Geoff Colvin

Keynote speaker Geoff Colvin is an award-winning thinker, author, broadcaster, and speaker on today’s most significant trends in business. As FORTUNE’s Senior Editor-at-Large, he has become one of America’s sharpest and most respected commentators on leadership, globalization, wealth creation, the infotech revolution, and related issues. As anchor of Wall Street Week with FORTUNE on PBS, he spoke each week to the largest audience reached by any business television program in America.

Colvin’s groundbreaking bestseller Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else received the Harold A. Longman Award for Best Business Book of the Year and has been published in a dozen languages. Charlie Rose says it is “spectacular” and “fascinating.” Daniel H. Pink calls it “profoundly important.” Donald Trump calls it “enlightening” and “inspiring.” Colvin’s book The Upside of the Downturn: Ten Management Strategies to Prevail in the Recession and Thrive in the Aftermath was named the best management book of the year by Strategy + Business magazine.

Directorship magazine has named Colvin one of the 100 most influential figures in corporate governance.

As a speaker, Geoff Colvin has engaged hundreds of audiences on six continents. He is also a skilled on-stage interviewer whose subjects have included Jack Welch, Henry Kissinger, Richard Branson, the Prince of Wales, Bill Gates, Alan Greenspan, Steve Case, Ted Turner, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and many others. He is the regular lead moderator of the Fortune Global Forum, and he serves as moderator for the International Business Leaders Forum in London.

Speaker Geoff Colvin is one of America’s preeminent business broadcasters. He is heard daily on the CBS Radio Network, where he has made over 10,000 broadcasts and reaches seven million listeners each week. He has appeared on Today, The O’Reilly Factor, Good Morning America, Squawk Box, CBS This Morning, ABC’s World News, CNN, PBS’s Nightly Business Report, and dozens of other programs.

A native of Vermillion, South Dakota, Colvin is an honors graduate of Harvard with a degree in economics and has an M.B.A. from New York University.

Leading Ahead Of What’s Next

The whole world of business is changing in historic and profound ways – competition, technology, government’s role, and the balance of global economic power are shifting massively — and it’s happening fast! Successfully navigating the tumult is every leader’s great challenge today and Geoff Colvin helps them meet it. Colvin has a unique perspective rooted in long-standing relationships with the world’s top leaders in business and government. He knows what they’re seeing, thinking, and planning and reveals how they’re leading, making choices, and responding to today’s challenges in ways that others can learn from. Competing and winning in business today requires extraordinary leadership at every level of the organization. In a presentation that’s as relevant as the day’s headlines, Colvin explains what’s important, what isn’t, and what’s next – offering audiences specific strategies they can put to work right now to navigate the future.

The Economic Outlook

It’s what everybody wants to know. Today’s economic environment is more volatile and uncertain than at any time in memory: The BRICs are slowing, America’s growing, Europe’s a question mark; technology is upending whole industries; surging demographic changes are creating new challenges and opportunities; governments are playing a larger role than they have in decades. And it all changes by the day. Colvin uses his relationships with top leaders to get ahead of official statistics and explain the latest trends and what they mean. Engaging, energetic, and topical, he helps his audience put it all together to make better decisions.

Talent Is Overrated – Unexpected Truths Of Great Performance

What if everything you know about raw talent, hard work, and great performance is wrong? Scientific research on great performance shows that what most of us believe is off-base – which means we’ll never perform as well as we could. Geoff Colvin, author of the groundbreaking international bestseller Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else, explains the findings and relates them to real life in real organizations. He shows how most organizations value the wrong things – how passion, honesty, and learning are more valuable than hours, IQ, or “native ability.” In this engaging, entertaining talk, Colvin demonstrates that world-class performance doesn’t come from mysterious natural gifts but rather from highly specific behaviors that every person and organization can adopt. Those who apply these principles gain a tremendous advantage.

The Power Of One: Aligning Your Organization’s Incredible Strengths

It’s one of the most striking trends in business today: companies feeling frustrated that the tremendous abilities inside their organizations – the knowledge, creativity, and innovation – aren’t being combined as one to deliver knockout products and services that leave competitors wondering what hit them. For most businesses it’s a huge missed opportunity. Yet a growing number of companies, as varied as Ford, Apple, Lego, Amazon, and Hershey, have cracked the code and are achieving extraordinary success as a result. Colvin explains how they do it and how your organization can too – before your competitors beat you to it.

Becoming Radically Customer-Centric: The New Opportunity

All companies like to claim they’re customer-centric, but few truly are. Most don’t deeply understand the varied wants and needs of their different customers, or craft different customer value propositions to meet those customers’ wants and needs – nor do they know how much money they actually make (or lose) with each customer or customer segment. Such companies are guaranteed to be wasting resources and losing customers to savvier competitors. There’s no excuse for that to happen. Big Data and powerful new analytic tools are changing the game, but they’re of no use unless companies know how to use them. Colvin, co-author of the groundbreaking book on this topic, Angel Customers and Demon Customers, explains how smart companies are taking customer-centricity to undreamed-of heights – and how doing so turbocharges profits.