Dr. Heidi K. Gardner is a sought-after advisor, keynote speaker, and facilitator for organizations across a wide range of industries globally. Named by Thinkers50 as both a Next Generation Business Guru and one of the world’s foremost leadership experts, she is a Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School and former professor at Harvard Business School. She is currently the faculty chair and instructor in multiple executive education programs at both institutions.

With her Gardner & Co. team, Dr. Gardner partners with boards, executive teams, and other senior leaders to boost performance by embedding the practices of smarter, cross-silo collaboration within those groups and across the broader organization and ecosystem. This results in concrete, quantifiable performance improvements. Altogether, Dr. Gardner has authored (or co-authored) more than 100 books, chapters, case studies, and articles. This includes best-selling books Smarter Collaboration: A New Approach to Breaking Down Barriers and Transforming Work (2022) and Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos (2017). Her research received the Academy of Management’s prize for Outstanding Practical Implications for Management, and has been selected five times for Harvard Business Review’s “best of” collections. Her work has been featured in major media
outlets around the globe, including ABC, the BBC, Børsen, The Boston Globe, CBS News, CNBC, CNN, Les Echos, The Economist, Fast Company, the Financial Times, Forbes, Fortune, MSN, and Time.

Dr. Gardner has lived and worked on four continents, including as a Fulbright Fellow, and for McKinsey & Co. and Procter & Gamble. She earned her BA in Japanese from the University of Pennsylvania (Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude), a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, and a second master’s and Ph.D. from London Business School.