Mary E. Boone, president of Boone Associates located in Essex, CT, designs strategic, complexity-based approaches to communication, leadership, and large-scale face-to-face, virtual and hybrid meetings. She specializes in high-performance collaboration.
Boone received an Academy of Management award for her Harvard Business Review cover article “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making,” which she co-authored with David Snowden. This article also received an Emerald Citation of Excellence Award in 2011 as one of the top 50 business articles from the top 300 management publications worldwide that have had a proven impact since their publication. It was also selected for inclusion in HBR’s September 2015 OnPoint Decisionmaking issue.
Among those quoting from and praising Boone’s work are The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, CNBC, National Public Radio, The Financial Times, Investor’s Business Daily, CIO Magazine, and Industry Week.
Boone’s books include Managing Inter@ctively: Executing Strategy, Improving Communication and Creating a Knowledge-Sharing Culture. (McGraw-Hill, 2001) and The Information Edge (co-authored with N. Dean Meyer, Dow Jones, 1987). Another of her books, Leadership and the Computer (Prima Publishing, 1993), was selected in 1994 as “required reading” for Congress by the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Successful Meetings Magazine profiled her as a top speaker and featured her as a “Strategic Thinker” on its July 2009 cover.
Throughout her career, Boone has integrated ideas across disciplines such as communication, IT, design, organizational development, communication, sales and marketing, and HR. She has authored hundreds of articles for a wide variety of general business publications.
Ms. Boone was the chief designer for MPI’s (Meeting Professionals International) first experiments with unconference sessions as part of their major conferences. She has designed unconferences and applied large group methods and collaborative meeting technologies for over 30 years.
Prior to founding Boone Associates, Boone was vice president of NDMA Inc., one of the foremost consultancies in the management of IT departments. Her pioneering work in IT influences her keen ability to apply technology to virtual and hybrid meetings and events.
Early in her career, Boone was a contributing editor to two leading teleconferencing industry publications: Business TV Magazine and TeleSpan. She also was a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a spinoff of the Rand Corporation.
Boone has been teaching organizational behavior for Northeastern University’s online MBA program for over a decade and she has been a Guest Lecturer at Emory University School of Business, Columbia University, The University of Texas School of Communication, Marist College, and the National Defense University’s ICAF Program.
Boone’s degrees, a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin and an undergraduate from Wake Forest University, are both in Communication Theory. She served as a Senior Fellow and on the Steering Committee of the International Executive Forum Program at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, California which provided one of the first online executive learning programs in the U.S.
In 2015, Mary and a spontaneously assembled on-site team won First Prize at ProtoHack in New York City, a code-free hackathon developed to encourage non-coders to develop app ideas. Her team developed a concept for encouraging peer-to-peer sharing during natural and man-made disasters. The team continued work on the project for two years following the event.
Mary lives in Essex, Connecticut with her husband Tom and her son Alex and is involved in a variety of capacities in her community. She serves on the Board of her local community bank and its fully-owned financial services subsidiary. Her volunteer activities include serving as co-chair of the Board of Tri-town Youth Services, a nonprofit agency dedicated to promoting the positive growth and development of youth and families. She is an active member of First Congregational Church of Old Lyme, CT where she is a substitute Sunday School teacher.