Whitney Johnson is the CEO of Disruption Advisors, a tech-enabled talent development company, and an Inc. 5000 2020 honoree, one of the fastest-growing private companies in America. Named by Thinkers50 as one of the ten leading business thinkers in the world (2021), she advises executives across the globe on smart growth leadership: growing your people to grow your company.
A Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Amazon bestselling author, Johnson is a world-class keynote speaker and a frequent lecturer for Harvard Business Publishing’s Corporate Learning. She has 1.8 million followers on LinkedIn where she was selected as a Top Voice in 2020. Her course on Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship has been viewed more than one million times, and she hosts a weekly LinkedIn Live with a million+ cumulative views. In 2017, she was selected from more than 17,000 candidates for the initial cohort of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches, and was named as the #1 Talent Coach.
Johnson is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, as well as the author of the bestselling Build an A Team, a Financial Times and Porchlight Book of the Month, and the critically acclaimed Disrupt Yourself. In these books, she codifies the S Curve of Learning and the Seven Accelerants of Personal Disruption, both of which operationalize disruption theory by applying it to the individual. Integral to her work is the weekly Disrupt Yourself Podcast which has millions of downloads. Guests have included Brené Brown, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and Stephen M.R. Covey.
Johnson was the co-founder of the Disruptive Innovation Fund with Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen, through which they invested in and led the $8 million seed round for South Korea’s Coupang, currently valued at more than $25 billion. She was involved in fund formation, capital raising, and the development of the fund’s strategy.
A former award-winning Wall Street stock analyst, Johnson applies her understanding of momentum and growth in stocks to people. She was an Institutional Investor–ranked equity research analyst for eight consecutive years, rated by Starmine as a superior stock-picker. As an equity analyst, stocks under coverage included America Movil (NYSE: AMX), Televisa (NYSE: TV), and Telmex (NYSE: TMX), which accounted for roughly 40% of Mexico's market capitalization.
She is married, has two children, and lives in Lexington, Virginia, her family grows strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries and enjoys making jam.
