What Gets Measured Gets Changed
Rethinking the Food System
The world’s biggest challenges aren’t always the hardest: they’re the hardest to understand. In this engaging keynote, Michelle Li makes complex topics simple, relatable, and actionable. Using carbon as a case study, she shows how better understanding leads to better decisions: for individuals, organizations, and industries.
Book Michelle for your next eventFood & Beverage, right now
From agriculture to consumer choices, food companies have tremendous opportunities to reduce emissions while improving efficiency and resilience.
Translating complexity into clarity
Michelle Li has built her career translating complexity into clarity.
She began in the world of science, earning a Bachelor’s in Biology and Chemistry and a Master’s in Cancer Genetics, where she helped advance research on one of medicine’s most complex challenges. She then spent nearly a decade in Silicon Valley with Salesforce and DocuSign, helping organizations understand sophisticated technologies and translate technical capabilities into real business value.
Today, as Founder of Clever Carbon, Michelle applies that same gift to one of the world’s most important, and often misunderstood, topics: climate change.
Whether explaining cancer genetics, enterprise software, or carbon emissions, Michelle has a unique ability to make complex ideas simple, relatable, and actionable. Her engaging style has inspired audiences around the world, helping Fortune 500 companies, professional sports organizations, governments, and global brands build understanding, spark curiosity, and turn knowledge into meaningful action.
Michelle is known for making the invisible visible. Through storytelling, pop culture, and unexpected connections, she turns complex topics into memorable “aha” moments. From Taylor Swift to coffee to everyday products, Michelle connects familiar experiences to hidden systems, making ideas easy to understand and impossible to forget.
Organizations Michelle has worked with
What Gets Measured Gets Changed: Rethinking the Food System
Everyone eats. And from agriculture to packaging to what ends up in the bin, the food system carries some of the biggest sustainability opportunities of any industry. Yet the data behind every plate, like carbon, remains invisible to most consumers and teams.
In this engaging keynote, Michelle Li uses her signature blend of creative storytelling, pop culture, interactive learning, and unexpected connections to break down complex topics and make them understandable, memorable, and actionable.
What do Taylor Swift concerts, Beatles records, your morning coffee, and tonight’s dinner menu have in common? They all reveal hidden systems (agriculture, energy, transportation, waste, and carbon) in ways that people instantly understand. Michelle’s famous Coffee Menu (the same drinks, ranked by footprint, translated into 9 languages) began exactly here.
The keynote concludes by exploring how food and beverage companies can use data to rethink the food system: from agriculture and sourcing to packaging, food waste, logistics, menus and consumer education, operations, and supplier engagement. Audiences leave seeing food data as a recipe for resilience: lower emissions, lower costs, and customers who trust what’s on the label.
The opportunity map
What participants leave with
Rated the best by attendees
“What truly set her presentation apart was its fun, light, and unexpectedly different approach, making a complex topic engaging and memorable.”
“Her unwavering professionalism, dedication, and inventive ideas have significantly elevated the quality of our conferences. We consider ourselves fortunate to have crossed paths with Michelle.”
“Michelle is a master of group engagement! As one student said "who knew that learning about something so dire could be so fun."”
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Michelle customizes What Gets Measured Gets Changed for conferences, leadership events, and teams.
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