Built to survive the flight home.
At 21, I sold keynotes. At 41, I bought them. Both jobs taught me to judge a talk by what people remember and use afterward.
Am I an AI speaker?
I am not a technical AI expert. I am a builder and small-business owner putting it to work in my own business. I believe AI is the biggest leveling technology of our working lives. I have studied technology’s effect on work since 2012; my book, Can I Have Your Attention?, examined what technology was doing to attention at work. Each keynote looks at a different part of the human response: how people lead, focus, communicate, adapt, and work together as AI changes the job.
What is your audience facing?
It’s Not Rocket Science... It’s Harder
A new engine for leadership in the age of AI
Most leadership advice assumes the person at the top has more answers, more information, and more control. AI weakens that assumption. It can produce answers and individual output quickly, but leaders are still responsible for priorities, judgment, and work that depends on other people. Adding more expectations to the job will not help. At Venus Aerospace, a new rocket engine changed what kind of flight was possible. This keynote makes the case for a different leadership engine: decide what deserves attention, make sound calls when the answer is not obvious, and help people do hard things together.
Can I Have Your Attention?
Helping people focus when work is built around interruption
People are working longer, responding faster, and still struggling to move important work forward. The problem is not a lack of care or discipline. Their attention is divided by more priorities, channels, meetings, and requests than it can absorb. This keynote shows leaders how to treat attention as an organizational resource: decide what deserves it, reduce the demands competing for it, and create the conditions focused work requires.
Signal in the Noise
Closing the gap between what leaders say and what people do
Your strategy can be clear at the top and disappear before it reaches the front line. A sales message can be accurate and still lose the buyer in seconds. Leaders often respond by repeating themselves, adding slides, or sending more communication. The result is usually more noise. Signal in the Noise is for people whose results depend on being understood. It shows how to identify the message that matters, earn attention without gimmicks, and structure it so people can repeat it and act on it. The standard is not whether the presentation went well. It is what the audience remembers a week later and what they do next.
Curiosity Under Pressure
The skill that unlocks every other skill
An AI rollout, a merger, a new system: whatever the change is, it lands on a team as a question about value. What does this mean for the work I’m good at? Some people stop touching the new tools. Some hand the tools everything, including the judgment someone still has to answer for. Almost everyone asks fewer questions out loud, because under pressure, questions feel like evidence you’re behind. That’s the moment a team most needs its curiosity, and the moment it’s hardest to find. Curiosity Under Pressure is about how teams keep learning when the stakes feel personal: what it takes to stop a change from feeling like an audition, and how people at every level stay valuable while the definition of valuable is moving.
Culture at Speed
Clarity, accountability, and room to do the job
Executives are right to be suspicious of culture talks. Most end in a poster. This one starts from a different place: culture is not the programs and events wrapped around the work. It is the experience of doing the work. What is my job? What does good look like? Will you let me do it? Does it matter? A company’s culture is how its people would answer those four questions, and almost no one ever asks them out loud. Culture at Speed is about where those answers get set, why they drift as a company grows or merges, and what a leader can do about it without launching a single new program.
Continue the work
Add an executive session, offsite, values work, or private coaching when the event needs more than a keynote.
Keynote + Executive Session
The keynote for the full audience, followed by a private session focused on the senior team’s decisions.
Multi-Day Offsite Facilitation
Curt helps the group address the issues slowing its work and agree on what happens next. A Farm Credit board retreat spent three and a half hours on meeting dynamics; Navy Federal built a half day around the daily challenges facing its communication leaders. Not trust falls.
Values & Operating Principles
Mission, values, and operating principles written specifically enough to shape behavior, settle arguments, and kill bad ideas early. More on values work →
Executive Communication Coaching
Investor pitches, board presentations, high-stakes moments. Private and confidential. More on coaching →
Tell me what your people are facing.
I will help you choose the keynote from there. If none is right, I will tell you.