Diana Kander

Did you know that once you finish a pitch, your audience will forget 50% of it within an hour and 90% of it within a week? How are they supposed to take action on your proposal when they can’t remember anything you said? This sad statistic doesn’t have to be your fate. Diana will show you how to be memorable and compel your audience to take action as soon as you’re done. Based on Diana’s newest book, this talk will offer five concrete tools you can use to emotionally connect with prospects, customers, and employees, and help them remember and act on what you said! Key Takeaways:

• How to create trust with your audience at lightning speed
• How to make your presentation memorable and worth telling others about
• How to do research that no one else will do to get meetings that no one else will get
• How to add surprises into your presentation that will keep the audience laser focused on what you’re saying

In today’s ever-changing business climate, your attendees’ roles have evolved far past their job descriptions. They face a volatile external environment – they encounter pressure to stay relevant to customers – they experience challenging workforce issues – and they are being asked to do a lot more with a lot less. All of this is asking them to be innovators. The big question is, are they doing it the hard way or the easy way.

Based on her book, The Curiosity Muscle, this keynote helps members of organizations who don’t have innovation in their job description to embrace and identity as an innovator. Diana will share the key skills and habits that make innovation easier and a lot more fun. And she’ll empower attendees to harness the power of curiosity to unlock new possibilities and drive business growth. Attendees will leave this keynote identifying as innovators and seeking opportunities to use their new skills.

ROI & Key Outcomes:

• How to institutionalize curiosity, asking better questions to stay competitive and relevant to your customers
• How to determine blind spots within your organization and avoid falling into the “expert trap”
• How to create a more innovative culture that leads to results and drives growth

FORMAT: Keynote

LENGTH: 75 minutes; includes 15 minutes of Q&A

AUDIENCE: Business leaders and managers responsible for innovation and customer experience measurement; Any organization/association who wants to uncover powerful insights and exponential growth to their entire company; Any organization/association looking to improve their business, relationships, and life

GREAT FOR: all-company meetings, leadership/executive meetings; team/department meetings, associations

TOPIC DESCRIPTION: Innovation isn’t about a good strategy or even a set of lean or agile practices that we teach. The culture of any team will eat both strategy and training for breakfast. The only way to make a team more innovative is to change their habits. This talk will address both the habits that stifle innovation and the 4 keystone habits teams need to demonstrate in order to produce breakthrough results. Diana will also share tiny tweaks teams can make in their existing cadence to start practicing the 4 habits immediately.

FORMAT: Keynote

LENGTH: 75 minutes; includes 15 minutes of Q&A

AUDIENCE: Business leaders and managers responsible for innovation and customer experience measurement; Any organization/association who wants to uncover powerful insights and exponential growth to their entire company; Any organization/association looking to improve their business, relationships, and life

GREAT FOR: all-company meetings, leadership/executive meetings; team/department meetings, associations

TOPIC DESCRIPTION: This keynote will explain the cultural challenges of bringing agile and lean principles into an organization. You’ll learn why it’s difficult to implement innovation tools and skillsets without understanding the existing team habits that will either support or destroy this transition. And why there are 4 keystone habits that our research has demonstrated innovative teams must practice for innovation to be able to flourish in an organization.

FORMAT: Keynote

LENGTH: 75 minutes; includes 15 minutes of Q&A

AUDIENCE: Any organization or association who wants to grow their business or career

GREAT FOR: closing keynote

TOPIC DESCRIPTION: Diana has spent her life making BIG things happen, whether it was launching a multimillion dollar company, writing a New York Times bestseller, or holding a 11.5 minute plank. Diana is going to walk you through why most of us won’t take action on the things we learned at this event and what the tiny tweaks we can make today to make our BIG ideas a reality. She’ll reveal the secrets the most successful innovators use to turn their dreams into a reality.

FORMAT: Keynote

LENGTH: 75 minutes; includes 15 minutes of Q&A

AUDIENCE: Business leaders and managers responsible for innovation and customer experience measurement; Any organization/association who wants uncover powerful insights and exponential growth to their entire company; Any organization/association looking to improve their business, relationships, and life Any organization/association looking for success ways to “future-proof” their business

GREAT FOR: all-company meetings, leadership/executive meetings; team/department meetings, associations

TOPIC DESCRIPTION: Diana Kander has created a new keynote based on her book, The Curiosity Muscle, in which she explains what it takes to stay competitive and relevant in today’s world. The scary truth is that the only thing harder than getting to the top is staying there. And while it may sound counter-intuitive, in many cases, it is the success of a company and it’s growing collective “expertise” that eventually leads to the company’s downfall.

