Laura Gassner Otting
Laura Gassner Otting is highly recognized for her impact within the nonprofit sector, Founder & CEO of Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group, a member of multiple nonprofit boards and a thought leader on mission-driven work.
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Laura Gassner Otting's 2024 biography
About Laura Gassner Otting
Author, Catalyst, and Executive Coach Laura Gassner Otting inspires people to push past the doubt and indecision that keep great ideas in limbo by helping audiences think bigger and accept greater challenges that reach beyond their current, limited scope of belief.
She delivers strategic thinking, well-honed wisdom, and perspective generated by decades of navigating change across the start-up, corporate, nonprofit, political, as well as philanthropic landscapes. Laura dares audiences to find their voice, and generate the confidence needed to tackle larger-than-life challenges by helping them to seek new ways of leading, managing, and mentoring others.
Laura’s rebellious and entrepreneurial edge has been well-honed over a 25-year career that started when she dropped out of law school to join an unknown southern governor’s presidential campaign, and ended up as a Presidential Appointee in Bill Clinton’s White House, where she helped shape AmeriCorps.
She left a leadership role as the youngest Vice President at a nationally respected search firm when she realized that her boss’s definition of success didn’t align with hers and, instead, founded and ran one of the fastest growing search firms in the country, partnering with the full gamut of mission-driven executives, from start-up dreamers to scaling social entrepreneurs to global philanthropists. In 2015, Laura sold that firm to the team who helped her build it, both because she was hungry for the next chapter and because she held an audacious dream of electing our nation’s first female president. (Whomp whomp.)
Since that time, Laura has appeared regularly on Good Morning America and the TODAY Show, and her writing has been seen in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, HR Magazine. Laura is the author of Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve Your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life (2019), which debuted at #2 on the Washington Post bestseller list (right behind Michelle Obama), has been translated into Arabic, Korean, Turkish, Portuguese, and German, and which Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts chose as one of her Favorite Books of 2019, as well as Mission-Driven: Moving from Profit to Purpose (2015). Her forthcoming book, Wonderhell, is expected in April 2023.
Through her own commitment to give back, Laura has helped build a local Montessori school, co-founded a women’s philanthropic initiative, advised a start-up national women’s PAC, grew a citizen-leadership development program, and completed five charity-inspired marathons, projects emblematic of her passions and values. She’s turned on by the audacity of The Big Idea and that larger-than-life goal you just can’t seem to shake. She’s an instigator, a motivator, and a provocateur, and she’s never met a revolution she didn’t like, just ask her enduringly patient husband, two almost-grown sons, and troublesome puppy with whom she lives outside of Boston, MA.
Laura Gassner Otting's 2024 talks & topics
Invitations, Not Limitations: Embracing Your Wonderhell
What is this talk about?
After stewarding thousands of leaders through massive moments of career shift and organizational disruption, Laura knows a thing or two about the emotional rollercoaster of going after everything you’ve ever wanted. This talk was born out of the question, “Why doesn’t success feel better?”
In this keynote, Laura explains that success isn’t just an endpoint, but a waypoint, a portal that shows you that you were made for even more… if you choose to embrace your ambition, conquer your fear, and actually learn to enjoy the ride. This talk throws down the gauntlet and dares your audience members to dream even bigger.
You can watch Laura’s viral TEDx (which was immediately elevated to TED.com and hit 150K views in the first month it was live) right here.
Limitless Leadership
What is this talk about?
Demographic shifts in the workforce have led to conversations about purpose and meaning that have heretofore never been had. Millennials, GenXers, and Boomers alike are all demanding that their work matter more. And, yet, only one-third of the US workforce reports that they are actively engaged in their work.
We are using an outdated scorecard which measures the value of a job – title, money, prestige, among others – without adding in the most important part of the equation: the employee. We know that engaged workers are 22% more productive and profitable for their employers, but what recruits the employee doesn’t retain them.
Backed up by a 20-year career in executive search and a three-year research project, comprising nearly 6000 responses from 74 different countries from before, during, as now as we come out of the pandemic, Laura Gassner Otting teaches leaders how to unlock their employees’ engagement to not only make them limitless, but make their companies and their profits limitless too.
Contagious Confidence: Mastering Your Voice of Leadership
A smash hit with empowerment audiences, Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve Your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life has helped readers find the courage to finally live the life they’ve always wanted. Through this interactive experience, Laura motivates audience members to channel their confidence and fully embody that aspirational state of leadership.
This action-oriented keynote is for aspiring corporate leaders, business owners, Direct Sales and MLM team leaders, corporate managers, executives, directors, and supervisors at industry conferences or individual organizational events.
Learn more about how Laura can leave your audience understanding exactly what they need to do to activate the inspiring leader within themselves.
Limitless Sales
What is this talk about?
Your clients don’t buy your products. They don’t buy your services. They don’t buy your brand.
They buy the solution that you provide to the problem that they have.
In order to win at the sales game, your audience must connect to why this product, this service, this brand actually matters to them, and be able to community that meaning as they build mutually beneficial relationships with your clients.
In this talk, based on decades of experience as an entrepreneur and chief rainmaker, Laura breaks down the process of connection… to self, to product, and to sale.
Solve Big Problems: Stop Asking “How Can I Help?”
“How Can I Help?” is a well-intended question that typically creates actions resulting in martyrdom, burnout, and malaise that prevents real innovative thinking and creative solutions.
This gut-wrenching, heart-invoking keynote speaks to core of nonprofit agencies and organizations, volunteers, donors, investors, business leaders and entrepreneurs looking to break through barriers holding their teams back from finding real solutions to stagnating problems.
Learn more how Laura can help your audience reframe the question and break through doubt and limited-scope thinking.
Laura Gassner Otting's 2024 speaking fees
- United States
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