Tim Sanders

Technology Pioneer & Best Selling Author

Tim Sanders

Technology Pioneer & Best Selling Author

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Biography

Tim Sanders is the Vice President of Customer Insights at Upwork, driving their customer-centric approach to help businesses solve their talent gap problems. As a strategic consulting for leading global brands, government agencies, and trade associations, he has helped individuals and organizations tackle marketing innovation, sales performance, talent management, leadership development, and organizational culture. He has served on advisory boards for several startups, including the social reading website Goodreads, which was purchased by Amazon.

Tim is the author of five books, including the New York Times bestseller, Love is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends. His publications have over one million copies in print with bestseller status in India, South Korea, Italy, Brazil, and Denmark.

Throughout his career, he has been on the cutting edge of innovation and change management. Fresh out of graduate school, he was deeply involved in the quality revolution, which disrupted manufacturing in the 1980’s. He joined the cellular phone industry the year it debuted in North America. He was an early stage member of Mark Cuban’s broadcast.com, which had the largest opening day gain in IPO history. He went to Yahoo! when they acquired Cuban’s company for almost six billion dollars and rose to the Chief Solutions Officer position and later was named the company’s leadership coach.

Tim credits his passions of research, critical thinking, and public speaking to his high school days, where he was the captain of the debate team, and then later in college, a national champion. He points to his years of fronting a rock band as the epicenter of his innovative approach to marketing.

Today, his mission is to bring all of his life experiences and his unconventional, disruptive – yet inspired strategies and perspectives to thousands of people every year, helping them to boost their leadership effectiveness, human connection, and business performance.

Speaker Videos

Future of Work

The Grand Redesign

The Power of 4

Unleash Innovation

The Grand Redesign

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Speech Topics

This Business Of AI: How to Convert the Hype into Business Growth

Join us for an enlightening session with Tim Sanders, an authority on driving business growth through Artificial Intelligence. In a landscape inundated with technology enthusiasts, Tim stands out as a pragmatic expert, dedicated to translating AI's potential into tangible returns on investment.

With a global reputation for guiding executives through the complexities of AI strategy, Tim's insights are invaluable for any organization seeking to leverage exponential growth to create value. As an executive fellow at Harvard Business School's Digital Data Design Institute, he spearheads insight development, aimed at democratizing AI for business leaders worldwide.

Tim's approach is not just about adopting AI for the sake of innovation; it's about strategically reframing business challenges as "prediction problems" to ensure maximum return on AI investments. Through engaging dialogue and real-world case studies, he will demystify AI for you and empower you to put it to work in your business.

Drawing from his extensive experience, Tim also sheds light on the often-overlooked pitfalls of AI implementation and shares actionable strategies to mitigate risks and optimize investments. By collaborating closely with meeting stakeholders, Tim tailors his remarks to address specific business challenges and event objectives, leaving attendees equipped with practical insights to drive transformative change within their organizations.

Key Learning Objectives:

Gain a strategic framework for ensuring Return on AI by reframing business challenges as prediction problems.
Explore the booming landscape of GenAI and identify high impact use cases for delivering ROI.
Navigate the hidden costs of AI implementation and learn how to avoid common pitfalls.
Discover proven strategies to de-risk AI programs, enabling more “swings at the plate.”
Reveal how managers and leaders can measure the value of AI investments.

The Grand Redesign

If you want to increase your company's velocity and competitiveness, embark on The Grand Redesign. This new leadership approach leverages design thinking to improve how the work is delivered and plans are met.

Tim Sanders, New York Times bestselling author and Upwork executive, offers a stunning collection of insights, statistics and customer stories that illustrate how leaders can tackle today's biggest challenges.

Deliver a key value proposition to talent: Flexibility. This is emerging as a key to driving productivity, innovation and employee retention. This is done by employing the right design questions that will help leaders craft the perfect hybrid solution for their teams.

Solve the top dependency for their most critical projects and programs: Someone with the skills to complete the work on time. This is done by designing the project canvas to ‘taskify’ and skill-source requirements early in the process, leveraging on-demand talent with an eye of building an elastic workforce.

