Frans Johansson

Featured Videos

TEDxNASA - The Future is Diverse and Unexpected

Diverse and Inclusive Teams: The New Engines of Growth

Speech Topics

In this classic talk, Johansson urges individuals and organizations to break down the silos and step into the Intersection – a place where different fields, disciplines, departments, and cultures converge to create new, remarkable breakthroughs.

A four-hour, intense and immersive experience where Johansson takes an audience through a stunning session of creativity and innovation in the wild. It incorporates a mix of keynotes, fast-paced interactions, vivid imagery, music and memorable techniques specifically designed to provide deep take-away.

How do you innovate your business and your career while the demands of non-stop performance are constantly increasing? Johansson will reveal how to rise to the tremendous challenges leaders today face around innovation and standing apart from everybody else.

The shelf-life of traditional IP is trending towards zero. Instead an organization’s ability to move fast, respond to changing conditions, capitalize on unexpected success and scale rapidly is becoming the key to future growth. Transform your company and drop the time of executing from 12 months to 12 weeks, even 12 days.

Johansson demonstrates why diversity is a key driver in innovative success and how you can capitalize on this fact. This talk has singlehandedly catalyzed organizational change across industry after industry.

The only constant is change and our interconnectedness means the world has become far more unpredictable. How can leaders navigate this climate? It takes collaboration, courage, and a new kind of thinking. Johansson will introduce a set of tools that can improve an organization’s ability to move fast, respond to changing conditions, capitalize on unexpected success and scale rapidly through breaking silos using connectedness to its advantage.

Biography

Frans Johansson is the author of The Medici Effect (HBS Press, 2004), an international bestseller that shattered assumptions about how great ideas happen and is now available in 20 languages, and The Click Moment (Penguin Portfolio, 2012), his acclaimed follow up on how to harness serendipity to stand apart.

In his books and in his presentations, Frans clearly shows how the best ideas and innovation come from collaboration between people with diverse experiences, skills, expertise, perspectives, backgrounds and cultures. Simply stated, Frans is known for making the business case for diversity. Beyond lip service, he packs his programs with plenty of examples and gives people what they need to know and what they need to do to break down silos and bring out the best that everyone has to give to any challenge or opportunity. Regardless of rank or where they reside on the org chart. Even if they aren’t on the org chart!

Frans has lived all his life at the intersection where ideas from different fields and cultures meet and collide. He was raised in Sweden by his African-American-Cherokee mother and Swedish father. Frans earned his BS in environmental science at Brown University and his MBA at Harvard Business School. He founded both a Boston-based software company and a medical device company operating out of Baltimore, Maryland and Stockholm, Sweden.

A dynamic and passionate leader and thinker, Frans has spoken extensively about “the Medici Effect” to companies, organizations and universities across the United States and the world. Organizations worldwide have engaged him to speak on issues of innovation and managing diversity before a wide range of audiences, from C-level executives to human resource practitioners to investment directors. These organizations include Volvo, Unilever, Kraft, PepsiCo, IBM, World Diversity Leadership Summit, Ernst & Young, General Motors, JP Morgan, Kodak, Mattel, SAAB, Sprint Nextel, Honeywell, Nike and the World Bank, among others.

He has written articles on healthcare, information technology and the science of sport fishing and has been featured on CNN’s AC360, ABC’s Early Morning Show, and CNBC’s The Business of Innovation series along with Jack Welch and Muhammad Yunus. Frans currently serves on the Board of Trustees for the New York Hall of Science.

Frans resides in New York City with his family.