JoAnn Garbin

With AI making creators of us all, the question isn’t whether your people can innovate. It’s whether you know how to deploy them. It takes an entire value chain to go from idea to impact but most organizations get the people part wrong. After studying 50 years of Microsoft breakthroughs, JoAnn and her co-author discovered that successful teams fit people to phase—and that one overlooked role predicts success more than any other. The people who fill it are not who you think.

The strategy is defined. Leadership is aligned. The technology works. So why isn’t anything changing? That’s the knowing-doing gap— and it’s about to derail most AI initiatives just like it derailed digital transformation before them. JoAnn draws from 25 years leading innovation at Microsoft and beyond to reveal what actually moves organizations from planning to doing: the trust dynamics, behavioral patterns, and Monday-morning practices the close the gap.

Efficiency is table stakes. Creating surplus is competitive advantage. JoAnn shows how regenerative design transforms stakeholder relationships, opens new markets, and generates value that efficiency-focused approaches can’t touch. Her Microsoft Datacenter of the Future program proved this at scale—turning critical infrastructure from liability into asset. Audiences leave knowing how to spot the hidden value in their own ecosystems and the reframing questions that shift teams from doing less to creating more.