Halla Tómasdóttir

Halla Tómasdóttir is the CEO and Chief Change Catalyst for The B Team, where global business and civil society leaders work together on confronting our crisis of conformity in leadership. She has long been on a quest to inspire and empower leaders to embrace purpose-driven, gender-balanced and principled leadership. She has passionately pursued this purpose as a business leader in Corporate America with M&M and Pepsi Cola, as the first female CEO of Iceland’s Chamber of commerce and as an executive and non-executive director for diverse businesses. An entrepreneur at heart, Halla joined the founding team of Reykjavik University where she founded the Executive Education department and led a successful initiative focused on empowering women and girls as entrepreneurs, leaders and investors. In 2007 Halla co-founded an investment firm with the vision to incorporate feminine values and ESG metrics into finance. The company made international headlines when it successfully survived Iceland’s infamous economic meltdown. In 2016, she ran for President in Iceland. Halla was an independent candidate with no prior political experience and surprised everyone as she emerged from an initial 1% in the polls to becoming the runner-up with nearly 30% of the vote.

Halla has an international MBA from Thunderbird and have lived and worked in the US, the UK and across the Nordics. Halla’s work has led her to the TED stage a few times, and she has delivered keynotes and participated in dialogues about leadership and change for companies and conferences around the world. Newsweek named her to a list of 150 women who “shake the world” and the New Yorker called her a “Living Emoji of Sincerity”.