Otto Scharmer
C. Otto Scharmer is a senior lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. In 2015 he received the Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching at MIT.
He is co-founder of the Presencing Institute, which offers training and research sessions for executives and activists on how to advance the transformation of our economy, and is founding chair of the MIT IDEAS program, helping groups of diverse stakeholders from business, government, and civil society to innovate at the level of the whole system.
With the help of the German government and the Gross National Happiness Centre in Bhutan, Scharmer co-founded the Global Wellbeing and Gross National Happiness Lab, which brings together innovative thinkers from both developing and industrialized countries to prototype new ways beyond GDP of measuring well-being and social progress. He is working with governments in Africa, Asia, and Europe and has led award-winning leadership and innovation programs for clients including Alibaba, Daimler, Eileen Fisher, Fujitsu, Google, Natura, and PriceWaterhouse.
He introduced the concept of “presencing”—learning from the emerging future—in his books Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society (2005), co-authored with P. Senge, J. Jaworski, and B. S. Flowers, and Theory U: Leading from the Future As It Emerges (2009). His latest book Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-system to Eco-system Economies (2013), co-authored with Katrin Kaufer, focuses on transforming business, society, and self. It describes the change from “me to us,” with emphasis on cooperation and sharing, which are fundamental to building the new economy we envision.
Through MITx and edX.org Scharmer created the U-Lab, a new type of social-entrepreneurship Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). With a platform of 45,000 participants from 185 countries U-Lab explains the presencing practices and social technology of co-sensing and co-creating emerging futures in order to introduce a new way of thinking that makes transformational change possible.
Otto Scharmer holds a Ph.D. in economics and management from Witten-Herdecke University in Germany.
Contact Otto Scharmer about speaking terms and dates.