Behnam Tabrizi

Dr. Behnam Tabrizi is a consulting professor at Stanford University's Department of Management Science and Engineering and an expert on organizational and leadership transformation. Tabrizi has served on the teaching faculty of Organizational Transformation at Stanford University and its executive programs for more than 25 years. He has advised the U.S. President, the European Union, and the Vatican on digital transformation, and his clients include Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, supporting leaders across 20 industries in generating over $23.5 billion in revenue.

Tabrizi's research with McKinsey & Co. contributed to the foundation of design thinking and agile development. His findings demonstrated that faster, dedicated prototyping—rather than extended planning—creates more agile cultures capable of rapid innovation. His research on more than 100 global companies on "Accelerating Agile Innovation & Transformation" has been featured in Forbes, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and San Jose Mercury News, and he has been interviewed by BBC, CNN, and C-SPAN regarding his work on transformation.

As senior advisor on change and transformation to President Obama, Tabrizi guided the transition team through the financial crisis, advising on major initiatives including a $19 billion Congressional investment in health and information technology.

Tabrizi is the author of ten books on leading change and innovation, including the international bestseller "The Inside-Out Effect," featured as The Washington Post's Leadership Book of the Week, and "Rapid Transformation," published by Harvard Business Review Press and selected as Business Insider's top book on leadership, with more than a million copies sold worldwide. "Going on Offense: A Leader's Playbook for Perpetual Innovation" appeared on The Wall Street Journal bestseller list. Tabrizi describes these works as a trilogy: "Rapid Transformation" addresses parallel and fast transformation, "The Inside-Out Effect" focuses on personal and leadership transformation, and "Going on Offense" centers on perpetual innovation and building an innovative culture.

Among his real-world projects, Tabrizi developed a blueprint at Hewlett Packard that impacted more than 19,000 employees, increasing sales by over 35 percent in two years, and helped Verisign grow its business from $380 million to $1 billion in two years. Tabrizi received the Administrative Science Quarterly Award for Scholarly Contribution for a paper with significant influence on strategy, marketing, organization, and operations. He has also received the School of Engineering Tau Beta Pi award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management Teacher of the Year award. Tabrizi has held positions at Harvard Business School and Stanford Graduate School of Business, establishing his standing in the field of organizational transformation, change management, and innovation leadership.