Diane Gherson

Diane is a faculty member of the Harvard Business School. She serves on the Board of Ping Identity (PING) as well as the National Academy of Human Resources, the SHRM Executive Council and the Executive Advisory Board of Semper Virens Venture Capital, a VC firm specializing in early-stage human capital management start ups.

Diane served as IBM's CHRO for seven years, responsible for the people and culture of IBM's 360,000 person workforce covering 172 countries. At the time she stepped down, IBM was ranked #3 on Forbes World’s Best Employer 2020 list for IBM’s Covid-19 responses, image, economic footprint, talent development, gender equality and social responsibility and ranked #3 by the Wall Street Journal/Drucker Institute Best Managed Companies of 2020 and 2021.

During her tenure as CHRO, IBM was engaged in a massive transformation and portfolio shift. Diane redesigned all aspects of the company’s people agenda and management systems to shape a culture of continuous learning, innovation and agility. She also digitally transformed the HR function, incorporating AI and automation across all offerings, resulting in hundreds of millions of net benefits. She championed the company’s global adoption of design thinking and agile methods at scale, as an example, driving a company-wide, co-created overhaul of performance management. Diane has been an external advocate for social issues affecting employees, such as DACA, transgender inclusion, and addressing bias and data ownership in AI.

With a U.S. patent in the field of predictive analytics, Diane is a leading voice on the topic of reinventing the profession of HR to create consumer-grade experiences for employees, predictive advice for business leaders, and improved productivity for the business. Diane's work has been profiled in the Economist, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Business Insider, Fortune and The Washington Post.

In 2018, Diane was named HR Executive of the Year by HR Executive magazine, and was elected as Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources (NAHR), the highest honor granted in the human resource profession. In 2019 she was named by Business Insider alongside Elon Musk and Elizabeth Warren as one of the Top 100 People changing the world of business and also by HR Executive magazine to their inaugural top 100 list of HR Tech Influencers.