The Big Impact of Small Changes

How did the CIA revolutionise their intelligence gathering with one simple question? How did one organisation increase their revenue by £10k by instituting a short coffee break? And how can a day-long hackathon change the culture of a company? Margaret Heffernan reveals how organisations can make huge changes with surprisingly small steps. In an age of ‘radical’ shifts and ‘disruption’, she lays the groundwork for a new kind of thinking, arguing that organisations can create seismic shifts by making deceptively small changes such as using every mind on the team, celebrating mistakes and encouraging time off from work. She takes us on a fascinating tour across the globe, highlighting disparate businesses and revealing how they’ve managed to change themselves in big ways through incremental shifts.

Speaker biography:

Margaret Heffernan is an entrepreneur, Chief Executive and author. She worked in BBC Radio for five years where she wrote, directed, produced and commissioned dozens of documentaries and dramas. As a television producer, she made documentary films for Timewatch, Arena, and Newsnight, among other programmes. She also produced music videos. Leaving the BBC, she ran the trade association IPPA, which represented the interests of independent film and television producers. In 1994 she returned to the United States where she served as Chief Executive Officer for InfoMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation and iCAST Corporation, and was named one of the Top 100 Media Executives by The Hollywood Reporter, among other accolades. Her books include The Naked Truth: A Working Woman’s Manifesto About Business and What Really Matters, Women on Top: How Female Entrepreneurs are Changing the Rules for Business Success and Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril.

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