Sanyin lives out her life’s mission to enable greatness in others as a mom, educator, executive coach, investor, board director, speaker and author. She is the founding executive director of Duke University’s Coach K Leadership & Ethics Center at the Fuqua School of Business. The center is a leadership laboratory that develops all Duke’s Daytime MBAs, and convenes think tanks across sectors and industries to explore today’s complex leadership challenges and what leaders need to do to prepare themselves and their successors. COLE also provides programming for all of Duke’s Daytime MBAs and engages with Duke’s undergraduate population. In addition to her role at Fuqua, Sanyin is a professor with Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering and a Faculty Fellow with Duke Divinity School’s Ormond Center.
Recognized by Thinkers50 (the premier global ranking of management thinkers) in 2019 as the World’s #1 Executive Coach & Mentor, she helps boards, CEOs and their teams lead in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world by leveraging their superpowers, build stronger teams and to reimagine the future. She draws insights from her work and engagements with Fortune 500 CEOs and their successors, Olympians, military generals, tech founders, and global thought-leaders.
An Influencer with more than 1 million LinkedIn followers, she was recognized on LinkedIn’s Top 20 Global Influencer Voices in 2017 and 2018. Her thought leadership has been featured in New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, HBR, and The Wall Street Journal. She pens The Last Word Column in Dialogue Review, a quarterly global practitioner journal for a million plus management leaders. She authored the award-winning book The Launch Book: Motivational Stories for Launching Your Idea, Business, or Next Career. Her biweekly substack newsletter - Leadership Playbook: Unleashing Your Superpowers, helps readers discover their innate and instinctive strengths and build super teams. In 2021, Thinkers50 recognized her as one of the 50 most influential thought-leaders in the world and subsequently, Poets & Quants listed her as one of top academic educators globally. She is a member of Silicon Guild.
Her board service includes the Museum of Life & Science where she had chaired its Governance & Nominating Committee and The Emily Krzyzewski Center (which democratizes access to education for 1st generation college hopefuls). She serves as an advisor for GV (formerly Google Ventures) and one of the 10 All Star Network advisors for DRIVE by Draftkings, alongside Theo Epstein, Larry Fitzgerald, and Hilary Knight. She is an advisory board member for the US Congressional Award (the highest award for youth legislated and presented by the United States Congress), Ripcord and Privateer (two robotics and space companies cofounded by Steve Wozniak and Alex Fielding), and Sports Innovation Lab. She is host of the Sports Leadership Institute’s Conversations with Legends. In 2021, she was a proud investor in the DC Spirit, the 2021 National Women’s Soccer League Championship Team.
Sanyin received her MBA and BSE from Duke University. She lives in Durham with the love of her life-Chad- and their 3 children (ages 12, 11, and 9).
