David S. Kidder

David S. Kidder Speaking Topics

• The Power of the Premortem: Fix the Future

  What would cause confidence in your most important initiative to collapse?

  That is the provocative question David S. Kidder asks every room. And the answer almost always lives in the beliefs and assumptions that everyone holds but nobody names. When evidence is absent, biases dominate, narratives form, opinion becomes story, momentum looks like progress, and by the time the truth surfaces, the cost of reversal has compounded beyond recovery.

  The PreMortem is an empowering mindset and system for replacing that pattern with a new powerful decision discipline. In this keynote, David demonstrates how leadership teams can surface over 100+ hidden risks and opportunities in less than a day, compress them into the 2 or 3 that actually determine success, that build commercial conviction, and are anchored in evidence rather than consensus. Drawing on real outcomes where his partners have saved hundreds of millions in misallocated capital, unlocked $1.6 billion in new revenue, and compressed two years of work into 12 weeks, David animates what becomes possible when organizations commit to commercial truth.

  Leaders walk away radically invigorated, with a new applied system they can apply immediately to any high stakes initiative, and a shared language for how to decide faster, allocate smarter, and grow with conviction.

  Best for:

  • Executive teams navigating high stakes strategic decisions where the cost of misalignment is measured in hundreds of millions.
  • Industries facing geopolitical, regulatory, technology, or competitive disruption and seeking a new commercial decision framework.
  • Organizations building Human + AI execution capability and seeking systems that compound institutional intelligence over time.

• Achieving Apogee: How to Unlock Peak Team Performance

  Most performance challenges are misdiagnosed. Teams plateau, decisions slow, silos harden, and the instinct is to restructure, retrain, or replace. The real issue lives deeper, in the operating system beneath performance: how leaders show up, how they work together, and how decisions actually get made. When that system was built for a previous era, effort increases while impact stalls.

  In this keynote, David S. Kidder shows how top leadership teams make identity-level shifts together and embed them into how they operate. Drawing on 20 years of behavioral science and Fortune 500 results, he introduces his latest growth system, ApogeeOS: a Human + AI system that drive identity-level shift in how leaders, and connects commercial outcomes to human growth. Leaders will experience the Board Session that transforms how enterprise teams build trust, restore accountability, and move from personality-driven to system-driven performance.

  The results are visible and measurable: how individuals lead under pressure, how teams collaborate across functions, how decisions gain speed and clarity, and how organizations achieve execution velocity. As one Chief Marketing Officer described it: "Our team is, for the first time, a team. We are rowing in the same direction, and at speed."

  Best for:

  • CHRO and leadership development programs seeking measurable, lasting behavior change across senior teams.
  • Enterprise organizations investing in how leadership teams collaborate, decide, and perform together in a Human + AI world.
  • Association events focused on the future of talent, team performance, and identity level leadership development.

• From New to Big

  Every company eventually reaches the moment where the playbook that built the core business can no longer build the next one. The management systems most enterprises rely on, planning, efficiency, incremental improvement, were designed to grow what already exists. They were never designed to discover, validate, and capture what comes next. Mastering both disciplines is what separates organizations that repeatably capture new growth from those that stall.

  In this keynote, David S. Kidder shares the mindsets, methodologies, and frameworks behind the GrowthOS — the system he built and installed across 40+ Fortune 500 organizations as co-founder and CEO of Bionic. It catalyzed over $10 billion in new revenue and became the subject of a Harvard Business Review case study. He reveals how the best enterprises become ambidextrous: operating the core with discipline while discovering and scaling new growth through portfolio governance and rapid experimentation. Leaders walk away understanding how to move growth from a program to a system to a permanent state, and with a clear framework for installing an always on growth engine.

  Best for:

  • Fortune 500 organizations seeking to reignite innovation and build repeatable growth capability at scale.
  • PE and VC portfolio companies under pressure to accelerate new revenue and deliver outsized returns.
  • Leadership teams ready to move beyond incremental improvement and install the systems, mindsets, and governance required for compounding growth.

• The Resilient Growth Playbook: Thriving Through Change

  The hardest moment for any leader and team is realizing that what worked yesterday won’t work tomorrow. Vision is important, but resilience is what carries organizations through change. Drawing on decades of experience, David S. Kidder brings lessons from ventures and enterprises that turned uncertainty into momentum. Leaders and teams walk away with ways to adapt faster, navigate uncertainty, and keep growth alive in any environment.

• The Board of Life: Grow With Your Personal Board

  No one succeeds alone. Behind every breakthrough is a circle of people who challenged, guided, and supported the journey. In this keynote, David S. Kidder shares how to create your own Personal Board of Directors. It’s a group of mentors, peers, and truth-tellers who help you see what you cannot see and raise the bar on who you can become. Leaders leave with a clear, practical way to bring this into their own lives and careers.