Dr. Cheng Zhu - Humor Leadership Consulting | leadership keynote speaker New York

Lead sharper. Laugh harder.

About

Meet Dr. Cheng Zhu
Also known as Dr. Ha Ha

Organizational psychologist by training.

Executive coach by practice.

Corporate comedian by necessity.

Based in New York City. Engagements worldwide.

The most underused tool in leadership is a well-timed laugh. It took Dr. Cheng Zhu two graduate degrees and a few hundred executives under pressure to understand why.

She is the CEO of Humor Leadership Consulting, advising leaders, boards, and investors from Fortune 500s to fast-growing AI-native companies, and turning behavioral science and humor into advantage that compounds. Her expertise spans leadership development, executive assessment, founder-to-CEO transition, succession planning, and board effectiveness. Increasingly, her work centers on human-AI adoption: why teams trust, resist, or misuse the tools they are betting the company on. Her clients lead sharper, laugh harder, and remain decidedly human: delightfully irreplaceable in the age of AI.

Dr. Zhu was the first Asian elected President of the Harvard Graduate Student Government (Harvard Graduate Council), and a recipient of the Harvard University Certificate of Distinction in Teaching and the Provost’s Outstanding Service Award.

She researched leadership and workplace culture at Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School of Government Center for Public Leadership, and served on the faculty of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL). She has designed and delivered executive education programs for leaders from more than 50 countries, including Eisenhower Fellowships’ inaugural Global Leadership Program and Women’s Leadership Program, developed under the guidance of then-Chairman General Colin L. Powell.

As a Fellow of Disruptor Foundation, she guides leaders in adopting growth strategies built on the pioneering insights of Harvard Business School’s Dr. Clayton Christensen, the world's foremost authority on disruptive innovation. Her book chapter appears in The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) Leadership Handbook, alongside some of the world's leading voices on leadership, and her writing in Forbes and The Leadership Quarterly Journal have been translated into multiple languages.

She holds a B.A. from Beijing University, a master’s and doctorate from Harvard University, and an improv certificate from New York's legendary Upright Citizens Brigade. Three of them are on her CV. The fourth is the one that saved her in her first boardroom: "Yes, and."

She guest-starred in truTV's hit comedy series "Impractical Jokers," and produces and hosts live comedy programming on resilience and community building, most recently the "Comedy of Kindness" series, with support from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

She works in keynotes, offsites, and boardrooms. The boardroom expects a serious meeting. It leaves laughing anyway.

Differentiators

Science, With Punchlines

Behavioral science delivered with humor that gets executives to actually change. No trust falls, no icebreakers, nobody pretending to be a tree.

Human Before Hierarchy

We coach the people behind the titles. Org charts don't have breakthroughs. Humans do.

Built for the Age of AI

The tools are new. The human problems are not. We work on both.

Speaking

Keynotes & Speaking

What kind of room are you filling?
Every room needs a different talk. Pick yours.

Big stage, mixed audience. Talks built to travel.

Laugh, Lead, Repeat: Humor as a Serious Leadership Tool
Work is too serious not to laugh about. How well-placed humor builds trust, lowers the temperature, and makes hard conversations sound like a person rather than a chatbot with a wellness budget.

AI Won't Replace You. Uninspired Leadership Might.
The threat isn't the robots. It's leadership that's been running on autopilot since 2019. How to lead with enough boldness that your team stays engaged and you stay the hardest thing in the building to automate.

Generational Intelligence: Four Generations, Plus the Robots
Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, and now a few teammates who don't take PTO. It's not a punchline, it's your org chart. Flex your leadership style so humans and AI agents actually build something together. Memes optional.

Women's Leadership: Boldly, Strategically, On Your Own Terms
Grow your influence without becoming someone else's idea of a leader. Research-backed insights for women ready to make bigger moves, hold real power, and skip the apology tour.

A room of leaders, a hotel ballroom, and change that survives the flight home.

Leading Change Without Losing Your Mind (or Your Team)
Move people from resistance to real buy-in, minus the eye rolls and the quiet quitting. Proven tactics for driving change while keeping the people who make it work.

The Feedback Fix: Conversations That Actually Land
Stop dreading review season. The conversations that build trust, sharpen performance, and spare everyone the awkward follow-up from HR.

Speak Up, Slip Up, Spark Ideas
Improv for leaders who'd rather not wing it but have to anyway. Agility, creativity, and composure for the moment the plan goes sideways. The session people are still talking about at dinner.

