Leadership Keynote Speakers
Executive leadership, organizational culture, resilience under pressure, and the operators redefining how leaders win in the next decade.
Leadership is the largest and most-booked topic on the Rave Speakers roster, and the questions facing your leadership team have never landed all at once like they do now: how to lead through AI and structural change without losing your people, how to build culture that survives hybrid work and generational turnover, how to stay resilient when the operating tempo never lets up, and what the next decade of leadership looks like once the current playbook stops working. The speakers below answer those questions from the seats that earned them, from founders and CEOs to military commanders, championship coaches, and the researchers shaping how the best teams actually work. Whatever your audience needs to hear, there is a voice here who has lived it.
Executive Leadership
Founders and chief executives like Keith Ferrazzi, Marc Randolph, Reid Hoffman, Danny Meyer, and Daymond John, built for boardrooms and C-suite offsites.
Keith Ferrazzi
Two #1 NYT bestsellers (Never Eat Alone, Never Lead Alone). Founder of Ferrazzi Greenlight, where he coaches sitting CEOs at the largest companies in the world. Books for offsites where the brief is to change how the senior team actually decides, not to inspire them.
Marc Randolph
Co-founder of Netflix. Author of That Will Never Work. The truest-telling founder story on the circuit, focused on the decisions that compounded into a category and the discipline of seeing what is not working before the market does.
Reid Hoffman
Co-founder of LinkedIn. Greylock partner. NYT bestselling author. The sharpest single voice on what every CEO and board has to decide in the next decade as AI reshapes hiring, productivity, and what a company actually is.
Arthur C. Brooks
Harvard Business School professor. #1 NYT bestseller with Oprah Winfrey (Build the Life You Want). Speaks to senior audiences on how high-achievers redesign work, relationships, and identity to keep thriving in the second half of a long career.
Danny Meyer
Founder of Shake Shack and Union Square Hospitality Group. Author of Setting the Table. Reframes leadership as the discipline of putting people in position to win, the same model that scales from one restaurant to a public company.
Daymond John
Founder of FUBU. Shark Tank star. Bestselling author. Forty years of operator credibility plus a direct coaching style. Books for leadership rooms that want a brand-discipline thesis from a builder, not a celebrity keynote.
Simon Sinek
Author of Start With Why, Leaders Eat Last, and The Infinite Game. The most-booked leadership voice in the world. The right call when a senior team needs to rediscover the purpose underneath the strategy on a stage their audience already trusts.
Barbara Corcoran
Star and executive producer of Shark Tank. Founder of The Corcoran Group. Four decades of operator-leader credibility and a no-fluff coaching style. Books for executive audiences that want a builder, not a theorist.
David Novak
Former Chairman and CEO of Yum! Brands. #1 NYT bestselling author. Host of How Leaders Lead. The leadership operating system he used to build hundreds of senior leaders inside one of the largest food businesses in the world.
Jennifer Fleiss
Co-founder of Rent the Runway. Reshapes how leadership audiences think about retail and consumer-tech moats. Speaks on building a category from zero, raising under pressure, and the operating discipline that separates founders who endure.
Will Guidara
Former owner of Eleven Madison Park, the #1 restaurant in the world. Author of Unreasonable Hospitality, the book that became required reading at every customer-experience-driven company in 2024. Operating standard that compounds into culture, brand, and revenue.
Carla Harris
Vice Chairman at Morgan Stanley. Bestselling author of Expect to Win. Sitting Wall Street leader on authentic leadership, sponsorship, and the actual practice of advancing senior talent. Books for executive audiences that want a working operator.
Christina Tosi
Founder and CEO of Milk Bar. Two-time James Beard award winner. NYT bestselling author. Talks to leadership audiences on the discipline of building a category-defining consumer brand and what founder leadership actually looks like at scale.
Bert Jacobs
Co-founder and Chief Executive Optimist of Life is Good. Built a global brand around a single operating idea. Speaks on the leadership discipline of staying genuinely optimistic at the top across three decades, and what that costs and pays.
Randy Garutti
Former CEO of Shake Shack. Walks senior teams through the inside-baseball of taking a one-restaurant brand to a global public company. Sharp on culture, operations cadence, and what the CEO actually does day-to-day at scale.
Culture, Trust, and Teams
Researchers and practitioners such as Liz Wiseman, David Horsager, Erica Dhawan, and Dr. Jessica Kriegel, ideal for people-leader and culture-focused summits.
Liz Wiseman
Bestselling author of Multipliers and Rookie Smarts. Researches the gap between leaders who multiply the intelligence of their team and those who diminish it. Required reading inside Apple, Salesforce, and dozens of Fortune 500 executive programs.
Chris McChesney
#1 bestselling author of The 4 Disciplines of Execution. Global Practice Leader at FranklinCovey. The right call for senior teams with strong strategy and chronically poor follow-through. Tested operating system for closing the gap, not a theory.
