CURT STEINHORST — KEYNOTE TOPICS Every keynote is customized to your audience. CAN I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? — SERIES OVERVIEW AI can take routine work off our plates—or fill the day with more messages, more content, and more to check. As producing information gets easier, deciding what deserves attention matters more. Built on over a decade of writing, researching, speaking, and advising companies on attention and workplace dynamics, this series applies that work to the choices teams face with AI: what to hand off, what still needs human judgment, and how to use the time saved. Two keynotes address both sides of attention: protecting your focus and earning someone else’s. RETHINKING LEADERSHIP Our model of leadership has needed an overhaul for years. Leaders are expected to make good decisions without enough information, keep up with a flood of messages, be available whenever someone needs them, and somehow still have time to think. More and more of the job has become keeping up. AI can help with that. It can make information easier to find and take some of the load off. But it cannot make a group work well together. The human work we’ve labeled “soft” cannot keep being left until everything else is done. In May 2025, Venus Aerospace flew the world’s first high-thrust rotating detonation rocket engine. Whether it flew came down to the human side of the work: did everyone know their own job and let the others do theirs, could they argue without it getting personal, and did they like each other enough to laugh on a day when a mistake could cost a life? In this keynote, Curt Steinhorst draws on fifteen years working with leaders from Nike to the U.S. Naval Academy and on his work as Head of People at Venus Aerospace to make the case for a leader’s job that gets easier as the tools get better: what comes off their plate, what stays, and how to build a team that will tell you the truth while there is still time to use it. BUILT FOR Organizations rolling out AI where the tools arrived faster than the people, and leaders are absorbing it on top of the job they already had. NOT BUILT FOR A tools overview, a prompt workshop, or a forecast about what AI does to your industry in 5 years. IN YOUR VERSION We examine the work your leaders can hand off, the decisions they still own, and what their teams need from them through the change. YOU’LL LEARN TO • Identify work you can delegate or stop doing. • Reassess what your team needs from your leadership as AI changes the work. • Protect the attention your team needs for work that requires careful thought. • Keep your team questioning assumptions under pressure. • Work through disagreements without making them personal. • Make it easier for your team to tell you when something is wrong. RETHINKING CULTURE Somewhere along the way, culture went from eating strategy for breakfast to cupcakes for the anniversary/birthday/get well soon monthly party. That version of culture is a distraction from the thing that decides whether a culture is healthy: the work people are asked to do, and how they are asked to do it. And there’s no amount of perks or parties that can make up for someone who doesn’t know what gets them fired, what good looks like, what gets them promoted, and whether what they’re doing with the vast majority of their waking hours matters to anyone or any outcome. A company’s culture is how its people would answer those four questions, and almost no one ever asks them out loud. A merger or a growth spurt rewrites all four answers at once, and getting them clear again is where culture work starts. At Venus Aerospace, the question was how to build a company capable of doing something extraordinarily difficult without burning people out. In the company’s language: How do we move at Mach 9 without burning out? In May 2025, Venus flew the world’s first high-thrust rotating detonation rocket engine. It reached flight in just over four years on roughly $80 million in capital, one of the fastest and most capital-efficient engine development efforts of its kind, according to Venus Aerospace. Curt Steinhorst was Head of People at Venus, where he wrote the Venus Flight Plan (five values that guided how the company worked, who it hired, and what it tolerated) and implemented the plan across the organization. In this keynote, he draws on that experience and fifteen years working with leaders across industries to show how a leader’s decisions answer those four questions for employees, and how to make expectations clear and give people the authority to meet them. CHART A NEW COURSE Innovative & Curious We are innovators and pioneers driven by curiosity, exploration, and a commitment to responsible growth. We solve hard problems – and the thousands of problems within every problem. MOVE AT MACH 9 Enterprising & Agile We deploy rapid design cycles engineered by world class performers. We succeed by doing. We are freed to fail fast...and fix even faster. ELIMINATE THE DRAG Focused & Efficient We prioritize people's ability to get work done, and the type of attention it requires. We avoid internal politics, fight bureaucracy, and eliminate wasteful meetings. ENJOY THE FLIGHT TOGETHER Kind & Humble We are on this flight together, and all are welcome aboard. We value the expertise each individual adds to our super team. GET BACK HOME Healthy & Whole We commit to the rhythms that yield healthy and whole people capable of navigating life's unique challenges. We