Kate W. Isaacs

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Kate W. Isaacs

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Kate Isaacs is a scholar, teacher, and strategy advisor who designs organizations and stakeholder partnerships for people and places to thrive. She is a Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan, where she teaches courses on Distributed Leadership, Discovering Your Leadership Signature, and Inclusive Innovation. She is an executive fellow at the Higher Ambition Leadership Alliance, where she and colleagues run CEOs Leading Local, a network of business coalitions that work to accelerate positive social and economic change in communities.

Isaacs consults with organizations in all sectors on strategy and culture change and specializes in facilitating multi-stakeholder collaborations. She is a certified Shadow Work coach who emphasizes the positive potential in people and organizations—noticing and expanding what is already working—and transforming obstacles that block the natural orientation towards creativity, growth, and health.

She is a dynamic and engaging speaker, and a frequent author on leadership, innovation, and sustainability for publications including the Harvard Business Review, the Sloan Management Review, strategy+business, Chief Executive, The Hill, and The Conversation.​

Kate holds a PhD in organization studies from the MIT Sloan School of Management, an MS degree in technology and policy from the MIT Engineering Systems Division, an MS degree in conscious evolution from the Graduate Institute, and a BS in biology from the Oakland University Honors College.

​She lives in Concord, Massachusetts with her family, and loves running, biking, swimming, yoga, skiing, gardening, and working on cars. She occasionally commutes to Colorado in the winter, where she finds no greater joy than telemark skiing in fresh Rocky Mountain powder.

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