Whitney Johnson
Expert on the powers of disruption, and the ways to grasp the opportunities of change, starting with the personal
Ranked No. 8 Thinker in the 2021 Thinkers50 in management and business, Whitney Johnson is an expert on disruptive innovation and personal disruption. Her presentation, ‘Disrupt Yourself®: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work’ explores the simple yet powerful idea disruptive companies and ideas create impact and upend markets by doing something truly different.
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Whitney Johnson's 2025 Biography
Meet Whitney Johnson
Whitney Johnson is a leading authority on organizational change, recently honored with the 2025 ATD Talent Development Thought Leader Award and ranked among the top 10 management thinkers worldwide by Thinkers50 in 2021. As CEO and co-founder of Disruption Advisors, she and her team partner with Fortune 500 companies, fast-growing startups, and private equity firms to build high-performing teams through large-scale organizational development programs and one-on-one coaching: their client roster includes Kraft Heinz, Intermountain Health, Morgan Stanley, and Amazon.
A former Wall Street equity analyst turned C-suite advisor and board member, Whitney brings rare insight into how organizations and their leaders navigate transformation. She co-founded the Disruptive Innovation Fund with Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen and has shaped how companies approach growth through her Wall Street Journal bestselling books “Smart Growth,” “Build an A Team,” and “Disrupt Yourself.” Her frameworks have reached millions through Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, LinkedIn, where she has nearly 1.7 million followers, and her “Disrupt Yourself” podcast.
Through Disruption Advisors, Whitney and her team guide organizations through critical transitions—from succession planning to merger integration—combining analytical rigor with deep emotional intelligence. Recent work includes an exclusive retreat for senior HR executives, demonstrating the firm’s commitment to developing exceptional human capital leaders.
And when Whitney’s not helping organizations disrupt their way to growth? She is at home in Lexington, Virginia with her family, growing raspberries, blackberries and strawberries, and making homemade jam. Though she will tell you there’s a surprising overlap between growing blackberries and change management—both require patience, the right conditions, and a willingness to roll up your sleeves.
Whitney Johnson's 2025 Talks & Topics
In a world where workplace dynamics shift overnight, staying ahead demands more than just resilience—it requires reinvention. How do you lead your team through uncertainty while staying relevant and innovative? In this engaging keynote, Whitney Johnson introduces a powerful framework that enables you to adapt, evolve, and inspire your workforce through change and disruption. Discover how to break free from outdated mindsets, embrace change with confidence, and become the transformative leader your organization needs to navigate the future of work. Change starts with you.
In a world focused on disruption, we often overlook the stabilizing forces that hold teams and organizations together. Stability isn’t the opposite of growth—it’s the foundation for it. In this thought-provoking keynote, Whitney Johnson reveals how stability fuels trust, fosters resilience, and creates the psychological safety necessary for innovation. Learn how to balance disruption with stability, identify stabilizers within your team, and harness their power to build stronger, more cohesive organizations. Discover how cultivating stability unlocks sustainable success in even the most unpredictable environments.
Your company’s growth starts with your people. Yet, many organizations unintentionally stifle employee potential, leaving talent bored, stagnant or disengaged. In this dynamic keynote, Whitney Johnson shares how to use the S Curve of Growth to unlock your team’s natural desire to learn and grow. You’ll gain insights into the three stages of growth—Launch Point, Sweet Spot, and Mastery—and learn actionable strategies to support your people at every stage. When you invest in individual growth, you don’t just transform careers—you ignite innovation and drive unparalleled results. Smart growth starts with your team.
The idea is simple, but powerful: disruptive companies and ideas upend markets by doing something truly different – they see a need, an empty space waiting to be filled, and they dare to create something for which a market may not yet exist. An expert in driving innovation via personal disruption, Whitney Johnson will demonstrate how you can put the power of disruptive innovation to work. To help your company in unexpected ways, dare to innovate. Dream big dreams. Do something astonishing. Disrupt yourself. In this session, Whitney Johnson will share stories of disruption and will teach you how powerful disruption can be in your organization’s evolving reinvention. Johnson builds on her investment background as co-founder of two early stage venture firms, and an award-winning equity analyst to provide a fresh perspective on innovation and change.
Audience members will leave with practical tips and concrete action steps for how to:
Drive innovation throughout their organization,
Move into the sweet spot of their personal S-curve,
Use the S-curve as a tool for understanding the psychology of disruption, and
Accelerate or decelerate innovation and change with a variety of variables.
Pursuing a disruptive course isn’t just a nice thing to do, there’s a compelling business case: the odds of success are 6x higher and the revenue opportunity is 20x greater.
