Whitney Johnson

In a world where workplace dynamics shift overnight, staying ahead demands more than just resilience—it requires reinvention. How do you lead your team through uncertainty while staying relevant and innovative? In this engaging keynote, Whitney Johnson introduces a powerful framework that enables you to adapt, evolve, and inspire your workforce through change and disruption. Discover how to break free from outdated mindsets, embrace change with confidence, and become the transformative leader your organization needs to navigate the future of work. Change starts with you.

In a world focused on disruption, we often overlook the stabilizing forces that hold teams and organizations together. Stability isn’t the opposite of growth—it’s the foundation for it. In this thought-provoking keynote, Whitney Johnson reveals how stability fuels trust, fosters resilience, and creates the psychological safety necessary for innovation. Learn how to balance disruption with stability, identify stabilizers within your team, and harness their power to build stronger, more cohesive organizations. Discover how cultivating stability unlocks sustainable success in even the most unpredictable environments.

Your company’s growth starts with your people. Yet, many organizations unintentionally stifle employee potential, leaving talent bored, stagnant or disengaged. In this dynamic keynote, Whitney Johnson shares how to use the S Curve of Growth to unlock your team’s natural desire to learn and grow. You’ll gain insights into the three stages of growth—Launch Point, Sweet Spot, and Mastery—and learn actionable strategies to support your people at every stage. When you invest in individual growth, you don’t just transform careers—you ignite innovation and drive unparalleled results. Smart growth starts with your team.

The idea is simple, but powerful: disruptive companies and ideas upend markets by doing something truly different – they see a need, an empty space waiting to be filled, and they dare to create something for which a market may not yet exist. An expert in driving innovation via personal disruption, Whitney Johnson will demonstrate how you can put the power of disruptive innovation to work. To help your company in unexpected ways, dare to innovate. Dream big dreams. Do something astonishing. Disrupt yourself.  In this session, Whitney Johnson will share stories of disruption and will teach you how powerful disruption can be in your organization’s evolving reinvention.  Johnson builds on her investment background as co-founder of two early stage venture firms, and an award-winning equity analyst to provide a fresh perspective on innovation and change.

Audience members will leave with practical tips and concrete action steps for how to:

Drive innovation throughout their organization,
Move into the sweet spot of their personal S-curve,
Use the S-curve as a tool for understanding the psychology of disruption, and
Accelerate or decelerate innovation and change with a variety of variables.
Pursuing a disruptive course isn’t just a nice thing to do, there’s a compelling business case: the odds of success are 6x higher and the revenue opportunity is 20x greater.

These ideas are for YOU if you are:

a high potential individual charting your career trajectory
a leader trying to jumpstart innovative thinking in your company
a self-starter ready to make a disruptive pivot in your business
These ideas are for your COMPANY if:

revenue growth is peaking and you need to reinvent
innovative thinking among your management team has stalled
industry changes are making the future uncertain
The fundamental unit of disruption is the individual.
The best way to drive corporate innovation is through personal disruption.
Disrupt yourself.
Allow others to do the same.
And disruptive products, services, companies and countries will happen on their own.
Companies don’t disrupt, people do.

Nearly everyone wants a culture of innovation: innovation opens new markets, creates jobs, drives revenue, and is an engine of economic growth and personal wealth. But have you pulled back the curtain on what is necessary to foster an innovative culture? In this thought-provoking keynote, Whitney Johnson, re-imagines the S-curve as a tool that we typically use to understand how quickly an innovation will be adopted, but for understanding how to promote and implement disruptive ideas, identifying variables that can accelerate/decelerate innovation such as: taking the right kinds of risk, battling entitlement (a surefire innovation killer) and getting the metrics right. Listen closely to Johnson’s intriguing approach, and you’ll not only accelerate into the sweet spot of your own S-curve curve, you’ll have the tools to put innovation on over-drive across your organization.

(Book being released by Harvard Business Publishing, May 2018; Keynote available September 2018)

If you are looking for a surefire sign, look at where your workforce is on the S-curve. Based on Whitney Johnson’s proprietary research around disruption, every organization is a collection of individual S or learning curves. You build an A team by optimizing these individual curves. In this speech, you will learn how to manage people all along the S-curve and what to do when they reach the top of that curve. As employees are allowed, even required, to surf their individual S-curve waves, disrupting themselves, you will be less vulnerable to disruption and become a boss people love to work for.

Disruptive thinking improves the odds of success for products, companies and even countries, and harnessing this powerful mindset begins with the individual. In this compelling keynote address, Whitney Johnson builds on her Harvard Business Review article Disrupt Yourself, applying the road-tested theory of disruptive innovation to the individual, providing practical tips along with real-world examples of personal disruption, with a focus on how managers can drive individual and firm-wide innovation. If you are ready to move your organization to the next level, it’s time to disrupt the status quo and innovate from the inside.