Speaking · Keynotes & Workshops · Mike Wittenstein

Your audience is smart and skeptical. Good.

Mike Wittenstein of Storyminers. Keynotes and workshops on AI, strategy, and alignment, for rooms full of leaders. Conferences, corporate events, leadership summits, executive round tables, and boards. Each talk is rebuilt for your theme, your audience, and your industry. Live, hybrid, or virtual.

mike@storyminers.com +1 404.229.5809 Travels from ATL Check a date
On stage

Watch a talk before you book.

First, the Future Story, the strategy written as a story people can react to, in a three and a half minute summary. Then highlights from keynotes around the world.

The Future Story, filmed in 2020. A three and a half minute summary.

The cover of Mike Wittenstein's speaker kit

Get Mike’s speaker kit

Enough to judge the fit before you spend an hour on a call. Every talk is paired with the audience it was built for, so you can see which one belongs on your stage. You’ll also find what Mike does with your team before the event, what your people keep afterward, one engagement told in full, and what it costs — keynote, workshop, or a day built around both.

Read here Download the speaker kit (PDF)

Get short and long bios, topics, and a headshot.

Keynote highlights around the world. The opening clip, for an international business school, was delivered virtually in 2020.

The record

Five hundred stages, and counting.

Mike Wittenstein on stage at the Intcomex Retail Workshop, 2019, speaking to a full roomIntcomex Retail Workshop, 2019

500-plus keynotes, workshops, and conference sessions in 18 countries, in English and Portuguese. Q&A also in Spanish. Source ↗

Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) designation (earned; lapsed). Named one of Nextiva’s Top 50 Customer Service Experts of the Decade. Source ↗

Stages have included Chain Store Age, Clorox, Teleflora, PNC, Subway, Publix, Georgia Tech, and Emory, and leading brands in South and Central America, Europe, and Asia.

Every talk is rebuilt for the theme, the audience, and the industry, because canned talks aren’t as valuable as custom presentations built on your industry, your experience, and your plans. Your audience will feel the difference.

“When Mike Wittenstein speaks, people listen. I’ve booked hundreds of experts, and he is the best of the best.”— Pat Haly, ExecuNet Source ↗
“Your special brand of cutting to the chase was just the wake-up call our audience needed to hear.”— Nancy Butler, Editor in Chief, Sleep Savvy Source ↗
“I’ve worked with a lot of people, and Mike is an exceptionally fun person to communicate with. His communication skills are lovely: direct, engaging, human, and helpful.”— Julie Anixter, Founder, New Scenario Source ↗
The talks
Mike Wittenstein leading a working session in a conference room, seen reflected in a grand piano, with the group listening

Six talks on AI, strategy, and alignment. One premise.

The premise behind every one: strategy fails in the gap between understanding and commitment. At Storyminers, story is how a big new idea gets across so people can feel it and walk inside it. Not an anecdote, an example, or a set of instructions: a way to bring the idea to life. People don’t just see the same picture. They see themselves in it, and that’s where alignment, and the desire to contribute, come from. Keynotes run 45 to 60 minutes; the workshop version of any of them runs from ninety minutes to a half day.

1New Motor, Old PulleysWhy AI is everywhere except your numbers.

When factories replaced steam engines with electric motors, they bolted the new motor where the old engine had been and kept every belt and pulley exactly where it was. Productivity stayed flat for decades. The gains only came when someone rearranged the factory around what the motor made possible. Most AI spending today is a motor bolted onto old pulleys.

People leave able to look at any AI project in their own organization and say which of the two it is: a faster version of work they already do, or a change in the work itself. They get the three questions that tell them apart — does it make old work faster, or change the work? What could we stop doing? What does it produce that the rest of the company could use? — and a plain way to raise it with a boss or a board without sounding like the person who is against everything.

Read here Download the one-page overview (PDF)

2Change the FrameStrategy: when to stop improving the answer and change the question.

Every company runs on a picture of what business it is in. That picture decides what its people can see and what they can’t, and almost nobody has said it out loud. Improving the answer inside the picture is what most planning is. Changing the picture is what makes genuinely new things possible. Six real companies, six moments the picture changed, and what happened next.

People leave able to say out loud what frame their own company is running on, most of them for the first time, and to tell the difference between a problem that needs a better answer and a problem that needs a different question. Every attendee takes home the companion field guide, Change the Frame. Também em português.

Read here Download the one-page overview (PDF)

3Busier, Not BetterWhy faster people don’t add up to a faster company, and what to fix first.

If everyone in your company got twice as fast tomorrow, would you get twice as far, or just twice as busy? Individual speed does not add up on its own. Fifty people accelerating can point in fifty directions, and the company ends up busier, more tired, and no further along. The fix isn’t more speed. It’s agreeing on the direction before you buy any.

