Lexington, Virginia, United States
Whitney Johnson is the CEO of Disruption Advisors (thedisruptionadvisors.com), a leadership development company, helping you grow your people to grow your business. A Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Amazon bestselling author, Whitney was named by Thinkers50 as one of the ten leading business thinkers in the world (2021). She is a world class keynote speaker and a popular lecturer for Harvard Business Publishing’s Corporate Learning. She has 1.7 million followers on LinkedIn where she was selected as a Top Voice in 2020. Her course on Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship has been viewed more than one million times, and her LinkedIn Lives have more than 1 million cumulative views. In 2017, she was selected from more than 17,000 candidates for the initial cohort of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches, and was named as the #1 Talent Coach. Johnson is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, as well as the author of the WSJ bestselling Smart Growth, Build an A Team, a Financial Times Book of the Month, and the critically acclaimed Disrupt Yourself. In these books, she codifies the S Curve of Learning and the Seven Accelerants of Personal Disruption, both of which operationalize disruption theory by applying it to the individual. Integral to her work is the weekly Disrupt Yourself Podcast which has millions of downloads. Guests have included Brené Brown, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and Stephen M.R. Covey. Johnson was the cofounder 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 $25 billion. She was involved in fund formation, capital raising and the development of the fund’s strategy. A former award-winning Wall Street stock analyst, Johnson applies her understanding of momentum and growth in stocks to people. 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. She is married, has two children, and lives in Lexington, Virginia, where her family grows strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries and enjoys making jam. Learn more at thedisruptionadvisors.com Reach my team: [email protected] Speaking inquiries: [email protected]
Find out more about how we can work together at: thedisruptionadvisors.com Fact: High growth organizations need high growth individuals. Start-ups, growth stage companies, and private-equity backed companies all have one thing in common––you need high growth employees to execute your high growth plans. To achieve your ambitious organizational goals, you need people who can do more than keep up, you need employees who can set the pace. At WLJ Advisors, we work with you to calibrate your people for growth. Our work begins with a deep understanding of where people are individually, as well as organizationally, on their current S Curve of Learning(TM). Together we then optimize individual curves to carry the high load of growth organizationally. We train and coach your leaders on our seven-point framework of Personal Disruption (TM), the mechanism by which people become high growth individuals. Our proprietary methodology brings your people up to the speed of your organization so that they are comfortable working at the pace of your business, delivering the results that you need in the time you need them. From her years as an award-winning stock analyst on Wall Street, Whitney Johnson understands momentum and growth. Leveraging her proprietary S Curve of Learning and Personal Disruption Frameworks, along with WLJ Advisors’ expertise in coaching, teaching, and consulting, Whitney's team delivers results at speed. Whether you are a Fortune 500 company that has decided you need your people to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, $1-$5 billion company growing at 30% / year or a growth stage company doubling every year, for you to grow you need people who can grow too. The fundamental unit of disruption is the individual––use that knowledge to reach your potential.
WLJ Advisors, LLC coaches C-Suite executives from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies across a variety of industries, leveraging the proprietary S Curve of Learning and Personal Disruption frameworks. CEO Whitney Johnson was recently named the #1 Talent Coach by Thinkers50 / MG100, she is a Master Certified coach in Stakeholder-Centered Coaching, has coached for Harvard Business School Executive Education, and was selected as a "Top 15 Coach" out of 17,000 applicants by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, the world's leading executive coach. As an Institutional Investor-ranked analyst at Merrill Lynch, Whitney innovated an approach to momentum and growth that started with stocks and then applied it to people. In working with legendary thought leader, Clayton Christensen at the Harvard Business School, she developed a similar adaptation to the concept of disruption: companies don't disrupt, people do. The Disruptive Innovation Fund in which she was a co-founder invested in and led the $8 million seed round for Korea's Coupang, currently valued at $9+ billion. In 2012, she sold her stake and focused exclusively on developing the IP of personal disruption as a mechanism for high growth. This work resulted in the bestselling Disrupt Yourself (2015), in which she codified her frameworks for building high growth individuals and organizations––Personal Disruption and the S Curve of Learning frameworks. More recently, she published Build an A-Team (Harvard Business Press, 2018) which applies the work to teams. WLJ Advisors works with high growth CEOs and select up-and-coming leaders who are ready and willing to calibrate for growth so that they can reach their potential. To learn more about how we think, our approach, listen to Episodes 80, 100 and 120 of the Disrupt Yourself podcast. whitneyjohnson.com
In this podcast, we interview some amazing people, like Adam Grant, the NY Times bestselling author of Give and Take, Brene Brown, the world's leading expert on shame and vulnerability, Eric Schurenberg, the publisher of Inc and Fast Company, and Susan Cain, author of Bittersweet and Quiet. The topic is always personal disruption, and how you can become a higher growth individual, moving up your current S Curve of Learning.
I have contributed to the Harvard Business Review regularly since I first wrote Can Nice Girls Negotiate? My signature piece, Disrupt Yourself, appeared in the August 2012 print version.
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