Jesse Hopps
Speaking
I want people to leave asking a different question.
Most audiences have heard plenty about why change matters. What I talk about is the other side of it: engineering the conditions for adaptation to happen naturally, without triggering resistance.
Who I speak to
I help most when the people listening have to get a large group to work differently.
- Executive leadership teams and offsites
- Commercial excellence and strategy
- Transformation and change teams
- Sales and commercial kickoffs
- Executive education and conferences
- Industry associations
- Podcasts and executive roundtables
What I talk about
Six topics, and the same question under all of them.
None of these is a packaged talk. Tell me who is going to be there and what they are responsible for, and I'll build one for them.
Adoption is not adaptation
Using an answer someone already found, and getting good enough to find one when no one has.
Read the ideaEvolving fast enough to hit the plan
What happens when your markets move faster than the company does, and what a leader does about the gap.
Watch the masterclassWhy people resist being changed
Reading resistance as information about how the change was built, before anyone reaches for more pressure.
Read the briefWhat makes impact last
What is still happening after the attention moves on, and what your people can do now that they couldn't before.
Read the ideaReal work as the classroom
Where people really learn to do the job, and what that does to training, coaching and the work itself.
Listen to Roy van GriensvenLeading without the authority
The job most of the audience is already doing: accountable for a result other people have to deliver.
About the book
Keynote, workshop, executive session or interview. Commercial excellence, sales leadership, transformation, strategy, and leadership offsites.
How I work
A talk should leave people arguing, not nodding.
- A question they have to answer about themselves.
- Real stories from inside big companies, not made-up ones.
- One or two things drawn on a whiteboard, not a deck of frameworks.
- Time for people to argue with me.
Bio
Copy and paste this.
236 words
Jesse Hopps is a founder, philosopher, author and coach. He works on one question: is an organization evolving fast enough to comfortably achieve its growth targets?
At twenty-four he founded Demand Metric, a research and tools business that grew to 6,589 companies in 108 countries. Since 2006 he has worked with Microsoft, Esri, Mitsubishi Chemical Group, LANXESS, Salesforce, HubSpot, Demandbase, Schneider Electric, GE, Honeywell, Ingersoll Rand, 3M, Pfizer, Medtronic and many other Fortune 2000 companies.
For years the work was playbooks and workshops. They scored well, changed little, and kept him on the road most weeks. Then his wife told him she hadn't signed up for this, so he stopped. He went looking for why people who know what to do still don't do it. Kurt Friedmann introduced him to Dr. Paul Stoltz, founder of PEAK Learning. Paul had spent four decades on how people respond to adversity.
With Roy van Griensven at LANXESS, he built something else: real work with a coach, in place of training. It ran through seven cohorts. By the later ones, the company's own coaches were running the Growth Projects, with his team behind them.
He founded the Commercial Excellence Consortium. It's an invite-only group of 350+ senior leaders in commercial excellence, strategy and transformation. He is writing The Transformation Architect, a book about the leaders who make change stick. He lives in Medellín, Colombia, with his wife and two daughters.
An introduction
Jesse Hopps has spent more than twenty years around commercial excellence and transformation. He built Demand Metric, a research and tools business used by thousands of companies. He founded the Commercial Excellence Consortium, where senior leaders compare what works. He works on one question. Is your organization evolving fast enough to comfortably achieve your growth targets? He is writing a book about the leaders who make change stick, and he is here to make you think harder about how change happens where you work. Please welcome Jesse Hopps.
Questions for me
- You sold information to executives for twenty years. What made you decide information was not the constraint?
- What is the difference between adoption and adaptation, and why does it matter which one a leader is doing?
- You say much of what we call resistance to change is resistance to being changed. What do you mean?
- What happened at LANXESS, and what did it teach you that a case study would not?
- How does a leader keep strategic control and still give people real ownership?
- What do you know now that you got wrong ten years ago?
- What is The Transformation Architect about, and who is it for?
Invite me to speak.
Email is fastest. Tell me the event, the date and what the people listening are up against.
A business challenge rather than a speaking date? That route is here.