Lynda Gratton
Hybrid working has settled into an awkward truce, and most operating models still reflect 2019. Boards want productivity, fairness and retention at once, and the workforce has changed underneath them, with longer careers, blurred role boundaries and higher expectations of how work fits a life. The question is no longer whether to redesign work, but how to do it without breaking the business in the process.
Lynda Gratton is the London Business School professor who helps organisations redesign work, hybrid models and careers for a workforce that lives and works longer than any before it.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Lynda Gratton
- A research base CHROs cannot replicate in-house: the Future of Work Research Consortium has run for over a decade with executives from more than 60 companies, generating comparative evidence on what is actually working in hybrid, skills and workforce design.
- Co-author of The 100-Year Life with economist Andrew Scott, the book that reframed longevity as a workforce and strategy issue and was shortlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year.
- Practical playbook for hybrid: her HBR cover piece How to Do Hybrid Right and Redesigning Work give leadership teams a four-lens method (jobs, employee preferences, projects, inclusion) rather than a slogan.
- Policy-grade credibility: co-chair of the WEF Global Future Council on Work, Wages and Job Creation, and adviser to the Japanese Prime Minister’s council on a 100-year-life society.
- Thinkers50 Hall of Fame member, which signals to a board that the perspective in the room has been independently judged against a global field over more than a decade.
Biography highlights
- Professor of Management Practice in Organisational Behaviour, London Business School.
- Founder of HSM Advisory and the Future of Work Research Consortium, working with executives from more than 60 companies.
- Author and co-author of ten books, including The 100-Year Life (with Andrew Scott), Redesigning Work, The Shift, Glow and Hot Spots.
- Thinkers50 Hall of Fame inductee; long-running presence in the Thinkers50 ranking since 2011.
- Co-chair, WEF Global Future Council on Work, Wages and Job Creation; former chair of the WEF Council on Leadership.
- Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Financial Times and The Times.
Biography
Most large organisations are running 2025 strategies on a workforce model designed for 2015. Roles, careers and contracts assumed predictable lifespans, fixed locations and a clear line between work and the rest of life. None of those assumptions hold, and the cost of pretending they do shows up in attrition, productivity disputes and stalled transformation programmes.
This is the territory Lynda Gratton has worked in for more than two decades from London Business School, where she is Professor of Management Practice in Organisational Behaviour. Through HSM Advisory and the Future of Work Research Consortium she founded in 2009, she has built a continuous comparative dataset on how more than sixty global companies are redesigning jobs, hybrid arrangements and skills, and what separates the redesigns that hold from the ones that quietly revert.
Her books anchor the argument. The 100-Year Life, written with economist Andrew Scott, became a bestseller in Japan and was shortlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year, reframing longevity as a strategic issue for governments and employers, not a personal finance question. Redesigning Work translates the same rigour into a four-lens method for hybrid: jobs and tasks, employee preferences, projects and workflows, inclusion and fairness. Her Harvard Business Review cover piece How to Do Hybrid Right and her ongoing MIT Sloan Management Review column put that method into the hands of operators.
Boards engage her when they need to move past slogan-level answers on hybrid, skills and longevity. Her co-chairmanship of the WEF Global Future Council on Work, Wages and Job Creation, and her advisory work with the Japanese Prime Minister’s office on a 100-year-life society, are evidence that the same frameworks travel from a single CHRO conversation to national policy.
Key speaking topics
- Future of work and hybrid organisational design
- Redesigning jobs, careers and skills for longer working lives
- The 100-year life and longevity as a workforce strategy
- Workforce transformation in large, complex organisations
- Hybrid work productivity, fairness and inclusion
- Leadership in the post-pandemic operating model
- Talent, retention and the changing employee contract
Ideal for
- CHROs and chief people officers leading hybrid, skills and workforce redesigns.
- CEOs and executive committees stress-testing their operating model against longer careers and tighter talent markets.
- Boards and remuneration committees confronting longevity, retention and multi-generational workforce questions.
- Government, public-sector and policy audiences working on labour market and ageing-society agendas.
Audience outcomes
- A clear method for redesigning hybrid work across jobs, employee preferences, projects and inclusion, drawn from her HBR and MIT Sloan research.
- A sharper read on what longevity does to careers, learning and talent pipelines, grounded in The 100-Year Life evidence base.
- Comparative benchmarks from the Future of Work Consortium on what more than sixty global companies are doing on hybrid, skills and workforce design.
- A board-ready language for distinguishing surface adjustments from genuine workforce redesign.
- Concrete prompts for the next ninety days of CHRO and ExCo workforce decisions.
Talks
A practical session built around the four-lens method from her HBR cover piece and Redesigning Work, applied to the audience’s own operating model.
Key takeaways:
- How to diagnose where hybrid is failing on jobs, preferences, projects or inclusion.
- What the Future of Work Consortium evidence says separates lasting redesigns from quiet reversions.
- A structured approach for the next phase of hybrid policy decisions.
The argument that drove the bestselling book with Andrew Scott, translated for boards and CHROs facing longer careers, multi-stage lives and changing retirement assumptions.
Key takeaways:
- Why longevity is a strategic and workforce issue, not a personal finance one.
- The implications of multi-stage careers for talent, learning and reward.
- How leading organisations and governments, including in Japan, are responding.
A keynote synthesising more than a decade of consortium research on how work, skills and the employee contract are being redesigned in large companies.
Key takeaways:
- The forces actually reshaping work, separated from the noise.
- Where companies are investing and where they are wasting effort.
- A framework for executive teams to set their own priorities.