Diana Kander

Curiosity, Innovation, and Customer Experience Expert, Bestselling Author, Serial Entrepreneur, Podcast Host

Topics: Customer Experience, Innovation, Best Selling Author, Business Growth, Business Leadership, Corporate Culture, Employee Engagement, Entrepreneur, Inspirational & Motivational, Leadership, Productivity, Sales, Strategy, Success, TED Speakers, Thought Leadership, Women Leaders, Business, Elite Performance

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Biography

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.

Videos

Speech TopicsExpand each topic to learn more

UNLEASH YOUR CURIOSITY!

WANT AN INCREDIBLE OPENING KEYNOTE SPEAKER THAT MAKES PARTICIPANTS MORE OPEN AND ENGAGED IN EACH AND 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 the simple questions we ask ourselves on a daily basis to get significantly better results and drive innovation. That includes the questions attendees are reflecting on throughout your event!

Diana will help participants understand that the longer they've been doing something, the more likely it is that their expertise has also created some blindspots. Blindspots that could be huge opportunities for growth. She'll demonstrate how we struggle with additive bias, or 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'll help 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.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:
- How to ‘institutionalize’ curiosity in your organization with simple daily habits
- How to dramatically reduce the ‘risk’ of new ideas and supercharge growth
- How to avoid allowing your past success to sabotage your future growth

GO BIG OR GO HOME

Did you know that once a sales rep finishes a presentation, the audience will forget 50% of it within an hour and 90% of it within a week? How are they supposed to pick your organization when they can't remember anything their rep said?

This sad statistic doesn't have to be the norm. Diana's Go Big or Go Home keynote will show you how to significantly increase the amount of a presentation that an audience will retain and how to create that "gut feeling" that compels them to take action. Based on Diana's popular book, this talk will offer five concrete tools to emotionally connect with prospects and customers and create moments of magic.

AND DIANA WON'T JUST SPEAK ABOUT THESE PRINCIPLES. WHAT FUN WOULD THAT BE? SHE'LL TAKE YOUR TEAM ON AN INTERACTIVE ROLLER COASTER, CAREFULLY WEAVING IN EACH PRACTICE INTO THE TALK ITSELF!

Key Takeaways
- 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

CUSTOMIZED KEYNOTE

As an innovation keynote speaker and consultant, Diana has created a number of tools and best practices, launched over 12 companies herself, and spent considerable time as an entrepreneur-in-residence inside several large organizations. And she's worked on innovation in almost every industry imaginable. Yes, even nuclear reactors! Diana's experience and her obsession with the topic of innovation allow her to create a custom keynote based on your organization's needs.

Testimonials

Diana delivered an on-point message about entrepreneurship and innovation which was a perfect complement to our program and was one of the highlights for our more than 400 attendees. Not only was Diana’s talk anchored in data and evidence, it also included plenty of relevant personal anecdotes as well as a dose of humor. In addition, she helped us structure a reaction panel for her talk which made every one of her points come through that much stronger for our audience.

– Grupo Guayacan, Inc

I am a meeting planner so I have seen lots of Innovation Keynote Speakers and very few have had an impact as much as yours has on this group. Keep up the good work and keep improving yourself, whatever you are doing is working!

– Gartner Program & Portfolio Management Summit

Diana was a dynamic speaker, and I took a lot away from her presentation. She was very energetic and thought provoking.

– Missouri Small Business & Technology Development Center

Diana was our opening keynote for our annual Youth Conference. She held our audience captivated as the discussed what goes through a business persons mind when deciding to make decisions… Particularly when making hiring decisions.

– California Workforce Association

Diana spoke at one of our recent Leaders Conferences. We received many positive comments about her message and engaging speaking style. I would highly recommend Diana to any organization who wants a speaker who has lived the life of an entrepreneur and can communicate in a relevant and humorous way what it takes to start a business and be successful.

– Assurity Life Insurance Company