Diana Kander

About

Diana talks about how to create an an internal culture of innovation so that every employee is a resource to the effort.
Audiences leave with the framework for how your organization – and the people within it – can flourish in this hyper-competitive world.
Diana is an attorney, founder, investor & successful entrepreneur, a Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Missouri and a Senior Fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
Past clients include: Lexmark, H&R Block, Hallmark, Ford, Gartner and Hyundai.

About Diana Kander - Entrepreneur, Author, and Speaker on Innovation:

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?

Diana 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.

Diana'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 Diana'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 Diana: 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.

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

Topics

What Diana Kander Talks About:

For All Company Meetings
Want an incredible opening keynote that makes participants more engaged in every session? Then teach them how to harness their curiosity!

Based on her book, The Curiosity Muscle, Diana’s high-energy keynote shows us how we can level up our simple questions to get significantly better results and drive innovation. That includes the questions attendees are reflecting on throughout your event!

She helps participants understand that the longer they’ve been doing something, the more likely it is that their expertise has also created some blind spots. Blind spots that could be huge opportunities for growth. She demonstrates how we struggle with additive bias (looking to add more things to our plate to solve a problem), when taking something away would be the much more optimal solution. And she helps attendees understand how our natural desire to be right gets in the way of our learning and improvement.

Through hilarious case studies and interactive exercises, Diana will leave your audience excited to learn and open to changing how they see the world.

ROI & Key Outcomes:

How you can institutionalize curiosity, ask better questions to stay competitive and relevant to your customers and drive growth
How you can dramatically reduce the risk of new ideas and create a more innovative culture that leads to results
How to determine pitfalls within your organization and avoid falling into the “expert trap”

Go Big or Go Home
For Executives & Managers
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 focussed on what you’re saying

Recent Publications

Diana's talk was amazing. It was one of the most talked about presentations at our two day event - both over social media and in person at the event itself. She was funny, engaging, thought provoking and truly able to connect with the audience - and it definitely showed. The gushing praise we received from our attendees was overwhelming.