The Next Frontier of Human Performance
Recognized among the Top 20 Women in both Luxury and Business Disruption, Florence Shaffer is a Executive who has led digital transformation for notable brands globally.
Florence’s work sits at the intersection of innovation, systems design, and human behavior.
Her 20+ years of experience spans multiple industries and cultures – including beauty (Estée Lauder Companies), luxury fashion (Burberry), automotive (BMW), film (Lucasfilm), real estate & construction (Matterport, YCombinator W12), healthcare (Possible/Harvard), and hospitality/food (Le Cordon Bleu, Alinea) – in New York, Miami, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, the SF Bay Area, Nepal, Paris, and Chicago.
At Estee Lauder Companies, Florence served as Global Vice President of Technology Strategy & Operations and Chief of Staff to the CIO, overseeing strategy, innovation and digital transformation while helping direct the operating rhythm of a 2,000 person organization. Previously, she was regional CTO for the Americas at Burberry, after leading digital innovation across Asia-Pacific markets to drive growth and deepen customer loyalty in China, Korea, and Japan.
Across industries and cultures, Florence became interested in a question that conventional measures of success rarely answer: once you have built an objectively good life, what comes next?
The qualities that create extraordinary outcomes in one chapter can quietly become the constraints of the next. And in a world growing more complex—where AI is making intelligence and execution increasingly accessible—the distinctly human capabilities of judgment, adaptability, agency, imagination, connection, and deliberate choice are becoming more valuable.
Today Florence is the co-founder and CEO of Becoming, a Human Performance Company for leaders who have reached the top and sense there is another level of life available.
Built on four years of research with more than 250 scientists, physicians, performance experts, and practitioners, Becoming helps people see the hidden systems shaping how they live, lead, and choose. Through a deeply personalized diagnostic and immersive experience, it expands their capacity to navigate complexity, move beyond the strategies that no longer serve them, and create a life of greater freedom, vitality, and possibility.
Not optimization for its own sake. Not another experience to escape into.
This is the next luxury: sovereignty. The ability to make your life the most extraordinary place you have access to.
Outside of work, Florence can be found exploring remote forests and ancient cities, playing sports with more enthusiasm than skill, reading voraciously about longevity and the future of society, and writing poetry that tries to capture it all.
Humanity & Technology
What does it mean to be human in today's world?
As advancements in technology and science continue to accelerate the evolution of our world, I often reflect on what this means for our society and our everyday experience of life. What I find confounding is the concerning statistics around our mental and physical health, in spite of the fact that we benefit from living in the most prosperous time in history.
My desire is to bring attention to our relationship with technology and ourselves, in order to design the future we want to see.