David Horsager
NYT bestselling author of The Trust Edge. Researches trust as a measurable performance lever and shows executive audiences which behaviors move it. The right voice when a leadership team senses trust is the bottleneck but cannot name it.
Heather McGowan
Author of The Adaptation Advantage. Frames the half-life-of-skills problem as a CEO question, not an HR one. Frequent Harvard Business Review contributor with a sharp point of view on what executives actually have to change to lead through it.
Erica Dhawan
Author of Digital Body Language. The world's authority on collaboration intelligence. Translates distributed-team research into the everyday leadership moves that decide whether a hybrid team trusts each other enough to perform.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel
Chief Strategy Officer at Culture Partners. #1 USA Today bestselling author. Brings data showing exactly how culture moves financial results, plus the change-management chops to help a leadership team shift it in measurable ways.
Steve Cadigan
First Head of Talent at LinkedIn. Scaled the company from 56 to 4,200 employees through IPO. Coaches founders and executive teams on the talent decisions that determine whether scale actually compounds, or just adds headcount.
Lindsey Pollak
NYT bestselling author of The Remix and Recalculating. The most-cited U.S. voice on managing a workforce that spans Boomers through Gen Z. The right call when the leadership challenge is making one team out of five generations.
Eric Termuende
Future of Work researcher with a decade of field interviews into the everyday leadership practices that separate Fortune's Best Places to Work from the also-rans. Workshop-ready content grounded in what high-trust leadership teams actually do.
Susan Salgado
NYU Stern instructor. Danny Meyer's long-time strategic partner on Setting the Table. Translates the hospitality-leadership operating model into a frame any industry can apply. Books for offsites that need a culture-led growth thesis.
Robert Safian
Former Editor-in-Chief of Fast Company. Host of Rapid Response. Has interviewed virtually every CEO and founder reshaping work in the last decade. Brings a sharp distillation of what those leaders actually believe is coming next.
David Burkus
Organizational psychologist. Bestselling author. Columbia professor. World-ranked business thinker. The right voice for executive teams that want a rigorous, research-backed read on why their organization behaves the way it does, and what to change first.
Eric Boles
Former NFL star. Expert on peak performance and leading growth. Translates locker-room leadership and high-performance team dynamics into a frame an executive team can actually use. Especially strong for sales-kickoff and mid-market leadership rooms.
Felipe Gomez
Keynote pianist. Entrepreneur. Bestselling author. Pairs live performance with leadership content in a way that lands with executive audiences tired of conventional keynotes. Memorable, distinctive, shareable closer for leadership summits.
Resilience & Performance Under Pressure
Fighter pilots, Navy SEALs, and a championship coach: John Foley, Rorke Denver, Nicole Malachowski, and Andy Reid, made for high-energy kickoffs.
John Foley
Former Blue Angels pilot. Peak-performance expert. Translates the leadership operating system of the world's most precision-dependent flight squadron into the operating conditions executive teams actually fly through.
Rorke Denver
Former Navy SEAL Commander. Bestselling author. Talks to executive audiences on building and leading teams that perform in nonlinear conditions where the cost of failure is real and the operating window is short.
Nicole Malachowski
First female Thunderbird pilot. Combat veteran. Fighter squadron commander. Former White House Fellow. Translates fighter-pilot decision-making and squadron leadership into language executive teams can adopt under pressure.
Lt. General (Ret) Jay Silveria
U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General (Ret). Ran a service academy and a combat air wing where lives depended on building a high-performing team across difference. The right voice when the inclusion conversation has to be operationally serious.
Jason O. Harris
Combat-proven military leader. Leadership researcher. Talks to executive audiences on the team-trust operating model that holds units together under fire, translated cleanly into the language of corporate leadership.
Coach Andy Reid
Winner of three Super Bowls in five seasons with the Kansas City Chiefs. Talks to executive audiences on the play-calling, talent-development, and culture decisions that compound across a championship-level leadership tenure.
Dave Roberts
Three-time World Series Champion manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Leadership speaker on culture, resilience, and managing across difference. The inside view of leading a top-of-the-game roster through a full season of pressure.
Emmitt Smith
NFL all-time leading rusher. Hall of Famer. Successful real estate and business magnate. Talks to executive audiences on the personal-discipline and team-leadership operating system that built one career, then transferred cleanly into the next.
Justin Forsett
Former NFL Pro Bowl running back. Mission-driven entrepreneur. Speaks on the discipline of building the next thing, drawn from a real second-act leadership transition with verifiable business outcomes, not a retired-athlete keynote.
Anthony Robles
NCAA Wrestling Champion with one leg. Subject of the Amazon Prime film Unstoppable. Speaks on the daily-discipline operating model that converts a stated improbability into a tested championship outcome.
Kenton Cool
2025 world-record-setter with 19 successful summits of Mount Everest. Talks to executive audiences on planning, team selection, and decision-making under altitude-thinned conditions, plus the leadership operating cadence on a long expedition.
John O’Leary
Burn survivor. Bestselling author and host. Reliably one of the highest-rated closing keynotes on the Rave roster. Brings an evidence-backed message on adversity and resilience as a leadership operating principle, not a poster slogan.
