Keynotes

It opens where the book opens: the hours a team loses to itself. Not to the work, but to the coordination around the work. The first stretch is diagnostic and deliberately uncomfortable, because most audiences arrive certain they have already tried everything, and spend the first twenty minutes realising they have been treating a structural problem as a personal discipline problem.

The middle is the system, compressed to the part a room can act on before the offsite ends. Where work lives. Where conversation lives. Where decisions get recorded. What each of those choices costs when nobody makes them on purpose. It is specific enough that people start pointing at their own tools during it, which is the intended reaction.

The close is the part that has to survive the flight home: what this particular company should do first, and what it should refuse to do at all. That section is tailored to the organisation ahead of the date, which is why the enquiry asks what it asks.

The standard engagement is a ninety-minute keynote. That length carries the diagnosis, the system, and enough Q&A to catch the objection that always comes, some version of “our situation is different.”

Five formats are offered: an in-person keynote, a virtual keynote, a workshop, a fireside or interview format, and custom consulting built around the event. Each runs an hour or more, with the exact length set against the agenda rather than fixed in advance.

Where a workshop follows a keynote on the same visit, the talk sets the vocabulary and the session installs the first change while the room is still together. That pairing is the highest-yield version of a speaking date, and it is worth asking about at enquiry rather than after.

One shared vocabulary. After the talk a team can say what specifically is costing it time, out loud, without anyone hearing it as a complaint about a colleague. That is the thing most rooms are missing, and it is the reason the talk is worth more than the same content read privately.

One agreed first move, not a list of twelve. The talk is engineered to leave a room with a single defensible change it can make in the week that follows, because a room that leaves with twelve makes none of them.

A working understanding of why the last attempt failed. Most audiences have already run a tools migration or a meeting amnesty that did not hold. The talk explains the mechanism: the agreement was never made explicit, so it eroded. That is what stops the next attempt going the same way.

The enquiry form routes straight to the speaking calendar. Include the date or window, the city, the audience size and seniority, the theme of the wider event, and the format you have in mind. Those five things are enough to answer availability and fit in one reply rather than four.

If the date is soft, say so. An early conversation about an unfixed date is more useful than a firm one that has already been built around a different theme.

Fees run from $10,000 to $50,000 depending on format, preparation and travel. Dates are taken anywhere, and the calendar usually books around six months out, so an enquiry a quarter before the date is late rather than early.

AV and stage requirements are agreed per date, and so is whether the recording can be reused internally afterwards. Both depend on the venue and the format, so raise them in the first exchange rather than assuming either way.