Halla Tomasdottir

Biography

Halla is a Change Catalyst on a quest to inspire and empower leaders to release the value of principle-based and gender balanced leadership. She has passionately pursued this purpose as a business leader in Corporate America with M&M and Pepsi Cola, as the first female CEO of Iceland’s Chamber of commerce and as an executive and non-executive director for diverse businesses. An entrepreneur at heart, she joined the founding team of Reykjavik University where she founded the Executive Education department and led a successful initiative focused on empowering women and girls as entrepreneurs, leaders and investors. In 2007 she co-founded an investment firm with the vision to incorporate feminine values into finance. The company made international headlines when it successfully survived Iceland’s infamous economic meltdown. In 2016, Halla ran for President in Iceland. She was an independent candidate with no prior political experience and surprised everyone as she emerged from an initial 1% in the polls to becoming the runner-up with 28% of the vote.

Halla holds an international MBA from Thunderbird and has lived and worked in the US, the UK and across the Nordics. Her work led her to the TED stage twice and she has delivered keynotes and participated in dialogues about leadership and gender for companies and conferences around the world. In 2011, Newsweek named her to a list of 150 women who shake the world and after following Iceland’s Presidential Elections in 2016, the New Yorker called her A Living Emoji of Sincerity.