Tamara Ghandour was faced with a business challenge that needed the perspective of others. Focused on the outcome, Tamara was unable to generate a lot of ideas from the team members. She instead focused on rewarding the behavior of giving ideas, no matter how ridiculous the ideas were, and was able to come up with more innovative solutions.
Tamara was born in Ramat Gan, Israel, and moved to Berkeley, California, when she was five. Tamara and her family moved every four years, so she grew up all over the Bay Area. She is very close with her younger sister, by four years, Naomi and her parents Adi and Anna. Yes, they still take family vacations together and talk on the phone almost daily.
As a child, Tamara was always questioning and breaking the rules. In school, if the teacher told the class that they had to always write their name on the top right of the paper, she would put it on the left. Long lines are just a reason to find another way in the door. Her parents still joke about the fact that Tamara knows there are rules out there but doesn’t believe they apply to her. That innate questioning of the rules has is part of the reason she is successful because she almost always finds an alternate way around the obstacles she faces and doesn’t buy into the bureaucracy that slows innovation and progress.
Tamara started her career in New York City in advertising on the infamous Madison avenue. From there, she went into brand strategy and innovation, where she built new products and services for Fortune 500 companies ranging from Procter and Gamble to IBM. After giving people innovative ideas for almost 20 years, Tamara realized the real impact isn’t in giving innovation but in unlocking innovation inside them. That is why she founded LaunchStreet and the Innovation Quotient Edge Assessment, pioneering a human-centered innovation method.
She’s a keynote speaker, podcaster, and author of Innovation is Everybody’s Business: How to Ignite, Scale, and Sustain Innovation for Competitive Edge. Tamara’s goal and legacy is to change the narrative around innovation from being siloed to the select, magical few to it being for everyone. Her mission is to unleash ONE MILLION plus innovators into the world, solving our biggest challenges, unearthing opportunities, and elevating happiness globally.
Tamara lives in Denver, Colorado, with her two crazy and amazing boys, Liam and Ari, and her 100lb Mastiff named Zoey.