Margaret Heffernan
Margaret Heffernan is an entrepreneur, Chief Executive and author. In the UK, she was CEO of IPPA and Marlin Consulting; in the US, she ran Internet software businesses InfoMation Corp., ZineZone Corp. and iCast Corp. She is the author of 6 books and is one of the most viewed TED speakers on business and leadership having been viewed by over 16 million people.
Margaret advises and writes about issues of growth, strategy and how companies confront an unpredictable future. She is acutely aware that leaders need external input in order to understand what is happening inside their organisations, outside in the marketplace and the strategic fit (or conflict) between the two. Given the executive need for focus, how can any leader have adequate peripheral vision? Given the need for vision, how do great leaders know what is going on inside their companies?
Margaret graduated from Cambridge University and produced award-winning programmes for the BBC for thirteen years. She then led IPPA, described by the Financial Times as ‘the most formidable lobbying organisation in the UK’. Returning to the US, she developed multimedia products with Tom Peters, Peter Lynch, Intuit, and Standard and Poors. As CEO of several, successive software companies, she was named one of the top 25 media executives by the Hollywood Reporter.
Since returning to the UK, she has published 6 books, including Wilful Blindness which was named ‘one of the most important business books of the decade’ by the FT and A Bigger Prize which won the Transmission Prize in 2015. Her most recent book, Uncharted, explores the challenges of forecasting and the inherent unpredictability of the future and has been described by the FT as ‘timely, wise and appealingly human’. Margaret is also a Professor of Practice at the University of Bath School of Management in the UK. In 2024, she was inducted into the Thinkers50 hall of fame.
Margaret is the Chair of DACS (Designers’ and Artists’ Collecting Society) and is also Faculty Co-Lead of the Responsible Leadership Programme as well as on the boards of several private companies. She also broadcasts on Radio 4 about business, leadership and thinking, and writes for the Financial Times and other journals. She is married with two children.