Opening Keynote with Daniel Pink

Beyond Resilience: A New Path to a Strong Culture

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Sunday, June 26
11:00 am • Music City Center

Daniel Pink is one of the foremost business minds of our time. His deeply researched books on business, creativity, and behavior have won multiple awards and sold millions of copies around the world. Pink has written five New York Times bestsellers, including his newest book The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward (February 2022), where he explores how we can enlist our regrets to make smarter decisions, perform better, and deepen our sense of meaning and purpose.

As the world emerges from the pandemic, organizations everywhere are reexamining their operations and rethinking their priorities. What do they stand for? How should they navigate what comes next? And how might they build cultures where people can do their best work and be their best selves? In this provocative and practical presentation, Pink will offer a fresh set of strategies. He'll draw on an unprecedented two-year study of our most misunderstood emotion: regret. He'll show that ignoring or rejecting regrets is a colossal mistake. Instead, confronting regrets systematically can deliver an array of organizational benefits. It can sharpen leaders' decisions, speed learning and development, and boost individual and team performance. In particular, he will show how the four core regrets shared by people around the world contain the seeds of a reimagined and more powerful corporate culture. By understanding what people regret most, we can learn what they value most—and that can help organizations of every kind attract top talent, deepen employee engagement, and strengthen loyalty and commitment. With Pink's trademark blend of big ideas and smart takeaways, compelling stories and sharp humor, this presentation will provide you with an urgent and inspiring map for flourishing in unpredictable times.  

You will learn:

• How to anticipate—and avoid—the most significant organizational regrets 
• How to transform existing regrets into a positive force and a coherent culture
• Why regrets of inaction outnumber regrets of action—and how to enlist that insight to spark innovation
• Why doing the right thing is more important to employees than most C-Suite executives understand—and why, in this fraught moment, being a good organization can pave the way to becoming a great organization.

Daniel Pink was host and co-executive producer of "Crowd Control," a National Geographic Television series on human behavior that aired in more than 100 countries. He has been a contributing editor at Fast Company and Wired as well as a business columnist for The Sunday Telegraph.  His articles and essays have also appeared in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, and other publications. He also appears frequently on NPR, PBS, and other TV and radio networks in the U.S. and abroad. Before venturing out on his own more than 20 years ago, Pink worked in several positions in politics and government, including serving as chief speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore. He earned a B.A. with honors in linguistics from Northwestern University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He has also received five honorary doctorate degrees, including from Georgetown University and the Pratt Institute. Pink and his wife live in Washington, D.C. They have three college-age children.