Fee Range for Curt Steinhorst
$20,001 - $30,000 USD
Curt Steinhorst's Videos
Videos & Resources
Speaker Overview | High Velocity Leadership, AI & Productivity
It's Not Rocket Science - It's Harder
Latest Books:
Can I Have Your Attention?
In his latest book Curt Steinhorst shows business leaders how to cut through the noise and get their employees back to work. Curt has spent years helping Fortune 500 companies overcome distraction and achieve focus. With technology creating endless opportunities to “improve productivity”, people spend so much time responding to the interruptions that they’ve lost the ability to focus and do their jobs. Yet, the potential for harnessing the power of your team’s attention has never been greater–if you can capture it.
Curt Steinhorst
C-Suite Leadership Keynote Speaker
on AI, Attention, Managing Teams & Trust
About Curt Steinhorst
Curt Steinhorst is a leadership keynote speaker on AI, attention, and trust, and the bestselling author of Can I Have Your Attention?
A former Head of People at Venus Aerospace, he brings rare operator credibility to conversations about leading teams through high-stakes change — drawn from helping build the culture behind the first rotating detonation rocket engine ever flown.
Curt has delivered 500+ keynotes across four continents for organizations including Nike, JPMorgan Chase, Deloitte, AT&T, and the U.S. Naval Academy, and is a Certified Keynote Speaker at The Center for Generational Kinetics and a regular Forbes contributor on leadership strategy.
Curt Steinhorst's Expertise
- AI Adoption & Human Judgment: Helps leaders integrate AI into decision-making without losing the judgment, context, and accountability that no machine can replace.
- Attention & Focus in the Workplace: Draws on his bestselling book Can I Have Your Attention? (Wiley) to help leaders reclaim focus and align teams around the priorities that actually matter.
- Leadership Presence: Identifies what leaders bring into a room — assumptions, ego, unspoken tension — and how it shapes outcomes before a meeting even starts.
- Team Culture & Cohesion: Maps the structural forces pulling modern teams apart and gives leaders practical tools to rebuild alignment and trust.
- High-Stakes Executive Communication: Coaches founders and executives through board presentations, investor pitches, and company resets where the stakes are highest.
- Change Management & Organizational Transformation: Applies lessons from building the team behind Venus Aerospace's rotating detonation rocket engine — a first in 60 years of rocket design — to leading teams through high-pressure change.
- Generational Dynamics in the Workplace: Certified Keynote Speaker at The Center for Generational Kinetics, helping leaders bridge generational gaps in expectations, communication, and work styles.
Curt Steinhorst's Bio
While others optimize for AI, speaker Curt Steinhorst Ignites The Human Advantage. Curt's keynotes bridge the gap between AI potential and human adoption. He helps leaders protect what technology can't replace: focused attention, genuine curiosity, earned trust, and the shared purpose that drives results.
Most leadership speakers talk about pressure. Curt Steinhorst has run people operations inside a company where pressure meant flying a rocket engine that had never been built before. As Head of People at Venus Aerospace, he spent three years helping the team behind the first rotating detonation rocket engine ever flown navigate leadership decisions where the cost of getting it wrong was measured in more than money.
Before Venus, Curt spent a decade on keynote stages studying a different kind of pressure: attention. His bestselling book, Can I Have Your Attention? became a go-to resource for leaders trying to reclaim focus inside distracted organizations, and led to coaching NFL Hall of Famers, Olympic gold medalists, and Fortune 500 CEOs through their own high-stakes moments.
Today, Curt combines both worlds — attention research and operator credibility — to help leaders adopt AI, build trust, and hold teams together under pressure. He has delivered 500+ keynotes across four continents to organizations including Nike, Deloitte, AT&T, and the U.S. Naval Academy.
Contact Us for Curt Steinhorst's speaker fees, and date availability.
Curt Steinhorst's Presentation Topics
Curt Steinhorst travels from the Frisco, TX / Dallas-Fort Worth area, USA. He offers a range of presentation formats — including keynote presentations, workshops, fireside chats, and moderated Q&A — on a wide variety of topics. Each presentation is unique, customized and tailored for audiences, industries, conferences and event formats. All of Curt’s programs can be delivered as a keynote (45–90 minutes) or as a workshop (1.5–3 hours).
It's Not Rocket Science... It's Harder +
Even when it is rocket science, it's how you get people to work together that dictates the outcome.
