Charlene Li
New York Times bestselling author of Open Leadership
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Charlene Li
Biography
For the past three decades, Charlene Li has been helping people see the future. She’s an expert on digital transformation, disruption leadership and strategy, customer experience, and the future of work. She’s the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller, “Open Leadership,” and co-author of the critically acclaimed book, “Groundswell.” Her latest book is the bestseller “The Disruption Mindset.” She is currently working on her next book, “Winning with Generative AI.”
Charlene is also an entrepreneur, the Founder and CEO of Altimeter, a disruptive analyst firm that was acquired in 2015. She most recently served as the Chief Research Officer for PA Consulting and currently leads her own firm, Quantum Networks Group.
Charlene has worked with hundreds of top companies ranging from Adobe to Southwest Airlines and advised 49 of the Fortune 100 companies. She has spoken at events like the World Economic Forum, TED, and SXSW.
Named one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company and a LinkedIn Top Voice on Culture, Charlene graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College. She received her MBA from Harvard Business School. She lives in San Francisco and teaches her cat tricks in her spare time.
Charlene Li
Featured Keynote Programs
Leadership in the Digital Era
Digital technologies have revolutionized relationships, and leadership is no exception. To be truly engaged, effective leaders must harness and master the power of digital communications and branding, especially with the challenges of leading a distributed team.
In this speech, Charlene explains that the key is understanding how your personal leadership style can be extended and scaled through digital techniques to achieve your most important goals. You’ll learn the art and science of how to listen, share, and engage with employees and customers in the digital era. We’ll also discuss common objections and concerns of leaders and how to address them.
Audiences will learn to:
• Master a new way of developing relationships, which begins by stepping out of traditional hierarchies
• Listen at scale, share to shape, and engage to transform
• Shift to a digital mindset
• Apply the right digital tools to meet strategic goals
Leading With Wisdom
What does it mean to be wise? Wisdom is not just a matter of intelligence, knowledge, or character. Smart people make foolish decisions all the time. But what if we could improve our decision-making even a little bit and make consistently wiser choices? Imagine the exponential impact if we could intentionally support the people in our organizations to be wiser, regardless of their experience levels.
In this speech, Charlene takes audiences on a journey of discovery toward experiencing the true power of wisdom. With the right tools and guidance, you, too, can learn to make the right decisions and create a life and organization filled with meaning, purpose, and happiness.
Audiences will learn to:
• Define wisdom in the context of leading an organization
• Develop wisdom in themselves and others
• Create a wise organization capable of consistently making great decisions
The Future Of Work
New technologies pop up daily that allow us to connect and communicate with employees in real time. Yet organizations are wired for a bygone era when there was the luxury of time and proximity. Most organizations measure employee engagement in yearly surveys—hardly the way to truly engage employees in the digital era.
In this speech, Charlene makes the case to develop a new mindset, one that’s centered on creating a long-term relationship with employees that melds holistically with creating great experiences for customers. From creating belonging among hybrid workers to the adoption of generative AI, we'll dig deep into how technology is changing the nature of work and our relationship with employees.
Audiences will learn to:
• Understand how employee expectations in the workplace are being influenced by their personal use of technology , especially generative AI
• Prepare for the long-term implications for employee engagement
• Identify the experiences that employees value the most
• Create rich collaboration experiences that support a different way of work
Disruptive Transformation
“Disrupt or die” has been the rallying cry for decades, but what does it actually mean to be disruptive, to make it the center of your strategy? Many established companies set a goal to develop “disruptive” innovations, believing innovation will disrupt their market and drive growth. But that’s not how it works: Disruption doesn’t create growth. Growth creates disruption.
In this speech, Charlene acknowledges that transformations are never easy, and the unrelenting pace of technological change makes it doubly difficult. But there’s hope and a way forward—starting with reframing your strategy, leadership, and culture so that disruptive growth is at the top of your agenda.
Audiences will learn to:
• Define what disruption is—and isn’t—and how it can drive disruptive growth
• Identify and prioritize the right disruptive growth moves and align the organization around them
• Understand how leaders must show up differently when pursuing a disruption strategy
• Instill disruption into a status-quo culture
Charlene Li
Featured Book
The Disruption Mindset: Why Some Organizations Transform While Others Fail
by Charlene Li
Many companies make disruption their goal. They believe that if they develop the right innovation, they will disrupt their markets forever and drive the kind of growth worthy of a magazine cover story. But as bestselling author Charlene Li explains, that’s not how disruption works. Disruption doesn’t create growth; instead, growth creates disruption.
Growth is always hard, and disruptive growth is exponentially harder. It requires companies to make tough decisions in the face of daunting uncertainties: Should we bet our company’s future on next-generation customers or today’s reliable ones? Should we abandon our current business model for an entirely new one? Making bold changes demands bold leadership and, often, massive cultural transformation.
Over the years, Li has seen some organizations beat the odds and succeed at becoming disruptive: Adobe, ING Bank, Nokia, Southern New Hampshire University, and T-Mobile, among them. Their stories make it clear that organizations don’t have to be tech start-ups or have the latest innovations to transform. What they need to do is develop a disruptive mindset that permeates every aspect of the organization. Li lays out how to do so by focusing on three elements:
- a strategy designed to meet the needs of future customers;
- leadership that creates a movement to drive and sustain transformation; and
- a culture that thrives on disruptive change.
Drawing on interviews with some of the most audacious people driving disruptive transformation today, Li will inspire leaders at all levels to answer the call to lead disruptive transformation in their organizations, communities, and society.
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