Mary Boone Speaker Biography
Leading Authority on Organizational Communication, Leadership Development, and Large-scale Interactive Meetings
Mary Boone, founder of MaryBoone.com and president of Boone Associates is a leading authority on high performance collaboration and engagement. Her passion for integrating ideas across disciplines has positioned her as a catalyst for transformation in the fields of IT, Communication, Marketing, and Meetings and Events. For over twenty-five years, she has helped organizations manage a wide range of organizational change efforts. Mary’s client list paints a diverse canvas of public and private organizations – such as IBM, NASA, JPMorganChase, ConocoPhillips, AARP, the Arthur Page Society, the U.S. Department of Labor, and the United States Army.
Awards and Accolades
Mary’s work — as a keynote speaker, educator, thought leader and published author – has received widespread acclaim. Among those quoting from and praising Mary’s work are Tom Peters, The New York Times, National Public Radio, CNN, The Financial Times, Chief Executive Magazine, Investor’s Business Daily, CNBC, Information Week, CIO Magazine, and Industry Week. Successful Meetings Magazine has recommended Mary as one of 25 hot speakers and in the summer of 2009 featured her on the cover as a “strategic thinker.”
Publications
Mary is a highly praised Thought Leader. The Harvard Business Review article she co-authored with David Snowden entitled “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making” won the Emerald Citation Award in 2011 which is awarded to the top 50 articles from the top 300 management publications worldwide that have proven impact since their publication date, and in 2008, they won an Academy of Management award for the same article. She has written over 100 articles for a wide variety of general business and information systems publications, is a contributor to Successful Meetings Magazine, has served as a regular columnist for Sales and Marketing Management Magazine and hosted a regular segment on FMN, a video series for financial executives. During this earlier part of her career, Mary was a contributing editor to two leading teleconferencing industry publications: Business TV Magazine and TeleSpan.
Books
Mary Boone’s books include Managing Inter@ctively: Executing Strategy, Improving Communication and Creating a Knowledge-Sharing Culture (McGraw-Hill) and The Information Edge (co-authored with N. Dean Meyer, Dow Jones). Another of her books, Leadership and the Computer (Prima Publishing), was selected as “required reading” for Congress by Newt Gingrich when he was Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Education
Mary’s degrees, a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin, and an undergraduate from Wake Forest University, are in communication theory. She is a Senior Fellow and on the Steering Committee of the International Executive Forum at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, California and early in her career, she was a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a spinoff of the Rand Corporation. Mary teaches Organizational Behavior for Northeastern University’s MBA program and she has been a Guest Lecturer at Emory University School of Business, The University of Texas School of Communication, and the National Defense University’s ICAF Program. Prior to founding Boone Associates, Mary was vice president of NDMA Inc., one of the foremost consultancies in the management of information technology departments.
Mary Boone Speaking Topics
High Performance Collaboration & Engagement: Strategies, Methods and Technologies for Building Authentic, Lasting Business Relationships
We are in an era where authentic relationships matter and relationships are built through high quality communication and collaboration. We have to now engage and truly listen to people rather than just “selling” them on our point of view. The good news is that we now have the tools and approaches to do just that. This speech will literally change how participants communicate and collaborate. The multi-disciplinary nature of Mary’s research and experience in IT, Communication, Marketing, Meetings and Events, Instructional Design and Organizational Behavior provide the perfect backdrop for understanding and mastering this new era of collaboration and social media.
Leadership, Collaboration, & Complexity: How to Lead in an Era of Transparency and Uncertainty
This speech is based on the award-winning Harvard Business Review article, “A Leader’s Framework for Decision-making,” that Mary Boone co-authored with Dave Snowden. Mary’s ideas on leadership are refreshingly unconventional. Leading in the New Millennium truly is different and she explains not only how it’s different, but also what to do about it. Boone’s twenty-five years of research and experience in the fields of communication, IT, and organizational behavior uniquely position her to assist leaders in facing the challenges of leadership in conditions of great complexity.
Four Elements of Strategic Value for Meetings and Events
Because meetings have been at the forefront of the minds of executives for the past several years, we have a clear opportunity to completely reshape how they perceive the value of meetings. As a call to action to take advantage of this opportunity, in 2009 Mary wrote a white paper called, "The Case for Meetings: Four Elements of Strategic Value" and donated it to the MPI (Meeting Professionals International) Foundation. Since then, she has designed and participated in workshops, seminars, and other events designed to educate the industry about what truly makes us strategic and how to share that information with key decision makers. These workshops are invaluable for not only increasing the industry’s ability to articulate its worth, but also for building bridges of understanding between suppliers and planners. In these highly interactive workshops, both planners and suppliers learn how to collaborate more effectively with each other to deliver truly strategic results to organizations.
Reinventing Meetings & Events--The Ultimate Collaboration Tool: How to Design Meetings and Events That Build Brands and Relationships, Change Cultures, and Get Things Done
Why do we need to reinvent meetings? What’s wrong with the ones we have? We bring smart people together only to have them sit and listen to lengthy presentations. We restrict their ability to freely share ideas except at breaks, and we fire PowerPoint slides at them like heavy artillery. Challenges extend to virtual meetings as well: Do you ever sit in an endless conference call while one person dominates the “conversation?” Have you been in threaded discussions that ramble on with no endpoint or purpose in sight? Mary’s session will give you the tools you need to put an end to ineffective meetings.
Mary Boone Books
Leadership and the Computer
Purchase Book
The Information Edge
Purchase Book
Managing Interactively: Executing Business Strategy, Improving Communication, and Creating a Knowledge-Sharing Culture
Purchase BookMary Boone Videos
Mary Boone Speaker Testimonials
Mary Boone is on a mission to revolutionize the meeting industry through the forward thinking use of "Meeting Design" to transform a gathering of people into a catalyst for positive change. She understands the importance of collaboration and thinks of meetings as one of the best ways to go beyond lip service to really solving problems. Every day, I see more CEOs embracing her as the "Secret Sauce" that drives their success. I use clips from Mary's speeches in my own talks because of her smart delivery and her important mission. Her work has transformed the way I think about the world of meetings and events as an engine to drive change management and organizational transformation. We need an army of Mary Boones working to change the world, and I trust that she is on the way to inspire thousands to follow in her footsteps.
- CEO and Founder | BizBash Media
Mary is the type of advisor who can work at the C-level with confidence. As a CEO, I found her insights into our organization to be invaluable. I’ve also witnessed firsthand her work in meeting design– she keeps high-level participants fully engaged before, during and after an event. Her intellectual involvement in the content and form of an event delivers real results.
- CEO | Text 100