Charlene Li
Best Selling Author & Digital Transformation and Disruption Expert
SPEAKER FEE RANGE: $20,000–$40,000 [FEE NOTE]
TRAVELS FROM: California
Charlene Li is an influential thought leader and guide on emerging technologies, with a specific focus on social technologies, interactive marketing and leadership. She is the author of the New York Times best-seller Open Leadership and co-author of the critically acclaimed, best-selling book, Groundswell. Li helps organizations and audiences understand and thrive in a new economy driven by social media tools and techniques. Li helps business leaders adapt to the demands and opportunities of digital leadership in the ever-changing terrain of the digital era.
For the past two decades, Charlene Li has been helping people see the future and thrive with disruption. She couples the ability to look beyond the horizon with pragmatic advice on what actions work today. She helps executives and boards recognize that companies must be disruptive to compete, not just innovate.
Charlene’s an expert on digital transformation, leadership, customer experience, and the future of work. Her perspectives from advising over 100 global companies such as Aetna, Bose, GE, Philips, and Southwest Airlines provide 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 early1990’s, helping 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, Charlene founded Altimeter Group, a disruptive competitor that challenged analyst firm incumbents such as Gartner, Forrester,and IDC. In 2015, Altimeter was acquired by Prophet and continues to operate under its own brand as a fully owned subsidiary.
Charlene is currently a Senior Fellow at Altimeter and her current research there focuses on digital transformation and transformational leadership. She has authored six books, including the New York Times bestseller, Open Leadership, and the critically acclaimed book, Groundswell. Her book The Engaged Leader is a call to business leaders to adapt to the digital landscape and revolutionize their relationships by connecting directly with their followers. Her latest book, The Disruption Mindset, lays out a blueprint for disruption. Charlene’s next book focuses on new leadership capabiliites need to drive transformation change in today’s fast-moving environment.
She is frequently quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USAToday, Reuters and The Associated Press and has shared her insights on 60 Minutes, The McNeil NewsHour, ABC News, CNN and CNBC. Charlene has inspired a wide audience as the keynote at conferences such as the World Business Forum, World Economic Forum, and South by Southwest.
Charlene earned a M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and an A.B. degree magna cum laude from Harvard College. On weekends, she supports her husband at their family winery, La Mesa Vineyards, in the California Sierra foothills and in her spare time she enjoys taking on seemingly impossible tasks such as training her cat to do tricks.
Charlene’s an expert on digital transformation, leadership, customer experience, and the future of work. Her perspectives from advising over 100 global companies such as Aetna, Bose, GE, Philips, and Southwest Airlines provide 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 early1990’s, helping 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, Charlene founded Altimeter Group, a disruptive competitor that challenged analyst firm incumbents such as Gartner, Forrester,and IDC. In 2015, Altimeter was acquired by Prophet and continues to operate under its own brand as a fully owned subsidiary.
Charlene is currently a Senior Fellow at Altimeter and her current research there focuses on digital transformation and transformational leadership. She has authored six books, including the New York Times bestseller, Open Leadership, and the critically acclaimed book, Groundswell. Her book The Engaged Leader is a call to business leaders to adapt to the digital landscape and revolutionize their relationships by connecting directly with their followers. Her latest book, The Disruption Mindset, lays out a blueprint for disruption. Charlene’s next book focuses on new leadership capabiliites need to drive transformation change in today’s fast-moving environment.
She is frequently quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USAToday, Reuters and The Associated Press and has shared her insights on 60 Minutes, The McNeil NewsHour, ABC News, CNN and CNBC. Charlene has inspired a wide audience as the keynote at conferences such as the World Business Forum, World Economic Forum, and South by Southwest.
Charlene earned a M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and an A.B. degree magna cum laude from Harvard College. On weekends, she supports her husband at their family winery, La Mesa Vineyards, in the California Sierra foothills and in her spare time she enjoys taking on seemingly impossible tasks such as training her cat to do tricks.
- The Disruption Mindset: Why Some Organizations Transform While Others Fail
“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. 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.
Audience members will learn how 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. - Leadership in the Digital Era
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. 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.
Audience members will learn how 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 - Creating a Next Gen Customer Experience Strategy
We all know that creating customer experiences is important. But which experiences take priority? And how do we justify long term investments in things like data and personalization – and tie it to business outcomes? What’s needed is a customer experience strategy that goes beyond making sure that the customer journey is smooth. Brands must invest in next-generation experiences that build movements, transformation relationships, and result in exponential growth. We’ll go beyond the platitude of “customer obsession” and share what it takes to build a culture that keeps customers at the center every day.
Audience members will learn how to:
• Prioritize which customer experience initiatives to invest in, so that they drive both business results and meet customers’ heightened expectations.
• Define and create next-generation customer experiences.
• Involve the right people and ensure that they have the skills, capabilities, and mindsets are required to succeed.
• Make great customer experiences a priority for everyone in the organization. - The Future of Work: Employee Engagement In The Digital Era
New technologies pop up every day that allow us to now 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. This integrated approach ties together the disparate parts of the organization dependent on a coherent employee engagement strategy — marketers are eager to tap employees advocates to scale scarce marketing dollars while HR wants to leverage them to spread the talent brand story. From collaboration platforms and Intranets to the use of social technologies and messaging, we’ll dig deep into how technology is changing the work and our relationship with employees.
Audience members will learn how to:
• Understand how employee expectations in the workplace are being influenced by their personal use of technology and the implications for employee engagement
• Identify the experiences that employees value the most.
• Create rich collaboration experiences that support a different way of work.
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