POLLY LABARRE

Creating Adaptable, Innovative and Inspiring Organizations

We live in a world where change is relentless and disruptive - even shocking. Success has never been more fleeting, and the ability to adapt more important. In this context, one of the most important questions leaders face is: are you changing as fast as the world is changing?

The "modern organization" was designed over a century ago - not to adapt but to preserve the status quo, not to invent the new but to clamp down on deviations from the norm, and not to unleash people but to control them. Founding member of Fast Company Magazine Polly LaBarre has been exploring how to change the DNA of an entrenched organization for nearly two decades.

Polly offers fresh perspectives to cast the most fundamental challenges for leaders and organizations in new light; after her presentations, audiences walk away with mind-flipping insights on how to evolve their management model -the most powerful source of competitive advantage today- and build an organization that is truly fit for the future: endlessly adaptable, relentlessly inventive, and genuinely inspiring.

Making Innovation an Everyday, Everywhere Capability

What company today doesn't put innovation at the top of the agenda? Yet few have devoted the energy and resources it takes to build innovation into the values, processes, and practices that rule everyday activity and behavior. No wonder. That disconnect is a product of organizational DNA - productivity, predictability, and alignment are embedded in the marrow of our management systems.

Instead, it is experimentation, risk-taking, and variety that produce game-changing innovation. Founding member of Fast Company Magazine Polly LaBarre demonstrates how to make every management process a catalyst -rather than a wet blanket- for innovation.

She shares how the world's most innovative organizations and leaders are strengthening their innovation DNA and shows audiences how to lay out the welcome mat for new and even dissenting ideas, upgrade the innovation skills of every person in the organization, build in the crucial space and slack needed for innovation, develop a robust set of innovation metrics and tools, leverage new social technologies in service of invention, bust bureaucracy and promote experimentation.

Human Organizations for Human Beings

For way too long the ruling ideology of most organizations has been control - control over people, control over information, control over deviations from the norm. That's exactly the wrong design for generating the innovation and engagement required to thrive in the 21st century. Today, leaders must shift their focus from controlling their "resources" to mobilizing and unleashing the full imagination, passion and initiative of every person inside the organization.

Those fundamental human qualities are the engine of the creative economy. They cannot be commanded, only inspired. In this presentation, founding member of Fast Company Magazine Polly LaBarre shares how to create an environment and systems for work that unleash freedom, creativity and contribution - how to create an organization that is as human as the people who work inside it.

She takes audiences on a journey deep inside the "positive deviants" - the organizations and leaders riding the waves of change, mastering the competition, and surprising their customers and partners by busting bureaucracy, instituting radical autonomy, rethinking the work of leadership, promoting artistry and creativity, and cultivating trust and well-being.

From Web 2.0 to Management 2.0

In the coming years the Web will have as profound an effect on management models as it has had on business models. The social Web is a seedbed of new organizational forms where coordination happens without centralization, all ideas compete on equal footing, contribution counts for more than credentials, mediocrity gets exposed, communities form spontaneously around shared interests, power comes from sharing rather than hoarding, and intrinsic rewards matter most of all.

Founding member of Fast Company Magazine Polly LaBarre shows why organizations must radically rethink how they mobilize people and organize resources to productive ends. She looks at progressive companies that are using the new social technologies and undergirding principles of the Web to reinvent how they do strategy, allocate resources, make decisions, lead, engage, develop, and reward people.

The End of Leadership as we Know It

The age of the heroic, all-knowing, all-powerful leader is over. From the citizen activists of Arab Spring, to the protestors of Occupy Wall Street, to the emergence of Pirate Parties across Europe and the increasingly vocal disgruntled passengers of many an airline, the message is clear - the established way of leading, ruling, governing, and managing is not working anymore. But if the leader is not in charge, what is the work of leadership today?

Founding member of Fast Company Magazine Polly LaBarre's presentation builds on the key theme of the new age; leadership is no longer a function of your title or where you sit in the organization - it's a function of your capacity to get things done with other people, meaning that at some point or another everybody in the organization has a chance to exercise his or her leadership capability.

Maverick Manual for Success

The future belongs to the mavericks. If we want originality and game-changing disruption in our organizations, we need to fill them with people who ignore the rules, flout convention, defy the gravity of the status quo, question constantly, and experiment fearlessly. In a world of non-stop competition and rampant commodification, mavericks are the people who invent the future and create the most value.