Stop Trying to Predict
THE FUTURE
OF WORK.
Build For It.
Eric Termuende’s insights, perspective and energizing storytelling & keynote will show your leaders The Blueprint.
The organizations that thrive through disruption are not the ones with the best forecasts. They are the best builders. They stopped asking what the future looks like and started building teams resilient enough to handle it — whatever it turns out to be.
ERIC TERMUENDE, AUTHOR OF RETHINK WORK
Watch Eric
SPEAK
What Are Winning
ORGANIZATIONS ASKING?
The question most organizations are trying to answer is: how do we make our people more engaged? So they run engagement surveys, design better perks, invest in mental health resources, and hire culture consultants.
None of these are bad ideas. The problem is the premise. Engagement is an outcome, not an input. You cannot manufacture it directly. You can only create the conditions it grows from.
The organizations winning right now are not asking how to make people more engaged. They are asking what is getting in the way. They are doing friction audits, not engagement surveys. They are building trust infrastructure, not trust workshops. They are designing cultures where experimentation is safe, not running innovation programs.
THAT SHIFT IN QUESTION IS THE ENTIRE DIFFERENCE.
THE PROBLEM
Your organization is paying for a problem it keeps
MISDIAGNOSING.
$1T
The estimated annual cost of poor management globally
25%
of employees feel genuinely engaged. That means 75% are not delivering their potential
52%
say burnout is actively reducing their engagement. (up from 34% just one year ago)
1.5×– 2×
the annual salary is the average cost of replacing a single, mid-level employee.
Those numbers have been climbing for years. And for years, organizations have responded the same way: a new engagement survey, a revised culture program, a wellbeing initiative, a leadership development workshop. Each well-intentioned. Each insufficient. Each solving the symptom while leaving the cause untouched.
The cause is not a lack of effort.
IT IS A MISDIAGNOSIS
Struggling teams are miscalculating the math needed to solve broken trust, accumulated friction and limiting cultural norms. The missing variable is NOT more motivation, the answer is enabling the right behaviours to flourish.
Three pillars. One operating system. Built to run
IN ANY FUTURE.
After nearly a decade of primary research — tens of thousands of employees surveyed, hundreds of organizations studied across every major industry — the pattern is unambiguous.
Every high-performing team Eric has encountered, in every industry and country, shares exactly three structural characteristics. Not perks. Not policies. Not ping-pong tables.
BUILD TRUST
The operating currency of every high-performing team. Without it, everything else is scaffolding on sand.
REMOVE FRICTION
Every unnecessary barrier between your team and their best work is costing you performance, energy, and people.
EXPERIMENT
Psychological safety to test, fail, and iterate fast. Teams that learn outperform teams that plan.
TRUST IS THE OPERATING CURRENCY
Trust is the operating currency of a high-performing team. When it is high, teams move fast, communicate honestly, recover from setbacks quickly, and stay. When it is low, every other initiative — the strategy, the culture programme, the performance framework — runs on sand.
Friction is the invisible tax. It accumulates quietly — unclear expectations, redundant approval chains, ambiguous ownership, meetings that could be messages, processes that serve no one. Every friction point costs energy. Enough friction points and you do not have a disengaged workforce. You have an exhausted one.
HIGH-PERFORMING TEAMS ARE
built on trust, reduced friction, and continuous experimentation.
Experimentation is what makes the first two sustainable. Teams that can test ideas quickly, learn from what fails, and iterate without fear of punishment are the teams that grow through change rather than breaking under it. Psychological safety is not a culture value. It is a structural requirement.
These three things, built in sequence and maintained as an operating system, are The Blueprint.
ERIC TEACHES LEADERS HOW TO BUILD ALL THREE — FROM STAGE, IN WORKSHOPS, AND THROUGH RETHINK WORK.
Four keynotes. One blueprint. Every one
BUILT FOR YOUR AUDIENCE.
Each of Eric’s keynotes addresses a different dimension of The Blueprint. Each one is fully customized to the specific industry, challenges, and organizational context of your audience.
