Engagements

Speaking & Media

Sharam Kohan speaks to senior leadership teams, boards, HR conferences, and business school programs on the strategic role of the people function, the economics of talent, and the quiet internal failures that end and stunt companies.

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On Speaking

What the engagements cover

The talks and workshops drawn from What Is Quietly Killing Your Company are not motivational. They offer an evidence-based account of where the most expensive failures in business actually originate, grounded in the research on engagement, turnover, culture, and management quality, and illustrated by more than twenty-five years of senior management and executive experience. Engagements are available as keynote addresses (45 to 60 minutes plus Q&A), half-day workshops, and full-day executive seminars for senior leadership teams. Customized presentations addressing organization-specific applications of the book's framework are available upon inquiry.

Keynotes & Workshops

Suggested Presentation Topics

1
What Is Quietly Killing Your Company: The Hidden Economics of the People Function
Keynote / Workshop · Executive leadership, boards, HR conferences, business school programs

The flagship presentation introducing the book's central argument: that most corporate decline is quiet, internal, and traceable to the management of people, and that its costs appear on no statement an executive reads. Appropriate for audiences with or without an HR background.

  • Why the most common corporate death is quiet, and why the autopsy looks in the wrong place
  • The costs no financial statement records: the regretted departure, the bad hire, the disengaged team
  • The two layers of the human resources function, and why most companies see only one
  • The leading indicators of decline that are visible years before the numbers move
2
The Manager Multiplier: The Highest-Leverage Investment Most Companies Never Make
Keynote / Workshop · HR executives, general managers, leadership development professionals

A focused presentation on the research finding that managers account for most of the variation in team engagement, what the managerial role actually requires, and why companies systematically promote for the wrong skills and then provide no training in the right ones.

  • The manager as the experience of work, and the evidence behind the multiplier
  • Why promoting the best individual contributor is a bet against the data
  • What the role actually requires, and the chronic underinvestment in it
  • The function's lever: selection, development, and the standards that make both real
3
Speaking the Language of the C-Suite: Making the People Case in Money, Risk, and Return
Keynote / Workshop · CHROs, HR leaders, CFOs, finance and people analytics teams

A practical presentation on the measurement problem: what can honestly be measured about the human condition of a company, which metrics actually carry information, and how the function earns its hearing by making its case in the only language the boardroom cannot wave away.

  • The three levels of people analytics and the boundary of honest measurement
  • The handful of metrics that matter, and the many that do not
  • A discipline for honest claims that survives the skeptic in the room
  • How the function translates people outcomes into money, risk, and return
Additional Topics

Other Presentation Areas

Hiring
Hiring for the Long Term: Selection as Strategy
Culture
Culture as an Asset, Not an Accident: How Culture Reaches the Balance Sheet
Engagement
Trust, Fairness, and the Withheld Margin of Discretionary Effort
Succession
The Succession That Was Never Planned: Workforce Planning Before the Strategy Requires It
Executive Leadership
The Barrier at the Top: The Executive's Own Part in the People Problem
Compensation
Compensation as Signal and Strategy: What Pay Actually Communicates
Booking

Speaking & Media Inquiry

For speaking invitations, podcast requests, and media interviews. All submissions receive a response within five business days.