Jim Knight is not your average keynote speaker. As the former Senior Director of Training & Development at Hard Rock International, Knight brings his high energy, interactive and entertaining approach to deliver insights on organizational culture, customer service, employee branding, performance management, philanthropy, facilitation training, personal development, and leadership skills.

Knight has a degree in Vocal Performance & Education and taught in the Florida public school system for 6 years, before embarking on his hospitality training career.

The acclaimed author of Culture That Rocks, Jim Knight began his 30+-year career in hospitality training as a restaurant staff-level employee for Olive Garden and Hard Rock Cafe, before serving as the head of the School of Hard Rocks, running point on all global training and development functions for Hard Rock International. In this role, Knight managed and contributed to all facets of organizational training, including staff and management training materials and programs, the corporate university, management training locations, company e-Learning initiatives, leadership transitions, and on-site training and assessment.

During his time with the Hard Rock brand, his team won multiple Telly Awards, as well as a Gold Best in Class Award from Brandon Hall's Excellence in Learning. Knight was also recognized by Training Magazine, as representing one of the Top 125 training companies in the world, out of all industries and businesses. Since 2012, Jim Knight has been featured in Forbes Magazine, Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, Business News Daily and Fox Business News and was highlighted in 2015 as one of the “Top 5 Speakers to Watch.”  
 

A portion of Knight’s book and speaking proceeds goes to No Kid Hungry, a campaign to eliminate childhood hunger in the U.S.

With thought-provoking content and a refreshing, edgy delivery style, Jim Knight shares his unique, seasoned outlook on company culture, guest service, building teams, employee engagement, training and philanthropy to help organizations achieve rock star status.

Sheila Heen specializes in particularly challenging conversations, where emotions run high and relationships are frayed. She offers the insight and skills to tackle the conversations and conflicts that leaders face every day.

She is a 20-year member of the world-renowned Harvard Negotiation Project, a Harvard faculty member and co-author of two New York Times best sellers.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most is used by leaders all over the world and has even been loaded onto the International Space Station to help astronauts collaborate effectively in that high-stakes, high-pressure environment. Named one of 50 psychology classics alongside Freud and Jung, Difficult Conversations was also named by Penguin as one of the most important books it has ever published.

In the revolutionary Thanks for the Feedback, Sheila brings a fresh perspective to our universal struggles with feedback in every organization by recognizing that in any exchange between giver and receiver, it’s the receiver who is in charge. It’s the receiver who decides what to let in, how to make sense of it, and whether and how to choose to change. The key to accelerating your own learning, as well as the culture of feedback on your team, is understanding the universal challenges of receiving feedback well. From examining our conflicted relationship with feedback, to identifying the triggers that create defensiveness and denial, Sheila’s highly interactive sessions bring insight, practical tools and concrete skills for transforming your own relationship with feedback.

A sought-after commentator and writer, her articles have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, O, The Oprah Magazine, the New York Times, Fortune and Real Simple. She has been featured on NPR and FOX News, Wharton Leadership Radio, CNBC’s Power Lunch and The Oprah Winfrey Show. Her corporate clients span six continents and a dozen industries, including banking, defense, consumer goods, mining, insurance, IT, pharma and biotech, education and media/entertainment. In the public sector, she has provided training for the New England Organ Bank, the Singapore Supreme Court, Greek and Turkish Cypriots grappling with the conflict that divides their island, and theologians struggling with disagreement over the nature of truth and God.

Sheila is a graduate of Occidental College and Harvard Law School. She is schooled in negotiation daily by her three children. 

Andy Boynton is dean of Boston College’s Carroll School of Management, one of the world’s leading business schools, the author of several books and co-creator of DeepDive™, the world’s leading methodology for helping executives harness the power of teams to significantly improve problem-solving speed, innovation and results.

Prior to joining Boston College, Boynton was a professor of strategy at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland for 10 years. At the IMD he led a faculty team and was program director of one of the world’s top ten Executive MBA programs, as recognized by BusinessWeek.

Boynton has recently launched new research projects to explore how distinguished experts from a variety of knowledge-domains work with ideas to achieve professional success and improve their effectiveness in social networks. His latest book, The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make them Happen (Jossey-Bass), is based on this research and is co-authored with Bill Fischer and William Bole.

He has also published extensively on factors underlying high-performing teams across a variety of disciplines, including art, science, exploration and design. His previous books include Virtuoso Teams: Lessons from Teams That Changed Their Worlds (Financial Times-Prentice Hall) and Invented Here: Maximizing Your Organization’s Internal Growth and Profitability (Harvard Business School Press).

He is a 1978 graduate of Boston College. Boynton earned his MBA and PhD at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He has served on the MBA faculty at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business and at the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia.

In addition to his publishing career and role as dean of the Carroll School of Management, Boynton has over twenty years of experience speaking and designing powerful executive education sessions and seminars for firms around the world. He is often utilized by organizations looking to build more innovative and effective teams and his articles in this area have appeared in elite management journals such as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review and The California Management Review.

Pandit Dasa is a Mindful Leadership Expert. He has spoken on Mindfulness and conducted workshops at Google, JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Nationwide, Intel, Novartis, The World Bank, UNICEF, Harvard and many other institutions. He has also presented at the World Government Summit in Dubai, the national SHRM convention, Oracle HCM conference, and WorkHuman. Through these workshops, Pandit helps individuals develop positive leadership qualities, lower stress and anxiety, increase focus and productivity, and boost emotional intelligence. Pandit has spoken at a TEDx conference and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, PBS, NPR, The New York Times and Inc.