And each one ends the same way: with a named, specific framework your attendees can put to work the following Monday.
01
Blueprint to the Future: Leading in a New World of Work
The future cannot be predicted. Here is how to build teams resilient enough to handle it — whatever it turns out to be.
Leaders leave this session able to:
- Run a live friction audit on their team and leave with a prioritized action plan
- Build the trust architecture that holds a team together when conditions change without warning
- Design a culture of experimentation that makes uncertainty a source of energy, not anxiety Apply the full Blueprint framework within the first week back
02
Complete Leadership: The Missing Dimension
The skills that made you a great leader yesterday are now incomplete. Here is the dimension that defines the best leaders of the next decade.
Leaders leave this session able to:
- Identify precisely where the human-centric dimension is missing from their leadership
- Build psychological safety without sacrificing accountability or performance expectations
- Practice empathy as a strategic leadership capability — specific, measurable, teachable
- Transform from a leader people report to into a leader people build careers around
03
Unwavering Teams: Building Resilience Into the Architecture
Disruption is no longer the exception. Build accordingly.
Leaders leave this session able to:
- Diagnose the specific structural weaknesses making their team fragile right now
- Deepen collaboration and belonging across distributed, hybrid, and multi-generational teams
- Convert uncertainty from a constant drain into a driver of performance and creativity
- Build the three non-negotiable foundations of an Unwavering Team
04
Leadership in the Age of AI: Staying Human in The Blueprint
AI changes what work looks like. The Blueprint tells you what to protect — and what to double down on.
Leaders leave this session able to:
- Understand AI clearly and confidently — in plain language, without the hype or the panic
- Identify and strengthen the leadership behaviors that AI cannot replicate
- Address AI anxiety on their teams with a framework, not platitudes
- Build the human infrastructure that determines whether AI becomes an asset or an accelerant of dysfunction
FREQUENTLY ASKED
QUESTIONS ABOUT BOOKING ERIC
Answer
Answer
Answer
Answer
There is no shortage of speakers on the future of work.
HERE IS THE DIFFERENCE.
Most future-of-work keynotes do one of two things: they give audiences a view of what is coming, or they give audiences a feeling — inspired, energized, hopeful. Both have their place.
The world’s most innovative organizations choose Eric Termuende because their audience wants to leave energized, inspired AND prepared for what is coming with a practical and useful framework. Not a summary of Gartner research. Not a motivational arc. A named, specific, research-grounded set of tools for building something better. Six months later, the leaders in that room are still using the language. That is the standard.
What Eric Will Deliver
ON YOUR STAGE
A compelling view of the future of work — the trends, the data, the forces reshaping the workplace. Important context. Rarely actionable.
Eric has applied The Blueprint inside Amazon, IBM, Coca-Cola, Nationwide, Toyota, Zoom, Nokia, and John Deere. His work is featured in Forbes, Fast Company, and Inc. He is the co-founder of NoW of Work and the author of the bestselling Rethink Work.
HE IS REGULARLY BROUGHT BACK BY THE SAME ORGANIZATIONS, YEAR AFTER YEAR, BECAUSE THE SESSIONS PRODUCE MEASURABLE CHANGE — NOT JUST MEMORABLE MOMENTS.
THE BLUPRINT IN ACTION
We have had a lot of future-of-work speakers. Eric is the first one who gave our leadership team an actual operating system to take back to their teams. The Blueprint became our shared language for the following year. We are still using it.
CHRO, GLOBAL FINANCIAL SERVICES FIRM
THE BESTSELLING BOOK
RETHINK WORK
The Blueprint started as a decade of primary research into what actually separates high-performing teams from the ones that quietly fall apart. Then it became a keynote. Then it became the book that thousands of leaders are using to rebuild their teams from the inside out.
If you believe the way most organizations work right now is not working — you are right. And if you are ready to do something about it that is more than another programme, Rethink Work is where you start.
Ready to stop predicting and
START BUILDING?
Bring The Blueprint to your next conference, leadership summit, or team offsite.