About Theresa

Thirty years leading organizations through technology change — the Gates Foundation, global law, disaster relief. Author of The Imagination Age.

I grew up on two acres of forest in northwest Montana, fifteen miles from the nearest town, with one TV channel and a sister who was game for anything. We spent our childhood building forts in the woods, inventing what wasn't there. The instinct those years gave me, the one that says build what's missing, never left. It traveled with me into every space I worked.

The first was the Gates Foundation, in the early days of the internet. I stood in front of librarians in the most rural communities in the country, across more than forty states, and explained a technology most had never touched, then convinced them it would remake how their towns learned and reached the world. Take something complicated, make it clear, paint a future people couldn't yet see. That turned out to be the work I'd do for the next thirty years.

From there it kept finding new forms. A global law firm in New York. A management consulting practice of my own. Then years getting relief to the employees of the world's largest companies, reaching their people through war and weather, wherever crisis found them. The settings changed every time. The work never did: help people see what they can't yet see, then work out what comes next.

It took me years to name what sat underneath all of it. Imagination. Not a soft skill or a creative luxury. The defining human competence of this moment, and the one we understand least. That became The Imagination Age: Reclaiming Your Most Essential Competence.

I write, speak, and advise on imagination as a practiced competence, the kind woven into the decisions that shape careers, organizations, and lives. Today I spend more than half the year abroad, designing a life the same way I'd build a strategy: imagining what isn't there yet, then making it real. Lately that's meant Vietnam, Cambodia, and Malaysia, with stops in Montana, New York, and South Carolina between the long flights.

If you're working on what comes next, let's talk.