Marcia Conner
Executive Advisor, Analyst, and Best Selling Author

Marcia Conner is a blank page systems architect, working with big-vision leaders and impact entrepreneurs across the globe ready to use their superpowers for good. Because the challenges organizations face are too complex for individuals to solve alone, Conner sets collaborative strategies into motion to inform decision-making invigorate innovation, and galvanize corporate culture. She surpasses traditional notions of engagement to connect, streamline, and energize ecosystems for new and dramatically improved results. Research topics have addressed the connection between exercise and brainpower, experience and education, social networks for social change, multi-generation business culture, and leadership preparedness for phase change.

For enterprise clients, Conner always 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.

Conner 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 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 latest book, a newly revised and expanded edition of The New Social Learning: Connect, Collaborate, Work (2015), addresses 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, LAZ Parking, Roche Pharmaceuticals, 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, Conner is a SupporTED Mentor, a Fellow of the Darden School of Business, and writes for Fast Company. She is an advisor to Mminddlabs and Way to 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.

She lives outside of Austin in the Texas hill country with her pickleball-pro husband, thirteen year-old son, dozens of deer and millions of cactus.

More about Marcia on MarciaConner.com and @marciamarcia.