Interview: Bill Duane

Bill Duane is the principal at Bill Duane and Associates, a consulting firm focused on innovation. He helps organizations and individuals execute well in ambiguity and rapid change through innovation mindset, managing complexity and resilience. He works with leading companies including tech, pharma and media.

He teaches innovation and AI workshops at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design and is the Director of Strategy and Implementation at the Center for the Study of Apparent Selves, working on applied AI ethics, funded by a two-year Templeton Foundation grant. He holds a Research Fellowship at Kathmandu University as part of this effort.

He was an engineering executive at Google for nine years, leading the production engineering teams for websearch infrastructure and then Google Workspace (gmail, docs, calendar, etc.) responsible for scaling these services worldwide during hypergrowth. After becoming curious about burnout, performance and culture, he started a second career at Google, establishing the role of Superintendent of Wellbeing and creating successful programs to explore the intersection of performance and human flourishing for the following five years.

He is on the advisory board of Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, a Fellowship Advisor to the Just Economy Institute and advisor to several for-profit and nonprofit startups.

https://apparentselves.org/