Whitney Johnson is the CEO of WLJ Advisors and one of the fifty leading business thinkers in the world as named by Thinkers50. She is an expert on helping high-growth organizations develop high-growth individuals. She is an award-winning author, world-class keynote speaker, frequent lecturer for Harvard Business School’s Executive Education program, and an executive coach and adviser to CEOs. Whitney is a popular contributor to Harvard Business Review. She has over 1.6 million followers on LinkedIn, where she was selected as a Top Voice in 2018, and her course “The Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship” has been viewed more than one million times. In 2019, she was ranked by Thinkers50 as one of eight finalists in the Leadership category, and placed #3 on the Global Gurus’ list of Top 30 Organizational Culture Professionals. In 2017, she was selected from more than 16,000 candidates for Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 15 (now 100) Coaches program.
An innovation and disruption theorist, Whitney is the author of the bestselling Build an A-Team (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018), a Financial Times and 800-CEO-READ Book of the Month, and Disrupt Yourself, which Publisher’s Weekly called “Savvy . . . often counterintuitive . . . superb.” In her books, she codifies her Personal Disruption and S-Curve of Learning frameworks for developing high-growth individuals and organizations.
Whitney was the cofounder of the Disruptive Innovation Fund with Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen, through which they invested in and led the $8 million seed round for South Korea’s Coupang, currently valued at more than $9 billion. She was involved in fund formation, capital raising, and the development of the fund’s strategy. As a former award-winning Wall Street stock analyst, Whitney understands momentum and growth. She was an Institutional Investor–ranked equity research analyst for eight consecutive years and was rated by StarMine as a superior stock picker.
Whitney hosts the weekly Disrupt Yourself podcast, publishes a popular weekly newsletter, and she is married with two children. For more information, please visit www.whitneyjohnson.com.