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About the event
TBD
Gravity Speakers’ Personal Recommendations
While Mike Robbins and Heather McGowan both fit squarely within the broader business leadership category, I would present them as two personal recommendations rather than simply additional names on the list. Each brings a distinctive point of view, a proven ability to engage business audiences, and practical frameworks that can continue to influence how leaders work long after the event.
Mike focuses on the human foundation of performance—trust, authenticity, connection, appreciation, and teamwork. Heather provides a more future-facing leadership lens, helping organizations build the adaptability, curiosity, and human capabilities required to lead through accelerating change. Together, they give Daikin two highly credible but differentiated options.
Leadership, Emotional Intelligence and Team Performance Expert | Five-Time Author | Former Professional Baseball Player
For more than 25 years, Mike Robbins has helped leaders and teams create cultures in which people feel valued, connected, and equipped to perform at their best. His work combines emotional intelligence, leadership development, organizational culture, and practical team-performance strategies, giving audiences tools they can begin applying immediately.
Mike is the author of five books, including We’re All in This Together and Bring Your Whole Self to Work. His books have been translated into 15 languages, his three TEDx talks have generated more than 2.3 million views, and his ideas have appeared in outlets including Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, ABC News, and NPR. He has worked with organizations such as Google, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, Coca-Cola, Walmart, eBay, and the NBA, with repeat clients accounting for a significant majority of his speaking engagements.
Before entering the business world, Mike played baseball at Stanford University and professionally in the Kansas City Royals organization. That experience gave him an early understanding of how trust, communication, resilience, individual accountability, and genuine teamwork determine whether talented groups succeed together.
- Speaker Fee - $30,000
- Travel and Expenses - $1500 flat travel fee to cover RT Flights, RT Ground. Organizer to provide Hotel Accommodations [for up to 2 nights]
“Mike Robbins is a trusted advisor to us, and has had a very positive impact on me personally, as well as on our leaders and the corporate culture at Nutanix.”-- Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of DevRev and co-founder of Nutanix
“Mike Robbins has a unique ability to open people’s minds, touch their hearts, and teach valuable lessons about life and business. I have personally benefited from his work, as have so many of the people on my team.” -- Jack Calhoun, former President, Banana Republic
“Mike is a gifted storyteller and talented speaker. His talks on authentic leadership and appreciation, and his exercises to ‘lower the waterline’ and build trust have been incredibly effective to both my management team as well as an international audience of 600. I have consistently received rave reviews from colleagues on Mike’s various efforts within Google.” -- Alan Moss, former VP of U.S. Sales, Google
Speaker Highlights
Speaker Reel - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlM0RVN6OtQ
Gravity Speakers Profile - https://www.gravityspeakers.com/speakers/mike-robbins
Speaker Website - https://mike-robbins.com/
Why Mike Robbins for Daikin?
Mike is one of my strongest recommendations because he addresses an element of leadership that is essential but often underdeveloped: how people experience one another while working toward demanding business goals.
His programs connect culture directly to performance. He helps leaders understand how trust, appreciation, authentic communication, psychological safety, feedback, and accountability influence engagement and results. The message is highly relevant for an organization whose success depends on people collaborating effectively across teams, functions, roles, and levels of leadership.
Mike also has the ability to create a genuine shared experience. His presentation style is warm, engaging, candid, and highly relatable, but the program does not stop at inspiration. He gives audiences specific practices they can use to improve communication, strengthen relationships, address difficult issues, and elevate the performance of the entire team.
Suggested Keynote
We’re All in This Together: Create a Team Culture of High Performance, Trust, and Belonging
High-performing teams require more than talented individuals and a strong business strategy. They need trust, authenticity, communication, and a genuine sense of connection.
Drawing on more than 25 years of work with leading organizations, as well as the lessons he learned through professional baseball, Mike explores how leaders and employees can create an environment in which people feel safe speaking up, contributing fully, and supporting one another.
Through personal stories, business examples, and practical tools, Mike helps audiences break down silos, strengthen relationships, communicate more honestly, and unlock the collective potential required for sustainable success.
Audience Takeaways
Participants will leave with:
- Practical tools for strengthening trust, psychological safety, and authentic connection.
- Strategies for improving collaboration and performance during change or disruption.
- A clearer understanding of how appreciation and recognition affect engagement.
- Techniques for communicating openly, exchanging feedback, and addressing difficult issues.
- A renewed sense of shared purpose, personal accountability, and commitment to succeeding together.
Highlights
- Human-centered business leadership: Connects how people feel, communicate, and collaborate with measurable team performance.
- Immediately applicable: Audiences receive clear, repeatable practices rather than broad leadership platitudes.
- Credible team-performance perspective: Draws from both his professional baseball career and decades of work with organizational leaders.
- Extensive corporate experience: Has worked with Google, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, Coca-Cola, Walmart, eBay, the NBA, and many other major organizations.
- Established thought leadership: Five published books, three TEDx talks, more than 2.3 million TEDx views, and coverage in major national business and media outlets.
- Strong repeat demand: Approximately 70 percent of his engagements come from repeat business, demonstrating his ability to build lasting value with clients.
- Broad leadership relevance: The program can be tailored around teamwork, authentic leadership, organizational change, employee engagement, culture, or human connection.