Global Leadership: Across Borders and Time Zones
Cultural complexity is an advantage right up until it isn't. Best practices for leading multicultural, cross-functional teams without losing context, credibility, or a full night of sleep.

Everyone in one room, from the executive team to the person who started Monday.

Culture Clash or Culture Blend?
Collaboration shouldn't fall apart just because people think differently. Decode the unwritten rules, name the friction out loud, and turn difference into performance instead of a standing HR item.

Inclusive Leadership: Building Cultures of Belonging
Inclusion isn't a slogan on the wall or a slide in the all-hands. It's a set of daily behaviors, and everyone in the room has some.

Managing Stress and Energy: Leadership That Doesn't Burn You Out
You can perform well and stay well. Science-backed ways to protect your energy and build resilience that outlasts the quarter.

Failing Well: The Comeback Is the Skill (new)
Every high performer in the room has a failure they haven't told anyone about. How to fail out loud, recover faster, and build a company where people take the swing anyway. Drawn from years of live comedy, where failing in public is the job.

Ten to fifteen people who have heard every framework. Small room, high stakes.

The CEO Playbook: Strategic Decisions and Legacy Leadership
Your biggest calls outlive your tenure. Make them with courage, clarity, and staying power, and leave behind something more durable than a press release.

Mastering AI Leadership: Lead Smart, Stay Human
The bots are here and they have opinions. Steering people, capital, and strategy when the tech cycle outruns your planning cycle, and protecting the judgment no model replicates.

Negotiation and Conflict: The Psychology of Getting to Yes
Skip the tired tactics. Behavioral science at the table, and a clear read on what the other side actually wants.

The Room Where It Happens: Executive Team Dynamics (new)
The behaviors at the top set the ceiling for everything below. An honest look at how your team actually makes decisions, who stops talking and when, and what the org is copying from you without being told.

TRAINING

Solutions

Dr Cheng Zhu on Global Leadership	Dr Cheng Zhu-Women Leaders Activity	Dr Cheng Zhu on Leadership Styles
Dr Cheng Zhu on Leadership Vision	Dr Cheng Zhu's Leadership Exercises	Dr. Cheng Zhu on Team Innovation
Dr Cheng Zhu on Team Leadership	Dr Cheng Zhu's Leadership Seminar	Dr Cheng Zhu's Coaching Exercises
Dr Cheng Zhu on Leaders' Negotiation

Who are we solving for?

The same problem looks different depending on where you sit. Pick your altitude.

One person, one blind spot, one set of habits formed before any of this got complicated. Start here when the constraint is a leader, not a system.

Individual Leader Assessments

Blind spots, meet bright lights. We hold up the mirror so leaders see what their team already sees, minus the sugarcoating and the survey fatigue. The starting point for everything else.

Cognitive Agility Bootcamp

Think sharper, pivot faster, spiral less. Name the biases, break the habits that stopped working in 2021, and make better calls under pressure. The skill that compounds when the tools change every eleven weeks.

Coaching Skills for Managers

Less control freak, more trusted guide. Ask better questions, deliver feedback people can actually use, and build ownership you didn't have to assign. Increasingly the whole job, now that the tasks are handled elsewhere.

Executive Coaching

Confidential, structured, and built for leaders who've run out of people who'll tell them the truth. Behavioral science, real accountability, and a coach who will laugh with you about the thing you can't say in the meeting.

Assessments feed directly into coaching and development. Most leaders start with one and continue into the other.

Learn More

Five to fifty people who are individually competent and collectively slower than they should be. Almost always a dynamics problem, rarely a talent problem.

Executive Team Assessments

Turf wars to teamwork. Silo-smashing, trust-building, goal-aligning work for the people at the top, so the executive team stops needing a referee and starts pulling the same direction.

Generational Intelligence

Turn "OK Boomer" into "OK, let's go." Four generations in one org chart, plus a few new teammates who don't take PTO. Practice the conversations that keep humans and AI agents building together instead of around each other.

Leading in the AI Era

Stay human while the machines handle the grunt work. Keep trust, candor, and real conversation alive when half your meetings have a bot in the corner taking notes and nobody's sure who owns the decision anymore.

The Choreography of Leadership

Great teams, like great ensembles, know when to lead, when to follow, and when to get out of the way. This one uses movement instead of memos to build the instinct. Jazz hands optional, historically popular.

