Sally Thornton

An instigator on how to thrive in the future of work, Sally Thornton is the CEO of Forshay, a firm that focuses on how people can do their best work through executive recruiting, interim experts, and optimizing teams through increased inclusion, diversity, and belonging.

Forshay was awarded #290 on the Inc. 5000 "Fastest-Growing Private Companies" list for 2015, and made the list again in 2019 at the squint-you-can-see-it #3377. Prior to founding Forshay, Thornton co-founded and was CEO of Flexperience. Under her leadership, Flexperience grew into a nationally acclaimed firm, and was awarded “Top 100 Fastest-Growing Private Companies” in 2010 by the San Francisco Business Times.

A speaker in two TEDx talks, Thornton is a frequent keynote speaker on the future of work, women in leadership, the science of work/life blend, applying design thinking to make work better, harnessing the value of a multi-generational and diverse workforce, and talent recruitment and engagement strategies. Thornton has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, BBC, Forbes, YahooFinance, Huffington Post, KQED radio, NBC11 News, ABC7 News, among numerous other media publications.

Thornton launched WorkLabAccelerator in 2015, a design thinking community of action committed to making work better, based on her work with Stanford's "Redesigning and Redefining Work" project. She is committed to prototyping new workplace strategies and systems that align with the lives of today's workforce so companies can better harness talent for mutual success. WorkLab uses design thinking, lean start up, and storytelling skills to design, test, and scale experiments to #MakeWorkBetter.

Thornton lectures regularly at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business as well as UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She served for six years on the Advisory Council of Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, the educational partner of LeanIn.org.