Dan Jahn · Keynote Speaker
Dan helps audiences lead through complexity by bringing together strategy, human insight, entrepreneurship, creativity, technology, and lived experience.
Founder · Fractional CSO · White House alumnus · Author · Speaker
Recently · SHRM Talent 2026 — “Leading with Empathy” · Keynote · Dallas, TX · April 2026
01Why Event Planners Book Dan
Dan is not only a leadership voice. He is a practitioner who has spent more than thirty years building companies, advising executives, leading strategy, and speaking across sectors. That is what a room feels the moment he starts.
The full arc is on the About page — entrepreneur. strategist. builder. leadership expert.
02The Reel
Before the topics and the one-sheets, watch how a keynote actually lands in the room.
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Like what you see? Book Dan for your event.
03What Dan Speaks About
Leadership is where Dan started, not where he stops. Every theme is adapted to your audience, your industry, and the outcome you need from the day.
The work that made Dan's name, grounded in three decades of leading teams and studying the ones that endure.
Where the work is heading, from someone who has launched platforms and now advises leaders on what stays human.
Practical talks for teams that have to win customers, close deals, and grow, drawn from ventures Dan has built himself.
For audiences carrying something heavier than a quarterly number, told through a life of service and reinvention.
Talks that meet students and early-career leaders where they are and send them out ready to lead.
04Signature Keynotes
Start here, then Dan tailors the talk to your audience on a pre-event call. Every keynote also runs as a half-day or full-day session.
Leadership conferences · Executive retreats · Teams facing change
The plan you built rarely survives contact with the real world. Drawing on decades of building and rebuilding companies, Dan shows how leaders stay steady, make good calls with incomplete information, and keep people moving when the ground shifts under them.
Audience takeawayA way to decide and lead the moment the plan changes.
Technology and AI conferences · Forward-looking organizations
Machines now draft the analysis, model the scenarios, and summarize the meeting. What they cannot do is lead the people in the room. Dan draws the line between the work to hand to the tools and the work that stays human, and shows how leaders build cultures that pair judgment with machine intelligence.
Audience takeawayA clear picture of where people still win as the tools get smarter.
Leadership development · Culture-focused events
The eight traits that show up again and again in leaders who leave a mark, drawn from patterns that hold across cultures and centuries and made usable for the modern workplace. This is the framework behind Dan's coaching and books, delivered as a keynote.
Audience takeawayThe traits worth building, and where to start building them.
Emerging leaders · All-company gatherings · Associations
Influence does not wait for a promotion. Dan makes the case that leadership is a set of behaviors anyone can practice today, and gives people a way to lead from exactly where they sit, whatever their line on the org chart.
Audience takeawayPermission and a method to lead before the title arrives.
Service and CX teams · Sales organizations · Hospitality
The experience a customer feels is the one a team lives first. Using lessons from building service businesses of his own, Dan connects internal culture to the moments customers actually remember, and shows leaders how to shape both.
Audience takeawayThe link between how a team is led and what customers walk away with.
Mission-driven teams · Nonprofits · Community and education events
A talk about deciding what your work should add up to, then building a career and a life around that answer. Told through Dan's own path across public service, entrepreneurship, the arts, and the outdoors.
Audience takeawayA way to aim your effort at what matters most.
Keynote openers · Future-of-work and innovation events
As more of the work is automated, the advantage moves to the things a model cannot scale: trust, judgment, creativity, and connection. Dan lays out, with clarity and without fear, where human leaders are needed more than ever.
Audience takeawayA grounded, confident view of leading in an AI era.
Entrepreneurs · Small business audiences · Growth teams
Most opportunities are not won at the front door. Dan shares how he has started ventures and opened markets by finding the side door, with stories from a career of building things from nothing.
Audience takeawayA different way to approach access, growth, and the deals that look out of reach.
Prefer a room to a stage? Every keynote runs as a half-day and full-day corporate workshop, custom-built for your organization.
05Built for Many Rooms
Dan reads a room and adapts to it. Here is how the same practitioner shows up for very different events.
Keynotes built around your theme, your industry, and the shift you want leaders to make.
A candid, senior-register session for executives who have heard every framework already.
Talks that meet students where they are and send them out with confidence and direction.
Leadership for mission-driven institutions, informed by Dan's own public service.
Resilience, trust, and human connection for people who carry real weight in their work.
A practitioner's read on AI and the future of work, not a spectator's.
Growth, grit, and go-to-market from a founder who has built ventures across sectors.
Purpose-driven talks that move a room and connect the mission to the people in it.
How internal culture becomes the experience customers remember and repeat.
Sessions tuned to your members' work, their pressures, and where their field is going.
06The Experience
From the first call to the resources you keep afterward, the goal is a session your audience is still talking about next quarter.
Before anything is written, Dan learns your audience, your goals, and the outcome you need from the room.
Every keynote is shaped to your theme and your people. Nothing is delivered off the shelf.
You and Dan agree on what attendees should think, feel, and be able to do when they leave.
Strong stage presence, real stories, the right amount of humor, and practical tools people can use on Monday.
From a large keynote to a working session, Dan reads the room and involves it when the format calls for it.
Where it helps, Dan leaves attendees with follow-up resources so the ideas outlast the event.
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07The Story Behind the Speaker
Dan was born in Sri Lanka during his parents' Peace Corps service and spent his earliest years moving across countries most people only read about. That start, inside cultures and institutions from an early age, planted the question that has driven his whole career: what do the leaders who last actually have in common?
The search took him from a White House internship to Oxford, from founding his first technology company at 22 to serving as a fractional strategy and technology chief for growing organizations. Along the way he built ventures across housing, hospitality, photography, and the outdoors, spent twelve years as a commercial and fine art photographer, competed in and coached elite sport, and marched with Habitat for Humanity from Maine to Georgia.
That range is the point. When Dan speaks, audiences get someone who has actually built companies, advised executives, led strategy, embraced AI, and worked across industries, not a theory with a microphone.
08Books and Thought Leadership
Dan is the author of seven books spanning leadership, politics, religion, ethics, just war theory, and international affairs, from The Pacem Papers to Leading with Impact. His forthcoming book, The Human Algorithm: Creative Leadership for the AI Workplace, anchors his current work on AI and the future of work.
The same ideas run through the keynotes, the coaching, and the page count. Browse all the books.
09From the Audience
The practical advice and compelling storytelling in Dan's keynote captivated our audience from start to finish.
Sarah Johnson
Denver University
The workshop with Dan was so valuable! Everyone had a great time, learned a ton, and we all felt that it was an incredibly valuable workshop.
Jason Weiss
BHPSD
Video testimonials, event photos, and partner logos are on the way. To add a reference from your event, get in touch.
10Planner Resources
Need a short bio, a long bio, headshots, or an intro script in a specific format? Just reach out. Dan is also bookable through Cadence Speakers Bureau.
11Keynotes · Conferences · Corporate Events
Tell me about your event, your audience, and your objectives. I'll shape the talk around them.
hello@danjahn.com · +1.720.730.2123
