Hal Gregersen is Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center and a Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management where he pursues his vocation of executive teaching, coaching, and research by exploring how leaders in business, government, and society discover provocative new ideas, develop the human and organizational capacity to realize those ideas, and deliver positive, powerful results. He is a Senior Fellow at Innosight and a former advisory board member at Pharmascience, a privately held pharmaceutical company based in Montreal, Canada. Before joining MIT, he taught at INSEAD, London Business School, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, Brigham Young University, and in Finland as a Fulbright Fellow.
To grasp how leaders can ask catalyic questions - ones that disrupt the world - Gregersen has studied 200+ renowned business, government, and social enterprise leaders for a forthcoming book "Questions are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and In Life" with HarperCollins (2018). This question-centric research project is surfacing insights into how leaders build better questions to unlock game-changing solutions. The first article from the project -"Bursting the CEO Bubble" (March/April 2017 Harvard Business Review) - explores how senior leaders can ask better questions to unlock what they don't know they don't know - before it's too late. Gregersen is also founder of The 4-24 Project, an initiative dedicated to rekindling the provocative power of asking the right questions in adults so they can pass this crucial creativity skill onto the next generation.
Gregersen has co-authored ten books, including his most recent, The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, which flows from a path-breaking international research project (with Jeff Dyer & Clayton Christensen). They explored where disruptive innovations come from by interviewing founder entrepreneurs and CEOs at 100+ of the most innovative companies in the world and by assessing how 15,000+ leaders leverage five key innovation skills to create valuable new products, services, processes, and businesses.
Putting his insight into practice, he is the creator of a unique executive development experience "Leadership and the Lens: Learning at the Intersection of Innovation and Image-Making." The workshop draws on Gregersen's two passions - photography and innovation - to teach participants how to ask radically better questions and change their impact as leaders.
Ranked as one of the world's most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50, Gregersen regularly delivers high impact keynote speeches and executive workshops with companies like Adidas, AT&T, Christie's, Coca-Cola, Daimler, Danone, Discovery Chanel, EY, Genentech, GM, IBM, IMF, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, LG, Lilly, McAfee, Marriott, MasterCard, SAP, Vivendi, WalMart, & World Economic Forum. He also works with governments, not-for-profit and NGO organizations to generate greater innovation capabilities in the next generation of leaders.
Gregersen has lived and worked outside the United States for over a decade - in England, Finland, France, and the UAE. He and his wife now reside in Boston where he pursues his lifelong avocation, photography, and she her lifelong love, sculpture.
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:...
