Whitney Johnson

Whitney Johnson is the CEO and co-founder of Disruption Advisors, a firm that has been an Inc 5000 fastest-growing company and formerly of human capital consultancy WLJ Advisors. Honored among the 50 leading business thinkers in the world as named by Thinkers50 and a top 200 female founder by Inc Magazine in 2023, Johnson and her team are experts at helping high-growth organizations develop high-growth individuals. She is an award-winning author, world-class keynote speaker, frequent lecturer for Harvard Business School's Corporate Learning, and an executive coach and advisor to CEOs. She is a popular contributor to the Harvard Business Review, has 1.8 million followers on LinkedIn, where she was selected as a Top Voice in 2020, and her course on Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship has been viewed more than 1 million times. In 2017, she was selected from more than 16,000 candidates as a “Top 15 Coach” by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith.

An innovation and disruption theorist, Johnson is a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review, and author of the bestselling "Build an A-Team," a Financial Times and 800-CEO-READ Book of the Month, and "Disrupt Yourself," which Publisher’s Weekly called “Savvy . . . often counterintuitive . . . superb.” In her books, she codifies her Personal Disruption and S Curve of Learning frameworks for developing high-growth individuals and organizations. Her most recent book, "Smart Growth: Grow Your People to Grow Your Company," is featured on the Thinkers50 2022 Best New Management Booklist.

Johnson co-founded 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 $9 billion. She was involved in fund formation, capital raising, and the development of the fund’s strategy. Her proprietary framework and diagnostics were developed during this period, aimed at helping people harness, rather than merely cope with, change.

Coming from a background as a former award-winning Wall Street stock analyst, Johnson understands momentum and growth. 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.