Whitney Johnson

Whitney Johnson, CEO and founder of boutique consultancy WLJ Advisors, is one of the fifty leading business thinkers in the world as named by Thinkers50 and 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 Corporate Learning, and an adviser to C-Suite executives. She has over 1.8 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 (MG100)– and was recently named by MG as the #1 Talent Coach.

An innovation and disruption theorist, Whitney is a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review, and author of the bestselling Build an A-Team (Harvard Business Press, 2018), a Financial Times and 800-CEO-READ Book of the

Month, and Disrupt Yourself (Harvard Business Press, 2019), 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 co-founder 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, rated by Starmine as a superior stock-picker. As an equity analyst, stocks under coverage included America Movil (NYSE: AMX), Televisa (NYSE: TV) and Telmex (NYSE: TMX), which accounted for roughly 40% of Mexico’s market capitalization.

Whitney hosts the weekly Disrupt Yourself podcast, the bi-weekly LinkedIn Live Calm Amidst Chaos, and publishes a popular weekly newsletter. She is married, has two children, and lives in Lexington, VA. For more information please visit whitneyjohnson.com.