Hal Gregersen, PhD, is a senior lecturer in leadership and innovation at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a former executive director of the MIT Leadership Center. He has dedicated his extensive career, including prior teaching posts at INSEAD, London Business School, and Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, Brigham Young University, and Aalto University, to creating cultures of fearless inquiry and to helping leaders transform their organizations into innovative powerhouses. He is an Innosight Fellow, a co-founder of The Innovator’s DNA, and a former Fulbright Fellow in Finland. Ranked as one of the world’s 50 most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50 since 2015 and winner of the 2017 Distinguished Achievement Award for Leadership, Gregersen regularly delivers inspirational keynote speeches, interactive and dynamic customized workshops, and transformational advisory experiences. At MIT he is academic director of several highly rated executive education courses, including Inquiry-Driven Leadership, The Innovator’s DNA, Navigating Transitions During Disruptive Change, and Embracing the Unexpected: Creative Transformation Amid Rapid Change (with Ed Catmull).
Gregersen is the author of ten books translated into 16 languages worldwide, including his Nautilus award-winning, Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life (based on 200+ interviews with catalytic questioners like Ed Catmull at Pixar and Orit Gadiesh at Bain Consulting). He argues that while people are programmed to look for answers, the real catalyst for innovative, disruptive change is catalytic inquiry. Twenty years ago Gregersen created a repeatable three-step methodology, the Question Burst, by which companies can begin to build better problem solvers, strengthen psychological safety, and enhance creative impact at all levels, from senior executives to entry-level employees. His Question Burst method, combined with four more habits of productive inquiry, have helped redesign company cultures around constructive questioning at Chanel, Daimler, Danone, Disney Pixar, Ernst & Young, Fidelity, Patagonia, Salesforce, UNICEF, World Economic Forum, and Zappos, among others.
He co-authored, with Clay Christensen and Jeff Dyer, The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, a guide to cultivating the discovery skills that CEOs and entrepreneurs rely on to build and guide sustainably creative companies. Having personally interviewed 100+ ground-breaking leaders at the world’s most innovative companies, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, Gregersen draws on rigorous research and analysis (based on a database of +25,000 leaders) to successfully advise the world’s largest corporations on innovation, transformation and key leadership challenges.
Gregersen has also published more than 75 articles, book chapters and cases on asking the right questions, leading innovation, and transforming creatively amid rapid change. His work has been covered by major media outlets, including the BBC, CNN, The Economist, Fast Company, The Financial Times, Forbes, Fortune, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and WIRED. At MIT he has translated his extensive research into several highly rated executive education programs where he serves as academic director, including Inquiry-Driven Leadership, The Innovator’s DNA, Navigating Transitions During Disruptive Change, and Embracing the Unexpected: Creative Transformation Amid Rapid Change (with Ed Catmull).
Gregersen has lived and worked outside the United States for over a decade in England, Finland, France, and the UAE. He and his wife, Suzi Lee, now reside north of Boston where she works as an artist and he pursues his lifelong avocation, photography, as an instructor with Santa Fe Workshops.
More information at halgregersen.com.