Hal Gregersen
Global Authority on Building Innovative Leaders and Companies; Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center; Co-Author, “The Innovator’s DNA”
Meet Hal Gregersen
Hal Gregersen is committed to creating insight with impact. As Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center and a Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management, he pursues his vocation of learning how leaders in business, government and society discover provocative new strategies, develop the human and organizational capacity to realize those strategies, and ultimately deliver positive, powerful results. Putting insight into practice, Gregersen regularly delivers inspirational keynote speeches, motivational executive seminars and transformational coaching experiences. He is also a Senior Fellow at Innosight, a leading global innovation consulting firm, and a former advisory board member at Pharmascience, a privately held pharmaceutical company based in Montreal, Canada. Before joining MIT, he taught at INSEAD, London Business School, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, Brigham Young University and in Finland as a Fulbright Fellow.
Gregersen’s most recent book, “The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators” (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011), uncovers the code for the successful innovator in business – and beyond. Unlike other books that help organizations simply maximize execution, “The Innovator’s DNA” demonstrates how execution alone can become a dead-end destination unless you cultivate enough competent innovators within your company to make crucial new discoveries. Co-authored with Jeff Dyer at Wharton/BYU and Clayton Christensen, the best-selling author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma” at Harvard Business School, “The Innovator’s DNA” comes from an eight-year international research project on the origins of disruptive innovations and how executives, entrepreneurs and employees build highly innovative companies. In collaboration with HOLT at Credit Suisse, Gregersen and his co-authors identified the 50 most innovative companies in the world and interviewed their founder entrepreneurs and current CEOs. They also conducted over 6,000 Innovator’s DNA survey assessments of leaders around the world to show how creativity skills generate valuable new products, services, processes and businesses. The book, named Book of the Year for Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Chartered Management Institute in association with The British Library, builds on the ideas found in Gregersen’s Harvard Business Review (HBR) article of the same name, which received the 2009 McKinsey runner-up award for the best article in HBR.
Packed with examples of high-profile innovators (as well as low-profile ones), Gregersen’s presentations illustrate not only how successful innovators got their great ideas, but how they transformed them into economic powerhouses. He regularly delivers high-impact keynote speeches and executive workshops around the world with companies like Accenture, Adidas, AT&T, Christie’s, Cisneros, Coca-Cola, Daimler, Danone, Essilor, Genentech, IBM, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, LG, Lilly, McAfee, Marriott, MasterCard, Nokia, Philips, Sanofi Aventis, SAP, Time Warner Cable, Twinings, Vivendi, WalMart, World Economic Forum and Yahoo! He works with governments, not-for-profit and NGO organizations to generate greater innovation capabilities in the rising generation of leaders. Gregersen also collaborated with IDEO and Lightspeed Apollo, along with Christensen and Dyer, to produce a ground-breaking online learning experience, Innovator’s Accelerator, to teach anyone how to cultivate innovation within themselves and their organizations.
To grasp how leaders find and ask the right questions – ones that disrupt how we view and interact with the world – Gregersen is now studying over 100 renowned innovative leaders, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and P&G’s A.G. Lafley. This question-centric research project, conducted in collaboration with Clayton Christensen, is already surfacing insights into how leaders can build better questions to unlock game-changing solutions. Gregersen is also founder of the 4-24 Project, an initiative dedicated to rekindling the provocative power of asking the right questions in adults so they can pass this crucial creativity skill onto the next generation in order to improve organizations, communities and global society.
Gregersen has co-authored 10 books, including “It Starts With One: Changing Individuals Changes Organizations” (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008) and “Global Explorers: The Next Generation of Leaders” (Taylor & Francis, 1999), and has published more than 70 articles, book chapters and cases on innovation and change in leading business journals such as HBRand Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. His research has been highlighted globally on CNN, and in magazines and newspapers including Across the Board, Bloomberg Businessweek,Chief Executive, Fast Company, Forbes, Fortune, Psychology Today and The Wall Street Journal.