Future-of-Work Strategist | Two-Time Bestselling Author | Leadership, Adaptability and Human Potential Expert
Recognized as one of Forbes’ top futurists, Heather E. McGowan is a future-of-work strategist, leadership expert, and two-time bestselling author who helps organizations activate their people to navigate relentless change.
Heather works with leaders to understand how emerging technology, artificial intelligence, shifting workforce expectations, changing demographics, and new business models are reshaping how organizations operate. Rather than asking audiences to predict one fixed version of the future, she teaches them how to ask better questions, increase their capacity to adapt, and turn distinctly human capabilities—including curiosity, empathy, collaboration, and imagination—into strategic advantages.
Her clients include Google, JPMorgan Chase, Mastercard, Accenture, FedEx, AT&T, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Siemens, Chevron, and the United States Army. Her books include The Adaptation Advantage and The Empathy Advantage, which was named a Top 10 Business Book of 2023.
Drawing on her early career as an industrial designer, her work in business strategy and innovation, and her experience creating an award-winning interdisciplinary higher-education curriculum, Heather translates complex information into clear visual frameworks and practical leadership applications.
Her mission is simple yet powerful: help leaders Solve Tomorrow’s Problems™ by teaching them to ask better questions today.
Speaker Fee -
- $30-32,000 [depending on location -- dilenated by Mississippi River], plus RT First Class Air, Ground Transportation in home and event city, hotels, and reasonable meals. A $3200 flat travel buyout is offered in lieu of providing itemized Travel and Expenses.
"Heather McGowan is outstanding at her craft, tailoring her presentation for maximum impact. She will leave your audience with clear imperatives and fired up to race into action!" -President, Abbvie North America
"Heather’s presentation style connects to the audience regardless of how your brain is wired. A broad coalition of colleagues found immediate, actionable application of her message" -Erin Watkins, SPHR, VP Transformation, Travelport
Speaker Highlights
Speaker Reel - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7gLE-9R34M&t=13s
Gravity Speaker Profile - https://www.gravityspeakers.com/speakers/heather-mcgowan
Speaker Website - https://heathermcgowan.com/
Why Heather McGowan for Daikin?
Heather gives Daikin a highly strategic and future-facing business leadership option.
Her work sits at the intersection of leadership, organizational adaptability, technology, workforce transformation, and human performance. She helps leaders recognize that the skills and structures responsible for past success may not be sufficient for what comes next—and that the answer is not simply adopting more technology. Organizations must also develop leaders who are curious, adaptable, willing to challenge assumptions, and capable of activating the collective intelligence of their people.
Heather is particularly strong for executive and leadership audiences because her presentations are data-rich, highly visual, and grounded in recognizable business realities. She can address major forces such as AI and workforce change without turning the session into a technology presentation. The emphasis remains on the leadership decisions, organizational capabilities, and human behaviors required to thrive through uncertainty.
Suggested Keynote
Leading in the Age of Uncertainty: The Curiosity Advantage
Leadership once rewarded the person with the most experience and the clearest answers. In an environment of accelerating change, the most effective leaders are increasingly those who can ask better questions, challenge assumptions, and activate the ability of their teams to learn.
In this perspective-shifting keynote, Heather explores why the future belongs to leaders who replace certainty with curiosity and who empower rather than simply manage. Drawing on research, organizational examples, and insights from The Adaptation Advantage and The Empathy Advantage, she demonstrates how trust, collaboration, continuous learning, and collective intelligence contribute to exceptional performance.
The program helps leaders move from being the primary source of answers to becoming enablers of talent, adaptability, and organizational growth.
Audience Takeaways
Participants will leave with:
- Practical methods for activating the collective potential of their teams.
- A better understanding of why curiosity has become a critical leadership capability.
- Tools for creating high-trust environments in which questions, learning, and experimentation are encouraged.
- Frameworks for moving from traditional management toward performance enablement.
- Strategies for helping people remain adaptable, engaged, and effective during rapid change.
- A clearer view of the uniquely human capabilities that become more valuable as technology advances.
Highlights
- Leadership for what comes next: Helps leaders prepare for change rather than relying solely on strategies that worked in the past.
- Connects technology and humanity: Addresses AI and technological disruption through the lens of leadership, organizational design, and human potential.
- Data-rich visual storytelling: Translates complex economic, technological, demographic, and workforce shifts into clear and memorable frameworks.
- Practical optimism: Avoids fear-based predictions and shows audiences where leaders and organizations still possess agency.
- Proven global corporate relevance: Has worked with organizations including Google, Mastercard, JPMorgan Chase, FedEx, Accenture, Microsoft, Siemens, Chevron, and AT&T.
- Deep innovation credentials: Brings experience from industrial design, product development, business strategy, education, and organizational transformation.
- Credible thought leadership: Two-time bestselling author whose work covers adaptability, empathy, leadership, innovation, and the future of work.
- Highly customizable: Can shift the emphasis toward leadership through uncertainty, human potential in the AI era, trust and team performance, organizational purpose, or broader future-of-work transformation.
Additional Topic Direction
Depending on where Daikin would like to place the emphasis, Heather could also deliver:
Solve Tomorrow’s Problems™: Harness Human Ingenuity to Navigate What’s Next
This program focuses more broadly on the ability of people and organizations to adapt, collaborate, challenge inherited assumptions, and identify breakthrough opportunities during periods of significant change. It would be a strong option if Daikin wants the keynote to combine leadership with innovation, transformation, and future readiness.