AUTHOR. SPEAKER. BASED IN SILICON VALLEY. | Nilofer Merchant is a master at turning seemingly “wild” ideas into new realities and showing the rest of us how we can too. She has done so through her books, her top ranked TED talk, and her accomplishments at Fortune 500 companies and startups. So much so that she was awarded the Future Thinker Award from Thinkers50, which ranks the world’s leading business thinkers and which also named her the #1 person most likely to influence the future of management in both theory and practice.

She has personally launched more than 100 products, netting $18B in sales and has held executive positions at everywhere from Fortune 500 companies like Apple and Autodesk to startups in the early days of the Web (Golive/ later bought by Adobe). Merchant is one of the few people who can say they’ve fought a competitive battle against Microsoft and won, for Symantec’s Anti-Virus $2.1B annual business. She has served on boards for both public and private companies, as well as on governance boards on public policies.

The author of two previous books on how organizations can better employ new ideas, Merchant’s latest, THE POWER OF ONLYNESS: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World (Viking Hardcover, August 29, 2017), shares her insider expertise with general readers to reveal new ways of connecting our ideas to the world around us in an era when the potential to make a difference is no longer bound by social status.

Wife and mother, a wilderness backpacker in the summer, and an avid hiker year-round – she gets around. She is an unfortunate addict of caffeine, poetry, dark-chocolate-covered-orange-peels that are best when eaten in France, and all-things-bacon. While most blog posts at Yes & Know are not personal, some of her stories are shared here.

Nilofer Merchant

Innovation expert & author

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