Gregersen and his wife have spent over a decade living and working outside the United States – in England, Finland, France and the UAE. Currently, they reside in Boston where he pursues his lifelong avocation, photography, and she her lifelong loves, sculpture and painting, as part of a global community of social entrepreneurs dedicated to creating positive change through the arts.
Gregersen’s most recent book, “The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators” (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011), uncovers the code for the successful innovator in business – and beyond. Unlike other books that help organizations simply maximize execution, “The Innovator’s DNA” demonstrates how execution alone can become a dead-end destination unless you cultivate enough competent innovators within your company to make crucial new discoveries. Co-authored with Jeff Dyer at Wharton/BYU and Clayton Christensen, the best-selling author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma” at Harvard Business School, “The Innovator’s DNA” comes from an eight-year international research project on the origins of disruptive innovations and how executives, entrepreneurs and employees build highly innovative companies. In collaboration with HOLT at Credit Suisse, Gregersen and his co-authors identified the 50 most innovative companies in the world and interviewed their founder entrepreneurs and current CEOs. They also conducted over 6,000 Innovator’s DNA survey assessments of leaders around the world to show how creativity skills generate valuable new products, services, processes and businesses. The book, named Book of the Year for Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Chartered Management Institute in association with The British Library, builds on the ideas found in Gregersen’s Harvard Business Review (HBR) article of the same name, which received the 2009 McKinsey runner-up award for the best article in HBR.
Packed with examples of high-profile innovators (as well as low-profile ones), Gregersen’s presentations illustrate not only how successful innovators got their great ideas, but how they transformed them into economic powerhouses. He regularly delivers high-impact keynote speeches and executive workshops around the world with companies like Accenture, Adidas, AT&T, Christie’s, Cisneros, Coca-Cola, Daimler, Danone, Essilor, Genentech, IBM, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, LG, Lilly, McAfee, Marriott, MasterCard, Nokia, Philips, Sanofi Aventis, SAP, Time Warner Cable, Twinings, Vivendi, WalMart, World Economic Forum and Yahoo! He works with governments, not-for-profit and NGO organizations to generate greater innovation capabilities in the rising generation of leaders. Gregersen also collaborated with IDEO and Lightspeed Apollo, along with Christensen and Dyer, to produce a ground-breaking online learning experience, Innovator’s Accelerator, to teach anyone how to cultivate innovation within themselves and their organizations.
To grasp how leaders find and ask the right questions – ones that disrupt how we view and interact with the world – Gregersen is now studying over 100 renowned innovative leaders, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and P&G’s A.G. Lafley. This question-centric research project, conducted in collaboration with Clayton Christensen, is already surfacing insights into how leaders can build better questions to unlock game-changing solutions. Gregersen is also founder of the 4-24 Project, an initiative dedicated to rekindling the provocative power of asking the right questions in adults so they can pass this crucial creativity skill onto the next generation in order to improve organizations, communities and global society.
Gregersen has co-authored 10 books, including “It Starts With One: Changing Individuals Changes Organizations” (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008) and “Global Explorers: The Next Generation of Leaders” (Taylor & Francis, 1999), and has published more than 70 articles, book chapters and cases on innovation and change in leading business journals such as HBRand Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. His research has been highlighted globally on CNN, and in magazines and newspapers including Across the Board, Bloomberg Businessweek,Chief Executive, Fast Company, Forbes, Fortune, Psychology Today and The Wall Street Journal.
Gregersen and his wife have spent over a decade living and working outside the United States – in England, Finland, France and the UAE. Currently, they reside in Boston where he pursues his lifelong avocation, photography, and she her lifelong loves, sculpture and painting, as part of a global community of social entrepreneurs dedicated to creating positive change through the arts.
