General Session featuring Dan Heath
The Power of Moments
Some experiences are vastly more memorable and meaningful than others: A moment of extraordinary service that a customer can’t stop talking about. A moment of insight that helps a group of employees embrace a new vision. A moment of compassion that makes a patient’s burden feel lighter. Everywhere you look, people are trying to craft memorable experiences—from customer experiences to patient experiences. Leaders are working hard to boost employee engagement, student engagement, and parishioner engagement. But these discussions have been dominated by a focus on fixing problems (what Dan Heath calls “filling pits”), rather than creating memorable experiences (“raising peaks”). Yet Heath’s research suggests that it’s far more valuable to build peaks. How do you build peaks for the people you care about? In this talk, drawing from his forthcoming book The Power of Moments, Heath will reveal the four elements that create defining moments. Armed with an understanding of these elements, we can be the authors of moments that spark delight, connection, and insight.
Dan Heath
Dan Heath co-wrote four of the most-loved business books of the past decade: Made to Stick, Switch, and Decisive, and their latest book, The Power of Moments, which explores why certain brief experiences can jolt, elevate and change us—and how we can learn to create these extraordinary moments in our life and work. All four were New York Times best-sellers. Together the Heath brothers' books have sold over two million copies worldwide and been translated into 33 languages.
Dan is a senior fellow at Duke University’s CASE center, which supports entrepreneurs who fight for social good. He is also an entrepreneur himself, having founded Thinkwell, an innovative education ompany that will celebrate its 20th anniversary in 2017. A former case writer for Harvard Business School, Dan was named in 2013 to the Thinkers 50, a ranking of the world’s 50 most influential management thinkers, and also to Fast Company magazine’s list of the Most Creative People in Business.
He has delivered keynotes or workshops for teachers, police chiefs, U.S. senators, interior designers, Navy admirals, health care leaders, marketers, ministers, and countless executive teams, across 26 countries on 6 continents. (He’s still waiting for that invitation from Antarctica.)
Dan has a Master of Business Administration degree from the Harvard Business School, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Plan II Honors Program at the University of Texas at Austin. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.