Keynotes
Four talks — pick the room
One body of research, four keynotes — each built for a different room, from a leadership offsite to a public-ideas festival. Tell me who’s in the seats, and I’ll point you to the one that fits.
Leadership · HR
The Good Soldier Problem
Your most dependable people are your least visible risk.
The week after a good soldier leaves is when most organizations find out what they were doing: the translating, the smoothing over, the absorbing of what others couldn’t, none of it in the job description. Every workplace I studied ran on a few people like this, and leaders always knew who they were. What almost no one had mapped was what those people were carrying. This talk gives the people carrying the load, and the people who depend on them, three questions for mapping it before a resignation does.
Best for — Leadership and HR teams, professional associations, all-hands where managers and staff sit together
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Emerging leaders · ERGs
Navigating Trust Situations
Trust doesn’t live inside people. It lives between them, in the moments that test it.
Most advice about trust at work is aimed at individuals: be more trustworthy, set boundaries, say no. But trust is something that happens between people, and the situation you’re in shapes how it goes. This talk looks at three situations that test trust in almost every workplace: the crisis, when everyone is asked to give more; the favor, when a manager offers protection off the books; and the hangout, when work friendships blur into evaluation. For each one, I show where people get caught and offer a few practical moves for handling it, including what’s safe to accept on a handshake and what should always be in writing.
Best for — Early-career and emerging-leader programs, women’s leadership and ERG events, staff development days, professional associations
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AI · leadership
Garbage In, Garbage Out
What your AI will learn from you, and how to keep it from learning the wrong things.
An AI system learns from your organization’s records: who got promoted, who got flagged, who got the benefit of the doubt. Those records are a history of your habits, including the ones nobody has looked at closely. So a new system doesn’t just automate your decisions. It automates the reasons behind them, and once it does, those reasons are harder to see and harder to argue with. In the workplaces I studied, the habits that did the most damage were the ones everyone had stopped noticing. This talk is for leaders deciding how to bring AI in. It covers what to fix before you build, what not to lose, what not to encode, and one test to run on any system before it goes live.
Best for — Leadership teams and HR leaders planning an AI rollout, boards, executive education programs, technology and product conferences
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Public · mainstage
Why Livin’ on a Prayer No Longer Works
How work gained a monopoly on Americans’ trust, and what it’s costing us.
Over fifty years, Americans appear to have lost trust in nearly everything: churches, Congress, the press, neighbors, even family. Surveys suggest workplace relationships are the exception. Most of us still trust our managers and coworkers, and more than any other institution, a job is where we go to prove our worth, meet our obligations, and find fulfillment and belonging. That’s a dangerous monopoly of trust, especially when employers themselves are most loyal to shareholders. Americans bought into this arrangement when the social contract was more equal. Decades of policy that protects corporations over people have since turned that trust into something we can’t walk away from: we can’t afford to burn a bridge, and we can’t afford to lose a job that so much else depends on, health insurance first among them. So we give work the best of our time and energy, and there’s less and less left for each other. The result is a society too burned out to fight for itself. This talk is about how we got here, what it’s costing our democracy, and what it would take to turn that trust into meaningful solidarity and stop living on a prayer.
Best for — Public-ideas festivals, cultural institutes, TED-style stages, commencements, and conferences
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Recent talks & appearances
University of Maryland · University of Georgia · Clemson University · Boston College · Montana State University · University of Iowa · Expel · American Sociological Association
