Behnam Tabrizi

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Behnam Tabrizi is a world-renowned expert in Organizational and Leadership Transformation, best-selling author, and an award-winning teacher, scholar and global advisor. He has served as a faculty member of Stanford University for the past 25 years; over which time he’s written six books on leading innovation and change. His latest book, The Inside-Out Effect: A Practical Guide to Transformational Leadership, is an international bestseller and was featured by the Washington Post as its best book on the subject of leadership. Another book by Dr. Tabrizi, Rapid Transformation, was chosen by Business Insider, and getAbstract, which covers over 20,000 business books, as their No. 1 book on leadership.

Dr. Tabrizi has advised thousands of global CEOs and leaders in a wide range of industries—including high-tech ( Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM and HP), banking and finance, retail, healthcare, and government—on how to plan, mobilize, and implement transformational initiatives that have lifted leaders’ aspirations and created over $23.5B in revenue and over $2.4B in savings for the world’s most well-known companies. He’s also had the privilege of advising the President of the United States, his cabinet, and the top leadership team at the European Union.

Dr. Tabrizi’s doctoral thesis, a global study of more than 100 companies conducted with McKinsey & Co., was the recipient of the prestigious ASQ award in organization studies. The study demonstrated that faster, more dedicated prototyping—versus more planning—results in a more agile culture capable of rapid product development. His research, touted as “pioneering work” in The Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and the San Jose Mercury News, helped lay the foundation behind both design thinking and agile development. His work has also been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The Financial Times, The Economist, Strategy+Business, Fast Company, BusinessWeek, and Fortune. Dr. Tabrizi has also been interviewed regarding his work on transformation by the BBC, CNN, and C-SPAN.

Dr. Tabrizi has served on the boards of Clever Sense (sold to Google), WebMBO (merged with Realm Corp.), Catapult Ventures, and has held positions at the Harvard Business School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He received a B.S. in computer science, summa cum laude, and then earned a master’s degree in computer science at the University of Illinois-Urbana. He earned an M.S. degree in engineering management as well as a doctorate in strategy, organizations and digital transformation from Stanford University.