People leave with one question to put to their own leadership team — where are we going? — and everyone writes down the answer; the spread starts the more valuable conversation that aligns it. They also leave with an understanding of alternate currencies: how to find sources of untapped abundance and apply them for collective gain. It runs in a staff meeting, in about an hour.

Read here Download the one-page overview (PDF)

4From Oversight to ForesightFor boards: three questions to ask before the options close.

A board’s job has always been to protect what the company has built, and that still matters. But the decisions that shape the next ten years are made long before they reach a board packet, and by the time they arrive the options have narrowed and the costs have hardened. Oversight protects what exists. Foresight protects what comes next.

Directors leave with three questions they can ask at the next meeting, early enough to keep choices open and worded so they read as good governance rather than second-guessing management: if we hit all our targets, will we be the company we need to become? What is keeping our options open costing us — and what might it earn us? What could we safely move faster on if we agreed on where we’re going and what the boundaries are? They also leave with three ways to encourage boards to lean forward, stories of big shifts in thinking, and ways to tap the board’s wisdom for future-state design while keeping their fingers out of operations.

Read here Download the one-page overview (PDF)

5Strap Them In and Push GoA future you can experience beats the spreadsheet you read.

Don’t tell somebody what a roller coaster is. Strap them in and push go. Plans work the same way. Described a future, people argue about whether it is realistic. Put inside one, they argue about how to make it work, which is the argument worth having and the one that never happens in a planning meeting.

People leave knowing how to make a future concrete enough for their own team to walk through, poke at, and improve, before anyone commits money to it: pick a future scenario to develop, ask friendlies, and keep it under wraps until the friendlies have walked it. They leave with the confidence to become an architect, and knowing how to earn their team’s support. It costs a morning, not a quarter.

Read here Download the one-page overview (PDF)

6The One Thing You Can’t DownloadJudgment, taste, reframing: what AI extends but can’t supply.

The tools equalized overnight. Same models, same prompts, same access, whether a person has thirty years of experience or three. What did not equalize: knowing which question matters, knowing which answer is right, and noticing when the frame itself is the problem. This is where human judgment now earns its keep, and it is the one thing nobody can download.

People leave able to name where their own experience is now worth more than it ever was, and where it is worth less than it used to be, which is the harder half and the more useful one. For anyone in the room quietly wondering whether they are being replaced, and for the leaders deciding where to put their most experienced people.

Read here Download the one-page overview (PDF)

How a booking goes

A planning call first. Customized from there.

It starts with a planning call: your theme, your audience, what the event needs the keynote to do. The talk gets customized from there: research on your industry, your attendees, what’s already been said from your stage. Delivery reads the room. Live, hybrid, or virtual.

And the keynote hour isn’t the whole job. I’m available beyond the stage: press, breakouts, Q&A, the hallway conversations where the real questions come out.

What your audience keeps

Still working after the talk.

Every attendee leaves with a digital toolkit they can use to put what they learned into practice, and you get a post-event summary: what landed, what your audience asked, what it means for your organization.

Go deeper

Add a workshop, for audiences ready to work.

A keynote gives the frame. A workshop gives the practice. From ninety minutes to a half day, participants apply the frameworks to their own strategic challenges: working sessions for senior teams, not team-building. People leave with completed strategic work: a written draft of the strategy as a story people can react to, a one-page map of the decisions in front of them, and a plan their leadership can act on. Not sticky notes and promises.

The economics

Keynotes from $15,000. One all-inclusive fee,
anywhere in the United States.

Keynotes start at $15,000, stated up front. The default is one all-inclusive number for events anywhere in the United States: talk, preparation, customization, toolkit, and airfare, no surprise fees. The one thing you provide is a room from your event’s hotel block. For events outside the United States, or if your organization would rather pay the fee and handle travel separately, that works too. No complaints either way. A virtual keynote is $10,000.

Workshops aren’t priced on the page: their content varies too much, and they’re usually packaged with a keynote. As a guide, a half-day workshop added to a keynote typically runs $8,000 to $15,000; the exact number comes after the planning call. A full day, or a workshop booked on its own, is quoted the same way.

The early days

A story from the early days.

One of my first big stages was a tech conference in São Paulo — 750 people, stadium seating. Midway through, the top row started a wave, left to right, shouting as it rolled. At the end of the row it came back the other way, one row closer, people hopping onto their seats. I had lost the crowd completely, and there was nothing I could do to get it back. When someone came down from up there, I asked what was happening. “Um rato,” she said. “Um rato super grande.”

A rat. A very big rat.

The next step

Check a date.

A short call about your event — the date, the audience, the theme. We’ll tell you quickly whether the fit is real and hold the date while you decide.

Check a date

Just want to talk? Email mike@storyminers.com or call or text +1 404.229.5809. Mike reads every note himself and replies within a day.

Curious about the work behind the talks? Read the Approach →

Storyminers · Founded 2002 · mike@storyminers.com · +1 404.229.5809|Ideas · Blog · Questions · Sources · How we use AI · Worldview · Legal