Most keynote speakers study your job. I had it.
For three years I was Head of People at Venus Aerospace. I took the job because I believed the People function dictates what a company becomes; I left believing it more. There’s no audience I have more to say to than the people who do this work.
Bestselling author of Can I Have Your Attention? · Forbes contributor
Keynote topics + outcomes
Every program is built custom after a call with your committee. Formats: keynote (you set the length; typically 45 to 90 minutes, and as short as 20) · extended keynote (up to 3 hours) · half-day or full-day working session · a session with the leadership team when it helps. How the formats differ →
It’s Not Rocket Science: Rethinking Culture
Building a culture that does hard things without burning out. The Flight Plan Curt wrote and implemented at Venus Aerospace, and what it changed about the experience of work. Can be built specifically for HR and People teams.
Assess your culture through employees’ experience of doing the work, and identify where rewards contradict your stated expectations.
View on keynotes →It’s Not Rocket Science: Rethinking Leadership
A new model for leadership in the AI-driven workplace: what comes off a leader’s plate, what stays, and how to build a team that will tell you the truth while there is still time to use it.
Reassess what their teams need from leadership as AI changes the work, and identify what to delegate or stop doing.
View on keynotes →Finding Focus in a Distracting World
Focusing on what matters when everything is a priority, at work and beyond it. From the Can I Have Your Attention? series.
Decide what deserves attention when everything has been called a priority, and make a team’s hours add up to a day’s work.
View on keynotes →The shifts Curt helps
People leaders navigate
I spent three years inside the challenges on this list. Every one of them lands on the People function’s desk first.
The AI rollout is a people problem.
The boards have funded the tools; the workforces haven’t absorbed them. Among U.S. workers at organizations using AI, Gallup finds only 12% strongly agree it has transformed how work gets done. Most report personal productivity gains. Manager support matters: frequent AI use is higher when managers actively support it (79% versus 46%).
Why the needle on engagement keeps moving down.
Gallup’s 2026 report puts global engagement at its lowest since 2020 and estimates $10 trillion in lost productivity from low engagement in 2025. Underneath the number: four generations defining a good job differently, hybrid teams that coordinate without connecting, and attention split across more channels than any workforce has ever managed. The lever that still works: teams that actually know each other, working on something they believe matters.
The manager in the middle.
Global manager engagement fell from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, and managers report more stress and loneliness than the people they lead. Every strategy above them and every anxiety below them routes through the same layer. It’s also the most fixable thing on this list: Gallup found 79% manager engagement in its best-practice organizations in 2025.
Change with no end date.
The restructures, tools, and priorities used to arrive as projects with finish lines. Now they just arrive. In Gallup’s 2024 U.S. research, employees experiencing major disruption who strongly trusted their leadership were 4.5 times as likely to be engaged, and that trust is earned between the announcements and spent during them.
Research: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026 · Gallup, trust through disruption (2024)
What people say
“The reviews have been unanimously positive, across the board... Curt absolutely hit it out of the park.”
Inside the Venus culture
“Build the most unique culture in aerospace: a female-friendly organization in the most male-dominated industry in the US.”
When Venus invited me onto the executive team, I asked to run People as well. I had no operational HR background, which everyone was too polite to mention.
What I had was a conviction that who we hired, how we decided, and what we tolerated would matter as much as the engineering.
Three years of hard conversations, values written and then used, offers held together against SpaceX money, and one thorough burnout later, I’d call it the most important work I’ve done.
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.
Press Start above for Curt on the values, in his own words. This is the full set, the Venus Flight Plan, which Curt wrote and implemented across the company: the values the whole company ran on.
Want help writing yours? It’s what teams ask about most once we’re talking: mission, values, and operating principles specific enough to change decisions. Start that conversation →
Let’s talk
Programming an HR event? Building the case for a speaker inside your company? Running an executive team that’s trying to get culture right? Any of those is the right reason to reach out.
First call runs about twenty minutes. If it’s not a fit I’ll tell you, and after two decades around this industry I can usually point you to who is.