“The future of work may be powered by AI, but it will be driven by human creativity, collaboration, and care.”
- Founder, Regenerous Labs
- Co-author, The Insider's Guide to Innovation at Microsoft
- Host, Innovating Out Loud
Twenty-five years of changing the question.
Most teams ask how to make the thing better. JoAnn asks whether it’s the right thing. At Microsoft, everyone was asking how to build data centers cheaper and faster. She asked what it would take for a town to welcome one.
She’s been asking questions like that since she was a kid growing up in a family construction company. Since then she’s built a mascot company, an energy platform Johnson Controls acquired, and a smart-building platform, and co-founded Regenerous Labs. Her writing and her talks turn on the same question: are we applying our creativity to the premise, or only to the solutions within it?
The full story →What she's building, writing, and learning out loud.
Three places the work shows up. Each has a home of its own; this is the short version.
Regenerous Labs
In 2024 JoAnn co-founded Regenerous Labs with six long-time collaborators — the people she'd built with for decades — to show what regenerative infrastructure looks like in practice. It's where her frameworks get built, tested, and put to work.
Visit the Lab → LearningInnovating Out Loud
A weekly essay and a monthly live webcast where JoAnn thinks in public — about data centers and the towns around them, builders and premises, and what she's still getting wrong. Say it ugly. Build it better. Together.
Subscribe on Substack → WritingThe Insider's Guide to Innovation at Microsoft
With co-author Dean Carignan, JoAnn decoded 50 years of breakthroughs into seven case studies, four patterns, and forty leaders' lessons on how innovation actually happens inside a company that refuses to get old. A Next Big Idea Club Must Read and Thinkers50 Innovation Award shortlist.
Visit the book site →From Innovating Out Loud.
Talks that start with the people in the room.
JoAnn accepts a limited number of keynotes, workshops, and programs each year. Three signature talks — Start With Who, Behavior Is the Barrier, Aim for Positive — or one tailored to your audience.
…she brings a passion to her work that I have rarely seen equaled in my business career. JoAnn is a rare talent and a valued colleague.
Start with Who.
Let’s start with you.
Keynotes, workshops, executive briefings, or a peer conversation.
Tell me who you are and what you’re building.