Speaking

Stever is available for presentations and workshops on time management, productivity, and entrepreneurship. Audiences and meeting planners alike give him rave reviews, and walk away with practical new skills. Known for his engaging, humorous presentation style, he can work with your group to create a session customized to your most important outcomes. Schedule a talk with Stever today

Sample Topics

Below you will find Stever’s most requested speeches and workshops. Don’t see what your group needs? Talk to Stever. He will be happy to develop a presentation to meet your group’s specific needs.

Building an Extraordinary Life.

How would life change if you committed to living only a life that you defined as extraordinary? In 2008, Stever began an experiment in doing just that: deciding to pursue a life that’s a perfect “10″, rather than a life of doing what he should do, or what makes sense. During that time, he created one of the world’s top business podcasts with almost 200,000 weekly listeners, write a book, helped with the strategy for the world’s #1 entrepreneurship school, co-wrote a one-man musical (with no prior experience), acted, sang, and danced in three musicals, co-founded two companies, and began learning to sight-sing.

In this highly-practical presentation Stever uses his own experience to illustrate practical strategies for getting out of ruts and turning your life into something extraordinary:

• Planning can be the worst thing for living an extraordinary life. But there are other things you can do instead.
• Fear isn’t what holds us back; habit is. Even when we desperately want change.
• Past freedoms become future prisons. How to recognize when it’s time to let go, and how to muster the courage to let go.
• Intelligence, willpower, and drive aren’t the keys to having the life you want. Systems and people are.
• How to stay vigilant, so today’s extraordinary life stays extraordinary tomorrow.

The material in this presentation draws from Stever’s own experiment in extraordinary living, but is also grounded in multidisciplinary science and research. By the time we’re done, we’ll cover topics from entrepreneurship, decision-making, learning, and career planning. The audience will walk away with new insight into how they’ve shaped their lives, and specific strategies for making minor or major changes in pursuit of whatever life they define as extraordinary.

The 7 Success Traps: How Success Now Can Stop Us In Our Tracks Later

We all love the notion of huge success at an early age. But success brings its own problems, not the least of which is that we often believe we know what made us successful (and that “what” was our own sweat, blood, and tears). The habits that make success today help us optimize and streamline our lives and organizations around creating that kind of success. If the world changes, or our goals change, the system that works so well for us now can become the barrier to change. Together, we’ll explore the seven ways in which the very things that lead to success also kill our flexibility, and how to restart ourselves when it’s time for a change.

The seven success factors:

• The Familiar
• Becoming Excellent
• Taking Responsibility
• Learning from Success
• Building our Support Network
• Willpower
• Money, Power, and Stuff

Ten Cultural Lies about Successful and Happy Careers

Based on my experiences doing career, business, and executive coaching, this shares many of the common myths about happiness, success, and how to build a career that encompasses both. Especially relevant for high-performers, many of whom are diving headlong into careers and lives that will make them thoroughly miserable, though reasonably wealthy.

The Entrepreneurial Life: Lessons from a Serial Entrepreneur

Life as an entrepreneur teaches a different way of thinking about the world. Entrepreneurship is rooted in instability, ambiguity, and luck. Entrepreneurs think on our feet, spot opportunity when it passes by, and ultimately do the best we can with what we have. Even if you plan to work in a corporation, life itself is an entrepreneurial venture.

This presentation interleaves principles of entrepreneurship and lessons learned over the course of 11 startups to address the question: how do we build a career we want, and a life we’ll be proud of? This presentation will cover:

• How your definition of ‘success’ determines your approach to life and career.
• When to consider yourself a serial entrepreneur—even if you work for someone else.
• Decision-making when the future is not only unknown, but unknowable.
• The cultural myths about life and careers that set us up for failure. (What worked in 1960 doesn’t work today.)
• A way to approach risk that eliminates it entirely.
• How to balance making money with meaning and happiness.
• Deciding when to look before you leap, and when to leap headlong into a life-changing decision.

Stever draws on his own experience and career, as well as the stories of his colleagues and MBA classmates, who have built a wide variety of different organizations and careers. From an entrepreneur who made hundreds of millions yet considers himself boring and routine, to the engineer who chooses to be homeless because he likes the lifestyle, we’ll uncover the hidden assumptions we’re making about life and success, and address head-on the question of how we approach our careers and lives as entrepreneurs.

Lessons from (1)9 Startups

Life in Startup Land isn’t easy. But many of the problems happen again and again. Learn the common pitfalls and how to avoid them. This presentation is an exposition of lessons from Stever’s learning log over the course of his involvement with nineteen startups, both bootstrapped and venture backed. He’ll cover issues that are rarely discussed in formal entrepreneurship settings.

