Diane Hessan – President & CEO
Diane Hessan is President and CEO of Communispace Corporation, the leading provider of online customer communities, a transformative marketing and organizational capability enabling global businesses to collaborate with, and listen to, their customers. A pioneer in the burgeoning social networking category, Diane helped found Communispace in 1999 and hasn’t looked back.
Today, Diane leads Communispace’s several-hundred employees in building and managing the 300+ communities the company has created for a list of over 100 marquee brands. She has led the company to double its size every year, while securing a 90+% client retention rate. Communispace was recently recognized for the 2nd year in a row, as one of the 15 fastest-growing companies in Boston and also as a Best Place to Work in Boston.
Diane has spent her 30-year career helping companies become customer-focused – as a Forum Corporation executive, and co-author of the best selling book Customer-Centered Growth: Five Strategies for Building Competitive Advantage, which has been translated into 11 languages. She has received many citations for her leadership, including the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in the marketing services category for the New England Region, Entrepreneur of the Year from Women’s Business Boston and ‘Best Boss’ from Winning Workplaces/Fortune Small Business.
Diane sits on the boards of: the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, the Business Innovation Factory, Progressive Business Leaders Network, Horizons for Homeless Children, the Boston Philharmonic, and the Tufts Entrepreneurial Leadership Institute.
A summa cum laude graduate of Tufts University, Diane received an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. She is the mother of two college-age daughters and co-founder of The Sound Bytes, a cappella group that writes lyrics about business and performs at conferences.