Eight Timely Keynote Topics for Your Next Event

August 19, 2021 Maddie Grant

Need a provocative and engaging keynoter for your next event or conference?

PROPEL co-founder Jamie Notter has been delivering keynotes and interactive sessions for association and corporate audiences for more than a decade. He delivers keynote presentations about the power of strong organizational cultures and the key trends that are shaping the future of business, today. Jamie doesn’t pander to the audience; he speaks the truth and cuts through the hype, making it engaging, entertaining, and specifically relevant to the audience in question. 

Popular topics include the following (always customized to your specific audience):

  • How to Go Back to the Office without Losing Your Best People

You think you have a plan for how you’re going to bring your folks back in to the office, but in your efforts to sort out all the logistical details (who’s coming in on Tuesdays and Thursdays again? What tech do we need for the conference room?), you might be missing more important, underlying issues that may very well push your best people to start looking for a new job. In this provocative session, culture expert Jamie Notter will share 4 critical culture decisions every organization must make before they decide how and when to return to the workplace. He’ll provide concrete strategies for adjusting your culture to today’s new reality in ways that will drive retention and engagement, right when you need it the most. 

  • How to Keep Your Culture Strong Even if You Go Hybrid 

It’s one thing to nurture a strong culture when everyone comes into the office every day, but how do you sustain that with a remote or hybrid workforce? It starts with staying on top of your culture patterns. As you changed the way you work over the last year, you may have changed the patterns inside your culture that are bringing your performance down. In this session, Jamie Notter will reveal research that can help you get your culture back on track by focusing on the patterns that work the best in a remote and hybrid environment. Learn how to make key changes in the way you manage transparency, collaboration, and innovation that will make you an employer of choice in an environment where everyone seems to be looking for a new job.  

  • Building A Growth Mindset to Break Through Today’s Limitations

Psychologists have long extolled the benefits of believing you can change and develop (the growth mindset), compared to the fixed mindset, where you accept your limitations. But in today’s environment of constant change, embracing the growth mindset is as important at an organizational level as it is for individuals. In this session, culture expert Jamie Notter will explain how to actively develop a growth mindset as an individual, a team, and a whole organization. You’ll get concrete strategies for expanding your change comfort zone, unlocking speed inside your teams, and building innovation and agility inside your organizational culture.

  • Unlocking Culture-Driven Performance

It’s not about foosball and Taco Tuesdays (and the pandemic proved that none of that is what truly matters). The truth is, culture is a tangible business tool that drives performance, and Jamie will share a model for managing culture that is rooted in his ongoing research with organizations that are breaking the rules and beating the competition. He’ll share tactics for spotting key culture patterns as well as a framework for changing culture both quickly and without all the drama.

  • Using a System of Accountability to Achieve Surprising Growth

You can’t get off the “last year plus two percent” hamster wheel of slow growth until you build a disciplined system of accountability. What few people realize, however, is that an accountability system requires a skillful integration of strategy, execution, and culture. In this session, Jamie Notter will share the system he built that integrates all three, drawing from models and practices used by both nonprofit leaders and tech entrepreneurs. You’ll learn how to connect strategy from long-term vision down to three-month priorities and how to create powerful metrics that drive a culture of agility instead of blame and help you break through barriers to growth that have been holding you back for years.

 

  • Creating a Culture of Innovation

Most organizations understand the value of innovation, yet few ever realize that value—and the root of this problem lies in organizational culture. They say culture eats strategy for breakfast, and that is particularly true when it comes to innovation. In this practical session, Jamie Notter will give you plain-English definitions of both culture and innovation, and then demonstrate how the patterns inside your culture can derail your innovation efforts, despite having a clear innovation strategy. He will include practical tips for changing your culture patterns to strengthen your capacity for innovation.

  • The Hidden Power of Culture Patterns

We all want amazing workplaces, yet traditional management “best practices” rarely get us all the way there. The reason why is not that our management practices are all wrong—it’s that we’re not seeing the hidden patterns inside our culture that are derailing our best efforts. In this session, culture expert Jamie Notter will share some of the dominant culture patterns that have emerged from his years of research and practice. He will demonstrate how existing patterns can make it nearly impossible to achieve the agility, collaboration, or innovation that we need to thrive in today’s environment, and he will offer practical strategies for fixing the broken culture patterns and unlocking new performance.

See testimonials and Jamie’s speaker site at jamienotter.com.

PROPEL’s other co-founder Maddie Grant does not keynote, but is available to speak about digital transformation and her latest white paper.  She also facilitates fishbowl discussions and is an expert panel moderator.

  • The No BS Guide to Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation has been a hot topic for a decade, and yet associations still struggle to make it happen, to get beyond “digitizing” and truly “go digital.” Why is that? Join Maddie Grant as she shares findings from their new, deeply researched whitepaper, The No BS Guide to Digital Transformation: How Intentional Culture Change Can Propel Associations Forward. The research is clear: the key to lasting, responsive digital transformation is intentional and focused culture change. This webinar will delve deeply into what makes association culture unique and how culture change particularly impacts associations—through the lens of an ever-evolving tech environment. The session will also include case studies of associations that have embraced digital transformation on behalf of their members and their industry and detail the specific steps you need to take to effect digital transformation in your association. 

Any interest in these topics? Contact us.

Maddie Grant

Maddie Grant, CAE, is an expert culture designer and digital strategist who focuses on helping organizations unlock the power in their culture and navigate culture change. She has specific expertise in digital transformation and generational differences in the workplace. She has explored the language of workplace culture for several years through her books, co-authored with her partner in business and life Jamie Notter, including Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World (2011), the Amazon category best-seller When Millennials Take Over: Preparing for the Ridiculously Optimistic Future of Business (2015), the Non-Obvious Guide to Employee Engagement (2019), and Culture Change Made Easy (2024).