Obsessed with leaders and the lessons they teach... whether they mean to or not.
Organizational psychology, culture, and the conditions that make people want to contribute.
I want to help create places where people want to show up, contribute, connect, and care.
Melissa Laci has spent nearly two decades building companies, products, and the cultures they run on.
She was Head of Culture at Zappos during one of the most closely watched periods of organizational experimentation in modern business, and later a founding leader at Delivering Happiness, where she helped translate research on happiness, meaning, and belonging into the way organizations operated around the world.
The same read on human behavior is what made her a product leader. As a cofounder and chief product officer she designed for how people actually behave, which is the same problem as culture: people respond to what a system does, not to what it claims.
Her work today centers on a simple idea: leaders are always teaching culture, and most of them never decided to. Through what they prioritize, model, reward, correct, tolerate, protect, and celebrate, leaders teach people what really matters, and how things actually work around here.
She works with leadership teams to see what their behavior is already teaching, and to course-correct before it hardens into the way things are done here.
She is currently completing her master's in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at Harvard, where her research focuses on culture, mattering, workplace loneliness, and leadership.
The long résumé in shorthand.
- ZapposHead of Culture
- Delivering HappinessCoach-sultant, global culture practice
- HarvardGraduate Research, I-O Psychology
- banq & Fortress TechnologiesCofounder & CPO
- Magnitude of ChangeCPO/CXO
- Confounders.coCofounder/CPO