value YOU as a part of VenUS. BUILT FOR Companies where two answers to “what good looks like” are now in the same building, or where the work got harder and how it gets done never caught up. NOT BUILT FOR A values rollout or an hour of culture and cupcakes. IN YOUR VERSION After a merger, we focus on competing expectations. During growth or reorganization, we examine the habits and rewards the company is carrying into its next stage. For HR and People teams → YOU’LL LEARN TO • Identify where rewards contradict your stated expectations. • Assess your culture through employees’ experience of doing the work. • Clarify what good performance looks like as the organization changes. • Match accountability with the authority to act. • Make the connection between individual work and organizational results visible. FINDING FOCUS IN A DISTRACTING WORLD AI can take routine work off a team’s plate. It can also make it easier to send more messages, launch more projects, and fill every hour it saves. The question is whether it gives people attention back for work that needs their judgment—or simply raises the volume of work they are expected to keep up with. Somewhere along the line, responding became the job and being reachable became proof you were doing it. A day cut into two-minute pieces by requests that have nothing to do with one another doesn’t add up to a day’s work, however many hours went into it. More often than not, the problem isn’t how much people have to do. It’s how divided their attention is, and because it got divided one reasonable choice at a time, that part a leader can change. Drawing on over a decade of research and advising companies on attention and workplace dynamics, this keynote makes the case that distraction is confusion about what matters, and that the outcomes leaders are measured on, from productivity to how fast a team adapts to change to engagement and well-being, move when leaders protect attention on the team’s behalf. That takes a different way of approaching, measuring, and organizing work, one that respects the limit on human attention, because the same limit is what makes a person valuable once it’s pointed at the right thing. For everyone in the room, it starts with deciding what deserves attention, recognizing what is pulling it away, and making room for the work and people they care about. BUILT FOR All-company meetings and kickoffs where the year opens with more priorities than anyone can hold at once. NOT BUILT FOR A productivity-app tour, a time-management system, or a phone-ban pep talk. IN YOUR VERSION We use the interruptions, meetings, and competing priorities your audience faces to make the choices concrete, at work and beyond it. YOU’LL LEARN TO • Use AI to reduce routine work without filling the time it saves with more requests. • Recognize how the demands on your attention shape the decisions you make. • Decide what deserves your attention when everything has been called a priority. • Make a team’s hours add up to a day’s work. • Protect a team’s focus, starting with the meetings and messages they already control. • Set boundaries that protect your attention for your best work and for a full life outside it. BREAKING THROUGH THE NOISE AI makes producing a message easier. Getting someone to pay attention, trust it, and act is still human work. Your ability to lead an organization or win a customer’s business depends on it. Information has exploded, publishing is free, and Graphite estimates that roughly half of newly published English-language articles are primarily AI-generated. What once captured attention now creates noise, and even what works today may not work tomorrow. Why do people ignore information they need and pay attention to things they never intended to? The answer matters when you’re asking someone to reconsider a decision, support a change, or buy what you’re selling. Your audience brings different experiences, expectations, and reasons for listening. And increasingly, they’re accustomed to information selected specifically for them. How do you get them to consider an idea they weren’t looking for—and might not initially want to hear? In this keynote, Curt Steinhorst, bestselling author of Can I Have Your Attention?, draws on the science of attention to show you how to shape and deliver messages that break through the noise. This presentation is for anyone whose work depends on influencing others. It can be tailored to the communication challenges specific to executives, sales professionals, and communications leaders. You’ll get beyond this week’s LinkedIn algorithm tricks and into what makes people pay attention when the noise is so loud. BUILT FOR Sales, marketing and communications teams who have to earn attention from people who were not looking for them. NOT BUILT FOR Media training or a presentation-skills clinic. IN YOUR VERSION We work from who you need to reach, what they already believe, and what you need them to do next. The examples follow the channels your audience actually uses. YOU’LL LEARN TO • Recognize how information overload and hyper-personalized media have changed audience expectations. • Communicate across generations, cultures, and geographically dispersed teams. • Apply the science behind what captures and keeps attention. • Adapt your message for the medium and moment. • Use advanced rhetorical techniques to make ideas more compelling and memorable. Contact: curt@curtsteinhorst.com https://curtsteinhorst.com/keynotes