Curt spent three years as Head of People at Venus Aerospace. During that time, the company completed the first-ever flight of a high-thrust rotating detonation rocket engine and secured more than $100 million. The thing that nearly broke the company wasn't the physics. It was getting the people who ran it to agree on what to do next, with everything on the line and nobody able to see the whole board. The talk tells that story, including the part where expertise turns into armor and what held the team together anyway.
Formats: Keynote (up to 90 min) · Extended with Q&A (up to 2 hours)
Built for:
- main-stage conferences
- technical and engineering organizations
- industries where the work is hard and the people problems are harder
- leadership summits.
People leave able to:
- Keep egos from derailing high-stakes work
- Hold a team together under sustained pressure
- Get deep experts working as one team
- Spot burnout early, in themselves and their people --
What AI Can't Decide +
How leaders make sound decisions, keep people together, and stay useful as AI changes the work.
AI can produce the analysis, draft the plan, and answer the question before most of us have finished asking it. It cannot decide what deserves attention, notice when the team is confidently wrong, or create the trust required for someone to say so.
This keynote helps leaders understand the work that becomes more important as the tools get better.
Formats: Keynote (up to 90 min) · Extended (up to 2 hours) · Add-on: closed-door executive session
Built for:
- leadership conferences
- executive teams
- founder groups
- organizations navigating major changes in how work gets done.
People leave able to:
- Identify the leadership decisions AI cannot make for them
- Protect time and attention for those decisions
- Test assumptions before confidence turns into a blind spot
- Create the conditions for someone to say the plan is wrong --
Your Newest Team Member Isn't Human +
Getting your team to actually work with the tool.
AI now does work that used to define somebody's job security, and often does it better. Some people see opportunity. A lot of people see a threat and do not say so. No rollout survives a team that has quietly decided the software is competition.
So the talk stays with the humans, not the technology: why capable people resist capable tools, what leaders do that makes the resistance worse, and how to get a team working with AI instead of around it.
Formats: Keynote (up to 90 min) · Workshop · Intensive
Built for:
- company-wide meetings and kickoffs
- operations, sales, and technology leadership
- boards and executive committees working through AI adoption
- association conferences.
People leave able to:
- Spot quiet resistance before it stalls the rollout
- Tip the team's perception of AI from threat to opportunity
- Close the gap between buying the tools and using them well
- Keep the humans and the tool on the same team --
Can I Have Your Attention? +
What actually earns focus when everything competes for it.
The tools that promised to make us productive mostly made us reachable. Somewhere in there, attention quit being something we aim and became something that gets taken, a little at a time, all day. Spent that way, it cannot do the work judgment needs.
The material grew out of the bestselling book and has been rebuilt for a moment when the thing fragmenting you is not just your phone. It is the entire environment around you. And yes, the guy who wrote the book on focus has ADHD. The deep training and team programs live at Focuswise.com.
Formats: Keynote (up to 90 min) · Workshop · Focuswise deep program
Built for:
- any audience drowning in inputs, from full-company kickoffs to executive teams.
People leave able to:
- Reclaim time for deep, focused work
- Protect the focus big decisions require
- Align the team's attention on top priorities
- Tell the difference between busy and productive --
Disagreeing Without Coming Apart +
Keeping the argument about the idea.
Most teams do not break because people disagree. They break because the disagreement turns personal, goes underground, or does not surface until it is expensive.
And the higher you sit, the less of it you hear at all. People close to power have a stake in your approval, and asking for honesty does not fix that when everyone answering knows you hold their paycheck. I learned to argue hard about an idea without making it about the person in competitive debate, then tested it on the executive team at Venus.
Teams leave with a practical way to disagree earlier, keep the argument about the idea, and make a decision without requiring everyone to pretend they saw it the same way. They may even have a decent time doing it.
Formats: Keynote (up to 90 min) · Workshop · Team retreat
Built for:
- executive teams and senior leadership offsites
- teams after reorganization, merger, or rapid growth
- organizations where unspoken conflict and politics are eroding energy
- leadership retreats.
People leave able to:
- Voice disagreement early, before it gets expensive
- Separate the idea from the person proposing it
- Get honest information flowing to the top
- Build a trusted circle that tells the leader the truth --
What Makes Groups Work +
Culture, dynamics, generations, and getting people genuinely on the same team.
The oldest human advantage is people learning how to function together, and much of modern work cuts against it. Add different locations, competing incentives, and four generations each reasonably certain the others are doing it wrong, and the wonder is that any team coheres at all.
