Charlotte Roberts

Charlotte Roberts Speaker Biography

Leadership * Learning * Change

Dr. Charlotte Roberts is an executive consultant, speaker and writer who focuses on organizations’ sustainability and competitiveness. She is co-author of two cutting-edge leadership books with her colleagues Peter Senge, Art Kleiner, Rick Ross, Bryan Smith and George Roth. The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization is a practical guidebook used for creating an enduring competitive advantage; over a million copies have been sold worldwide. Their second Fieldbook, The Dance of Change: The Challenges of Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations (1999) maps a pathway to sustaining system-wide change beyond the leadership team’s personal drive and commitment. In 2007 Dr. Roberts’ research, “Executives’ Fractured Spirit and Dissociation at Work,” was published in The Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion, an international refereed journal.

As a speaking professional, Charlotte has served in many roles. She has helped design conferences, served as emcee and theme weaver, been a keynote speaker and workshop presenter. She has worked with corporations, associations and government organizations in the United States, Europe and Asia.

Charlotte has been an organizational development consultant for over 15 years. Her clients have been in different industries from shipbuilding to computer software and hardware design to consumer products and pet nutrition to healthcare delivery. She works with her clients on strategy implementation, building high-performing leadership teams and creating a culture of learning.

Dr. Roberts uses her hands-on experience and wealth of anecdotes in keynote speaking, training and writing to engage others in learning. Recognizing the power of distance learning as early as 1993, Charlotte has hosted nation-wide satellite broadcasts on leadership, managing people and building the learning capacity of organizations. She and Peter Senge led a satellite broadcast series in 1995-96. In 1998, she introduced the sixth discipline of leadership in a nation-wide broadcast “Conscious Oversight: The Sixth Discipline.”

For three years, Dr. Roberts’ column, “Managing People,” was featured in a business journal in the Philadelphia area. Her articles, “Leading Total Quality” and “Can We Talk?” in the Journal for Quality and Participation, are among her published articles. Her article, “The Learning Organization: Making It Work,” was published in the June, 1996 proceedings of Foundation de L’Enterprise, Brussels, Belgium, where she presented before European executives, Belgian government officials and His Majesty Albert II. The meeting focused on Europe as a unified knowledge-based society.

Her background includes a Bachelor’s degree in Education and a Master’s degree in Human Development from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where she later served on the faculty. While working for SmithKline & French Pharmaceuticals in sales and sales training, she graduated from the Management Program at the Wharton School of Business.

As part of her professional development, Ms. Roberts completed a one-year program in Systems Dynamics and Policy design taught by MIT faculty and the breakthrough program in Scenario Planning taught by the staff of Global Business Network in Berkeley. In spring 1997, Charlotte toured China with a group studying the medical delivery system and alternative healing practices of Traditional Chinese Medicine.  Charlotte recently completed a doctoral program in Consciousness and Spirituality from Saybrook Graduate School. This will serve her clients who recognize the connection between work and spirit in their organizations.

Charlotte serves on the Board of Trustees of Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina and the Excellence Foundation Board for UNC-Greensboro. She has served on the Advisory Council of the American Compensation Association and the boards of several educational and service organizations.

She is president of Blue Fire Partners, Inc. located in the Charlotte area of North Carolina. When Charlotte is not working, you’ll find her cruising on a jet ski on Lake Norman, walking, playing the piano or playing with her cairn terrier, Tess.