Polly LaBarre – Authority on Leading Change

Co-founder, Management Lab
Founding Team, Fast Company
Co-author, Mavericks at Work

SPEAKS ABOUT

Leading Organizational Change
Culture
Innovation
Talent Retention/Attraction
The People-Centered Organization
Creating an Adaptive Organization
Banishing Bureaucracy
New Architectures for Collaboration
New Ways to Develop Talent
Building a Better Workplace
Creating Nimble Organization

What kinds of organizations would we design if we started with the assumption that every person is fundamentally good, capable, and creative?

Polly LaBarre

In a world awash in profound change and at a time when everything is on the table, Polly LaBarre helps leaders make sense of and creatively respond to the forces buffeting their organizations.

A bestselling author, speaker, and thinker who’s advised top global organizations, Polly’s mission for the past 20 years has been to make every kind of organization fundamentally more resilient, innovative and inspiring.

Her insights embolden and equip leaders at every level to make a meaningful impact.

Polly is an inspiring and provocative voice on the big ideas and important questions that will shape the future of organizations, work, and collective progress.

Polly’s work is driven by three core questions:

1. How do we support human flourishing?
2. How do we cultivate the audacity of imagination required to tackle our most intractable problems?
3. And, how do organizations and individuals change how they change to become endlessly resilient?

To make genuine progress on those questions, Polly studies and works with progressive organizations, creates curriculum,and runs experiments for unleashing creativity, expanding collaboration, and accelerating change.

As cofounder of the Management Lab (with Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini), Polly spent the last decade working to develop amethodology, platform and practical tools for building organizational capability and accelerating change.

Polly and her colleagues deployed that pioneering approach to collaborative innovation in a range of large-scale experiments in “hacking management” inside leading companies and across a global community of some 35,000 management innovators.

Polly is the coauthor of the bestselling book Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win (which TheEconomist named a “Book of the Year” and called “a pivotal work in the tradition of In Search of Excellence and Good toGreat”).

She was a member of the original team of Fast Company magazine, where she played a central role in the remarkablesuccess of a magazine that recast the conventional wisdom on working, leading, and winning.

A sought-after speaker, moderator, and interviewer, Polly has delivered hundreds of keynote addresses around the world anddeveloped and hosted numerous events.

Her writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including Fast Company, The New York Times,

The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Fortune.com, the McKinsey Quarterly, and TheHuffington Post.

In addition to frequent television appearances on CNBC, PBS’s Nightly Business Report, Good Morning America, and the Today Show, Polly has also been a business and innovation correspondent for CNN where she produced regular segments on big ideas and best practices from the world of business and beyond.

Polly is a passionate (and experimental) gardener, an ardent cook, and a devoted yogi.

She serves on the board of CitySeed, a nonprofit working to build a just and healthy food system and economic opportunity in New Haven, CT.

A graduate of YaleUniversity, Polly lives with her family in New Haven.

POLLY IS DRIVEN TO TURN EVERY ORGANIZATION INTO A LAB – AND EVERY LEADER INTO A FEARLESS EXPERIMENTER – IN ORDER TO MAKE THE REALM OF HUMAN ENDEAVOREVER MORE CREATIVE, PRODUCTIVE, AND FULFILLING.

TESTIMONIALS

Polly was really good.
She packed A TON in and I was sitting next to two people that absolutely loved her and hermessage.
She did such a perfect job of customizing her speech to the audience and to her bike family cred – it wasspot on.

CEO, People for Bikes

The feedback on the conference has been unbelievable! We can’t thank you enough.
Your message that today’s leaders can come from all directions and different roles and that power is a product of contribution, not position, resonated deeply with our clients. We will follow up with a formal thank you with great stats and feedback from the conference, but we wanted to send you this note ahead of time because we can’t express our gratitude enough for being the keynote speaker at our conference.

Bank of America

Man, you knocked it out of the park this morning! The room was full, attendees were snapping pictures of your slides – clearly you hit a sweet spot. Thank you so much for being here and inspiring our partners to innovate.

Content Manager, Microsoft Inspire