Quick and Nimble
Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation
Lavin Exclusive Speaker
What happens if you interview over 500 of the world’s top CEOs, and instead of asking them about share prices or bottom lines, you ask them about how they lead, motivate, and hire employees? You get Adam Bryant’s decade-long “Corner Office” column in The New York Times. And you also get his incredible talks: razor-sharp distillations of the finest strategies on leadership and corporate culture from the world’s best innovators.
Want to know how America’s top CEOs lead? Just ask them. That’s what Adam Bryant did, for a decade, in his landmark “Corner Office” column for The New York Times. Asking these outstanding executives how they build and hire teams, create a sense of mission, and stay motivated and curious brought Bryant to the heart of transformative leadership today—beyond thoughtless clichés and canned responses. It also built the core of his two remarkable books—The Corner Office and Quick and Nimble—which offer unparalleled insight into what it takes to foster a corporate culture of innovation, and what sets high performers apart from their peers.
Today, Bryant puts his extensive knowledge to work as Managing Director and Partner at Merryck & Co., helping executive teams sharpen their thinking around culture and leadership, and is working on his upcoming book The CEO Test: Mastering the Seven Critical Challenges that Make or Break Leaders (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021).
As a speaker, Bryant offers a much-needed tonic against the dry, academic jargon that afflicts many keynotes. Instead, he presents real stories—from real people at real companies—combined with a hands-on application of their hard-earned lessons. Always candid and conversational, Bryant can speak broadly and universally, as well as get down to the particulars of any company through a personalized “culture audit.”
In his latest book Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation, Bryant collects the wisdom of hundreds of business leaders to tackle innovation in today’s relentlessly transforming global economy. Quick and Nimble offers “reams of practical advice for and from business leaders—most thankfully—with a human, caring touch” (Kirkus) and is what The Huffington Post calls “both enlightening and immensely practical.” Bryant’s first book, The Corner Office: How Top CEOs Made It and How You Can Too, was an instant New York Times bestseller drawing together wisdom from leaders at iconic companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and DreamWorks to establish the “five qualities CEOs value most in their employees.”
Bryant has over thirty years of journalism experience as a reporter and editor, including eighteen spent at The New York Times, where he was a member of the team that founded the Innovation Report. He was the lead editor of a series that won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. In addition to consulting, Bryant is the Senior Adviser to the Reuben Mark Initiative for Organizational Character and Leadership at Columbia University. He also holds a Masters degree from Columbia University.