These ideas are for YOU if you are:
a high potential individual charting your career trajectory
a leader trying to jumpstart innovative thinking in your company
a self-starter ready to make a disruptive pivot in your business
These ideas are for your COMPANY if:
revenue growth is peaking and you need to reinvent
innovative thinking among your management team has stalled
industry changes are making the future uncertain
The fundamental unit of disruption is the individual.
The best way to drive corporate innovation is through personal disruption.
Disrupt yourself.
Allow others to do the same.
And disruptive products, services, companies and countries will happen on their own.
Companies don’t disrupt, people do.
Nearly everyone wants a culture of innovation: innovation opens new markets, creates jobs, drives revenue, and is an engine of economic growth and personal wealth. But have you pulled back the curtain on what is necessary to foster an innovative culture? In this thought-provoking keynote, Whitney Johnson, re-imagines the S-curve as a tool that we typically use to understand how quickly an innovation will be adopted, but for understanding how to promote and implement disruptive ideas, identifying variables that can accelerate/decelerate innovation such as: taking the right kinds of risk, battling entitlement (a surefire innovation killer) and getting the metrics right. Listen closely to Johnson’s intriguing approach, and you’ll not only accelerate into the sweet spot of your own S-curve curve, you’ll have the tools to put innovation on over-drive across your organization.
(Book being released by Harvard Business Publishing, May 2018; Keynote available September 2018)
If you are looking for a surefire sign, look at where your workforce is on the S-curve. Based on Whitney Johnson’s proprietary research around disruption, every organization is a collection of individual S or learning curves. You build an A team by optimizing these individual curves. In this speech, you will learn how to manage people all along the S-curve and what to do when they reach the top of that curve. As employees are allowed, even required, to surf their individual S-curve waves, disrupting themselves, you will be less vulnerable to disruption and become a boss people love to work for.
Disruptive thinking improves the odds of success for products, companies and even countries, and harnessing this powerful mindset begins with the individual. In this compelling keynote address, Whitney Johnson builds on her Harvard Business Review article Disrupt Yourself, applying the road-tested theory of disruptive innovation to the individual, providing practical tips along with real-world examples of personal disruption, with a focus on how managers can drive individual and firm-wide innovation. If you are ready to move your organization to the next level, it’s time to disrupt the status quo and innovate from the inside.
Whitney Johnson's Latest Books
Disrupt Yourself, With a New Introduction: Master Relentless Change and Speed Up Your Learning Curve
Startups, growth-stage companies, and private equity–backed companies all have one thing in common: They need high-growth individuals to execute high-growth plans. As a leader trying to achieve ambitious organizational goals, you need people who can do more than just keep up; you need people who can set the pace. You need high-growth individuals.
Disrupt Yourself helps high-growth individuals–and those trying to attain this status–learn the tools and frameworks necessary to make changes that matter.
Dare, Dream, Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream
Whitney Johnson, popular Harvard Business Review blogger, has a goal: to help us identify and achieve our dreams. Her belief is that we can each achieve greater happiness when focusing both on our dreams and on other people in our lives. In this inspiring book, Johnson directs her attention to teaching women, in particular, a three-step model for personal advancement and happiness. She first encourages us to DARE to boldly step out, to consider disrupting life as we know it. Then she teaches us how to DREAM, to give life to the many possibilities available, whether to start a business, run a marathon, or travel the world. She shows us how to “date” our dreams (no need to commit!) and how to make space for dreams. Finally, Whitney’s model brings out the businesswoman in her; she teaches us to DO, to execute our dreams. She showcases the importance of sharing dreams with others to give them life, creating your own “dream team.” Rich with real stories of women who have dared to dream, DARE, DREAM, DO offers a practical framework to realize one’s true potential.
Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company
Growth is the goal. Helping people develop their potential—enabling them to articulate and become the self they want to be, are capable of being, and that best serves them and others in the short and long term—is what we as individuals and leaders strive toward.
But how do we grow? It turns out it happens in a predictable way, which means we can understand where we are in our growth and chart a way forward. In this compact, complete guide, Whitney Johnson dives more deeply than ever into the S Curve of Learning so that you can envision how growth happens and direct yourself and others in your organization to create a culture that fosters it.
Build an A-Team: Play to Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve
What’s the secret to having an engaged and productive team? It’s having a plan for developing all employees–no matter where they are on their personal learning curves.
Better morale and higher performance happen through learning, argues Whitney Johnson. In over twenty years of coaching, investing, and consulting, Johnson has seen that employees need continuous learning and fresh challenges to stay motivated.
The best bosses know this, and they know how to make it happen by thoughtfully designing people’s jobs around the skills they have today as well as the skills they’ll need to be even more valuable tomorrow. That’s how entire organizations stay competitive in an unpredictable, rapidly changing business environment.
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