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Diana Kander    

Founder, Investor, Author & Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation

Diana Kander revolutionizes the way businesses look at innovation and curiosity. A New York Times best-selling author, innovation consultant and keynote speaker, she asks some big questions. What kind of culture needs to exist in an organization to ensure innovative ideas and practices? How has Snoop Dogg continued to innovate decade after decade to stay relevant to the next generation? What causes name brands to lose relevance with their customers and go out of business? Can organizational decline be prevented?

Kander has spent her career challenging assumptions and asking thought-provoking questions. A serial entrepreneur who entered the United States as a refugee at the age of 8, she has launched and sold millions of dollars worth of products and services. She outlined her biggest lessons learned for launching new products in her first book, "All In Startup," which has been used by over 100 universities in their innovation courses and countless large organizations to help their employees think more like entrepreneurs. A former MBA professor at Mizzou, she has served as an entrepreneur in residence at H&R Block, Commerce Bank and several government agencies.

Kander's second book, "The Curiosity Muscle" explains why it's harder to stay at the top than it was to get there. The book documents Kander's consulting experience with large organizations and demonstrates why most companies who experience significant success can so easily get comfortable, lose their curiosity and crash into irrelevance. The book walks readers through a methodology to keep curiosity alive and thriving inside of an organization, ultimately, future-proofing the business.

Fun fact about Kander: She likes to use her curiosity methodology to push herself out of her own comfort zone and achieve big personal challenges each year. Despite having never completed a pull-up prior to 2021, she raised over $26,000 for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Kansas City by doing 5,000 pull-ups that year.

Kander lives in Kansas City, Missouri with Jason, her high-school sweetheart and husband, their son, True and daughter, Bella Brave.

Speech Topics

Unleash the Innovator Within

In today’s ever-changing business climate, your attendees’ roles have evolved far past their job descriptions. They face a volatile external environment - they encounter pressure to stay relevant to customers - they experience challenging workforce issues - and they are being asked to do a lot more with a lot less. All of this is asking them to be innovators. The big question is, are they doing it the hard way or the easy way.

Based on her book, The Curiosity Muscle, this keynote helps members of organizations who don't have innovation in their job description to embrace and identity as an innovator. Diana will share the key skills and habits that make innovation easier and a lot more fun. And she'll empower attendees to harness the power of curiosity to unlock new possibilities and drive business growth. Attendees will leave this keynote identifying as innovators and seeking opportunities to use their new skills.

ROI & Key Outcomes: How to institutionalize curiosity, asking better questions to stay competitive and relevant to your customers; How to determine blind spots within your organization and avoid falling into the “expert trap"; How to create a more innovative culture that leads to results and drives growth

Go Big or Go Home Keynote

Did you know that once you finish a presentation, your audience will forget 50% of it within an hour and 90% of it within a week? How are they supposed to take action on your idea when they can't remember anything you said?

This sad statistic doesn't have to be your fate. Diana's Go Big or Go Home keynote will show you how to significantly increase the amount of your presentation that an audience will retain and create that "gut feeling" that compels them to take action as soon as you're done. Based on Diana's newest book, this talk will offer five concrete tools you can use to emotionally connect with prospects, customers, and employees, and help them remember and act on what you said!

And Diana won't just educate you about these principles. What fun would that be? She'll take you on an interactive roller coaster, carefully weaving in each practice into the talk itself! (Note: Due to the audience participation level of this presentation, it is exclusively available through an in-person format).

ROI & Key Outcomes: How to create trust with your audience at lightning speed; How to make your presentation memorable and worth telling others about; How to do research that no one else will do to get meetings that no one else will get; How to add surprises into your presentation that will keep the audience laser focused on what you're saying

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