Ashish Kothari
Executive in Residence, Center for Positive Organizations
Founder and CEO, Happiness Squad
Ashish Kothari is an executive coach, author, and founder of Happiness Squad, a company focused on helping individuals and organizations unleash the power of happiness and well-being to achieve their full potential. Ashish is a deep expert on the topic of happiness and human flourishing having read over 450 books and trained under masters across the disparate fields of spiritual wisdom traditions, psychology, and neuroscience. In his book “Hardwired for Happiness” Ashish outlines an easy-to follow recipe that can help anyone increase joy, health, love, and meaning in their lives. His transformational approach is secular, interdisciplinary and integrates learnings and best practices across the fields of science and spirituality.
Prior to starting Happiness Squad, Ashish spent over 17 years at McKinsey and Co, a premier management consulting firm, supporting thousands of leaders and their organizations succeed through increasing their effectiveness, building more human-centric cultures, and developing new mindsets and capabilities at scale. He served as the co-dean for the Centered Leadership as well as Reenergizing organizations’ training programs at McKinsey and highly sought-after Expert on the topics of leadership and well-being, both internally and externally.
Ashish is a Newfield-certified ontological coach trained to help leaders overcome obstacles through the use of language, mood, and somatics to shift how they observe the world. He also has a Master in Business Administration (MBA) with a specialization in Organizational behavior from Chicago Booth and a Bachelors and Masters degree in Chemical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, India.
Ashish is married and lives with his wife Lizzie, son Ashwin, and their dog Ms. Puggles in Boulder, Colorado. He serves on the advisory board of the CU Leeds business school.