Keynote SpeakerMargaret Heffernan

Margaret Heffernan is an entrepreneur, chief executive, and author. She writes books and blogs, teaches and mentors senior and chief executives, and has built and led organizations of all sizes.

Born in Texas, raised in Holland, and educated at Cambridge, Margaret started her career at the BBC, working on radio documentaries and dramas and producing films for Timewatch, Arena, and Newsnight. After the BBC, she ran the independent producers’ trade association, the IPPA, which was once described by the Financial Times as “the most formidable lobbying organization in England.”

Margaret later returned to the US, where she worked on public affairs campaigns and with software companies attempting to break into the nascent multimedia industry. She developed interactive multimedia products with Peter Lynch, Tom Peters, Standard & Poor’s, and The Learning Company. She then joined the software and consulting firm CMGI, where she ran, bought, and sold various leading internet businesses of the time. She was named one of the internet’s Top 100 by Silicon Alley Reporter and one of the Top 100 Media Executives by The Hollywood Reporter.

Now an acclaimed business author, Margaret has written extensively on the nature of effective leadership, challenging many of the assumptions and stereotypes that organizations have adopted. In Wilful Blindness, she examines why we ignore the obvious and the implications of choosing to turn a blind eye to potential problems. In The Naked Truth: A Working Woman’s Manifesto and Women on Top: How Female Entrepreneurs are Changing the Rules for Business Success, she explores how women executives are perceived and how they perceive themselves, how things are changing, and what still needs to change. A Bigger Prize looks at what it takes for individuals and organizations to be truly creative and collaborative, while Beyond Measure: The Big Impact of Small Changes explores how organizations can identify small but significant changes to their strategy and operations, leading to large improvements. In Uncharted, she undertakes a timely examination of leaders’ obsession with making predictions and plans, despite indisputable evidence that complex, unpredictable systems, environments, and people make it almost impossible. All of these works explore why and how companies full of talented, motivated, and committed executives fail to spot major problems or capture the full intellectual and innovative capacity of their people.

A regular contributor to the print and broadcast media, Margaret has also presented documentaries on these subjects for Radio 4. She has designed, taught, and lectured on academic courses in the UK and US, including at Harvard and the London Business School, and has presented three TED Talks.

With examples from the business world, ranging from new tech disruptors to established multinationals, as well as from the military, sports, and other fields, Margaret analyzes the nature of good leadership. She considers the culture of disruptive businesses that have revolutionized the workplace and how things have shifted from the top-down, command-and-control style of traditional business to a more collaborative, less dog-eat-dog philosophy. She also examines crises of leadership, such as BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster and the VW emissions scandal, exploring how they happened, the culture that ignored the warnings, and how they might have been handled better.

Her new book, Embracing Uncertainty: How Writers, Musicians, and Artists Thrive in an Unpredictable World, is published in March 2025. Reflecting on uncertainty, she noted that the people she has worked with most, who manage uncertainty with real aplomb, talent, and grit, are artists. Since Uncharted, she has argued that these times require individuals to create the future, not simply sit passively awaiting it. Therefore, this book examines what it is that artists do, how they generate ideas, agency, nerve, persistence, clarity, and the capacity for change that enables them to dive into uncertainty with such gusto.