Margaret Heffernan

MARGARET HEFFERNAN is an entrepreneur, Chief Executive and author. She writes books and blogs, teaches and mentors senior and chief executives.

She was born in Texas, raised in Holland and educated at Cambridge University. She worked in BBC Radio for five years where she wrote, directed, produced and commissioned dozens of documentaries and dramas. For 8 years as a television producer, she made documentary films for Timewatch, Arena, and Newsnight. She designed and executive-produced a thirteen part series on The French Revolution for the BBC and A&E. She also produced music videos with the London Chamber Orchestra to raise money for Unicef’s Lebanese fund.

Leaving the BBC, she ran the trade association IPPA, which represented the interests of independent film and television producers and was once described by the Financial Times as “the most formidable lobbying organization in England.”

In 1994, she returned to the United States where she worked on public affair campaigns in Massachusetts and with software companies trying to break into multimedia. She developed interactive multimedia products with Peter Lynch, Tom Peters, Standard & Poors and The Learning Company. She then joined CMGI where she ran, bought and sold leading Internet businesses, serving as Chief Executive Officer for InfoMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation and iCAST Corporation. She was named one of the Internet’s Top 100 by Silicon Alley Reporter in 1999, one of the Top 25 by Streaming Media magazine and one of the Top 100 Media Executives by The Hollywood Reporter. Her “Tear Down the Wall” campaign against AOL won the 2001 Silver SABRE award for public relations.

Margaret has published six books: The Naked Truth: A Working Woman’s Manifesto (Wiley, 2004) is about women’s careers. Women on Top: How Female Entrepreneurs are Changing the Rules for Business Success (Penguin 2007) charts the rise of female entrepreneurs. Her third book Wilful Blindness (Simon & Schuster 2011) was a finalist for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Best Business Book of the Year Award; the FT later described it as one of the most important books of the decade. All of these works explore why and how companies packed full of talented, motivated and committed executives fail to spot major problems or to capture the full intellectual innovative capacity of their people. A Bigger Prize (Simon & Schuster 2014) looks at what it takes for individuals and organizations to be truly creative and collaborative: where the barriers to achievement lie and how to overcome them. In 2015 TED published Beyond Measure: The Big Impact of Small Changes which looks at the defining characteristics of sustainably innovative organizations. Margaret’s TED talks have been seen by over 13 million people. 2020 saw the publication of Margaret’s sixth book, Uncharted: How to map the future together, which explores how individuals and organizations can creatively and productively prepare for an unknowable future. It was nominated for best business book of the year by the Financial Times, CMI, Strategy + Leadership, LeadershipNow, and Porchlight. It was also selected as the “Best of the Best” by Medium and was featured by Bloomberg as one of the best books of 2021.

Margaret won the 2008 Prowess Media aware for her programme about female entrepreneurship, Changing the Rules. She has written and presented many Analysis programmes for BBC Radio 4 and written five plays for the BBC. Through Merryck & Co., she mentors global businesses leaders. She is a Professor at the School of Management at the University of Bath and has been invited to speak at business schools around the world, including Harvard Business School, the Rotman School, London Business School and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. She is the Faculty Co-Lead for the Forward Institute’s Responsible Leadership Programme. She also lectures widely at organizations as diverse as the Federal Bank of the United States, Disney, Accenture, Intel, Google, GSK, Novartis, Microsoft, Roche, KLA-Tencor, State Street, Khosla Ventures, Standard Chartered Bank, Chrysler, J.P.Morgan Chase and Procter & Gamble. She chairs the board of DACS and has advised both the Casey Review into the culture and standards of the Metropolitan Police and the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse led by Alexis Jay.