Hundreds or thousands of people, a structure someone designed for a company that no longer exists, and a culture that formed whether anyone planned it or not.

Organizational Leadership Assessments

A clear read on your bench strength. How your leadership layer actually stacks up, strengths and gaps and surprises included, so you invest deliberately instead of discovering the succession problem the week it becomes one.

Leadership Development

Custom-fit, not off the shelf. Programs built around your people, your strategy, and your context. No binders anyone will shelve. Just skills leaders keep using when the pressure arrives.

Change Management

Roadmaps nobody snickers at. Change plans that land, stick, and keep the skeptics onside, so a good idea survives past slide three. Built for the pace of AI adoption, where the plan changes twice before rollout.

Organization Design

Org charts that don't cause migraines. Clear roles, smart structures, fewer awkward overlaps, and a real answer to which decisions still need a human in the loop.

Culture Transformation

More doing, less corporate chanting. Turn stated values into daily habits, shift the behaviors that signal what's actually rewarded, and build a culture people choose to stay for. No drum circles.

→ Organizational work always begins with a diagnostic. We don't guess.

Learn More

The part nobody else can run. Built on years of live comedy, applied to the moments where leadership is hardest and most human. Works at every altitude.

Humor at Work

Laugh with intent. Lead with ease. When the quip lands, when to hold it, and how humor defuses tension, crosses silos, and buys you candor that no engagement survey will ever produce.

Failing Well: The Comeback Is the Skill

Every high performer in the room has a failure they haven't mentioned. How to fail out loud, recover faster, and build a place where people take the swing anyway. Drawn from stand-up, where bombing in public is Tuesday.

Speak Up, Slip Up, Spark Ideas

Improv for leaders who'd rather not wing it but have to anyway. Composure, agility, and presence for the moment the plan changes mid-sentence. The most uncomfortable session on this page and the one they talk about at dinner.

The Room Read

Reading what a room is actually doing, not what the agenda says it's doing. A performer's skill, taught to executives, and the thing AI is furthest from replicating.

→ These pair with any engagement above and are the reason people remember the work.

Strategic Consulting
For decisions that outlast the people making them.

Partnership with executive teams and boards navigating strategy resets, leadership transitions, and growth that has outpaced the structure built to hold it.

The approach

Most strategy fails on execution, and most execution fails on human dynamics nobody named during planning. The plan was sound. The team couldn't carry it, or wouldn't say so.

We start with organizational psychology rather than a framework: how decisions actually get made here, where information stops moving, which conversations the team has been avoiding. Everything after is built on evidence about your organization, not a model borrowed from someone else's.

How it works

Discovery: Structured conversations with executives, the board, and the layer beneath. The stated challenge and the actual one are rarely the same.
Diagnostic: A rigorous read on decision rights, information flow, and where strategy dies on its way down, alongside industry policy and practice analysis.
Strategy sessions: Facilitated working sessions that force the trade-offs into the open, led by someone with no stake in which answer wins.
Initiative design: Built with the people who'll execute them, sequenced against your real capacity rather than the optimistic version.
Measurement: Agreed markers set before the work begins, so the assessment isn't a negotiation afterward.

Innovation and adaptive capacity

Strategy assumes a stable environment. Most organizations no longer have one, and the constraint is rarely a shortage of ideas.

This stream builds the capacity to adapt: change methodologies matched to your context, innovation projects designed to scale rather than stall in pilot, and the cultural conditions that decide whether people bring their best thinking to work or keep it to themselves.

Where this fits

Strategy resets. CEO and leadership transitions. Post-acquisition integration. Growth inflection points. Board-driven transformation. Succession with real stakes.

Engagements run one to two quarters, some continuing as ongoing advisory.

Dr. Cheng Zhu speaking at National Training Conference

Consulting

CLIENT TESTIMONIALS

Client Testimonials

General Colin Powell & Dr. Cheng Zhu @ Eisenhower Fellowships Global Leadership Development Programs	Eisenhower Fellowships	Eisenhower Fellowships Testimonial on Women's Leadership Program led by Dr. Cheng Zhu
Eisenhower Fellowships President's Letter - Testimonial on Multi Nation Program led by Dr. Cheng Zhu	Eisenhower Fellowships Testimonial on Dr. Cheng Zhu's Women's Leadership Programs