Alexa Clay

Culture Hacker, economist and writer, Alexa Clay furnishes her  keynotes  with fascinating and insightful tales, gleaned from extensive research and travel into misfits and rebels, and the way they conduct their societies and economies. Edgy and thought-provoking, her ideas relate to business with authentic clarity.

Fascinated by and passionate about subcultures and misfits who are breaking the rules, but are entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs in their own organisations, Alexa is on a mission to bring their inventive and impressive management skills to mainstream business.

As a leftfield anthropologist and economist, looking at the world’s ‘not strictly legal’ economy, Alexa explores groups and themes such as pirates, terrorist organisations and hermits, and the ways in which they function and communicate.

Gangs, for example, do not want to be called ‘gangs’ but ‘organisations’, and exemplify similar recruitment, branding and management issues as normal businesses. In trying to become social organisations, many of the gangs that Alexa researched, were doing ‘change management’ in the same way as mainstream businesses, but with innovative and effective approaches.

In jail, inmates run businesses, and are replete with skills that can be used in the formal economy, and in understanding them and the organisational model of the hacking community, we can learn much about running businesses.

Alexa has always been interested in alternative approaches to traditional subjects, and throughout her childhood and education enjoyed scrutinising societies dismissed as ‘too different to count’ by others. The result is a creative and unique examination of those from whom we, surprisingly, have much to learn.

Through her Misfit Academy, Clay teaches how to think like the underworld’s most creative, innovative and forward-thinking individuals and how to apply their lessons to legitimate markets.

In 2015 Alexa's book Misfit Economy was published. The book explores how the other half innovates, drawing on stories from the lives of gangsters, pirates, hackers, and slum dwellers.

Alexa's fascinating keynote speeches cover areas as diverse as learning from misfit cultures to transforming business from the inside out, and how to learn from the grassroots economy.