“Creating a positive future begins in human conversation. The simplest and most powerful investment any member of a community or an organization may make in renewal is to begin talking with other people as though the answers mattered.” – William Greider

A former Harvard Business School professor, Jim Ware focused his professional career on understanding what organizations must do to thrive in a rapidly changing world. His long-time passion is fostering collaborative conversations about the future – how to anticipate and prepare for technology-driven change.

His most recent book is Making Meetings Matter: How Smart Leaders Orchestrate Powerful Conversations in the Digital Age. It documents the learning from over 30 years of personal experience leading meetings of all kinds to propose a few simple principles for ensuring that every meeting is both effective and efficient.

For a brief video overview of the book, and to download a free copy of the Introduction and Chapter One, go to this link.

Jim’s business wisdom comes from deep academic knowledge and over thirty years of hands-on experience as a senior executive and a change leader driving corporate innovation. All that work in the trenches taught him how critical meetings are to organizational success and how rare it is for them to be productive, let alone popular.

Jim has worked with dozens of organizational leaders to turn all those dull, boring meetings into highly engaging conversations. A passionate meeting design strategist, he has distilled decades of personal learning into an essential set of “new rules” for designing and leading meetings that matter.

Jim has co-authored several other books about the digital economy and its implications for leadership and organizational performance.

He was the founder and executive director of The Future of Work…unlimited for over a decade. Simultaneously he served as the Global Research Director for Occupiers Journal Ltd., and he was also a Partner with The FutureWork Forum before his retirement in 2020. In addition, he was a co-founder of The Great Work Cultures initiative.

His current sole professional focus is serving as the Managing Editor of Work&Place, a global management journal he co-founded in 2012.

Jim holds PhD, M.A., and B.Sc. degrees from Cornell University and an MBA (With Distinction) from the Harvard Business School. He lives and works in northern California. He was a member of the National Speakers Association for many years, where he served for three years as a member of the Chapter Leadership Council and one year as president of the NSA Northern California chapter.