Diana Kander

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.

Why Curiosity is the Ultimate Competitive Advantage

This keynote explains exactly why most companies reaching the peak of their potential lose their curiosity and crash into irrelevance. From how we develop blind spots about our business, to the pitfalls of feeling like an expert, this thought-provoking, engaging program reveals the smokescreens obscuring imminent threats to long-term viability. It walks you through specific ways to boost innovation, uncover customer needs, solve problems, create new value for customers, and increase employee engagement. Most importantly, Diana demonstrates why curiosity is your greatest asset to drive constant innovation and help your company thrive and compete on more than price alone — ultimately, future-proofing your business.

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”

Increasing the Speed of Innovation

The pace of change in today’s economy requires innovative, value-adding ideas to come from all parts of your organization – whether they are internal improvements or new sources of revenue. The way managers were traditionally trained stifles innovation and forces out-of-the-box thinkers out of the company. This interactive presentation outlines the must-have skill sets to effectively lead your employees. Diana will provide the framework for how your organization – and the people within it – can flourish in this hyper-competitive world.

ROI & Key Outcomes:

• Learn new skill sets required of the innovative leader
• Avoid common pitfalls of innovative leadership
• Create an internal culture of innovation so that every employee is a resource to the effort

How to Compete on Value Instead of Price 

This presentation teaches a methodology used by both entrepreneurs and established organizations to continuously create new value for their customers. You will learn the key questions you must ask in order to uncover value-creating opportunities, as well as precisely how to ask them to effectively yield useful insights. Questions like: are you competing on price or value with your customers? If your focus is on value (which it should be), are you missing some key blind spots in your product or service? Are you measuring true data about the health of your project or just relying on vanity metrics that are concealing what’s really going on?

ROI & Key Outcomes:

• Change the way you solicit feedback from customers to make it more actionable
• Learn the key customer questions that will uncover value-creating opportunities.
• Learn detailed examples to improve curiosity, creativity and leadership skills