Hal Gregersen
About Hal Gregersen
Speech topics
Building a Sustainably Creative Company: Putting People, Processes & Philosophies to Work
Innovative leaders hold the power to create monumental impact throughout an organization by acting and thinking innovatively themselves. However, if leaders don’t empower others to do the same, the breadth of a company’s innovation capacity – and consequently, its growth potential – rises and falls with them alone. In this session, Hal Gregersen discusses how today’s most innovative leaders, including Pixar’s Ed Catmull, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff, build a culture of innovation by decentralizing the source of ideas and instilling a creative capacity from the bottom up – and why it’s the single most important legacy leaders can leave behind. As Benioff put it, “It’s my job to create a culture of innovation.”
Speaking videos
Books by Hal Gregersen
“Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life” (2018)
What if you could unlock a better answer to your most vexing problem—in your workplace, community, or home life—just by changing the question?Talk to creative problem-solvers and they will often tell you, the key to their success is asking a different question.Take Debbie Sterling, the social entrepreneur who created GoldieBlox. The idea came when a friend complained about too few women in engineering and Sterling wondered aloud: "why are all the great building toys made for boys?" Or consider Nobel laureate Richard Thaler, who asked: "would it change economic theory if we stopped pretending people were rational?" Or listen to Jeff Bezos whose relentless approach to problem solving has fueled Amazon’s exponential growth: “Getting the right question is key to getting the right answer.” Great questions like these have a catalytic quality—that is, they dissolve barriers to creative thinking and channel the pursuit of solutions into new, accelerated pathways. Often, the moment they are voiced, they have the paradoxical effect of being utterly surprising yet instantly obvious.For innovation and leadership guru Hal Gregersen, the power of questions has always been clear—but it took some years for the follow-on question to hit him: If so much depends on fresh questions, shouldn’t we know more about how to arrive at them? That sent him on a research quest ultimately including over two hundred interviews with creative thinkers. Questions Are the Answer delivers the insights Gregersen gained about the conditions that give rise to catalytic questions—and breakthrough insights—and how anyone can create them.
“The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators” (2011)
In The Innovator’s DNA, authors Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and bestselling author Clayton Christensen build on what we know about disruptive innovation to show how individuals can develop the skills necessary to move progressively from idea to impact.
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