HAL GREGERSEN SUGGESTED SPEAKING TOPICS
The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering Five Skills for New Market Creation
Is an innovator born or made? This is the question Hal Gregersen, along with Clayton Christensen and Jeff Dyer, set out to answer for their bestselling book, “The Innovator’s DNA.” Drawing on his firsthand conversations with game-changing founders and CEOs – and research from more than 10,000 creative leaders around the world – Gregersen discusses five key skills that innovators leverage to solve challenging problems, discover new markets and fuel economic growth. Gregersen also focuses attendees’ energy on actively developingthese skills through brief, high-energy learning activities so they leave thinking and acting differently in their professional work and personal lives.
The CEO’s Dilemma: Asking the Right Questions (Before Someone Else Does)
Powerful organizational and industrial forces can keep any senior leader from asking (or hearing) uncomfortable questions, creating an answer-centric environment at his or her own peril. It’s what Hal Gregersen calls “The CEO’s Dilemma,” and in many ways, it’s everyone’s dilemma. In this session, Gregersen discusses how leaders and organizations can escape the innovator’s most dangerous blind spot, the space where “we don’t know what we don’t know.” Based on in-depth interviews with more than 100 of the world’s best question-asking leaders, he reveals four daily disciplines these leaders rely on to surface the right questions. Gregersen also helps audience members become better questioners in real time by sharing key questioning tools, helping them unlock solutions, innovations and processes.
Building a Sustainably Creative Company: Putting People, Processes & Philosophies to Work
Innovative leaders hold the power to create monumental impact throughout an organization by acting and thinking innovatively themselves. However, if leaders don’t empower others to do the same, the breadth of a company’s innovation capacity – and consequently, its growth potential – rises and falls with them alone. In this session, Hal Gregersen discusses how today’s most innovative leaders, including Pixar’s Ed Catmull, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff, build a culture of innovation by decentralizing the source of ideas and instilling a creative capacity from the bottom up – and why it’s the single most important legacy leaders can leave behind. As Benioff put it, “It’s my job to create a culture of innovation.”
Is an innovator born or made? This is the question Hal Gregersen, along with Clayton Christensen and Jeff Dyer, set out to answer for their bestselling book, “The Innovator’s DNA.” Drawing on his firsthand conversations with game-changing founders and CEOs – and research from more than 10,000 creative leaders around the world – Gregersen discusses five key skills that innovators leverage to solve challenging problems, discover new markets and fuel economic growth. Gregersen also focuses attendees’ energy on actively developingthese skills through brief, high-energy learning activities so they leave thinking and acting differently in their professional work and personal lives.
The CEO’s Dilemma: Asking the Right Questions (Before Someone Else Does)
Powerful organizational and industrial forces can keep any senior leader from asking (or hearing) uncomfortable questions, creating an answer-centric environment at his or her own peril. It’s what Hal Gregersen calls “The CEO’s Dilemma,” and in many ways, it’s everyone’s dilemma. In this session, Gregersen discusses how leaders and organizations can escape the innovator’s most dangerous blind spot, the space where “we don’t know what we don’t know.” Based on in-depth interviews with more than 100 of the world’s best question-asking leaders, he reveals four daily disciplines these leaders rely on to surface the right questions. Gregersen also helps audience members become better questioners in real time by sharing key questioning tools, helping them unlock solutions, innovations and processes.
Building a Sustainably Creative Company: Putting People, Processes & Philosophies to Work
Innovative leaders hold the power to create monumental impact throughout an organization by acting and thinking innovatively themselves. However, if leaders don’t empower others to do the same, the breadth of a company’s innovation capacity – and consequently, its growth potential – rises and falls with them alone. In this session, Hal Gregersen discusses how today’s most innovative leaders, including Pixar’s Ed Catmull, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff, build a culture of innovation by decentralizing the source of ideas and instilling a creative capacity from the bottom up – and why it’s the single most important legacy leaders can leave behind. As Benioff put it, “It’s my job to create a culture of innovation.”
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