Margaret Heffernan

Author, CEO and Entrepreneur

Topics:

Expertise:

Change Management, Diversity, Inclusion, Motivation & Teamwork

Margaret Heffernan

Our growing dependence on technology risks us become less skilled and more vulnerable to the deep and growing complexity of the real world. “

Margaret Heffernan is an entrepreneur, CEO, and an author.  She was named one of the Internet’s Top 100 by Silicon Alley Reporter in 1999, one of the Top 25 by Streaming Media magazine and one of the Top 100 Media Executives by The Hollywood Reporter. Her “Tear Down the Wall” campaign against AOL won the 2001 Silver SABRE award for public relations.

Margaret is the author of several books including Wilful Blindness, which was a shortlisted for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Best Business Book award and, in 2014, the Financial Times named it one of its “best business books of the decade.” Her book A Bigger Prize won the Transmission Prize in 2015 for the great communication of important ideas. Beyond Measure : The Big Impact of Small Changes was published in 2015.

Margaret’s TED talks have been seen by over 6 million people. She has been invited to speak at all of the world’s leading financial services businesses, the leading FTSE and S&P corporations as well as the world’s most successful sports teams. She continues to advise private and public businesses, to mentor senior and chief executives and to write for the Financial Times and Huffington Post.

Margaret has been outspoken on the topic of gender equality and the gender pay gap, having confronted her own employers as a Chief Executive who was earning less than her male peers.

TOPICS:

Human Work – Discussing how there are fundamental mindsets and attitudes which will make organizations better able to be creative and responsive as the world changes. This talk derives from all of Dr Heffernan’s major work around collaboration, creativity, curiosity and the need for organizations of all kind to stay connected to the societies they serve.is an entrepreneur, Chief Executive and author. She was born in Texas, raised in Holland and educated at Cambridge University. She worked in BBC Radio for five years where she wrote, directed, produced and commissioned dozens of documentaries and dramas.

Collaboration: A Bigger Prize – Dr Heffernan discusses how organizations have specific routines and cultures that develop and enhance people who can work together effectively for years on end.

Willful Blindness: How we ignore the obvious at our peril – Discussing the forces at work in corporate cultures that allow willful blindness to flourish and how to maximize it.

Uncharted: How to think about an unpredictable future – Preparing companies for the age of uncertainty.

An urgent read … Karl Popper for the 21st century’  Robert Phillips, former CEO, Edelman EMEA and author of Trust me, PR is Dead
‘Heffernan is … a deft storyteller. Uncharted is … wise and appealingly human’ Tim Harford, Financial Times

How can we think about the future? What do we need to do – and who do we need to be?

In her bold and invigorating new book, distinguished businesswoman and author Margaret Heffernan explores the people and organizations who aren’t daunted by uncertainty.
We are addicted to prediction, desperate for certainty about the future. But the complexity of modern life won’t provide that; experts in forecasting are reluctant to look more than 400 days out. History doesn’t repeat itself and even genetics won’t tell you everything you want to know. Ineradicable uncertainty is now a fact of life.

In complex environments, efficiency is a hazard not a help; being robust is the better, safer option. Drawing on a wide array of people and places, Margaret Heffernan looks at long-term projects developed over generations that could never have been planned the way that they have been run. Experiments, led by individuals and nations, discover new possibilities and options. Radical exercises in forging new futures with wildly diverse participants allow everyone to create outcomes together that none could do alone. Existential crises reveal the vital social component in resilience. Death is certain, but how we approach it impacts the future of those we leave behind. And preparedness – doing everything today that you might need for tomorrow – provides the antidote to passivity and prediction.

Ranging freely through history and from business to science, government to friendships, this refreshing book challenges us to resist the false promises of technology and efficiency and instead to mine our own creativity and humanity for the capacity to create the futures we want and can believe in.

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Margaret Heffernan