Stewart Friedman

Stewart Friedman Speaking Topics

• Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life

  Life is a zero-sum game, right? The more we strive to win in one dimension (such as our work), the more we sacrifice performance and satisfaction in the other three: family, community, and private self. Not true, says Stew Friedman. Drawing on decades of research, teaching, and practice in many organizations around the world – detailed in his best-selling book “Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life” – Friedman persuasively shows us how we don’t have to make trade-offs between life’s most important domains, and certainly not as often as we think. A trade-off mindset makes people feel all manner of painful emotions; it hurts those we care about most, and it prevents us from leading and performing effectively in every part of life. Friedman provides a proven blueprint for becoming a more successful leader in all four domains of life: work, home, community and self (mind, body and spirit).

• Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life

  You might be skeptical, but you can create harmony between work and the rest of life, says Stew Friedman. Building on his best-selling “Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life” and on decades of research, teaching and practice as both consultant and senior executive, Friedman describes the skills needed to do so, and illustrates them with riveting original stories of exemplars of great achievement and impact, including Sheryl Sandberg, Michelle Obama and Bruce Springsteen.

  Friedman’s stories paint vivid pictures of the ways these very different leaders act with authenticity, integrity, and creativity – and they prove that significant professional or public success is accomplished not at the expense of the rest of life, but as the result of meaningful attachments to all its disparate parts. The good news, says Friedman, is that anyone can practice and hone these skills. Drawing from another best-seller, “Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life,” he provides evidence-based exercises for how cultivate them and offers practical insights that will inspire, inform, and instruct attendees on how to take realistic steps now toward leading the life you truly want, just as it has for employees at Bloomberg, Morgan Stanley, Warby Parker, Google and many other organizations.

• New Choices for Men and Women in Work and Family

  Millennials see the world very differently from other generations. Stew Friedman shares why that is and what it means for our society, our organizations and our families. Since founding the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project in 1991, Friedman’s research, teaching, and advocacy for the evolution of social policy and business practices has influenced both the public sector (including projects with the White House and the U.S. Departments of Labor and State) and many private sector organizations. His ground-breaking research of two generations of Wharton students as they graduated – Gen Xers in 1992 and Millennials in 2012 – found that men and women are now more aligned in their attitudes about dual-career relationships. Drawing on this historic research, Friedman’s thought-provoking talk shows:

  How views about work and family have changed in the past 20 years Why men and women have different reasons for opting out of parenthood How family has been redefined Why we are all now part of a revolution in work and family What choices we face in our social and educational policy How organizations and individuals – especially men – can spur cultural change

• Enhancing Your Reputation by Building Social Capital

  Everyone needs the support of others in order to succeed – at work, at home and in the community. So how do you cultivate your reputation as someone others should want to help? In this high-energy session, Stew Friedman teaches the fundamentals of social capital – understanding the practical meaning of “six degrees of separation,” the universality of the reciprocity principle and more – and then leads an interactive exercise in which all attendees ask for help and give it to others. Not only does everyone gain real, practical assistance on a project that matters to them, attendees learn how to cultivate their networks by discovering what others need and providing it in a low-cost way that works.

  Employees at all levels in organizations as diverse as KPMG, the OECD (Paris) and Ford Motor Company have enjoyed and valued the experience of actively learning how to design and enact a strategy for building lifelong support by enhancing their reputations as people worthy of others’ trust.

• Change Management