Hal Gregersen

Hal Gregersen is committed to creating insight with impact. He challenges organisations and individuals to question the way they think and act to build a better, more creative world.

Hal is Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center and a Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management. These roles enable him to pursue his vocation of learning how leaders in business, government and society discover provocative new strategies, develop the human and organisational capacity to realise those strategies, and ultimately deliver positive and powerful results.

Hal Gregersen presents with great charm and charisma, his inspirational talks are none the less grounded in concrete examples from the world’s top innovators.

Ranked as one of the world’s 20 most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50 and winner of the 2017 Distinguished Achievement Award for leadership, Gregersen regularly delivers inspirational keynote speeches, interactive and dynamic customized workshops, motivational executive seminars and transformational coaching experiences. Along with 10 books, Gregersen is the author of more than 50 articles, book chapters, and cases on leading innovation and change (with more than 10,000 citations by other scholars). His research has been highlighted in global media such as BBC, CNN, The Economist, Fast Company, Financial Times, Forbes, Fortune, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. In 2020, Gregersen was named a Top 30 Global Guru.

His most recent book, “The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators”, uncovers the code for the successful innovator in business – and beyond. Co-authored with Jeff Dyer and Clayton Christensen, the book comes from an eight-year international research project where they explored where disruptive innovations come from by interviewing founder entrepreneurs and CEOs at over 100 of the most innovative companies in the world and assessing how 8,000+ leaders leverage five key innovation skills to create valuable new products, services, processes, and businesses.

To get a grasp on how leaders find and ask the right questions – ones that disrupt how we view and interact with the world – Hal Gregersen has researched and interviewed more than 200 renowned innovative leaders, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Tesla’s Elon Musk. His question-centric research project to obtain insights into how leaders can build better questions to unlock game-changing solutions helped define Gregersen’s Catalytic Questioning methodology. Hal is the 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.

His tenure at MIT is the culmination of an illustrious academic journey that has included teaching positions at INSEAD, London Business School, Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, Brigham Young University and a Fulbright Fellowship in Finland. Prior to his academic career, Gregersen was an advisory board member at Pharmascience, a Montreal-based pharmaceutical company, and he remains a senior fellow at the global innovation consulting firm Innosight.

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 north of Boston where he pursues his lifelong avocation, photography, and she her lifelong love, sculpture.

Teemat: Questions Are the Answer: Discovering the Power of Inquiry in the Innovation Process | Building a Sustainably Creative Company: Putting People, Processes & Philosophies to Work | The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators | Navigating the Human Side of Transitions in an Ocean of Change | Bursting the CEO Bubble: Asking Catalytic Questions – Before It’s Too Late | Master Moderator: Creating Conference-wide Question-Centric Culture