Polly LaBarre
Bestselling author, speaker, and thinker who’s advised top global organizations, Polly’s mission for the past 20 years has been to make every kind of organization fundamentally more resilient, innovative and inspiring.
Why you should book Polly LaBarre for your next event
- Through the Management Lab, Polly has co-developed groundbreaking methodologies and tools to reinvent how organizations lead, manage, and innovate at scale.
- Polly has advised Fortune 500 companies and global changemakers, bringing cutting-edge ideas to life through leadership development and large-scale transformation.
- As a founding team member of Fast Company, she helped redefine what it means to lead and succeed in a new era of work and innovation.
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Leading Change with Courage & Creativity
Polly LaBarre is a trailblazing voice on organizational change, innovation, and human-centered leadership. As co-founder of the Management Lab, founding team member of Fast Company, and co-author of the bestseller Mavericks at Work, she brings decades of experience helping top global organizations transform how they lead and work. Her keynotes deliver bold, actionable insights that empower leaders to build resilient, creative, and future-ready cultures, turning disruption into a strategic advantage. If your organization is ready to lead change instead of react to it, Polly delivers the roadmap.
Keynote Speaker Polly LaBarre is a pioneering voice on leading organizational change, building resilient cultures, and driving human-centered innovation. With a dynamic career that includes co-founding the Management Lab and helping launch Fast Company magazine, Polly brings unmatched expertise to the stage, making her a sought-after speaker for organizations navigating disruption and complexity.
For over two decades, Polly has worked with Fortune 500 companies, progressive startups, and mission-driven institutions to help reimagine how they lead, collaborate, and grow. Her bestselling book, Mavericks at Work, challenged conventional business thinking and inspired leaders to embrace originality and bold thinking. Polly’s keynote presentations deliver powerful insights, practical tools, and fresh strategies for unleashing creativity, accelerating change, and designing future-ready cultures.
Known for her engaging and provocative speaking style, Polly speaks directly to the challenges facing today’s leaders, offering actionable guidance on creating agile, innovative, and inspiring organizations. Whether you’re looking to energize a leadership team, spark cultural transformation, or future-proof your organization, Polly delivers high-impact keynotes tailored to your needs.
Book Polly LaBarre for your event to inspire bold leadership and equip your teams with the mindset and strategies to thrive in the future of work. Her message is clear: in a world of constant change, organizations must change how they change and Polly shows you how.
Keynotes
Keynote by Polly LaBarre:
Leading in the New Work Order
A monster wave of change has set off a vast reckoning with our taken-for-granted beliefs about every aspect of how and where work gets done. Every leader today must grapple with the inescapable imperative to create and embrace a comprehensive agenda for meaningful change on the design of work and the interconnected urgent challenges of our time—deep inequities, structural dehumanization, and environmental calamity.
Polly LaBarre takes leaders on a journey across this new landscape—inspiring them with fresh thinking on the work of leadership and equipping them with powerful new approaches for this new work order, including:
- How to transcend the seemingly intractable tradeoffs between performance imperatives and responsibility for people and planet.
- How to cultivate an “audacity of imagination” and galvanize people around a shared sense of purpose.
- How to “leader-proof” your organization.
- How to design platforms for involving, equipping, and connecting people.
- How to build organizational respond-ability by enlarging individual responsibility.
- How to grow your own resilience in the face of daunting uncertainty.
Keynote by Polly LaBarre:
Roll With Change
Who hasn’t been rocked by change in the last few years? While we’ve all been forced to rethink, adjust, and adjust again, the gravitational pull of the status quo remains a stealthy enemy of innovation. What does it take to wake up an organization’s inner insurgent to change ahead of change? These times demand every organization dramatically amp up its agility, inventiveness, and adaptability.
Drawing on her research and work inside some of the world’s most innovative and progressive organizations, Polly LaBarre lays out actionable strategies for building a perpetual innovation engine:
- What mindsets, practices and behaviors allow you to see the world differently and subvert the status quo.
- Where to look for the future—and how to generate a whole new map of possibility.
- How to embed innovation as a social process.
- What it takes to create a robust architecture of collaboration for a distributed, ever-evolving cohort of innovation peers and partners.
- How to build a resilient organizational microbiome by embedding the mindset and methods of experimentation into everything you do.
Keynote by Polly LaBarre:
The Human Edge: Designing Work to Create a Cultural Advantage
Today’s whirlwind of challenges—pandemic, social turbulence, economic uncertainty, looming climate catastrophe—has revealed just how inhospitable our organizations are to the human beings who work inside them. It’s not enough to ask which is the right hybrid work policy. It’s past time to ask: what kinds of organizations would we design if we genuinely believed in the inherent value, fundamental goodness, and unlimited potential of every person? Short answer: they’d be very different.
In this talk, Polly LaBarre unpacks design rules for unleashing your organization’s full human and creative capacity and lays out a path for humanizing work, including:
- How to unleash, mobilize and amplify the often unruly, but essential human qualities—imagination, energy, resourcefulness, curiosity, intuition, empathy, artistry, eccentricity, passion, and more—without losing control.
- How to cultivate a culture of agency, activism, and ownership where every person makes it their job to change things for the better.
- How to equip and involve every person in the organization as a creator, strategist, and entrepreneur.
- How to build a community of peers that amplifies belonging, contribution, and voice.
- How to maximize engagement by investing in wellbeing and widening the circle of care.
Keynote by Polly LaBarre:
Designed to Flourish: Develop People, Defeat Disruption
Change is an inside-out job. It’s not about reacting to external events or chasing trends, so much as it’s about developing your respond-ability—your elasticity, maturity, plasticity, openness, emotional dexterity, regulatory power, and more. Organizations that deliberately develop that capacity in every individual shore up their own resilience. In other words, “adult development” doesn’t just promote individual growth, it’s a cornerstone of organizational flourishing.
Polly LaBarre takes the audience on a quick tour of the organizations and leaders investing in human flourishing in powerful new ways—and offers up a short course in “adult development,” including:
- How to begin, again (and again).
- How to change your mind—cultivating consciousness, mediating mindsets, biases, blinders.
- How to develop intuition—learning to tune into your inner knowing.
- How to train like an artist, a monk, and an athlete.
- How to design and run self-experiments to accelerate your growth loops.
- Principles for adult capacity building.
Becoming Rugged and Durable Amid Relentless Change
Watch Polly LaBarre in action!
Generating Ideas More Quickly Isn't Hard
Watch Polly LaBarre in action!
