Jeffrey Sonnenfeld
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld on What Top Turnaround CEOs Do Differently
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld
WSB Exclusive Speaker
Senior Associate Dean, Yale School of Management; Founder, Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute
When the world's most powerful CEOs face something they cannot solve alone, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is the first call they make. For forty years, they have brought him what leadership will demand next, how AI is reshaping work, and where geopolitics and the global economy are heading. He built the school they come to, first at Harvard, then again at Yale. Few people alive have shaped how great companies are led more than he has.
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The decisions in front of companies keep getting bigger, and the signal behind them keeps getting harder to find. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is who they call when the stakes are that high. He created the first school for sitting CEOs almost forty years ago, and the most powerful people in business have come to him ever since. Each year he draws thousands of them to the Yale CEO Summit, the longest-running gathering of top executives in the world. There is no stage in that room, only candid talk among the people running the global economy, which is why his read is always current and never academic. Some of them have come back more than fifty times.
He is a foundational scholar of how companies are led, with a decade each at Harvard and Emory behind him. The Academy of Management named him its Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner, for living on both sides of that line. He has advised five presidents across both parties and the CEOs who run the global economy, and testified to Congress on the decisions that shape it. He is the rare bridge between the boardroom and the White House. He does not just analyze the world. He moves it.
On stage, he brings the same candor and pace that keep those CEOs coming back, never a lecture. He is a New York Times best-selling author, from The Hero’s Farewell on how leaders leave power to Firing Back on recovering from failure. On CNBC and in Fortune, he reads the world in real time and connects it to the decision in the room. What he gives an audience is rarer than another forecast: a seat inside the conversation happening above them, and a clear read on what it means for their own work.
Why Audiences Will Be Better Off
- Audiences leave seeing what competitors do not see yet, because the patterns form in that room first.
- Audiences leave knowing where the conversation at the top is heading, ahead of the moment it hardens into conventional wisdom.
- Audiences leave making their biggest bets on capital, technology, and risk with far better signal and less noise.
- Audiences leave better able to decide when to speak, when to stay silent, and how to move either way.
- Audiences leave with the candor, wit, and pace of a closed-door CEO forum, not a lecture.
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Jeffrey Sonnenfeld’s Speech Topics
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What the World’s Top CEOs Are Seeing Now, and What It Means for Your Business
Headlines are not the problem. Knowing which ones actually matter is. Sonnenfeld reads the whole board, the geopolitics and the economics as one picture, not from a research desk but from inside the room with the CEOs living it. Then he makes it concrete, showing what the world means for one industry, one balance sheet, one decision. Audiences leave able to see what is actually changing, what is only noise, and what deserves action now.
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Leadership Lessons from the World’s Top CEOs
Most leadership talks are built on theory, or on one person’s career. Sonnenfeld has spent forty years in the room with the people running the largest companies on earth, watching them take command, struggle, recover, and let go. He brings the case studies that come out of those rooms: what the best ones do differently, how they hold their nerve, and what separates the leaders who last from the ones who flame out. Audiences leave with a practical model for how great leaders actually operate, drawn from the people whose names they already know.
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Leading at the Top: The Calls No One Can Make for You
The hardest calls at the top rarely have clean answers. When to hold on and when to let go, who should succeed you, when a board should step in, and how to come back when things go wrong. Sonnenfeld has spent a career on exactly these moments, from his landmark work on how leaders leave power to his research on recovering from public failure. Audiences leave with a sharper, more honest model for deciding when there is no obvious right answer.
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The CEO Decision on AI: Where to Bet, and How Fast to Move
Every company knows AI is a bet it has to make. The harder questions are where to place it, how fast to move, and where the hype is outrunning the value. Sonnenfeld is not an engineer and not a doom-monger. He brings the view from inside the boardrooms already making these calls. Audiences leave able to separate real urgency from expensive noise, and to make the call with judgment instead of anxiety.
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When Machines Act: The New Rules for Leading with AI Agents
AI is crossing from advising to acting, and companies are beginning to hand real work to systems that decide on their own. Sonnenfeld’s forthcoming book When Machines Act (MIT Press, March 2027) takes on the leadership question underneath that shift. It draws on the CEOs already deciding what to hand to machines, what stays human, and who answers when an autonomous system gets it wrong. Audiences leave with a working frame for leading an organization where machines act, ahead of the market and the regulators.
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Working With Powerful, Unpredictable Leaders: Three Decades with Donald Trump
Every organization has to deal with someone powerful whose next move it cannot predict, and right now that person is often President Trump. Sonnenfeld has known him personally for three decades, and his New York Times and USA Today bestseller Trump’s Ten Commandments breaks down the leadership and negotiation patterns behind the noise. The same patterns show up in any counterparty who holds the leverage, which is why this is analysis rather than advocacy. Audiences leave with practical lessons for negotiating, anticipating, and responding when the rules keep changing.
Works by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld
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Jeffrey Sonnenfeld
When Machines Act: The Promise and Peril of Navigating Our Agentic AI Future -
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld
Firing Back: How Great Leaders Rebound After Career Disasters -
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld
Leadership and Governance from the Inside Out -
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld
The Hero’s Farewell: What Happens When CEOs Retire
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Jeffrey Sonnenfeld Topics & Types
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) Speakers
- Authors
- Business Speakers
- Business Consulting Speakers
- Business Growth & Trends Speakers
- Business Management
- Corporate Culture Speakers
- Economy Speakers
- Ethics Speakers
- Geopolitical Speakers
- Keynote Speakers
- Leadership Speakers
- New Speakers
- Professors
- Resilience Speakers
- Technology Speakers
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