About
SPEAKER | AUTHOR | INNOVATOR | GLOBALIST
Chris Colbert has helped build and run several domestic and international companies focused on innovation and business optimization. After leading a bold revamp of Scholastic’s core publishing business and its return to positive growth, he left in early 2014 to explore the world of higher education and innovations that might help improve its price/value. That led him to the Harvard Innovation Labs, where he served as Managing Director for four years. In 2019 he left to found one eighty, a global innovation firm focused on helping countries and companies better compete by creating adaptive learning systems that yield cultures of innovation. He is first and foremost an innovator, capable of finding simple solutions to complex problems while painting a compelling picture for any organization of its unrealized potential.
Chris is an author, recently publishing This Is It, a provocative treatise on how to take advantage of the only life we get, as well as an inspirational speaker and a strategic advisor to several CEOs and their executive teams. He received a BA from Connecticut College, an International MBA from Duke's Fuqua School of Business and sits on several boards including Pillar Venture Capital, Now + There, Fintech Americas, Nilus and the Copenhagen Fintech Global Advisory Board.
JUST PUBLISHED.
In This Is It, his refreshing tour de force, Chris Colbert cuts through the self-help clutter with a buzz saw and delivers a slightly whimsical but completely actionable wallop of the truth about why so many of us humans waste the lives we are given and what exactly we can do about it.
Available now in Kindle and Hardcover from Amazon.
writing
In addition to his books, Chris is a prolific short-form writer, sharing his perspectives on innovation, learning and how to realize the full potential of any organization or individual. His work ranges from his life-focused blog The Blueberry to more work and world-oriented discourses made available through the standard social media channels.
ADVISING
The pace of change in the world is now faster than the natural pace of most organizations and people. Technology, globalization and inter-connectedness have resulted in hyper-competition and an unrelenting pressure to perform better, which means to innovate faster. Innovation is not a thing, it's a way of being, an ethos and belief system also known as a culture.
Chris and his one eighty global innovation team provide strategic advisory services to countries, companies and individuals who are seeking to innovate faster and more effectively.
Their focus is on working side by side with clients to improve operational methodologies and install active learning systems that result in higher performing cultures and the individuals within them.
If you’re looking for different thinking and practical applicable guidance on how to create a culture of innovation and realize the myriad of positive consequences it will yield, contact them here.
The 24/7 information frenzy and unrelenting work and life demands are like rising floodwaters. It’s time to get out of the gerbil cage and start doing nothing.