Erica Dhawan
Erica Dhawan on Driving Your Culture Forward
Erica Dhawan
Keynote Speaker
Leading Authority on 21st Century Teamwork, Collaboration, and Innovation; Bestselling Author; Named “Oprah of Management Thinkers” and Ranked #1 of Top Women Keynote Speakers
When leaders want to break team silos, drive exponential growth and innovate through teamwork, they call Erica Dhawan.
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Erica is an internationally recognized authority, bestselling author, and advisor on 21st century teamwork, collaboration, and innovation. Named by Thinkers50 as the “Oprah of Management Thinkers,” she is the author of three books: Use Your Brain, Digital Body Language, and Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence.
The world of business is increasingly digital, and work practices have changed at a blistering rate. Erica shares innovative strategies to unlock the collective power of teams, build a culture of trust across any distance, and create authentic engagement that keeps organizations competitive and original in the age of AI. Rated #1 on the Top Women Keynote Speakers list and featured among the top 50 management thinkers most likely to shape the future of business, Erica appears frequently in Harvard Business Review, New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. She pairs storytelling and humor with research to give audiences interactive, refreshing, practical strategies for modern, innovation-driving teamwork.
She holds degrees from Harvard, MIT, and Wharton.
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Erica Dhawan on Driving Your Culture Forward
Erica Dhawan’s Speech Topics
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Use Your Brain: Critical Thinking Intelligence for the Era on Autopilot
Your people aren’t using AI. They’re agreeing with it. We stopped drafting and started approving. We stopped wrestling with the idea and started accepting the summary. It feels like productivity. It’s cognitive surrender, and it’s quietly flattening originality, weakening recall, and producing decisions no one in the room can actually defend.
Erica Dhawan, global expert on 21st century teamwork and innovation and author of Use Your Brain, argues that Critical Thinking Intelligence is to this decade what Emotional Intelligence was to the ’90s: the differentiator between the leaders who compound and the ones who get automated.
This is a keynote about running at full speed without outsourcing the original thinking that makes your people worth paying for. Based on case studies and practical storytelling, Dhawan sends audiences home with team rituals they can run the next morning: the Think Sandwich, where human judgment opens and closes every AI-assisted task, the Friction Meeting, where someone is assigned to argue how the work is wrong; and a Decision Filter for what to automate, what to augment, and what stays non-negotiably human.
Interactive, immediately usable, and built for teams that think originally and creatively in our modern age.
Learning Outcomes:
- Catch themselves and their teams on autopilot, and put real thinking back around the machine in their organization and with customers/clients
- Pressure-test technology output, stop AI slop, separate signal from noise, and decide what to automate, augment, and protect
- Own high-stakes decisions they can explain, defend, and recall
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Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence
Two teams have been working on the same problem for six months. Neither knows the other exists. That is what endless meetings, cross-team dysfunction, duplication, and delay actually cost you. And it isn’t a tools problem. Your people can find any document, any dataset, any answer in seconds. So why is collaboration still hard?
Because what actually moves work forward is their human relationships across silos. The colleague who tried this years ago and watched it fail. The client relationship that makes a hard conversation possible. Tools can retrieve everything your company recorded. It cannot reach what only your people know.
When every organization has the same tools, the edge belongs to those who connect across the lines that divide them. Function to function. Region to region. Level to level.
Erica Dhawan, global expert on 21st century teamwork and innovation and author of Get Big Things Done, named this Connectional Intelligence, which turns people into superconnectors who break silos and drive breakthrough impact. She shows leaders and teams how to surface what no system captured, build trust fast across boundaries, and unlock the collective expertise of the whole enterprise.
Learning Outcomes:
- Surface the tacit knowledge and relationship capital no AI system can retrieve
- Diagnose where collaboration stalls in your organization, and unstick it
- Break silos and keep teams aligned, accountable, and motivated
- Build trust across functions, geographies, and reporting lines without adding meetings
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Collaborate Faster and Further, Together
Every message is now well-written. Warm opener. Clean structure. Thoughtful closing line. And you have no idea whether the person actually read your note, cared about your problem, or was even the one who wrote it. That’s the new trust problem.
In the past, the signals were sloppy but real. A rushed reply meant something. A typo at 11pm meant something. A long thoughtful message meant someone spent time on you. Effort used to be visible in the writing. Now polish is free.
Erica Dhawan, global expert on 21st century teamwork and innovation and author of the WSJ bestseller Digital Body Language decodes what actually signals care, credibility, and commitment. Specificity is the new sincerity. Response time is the new eye contact. Showing your reasoning is the new showing your work. And the fastest way to rebuild trust with a client, a peer, or a direct report is to be unmistakably human in a channel where everyone else sounds like a machine.
This keynote will name the norms that are quietly eroding trust, and leave audiences with shared communication rules and guidelines for what gets automated, what gets drafted, and what has to come from a person.
Learning Outcomes:
- Read the signals that still carry meaning, and stop trusting the ones AI made worthless
- Create cultures of maniacal clarity across email, phone, IM, text, video and even live meetings
- Rebuild credibility with clients and colleagues in channels flooded with perfect, forgettable communication
Works by Erica Dhawan
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Erica Dhawan Topics & Types
- AAPI Speakers
- Authors
- Business Speakers
- Communication Speakers
- Corporate Culture Speakers
- Emotional Intelligence Speakers
- Human Resources (HR) Speakers
- Innovation Speakers
- Journalists & Broadcasters
- Leadership Speakers
- Motivational Speakers
- Overcoming Adversity Speakers
- Peak Performance Speakers
- Storytelling Speakers
- Teamwork Speakers
- Technology Speakers
- Virtual Speakers
- Visionary Speakers
- Women Speakers
- Women Leadership Speakers
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