Curt Steinhorst
About
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As the founder and CEO of Focuswise, he has consulted with North America’s top companies, such as Deloitte, JPMorgan Chase, Nike, AT&T, and many more.
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As a leader at Venus Aerospace, he is building a future-facing workplace that proactively fights to preserve a positive workplace, defending the organization against stress and inefficiency, the relationship between focus and accountability, and productivity.
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As a frequent keynote speaker, he addresses the theory behind these ideas, but also presents practical applications that his audiences can put to use immediately.
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As a writer and influencer, he shares his expertise on leadership strategy, brain science, generational differences, and technology trends through his podcast and regular Forbescolumn.
About Curt Steinhorst - Leadership Strategist, People & Culture Expert, Bestselling Author :
Curt Steinhorst has spent his career closing the distance between people who have to work together but don’t speak the same language: across generations, between leaders and the people they depend on, and between what was said and what was heard.
He’s done it in Fortune 500 boardrooms, professional locker rooms, and inside the executive team of a hypersonic deep tech company.
Most recently, he spent three years as Head of People at Venus Aerospace, where his teams achieved America’s first flight of a rotating detonation rocket engine, a fundamental leap in rocket propulsion not seen since the Apollo program. They also raised $100M+ in the tightest venture market in decades. It turns out that even when it IS rocket science, the outcome still depends on people working together.
Before Venus, Curt built a company around the question of attention. He wrote Can I Have Your Attention? (Wiley bestseller) and became a Forbes contributor. He also has ADHD, which is either ironic or the whole point.
Curt got his start on the speaking circuit working with the Center for Generational Kinetics. He looked fourteen, so nobody was going to hire him to talk about anything other than millennials.
His current work centers on the questions AI can’t answer: what deserves our attention, how experienced leaders stay curious when industries shift, and how teams tell the truth under pressure.
Click Here to Watch Curt's Virtual Presentation
Topics and Audience Takeaways
What Curt Steinhorst Talks About:
It’s Not Rocket Science… It’s Harder
A new engine for leadership in the age of AI
Most leadership advice assumes the person at the top has more answers, more information, and more control. AI weakens that assumption. It can produce answers and individual output quickly, but leaders are still responsible for priorities, judgment, and work that depends on other people. Adding more expectations to the job will not help. At Venus Aerospace, a new rocket engine changed what kind of flight was possible. This keynote makes the case for a different leadership engine: decide what deserves attention, make sound calls when the answer is not obvious, and help people do hard things together.
Can I Have Your Attention?
Helping people focus when work is built around interruption
People are working longer, responding faster, and still struggling to move important work forward. The problem is not a lack of care or discipline. Their attention is divided by more priorities, channels, meetings, and requests than it can absorb. This keynote shows leaders how to treat attention as an organizational resource: decide what deserves it, reduce the demands competing for it, and create the conditions focused work requires.
Signal in the Noise
Closing the gap between what leaders say and what people do
Your strategy can be clear at the top and disappear before it reaches the front line. A sales message can be accurate and still lose the buyer in seconds. Leaders often respond by repeating themselves, adding slides, or sending more communication. The result is usually more noise. Signal in the Noise is for people whose results depend on being understood. It shows how to identify the message that matters, earn attention without gimmicks, and structure it so people can repeat it and act on it. The standard is not whether the presentation went well. It is what the audience remembers a week later and what they do next.
Curiosity Under Pressure
The skill that unlocks every other skill
An AI rollout, a merger, a new system: whatever the change is, it lands on a team as a question about value. What does this mean for the work I’m good at? Some people stop touching the new tools. Some hand the tools everything, including the judgment someone still has to answer for. Almost everyone asks fewer questions out loud, because under pressure, questions feel like evidence you’re behind. That’s the moment a team most needs its curiosity, and the moment it’s hardest to find. Curiosity Under Pressure is about how teams keep learning when the stakes feel personal: what it takes to stop a change from feeling like an audition, and how people at every level stay valuable while the definition of valuable is moving.
Recent Publications
Curt was fabulous! The audience was very engaged, the topic was extremely beneficial and he was really funny. Our United Van Lines and Mayflower agents wanted more time with him!
Unigroup, Inc.
