Sally Thornton

CEO & Founder, Forshay

Sally is the CEO & Founder of Forshay, a firm that takes a holistic lens on how hard work can be accomplished more easily, as it’s essential to have both the right players on the team, and the culture and organizational structure that enables people to do their best work. Forshay does this in two ways – with a modern approach to executive recruiting, and by supporting overworked teams with interim experts in the People/HR and Marketing domains -- all grounded with inclusion, diversity, equity and belonging.

Forshay was awarded #290 on the Inc. 5000 "Fastest-Growing Private Companies" list for 2015. Prior to founding Forshay, Sally co-founded and was CEO of Flexperience. Under her leadership, Flexperience grew into a nationally acclaimed firm, and was awarded “Top 100 Fastest-Growing Private Companies” in 2010 by the San Francisco Business Times.

Sally lectures regularly at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business as well as UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She was also in two Prince videos.

The Future of Teams

In her talk, Sally will talk about the delicate balance between individual well-being and team dynamics in the workplace. She will discuss strategies for activating meaningful connections within teams while addressing the tension between self-care and organizational systems. 

She’ll teach what she learned from years of working in large teams, and offer practical insights on how to enhance both personal satisfaction and collective productivity, tying her ideas to the conference's broader themes of workplace innovation and human-centered companies.