Author, Great at Work & Co-Author, Great By Choice
Morten Hansen: Biography at a Glance
- Morten Hansen is the bestselling author of Great at Work - a practical guide to individual performance. Drawing on an exhaustive study of 5,000 managers and employees, it shows how top performers work smarter and achieve more.
- He is also co-author of the New York Times bestseller Great by Choice with Jim Collins, that provides data-driven, groundbreaking insight into how businesses can thrive in uncertainty.
- Morten is a faculty member and senior director at Apple University, Apple’s internal leadership development unit. He teaches Apple’s top 300 senior leaders on a range of leadership subjects, including team decision making, collaboration, and how to prioritize and focus in their jobs as leaders.
- He was Ranked by Thinkers50 as one of the 50 most influential management thinkers in the world
- Morten is a management professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and formerly at INSEAD and Harvard Business School
- His award-winning research on leadership, collaboration, innovation and corporate greatness has been published in leading academic journals, with several best-selling articles in Harvard Business Review
Videos
Biography
Morten T. Hansen is a renowned leadership expert and best-selling author, ranked as one of the world’s most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50.
Formerly a professor at Harvard Business School and INSEAD (France), he is now a management professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Hansen’s award-winning research on leadership, collaboration, innovation, and corporate greatness has been published in several leading academic journals.
Hansen’s most recent book, "Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Smarter, and Achieve More," is based on an exhaustive study of 5,000 managers and employees. He is also the co-author of the New York Times bestseller "Great by Choice" (with Jim Collins), which provides data-driven, groundbreaking insight into how businesses can thrive in uncertainty. His acclaimed book "Collaboration" describes how managers can overcome silos in a company and create real value from working across the organization.
Hansen has written several bestselling Harvard Business Review articles and his work has been covered by Business Week, Fortune, New York Times, and The Economist, among others. A veteran speaker, Hansen has advised and given keynotes to many Fortune 100 companies, including Intel, Apple, American Express, AT&T, Walmart, Chevron, IBM, Microsoft, and Cisco, among others.
Hansen has a PhD from Stanford Business School, where he was a Fulbright scholar. He was also a senior manager at the Boston Consulting Group where he advised corporate clients worldwide.
A native of Norway and a former silver medalist in the Norwegian junior track and field championship, Hansen lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two daughters, and enjoys running, hiking, good food, and traveling.
Topics
How to Boost Performance in the Workplace
Based on a massive new study of more than 5,000 people, Morten Hansen distills the key factors that drive outstanding performance among leaders, teams, and individuals in companies and other organizations. He reveals the answers in his “Seven Work Smarter Practices” that can be applied by anyone looking to maximize their own or their team’s performance. Hansen's counterintuitive findings will compel the audience to think anew how they can take their performance to the next level. Based on the Wall Street Journal bestseller “Great at Work,” the session is packed with practical insights and tips for how people in your organization can improve productivity, innovate better, and make better decisions. It is well suited for topics such as leading change, performance improvement, teamwork, collaboration, and time management.
Leading Collaboration (That Creates Real Results)
One of the great leadership challenges of our time is to drive effective collaboration throughout organizations. Morten Hansen has long been recognized as one of the world foremost experts on this topic, starting with his award-winning doctoral dissertation at Stanford Business School and his pathbreaking book “Collaboration” that has been used by many executives and leaders in business, government and non-profits to reap results from better collaboration. In this thought-provoking session, Hansen starts with the premise that “bad collaboration is worse than none at all.” The idea is that not all collaboration is a good thing; rather, the key is to implement disciplined collaboration that maximizes results. Hansen offers practical frameworks for identifying barriers to collaboration and describes how the powerful concept of “T-shaped management” improves collaboration performance.
How to Lead in a Disruptive World
Nearly every business and organization is undergoing dramatic changes, much of it fueled by the digital revolution. How do you prepare your team and organization to thrive in such a world? In their New York Times bestseller “Great by Choice,” Morten Hansen and Jim Collins (author of “Good to Great”) reveal the findings from a massive study that show how the best leaders and companies navigate through uncertainty and disruption and become truly great. In this session, Morten Hansen will offer practical advice and unpack the leadership skills required to succeed in turbulent times.
