Jay Acunzo
Inspiring others to push past conventional thinking in their work
Topic Categories:
- Author, Break the Wheel
- Award-Winning Podcaster
- Speaker
- Previously with Google, Hubspot & the VC firm
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Jay Acunzo is the author of the book Break the Wheel: Question Best Practices, Hone Your Intuition, and Do Your Best Work. He is a critically acclaimed show host and executive producer, as well as the founder of Unthinkable Media, which creates documentary shows with brand clients.
As a digital media strategist at Google, Jay was responsible for pushing marketing executives and practitioners into the digital age. He then held multiple leadership positions at high-growth tech startups, including HubSpot, and served as Vice President of Brand at the venture capital firm NextView.
Courses at Harvard Business School have cited Jay’s work, as well as writers at the New York Times, the Washington Post, FastCompany, Forbes, and more. He has been called a “creative savant” by Salesforce and named to the city of Boston’s “50 on Fire” list.
In a world where “storyteller” has become a buzzword, Jay has earned a living by understanding how to tell actual stories — emotional tales of people and teams doing their best work that help inspire others to push past conventional thinking in their work.
We live in a world flooding with best practices, conventional wisdom, and trendy tactics. Every day, dozens of supposed “right” answers both internally and externally promise that they will deliver our best results. It’s all we can do to simply keep up, let alone take control, get proactive, and finally do our best work. It’s like we’re trapped. We’re stuck on this always-spinning wheel of reactive decisions and commodity work, and this wheel leads straight to the one place we don’t want our companies or careers to be: average.
It’s time to escape this cycle. It’s time to break the wheel.
In this fast-paced, inspiring talk, award-winning documentary host and former Google and startup brand-builder Jay Acunzo will hand attendees a sledgehammer. They’ll learn how to find clarity more quickly among the noise, cutting through past precedents and buzzy trends that only create sameness in their niche. Through science and story, Jay will share a framework to more successfully think for yourself when surrounded by conventional thinking. This isn’t about being a rebel. It’s about driving real results for companies and careers alike. In the end, attendees will become the welcome exceptions to the status quo.
While everyone around them merely survives, they’ll know how to thrive. Remember: Finding “best practices” isn’t the goal. Finding the best approach for you is. Jay’s presentation will inspire and empower people to do exactly that.
In this talk, attendees will learn:
- The psychological barriers to making good decisions at work.
- The one behavior change that can help them overcome these barriers.
- Why this change can make creativity feel more logical than lofty.
- How to create a personal, team-wide, or company-wide “decision-making filter” to more quickly and confidently find the best approach in each new situation.
This speech is perfect for audiences who want to…
- Create better experiences for others they serve (internally or externally).
- Make constant improvement and experimentation an operational advantage.
- Generate word-of-mouth business by exceeding expectations routinely over time.
When most teams hear the call to “innovate,” the work morphs into stress-induced, one-off attempts to be creative or juice the numbers. Teams try to “go big,” or trend-hop, or sprint all-out in a reactive, exhaustive way.
This is simply NOT sustainable.
It turns out the world’s best organizations don’t operate this way. Unlike most teams, they have a proactive plan, and they make innovation consistent instead of random. In fact, their everyday way of operating naturally leads to creative breakthroughs all the time, without needing to stop or panic. After all, true success is measured by the trajectory of the entire line — not periodic spikes — so how can we all shift the line in the right direction?
In this eye-opening, insightful, and hilarious talk, Jay Acunzo helps attendees turn innovation into a habit. Through customized, relevant stories and surprising research, he unearths the root causes of the typical, unsustainable approach plaguing most teams, before sharing a more sustainable framework attendees can implement right away.
Attendees will learn:
- The cultural and behavioral forces that cause work to grow stale or stop yielding returns in the first place.
- A repeatable system to answer three crucial questions: WHAT should we change? WHEN should we change? HOW should we change?
- A team-wide framework to make innovation proactive and consistent, instead of reactive and risky.
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