SPEAKING
Talks that make leadership practical — and human
My talks explore the tension between the received wisdom of management and the day-to-day reality inside large organizations. Combining research, real organizational experience, and stories drawn from everyday working life, they help audiences see familiar leadership challenges in a new way.
KEYNOTES
Selected talks
NEW FOR 2026
THREE QUESTIONS ABOUT AI
What, exactly, does AI change about human performance inside an organization? When it comes to real work, on real teams, on real days, what will actually be different? This talk explores three simple questions about AI: what will change for sure, what might change, and what will not change. The result is a clear, practical way to think about AI, grounded not in speculation but in how performance actually happens.
KEYNOTE
LEADERSHIP IS NOT A THING
Of all the myths we have come to believe about the world of work, the idea that there is a single, universal, and easily learned set of characteristics that make a person a leader is perhaps the most harmful. This presentation weaves together an examination of our traditional concept of leadership — and its shortcomings — with insights from the Civil Rights movement in the USA to provide a powerful illustration of leading at its finest.
KEYNOTE
ORGANIZATIONAL RESILIENCE AND THE PROBLEM WITH CHANGE
In today’s fast-paced business world, many have come to think of change and disruption as the building blocks of innovation and success, but what if the reality is actually the opposite? This eye-opening presentation illustrates the psychological costs of constant change, and demonstrates how change can itself stymie the very progress it seeks. As a counterbalance, it offers practical ways to create stability for leaders who want improvement to emerge sustainably.
KEYNOTE
CHANGE MANAGEMENT FOR HUMANS
Organizations are constantly changing — and so leaders are constantly grappling with how to manage change, whether it comes from within or without. But the most commonly used approaches to change management pay little heed to the fundamentals of human performance, and as a result many change initiatives flounder. This talk describes an approach to change centered on clarity and resilience and designed to sustain employee and team contributions in uncertain times.
KEYNOTE
HOW TO BUILD MAGICAL TEAMS
Why cascaded goals, ratings, consensus meetings, and once-a-year feedback don’t actually help people improve their work — and three core principles that organizations can use to put teams at the center of their approach to organizational performance and build more (magical) teams like their best teams.
KEYNOTE
THE FUTURE OF HR
How can Human Resources rethink its function to give employees the tools they need to do their best work? It begins by seeing that the fundamental role of HR is to “build people up” — that is, to ground every people practice and program in the essential nature of human performance, and thereby to reestablish HR as a full-throated advocate for employees and as a truly empowering function in an organization.
WATCH
Keynotes on video
WORKHUMAN LIVE · 40 MIN
Leadership Is Not a Thing
The idea that great leaders share one universal, teachable set of traits may be the most harmful myth about work. This keynote takes that idea apart and turns to the US Civil Rights movement for a picture of leading at its finest.
I4CP CONFERENCE · 33 MIN
The Problem with Change
Re-orgs, mergers, new systems, new office layouts: for many leaders, change has become the default answer. This keynote looks at what all that churn costs the people living through it, and why leaders get more improvement by creating stability than by adding more disruption.
Workshops
Highly interactive sessions with hands-on exercises and group discussion — for intact leadership teams or cohorts.
01
HOW TO LIFT PERFORMANCE THROUGH CHECK-INS
The essential elements of a check-in, what makes it different from a one-on-one, and how to deploy them at scale — drawn from rollouts to more than 150,000 employees.
02
HOW TO BUILD A HIGH-PERFORMING TEAM
The most important unit in any organization is the team. Two decades of leading and teaching team leadership, made real through practical exercises.
03
HOW TO LEAD FOR RESILIENCE
A practical breakdown of the human impacts of change, and hands-on methods for strengthening stability so people have what they need to contribute.
FORMATS
Keynote · 45–60 minutes
Interactive workshop · half day
Fireside & moderated Q&A
Virtual sessions & small-group advisory
“Great preparation, appropriately tailored to our needs, and an absolute pleasure to work with.”
VP OF TALENT & DEVELOPMENT, EDTECH COMPANY
“We have never received so much positive feedback from one of our community calls as we did last Friday. We had around 200 consultants in attendance and heard nothing but praise.”
PROFESSIONAL SERVICES CLIENT
BOOKING
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