Lisa's message is incredibly relevant and compelling. I find her work to be thought-provoking, challenging and necessary given today's complex and ever-changing business environment.
Lisa Bodell
CEO, FutureThink; Bestselling Author, Why Simple Wins
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Lisa Bodell
Biography
When the most important work isn’t getting done, it’s not the people that need to be fixed – it’s the work. Lisa Bodell, a global leader on simplification, collaboration, and innovation, helps organizations transform performance by reimagining the work. By trading complexity for simplicity, organizations find new ways to unleash creativity and spark the energy so essential to innovate and compete. It also lifts morale, increases engagement, and improves employee well-being and retention. Lisa is the author of two groundbreaking books, Why Simple Wins and Kill the Company. She ranks on the “Top 50 Speakers Worldwide” list and captivates audiences with her insights, energy, and humor. Lisa inspires them to question the status quo and make small changes that have profound impact – giving them time and energy to focus on the work that matters most.
After earning her business degree from University of Michigan, Lisa launched her career at Leo Burnett in Chicago, where she discovered a gift for uniting strategically-driven ideas with forward-thinking themes. She went on to build two successful businesses before moving to New York and focusing on the simplification and innovation space with FutureThink. Founded in 2003, FutureThink works with leading brands worldwide and has become one of the largest sources for simplification and innovation research, tools, and training in the world.
Lisa brings a compelling perspective to the sought-after topics of simplification and innovation to thousands of people each year. A thought leader and serial entrepreneur, her transformational message has inspired executives at top-ranked organizations such as Google, SAP, Citigroup, and the Department of National Intelligence to lead change in their organizations.
Lisa has contributed her expertise to a wide variety of media. She is a monthly contributor to Forbes and has frequently appeared in other media including: Fast Company, WIRED, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and CNN. She has also been featured in many major books such as Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question, Adam Grant’s Originals, and AfterShock, the 50-year celebration based on futurist Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock.
Lisa has taught innovation at both American University and Fordham University and has a TED popular talk on the topic. She serves on the board of advisors of several organizations, including the Global Agenda Council for the World Economic Forum, the United States National Security Agency, the Association of Professional Futurists, and Novartis.
Lisa Bodell
Featured Videos
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Lisa Bodell
Featured Keynote Programs
Unleash The Power of Simplification
People are drowning in the work of doing work and it’s sabotaging organizations. Our days are continually hijacked by the unplanned and unnecessary – unproductive meetings, outdated rules, irrelevant reports, and endless emails that dampen morale, creates feelings of futility, and can be detrimental to mental health. In this presentation, Lisa Bodell shows audiences a new way to unleash energy, collaboration, and innovation by embracing a mindset of simplification. This is not about getting organized or efficient – it’s about how small changes to make things simple can have a profound impact. Lisa’s insights, storytelling and interactive exercises make the case: adopting simplicity as an operating principle is the surest path to organizational transformation.
“Our systems are designed for a world that’s manageable and predictable. That world is gone. It’s time to look with fresh eyes at how we work. When we simplify, we unleash energy and creativity that is being lost by adhering to the status quo.”
You will learn:
- Why simplification is not just a method but a mindset and a habit – a key to resilience and adaptability and improved mental capacity and focus
- How to spot and eliminate organizational and individual busywork that’s outlived its time.
- Phone-based interactive polling and dynamic interactivity helps audiences discover surprising insights about what keeps them from doing their best work.
- Why subtraction is more important than addition. There’s only so much time
- How killing stupid rules enables organizations and teams move faster and with more focus
Unleashing Innovation
If your organization is not innovating as fast as you’d like, it’s time to address it – before it’s too late. In most organizations, the very structures put in place to help them grow all too often hold them back. If you want people to approach change differently, you have to help them change their approach. In this presentation, Lisa Bodell delivers a high energy and inspiring call to arms to start a revolution in how we think and how we work. Lisa is founder and CEO of FutureThink, the largest source of innovation research, tools, and training in the world. Her insights help increase the capacity for innovation by shifting mindset and engaging everyone in the process of killing off the status quo. In this presentation, Lisa inspires people to think differently and provides the tools to solve problems that stand in the way of breakthrough innovation in your organization.
You will learn:
• How our current organizational values and structures, designed to help innovation take hold, often hold it back – and how to
change that.
• How to unleash the dormant potential in teams by reigniting critical aptitudes such as curiosity, inquiry, and creative problem-
solving.
• Practical yet provocative techniques for reinvention and innovation with current products and services.
• Proven methods that reignite change and transformation and make everyone a change agent.
• Examples of how even the smallest changes can have big impact.
