Willie Jackson is a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Consultant & Facilitator with ReadySet, a boutique consulting firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a frequent writer and speaker on the topics of workplace equity, global diversity, and inclusive leadership.
Willie founded an online magazine for black men called Abernathy in 2015, growing the publication from initial concept to over 400 articles and thousands of subscribers, made possible by dozens of contributors and sponsors like Mailchimp, Basecamp, DigitalOcean, and Atlassian.
From 2015 to 2017, Willie served as Technical Lead of Seth Godin’s altMBA program, a 4-week online workshop for high-performing individuals who want to level up and lead. Previously, Willie served as the Director of Web Optimization at W3 EDGE, a Boston based interactive web development and marketing agency. In this role, he supported users of products such as W3 Total Cache, a popular web performance framework for WordPress.
Before W3 EDGE, Willie relocated to Buenos Aires, Argentina and spent five months immersing himself in a foreign culture in order to challenge himself and his assumptions about life outside what’s familiar. Much to the relief of his dear mother, he did not find himself stranded and destitute at any point during the adventure.
In 2011, Willie served as the CTO of The Domino Project, a publishing company in New York City started by bestselling author and marketing guru Seth Godin. In its year-long lifecycle, The Domino Project published twelve books, all of which became bestsellers, and redefined the way books are created, published, and shared.
Before The Domino Project, Willie spent three years as an IT Consultant with Accenture in Atlanta. He specialized in portal and content management deployments, and helped select, implement, and support Enterprise technology solutions for Fortune 500 clients across North America.
He has been featured in documentaries (I’m Fine, Thanks), on HTGV (House Hunters International Episode HHINT-5010H), and in print (Icarus Deception by Seth Godin). Willie writes semi-regularly on his eponymous blog about business and success through the eyes of a curious marketer.
A graduate of Florida State University (Information Technology), Jackson currently splits his time between Oakland, California and Brooklyn, New York.
“There are consultants that listen to your needs, develop the plan on how to fulfill them and then execute. And there are people like Willie Jackson, who challenge the patterns, disrupt the comfort, and ask the sort of questions that not only flip the organization’s paradigms but encourage the culture of critical thinking and self-betterment. Sure, Willie can help you with your HOW, but his strengths really lie in discovering the WHY.”
—Bojan Mandaric, Executive Director, November Project Inc.