Polly LaBarre

Polly LaBarre is a bestselling author, speaker, and thinker who has worked for over 20 years to make every kind of organization fundamentally more resilient, innovative, and inspiring—and to embolden and equip leaders at every level to make a meaningful impact. She is an inspiring and provocative voice on the big ideas and important questions that will shape the future of organizations, work, and collective progress.

Polly’s work is driven by three core questions:

1) How do we unleash and organize human potential in ever more powerful ways?
2) How do we cultivate the audacity of imagination required to tackle our most intractable problems?
3) And, how do organizations and individuals change how they change to become endlessly adaptable?

To make genuine progress on those questions, Polly works with leading organizations, creates curriculum, develops methodology, and platforms for unleashing creativity, expanding collaboration, and accelerating change.

Polly speaks about:

• Leading Organizational Change
• Culture
• Innovation
• Talent Retention/Attraction
• The People-Centered Organization
• Creating an Adaptive Organization
• Banishing Bureaucracy
• New Architectures for Collaboration
• New Ways to Develop Talent
• Building a Better Workplace
• Creating a Nimble Organization +
  

As a founding member of Fast Company magazine, Polly played a central role in the remarkable success of a magazine that recast the conventional wisdom on power, competition, work, leadership, innovation, and change.

Currently, she is the co-founder of Management Lab (MLab), the think-and-do tank where she consults with top global brands. Along with her partners at MLab, Polly has developed a pioneering method and platform for changing how large organizations change. They run large-scale, real-world experiments in “hacking management” to build the deep organizational capabilities crucial for thriving in a creative, disruptive world: adaptability, innovation, and inspiration.

In addition to running global “management hackathons,” MLab has also built the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX), the world’s largest community of management innovators; created a clearinghouse of management hacks and innovation stories; and launched a series of events.

Polly is the co-author of the award-winning book Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win, which was a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek bestseller. Polly’s writing has also appeared in a variety of publications, including Fast Company, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Fortune.com, the McKinsey Quarterly, and she has served as business and innovation correspondent for CNN. --

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 --

To inquire about Polly LaBarre's speaking schedule & booking Polly Labarre contact us.

Keywords: Accountability, Author, Change, Corporate Culture, Diversity, Empowerment, Execution, HR Focus, Improving Performance, Inspiration, Leadership, Managing/Leading Change, Creativity, Innovation, Organizational Culture, Peak Performance, Reinventing Management, and Innovation.