Member since November 2025
For over 25 years Laura Weiss, CPCC, PCC has helped global brands and their leaders achieve meaningful growth through product, service, and process innovation.
Originally a licensed architect, Laura’s curiosity about the business side of design drew her to the broader world of innovation. She spent a decade as an Associate Partner at world-renowned design consultancy IDEO where she helped launch two practice areas and led numerous innovation programs for Fortune 500 businesses as well as organizations in the social and public sectors. While at IDEO her clients included AT&T, Morgan Stanley, and the Government of New Zealand.
Recognizing the critical importance of leadership to the success of innovation initiatives, Laura shifted her focus to talent development and the role of conflict in the creative problem-solving process. She became an ICF-certified coach and professional mediator, and served as a Principal in Korn Ferry’s Leadership and Professional Development practice.
Laura’s passion for developing talent extends to academia, where she has been an Adjunct Professor in pioneering graduate programs focused on leadership at both the California College of the Arts and the Yale University School of Architecture. She has also been a director on several nonprofit boards including the American Institute of Architects’ Strategic Council, Public Architecture, the Yale Alumni Association’s Board of Governors, and The Resolution Center serving Boston’s Northshore communities.
Today, Laura partners with creative organizations to dramatically improve the Five Leadership Conversations that drive innovation and growth.
I suspect that I became intrigued with coaching and consulting because of the series of sketches I made in Denmark.
It was the summer of 1984 and I was standing in a circle with my college classmates in a Danish palace whose name I now cannot recall. We were at the start of a summer program for architecture undergrads and one of our instructors was holding court. “Find a blank page in your sketchbook” he instructed, “and divide it into quarters.” He then placed a wooden chair in the center of our circle. “In the upper left-hand quadrant draw this chair. You have 30 seconds - begin!” And we all earnestly began sketching that chair.
We were to draw the same chair, but in decreasing increments of time: 15 seconds, 10 seconds, and 5 seconds. Or something to that effect – my drawing ability was a little rusty then and my memory is a little rusty now.
The pedagogical objective, however, I remember clearly: to provide an experience of sketching in-situ, which was to be our primary activity for the next two months of the program. We were to learn how to make a quick assessment of the subject in front of us and consider its essence – the idea of it, not merely a view of it. If our sketches looked like something that a camera could have produced, we were taking the wrong approach.
Experiencing the power of creative instruction to facilitate learning made a distinct impression on me that day, and has stayed with me ever since.
I began my career as an architect, something I had wanted to be since about the age of twelve. I pursued a professional degree right out of high school, and because I had an interest in teaching, I earned my master’s degree immediately after that. A couple of years later I got licensed – and figured I’d be an architect for the rest of my professional life!
But as an architect I became increasingly interested in the business side of the creative process - specifically how architects worked with their clients and the general public, and the impact those relationships had on what actually got designed and built. It was often disheartening.
This experience prompted the first of three career pivots; I returned to school to earn an MBA with a goal of more directly influencing how the business world understood and engaged with the practice of design. Similarly, I believed I could also bring strategic thinking to the design professions. In the mid 1990’s this was certainly a risky move, as the roles now available for designers with a business degree were practically non-existent.
I was fortunate to find the right sandbox for experimentation at IDEO, one of the best-known innovation and design firms in the world. Over the course of a decade I worked with clients in a wide range of industries, and developed new ways to expand the applicability of design methodologies for Fortune 500 clients in the service industries. I eventually co-founded a practice focused on this new arena, what we might today call experience design.
The second pivot came when I left IDEO to better understand, and help develop the capacity for, innovation from the inside of those same kinds of organizations. What I learned is that the most successful efforts do not result from a “big idea” (even that is often what is celebrated, especially when it concerns a new technology or novel business model). Ideas are actually the easy part. The real challenge is in leading the change required to bring new ideas to life. And that requires leadership – organizational leadership, team leadership, and (perhaps most important of all) self-leadership.
It was this insight that led to the third pivot, and the current focus of my professional life. Today I am dedicated to empowering the human side of design and innovation by supporting the growth, influence, and impact of its leaders.
Much has been written about feedback techniques, yet it remains an elusive practice - every wonder why? This session explores the four hurdles that stand in the way of effective feedback, why they exist, and how clearing them can transform our experience of feedback as a dreaded event about performance into a continuous conversation about growth.
