Deborah Perry Piscione
Deborah speaks globally on the Silicon Valley ecosystem, innovation process and risk-taking leadership for clients such as London School of Economics, TedX, Accenture and Council on Foreign Relations. She is also an author for LinkedIn Learning, and her course on “Risk-taking for Leaders” has now been translated into Mandarin, German and French.
Executing on Innovation: Harvesting New Ideas from Anyone in Any Corner of the Company
Deborah Perry Piscione has uncovered the DNA from the inspired cultures of the most innovative companies in the world. In doing so, she architected a bottom’s up innovation process called, Improvisational Innovation, where anyone in any corner of the company can bring forth new ideas and be rewarded for it. And for the companies that has heard her presentation and brought the Improvisational Innovation process internally? A record 10x growth in new or existing revenue streams!
TAKE AWAY: Attendees will learn how to take the annual 12-step Improvisational Innovation process back to their organizations and provide employees an opportunity to bring forth new ideas in a safe and trusted space and be recognized and rewarded for it.
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How to Create a Risk-taking Culture
It’s no coincidence that our most revered business icons are also the boldest risk-takers, such as Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. Yet with so much emphasis on short-term stock price gains and bottom line focus, organizations tend to act too safe, resulting in a stagnant business culture which generates entirely forgettable results in a world that demands significant solutions.
Exemplifying the heroes of risk, entrepreneurship, and venture capitalism, and the role risk-taking play in their success, Piscione makes the case that for your culture to act smarter, faster, with more agility in reacting to competition and developing innovative ways to grow, you must explore the one core leadership skill that has been completely ignored in corporate cultures. She explores both the individual skills and organization systems to unleash risk-taking. This is a very exciting speech for an entire audience.
Learning Outcomes:
- Discover how to create a culture of risk-taking to generate next level business solutions
- Develop skills for effective risk-taking and betting big on the creativity of employees
- Explore new avenues for improving organizational culture to optimize risk-taking and encourage creative exploration
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Bold Leadership: Corporate Courage
Leadership is about courage. The courage to chance failure as the price for succeeding big. The courage to ignite the passions of your workforce and being open to great ideas from anyone at any time. It is about doing what is right, and seizing the moment when the iron is hot. So, why is this so hard? Because in all of the books and speeches about leadership, what has been neglected is how to master the art of risk-taking.
In this exciting presentation, Piscione shows how risk can become an incredibly powerful tool in the leader’s tool belt. Deborah reveals the key differences between gambling and calculated risk-taking, and how to master the skills of risk. Audiences are then able to build a culture that not only focuses on producing the work, but to also create and execute a steady flow of ideas to improve every aspect of the organization, and recognize a leader’s bias toward their own ideas to find the balance between long-term value creation and short-term profitability.
Learning Outcomes:
- Discover a deep, individual courage to help leaders seize the moment and take risks
- