Business Engagement Networking Breakfast with Sinéad O’Sullivan - What do Taylor Swift and Elon Musk have in common?

Business Engagement Networking Breakfast with Sinéad O’Sullivan

We are delighted to invite you to the Business Engagement Networking Breakfast with Sinéad O’Sullivan. Sinéad is an acclaimed author, entrepreneur and educator who will deliver her lecture titled: What do Taylor Swift and Elon Musk have in common?. The event will open with a networking breakfast, followed by Sinéad's lecture, and close with a book signing of Good Ideas and Power Moves: Ten Lessons for Success from Taylor Swift.

About the Lecture

This talk explores one of the most important questions of management theory: why did the business world dismiss the most successful business builders of the last twenty years? While boardrooms studied the playbooks of GE and Unilever, a new kind of enterprise was being built in full public view by a country singer from Pennsylvania, a rapper with no degree, and a maniacal rocket builder.

Drawing on economic theory from the economists who built modern management, this talk traces how the very frameworks that shaped twentieth-century business rendered a new generation of business leaders invisible; the same leaders who are now moving markets, commanding audiences of billions, and building multi-planetary empires. It explains why the most valuable assets in this new business era don't appear on balance sheets, and what happened when the cost of building a company fell a thousandfold in a single decade.

About the Speaker

Sinéad O’Sullivan holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she also served as Head of the HBS Institute for Strategy, working with leading business economists, global CEOs, prime ministers, and financiers. She has held roles at MIT Sloan and as a professor at the Stuart School of Business. Sinéad has also worked as an aerospace engineer and human spaceflight designer at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Her writing has appeared in the Financial Times, FT Alphaville, Vogue, British Vogue, and The Irish Times. Sinéad O'Sullivan is a renowned Armagh-born aerospace engineer and economist who graduated from Queen's University Belfast (QUB) in 2011 with a BEng in Aerospace Engineering. Sinéad will be signing copies of her latest book Good Ideas and Power Moves: Ten Lessons for Success from Taylor Swift.

About the Book 
The inspiring new book explores the 10 power moves that have built Taylor Swift’s superstardom and empire – and how you can implement them for success in business and in life - from a former Strategist at Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy.

Taylor Swift’s genius is not limited to her singing and songcraft: as the founder of her own multi-billion-dollar enterprise, she has higher returns than 99.9% of hedge funds, and has built a stronger global corporation than nearly every other American conglomerate CEO. She is the only person that the US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank track with precision. She has a larger impact on the world economy than most economists that have ever lived, and has done more for US antitrust law than any sitting member of Congress. There is a lot to learn from Taylor Swift.

Global investment fund manager and former head of Strategy at HBS (and Swiftie!) Sinead O’Sullivan taps into the same genius that sells out stadiums and shuts down the internet to give Taylor - the CEO, the strategist - the respect she deserves. O’Sullivan sums up Swift’s business savvy into ten big, teachable lessons, including:

• Build Worlds, Not Products: how to create value that is greater than the sum of its parts (or, how Taylor created the fan-centered Swiftverse that fosters community, belonging, and off-the-charts engagement)

• Be Anti-Fragile: how to embrace volatility and thrive in uncertainty (or, how Taylor gamed the chaos of COVID shutdown to own the airwaves)

• Negotiate with authenticity: how to rewrite the rules on your own terms when your chips are down (or, how Taylor almost lost control of her music catalogue to private equity - but took it back)