Steve Denning

Steve Denning Speaker Biography

Master Storyteller, Agile Business and Leadership Expert

Steve Denning is a master storyteller, and an agile business and leadership expert. He is the author of six successful business books on leadership, leadership storytelling, and management, as well as a novel and a volume of poems.

Forbes Columnist

Since 2011, he has been writing a popular Leadership column for Forbes.com and has published more than 600 articles on the Creative Economy, with more than 6 million visitors and more than 15 million page views. He has interviewed eminent gurus such as Clayton Christensen.

Affiliations

Steve is a member of the Advisory Board of the Drucker Forum, headquartered in Vienna, Austria. The annual Drucker Forum, held in November each year, has become the leading global conference on general management issues. Each year, Steve has chaired a panel at the Forum, which attracts the world’s top thought leaders in management.

From 2014 to 2016, Steve was a member of the board of directors of Scrum Alliance, a rapidly growing association of some 460,000 members with a mission of transforming the world of work. On behalf of Scrum Alliance, he hosts a monthly series of webinars with world-renowned management thought leaders like Gary Hamel and Roger Martin.

In 2015, Steve led the Learning Consortium for the Creative Economy in which a group of firms, including Microsoft and Ericsson, which shared insights on the emerging Creative Economy. The Learning Consortium was highlighted by the Financial Times and by Forbes and presented to the Drucker Forum in November 2015.

Twitter

Steve has more than 19,000 followers on Twitter He has been named by A.T. Kearney as “one of the top ten digital innovation influencers on Twitter.”

Books

Steve Denning is the author of The Age of Agile, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Re-inventing the Workplace for the 21st Century, The Secret Language of Leadership and The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling.

World Bank

Steve worked at the World Bank for several decades in many capacities and held various management positions, including Director of the Southern Africa Department from 1990 to 1994 and Director of the Africa Region from 1994 to 1996. From 1996 to 2000, Steve was the Program Director, Knowledge Management at the World Bank.

Radical Management

In November 2000, Steve Denning was selected as one of the world’s ten Most Admired Knowledge Leaders (Teleos) He now works with organizations in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia on leadership, innovation, business narrative and most recently, radical management.

Clients

His clients have included many organizations, large and small, around the world, including GE, IBM, Microsoft, McKinsey, Shell, Netflix, Bristol Myers Squibb, Deloitte, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Syngenta, Danfoss, McDonalds, Unilever, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Abbott Laboratories, MWH, Ernst & Young, CRM Learning, Xerox, Oracle, Maritz, Target, Burns & McDonnell, Mitre Corporation, Innovation Council, Deluxe, Fetzer Foundation, Diageo (UK), UK Parliamentary Ombudsman, Nestle (Switzerland), Novo Nordisk (Denmark), International Energy Agency (Austria), Symbiosis (Austria), PMI (France), Ambrosetti (Italy), ARK group (UK, Asia, Australia), Air New Zealand, World Bank, UN, UNDP, US Army, USAID, CIA, NSA, Defense Intelligence Agency, NetHope, The Brookings Institution, American Institute of Architects, California Workforce Association, CIA, NSA, NIMA, FAA, NY State Government, Oregon State Government, Australian government ministries, New Zealand ministries and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Norway).

Education

Steve was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He studied law and psychology at Sydney University and worked as a lawyer in Sydney for several years. He did a postgraduate degree in law at Oxford University in the U.K.

Teaching

Steve was a Senior Scholar at the Burns Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland from 2006-2009. In the Fall of 2009, Steve was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls Colleges, Oxford University, UK.

Steve Denning Speaking Topics

The Benefits of Knowledge Management: Communication Tactics for Leaders

Steve Denning is a leader in public knowledge, pushing the envelope in the ideologies of business, leadership and communication. His insight on effective tactics and strategies is highly engaging. He found that, in dealing with unexpected change and an overflow of information, the best format for persuasion is storytelling. The process of finding leadership within the chaotic atmosphere of the business world appears complex, but can be overcome with diligence and commitment. Attempting to shift a slow-moving public company is daunting. Denning tried many tactics of proposition before being successful. All humans can relate to a story and see the rational decisions and consequences being played out. He therefore developed a theory of rhetorical narrative which resulted in more concise levels of communication.

Radical Management

In this speech, author Steve Denning defines "radical management" and shows how it can be an effective way to lead team members in a business. He explains that radical management is everything that traditional management isn't, and demonstrates how this is so. Radical management works with the ever-changing environment of the current working world and simultaneously creates deep job satisfaction, high productivity, client delight and continuous innovation. In this interesting speech, Steve Denning uses examples from his book, 'The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century,' to show how this new form of management is becoming increasingly more popular in the world of business and how viewers of this presentation can apply it into their own lives.

What’s Next for Agile: Strategic Agility

If Agile only creates great workplaces for software developers, but doesn’t generate better business outcomes, its life expectancy will be short. Many organizations embraced Agile management assuming that cost reductions, time savings and quality enhancements for existing customers (i.e. operational Agility) will yield financial gains. Owing to increased competitive pressures this assumption often proves incorrect. Dramatic recent instances include Intel and GE. Major financial gains are more likely to come from Strategic Agility, i.e. generating innovations that create entirely new markets and that turn non-customers into customers. Instead of being slightly better than everybody else in a crowded field, a firm practicing Strategic Agility creates new markets and dominates them. Profit margins are bigger, and the value to society is often larger. The talk will cover what’s involved in achieving Strategic Agility, including a playbook for systematically generating market-creating innovations, and the necessary shift in culture that is required.