I have tested the same basic group problems with a rocket company and a youth baseball team. The settings looked nothing alike, but the group dynamics were familiar. This keynote gives leaders practical ways to rebuild connection, set shared expectations, and get people playing for the same team.
Formats: Keynote (up to 90 min) · Workshop
Built for:
- company-wide meetings
- growing organizations
- leadership retreats
- multi-generational workforces.
People leave able to:
- Break down silos
- Rebuild connection across remote and hybrid teams
- Establish team norms for handling friction
- Keep a shared sense of purpose as the company grows --
Navigating Through the Fog +
Leading when the next quarter is a guess
The fog stopped being weather you wait out and became the climate you work in. Markets, supply chains, policy, and technology refuse to settle into something leaders can confidently plan around.
Leaders still have to give people direction without pretending to have certainty. The keynote helps them keep a team focused and willing to move while the future is still taking shape.
Formats: Keynote (up to 90 min) · Workshop
Built for:
- association conferences
- industries in turbulence
- company-wide meetings during change.
People leave able to:
- Set direction people can act on while the picture is incomplete
- Keep a team focused through constant change
- Protect morale and retention through uncertainty
- Keep people engaged when there's no clear end date --
Speaker's Choice +
When What You Need is not on the Menu
Sometimes, what your team needs most is the thing no one else will say—and no one else has the permission to deliver.
Here's the truth: Curt spends his days thinking about what actually moves organizations forward. Sometimes that's a new framework. Sometimes it's remembering why work should be energizing, not exhausting. Sometimes it's the strategic insight everyone's missing. Or the simple truth that changes everything. When you choose this option, you're saying: "We trust you to step back, look at where we are, and deliver what we actually need to hear."
It might be brand new thinking that hasn't made it to a slide deck yet. It might be a proven idea applied exactly to your moment. It might even be permission to stop doing something everyone thinks is essential. The point is, you're getting what matters most right now—not what was predetermined, but what's actually useful.
Key Outcomes may include....
- What you didn't know you needed to hear
- Permission to stop doing that thing everyone pretends is working
- At least one idea you'll steal immediately
- A story you'll retell at dinner (and probably claim as your own)
Side effects may include: sudden clarity, uncontrollable honesty, and the urge to cancel half your meetings. --
Book Curt Steinhorst to speak at your next conference or corporate event.
Frequently Asked Questions About Curt Steinhorst
What can we expect when we book Curt Steinhorst? +
Curt Steinhorst brings a rare combination of communication research and hands-on operating experience to every keynote. A bestselling author and former Head of People at Venus Aerospace, Curt draws on real leadership stakes — not theory — across topics ranging from AI adoption and executive decision-making to team culture, focus, and navigating uncertainty. Known for blending practical tools with an honest, non-performative style, every talk is customized for the room, and audiences leave with something they can use immediately. --
Does Curt Steinhorst offer anything beyond a keynote? +
Yes. Every program can be delivered as a 45–90 minute keynote or expanded into a workshop, and select topics include closed-door executive sessions, team retreats, or Focuswise deep-training programs as add-ons. --
Why Book Curt Steinhorst Through a Canadian Speakers Bureau? +
Booking Curt Steinhorst through K&M Productions means working with a Canadian bureau that handles CAD pricing (for events in Canada), cross-border travel logistics, and the realities of Canadian corporate events, AGMs, and association conferences. K&M manages contracts, fees, and date availability directly, with a written agreement and a built-in safeguard: if illness or cancellation ever affects an event, K&M sources a comparable replacement speaker at no extra cost. For Canadian event planners, that means one local point of contact managing the entire process, rather than navigating a US-based agency for a Canadian booking. --
What topics does Curt Steinhorst cover in his keynotes? +
Curt Steinhorst offers eight core presentations spanning leadership under pressure, AI adoption, and team dynamics: It's Not Rocket Science... It's Harder (leading high-stakes teams), What AI Can't Decide (executive judgment in an AI-driven workplace), Your Newest Team Member Isn't Human (getting teams to actually adopt AI tools), Can I Have Your Attention? (focus and distraction, based on his bestselling book), Disagreeing Without Coming Apart (healthy conflict and honest feedback), What Makes Groups Work (culture and multi-generational team dynamics), Navigating Through the Fog (leading through uncertainty), and a fully customized Speaker's Choice option built around a client's specific situation. --
Is Curt Steinhorst available for virtual events? +
Yes. Curt customizes his material for a client's industry and event format, and his presentations are available both in-person and virtually. --
