About Kate
Dr. Kate Isaacs is a speaker, author, teacher and strategy advisor who helps leaders design distributed leadership organizations and stakeholder partnerships for people and places to thrive. She draws on design thinking, system dynamics, and developmental psychology to help leaders create conditions for collective intelligence, agile performance, and transformative change.
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Isaacs is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where she teaches courses on Discovering Your Leadership Signature and Distributed Leadership: Cultivating Nimble Organizations. She is a prolific author, with work featured in HBR at 100: The Most Influential and Innovative Articles from Harvard Business Review’s First Century.
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Isaacs is faculty director of MIT Sloan Executive Education programs including the Businesses for Inclusive Local Thriving Lab (BILT-Lab) and The Future-Ready Leadership Academy.
She speaks and teaches about Leading with Purpose and Resilience, Leading High-Performing Teams, Distributed Leadership Organizations, and Regional Economic Innovation, all with a focus on inclusive innovation and human thriving.
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Isaacs serves as an Executive Fellow at the Higher Ambition Leadership Alliance, where she is lead faculty for HALI, an intensive 10-month leadership development program for senior business executives. She consults with organizations in all sectors on strategy and culture change, and specializes in designing peer-based learning experiences and facilitating multi-stakeholder collaborations.
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Isaacs is a certified Shadow Work coach and is trained in Internal Family Systems therapy. She emphasizes the positive potential in people and organizations—noticing and expanding what is already working—and releasing obstacles that block our natural orientation towards joy, creativity, growth, and health.
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She is a dynamic and engaging speaker who delivers inspiring keynote addresses, and is a frequent author on topics of leadership, innovation, systems change, multi-stakeholder collaboration, and corporate sustainability for publications including the Harvard Business Review, the Sloan Management Review, strategy+business, Chief Executive, The Hill, and The Conversation.