A strategic advisor, entrepreneur, and lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Amy Wilkinson has spoken on innovation and entrepreneurship at the Wall Street Journal Women in the Economy conference, The Economist Innovation Summit, Federal Reserve Board of Governors, National Governor’s Association, and International Council of Small Business Summit, as well as national media outlets such as Fox News and CNN.
Amy’s background is in international business and trade including serving in the White House as a Senior Policy Advisor and White House Fellow. Working with the cabinet-ranked U.S. Trade Representative, Amy outlined U.S.-China trade policy, coordinated congressional passage of the Central America Free Trade Agreement, and helped negotiate the Panama, Peru, and Colombia trade agreements. As an international business executive, she led strategy teams for McKinsey & Company in the firm’s London and San Francisco offices and cross-border mergers and acquisitions teams for JP Morgan in New York and Latin America. Amy spent five years living in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil and is founder of Alegre, an international art-export company that provided indigenous artisans with access to the U.S. market. She began her career as the youngest ever Chief of Protocol for the United States Embassy in Mexico.
Amy was born in Hong Kong and has lived and traveled extensively overseas. She has studied at Oxford University and The University of Salamanca and received a Rotary International Scholarship to live in Spain and a 2015 Eisenhower Fellowship to travel in China and Singapore. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an Ewing Marian Kauffman Foundation grantee for her research on high scale entrepreneurship. Amy holds a BA, MA, and MBA from Stanford University. Her writing has been featured in The Economist, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Washington Post, USA Today, and Stanford Social Innovation Review, among other publications.
About The Creator’s Code: The Six Essential Skills of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs
Each of us has the capacity to spot opportunities, invent products, and build businesses–even $100 million businesses.
How do some people turn ideas into enterprises that endure? Why do some people succeed when so many others fail? The Creator’s Code unlocks the six essential skills that turn small notions into big companies. This landmark book is based on 200 interviews with today’s leading entrepreneurs including the founders of LinkedIn, Chipotle, eBay, Under Armour, Tesla Motors, SpaceX, Spanx, Airbnb, PayPal, Jetblue, Gilt Groupe, Theranos, and Dropbox.
Over the course of five years, Amy Wilkinson conducted rigorous interviews and analyzed research across many different fields. From the creators of the companies ranging from Yelp to Chobani to Zipcar, she found that entrepreneurial success works in much the same way. Creators are not born with an innate ability to conceive and build $100 million enterprises. They work at it. They all share fundamental skills that can be learned, practiced, and passed on.
The Creator’s Code reveals six skills that make creators of all kinds of endeavors breakthrough. These skills aren’t rare gifts or slim chance talents. Entrepreneurship, Wilkinson demonstrates, is accessible to everyone. The book’s insights provide core guidance for success in the new world of work.
