Built to survive the flight home.

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.

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.

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.

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.