Whitney Johnson: Business Innovation
Disruption expert and top management thinker Whitney Johnson helps organizations grow their people, strengthen innovation, and accelerate transformation through her powerful frameworks of personal disruption and smart growth.
Quick Facts:
- Highlights:
- CEO and co-founder of Disruption Advisors
- Ranked top 10 management thinker by Thinkers50
- WSJ, USA Today, and Amazon bestselling author of Smart Growth
- Author of Disrupt Yourself, How to Build an A Team, and Dare, Dream, Do
- Formats: Keynote speaker, executive coach, innovation strategist, talent development consultant
- Audiences: Corporate leaders, executive teams, HR and talent development professionals, innovators, high-performing teams, and organizations navigating disruption, growth, and transformation.
- Outcomes:
- Frameworks for personal disruption that accelerate learning and adaptability
- Strategies to grow people, strengthen teams, and build cultures of continuous improvement
- Tools to drive innovation and embrace change with confidence and intention
- Travels from: Lexington, VA
- **Fee range: $35,001 - $50,000
Talent Services
Keynote Topics:
Smart Growth – The Key to Growing Your Company
The most important funding mechanism for your company’s growth is the learning and growth of your people. But somehow jobs muffle people’s innate desire to learn––they find themselves bored, stagnant, or wanting more at work.
In this keynote, you will learn about the S Curve of Learning™, a model for smart growth.
We will answer questions like,
- why, despite the desire to grow, can it be so difficult to start?
- What does it take to gain and maintain momentum once people start?
- And finally, why do people outgrow things so quickly?
The answers to these questions prepare you to understand the growth process and identify where each person, including yourself, is in his/her growth.
When you know where people are on their S Curves, you can help and support them as they move forward. Grow yourself to grow your people to grow your company. That’s smart growth.
Dare to Disrupt: Put Innovation on Overdrive
Nearly everyone wants a culture of innovation: innovation opens new markets, creates jobs, drives revenue, and is an engine of economic growth and personal wealth.
But have you pulled back the curtain on what is necessary to foster an innovative culture?
In this thought-provoking keynote, Whitney Johnson, re-imagines the S-curve as a tool that we typically use to understand how quickly an innovation will be adopted, but for understanding how to promote and implement disruptive ideas, identifying variables that can accelerate/decelerate innovation such as: taking the right kinds of risk, battling entitlement (a surefire innovation killer), and getting the metrics right.
Listen closely to Johnson’s intriguing approach, and you’ll not only accelerate into the sweet spot of your own S-curve curve, you’ll have the tools to put innovation on over-drive across your organization.
Disrupt Yourself: Innovation Begins on the Inside
Disruptive thinking improves the odds of success for products, companies and even countries, and harnessing this powerful mindset begins with the individual.
In this compelling keynote address, Whitney Johnson builds on her Harvard Business Review article Disrupt Yourself, applying the road-tested theory of disruptive innovation to the individual, providing practical tips along with real-world examples of personal disruption, with a focus on how managers can drive individual and firm-wide innovation.
If you are ready to move your organization to the next level, it’s time to disrupt the status quo and innovate from the inside.
Disrupt Yourself®: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work
The idea is simple, but powerful: disruptive companies and ideas upend markets by doing something truly different – they see a need, an empty space waiting to be filled, and they dare to create something for which a market may not yet exist.
An expert in driving innovation via personal disruption, Whitney Johnson will demonstrate how you can put the power of disruptive innovation to work. To help your company in unexpected ways, dare to innovate. Dream big dreams. Do something astonishing.
Disrupt yourself. In this session, Whitney Johnson will share stories of disruption and will teach you how powerful it can be in your organization’s evolving reinvention.
Talent Short Bio
Whitney Johnson is the CEO and co-founder of Disruption Advisors, a leading talent development company, and one of the world’s most influential voices on growth, innovation, and personal transformation. Ranked by Thinkers50 as a top 10 management thinker, Whitney is a bestselling author, keynote speaker, executive coach, consultant, and trusted advisor to high-performing leaders and organizations navigating change.
Her bestselling book Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company (Harvard Business Press, 2022) builds on her pioneering research into personal disruption—a framework she developed to help individuals, teams, and companies embrace change, accelerate learning, and unleash their full potential. She is also the author of How to Build an A Team, Disrupt Yourself, and Dare, Dream, Do, and her ideas are frequently featured in the Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and global media outlets including The Atlantic, BBC, CNN, Fast Company, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal.
Whitney captivates audiences with her genuine warmth, clarity, and ability to build immediate trust. Her keynote programs, podcast Disrupt Yourself, and Harvard Business School Corporate Learning lectures help leaders and teams harness disruption as a tool for growth rather than a threat.
Read Full Bio
Whitney Johnson is the CEO and co-founder of Disruption Advisors, a tech-enabled talent development company.
Whitney is a globally recognized thought leader (named by Thinkers50 as a top #10 management thinker), author, keynote speaker, executive coach, and consultant; Whitney is the WSJ, USA Today and Amazon bestselling author of Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company (Harvard Business Press, 2022).
She shares her passion for personal disruption, helping individuals transform their lives, careers, teams, and companies through her keynote addresses; her popular podcast Disrupt Yourself; lectures at Harvard Business School’s Corporate Learning; the award-winning books How to Build an A Team, Disrupt Yourself, and Dare, Dream, Do; and frequent article contributions to the Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review.
In this technology era where attentions are strewn like leaves in the wind, Whitney Johnson captivates. Genuineness, warmth and an ability to breed trust underscore her personal brand, as affirmed by one of her workshop participants: “Sincerity is often undervalued in our age of hype and hyperbole.
But time and again, those who hold our attention always bring their heart into the conversation.”
As a speaker, writer, and consultant, Ms. Johnson is appreciated for her gentle honesty and ability to inspire people to make great things happen. She has spoken to audiences of over 25,000 people and is a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review.
She has received widespread recognition for her ideas which have been covered in The Atlantic, BBC, CNN, Fast Company, the Guardian, Wall Street Journal and more.
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