Lead talent based on outcomes, not attendance or effort. This is the most critical leadership skill because it enables true scale in any working environment. This is done by developing the ability to assign, resource and coach talents to deliver measurable results, regardless of role.

The last three years have been filled with change from Covid to digital disruption to the economy. Historically, times of great change are the best times to redesign key components of your culture – starting with “how we work now.”

Innovating Faster: Why Collaboration Changes Everything

Leaders in every industry prioritize innovation but are frustrated with how long it takes to bring breakthroughs to market. According to bestselling author and consultant Tim Sanders, the best way to speed up the innovation process is to promote a culture of collaboration across your organization and externally with partners, customers and competimates.

Over his career, Tim has studied leaders that practice what he terms ‘disruptive collaboration,’ a problem-solving style that leverages surprising alliances along the fault-lines of a company or its market. He’ll reveal how the biggest leaps and turnarounds in history came from collisions of thought, not safe work in our silos of excellence. Tim’s eye-opening keynote will deliver actionable insights and tools that will accelerate the rate of innovation, drive agility and quickly produce breakthrough business outcomes.

You’ll learn:

Why Companies That Practice Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration Outperform Rival
How to Leverage the Power of Multiple Perspectives to Solve Problems 3X Faster
How to Bring Multiple Stakeholder Needs From “Me-to-We” in a Collaborative Project
Why Innovation Requires a Focus on Building a Collaborative Web of Relationships
How to Connect the Silos, One Collaboration Project at a Time

Testimonials

"Thank you for an outstanding presentation today! We thoroughly enjoyed your energy, passion, and thought-provoking, personalized presentation. We couldn’t have asked for a better kick-off to our annual business retreat. Our group was still buzzing about your message three days later."

- ISA Connection, The Association of Learning Providers

"Your hard work, dedication and commitment to excellence are evident from the evaluation results we received on your session. Thank you for your significant contribution."

- Frost & Sullivan

"Tim’s talk was excellent! His message was spot-on with our group. I have received numerous positive comments and great feedback and I will say that I felt an energy shift with our group after our dinner. All in all, I believe the best outcome was achieved in that we have started the conversation about the importance of culture and many in the firm want to continue this conversation."

- Chief Strategy Officer of Gunster

"Tim was absolutely great. Everyone loved hearing him. I, myself, had the pleasure of working with him one-on-one and he was so personable and easy going. He was a perfect match for our conference."

- NACAS

"Thank you very much for attending and speaking at the Celebrate the Work event. Several of my colleagues and senior members gave you high marks both on your content and delivery. Your points about creativity and stimulating the whole brain really hit home and inspired people to start doing something about it."

- Sports Management of ESPN

"Tim was absolutely phenomenal! It was a great event and Tim delivered an exceptional presentation to our conference, it was everything we had hoped for and more. If I can ever help you or Tim by providing a reference please let me know."

- Managing Member of Network Building + Consulting

"Tim’s presentation was fantastic and blew away our high expectations. His presentation on building up your employees and why talent is everything was the perfect balance of engaging stories, researched facts and takeaways that could be implemented in our markets.

I would recommend Tim to any organization looking for an impactful and dynamic story about growing your people and why this is where you have to focus. I do hope I have the fortune of seeing Tim speak again someday."

- Manager, Revenue Resources of Cox Media Group

"Tim, thank you for your presentation at our national sales conference in Orlando this week. Your words were impactful to many of our leaders and fit closely to our values and special work we do in each of our markets. Thanks for the idea session, I know we will take away many items to act upon. I particularly liked your challenge about service and how we can do more through our conference and in each market."

- -President of Integrated Media Company

"I wanted to let you know that Tim Sanders spoke at the CCH User Conference today. What a great event. Our attendees were so positive about his speech – I’ve heard from many people that it was the best speaker we have ever had. Lots of positive tweets also, and the session feedback ratings are very high. Just wanted to let you know what a great success Tim was, and that it was a pleasure to work with him."

- VP of Communications of Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting