Travels from California, USA
Charlene Li's speaking fee falls within range: $30,000 to $50,000
For the past three decades, Charlene has been helping people see the future and thrive through disruption. She has advised executives and boards to recognize the vital truth that companies can’t simply innovate in order to stay competitive. They must transform.
As a sought-after expert on disruptive transformation, leadership, customer experience, and the future of work, Charlene has worked with hundreds of organizations—ranging from Adobe to Southwest Airlines and 14 of the Dow Jones Industrial 30 companies—to provide her insights to support a winning strategy for disruptive growth and a plan to identify and seize an opportunity no one else has the audacity or confidence to reach for.
Throughout her career, Charlene has been at the edge of disruption. She worked in newspapers in the early 1990s and helped them navigate the shift from print to online. As a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, she covered interactive advertising, search marketing, and the rise of social media. In 2008, she founded Altimeter Group, a disruptive competitor that challenged analyst firm incumbents such as Gartner, Forrester, and IDC, which was acquired by Prophet. Charlene went on to serve as the Chief Research Officer at PA Consulting, where she led the company’s thought leadership program. She currently leads her own firm, Quantum Networks Group.
Charlene is the New York Times bestselling author of six books, including The Disruption Mindset, Open Leadership, and the critically acclaimed Groundswell. Her latest book, Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success, lays out a master plan for AI strategy.
She is an experienced speaker who has inspired leaders in intimate forums and expansive conference halls. She has delivered keynote addresses at such venues as the World Economic Forum, TED, and South by Southwest.
Charlene is frequently quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USAToday, Reuters, and The Associated Press, and she’s shared her expertise on 60 Minutes, The McNeil NewsHour, ABC News, CNN, and CNBC.
Charlene earned an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and an A.B. degree magna cum laude from Harvard College. In her spare time, she teaches her beloved cat new tricks.
WINNING WITH AI (Three different descriptions, depending on the audience)
For Large Conference Audiences: Winning With AI: Crafting a Future-Ready Strategy
Explore the transformative world of AI in this keynote, tailored to introduce its strategic implications. Learn how to integrate AI with your organization's core mission, enhancing competitive advantage and driving long-term growth. This session offers insights into prioritizing transformative initiatives, understanding workforce implications, and mitigating risks while maximizing opportunities. Gain foundational knowledge to develop a robust AI strategy that aligns with your strategic goals and prepares your organization for the future.
In-Company Executive Session: Creating a Unified AI Strategy: An Executive Roadmap
Delve into the strategic integration of AI, specifically crafted for executive leadership. This session focuses on aligning AI with the company's overarching objectives, identifying key initiatives for substantial impact, and addressing workforce evolution. Discussions will also cover risk management and the importance of a cohesive, actionable plan that commands executive alignment. Emerge with a unified vision and a clear strategy for leveraging AI to enhance organizational excellence.
For AI Leaders: Strategizing AI: Vision, Alignment, and Execution
This session is designed for AI leaders, focusing on the intricacies of formulating and executing a comprehensive strategy. Create a compelling vision for AI that aligns with long-term organizational goals, ensuring stakeholder buy-in and executive support. Explore the balance between innovation and risk, the impact on the workforce, and the steps needed to maintain a competitive edge. This discussion aims to equip leaders with advanced strategies for leading their organizations in the AI space, fostering innovation and sustainable growth.
Audiences will learn to (based on the session content): • Ground the AI strategy in the company’s purpose, values, and business strategy • Identify the top ways AI can strengthen and defend your competitive advantage • Understand the workforce, leadership, and culture implications of AI adoption • Create a robust AI strategy amid a fast-changing and uncertain technology landscape
DISRUPTIVE TRANSFORMATION
“Disrupt or die” has been the rallying cry for decades, but what does it actually mean to be disruptive, to make it the center of your strategy? Many established companies set a goal to develop “disruptive” innovations, believing innovation will disrupt their market and drive growth. But that’s not how it works: Disruption doesn’t create growth. Growth creates disruption.
In this speech, Charlene acknowledges that transformations are never easy, and the unrelenting pace of technological change makes it doubly difficult. But there’s hope and a way forward—starting with reframing your strategy, leadership, and culture so that disruptive growth is at the top of your agenda.
Audiences will learn to: • Define what disruption is—and isn’t—and how it can drive disruptive growth • Identify and prioritize the right disruptive growth moves and align the organization around them • Understand how leaders must show up differently when pursuing a disruption strategy • Instill disruption into a status-quo culture
THE FUTURE OF WORK
New technologies pop up daily that allow us to connect and communicate with employees in real time. Yet organizations are wired for a bygone era when there was the luxury of time and proximity. Most organizations measure employee engagement in yearly surveys—hardly the way to truly engage employees in the digital era.
In this speech, Charlene makes the case to develop a new mindset, one that’s centered on creating a long-term relationship with employees that melds holistically with creating great experiences for customers. From creating belonging among hybrid workers to the adoption of AI, we'll dig deep into how technology is changing the nature of work and our relationship with employees.
Audiences will learn to: • Understand how employee expectations in the workplace are being influenced by their personal use of technology, especially AI • Prepare for the long-term implications for employee engagement • Identify the experiences that employees value the most • Create rich collaboration experiences that support a different way of work
LEADERSHIP IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Digital technologies have revolutionized relationships, and leadership is no exception. To be truly engaged, effective leaders must harness and master the power of digital communications and branding, especially with the challenges of leading a distributed team.
In this speech, Charlene explains that the key is understanding how your personal leadership style can be extended and scaled through digital techniques to achieve your most important goals. You’ll learn the art and science of how to listen, share, and engage with employees and customers in the digital era. We’ll also discuss common objections and concerns of leaders and how to address them.
Audiences will learn to: • Master a new way of developing relationships, which begins by stepping out of traditional hierarchies • Listen at scale, share to shape, and engage to transform • Shift to a digital mindset • Apply the right digital tools to meet strategic goals
LEADING WITH WISDOM
What does it mean to be wise? Wisdom is not just a matter of intelligence, knowledge, or character. Smart people make foolish decisions all the time. But what if we could improve our decision-making even a little bit and make consistently wiser choices? Imagine the exponential impact if we could intentionally support the people in our organizations to be wiser, regardless of their experience levels.
In this speech, Charlene takes audiences on a journey of discovery toward experiencing the true power of wisdom. With the right tools and guidance, you, too, can learn to make the right decisions and create a life and organization filled with meaning, purpose, and happiness.
Audiences will learn to: • Define wisdom in the context of leading an organization • Develop wisdom in themselves and others • Create a wise organization capable of consistently making great decisions
“Charlene Li is one of our finest business minds.” – DANIEL H. PINK, Author of six books, including New York Times bestsellers When and Drive
“Charlene Li will help you and your team dance with disruption in this fast-changing world.” – BETH COMSTOCK, Author of “Imagine It Forward” and former vice chair of GE
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Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success
You know AI matters, but you’re just not sure what to do with it.
Every day brings a new tool, a new headline, or worse, another feeling that you’re falling behind. In your leadership role, you don’t know where or how to get started, much less how to mobilize others.
You’re not alone.
Most books about AI explain what AI is. This book tells you what to do with it—how to get started right now and set up your organization to drive value with AI within 90 days. Winning with AI is the no-fluff blueprint that will show you how to separate your organization from most of the others that are still running pilots.
In just twelve weeks, you’ll put in place the roadmap, leadership, and building blocks to move from uncertainty to action. You’ll learn how to prioritize AI deployment, advance it at speed, develop the workforce to sustain it, and govern it responsibly. Every chapter delivers concrete advice you can use immediately, tapping into the wisdom of more than fifty executives who’ve pioneered AI value creation.
Charlene Li, one of the world’s foremost authorities on disruptive leadership, and Dr. Katia Walsh, one of the world’s first chief AI officers, have spent decades leading and helping iconic global organizations create value with AI at scale. Together, they’ll challenge what you hear elsewhere—starting with this: you don’t need an AI strategy. Instead, AI must serve your organization’s strategy. You don’t need AI business cases. Instead, your organizational priorities drive how you use AI. You don’t need to engage expensive consultants; you already have the blueprint in your hands.
Your 90 days start now.
Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead
An essential guide for leaders who want to use social media to be “open” while maintaining control “Be Open, Be Transparent, Be Authentic” are the current leadership mantras-but companies often push back. Business is premised on the concept of control and yet the new world order demands openness-leaders do not know how to be open and be in control. This must-have resource will help the modern leader understand how to lead in the new open world-where blogging, twittering, facebooking, and digging are becoming the norm. the author lays out the steps that leaders must take to transform their organizations and themselves into being “open” -and exactly what that will mean. In easy-to-understand language, this book will help leaders orient themselves to social networking and other technological advances.
The Disruption Mindset: Why Some Organizations Transform While Others Fail
Many companies make disruption their goal. They believe that if they develop the right innovation, they will disrupt their markets forever and drive the kind of growth worthy of a magazine cover story. But as bestselling author Charlene Li explains, that’s not how disruption works. Disruption doesn’t create growth; instead, growth creates disruption.
Growth is always hard, and disruptive growth is exponentially harder. It requires companies to make tough decisions in the face of daunting uncertainties: Should we bet our company’s future on next-generation customers or today’s reliable ones? Should we abandon our current business model for an entirely new one? Making bold changes demands bold leadership and, often, massive cultural transformation.
Over the years, Li has seen some organizations beat the odds and succeed at becoming disruptive: Adobe, ING Bank, Nokia, Southern New Hampshire University, and T-Mobile, among them. Their stories make it clear that organizations don’t have to be tech start-ups or have the latest innovations to transform. What they need to do is develop a disruptive mindset that permeates every aspect of the organization. Li lays out how to do so by focusing on three elements:
a strategy designed to meet the needs of future customers; – leadership that creates a movement to drive and sustain transformation; and – a culture that thrives on disruptive change.
Drawing on interviews with some of the most audacious people driving disruptive transformation today, Li will inspire leaders at all levels to answer the call to lead disruptive transformation in their organizations, communities, and society.
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
Corporate executives struggle to harness the power of social technologies. Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube are where customers discuss products and companies, write their own news, and find their own deals but how do you integrate these activities into your broader marketing efforts? It′s an unstoppable groundswell that affects every industry — yet it′s still utterly foreign to most companies running things now. When consumers you′ve never met are rating your company′s products in public forums with which you have no experience or influence, your company is vulnerable. In Groundswell, Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li explain how to turn this threat into an opportunity.
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