Top Organizational Change Keynote Speaker
Why Book this Speaker: Robert Sutton is a top organizational change keynote speaker, Stanford Professor, and the New York Times bestselling author of Scaling Up Excellence, Good Boss, Bad Boss, and The No Asshole Rule. He also speaks about and is working on The Friction Project. It focuses on why organizations make the right things too hard to do, the wrong things too easy, and how skilled leaders and organizational designers can avert and overcome these obstacles.
Traveling From: CA
Fee Range: $35,000 – $100,000
Robert I. Sutton is an organizational psychologist and Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. He studies leadership, innovation, organizational change, and workplace dynamics. Sutton has published over 200 articles, chapters, and case studies in scholarly and applied outlets. His main focus over the past decade is on scaling and leading at scale—how to grow organizations, spread good things (and remove bad things) in teams and organizations, and enhance performance, innovation, and well-being given the distinct challenges in big organizations.
Sutton received his Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology from The University of Michigan and has served on the Stanford faculty since 1983. Sutton is co-founder and former co-director of the Center for Work, Technology and Organization, co-founder of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and co-founder of the “Stanford d.school,” a multi-disciplinary program that helps people reach their creative potential.
Sutton has published seven books and two edited volumes. These include (with Jeffrey Pfeffer) is The Knowing-Doing Gap (Harvard Business School Press, 2000), selected by Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten as one of the best 100 business books of all time. Weird Ideas That Work (The Free Press, 2002), selected by the Harvard Business Review as one of the best ten business books of the year. Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer then published Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense (Harvard Business School Press, 2006), selected by Toronto’s Globe and Mail as the top management book of 2006 and by Strategy+Business (in 2011) as one of the best 10 books in the last decade.
The No Asshole Rule (Business Plus, 2007), is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and and Businessweek bestseller—and been translated into more than 20 languages and sold over 900,000 copies. Good Boss, Bad Boss (Business Plus, 2010) is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. In 2014, Sutton and Huggy Rao published Scaling-Up Excellence, a Wall Street Journal bestseller that was selected as one of the best business books of the year by Amazon, Financial Times, Inc., The Globe and Mail, and Library Journal. The Asshole Survival Guide (HMH, 2017) was selected as book of the month by the Financial Times, and featured in outlets including The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, New York Magazine, and Vox.
SCALING YOUR COMPANY: HOW TO SPREAD AND ENHANCE EXCELLENCE–IN EVERYTHING FROM STARTUPS TO BIG ORGANIZATIONS (BASED ON HIS BEST-SELLER “SCALING UP EXCELLENCE”)
For the past 15 years, Stanford’s Bob Sutton and co-author Huggy Rao have studied, written about, and worked with diverse companies on three elements of leading at scale: How to grow organizations, including skills that leaders need to develop as their teams and businesses grow (“up”), how to spread good norms, practices, and behaviors throughout organizations (out”), and how to be an effective leader in a large and complex organization (“big”). In addition to numerous articles on such topics, Sutton and Rao wrote that bestselling book Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less and are currently writing The Friction Project: How Smart Organizations Make the Right Thigs Easier, the Wrong Things Harder, and Do it Without Driving people Crazy.
Sutton has done keynotes and led workshops on leading at scale for more than 100 organizations including Google, Bloom Energy, Deloitte, SAP, InBev, WestRock, Oracle, Rabobank, Netflix, United Fresh, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Girl Scouts of the USA, Uber, UL, McKinsey, American Medical Association, Medtronic, Onyx Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Amgen), and since 2019, he has developed and delivered more than a dozen interactive sessions for Microsoft executives.
The key themes that Sutton discusses during such in-person and online gatherings include:
In this experience, the moderator can interact with Dr. Sutton on a combination of his (3) key topics, listed here. This allows a more unique and customized experience for the audience and how his tools and practical takeaways can be applied.
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