Where does Curt Steinhorst travel from? +
Curt Steinhorst travels from the Frisco, TX / Dallas-Fort Worth area, USA for events across Canada, the United States, and internationally. --
How much does it cost to book Curt Steinhorst, and how do I check his availability? +
Curt Steinhorst's current fee range is $20,001–$30,000 USD, with final pricing confirmed through K&M Productions Speakers & Shows based on event format, location, audience size, and customization. Contact K&M Productions to check date availability and arrange a pre-event call. --
How far in advance should I book Curt Steinhorst? +
Popular dates fill quickly, especially during peak conference season in spring and fall. Contact K&M Productions early to confirm availability and secure your preferred date. --
Does K&M Productions handle the entire booking process? +
Yes. K&M Productions manages the full engagement — availability checks, fee negotiation, written contracts, logistics, billing, and payment — so event and meeting planners have a single point of contact from inquiry through event day. --
Is Curt Steinhorst represented by a speakers bureau in Canada, and how is the booking contract handled? +
Curt Steinhorst is represented by K&M Productions Speakers & Shows Canada for Canadian, USA, and international speaking engagements, including booking coordination, contract management, and event logistics. Working with a professional speakers bureau like K&M Productions ensures a seamless experience for event planners and meeting planners — covering support requests, contracts, billing, and payments from start to finish. --
How do I contact Curt Steinhorst to check availability and begin the booking process for events in Canada? +
To check Curt Steinhorst's availability for your Canadian, USA, or international event, contact K&M Productions Speakers & Shows directly. Their team will confirm open dates, discuss your event details, and guide you through the booking process. Event planners and meeting planners are encouraged to schedule a pre-event consultation call to clarify format, audience, objectives, and speaker expectations. Once your event requirements are confirmed, written booking confirmation follows upon contract execution — ensuring a clear, professional agreement for all parties. --
This speaker profile was last updated by K&M Productions on August 7, 2026
What Clients are Saying About Curt Steinhorst
It’s no small feat to keep a room full of top performing wealth managers engaged and off their phones for an entire keynote. Not only did Curt maintain enthusiastic attention, but he gave us plenty of practical advice for finding focus in the ocean of distractions. His session was the highest rated of the conference.
–Ameriprise
I want to share my deepest thanks for the presentation you just made to our Summer Learning Academy! You have set the bar very high for our program for the next two weeks, and the participants are extremely excited to tweet and post their responses…Your tips, research, and insights really connected well with this audience, and I can tell you have encouraged a lot of reflection on the topic of focus. Thank you so much for sharing your time and talent with us.
–Corporate Leadership Development Strategy Lead, AT&T
We want to take a moment to thank you for your help with our COVID-19-inspired work-at-home webinar. The first one went so well that we can’t wait for the follow-up in a few weeks.
We were very impressed with the amount of custom-tailoring you put into the program as well as your willingness to be flexible to incorporate our needs. More than that, our participants felt inspired and energized by you personally. They took away many actionable insights and attitudes that are particularly useful while we are all isolating and juggling responsibilities for our homes, our families, and particularly educating and managing (or trying to manage) our children.
With your webinar oriented specifically for this coronavirus chapter in our history, and the extraordinary changes, challenges, doubts, shifts, and responsibilities that our people face because of it, your message resonated with our culture. Fortifying our focus, managing our attention, and deflecting distraction, could not be more timely or necessary subjects to realize as we address a reshaped future.
The participation was at all-time high, the message was inclusive, and feedback we gathered after the webinar was positive.
–Farm Credit Services of America
The reviews have been unanimously positive, across the board, and we could not have been happier with how everything went. Curt was energetic, entertaining, and engaging—and gave all-in attendance some important things to think about. In short, Curt absolutely hit it out of the park!
–United States Naval Academy
Thank you for presenting at this year’s ReVive Conference at Texas Health Resources. We appreciate the amount of work you put into making your presentation so captivating and thought provoking. Many thanks for making time in your busy schedule to attend and make a truly great talk.
–Texas Health Resources
It feels like an impossible dream — to be creative and productive…responsive aand efficient…open to others and focused on your own work. In his provocative, pithy style, Curt Steinhorst shows how to make this dream a reality.
–Fast Company