Steve A Furman
Steve A Furman spent over 40 years studying how people think, behave, and make decisions—through his degree, his career, and always through golf.
His career closely tracks the evolution of media itself, guided throughout by a background in behavioral psychology and a lasting curiosity about how people react when a new medium arrives. He began in the late 1970s as General Manager of a regional bookstore chain, spending time in New York with international book publishers—Random House, Harper & Row, and Simon & Schuster. Not long after, books on tape and home video emerged, and home video rental created an entirely new form of retail—one that soon opened into a nationwide opportunity for him as consumers moved from renting to building their own video collections. His East Coast travel was replaced with trips to Los Angeles, working with major film studios such as Paramount, Disney, MGM, Universal and Warner Bros. At each stage, he watched closely how consumers adapted their habits to these new ways of experiencing entertainment.
When the internet arrived in the mid-1990s, he pivoted again, applying that same behavioral lens to help companies establish their first online presence, grounded in research into how people were moving online in the first place. That pattern—studying how people respond to a new medium, then translating it into something they could actually use—eventually led him to Discover Financial Services, where he spent twenty years leading digital customer experience, drawing on his psychology training to understand how people make financial decisions and turn complex digital tasks into intuitive ones.
While at Discover, the consumer facing website, discover.com, regularly placed first among credit card issuer sites in the J.D. Power customer satisfaction rankings for its ease of use and thoughtful design. He has given numerous industry talks on user-centered design.
In 1998 he co-produced an art photography book, These Rare Lands, featuring large format landscapes of every national park in the U.S., photographed solely by Stan Jorstad, with accompanying literary reflections by Mark Strand, Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress, and an introduction by Robert Redford.
In 2011 he was granted a design patent (US D636,779 S) for a spend analysis interface that visualizes consumer spending by category and merchant.
Steve’s exploration of human behavior didn’t stop at work. With a psychology degree from Western Illinois University and over thirty-five years of Buddhist meditation practice, he’s long been fascinated by the intersection of mind and performance. That curiosity led him to apply those insights to golf—a sport he’s played since age thirteen—and eventually to developing the Swing to Flow process, which recognizes golf as both physical skill and moving meditation.
His book Swing to Flow: A Mindful Approach to Better Golf, now in a revised an expanded edition, brings together five decades of playing, a career studying human behavior, and decades of mindfulness practice into a practical system for playing better golf. It’s the part of the game no one taught you.
Steve lives in Arizona and New Jersey with his wife and two grown sons and of course, continues to play golf.
stevefurman.com 