This keynote explains exactly why most companies reaching the peak of their potential, lose their curiosity and crash into irrelevance. From how we develop blind spots about our business, to the pitfalls of feeling like an expert, this thought-provoking, engaging program reveals the smokescreens obscuring imminent threats to long-term viability and walks you through specific ways to boost innovation, uncover customer needs, solve problems, create new value for customers, and increase employee engagement.

Most importantly, Diana demonstrates why curiosity is your greatest asset to drive constant innovation and help your company thrive and become competitive on more than price alone — ultimately, future-proofing your business.

ROI & Key Outcomes:

• • How can you institutionalize curiosity and ask better questions to stay competitive and relevant to your customers and drive growth
  • How you can dramatically reduce the risk of new ideas and create a more innovative culture that leads to results
  • How to determine pitfalls within your organization and avoid falling into the “expert trap”

“Diana Kander and Andy Fromm offer a powerful and persuasive argument. What ultimately undermines companies isn’t the wrong strategy, sloppy marketing or inadequate financing. It’s lack of curiosity. This fun business fable will show you how to institutionalize curiosity and avoid the blind spots that trouble most organizations. “

– Daniel H. Pink, New York Times and Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author

FORMAT: Interactive workshop

LENGTH: 90 – 120 minutes

AUDIENCE: executives, leadership, management & associations

GREAT FOR: leadership meetings, team/department meetings, internal meetings, association meetings

TOPIC DESCRIPTION: Doing what you’ve always done isn’t going to get you to extra-ordinary results. If you have a big, hairy, audacious goal or a pervasive problem you’ve been trying to solve, this workshop will provide you with an innovative road-map of getting to the right answer. Participants will come to the workshop with a specific goal they would like to reach over the next year and learn the four essential Curiosity questions that will help them achieve significant results. These four questions are:

• • What are my blindspots?
  • Am I correctly prioritizing my efforts?
  • Am I measuring the right things?
  • How can getting others involved help me with my project?

FORMAT: Interactive workshop

LENGTH: 90 – 120 minutes

AUDIENCE: executives, leadership, management & project managers

GREAT FOR: project management meetings, leadership meetings, team/department meetings, internal meetings, association meetings

TOPIC DESCRIPTION: The easiest thing to do in an innovation project is waste a lot of time and effort without any real results to show for it. Innovation projects require a different management methodology to minimize this wasted effort and reduce the risk of the initiative. Participants will come to this workshop with an innovation project they are currently working on or have completed in the past. They will learn why innovation projects are different and why they need a unique process to manage their efforts.

FORMAT: Keynote

AUDIENCE: the entire company, associations

GREAT FOR: all-company meetings, team/department meetings, association meetings

TOPIC DESCRIPTION: Everyone in an organization can innovate and create more value, but their “expertise” is getting in the way. This talk will demonstrate why the more success we experience, the bigger the threat of falling into one of the three expert traps: over-confidence, self-delusion, and fear of failure. Diana will demonstrate how these traps impact our ability to create value for our company on a daily basis and teach attendees a simple practice to increase self-awareness and innovation at every level of the organization. Understand the impact over-confidence, self-delusion, and fear of failure have on your everyday tasks.

ROI & Key Outcomes:

• Learn how to request and receive actionable feedback
• Learn a practice to significantly improve “the way you’ve always done it”
• Create internal practices to encourage growth and innovation.

FORMAT: Keynote

AUDIENCE: C-suite, Senior VPs, directors & executives

GREAT FOR: YPO/EO meetings, leadership/executive meetings/retreats

TOPIC DESCRIPTION: The pace of change in today’s economy requires innovative, value-adding ideas to come from all parts of your organization – whether they are internal improvements or new sources of revenue. The way managers were traditionally trained stifles innovation and forces out-of-the-box thinkers out of the company. This interactive presentation outlines the must-have skill sets to effectively lead your employees. Diana will provide the framework for how your organization – and the people within it – can flourish in this hyper-competitive world.

