Dr. Heidi K. Gardner

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 a Next Generation Business Guru, 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.

Dr. Gardner works extensively with her team at Gardner & Co., partnering with boards, executive teams, and other senior leaders to boost performance and engagement by embedding the principles and practices of smarter, agile, cross-silo collaboration within those groups and across the broader organization and ecosystem—resulting in concrete, quantifiable performance improvements.

Altogether, Dr. Gardner has authored (or co-authored) more than 100 books, chapters, case studies, and articles. This includes newly published Smarter Collaboration: A New Approach to Breaking Down Barriers and Transforming Work and Washington Post best-selling book Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos. Her research received the Academy of Management’s prize for Outstanding Practical Implications for Management and has been selected multiple times for Harvard Business Review’s “best of” collections. It has also been featured in major media outlets around the globe.

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 Studies from the University of Pennsylvania (Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude), a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, and another master’s and Ph.D. from London Business School.