How do we meet this moment together?
My keynotes and workshops help mission-centered leaders navigate uncertain times with clarity, creativity, and grace.
Hello, my name is Melanie Ho & I’m an award-winning author, keynote speaker, and executive education leader who has worked with Fortune 500 organizations, rising start-ups, leading universities, non-profits, and government groups.
I blend 20 years of leadership expertise with my perspective as an artist and multi-media storyteller. My unique keynotes and workshops start with today’s most important leadership concepts — and then come alive through the power of the imaginative arts.
New: Serialized Fiction Podcast: University of the Surreal
A gigantic Goldfish Bowl, three stories high, has appeared overnight on the university quad. No one knows where it came from. No one knows what it means. But the fish need feeding, a committee has been formed to determine how many subcommittees the situation requires, and somewhere in the Administration Building, a college president is too busy drowning in his inbox to look up.
There was, of course, another campus that once had a similarly-sized snow globe appear in its quad. It eventually consumed the entire campus. But that was another century, another country — so probably not relevant here.
University of the Surreal is a story about the things we learn not to see — and what it takes to finally look.
Season One Dropping Soon: Apple | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Amazon Music
Facilitating new ways of thinking
“Melanie has built businesses, served as an executive leader, and advised multi-billion-dollar institutions — and that’s only a fraction of the unique expertise she brings to her work as a speaker and facilitator. She also draws on her background as a storyteller, educator, and artist to facilitate her audience to new ways of thinking. Our sessions with Melanie are always creative, memorable, and actionable.”
— Yolanda Gorman, Chief of Staff and Special Advisor to the Chancellor, UCLA
A different kind of business book
Based on research, but told as a fast-paced novel, Beyond Leaning In: Gender Equity and What Organizations are Up Against is a silver medalist in the 2022 Axiom Awards, recognizing the world’s best business books. Previous Axiom winners include Nobel laureate Robert Shiller, former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Pulitzer Prize winner Doris Kearns Goodwin, investor Raymond Dalio, NYT best-seller Dan Ariely, and entrepreneur Steve Case.
Also check out my #BeyondLeaningIn Webcomics and Podcast for more about the hidden challenges women face at work.
Ways we can work together
Keynote presentations
Interactive workshops
Customized professional development courses
In-day or multi-day retreat agenda development
A variety of topics related to leading through complexity and change & reimagining equity, inclusion, and culture
Tools that work in the real world
I create models and frameworks for the challenges that seem impossible to pin down—the ones where old playbooks fall short and new approaches make all the difference.
Here are two you can try right now:
Explore the Conflict Foresight Model: Understand the hidden forces driving resistance to change—so you can anticipate resistance, build trust, and keep healthy conflict from
Take the Boundary Self-Saboteurs Assessment: Discover the patterns that undermine your boundaries and learn to protect time for high-priority work, not just what's loudest or most urgent.
Workshop and retreat participants receive tailored follow-up toolkits to deepen the work.
Experience with some of the world’s most complex organizations
In any given week, you might find me leading presentations for mission-centered teams of all types. But I initially cut my teeth in consulting for higher education leaders: advising hundreds of college and university presidents, provosts, CFOs, and deans. I gained a special appreciation for the challenges of managing extreme complexity — whether aligning disparate stakeholders, balancing mission and margin, steering large-scale initiatives in matrixed environments, or confronting continuous public scrutiny and market disruption.
I continue to maintain a select higher ed practice and am honored to partner with The Chronicle of Higher Education to lead several Chronicle professional development programs open to college and university leaders, including the Leadership Transformation Collaborative and Women Leading Change.
A different way forward
I’m founder of Strategic Imagination, a firm dedicated to the power of the imaginative arts to help leaders and organizations break free from stuck patterns, think in new ways, and take purposeful action—especially when doing things “the way they’ve always been done” is no longer an option.
Fiction, film, theatre, comics, and other imaginative arts spark fresh thinking, help us step into others’ perspectives, and make it possible to see bolder futures—and find practical paths to reach them.