ROI & Key Outcomes:

• Learn new skill sets required of the innovative leader
• Avoid common pitfalls of innovative leadership
• Create an internal culture of innovation so that every employee is a resource to the effort

FORMAT: Keynote

AUDIENCE: the entire company, associations

GREAT FOR: all-company meetings, team/department meetings, association meetings

TOPIC DESCRIPTION: The innovator’s skill-set is the equivalent of typing skills in today’s marketplace. It is the only way to make sure the work you do isn’t just filling time but actually creates value for your organization.

The only way to become irreplaceable is to find a way to create new value over and over again. In the not-too-distant future, this set of skills will not be enough just to get ahead. Rather, mastering these skills will be the only way to survive in the workplace.

ROI & Key Outcomes:

• • Shift your perspective to think like an innovator on a daily basis
  • Understand the difference between new ideas and ideas that actually create value for your organization\
  • Strengthen your job security and highlight your unique talents

FORMAT: Keynote

AUDIENCE: sales managers & sales professionals

GREAT FOR: sales meetings, all-company meetings, team/department meetings, association meetings

TOPIC DESCRIPTION: Are you competing on price or value with your customers? If your focus is on value, (which it should be) are you consistently measuring for success? Do you have the data to prove your value proposition is actually creating value for the customer? This presentation teaches a methodology used by both entrepreneurs and established organizations to continuously create new value for their customers. You will learn the key questions you’ll need to ask to uncover value-creating opportunities – and exactly how to ask them so you generate deeper insights.

ROI & Key Outcomes:

• Change the way you solicit feedback from customers to make it more actionable
• Learn the key customer questions that will uncover value-creating opportunities
• Shift the way you compete for business

AUDIENCE: the entire company, associations

GREAT FOR: all-company meetings, team/department meetings, association meetings

TOPIC DESCRIPTION: This workshop will show participants why the most dangerous thing about failure is waiting too long to recognize when it’s happening and not giving yourself enough time to adjust. Through hands on exercises, participants will learn how to create and apply failure metrics or pivot indicators to their projects, how to identify and address zombie projects, and how to prevent confirmation bias from steering them in the wrong direction. Attendees will leave this workshop with specific steps they can take to significantly increase the speed and agility of their existing projects.

FORMAT: Keynote

AUDIENCE: human resources: directors, executives, managers, associations

GREAT FOR: HR meetings, leadership meetings, association meetings, business development meetings

TOPIC DESCRIPTION: Have you had trouble getting everyone in the organization on board with new programs and initiatives? Maybe it’s time to try the methodology entrepreneurs use to virally spread new ideas and achieve exponential adoption. You see, everyone in your organization is not created equal; there are four distinct types of users and each group needs to be communicated with in a unique way. This session will give you both the methodology and tools to increase adoption of every new program you roll out as well as underperforming existing programs.

ROI & Key Outcomes:

• Understand why your current program or initiative isn’t sticking
• Learn how to launch new programs the same way successful entrepreneurs launch new products
• Understand the four distinct types of “users” of programs in your organization and why their differences impact program adoption.

FORMAT: Keynote

AUDIENCE: entrepreneurs, small business, entrepreneurial students & academia, economics

GREAT FOR: economic development events, entrepreneurial/lean/startup conferences, university/education summits/speaker series

TOPIC DESCRIPTION: Diana Kander shares her personal journey; from its humble beginnings (escaping the Soviet Union in the middle of the night), to a successful entrepreneurial career, to writing a New York Times best-seller used in over 70 colleges to teach entrepreneurship and innovation, to advising Fortune 1000 companies on creating a culture of innovation and launching new products and services. Diana shares three important lessons in her journey: 1). The power of entrepreneurship and how it can transform lives; 2). The power of mentorship and how it can help you achieve what you never thought possible; and 3). The power of creating real value for others.

ROI & Key Outcomes:

• Learn what’s holding most “wantapreneurs” back from creating successful companies
• Shift your thinking on what a mentor/mentee relationship should look like and how it can add the most value to a new company
• Understand what a community can do to foster and grow successful entrepreneurs