The ranking of opening keynote speakers

1. Simon Sinek

Simon Sinek wrote Start With Why, Leaders Eat Last, The Infinite Game and Together Is Better, and he runs The Optimism Company, which produces keynotes, courses and leadership programs. His 2009 talk on why organizations exist is among the most watched recordings on the TED platform, and he has built a publishing and training practice around that single question in the years since.

Sinek covers purpose and what a company is actually for, in language a general audience follows with no preparation at all. He suits a first session where several hundred people from different functions need one idea they can carry into the breakouts and still be arguing about over lunch. Event owners come to him when a day has to begin with something that holds a room together before it splits into tracks, which is a narrower job than it sounds.

Best fit: company-wide meetings, large annual conferences, leadership summits

2. Erica Dhawan

Erica Dhawan holds degrees from Harvard University, MIT, and the Wharton School, and went back to teach collaboration and leadership as a research fellow. Her advisory work is with Fortune 500 executives, and she wrote Get Big Things Done, which set out her Connectional Intelligence™ framework, and Digital Body Language, which reached the Wall Street Journal bestseller list.

Erica Dhawan's advisory work runs past the stage. Her board seats have included Deloitte's Inclusion External Advisory Council and the Lufthansa Innovation Hub advisory board, so this is governance work she has done directly. RealLeaders put her first among female keynote speakers, and Global Gurus lists her in its top 20 management experts. The session is agreed with the organizers before the date, so a leadership audience hears its own year described back to it.

Best fit: leadership summits, association main stages, company-wide meetings

3. Shawn Achor

Shawn Achor wrote The Happiness Advantage, Before Happiness and Big Potential, and he taught at Harvard before moving into research and speaking full time. His work draws on studies of how mindset relates to measurable performance at work, and he has run that research inside companies and schools across more than 50 countries.

Achor covers what the evidence says about the order of cause and effect between success and outlook, which is the reverse of the order most organizations assume. He works at the open when a company wants the room lifted and handed something it can test the same week without a budget line. Sales and operations audiences tend to take to the format, partly because the claims arrive with numbers attached and partly because the delivery is quick.

Best fit: sales kickoffs, all-company meetings, employee engagement events

4. Kindra Hall

Kindra Hall wrote Stories That Stick and Choose Your Story, Change Your Life, and she was chief storytelling officer at Success magazine. Her practice is built on teaching storytelling as an operational skill instead of a stage talent, and she works with sales and marketing organizations on finding the material they already hold.

Hall covers the four kinds of story a business owns and does not use, and the method for locating and shaping them. She suits an opening session in front of marketing, sales or communications teams who will spend the rest of the day building something of their own. A room leaves with a repeatable process, which is why the session tends to get booked ahead of a working day instead of as the close to one.

Best fit: marketing conferences, sales kickoffs, communications team offsites

5. Vanessa Van Edwards

Vanessa Van Edwards founded Science of People, a behavioral research lab, and she wrote Cues and Captivate. Her work turns academic research on nonverbal behavior into material for people who present, negotiate and sell for a living, and her courses and talks have reached a large online audience.

Van Edwards covers the signals people send without choosing to, and the small adjustments in voice, posture and word choice that move how warm and how capable someone seems. She fits a first session for client-facing groups who want something concrete before a day of practice. The research framing is what keeps the hour from reading as presentation coaching, and it gives a skeptical room a reason to try the material on a live call that afternoon instead of filing it.

Best fit: client-facing team meetings, leadership development programs, sales conferences

6. Neil Pasricha

Neil Pasricha wrote The Book of Awesome, The Happiness Equation and Two-Minute Mornings, and he led leadership development at Walmart before writing full time. He has given several widely viewed talks on resilience and attention, and his books have sold in the millions across a decade of publishing.

Pasricha covers resilience and where attention actually goes in a working week, told through his own account of a difficult stretch. He works at the open when an organization has been through something hard and needs the day to start honestly instead of brightly. Employee audiences find the register approachable, and the personal material gives a large room permission to talk about the year it has had before the agenda moves on to whatever the organizers have planned for the rest of the morning.

Best fit: employee events, culture conferences, all-company meetings

7. Cy Wakeman

Cy Wakeman is a workplace researcher who wrote Reality-Based Leadership, No Ego and The Promise, and she runs a consultancy that works with organizations on accountability. Her findings come from her own surveys of employees and managers, and she has spent decades inside operational businesses before and during the research.

Wakeman covers the hours a team loses to workplace drama and what accountability looks like when it is treated as a promise to colleagues. She suits a first session for manager and operations audiences who are about to spend the day on process. The argument is direct and it lands with groups that dislike soft framing, which makes her a useful opener in a room where a motivational tone would be rejected on arrival and the rest of the day lost with it.

Best fit: manager training days, operations meetings, HR conferences

8. Dan Heath

Dan Heath co-wrote Made to Stick, Switch, Decisive and The Power of Moments with his brother Chip, and he wrote Upstream and Reset on his own. He is a senior fellow at Duke University's Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship, and the books are widely read across business and public sector organizations.

Heath covers how decisions get made in practice and why organizations spend more on fixing problems than on preventing them. He opens well for strategy audiences who will be deciding something later in the same day or week. The books give a mixed room a common reference before the working sessions begin, which matters when the attendees come from functions that do not usually plan together and have a long afternoon of joint decisions ahead of them to get through.

Best fit: strategy offsites, executive meetings, planning conferences

9. Brene Brown

Brene Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston and wrote Dare to Lead, Daring Greatly and Atlas of the Heart. Two decades of qualitative research sit behind her work on courage and vulnerability, and her Netflix special and podcasts have carried it well past a business audience.

Brown covers the conversations organizations avoid and the vocabulary for naming what is happening in a room while it happens. She works at the open for culture and leadership audiences who need permission to speak candidly across the rest of the event. Her recognition is wide enough that a large general session will fill for her name alone, which is a practical consideration in a year when the opening slot also has to carry registration numbers for the whole event.

Best fit: culture conferences, leadership retreats, large general sessions

10. Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell has written for The New Yorker since 1996 and wrote The Tipping Point, Outliers, Blink, Talking to Strangers and Revenge of the Tipping Point. He hosts the podcast Revisionist History and co-founded the audio company Pushkin Industries, and his books have sold tens of millions of copies.

Gladwell covers social behavior and the research behind why groups act as they do, delivered as narrative instead of argument. He fits a first session at an association event where the audience spans industries and wants something it can keep discussing for two more days. The sessions are built to be talked about afterward, which suits an opener whose job is partly to hand a conference the conversation it will be having in the hallways until the closing session.

Best fit: association main stages, large general sessions, annual conventions