You’re looking for the straight goods when it comes to leadership and corporate culture so people can thrive, customers are delighted, and goals get met.
Dan’s Credibility
For 20 years, Dan held senior roles at SAP, TELUS, and Business Objects leading corporate culture change, leadership development, employee experience and overall performance improvement. Ever since, he has worked with organizations around the world including the likes of Salesforce, Amgen, State of Tennessee, Nestlé, Canada Post, Autodesk, Manulife, Nutrien, City of Toronto, BMO, D2L, among many others.
He has on-the-ground experience to improve your leadership and corporate culture. Indeed, the future of work is now.
Dan is the award-winning author of four leadership books: LEAD. CARE. WIN., OPEN TO THINK, THE PURPOSE EFFECT and FLAT ARMY. His 5th book will publish in 2023 titled WORK-LIFE BLOOM 🌸.
A renowned leadership keynote speaker, Dan has presented at four different TED events and delivers roughly 50 keynotes per year. In addition to keynotes, Dan facilitates workshops as well as small or large consulting engagements. He writes for Forbes and Harvard Business Review and is an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, Gustavson School of Business. Download his short orlong bio.
Dan also hosts the popular Leadership NOW program; interviews in audio, video, and Forbes column formats. Dan is always in pursuit of what makes leadership better… now.
Dan’s Distinctions
Dan is honoured to be on the Thinkers50 Radar list. HR Weekly listed him as one of its 100 Most Influential People in HR. PeopleHum listed Dan on the Top 200 Thought Leaders to Follow and Inc. Magazine listed him as one of the top 100 leadership speakers. He has earned over 25 professional, leadership, and author awards over his career.
Dan’s Purpose
We’re not here to see through each other; we’re here to see each other through.
WOW what a talk! I have been inundated with positive feedback from your keynote all weekend. You hit the nail on the head in terms of what’s happening in our organization and your examples really resonated with our group. One of our Execs was really thankful for how you directly tackled the “elephants in our room”. Our SVP couldn’t stop praising you during the reception. Thank you!
Vice President
Dan is a conference organizer’s ideal speaker. Not only did he inspire and energize our group, but he also masterfully adapted his content so it resonated with the audience and our conference theme. As a bonus, Dan is able to nimbly navigate to adjust to a reduced time slot when other speakers went over time without sacrificing the impact of his session.
Director and General Counsel
Dan was excellent. He really took into account our briefing and developed a presentation that was spot on. Everyone enjoyed it. I have read his book now too, quite good.
SVP Communications
Dan, thank you for sharing your wisdom with the professionals within the State of Tennessee – we are better leaders because we learned how to be Open To Think!
Chief Learning Officer
Loved Dan! I think he is the best speaker that I have heard from at the breakfast series. Engaging, relevant, powerful speaker.
Event Attendee
One of the best motivational speakers we have had over the past 21 years.
CEO
Thank you for your keynote talk this morning. It was funny and filled with good advice and ideas, and unsurprisingly, the feedback I received was overwhelmingly positive.
Executive Director
Dan Pontefract presented at our Practice Management & Tax Summit as the closing keynote and was a real hit for our members. He not only brought his presentation to life with his charisma, but also content, style and presentation finesse. Our members were especially interested in his thought provoking AND top of mind topic on the future of work and how we’re going to be leading the next generation of leaders
Practice Lead
Dan presented a high energy talk at our internal conference. He challenged us to have clarity of purpose, both as individuals and as an organization. He related inspiring stories drawing on his experience in business, technology and academia.
Vice-President
We accomplished what we set out to do, which was not only to be inspirational, but also to leave everyone with tools and food for thought / self-reflection to improve their personal and professional lives.