Indeed Interactive 2018: Search for Greatness With the “Jane Bond of Innovation”

Known as the “Jane Bond of Innovation,” Nilofer Merchant is an author, speaker and leading business thinker who has a gift for turning what others would consider to be “wild” ideas into reality.

We’ve admired her work for a while now, and we’re thrilled to welcome her to Indeed Interactive 2018 as our keynote speaker. She’ll be joining us to explore what it means to search for greatness in hiring today, and explore how you can do so through the power of your ideas.

Register today to secure your place among the top talent leaders attending Indeed Interactive.

From administrative assistant to CEO

Merchant began her business career 25 years ago as an administrative assistant at Apple, where she was thrown in at the deep end. She had more than 23 different managers during this time: “While it would be easy to say one was good or another was lacking, the reality is that no person has the same facts, abilities or perspectives as what they might need,” she told the Wall Street Journal.

From this beginning, she quickly demonstrated entrepreneurial acumen, and learned the importance of “failing fast” and then learning from mistakes—a philosophy which enabled her to rise through the ranks to become VP, then CEO, then board member of a NASDAQ-traded company.

For most professionals, this type of dream career path would stretch over a lifetime, but Merchant was just getting started. She would go on to offer her guidance on delivering new product strategies, entering new markets and optimizing revenues for companies such as HP, Logitech, Symantec, VMWare and Yahoo.

A lecturer on innovation at Stanford University and Santa Clara University, Merchant has launched over 100 products that have generated a total of $18 billion in revenues.

With three books, a top-ranked TED talk and articles in publications like Harvard Business Review, Wired and Oprah, Merchant was named the #1 person most likely to influence the future of management in both theory and practice by Thinkers50.

The Power of Onlyness

In her keynote at Indeed Interactive 2018, Merchant will dive into the transformative idea that an individual’s unique perspective, talent or vision has boundless potential. It’s a subject she also explores in her latest book, The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World, which includes instructional and inspiring stories of how real people unleashed the power of a new ideas and went on to disrupt the status quo.

Merchant’s idea of onlyness is especially relevant in the hiring world, where too many companies ultimately choose candidates through a “pattern recognition” process that passes over talented individuals who don’t fit the familiar model.

Merchant is uniquely positioned to show talent professionals how to identify and embrace the “onlyness” within both their candidates and their own organizations in their pursuit of greatness.

Ready to learn more? Join us at Indeed Interactive 2018 to hear Merchant’s keynote. Register today to reserve your spot.