Featured Speakers

Iris Firstenberg, Ph.D
Associate Adjunct Professor
UCLA Anderson School of Management

Introduction and comments by Professor David Lewin

A great leader helps keep a team engaged and energized when the pressure is high. In times of great uncertainty and rapid change, the challenge to maintain a sense of focus, drive, and enthusiasm requires unique efforts. We will discuss how to inspire and motivate people so that even in difficult times, people can accomplish extraordinary results. We will also discuss strategies for tapping the human potential for creative thinking in the workplace as a way of dealing with uncertainty and leading change in difficult times. 

Iris Firstenberg, Associate Adjunct Professor at the Anderson Graduate School of Management, will discuss how a culture of innovation rapidly recognizes change and adapts with new learning and action.  Successful organizations operate on the edge of chaos and embrace risk, error, and ambiguity as a way of life while practicing strategies that reduce the need for doing, undoing, and redoing.  This session provides provocative ideas and tools to give participants the adaptive capacity to work creatively with change and uncertainty and adapt more quickly to emerging opportunities.

Iris will lead an interactive session on setting the stage for creative thinking which focuses on the constraints that inhibit our ability to think with flexibility and delivers powerful thinking strategies that expand possibilities and prepares leaders to meet new challenges and create better opportunities as the future unfolds.  Through group discussion and conversation we will generate actionable ideas for participants to take back to their organizations.