Joan Blades

Domestic peace advocate
Joan Blades shares a simple six-person conversation guide that helps people with differences get to know and even like each other.

Why you should listen

Joan Blades is a co-founder of LivingRoomConversations.org, an open-source effort to rebuild respectful civil discourse across ideological, cultural and party lines while embracing our core-shared values. She is also a co-founder of MomsRising.org and MoveOn.org. She is a co-author of The Custom-Fit Workplace: Choose When, Where and How to Work and Boost Your Bottom Line, winner of a Nautilus book award in 2011, and The Motherhood Manifesto, which won the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize in 2007.

Last century, Blades was a software entrepreneur, a co-founder of Berkeley Systems, best known for the Flying Toaster and the game "You Don't Know Jack." A mediator (attorney) by training and inclination, she is a nature lover, artist and true believer in the power of citizens and our need to rebuild respectful civil discourse while embracing our core shared values.

Joan Blades’ TED talk

More news and ideas from Joan Blades

Live from TEDWomen

The power of partnership: Notes from Session 3 of TEDWomen … Connect

November 2, 2017

Our hosts for this session, Jean Oelwang and Chris Waddell, are life partners who’ve both had to overcome their inclination to be a solo superhero — to be the best at business, school, sports. Jean spent her career climbing the corporate ladder, being tough, making her way to the top alone. Meanwhile, Chris was a […]

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