Deborah Perry Piscione

 About

  • Deborah talks about  every organization can develop new mindsets, organizational structures, and product development/problem-solving processes – that will maximize opportunities in the future.
  • Audiences leave inspired by her pragmatic presentation on harnessing the energy in every organization.
  • Deborah Perry Piscione is a Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur, national bestselling author, media commentator and public speaker.
  • Past clients include: Google, McKinsey, TED Talks, Cadence Design, London School of Economics, Microsoft, McDonald's, NetApp, Princeton University, KPMG, Innotown, Qualcomm, Stanford University, and Accenture.

About Deborah Perry Piscione - Best-Selling Innovation Author and Entrepreneur:

We know that great leaders are defined by the extraordinary people that they lead. What makes Deborah Perry Piscione so special is that she has uncovered the DNA from the inspired cultures of the most innovative companies in the world. It is no surprise that organizations that build systems to grow the passions of their talented workforce are more productive, more innovative, more loyal, and consistently move faster than competitors. Provocative and wonderfully entertaining, Deborah’s presentations are a prerequisite for leaders looking to shake the status quo.

Through her years of research and hands-on work with many of Silicon Valley’s pioneer companies, she has found the keys to building organizations into innovation machines and preparing leaders for the future. She is the architect of Improvisational Innovation, a bottom’s up innovation process, where anyone in any corner of the company can bring forth new ideas in a trusted environment and be rewarded for it. Adopted at Qualcomm, Tata Group, Nike, McKinsey & Co, among many other leading global companies, Deborah’s process has created a minimum of 10x ROI in new products and services for the company, and greatly assist in talent development as employees explore their passions.

Deborah’s discoveries are highlighted by her series of critically acclaimed books:

  1. Employment is Dead: How Web3 Technologies will Radically Change our Relationship with Work (to be published Fall 2024, Harvard Business Review Press)
  2. The People Equation: Why Innovation Is People, Not Products
  3. Secrets of Silicon Valley: What Everyone Else Can Learn from the Innovation Capital of the World 
  4. The Risk Factor: Why Every Company Needs Big Bets, Bold Characters and the Occasional Spectacular Failure

All of these books and the research in them stems from the differences between old-school power and new-school leadership, which Deborah understands well thru first-hand experience. Having worked as an insider at the White House and Capitol Hill, and then moving into the center of Silicon Valley, Deborah was struck by the vast differences in power and leadership between the two coasts. She became fascinated by the collaborative cultures of innovation that dominate the Silicon Valley region, especially the voracious appetite for growing value from ideas.

This spurred her to launch five successful companies, including Sterling Capital (a venture capital fund focusing on the future of work). Another, Alley to the Valley, has grown into the most influential program for connecting powerful business women.

It is this unique experience and understanding that has made her one of the most sought-after business speakers today. With companies and industries looking for every new customer, every new idea, every advantage they can find, Deborah specializes in helping organizations do this by understand their under-realized assets — their talent workforce — that they already have under their nose, and build systems that unlock their full potential. Both her keynotes and her innovation boot-camps for Fortune 500 leaders are fully customized for your very specific needs.

Deborah is a LinkedIn Learning author (“Executing on Innovation” and “Risk-taking for Leaders”), a Stanford University Case Study (Graduate School of Business) “Deborah Perry Piscione: Finding Opportunity in Silicon Valley” and a former television commentator with CNN, MSNBC and Fox News.

Her speaking clients include Google, McKinsey & Co., TED Talks, Cadence Design, London School of Economics, Microsoft, McDonalds, NetApp, Princeton University, KPMG, Innotown, Qualcomm, Society for Human Resource Management, Stanford University, Accenture, Texas Economic Development Council, Singularity University, among many others.

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 Topics

What Deborah Perry Piscione Talks About:

Executing on Innovation: Harvesting New Ideas from Anyone in Any Corner of the Company
Deborah Perry Piscione has uncovered the DNA from the inspired cultures of the most innovative companies in the world. In doing so, she architected a bottom’s up innovation process called, Improvisational Innovation, where anyone in any corner of the company can bring forth new ideas and be rewarded for it. And for the companies that has heard her presentation and brought the Improvisational Innovation process internally? A record 10x growth in new or existing revenue streams!

TAKE AWAY: Attendees will learn how to take the annual 12-step Improvisational Innovation process back to their organizations and provide employees an opportunity to bring forth new ideas in a safe and trusted space and be recognized and rewarded for it.

How to Create a Risk-taking Culture
It’s no coincidence that our most revered business icons are also the boldest risk-takers, such as Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. Yet with so much emphasis on short-term stock price gains and bottom line focus, organizations tend to act too safe, resulting in a stagnant business culture which generates entirely forgettable results in a world that demands significant solutions.

Exemplifying the heroes of risk, entrepreneurship, and venture capitalism, and the role risk-taking play in their success, Piscione makes the case that for your culture to act smarter, faster, with more agility in reacting to competition and developing innovative ways to grow, you must explore the one core leadership skill that has been completely ignored in corporate cultures. She explores both the individual skills and organization systems to unleash risk-taking. This is a very exciting speech for an entire audience.

Learning Outcomes:

  • Discover how to create a culture of risk-taking to generate next level business solutions
  • Develop skills for effective risk-taking and betting big on the creativity of employees
  • Explore new avenues for improving organizational culture to optimize risk-taking and encourage creative exploration

Bold Leadership: Corporate Courage
Leadership is about courage. The courage to chance failure as the price for succeeding big. The courage to ignite the passions of your workforce and being open to great ideas from anyone at any time. It is about doing what is right, and seizing the moment when the iron is hot. So, why is this so hard? Because in all of the books and speeches about leadership, what has been neglected is how to master the art of risk-taking.

In this exciting presentation, Piscione shows how risk can become an incredibly powerful tool in the leader’s tool belt. Deborah reveals the key differences between gambling and calculated risk-taking, and how to master the skills of risk. Audiences are then able to build a culture that not only focuses on producing the work, but to also create and execute a steady flow of ideas to improve every aspect of the organization, and recognize a leader’s bias toward their own ideas to find the balance between long-term value creation and short-term profitability.

Learning Outcomes:

  • Discover a deep, individual courage to help leaders seize the moment and take risks
  • Deliver a set of tools that can be used to master the skills of risk and decision-making
  • Design a framework to produce a steady flow of ideas to improve every aspect of an organization’s productivity

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 Recent Publications

One of the best speakers we've encountered in innovation process. It was Deborah's talk that made us transform our global innovation team and practices.

Phillip Morris International

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