Margaret Heffernan
- Author •
- TED Speaker
Dr. Margaret Heffernan produced programmes for the BBC for 13 years. She then moved to the US where she spearheaded multimedia productions for Intuit, The Learning Company and Standard&Poors.
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Margaret Heffernan's 2024 biography
About Margaret Heffernan
Margaret Heffernan is a charismatic and authoritative speaker who takes little at face value and regularly challenges received wisdom. With an unerring ability to highlight the talent that often lies underutilised in organisations, this five-time CEO and six-time author consistently questions common business practices in ways and from angles that never fail to surprise. Her aim? To show organisations how to ‘get out of their own way’ and release the talent already in their ranks.
Originally a producer for the BBC, Margaret moved to the US in the 1980s where she became a renowned media executive through her work at The Learning Company, Standard & Poor’s, and others. To date she has written six books.
Her latest, Uncharted: How to Map the Future Together, invites us to adapt to a world in which uncertainty is now the default rather than the exception. It could not be more timely as Covid19, Brexit, AI and other volatile forces bring unprecedented disruption to lives and businesses across the globe.
Among her other roles, Margaret is a Professor of Practice at the University of Bath, Lead Faculty for the Forward Institute’s Responsible Leadership Programme and, through Merryck & Co., she mentors CEOs and senior executives of major global organizations. She also writes for the Financial Times and Huffington Post.
She was shortlisted for a Thinkers50 Strategy Thinking Award in September 2021.
Margaret Heffernan's 2024 talks & topics
Disruption: Uncertainty Is The ‘New Normal’.
With business’ ability to predict accurately being increasingly curtailed by myriad disruptive forces (such as Covid19, AI, climate change) leaders need to understand that uncertainty is here to stay. In this powerful keynote, Margaret illustrates the tools and approaches leaders need to adopt in order to navigate the ‘new normal’ with confidence and purpose.
Leadership: The Future Of Leadership.
Leaders used to run their organizations with a 3 step process: forecast/plan/execute–and for decades, it worked well enough. But now that the future is uncertain, stakeholders demand participation, transparency and long-term thinking, which crucially, feels harder than ever. In an age of ambiguity and anxiety, what are the crucial skills and characteristics that leaders must have? What is their relationship to experts, to stakeholders, to the world at large. Where will we find such leaders and what kind of development will they require?
Business Strategy: The End Of Efficiency.
Since the Industrial Revolution, people and processes have been managed for efficiency: bigger, faster, cheaper. Technology optimises for efficiency too. It is the watchword of management everywhere.
But while efficiency delivers tangible benefits in complicated environments, it plays havoc with complex ones. Being able to distinguish the difference between the two, knowing when efficiency is safe and when it’s dangerous, has never been more critical. Get it wrong and companies risk spending too much, amplifying endemic risks or missing huge opportunities to innovate. In today’s organizations, being too efficient is as dangerous as being spendthrift. How can you tell when efficiency is your friend—or a foe?
UNCHARTED: How to navigate the future
The time horizon for accurate prediction is now 150 – 400 days out. Which means that the 3-legged tool of management (forecast-pal-execute) is broken. But that need not leave us helpless. Individuals and organizations can find in uncertainty the creativity, ambition and robustness they need to stay meaningful and important in the world—but only if they’re prepared to rethink core concepts like efficiency, planning and strategy. Ineradicable uncertainty may be the defining characteristic of our age and it requires a new kind of leadership, from everyone.
The One Firm Firm
After years of streamlining and hunkering down to weather the crises, what companies now most need to do is pull their people together. Collaboration and innovation are vital skills in global business—but where do they come from? How do leading companies get the alignment, trust and energy they need to get their people to work well together? What are the impediments to, and habits of, creative collaborative teams?
Working across cultures, time zones and technology is logistically difficult but it’s usually the human factors that make it hard for companies to achieve their aims. Everyone talks about collaboration but few know how to do it, what it feels like or what organizational structures enable—or disable—it. What they all know is that if they can’t figure out how to do it will, others will.
Two For One: Seeing Risks/Seizing Opportunity
Big data, market research, social media: we can know more than ever and yet we keep missing the most important trends, information and trends. Why? What makes companies and individuals willfully blind?
Pulling together a century of psychological, industrial and economic research, Margaret Heffernan argues that willful blindness is the biggest risk most organizations face. But the good news is that those companies that confront the issue don’t just reduce their risk; they also make themselves inherently more creative and collaborative. It’s a twofer: when you see more, you can make more and risk less.
Margaret Heffernan's 2024 speaking fees
- United Kingdom
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