Tom Hardin

What happens when you lose your career, your reputation, and the trust of the people closest to you, in public? Hardin doesn’t sugarcoat the answer. He takes you through the shame, the silence, and the slow, unglamorous work of earning it all back. Drawing on lessons from his grandfather, a Bataan Death March survivor, and his own life as an ultramarathon runner, he shows what rebuilding actually requires when there’s no shortcut and no script. No platitudes. No highlight reel. Just an honest account of what it costs to own your worst decisions, face the people you let down, and start over.

Nobody wakes up and decides to commit fraud. It happens in inches. A small shortcut. A number you let slide. A question you don’t ask because you already know the answer. Hardin has lived that progression and spent a decade helping Fortune 500 leadership teams see it in their own cultures. He introduces his Integrity Gap framework, showing how the distance between what leaders say and what teams actually do gets wider under pressure — and what it takes to close it before the gap becomes a headline. This talk gives leaders a language for the problems they already sense but haven’t named.

At 29, Tom Hardin was secretly recording conversations for the FBI at the center of Operation Perfect Hedge. In this keynote drawn from his national bestseller Wired on Wall Street, he doesn’t recount what happened. He puts you in the room where it happened. You’ll feel the pressure, the rationalizations, and the moment the line moves under your feet. Then he connects it to your organization, your team, your next quarter — showing how the same forces that drove Wall Street’s insider trading scandal are quietly at work in every industry. Audiences don’t just learn how scandals start. They recognize the patterns already around them.