Carmen Medina

Carmen is an organizational heretic and all-purpose troublemaker whose only real expertise is asking stupid questions and noticing odd, new things that might amount to something…or maybe not. Carmen spent 32 years at CIA but when you meet her you will hardly notice. The top five skills that people on LinkedIn endorse her for are strategy, analysis, leadership, national security, and government, FWIW. She is the co-author of the new book: Rebels At Work: A Handbook for Leading Change from Within, which was informed by her career as a heretic at the CIA.

She likes to speak in public and will go just about anywhere if you pay her expenses. Some of her most recent engagements include speaking at the GeoInt 2015 Symposium, at All Stars Suits and Spooks conference on excellence in analytics, to Canada’s Ontario public sector leadership about Cognitive Diversity, to Spain’s Basque Innovation Day, 2014 about Innovation; consecutive presentations (2013-2015) at GovLoop’s NextGen Leadership Summit; panel presentations and book talk at South by Southwest Interactive (2013-2015), keynote address on Sensemaking and Cognitive Diversity at Canada’s Institute for Public Administration, 2013, and speaking at IBM’s centennial anniversary in 2011.

If you’re interested in the serious career details, read this paragraph. From 2005-2007 Carmen was part of the executive team that led the CIA’s Analysis Directorate; in her last assignment before retiring she oversaw the CIA’s Lessons Learned program and led the Agency’s first effort to address the challenges posed by social networks, digital ubiquity, and the emerging culture of collaboration. She was a leader on diversity issues at the CIA, serving on equity boards at all organizational levels and across Directorates. She was the first CIA executive to conceptualize many IT applications now used by analysts, including online production, collaborative tools, and Intellipedia, a project she personally green-lighted; as a senior executive, she began using in 2005 social networking and blogs to reach her diverse workforce. Upon her retirement from CIA, she received the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal. From 2011—2015, Carmen was a member of Deloitte Federal Consulting where she served as senior advisor and mentor to Deloitte’s flagship innovation program, GovLab, and sponsored research projects on Bitcoin, Millennials, and the impact of the Internet of Things on government.

Carmen describes herself as Puerto Rican by birth and Texan by nationality. She likes to garden and cook things that she has grown. You can follow her on Twitter @milouness and visit her two blogs: recoveringfed.com and rebelsatwork.com.