2025 McGregor Memorial Lecture: Reimagining leadership: Who gets to lead and why?
Shari Dunn challenges the outdated thought on leadership that influences hiring, promotion and succession planning in many businesses.
Shari Dunn is an attorney, journalist, CEO, professor, transformative changemaker, and — our 2025 keynote for the annual Susan J. McGregor Lecture on Women’s Leadership. Dunn spoke to students about how leadership is evolving, and about the power in shaping a future that is more inclusive, more innovative, and more true. Her recently-released book, Qualified: How Competency Checking and Race Collide at Work, offers a groundbreaking look at how hidden biases — especially around race and gender— influence who gets opportunities to lead.
Named Executive of the Year (2018) and a Women of Influence Award recipient (2019), Dunn’s insights on leadership and workplace dynamics have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, and Fast Company. Dunn’s groundbreaking work on “competency checking” offers practical solutions for organizations seeking to build more equitable and effective leadership pipelines — precisely the kind of innovative thinking that drives positive societal change in business.
In this thought-provoking lecture, Dunn examines how our unspoken assumptions about what leaders should look like, sound like and act like create barriers to building truly innovative organizations. This discussion occurs as technology, changing workplace demographics and evolving social values are fundamentally reshaping leadership expectations.
Dunn directly challenges the outdated “Great Man Theory” of leadership that still unconsciously influences hiring, promotion and succession planning in many businesses. In its place, she introduces the concept of “Leader as Learner” — a framework that values adaptability, collaboration and diverse perspectives as essential business advantages rather than optional add-ons.
By understanding how bias affects leadership selection, our students and community members gain the awareness needed to create and work within more equitable workplaces where every individual’s potential can be nurtured and realized.
Drawing from personal experience, leadership theory and research, Dunn explores how gender, race and cultural expectations shape our ideas of competence and authority. She also offers concrete strategies for future business leaders to navigate and change not only the narrative but reality.
About Susan J. McGregor
The Susan J. McGregor Memorial Lecture on Women’s Leadership is made possible through the estate of Susan J. McGregor in keeping with her interest in support of the advancement of women.
Susan J. McGregor, College of Business ’85, passed away in 2014 after a valiant battle with brain cancer. Her career included stints at the Internal Revenue Service and Coopers and Lybrand before she joined Microsoft, where she rose through the ranks of the tax department to become one of the company’s first female general managers in 2007. She was an Alpha Phi, an avid Beaver believer and a generous friend to the OSU Foundation. The College of Business is honored to be able to continue her legacy by hosting this endowed women’s leadership lecture in her honor every year.
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