Dorie Clark

Business Professor at Duke and Columbia, Ranked #1 Communication Coach, Bestselling Author, and A Top 50 Business Thinker in World

Topics: Business, Strategy, Leadership, Branding & Marketing, Business Leadership, Communication, Best Selling Author, Entrepreneur, Thought Leadership, Women Leaders, TED Speakers, Education, Innovation, Media

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Biography

Dorie Clark has been named one of the Top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinkers50, and was recognized as the #1 Communication Coach in the world by the Marshall Goldsmith Leading Global Coaches Awards. Clark, a consultant and keynote speaker, teaches executive education at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and Columbia Business School.

Recognized as a “branding expert” by the Associated Press, Fortune, and Inc. magazine, she is the author of The Long Game, Entrepreneurial You, Reinventing You, and Stand Out, which was named the #1 Leadership Book of the Year by Inc. magazine and one of the Top 10 Business Books of the Year by Forbes. It was also a Washington Post bestseller. Her books have been translated into Russian, Chinese, Arabic, French, Polish, Korean, Spanish, Italian, Vietnamese, and Thai.

Clark, whom the New York Times described as an “expert at self-reinvention and helping others make changes in their lives,” is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review. She consults and speaks for a diverse range of clients, including Google, the World Bank, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, the Ford Foundation, and Yale University.

A former presidential campaign spokeswoman, Clark has also taught for Spain’s IE Business School, HEC-Paris, Babson College, Smith College Executive Education, UNC’s Kenan-Flagler School of Business, and more.

She has guest lectured at universities including Harvard Business School, the Harvard Kennedy School, Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Georgetown, NYU, the MIT Sloan School of Management, and the University of Michigan.

Her work has been published in the Harvard Business Review Guide to Getting the Right Job and the Harvard Business Review Guide to Networking, and she is quoted frequently in the worldwide media, including NPR, the BBC, and MSNBC. She has been a regular commentator on Canada’s CTV and was named one of Inc. magazine’s “100 Great Leadership Speakers for Your Next Conference.”

A former New England Press Association award-winning journalist, Clark directed the environmental documentary film The Work of 1000, and was a producer for a multiple-Grammy-winning jazz album. She is a Broadway investor, as well as a member of BMI’s Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Advanced Workshop, widely considered the premier training ground for musical theater lyricists and composers.

At age 14, Clark entered Mary Baldwin College’s Program for the Exceptionally Gifted. At 18, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College, and two years later received a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. You can download her Long Game strategic thinking self-assessment at dorieclark.com/thelonggame.

Videos

Speech TopicsExpand each topic to learn more

How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World

It’s no secret that today’s professionals feel pulled in too many directions. In this talk, Dorie Clark – Harvard Business Review author and Duke University Fuqua School of Business executive education professor – will share concrete strategies to help you sharpen your strategic thinking and embrace a long-term perspective that pays future business and career dividends.

You’ll learn how to:
• Create priorities with the future in mind
• Understand what we’re optimizing for
• Make the right kind of tradeoffs
• Achieve ‘strategic patience’
• Place little bets to identify promising leads and emergent possibilities

Cultivating Mental Agility in a Complex World

Now more than ever, we have to be ready to adapt to rapid change – and, even better, predict it. Columbia University executive education professor Dorie Clark – twice named one of the Top 50 Business Thinkers in the World – will share strategies to help you nimbly adjust when the situation changes, learn from the past, and get smarter about planning for the future.

Participants will learn how to:

• Create ‘smart networks’ that enable you to predict changes ahead of others
• Analyze bad outcomes – before they happen, so you can prevent them
• Seize opportunity by leveraging your unique advantages
• Harness the forces that create serendipity

The Real Reason You Feel So Busy (and What to Do About It)

These days, every professional is pressed for time. But it’s not just too many meetings and too many emails. It turns out we’re making upstream choices that render us busy – and feeling overwhelmed – much of the time. In this expanded version of her viral TED.com talk (2 million+ views), Wall Street Journal bestselling author Dorie Clark shares research that reveals the hidden reasons behind the choices we’re making, and practical tips to break the cycle. That enables us to make better strategic choices about how and where we want to spend our time to achieve the greatest impact.

You’ll learn how to:
• Create white space in your schedule, so you can finally think
• Guard your priorities and convey them to others – without creating friction
• Feel more in control of your time and your calendar
• Achieve more, because you’re focusing on the right things

Reinventing You in the Age of AI

Between the post-pandemic shifts in the workplace (including hybrid and remote work) and the rise of artificial intelligence (including ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies), we’re facing rapid, profound disruption. In this talk, Dorie Clark – author of Reinventing You (Harvard Business Review Press) – will discuss practical strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve in your career, take charge of your professional development, and ensure your skills and abilities are fully recognized at work.

You’ll learn how to:
• Discover how you’re currently perceived
• Strategically position yourself for the future
• Leverage your unique strengths
• Powerfully demonstrate the contribution you can make at work