundreds of articles, consults for corporations and governments, and is a frequent speaker, once substituting for Peter Drucker. Previously, he served as a major in the US Air Force, an aerospace engineer on the Apollo Program, and a business manager in Silicon Valley. 

His article “Beyond the Profit-Motive” won the 1977 Mitchell Prize, and another article, “Through the MegaCrisis,” was awarded Outstanding Paper of 2013 by Emerald Publishing. Halal was cited by the Encyclopedia of the Future as one of the top 100 futurists in the world. His book Beyond Knowledge is a bestseller on Amazon and has been translated into Spanish, Arabic, and Thai.

He is also more than an ordinary academic. After graduating from Purdue’s ROTC program, second lieutenant Halal served a tour at Evreux Air Force Base in France, flying the first C-130 Hercules aircraft for NATO throughout Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Later, while he was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, he served in the Air Force Reserves at Hamilton and Travis Air force bases in California, home of the amazing C-141 Starlifter (shown in the photo in this section). He retired at the rank of major.

Halal also worked for Grumman Aerospace Company on the lunar module of the Apollo program. He served on the team responsible for designing the rocket engine that landed the first men on the moon. Later, he became the Grumman representative at the Rocketdyne testing facility in Reno, Nevada, where the engine was fired under the near vacuum conditions of the moon.

In graduate school, he also worked at the Raychem Corporation, Forum, and other firms in Silicon Valley, as well as for the California state government, Sea Ranch, and other ventures.