Sanyin’s mission in life is to enable greatness in others. She lives out this mission as a thought-leader, CEO and C-Suite advisor, professor, sports investor and mom.
She is the Founding Executive Director of Duke University’s Coach K Leadership & Ethics Center (COLE) at its Fuqua School of Business and a professor with Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering.
Inducted into the Executive Coaching Hall of Fame by Thinkers50 in 2023 (the premier biennial ranking of global management thinkers and advisors), she was recognized as the world’s most influential executive coach & mentor (2019) and one of its top 50 management thinkers (2021, 2023). Sanyin brings a unique combination of practitioner sensibility, academic grounding, and patterns for leadership success drawn from work with leaders across a diversity of sectors and industries.
Her ideas have been featured in New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, Harvard Business Review. She pens the quarterly print and online columns – Coaching for the Future Forward Leader for MIT Sloan Management Review and The Last Word for Dialogue Review. She is the author of The Launch Book and has a LinkedIn following of more than 1 million. Additional insights for a Leadership Playbook are in her newsletter: https://leadershipplaybook.substack.com
She serves on Novartis’s Cultural Leadership Advisory Board, helping the CEO and CHRO with culture transformation. She is an advisor for GV (formerly Google Ventures), Privateer Space, DRIVE by DraftKings, National Women’s Soccer League, and the US Tennis Association. Her Board Service has included the NC Museum of Life & Science, The National Advisory Board of Duke Chapel, The Friends Board of the Nasher Museum of Art, and The Congressional Award Advisory Board. She is an alumnus of the Joint Civilian Orientation Conference (the US Department of Defense’s most prestigious civilian program). In 2026, she will be inducted as an Honoree of the Ellis Island Medal of Honor.
In 2022, she was an investor in the NWSL DC Spirit Team, which won the 2022 League Championships. She is also an investor in Unrivaled, Barcelona Dragons, SailGP, Tiger Golf League and Premier League of Basketball UK.
Sanyin received her MBA and BSE in biomedical engineering from Duke University.