Some of the topics covered in this wide-ranging presentation include:

• When, why, and how your approach to finance will cripple your strategic thinking.
• How ego distorts your business judgment, and how to safeguard against it.
• Conventional wisdom about entrepreneurship that didn’t work in the real world.
• … and conventional wisdom that did.
• The role of luck, self-assessment, and skill in entrepreneurship.
• When people are important, and when they aren’t.

This presentation has been a hit at several of the country’s top business schools, including Wharton, Harvard Business School, MIT’s Sloan School, and Brown University.

A “Wow!” speaker

Stever will deliver an experience for your group that directly addresses what’s most important to them. Part Q&A, part presentation, part tools, all interactive conversation and exercises, you’ll find it funny, entertaining, and thought-provoking, as Stever provocatively and profoundly challenges your audience. Schedule a presentation today

Address your most pressing problems

Grow your business and your self with Stever’s memorable presentations. Stever inspires excellence through top-quality content and disarming humor.

Speaking from deep business knowledge, he motivates thought and action with stories and lessons gained from 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur, executive and advisor.

Rave reviews

Stever’s past clients give rave reviews about Stever’s ability to provide just the right content for their most pressing problems. See what he can do for you

“Stever’s not just a presenter, he’s an experience!”
Jack Canfield, author of Chicken Soup for the Soul

“Compelling, entertaining, fascinating. Stever Robbins is someone you can listen to for hours – and the messages stick! On a scale of 1-5, he gets a 10!”
Lance Webster, L.W. Communications

“Stever’s history with start-ups, the Harvard Business School’s ‘Leadership and Learning’ curriculum overhaul and his educational background leave him uniquely qualified to speak to a broad and diverse group of business audiences. Combine his experience base with an ability to touch all of us with an engaging and thought provoking style and you have the makings of a great session/workshop. If we all followed Stever’s advice the business world would be in much better shape!”
Len Schlesinger, Vice Chairman and COO, Limited Brands

“… We had other coaching events before, but none had the impact, the ability to generate new insights, and — ultimately– the actionability of Stever’s seminar… My Leadership Team and I came [away] highly energized!”
Roberto Marinucci, General Manager, Fater S.p.A., Italy

“Stever is a great presenter. He presents with energy, enthusiasm and displays a mastery of the material that makes it fun and accessible to the whole audience.”
Ken Blanchard, co-author of The One Minute Manager

“You hit a home run for our audience. People learned a great deal and left understanding how their business works, what drives profitability, and what options they have for creating long-term business value.”
James Lavoie, CEO, Middlesex Savings Bank

“We invited Stever Robbins in to speak to our business customers about growing their companies and he was great. His insights were right on, and a number of our customers commented that they walked away with an action list of useful suggestions.”
Charles F. Frosch, President & CEO, Union Savings Bank, Danbury CT

“Stever’s vast knowledge is embedded into stories of great amusement and fun. We found Stever Robbins’ teachings so valuable that we have included his digital recording of a workshop in our ‘Master Package for Trainers and Communicators’.”
Chris Muzler, CEO, PMA Change Management, Berlin, Germany

“Stever’s presentation at the ICF Conference exceeded our expectations — he demonstrated command of his material, delivered it with humor, and reached the entire audience. He is a dynamic, entertaining speaker whom I would highly recommend.”
Susan Klein, Program Chairperson of ICF Annual Conference

“Stever was the talk of the 2002 ICF Conference. Not only was he a wealth of information, he also brought lightness and fun to a techincal topic that could have been dry and boring. You can count on your audience to be engaged and entertained with Stever….”
Ellen Fredericks, Program Chairperson of ICF Annual Conference

“Stever’s depth of knowledge on all things entrepreneurial is extraordinary, and his ability to listen and shape a discussion to the needs of an audience is unparalleled. I recommend him to anyone seeking an engaging, intellectually rigorous and highly worthwhile learning experience.”
Michelle Toth, CEO, The Inner Workout, Inc.

“Stever brings a special energy to his training by creatively engaging participants on any subject he takes on. He shares refreshing insights while delivering substantive material about a wide array of topics. He provides a novel approach to presentation skills, simulations and other types of training enabling the participants to learn a new portfolio of techniques that enhance their effectiveness as managers.”
Ellen Herman, Organizational behavior faculty, Boston University School of Management

“If Stever’s message and work on leaders and leadership can spread and involve each of us in a more personal way this world could be transformed for the better.”
Peter Mandell, Owner, Life’s Game Plan

“Stever’s energy & knowledge are incredible and he involved the audience totally. He truly exemplifies his own definition of a leader as one who inspires others to follow.”
Karen Latavala, Coach, Life Quest

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