Today’s world is filled with conflict: physical conflict around the globe; verbal conflict on the political stage, the workplace, the home front, and social media; and emotional conflict that is playing out within each of us, whether we are conscious of it or not. This session explores the true sources of conflict, how it is critical to the creative process, and how skilled conflict engagement (not avoidance) is the key to strengthening relationships and achieving goals.
In professional services, the client is king. That’s because clients don’t simply purchase or consume a service, they also participate in creating it: making it slower or faster, better or worse, cheaper or more expensive to deliver. This session explores how to balance expertise with a service mindset to build trust and produce successful outcomes at the moments that matter across the client’s journey.
I suspect that I became intrigued with coaching and consulting because of the series of sketches I made in Denmark.
It was the summer of 1984 and I was standing in a circle with my college classmates in a Danish palace whose name I now cannot recall. We were at the start of a summer program for architecture undergrads and one of our instructors was holding court. “Find a blank page in your sketchbook” he instructed, “and divide it into quarters.” He then placed a wooden chair in the center of our circle. “In the upper left-hand quadrant draw this chair. You have 30 seconds - begin!” And we all earnestly began sketching that chair.
We were to draw the same chair, but in decreasing increments of time: 15 seconds, 10 seconds, and 5 seconds. Or something to that effect – my drawing ability was a little rusty then and my memory is a little rusty now.
The pedagogical objective, however, I remember clearly: to provide an experience of sketching in-situ, which was to be our primary activity for the next two months of the program. We were to learn how to make a quick assessment of the subject in front of us and consider its essence – the idea of it, not merely a view of it. If our sketches looked like something that a camera could have produced, we were taking the wrong approach.
Experiencing the power of creative instruction to facilitate learning made a distinct impression on me that day, and has stayed with me ever since.
I began my career as an architect, something I had wanted to be since about the age of twelve. I pursued a professional degree right out of high school, and because I had an interest in teaching, I earned my master’s degree immediately after that. A couple of years later I got licensed – and figured I’d be an architect for the rest of my professional life!
But as an architect I became increasingly interested in the business side of the creative process - specifically how architects worked with their clients and the general public, and the impact those relationships had on what actually got designed and built. It was often disheartening.
This experience prompted the first of three career pivots; I returned to school to earn an MBA with a goal of more directly influencing how the business world understood and engaged with the practice of design. Similarly, I believed I could also bring strategic thinking to the design professions. In the mid 1990’s this was certainly a risky move, as the roles now available for designers with a business degree were practically non-existent.
I was fortunate to find the right sandbox for experimentation at IDEO, one of the best-known innovation and design firms in the world. Over the course of a decade I worked with clients in a wide range of industries, and developed new ways to expand the applicability of design methodologies for Fortune 500 clients in the service industries. I eventually co-founded a practice focused on this new arena, what we might today call experience design.
The second pivot came when I left IDEO to better understand, and help develop the capacity for, innovation from the inside of those same kinds of organizations. What I learned is that the most successful efforts do not result from a “big idea” (even that is often what is celebrated, especially when it concerns a new technology or novel business model). Ideas are actually the easy part. The real challenge is in leading the change required to bring new ideas to life. And that requires leadership – organizational leadership, team leadership, and (perhaps most important of all) self-leadership.
It was this insight that led to the third pivot, and the current focus of my professional life. Today I am dedicated to empowering the human side of design and innovation by supporting the growth, influence, and impact of its leaders.
Much has been written about feedback techniques, yet it remains an elusive practice - every wonder why? This session explores the four hurdles that stand in the way of effective feedback, why they exist, and how clearing them can transform our experience of feedback as a dreaded event about performance into a continuous conversation about growth.
Today’s world is filled with conflict: physical conflict around the globe; verbal conflict on the political stage, the workplace, the home front, and social media; and emotional conflict that is playing out within each of us, whether we are conscious of it or not. This session explores the true sources of conflict, how it is critical to the creative process, and how skilled conflict engagement (not avoidance) is the key to strengthening relationships and achieving goals.
In professional services, the client is king. That’s because clients don’t simply purchase or consume a service, they also participate in creating it: making it slower or faster, better or worse, cheaper or more expensive to deliver. This session explores how to balance expertise with a service mindset to build trust and produce successful outcomes at the moments that matter across the client’s journey.