Hal Gregersen, Ph.D.

Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Innovation, MIT Sloan School of Management

Hal Gregersen is a senior lecturer in leadership and innovation at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, a former executive director of the MIT Leadership Center, a fellow at Innosight, and a co-founder of the Innovator’s DNA consulting group. He has dedicated his extensive career, including prior teaching posts at INSEAD, London Business School, and Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, to creating cultures of fearless inquiry and to helping leaders transform their organizations into innovative powerhouses. Ranked as one of the world’s 20 most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50 and winner of the 2017 Distinguished Achievement Award for leadership, Gregersen regularly delivers inspirational keynote speeches, interactive and dynamic customized workshops, and transformational advisory experiences. 

In his Nautilus award-winning book, “Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life” (based on 200+ interviews with catalytic questioners like Elon Musk and Orit Gadiesh), he argues that while people are programmed to look for answers, the real catalyst for innovative, disruptive change is catalytic inquiry. Twenty years ago Gregersen created a repeatable three-step methodology, the Question Burst, by which companies can begin to build better problem solvers and enhance creative impact at all levels, from senior executives to entry-level employees. His Question Burst method, combined with four more habits of inquiry, have helped redesign company cultures around constructive questioning at Chanel, Daimler, Disney·Pixar, Ernst & Young, Fidelity, Genentech, Patagonia, Salesforce, World Economic Forum, and Zappos, among others.

Gregersen co-authored, with Clayton Christensen and Jeff Dyer, “The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators” (translated into 14 languages worldwide), a guide to cultivating the discovery skills that CEOs and entrepreneurs rely on to build and guide sustainably creative companies. Having personally interviewed 100+ ground-breaking leaders at the world’s most innovative companies, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, Gregersen draws on rigorous research and analysis (based on a database of +25,000 leaders) to successfully advise the world’s largest corporations on innovation, transformation and key leadership challenges.

Gregersen has lived and worked outside the United States for over a decade – in England, Finland, France, and the UAE. He and his wife now reside north of Boston where he pursues his lifelong avocation, photography, and she her lifelong love, sculpture.