Polly LaBarre
Most large organisations were built to scale efficiency, not to keep pace with change. The result is a workforce full of people who innovate at home and comply at work, and a leadership team that asks why initiative is dying while the structures keep killing it. The real problem is not strategy or talent. It is the management model itself.
Polly LaBarre helps senior leaders rebuild the management model so their organisations can become more resilient, more inventive and more worth working in.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Polly LaBarre
- She co-built, with Gary Hamel, the most concrete body of practice on post-bureaucratic management, drawing on case studies from named companies rather than abstract principles.
- She wrote the bestselling field guide to original organisations, Mavericks at Work, and has spent two decades adding to that evidence base through Fast Company and HBR.
- She brings a working operator’s view on what actually frees creative capacity inside large firms, sharpened through running the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize and the MIX Mashup.
- She lands as a journalist first, which means specific stories about specific companies, not slide-deck frameworks recycled from other speakers in the same topic area.
Biography highlights
- Co-author, Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win, named a Book of the Year by The Economist
- Co-founder, Management Lab, with Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini
- Co-founder and editorial director, MIX (Management Innovation eXchange), partnered with HBR and Fortune
- Founding member and senior editor, Fast Company magazine, for eight years
- Business and innovation correspondent, CNN, with recurring on-air segments on American Morning and Your Money
- Contributor to Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune and McKinsey Quarterly
Biography
Most companies were engineered for a world that no longer exists. They reward consistency, suppress dissent and treat management as a control function. That mismatch, between how organisations are built and what they now need to do, is the problem Polly LaBarre has been studying, writing about and trying to fix for more than two decades.
She was a senior editor and founding team member at Fast Company, the magazine that reframed how a generation of leaders thought about work. With William C. Taylor she wrote Mavericks at Work, a New York Times bestseller that The Economist called a Book of the Year and put alongside In Search of Excellence. The book set out, through detailed company case studies, what it actually takes to compete with originality at scale.
That work led directly into the Management Lab, which she co-founded with Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, and into the MIX (Management Innovation eXchange), the open platform partnered with Harvard Business Review and Fortune and backed by McKinsey, Red Hat and Gartner. Through the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize and the MIX Mashup, she has spent the past decade pulling together a working catalogue of progressive management practice from companies inside the Fortune 500 and well beyond it.
Her background as a journalist shows in how she works on stage. She speaks in named cases, names sources and concrete mechanisms, and her writing in HBR, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and McKinsey Quarterly is the basis for most of what she puts in front of an audience. CNN used her as a business and innovation correspondent for exactly that reason.
Key speaking topics
- Post-bureaucratic management and organisational redesign
- Resilience and adaptability in large organisations
- Innovation as a managed discipline
- Corporate culture and the human edge
- Talent, autonomy and the future of work
- Leadership for purpose-driven change
Ideal for
- CEOs, COOs and executive teams confronting the limits of their current operating model
- CHROs and chief people officers redesigning work and culture for a more capable workforce
- Heads of innovation, transformation and strategy looking for evidence rather than slogans
- Boards and leadership offsites wanting a sharp, journalist’s read on what original organisations actually do differently
Audience outcomes
- A clear-eyed picture of why traditional management practices are now a constraint on competitiveness
- Concrete examples, drawn from named companies, of how organisations have rebuilt for adaptability
- A working vocabulary for diagnosing where their own management model is leaking energy and initiative
- A sharper sense of what to change first when the goal is more resilience and originality, not more control
Talks
A keynote on what serious organisations are doing to redesign work and management for a faster, less predictable economy.
Key takeaways:
- Why bureaucratic operating models are now a strategic liability
- How leading companies are pushing authority and accountability deeper into the organisation
- A practical map for where to start a management redesign
A talk on culture and work design as the real source of differentiated capability.
Key takeaways:
- What “humanised” workplaces actually look like in operating terms
- How autonomy, mastery and contribution translate into measurable performance
- The leadership behaviours that protect the human edge as companies scale
A keynote on building organisations that adapt continuously rather than in episodic transformations.
Key takeaways:
- Why episodic change programmes keep failing in the same ways
- The structural conditions that make adaptive organisations possible
- How leaders can shift from running change projects to running a more change-capable system