Keynotes
Four talks — pick the room
One body of research, four keynotes — each built for a different room, from a leadership offsite to a conference main stage. Tell me who’s in the seats, and I’ll point you to the one that fits.
Most bookable · corporate
Why People Leave Companies They Love
Good people can make a hard job bearable. They can’t make it sustainable.
Your best people don’t leave because their passion and care failed. They leave because the company asked that goodwill to do the job of structure, and no one can carry that forever. This keynote reframes retention as a load problem, not a people problem. Where is your culture quietly running on favors instead of systems?
Best for — L&D leadership, executive offsites
The room leaves with — a tool for spotting where load is quietly breaking your team.
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The system at work
Maverick Management
Your meritocracy is rewarding style over substance, and it’s quietly costing you.
The managers we trust most are often the well-liked ones: easy charm, blunt talk, the confident rule-bend. It reads as bold, original leadership but only from the people who already fit the mold. So the same kind of person keeps rising while genuinely original leaders get left on the table, and your bench grows more uniform and more stagnant. You end up promoting the familiar over the visionary: a leadership bench selected on a signal you can’t trust.
Best for — People, talent & leadership teams
The room leaves with — a test to run on your own promotion and performance criteria: are they rewarding real substance and fresh thinking, or just the people who perform authenticity most convincingly?
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Conference · provocative
We Celebrate the Firefighter. We Ignore the Arson.
Trauma-bonding may create a quick culture but not a lasting one.
The modern workplace doesn’t just have crises — it runs on them, and teaches us to bond inside them. But most crises aren’t fires. They’re arson: failures of design we keep rewarding as heroics. This talk gives a room the nerve to stop celebrating the rescue and start asking the question that prevents the next one: fire, or arson?
Best for — Conferences & culture-forward teams
The room leaves with — a diagnostic tool for identifying and addressing arson in your workplace.
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TED-style · public
Dignity Is Not a Perk
Why work keeps telling you it’s human, and what the warmth is hiding.
When dignity, respect, and fairness get paraded as a company’s special virtues, they quietly stop being rights and become perks — and a perk can be taken away. This talk pulls off the disguise and leaves a whole room with the one question that tells the difference: is this a right, or a favor?
Best for — Public & TED-style audiences, all-hands
The room leaves with — the test that tells a right from a perk: is this a right, or a favor?
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Go deeper — workshops. Half- and full-day sessions that put one idea to work on your team’s own situations.
The Relational Load Audit — map where your culture quietly rests on one person’s goodwill. For People & HR teams.
Trust That Holds — find where your team’s trust has quietly become a liability, and rebuild it into a resource you can count on. For leadership & People teams.
+ more, tailored to your team.
Recent talks & appearances
University of Maryland · University of Georgia · Clemson University · Boston College · Montana State University · University of Iowa · Expel · American Sociological Association
