Suzanne Muchin is an award-winning Clinical Associate Professor in Kellogg’s Leadership Development Communications (LDEV), where she teaches Selling Yourself and Your Ideas, Women’s Leadership Seminar, and is a featured lecturer in New Venture and entrepreneurship courses at Kellogg. She and Professor Craig Wortmann also offer the Life Hacks workshop, and Suzanne (being Kellogg's most outspoken introvert) also offers her workshop on Selling Yourself: Introverts Edition.

 

Outside of Kellogg, she is the co-founder of Bonfire, a talent development accelerator for the rising generation of women in the workplace. With her long-time business partner (and Bonfire co-founder), Rachel Bellow, Suzanne is also the host of the popular podcast on work and your life: The Bonfire Podcast. 

 

Before launching Bonfire, Suzanne was a founding partner and lead strategist of Mind + Matter Studio, and a founder of Frequency540, a strategic communications agency that acquired her first brand strategy firm, ROI Ventures (Return on Inspiration). With Rachel, Suzanne launched and developed ROI Ventures’ incubator (Return on Inspiration Labs, LLC) and its media arm (ROI Distributed, LLC).  She was inducted into the Chicago Entrepreneur Hall of Fame in 2012 for these ventures.

 

A graduate of Tufts University, Suzanne began her career as a Charter Corps member of Teach For America, and taught eighth grade Spanish in the South Bronx. She then spent four years on the National Staff of TFA as the Vice President for Programs, overseeing recruitment, selection, training and support for all corps members. It was during her time at TFA that Suzanne began focusing on the need for high quality early childhood programs, particularly in the most vulnerable communities. As a result, she became the CEO of Civitas, a communication agency for the early childhood field which was founded by the CEO of Harpo Entertainment. She spent 11 years in that position, during which Civitas launched large-scale, national communication campaigns that included Begin with Love, Born Learning, What Grown-Ups Understand about Young Children and other efforts. She also co-authored the book Understanding Children with TED founder Richard Saul Wurman.

 

Suzanne is an investor in impact companies, a mentor to entrepreneurs at 1871 and TechStars, and an LP and Advisory Board member for MATH Venture Partners.  She is a Wexner Heritage Member, and on the Board of Directors of the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center (1871). She has served as an Independent Director at Knightscope (NASDAQ: KSCP), and is currently an Independent Director of Fooda. In 2022, Suzanne and her husband were awarded the Human Rights Medallion by the American Jewish Congress.

 

In her free time, Suzanne can be found somewhere on the Chicago lakefront path, as she is a long-time marathon runner, having run nine full marathons and four half marathons over the years. That activity started as a stress-reducing strategy for raising five (now college-age and adult) children and one rescue dog.

 

• BA, 1990, International Relations, Tufts University, cum laude

• Co-founder, Bonfire, 2016-present
• Co-host, The Big Payoff Podcast, 2012-present
• Guest Lecturer, Chicago Booth, 2001-2012
• Principal, Mind + Matter Studio, 2012-2016
• Founder and Lead Strategist, ROI* (Return on Inspiration) Ventures, 2006-2012
• CEO, Civitas, 1996-2005
• National Program Director, Teach For America, 1993-1996
• Midwest Recruiter, Teach For America, 1992-1993
• Charter Corps Member/Teacher, Teach For America, 1990-1992

• Sidney J. Levy Award for Excellence in Teaching
• American Jewish Commitee Human Rights Medallion Award Award given each year to leaders whose contributions demonstrate a commitment to building a more enlightened and compassionate society and whose civic contributions have helped to promote intergroup understanding and cooperation. Past recipients of this award have included Lester Crown, Penny Pritzker, among others.

The Pointy Point of View (Start-up edition)

Leading with a Point of View (C-suite edition)

Leading with a Point of View (for women on the rise)

Selling Yourself and Your Ideas: Introverts Edition

Mattering More: Defining Success on Your Own Terms

Claiming Your Voice for Influence and Impact

Networking for Introverts

Developing Your Voice for Influence & Women's Leadership Seminar

Selling Yourself and Your Ideas: main course

Selling Yourself and Your Ideas: full credit course

 

Energizing People for Performance

Participants in this highly interactive program, master the processes and tools required to unleash the potential in individuals, energize their teams, and empower people to achieve consistently higher levels of performance and deliver better bottom-line results.

Selling Yourself and Your Ideas (LDEVX-477-0)
It’s been said that humans are “meaning making machines.” More than 70,000 years ago, near the outset of the Cognitive Revolution, we created language to help protect and organizeourselves.1Over the ensuing millennia, we have developed myriad ways to communicate with each other. Present day, our communications take many forms, and so we find ourselves in conversations, meetings, presentations, and even as producers on social media. As business leaders, we move through these many forms of communication in the course of a week, and indeed we can even traverse each of them within one day. At no time in history have interpersonal communication skills been as important as they are today. In the Agrarian Age, a farmer who ploughed the field a little better than their neighbors could not acquire significantly more wealth. In the Industrial Age, a factory worker who assembled widgets a little faster than the person next to them could not acquire significantly more wealth. Today, anyone, anywhere in the world, who is a little better at expressing their ideas can see a sudden, massive increase in wealth that is unprecedented in human history. In the 21st-century knowledge economy, you are only as valuable as your ideas. Says Gallo, “The ability to convince others that your ideas matter is the single greatest skill that will give you a competitive edge at a time when the combined forces of globalization, automation, and artificial intelligence trigger a wave of anxiety across every profession in every country. In the next decade, your ideas-and the ability to articulate those ideas successfully-will count more than ever. Persuaders are irreplaceable." Selling Yourself & Your Ideas is a course that will force you out of your comfort zone to help you develop the knowledge, skills, and disciplines you need to be a powerful and influential communicator, no matter the situation in which you find yourself.

Selling Yourself & Your Ideas: The Fundamentals (LDEV-477-5)


Selling Yourself and Your Ideas (LDEV-477-0)
It's been said that humans are "meaning making machines." More than 70,000 years ago, near the outset of the Cognitive Revolution, we created language to help protect and organize ourselves.1 Over the ensuing millennia, we have developed myriad ways to communicate with each other. Present day, our communications take many forms, and so we find ourselves in conversations, meetings, presentations, and even as producers on social media. As business leaders, we move through these many forms of communications in the course of a week, and indeed we can even traverse each of them within one day. In order to be dynamic, high-performing communicators, we must do three things: 1. Be cognizant of what high performance looks like in each of these distinct modes of communication; 2. Develop a situational awareness for how to succeed in each form; and 3. Become agile in calibrating our approach. Selling Yourself & Your Ideas is a course that will force you out of your comfort zone to help you show up, stand out, and break through. You will develop the knowledge, skills, and disciplines you need to be a powerful and influential communicator, no matter the situation in which you find yourself.