Marcia Conner

Co-Founder

Marcia Conner works with big-vision leaders and impact entrepreneurs ready to use their superpowers for good. Specializing in the complex work of Octopus Organizations (with many arms going their own way), she focuses on modern collaborative approaches to solve pressing problems and is brought in to quickly address catastrophic challenges.

Conner sidesteps traditional notions of engagement, best-practices, and business-as-usual to connect, streamline, and energize entire ecosystems for rapid phase change.

For enterprise clients, Conner addresses will-building, change readiness and stymied relationships with cultural assessments and strategic recommendations. For software vendors, she provides tactical guidance in go-to-market strategies; reviews products for usability, learnability, and adoption; delivers competitive evaluations; and recommends software partnerships. For heads of state, community leaders, civil servants, and bipartisan coalitions, she advises on policy related to changes in the nature of work.

She translates her two decades of corporate experience into the credibility that executives demand. She has confronted and overcome the same pressures and responsibilities leaders face, bringing to bear the agility and advantages of working in personal ways. When a strategy runs off course, innovation bogs down or an enterprise-wide system under-performs, Conner delivers on the promise of new social technology and expanding networks to unleash the way people actually think and behave. She overcomes ambiguity, resistance, and skepticism with fact-based examples of success. Clients are typically multinational enterprises, spanning industries and markets, with a focus on business-to-business, business-to-consumer, financial services, professional services, advanced technology, national intelligence, and telecommunications.

Her fourth book, The New Social Learning: Connect, Collaborate, Work (2015), addressed modern organizational challenges such as widely dispersed employees and striking differences in work styles across ages and demographics. With case studies from over 100 organizations including TELUS, Sanofi Pasteur, National Australian Bank, Boston Children’s Hospital, Mayo Clinic, and the CIA, Conner shows how new social tools can transform the workplace by harnessing the experiences of colleagues across oceans as easily as if they were side by side. She also published Learn More Now and Creating a Learning Culture, contributed to Changing the World of Work: One Human at a Time for Change Agents Worldwide and Leading Organizational Learning for Marshall Goldsmith, and wrote the forewords to Opting In by Ed Brill and Engaging Learning by Clark Quinn. She is currently working on her next book about human ingenuity to foster societal transformation.

A former corporate executive focused on high-growth organizations (Microsoft and PeopleSoft), Conner is a SupporTED Mentor, a Fellow of the Darden School of Business, and has been a columnist for Fast Company. She has been an advisor to RWJF’s Culture of Health Leaders program and Wellville. She has been quoted on the BBC, in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, CIO, CLO, HR Executive, Information Week, Natural Health and has appeared on ABC World News This Morning.