Growth in Leaders, Teams, and Organizations

Whitney Johnson

CEO

Whitney Johnson is a leading authority on organizational change, honored with a 2025 ATD Thought Leader Award and named among the top management thinkers globally by Thinkers50 since 2015.

As CEO of Disruption Advisors, she helps companies like Mondelez, Intermountain Health, Utah Valley University, and Amazon navigate critical transitions, combining analytical rigor with deep emotional intelligence.

A former Wall Street equity analyst, she co-founded the Disruptive Innovation Fund with Clayton Christensen, but discovered she was more interested in the momentum of people than stocks. Her books Disrupt Yourself, Build an A Team, and Wall Street Journal bestseller Smart Growth, along with her Harvard Business Review contributions, have influenced millions. Whitney hosts the Disrupt Yourself podcast and has over 1.6 million LinkedIn followers.

She holds a degree in music and has lived and worked across Latin America. She and her husband have two adult children and live in Lexington, Virginia, where they enjoy watching K-dramas, growing berries, and making homemade jam.

Whitney Johnson, CEO and Co-Founder of Disruption Advisors, is a world-class coach globally recognized thought leader, author, keynote speaker, and consultant helping organizations operationalize a high-growth mindset in their leaders and teams.

Whitney is the WSJ, USA Today, and Amazon bestselling author of Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company (Harvard Business Press, 2022). She shares her passion for personal disruption, helping individuals transform their lives, careers, teams, and companies through her keynote addresses; her popular podcast Disrupt Yourself; lectures at Harvard Business School’s Corporate Learning; the award-winning books How to Build an A Team, Disrupt Yourself, and Dare, Dream, Do; and frequent article contributions to the Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. Whitney is ranked a top talent coach by Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches, recognized by Thinkers50 as one of the top 10 leading business thinkers in the world, and named Inc.’s 200 Female Founders of 2023. She is co-founder of the Disruptive Innovation Fund with Clayton Christensen, and a former award-winning stock analyst on Wall Street, Whitney Johnson now applies her understanding of momentum and growth in stocks to people.