Polly Labarre Keynote Speaker

Author & Founding Member of Fast Company
Co-Author of bestselling book, "Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win"
Co-Founder of MIX (Management Innovation eXchange)

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Polly Labarre's Biography

Polly LaBarre is a bestselling author, speaker, and expert on making organizations more resilient, innovative, and inspiring. For over 20 years, she has focused on helping leaders creatively navigate the profound changes impacting their organizations. Her insights empower leaders at every level to create meaningful change. Polly is a thought-provoking and inspiring voice on the big ideas and crucial questions shaping the future of organizations, work, and collective progress.

Polly’s work centers around three core questions: How do we support human flourishing? How do we unleash the imagination and collaboration needed to tackle our most complex problems? And how do organizations and individuals rethink change to become endlessly resilient? She pursues these questions by studying progressive organizations, creating curricula, and running experiments designed to accelerate change and foster creativity.

As cofounder of the Management Lab with Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, Polly spent a decade developing methodologies and tools for building organizational capability and leading large-scale change. Her pioneering work in “hacking management” has influenced a global community of 35,000 management innovators and led to successful experiments in collaborative innovation within leading companies.

Polly coauthored the bestselling book Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win, which was recognized as a “Book of the Year” by The Economist. She was also a founding member of the Fast Company magazine team, where she played a key role in redefining the conventional wisdom on work, leadership, and success.

As a sought-after speaker, Polly LaBarre has delivered hundreds of keynotes and hosted numerous events worldwide. Her writing has appeared in top publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Fortune.com. Polly has also appeared on major television networks, including CNBC, PBS, and ABC, and served as a business and innovation correspondent for CNN.

Beyond her professional endeavors, Polly is passionate about human and planetary flourishing. She serves on the board of CitySeed, a nonprofit dedicated to building a just and healthy food system in New Haven, CT, where she lives. Polly is also an avid gardener, experimental cook, and dedicated yogi.

LEADING IN THE NEW WORK ORDER

A monster wave of change has set off a vast reckoning with our taken-for-granted beliefs about every aspect of how and where work gets done. Every leader today must grapple with the inescapable imperative to create and embrace a comprehensive agenda for meaningful change on the design of work and the interconnected urgent challenges of our time—deep inequities, structural dehumanization, environmental calamity. Polly LaBarre takes leaders on a journey across this new landscape—inspiring them with fresh thinking on the work of leadership and equipping them with powerful new approaches for this new work order, including:

How to transcend the seemingly intractable tradeoffs between performance imperatives and responsibility for people and planet

How to cultivate an “audacity of imagination” and galvanize people around a shared sense of purpose

How to “leader-proof” your organization

How to design platforms for involving, equipping, and connecting people

How to build organizational respond-ability by enlarging individual responsibility

How to grow your own resilience in the face of daunting uncertainty

ROLL WITH CHANGE: RECIPES FOR REINVENTION & RESILIENCE

Who hasn’t been rocked by change in the last few years? While we’ve all been forced to rethink, adjust, and adjust again, the gravitational pull of the status quo remains a stealthy enemy of innovation. What does it take to wake up an organization’s inner insurgent to change ahead of change? These times demand every organization dramatically amp up its agility, inventiveness, and adaptability. Drawing on her research and work inside some of the world’s most innovative and progressive organizations, Polly LaBarre lays out actionable strategies for building a perpetual innovation engine:

What mindsets, practices and behaviors allow you to see the world differently and subvert the status quo

Where to look for the future—and how to generate a whole new map of possibility

How to embed innovation as a social process

What it takes to create a robust architecture of collaboration for a distributed, ever-evolving cohort of innovation peers and partners

How to build a resilient organizational microbiome by embedding the mindset and methods of experimentation into everything you do

THE HUMAN EDGE: DESIGNING WORK TO CREATE A CULTURAL ADVANTAGE

Today’s whirlwind of challenges—pandemic, social turbulence, economic uncertainty, looming climate catastrophe—has revealed just how inhospitable our organizations are to the human beings who work inside them. It’s not enough to ask which is the right hybrid work policy. It’s past time to ask: what kinds of organizations would we design if we genuinely believed in the inherent value, fundamental goodness, and unlimited potential of every person? Short answer: they’d be very different. In this talk, Polly LaBarre unpacks design rules for unleashing your organization’s full human and creative capacity and lays out a path for humanizing work, including:

How to unleash, mobilize and amplify the often unruly, but essential human qualities—imagination, energy, resourcefulness, curiosity, intuition, empathy, artistry, eccentricity, passion, and more—without losing control

How to cultivate a culture of agency, activism, and ownership where every person makes it their job to change things for the better

How to equip and involve every person in the organization as a creator, strategist, and entrepreneur

How to build a community of peers that amplifies belonging, contribution, and voice

How to maximize engagement by investing in wellbeing and widening the circle of care

DESIGNED TO FLOURISH: DEVELOP PEOPLE, DEFEAT DISRUPTION

Change is an inside-out job. It’s not about reacting to external events or chasing trends, so much as it’s about developing your respond-ability—your elasticity, maturity, plasticity, openness, emotional dexterity, regulatory power, and more. Organizations that deliberately develop that capacity in every individual shore up their own resilience. In other words, “adult development” doesn’t just promote individual growth, it’s a cornerstone of organizational flourishing. Polly LaBarre takes the audience on a quick tour of the organizations and leaders investing in human flourishing in powerful new ways—and offers up a short course in “adult development,” including:

How to begin, again (and again)

How to change your mind—cultivating consciousness, mediating mindsets, biases, blinders

How to develop intuition—learning to tune into your inner knowing

How to train like an artist, a monk, and an athlete

How to design and run self-experiments to accelerate your growth loops

Principles for adult capacity building

Books by Polly Labarre

Mavericks at Work

Comments & Testimonials

I had high expectations, but you completely exceeded them! You were absolutely brilliant on all fronts: content, delivery, timing, storytelling, and more. Everyone I talked to cited your talk as the highlight of our conference.

CEO, Perkins+Will

We could not have had a better presentation to close out our Wednesday session. Your insight on innovation in the workplace as well as how we can better incorporate innovation into our core company DNA was a hit!

President and Chief Executive Officer, Aerospace Industries Association