Margaret Heffernan

Margaret was in BBC Radio for five years where she wrote, directed, produced and commissioned dozens of documentaries and dramas. For 8 years as a television producer, she made documentary films for Timewatch, Arena, and Newsnight. Leaving the BBC, she ran the trade association IPPA, which represented the interests of independent film and television producers and was once described by the Financial Times as “the most formidable lobbying organization in England.”

Margaret was named one of the Internet’s Top 100 by Silicon Alley Reporter in 1999, one of the Top 25 by Streaming Media magazine and one of the Top 100 Media Executives by The Hollywood Reporter. Her “Tear Down the Wall” campaign against AOL won the 2001 Silver SABRE award for public relations. Margaret has published five books and her most recent was shortlisted for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Best Business Book of the Year Award; entitled Wilful Blindness. In 2015 TED published Beyond Measure: The Big Impact of Small Changes, which looks at the defining characteristics of sustainably innovative organisations. All of these works explore why and how companies packed full of talented, motivated and committed executives fail to spot major problems or to capture the full intellectual innovative capacity of their people.

Through Merryck & Co., Margaret now advises global businesses leaders. She also teaches at the School of Management at the University of Bath and has been invited to speak at business schools around the world, including Harvard Business School, the Rotman School, London Business School and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. She also lectures widely at organizations as diverse as the Federal Bank of the United States, Accenture, Intel, Google, Microsoft, Roche, KLA-Tencor, State Street, and Procter & Gamble.