Available to book
Margaret Heffernan
Challenge organisational blind spots with Margaret Heffernan, leadership thinker and bestselling business author. Margaret helps executives rethink competition, build collaborative cultures, and navigate uncertainty. Former CEO, TED speaker with 15M+ views, Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, and Financial Times-recognised author who mentors global leaders.
Dr Margaret Heffernan is a business leader, author, and management thinker whose work explores how organisations confront uncertainty, lead through change, make better decisions, and build stronger, more resilient cultures. A former CEO and media executive, she is widely recognised for challenging conventional thinking about leadership, competition, and organisational success.
Margaret produced programmes for the BBC for 13 years before leading multimedia companies in the United States, where The Hollywood Reporter named her one of the Top 100 Media Executives. She has written seven books examining leadership, change, and organisational behaviour, including Willful Blindness, which the Financial Times named one of the most important business books of the decade, and Uncharted, which became a bestseller and explored how leaders can navigate an unpredictable future. Her TED talks have reached over 15 million viewers.
Margaret is Professor of Practice at the University of Bath and mentors CEOs and senior executives through Merryck & Co. She has also contributed to major public inquiries, and in 2023 was inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame for her lasting contribution to management thinking. Her work examines how organisations overlook critical information, why excessive competition can undermine long term success, and how leaders can cultivate environments where collaboration, curiosity, and openness drive better decisions during periods of disruption and change.
Audiences leave Margaret's presentations with practical frameworks for recognising blind spots in their organisations, specific techniques for building more collaborative and resilient teams, and strategies for leading effectively when the future cannot be predicted. Her research translates directly into actionable approaches that help organisations adapt, innovate, and manage change with greater confidence.
Margaret brings evidence-based insights about organisational behaviour that challenge conventional thinking and offer practical alternatives to outdated management practices, helping leaders build organisations capable of thriving in uncertainty.
Margaret's insights on navigating uncertainty have proven particularly valuable to senior teams facing complex change or long planning horizons. Her executive background and Thinkers50 Hall of Fame recognition give her unusual credibility with leaders who need clear thinking and practical perspective when the future is hard to map.
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Margaret Heffernan draws on evidence-based research into organisational behaviour to structure her presentations around practical frameworks, delivering findings through a model that moves from identified blind spots to actionable techniques for building collaborative and resilient teams.
Dr Margaret Heffernan speaks on organisational resilience, decision-making under uncertainty, leadership through change, company culture, and the ways organisations overlook critical information. She is a Thinkers50 Hall of Fame inductee, Professor of Practice at the University of Bath, and author of Willful Blindness, named by the Financial Times as one of the most important business books of the decade.
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