Keynotes
Keynotes deliver enormous value by condensing decades of knowledge into a short period of time. My sessions are dynamic, engaging, and motivational. Guaranteed to provide solid takeaways, new skills, a brighter outlook and up-to-date ideas for you and your team.
I am often hired as the kickoff or closer for a conference, retreat, or corporate event, to give all attendees a positive outlook along with really useful knowledge.
Recent past clients include: The Human Resources Professional Association (HRPAO),The Supply Chain Management Association, The Ontario Public Buyers Association, Ontario Power Generation, RBC Royal Bank, the Chartered Professional Accountants assocition of Ontario (CPAO) as well as Alberta and New Brunswick CPA associations, Ontario Tech University Continuous Eductaion Faculty, and the National Speakers Association Premium Speaker (multi-years/multiple US conventions). For a full list, click here.
Topics
- Understanding AI and Gen-AI - is it hype or a game-changer? Artificial intelligence (AI), especially the subset called Generative AI (Gen-AI) has taken the world by storm in ways not seen since Facebook introduced us to social media, or the way the computer changed everything in the 1990s. Gen-AI especially has become the object of both fascination and fear, given that it seems to be able to do everything so much and so well. Will it replace people's jobs? Will it turn all students into cheaters? Is there any way to put this particular genie back in the bottle? The answer to all these questions is no, but as with all tools, it comes down to how you use it. This presentation, which is updated almost daily, will give you and your team a solid understanding of the do's and don’ts of this remarkable technology.
- The Challenges of Leadership in the Age of AI and Social Media. Leadership is a one-word maze of ideas, principles, and tactics. Some of the best leadership practices have remained rock-solid for decades, while others - like becoming an AI augmented leader - are very new. Steve's presentation has been designed for leaders and leadership teams to learn more about what great leadership is in this era, when people have become more isolated and polarized, generational differences more pronounced, and the challenges of leading teams in from wherever they may be working, often sets traditional assumptions on their heads. Steve speaks to these topics in a clear and straightforward manner, giving leaders and leadership teams the opportunity to reassess their vital roles in a quickly evolving world.
- The Innovative Mindset: New best practices for working in the 2020s. It provides a clear and neutral assessment of hybrid, work-from-home, and traditional workspaces, as well as demonstrating the best in virtual environments such as Virbela. It also explores concepts such as asynchronous meetings and async learning, and working with generative AI. He challenges participants to create yes/no lists of what works and what doesn't work in their organization, and what kinds of innovations could be devised. The goal of this presentation is to demonstrate to managers, leaders and team members that this new era is not just about individual technologies, but is also about maintaining a culture of innovation. He also discusses issues of trust, leadership, team dynamics, socialization, time management and work-life integration as well as issues dealing with cybersecurity, privacy, and management, leadership and trust.
- Thinking, Feeling and Connecting at Work: McKinsey and others have identified soft skills such as critical thinking, empathy, and networking as essential to all levels of jobs in the new economy. And it’s not just theory. All the comments left on “Best Places to Work” sites show how important this is, and the statistics on Quiet Quitting and the Great Resignation show what happens when it is missing. Learn how to reintroduce human connection, emotional intelligence, credibility, and personal credit ratings back into work relationships. This was sorely needed in the years before hybrid work became a thing, and certainly is necessary now.
- Managing Time and Balancing Life: Yes, this is a keynote on time management. It’s based on the third edition of Steve’s book, Cool-Time: A Hands-On Plan for Managing Work and Balancing Time and includes the time-proven techniques from his first and second editions, namely project management, influence and physiology, and adds the realities of today’s workplace including chat technologies like Slack and Teams, work-life integration and hybrid work environments, and how to make your calendar a powerful tool of personal productivity rather than a shopping list of tasks. Even though it’s a keynote speech there will be dozens of immediately useful takeaways for every participant.
- Cyberhygiene and Cyber Safety in the Workplace: Why do companies get hacked? Sadly, the weakest point in any organization’s security platform is people. Employees at all levels are busy, distracted, stressed, and very trusting. This means that cybercriminals can use techniques such as social engineering, spearphishing, and AI-generated deepfake technologies to fool people into providing crucial entry points and permissions. Secondly, things happen by accident. Connections get left open: computers go unattended while still logged on, data gets stored in unprotected repositories, software goes years without updates and patches, and even physical doors are left propped open. Thirdly, there’s complacency – the sense that “it couldn’t happen to us,” or “stealing email addresses isn’t so bad,” or “we’ll get to it later, when things are less busy.” Fourthly, there’s resistance to learning about security tools like passkeys or even creating better passwords. People fear change and have little time to accommodate it. But at the same time, we humans are not to blame for these security failings. In almost all organizations, cyberhygiene training is too quick, infrequent, and fails to connect on a learning level. Also, humans are not designed to be on constant alert.
- All these items and more make a perfect landscape for the cybercriminal organization. Something needs to be done. Steve’s presentation lays out some key factors about how to make cyberhygiene work. It teaches personal skills like critical thinking and it also incorporates time and priority management skills to ensure that we can align cyberhygiene skills with our physiology.
- Equally importantly, the session delivers an understanding of the technologies and practices used in both cybersecurity and cybercrime, using straightforward terminology. It reveals how to better align humans with the priorities of protection, and equally importantly provides steps on how to formulate a culture of proactive security at the workplace and at home.
- The Future of Workplace Fear: When people talk about digital transformation, the "new normal," and the future of work, the focus is very much on the technologies that are coming in to change our world once again. But what about people and their instinctive fear of change? This presentation, based on Steve’s book of the same name, addresses the types of fears people experience in times of change, how they become the root cause of a wide range of workplace problems, and what can be done to improve the situation.