Joan Lunden
Award-winning journalist. Former Good Morning America host. Cancer survivor. Speaks to leadership audiences on caregiving, women's health, and the discipline of showing up energized for a demanding second-act career.
Adam Markel
Author of Change Proof. Coaches executive teams on the practices that convert organizational change-resistance into a durable competitive advantage. Workshop-ready content paired with a strong keynote; works as both opener and follow-on session.
Tim Tebow
Heisman Trophy winner. NFL quarterback. Six-time NYT bestselling author. Founder of the Tim Tebow Foundation. Speaks to leadership audiences on faith, purpose, and the discipline of staying the same person across very different stages of a career.
Deion Sanders
Sports legend. NFL Hall of Famer. Head football coach at the University of Colorado. The voice for an audience that wants to see a real-time, public turnaround executed with culture as the operating lever.
Innovation & the Future of Leadership
Forward-looking voices like Cassie Kozyrkov, Ben Casnocha, Nick Webb, and Crystal Washington, suited to strategy days about where leadership is headed next.
Cassie Kozyrkov
Google's First Chief Decision Scientist. Pioneered the discipline of Decision Intelligence. Trained 18,000 Googlers. The right voice when a leadership team needs to make better calls in an AI-augmented environment, not just hear about AI.
Ben Casnocha
Co-author of The Start-Up of You with Reid Hoffman. Reframes leadership development as personal entrepreneurship: assets, allies, intelligent risk. The right voice for leadership programs that want operators, not employees.
Alison McCauley
Author of Unblocked: How to Lead Your Team Through the Web3 and AI Revolutions. The right speaker for a leadership audience that has to lead its organization through AI without being a technical expert. Gives leaders a working mental model.
Nick Webb
Innovator on the Future of Healthcare, Technology, and the Customer Experience. Talks to leadership audiences on the structural shifts reshaping value creation in service-heavy industries, and the leadership behaviors that compound during the shift.
Crystal Washington
Author of One Tech Action. Coaches executive audiences on the practical futurism habits that keep a leadership team a step ahead of the technology curve without becoming technologists. Especially strong with operations-led and mid-market rooms.
Gregory Offner
Award-winning keynote speaker. Author of The Tip Jar Culture. Creator of the Encore Effect. High-energy, story-driven take on the leadership behaviors that earn discretionary effort from a workforce that has stopped giving it for free.
Debra Jasper
CEO of Mindset Digital. Trains Fortune 500 executive teams on leading and communicating with a workforce that has 8-second attention spans across 14 platforms. Practical, demo-driven, immediately useful for sales-leadership and CEO comms audiences.
Jay Shetty
#1 NYT bestselling author of Think Like a Monk. Host of one of the largest podcasts in the world. Speaks to leadership audiences on purpose, identity, and the kind of leader the next decade will reward. Reserved for tentpole events.
Kasley Killam
Harvard-trained social scientist. Leading expert on social health, connection, and thriving. Brings senior audiences a research-backed case for leading the social-health conditions of a team as a measurable performance lever.
Mark Zandi
Chief Economist of Moody's Analytics. Briefs senior leadership audiences on the macroeconomic forces (rates, labor, housing, productivity) that will define the next 12 to 24 months of operating decisions. Built for executive offsites and board education.
Matthew Emerzian
Founder of Every Monday Matters. Coaches leadership audiences on leading from a mattering-mindset (people, work, outcomes) rather than an extraction-mindset. Strong fit for leadership programs that need a values-anchored close.
Merril Hoge
Former NFL star and broadcaster. Author and leadership keynote. Talks to executive audiences on living life to the fullest as a leadership operating model, with a story-driven style that works well as an opener or closer.
The Leadership roster spans four lanes built for different rooms. Executive Leadership brings founders and operators like Keith Ferrazzi, Marc Randolph, Reid Hoffman, Arthur C. Brooks, Danny Meyer, and Daymond John for boardrooms and C-suite offsites. Culture, Trust, and Teams pairs researchers and practitioners such as Liz Wiseman, Chris McChesney, David Horsager, Heather McGowan, Erica Dhawan, and Dr. Jessica Kriegel for people-leader summits. Resilience and Performance Under Pressure fields John Foley, Rorke Denver, Nicole Malachowski, Jay Silveria, Jason O. Harris, and Coach Andy Reid for high-energy kickoffs. Innovation and the Future of Leadership features Cassie Kozyrkov, Ben Casnocha, Alison McCauley, Nick Webb, Crystal Washington, and Gregory Offner for forward-looking strategy days.
These speakers fit keynotes, fireside chats, half-day workshops, and executive panels, and they scale from intimate leadership retreats to general sessions of several thousand. Booking through Rave gets you a single point of contact who knows each speaker firsthand, vetted availability, and honest counsel on the right fit and fee for your budget and your audience.
Call (310) 614-8653 or email [email protected] to check availability and fees.
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