• What’s holding your organization back from innovating through the use of online interactive exercises.
Leading Simplicity
A Roadmap
Embracing simplicity as an operational mindset can unleash the power of people to be their best and focus on work that really matters. But simplicity needs an advocate and leaders who step up to send a message that simplicity is a priority that will reap outsized results. In this presentation, Lisa Bodell delivers real world tools leaders can use to create a culture with simplicity in its DNA and a bias for action. Lisa, author of the bestseller Why Simple Wins, unpacks stories and insights leaders can use to inspire their people, ignite disruptive thinking, build agility, and turn problems into possibilities. With energy, humor, and revealing online interactive exercises, Lisa shows that simplicity is the catalyst that accelerates innovation, collaboration, engagement, and growth. Simplicity will create a sustainable competitive advantage because it’s the absolute foundation of resilience in the face of never-ending change.
You will learn:
• How to cultivate a dynamic culture of simplification that makes challenging outdated practices the norm, creating space for more
innovation to happen.
• Drive an agenda that makes simplification a seamless part of your operating system, placing equal importance on eliminating work
as adding it, fostering a more balanced approach.
• Align teams in identifying and eliminating time-wasting habits, allowing them to reach their goals more quickly.
• Set the groundwork for enduring change and improved problem-solving by reducing stress and giving teams the space to think.
• Create a strategic advantage by better focusing teams, driving proactive change, retaining talent effortlessly, and outpacing
the competition with increased agility.
• Online interactive exercises reveal what’s holding your organization back from embracing a mindset of simplicity.
Lisa Bodell
Featured Books
Why Simple Wins
by Lisa Bodell
Imagine what you could do with the time you spend writing emails every day. Complexity is killing companies' ability to innovate and adapt, and simplicity is fast becoming the competitive advantage of our time. Why Simple Wins helps leaders and their teams move beyond the feelings of frustration and futility that come with so much unproductive work in today's corporate world to create a corporate culture where valuable, essential, meaningful work is the norm. By learning how to eliminate redundancies, communicate with clarity, and make simplification a habit, individuals and companies can begin to recognize which activities are time-sucks and which create lasting value. Lisa Bodell's simplification method has several unique principles: Simplification is a skill that's available to us all, yet very few leaders use it. Simplification is the right thing to do--for our customers, for our company, and for each other. Operating with simplification as our core business model will make it easier to be respectful of each other's time. Simplification drives culture, and culture in turn drives employee engagement, customer relations, and overall productivity.
This book is inspired by Bodell's passion for eliminating barriers to innovation and productivity. In it, she explains why change and innovation are so hard to achieve--and it's not what you might expect. The reality is this: we spend our days drowning in mundane tasks like meetings, emails, and reports. These are often self-created complexities that prevent us from getting to the meaningful work that truly matters. Using simple stories and techniques, Why Simple Wins shows that by using simplicity as an operating principle, we can eliminate the busy work that puts a chokehold on us every day, and instead spend time on the work that we value.
Kill the Company: End the Status Quo, Start an Innovation Revolution
by Lisa Bodell
In the ever-changing world of business, we've arrived at a point where process has trumped culture, where the race toward efficiency has made us complacent and unable to reach our potential. Stuck in the land of status quo, we've forgotten how to think. And the very structures put in place to help businesses grow are now holding them back. It's time to Kill the Company. This book is a call to arms: to start a revolution in how we think and work. But instead of more one-size-fits-all change initiatives forced upon employees, we need to embrace smaller, positive behavioral changes that create ripple effects throughout the organization. Thinking can no longer be exclusive to the creative team or lead strategists. Rather, a culture of curiosity must be fostered among the ranks to shake up our standard practices, from unproductive meetings to go-nowhere strategic planning. This revolution can and will awaken our ability to think, and ultimately, to innovate and grow. In Kill the Company, innovation specialist Lisa Bodell urges companies to shift the mindset from business as usual to the company of the future, to move from what she calls “Zombies, Inc.” to “Think, Inc.” This involves both risk and trust: to allow all employees the opportunity and environment to be curious and inquisitive—even challenging and provocative when the situation calls for it. Too often, this type of behavior is seen as threatening, says Bodell, who has actually been told by CEOs that they discourage employees from thinking. In step with the call to Kill the Company, is a plea to kill fear, complacency, and the all-too-familiar answer from our leaders: “I can't be bothered with your (perhaps brilliant) idea.” In the end, readers of Kill the Company will have a full sense of how much riskier it is to stay here in the status quo than to break out and think.
Lisa Bodell
Featured Reviews
Lisa Bodell
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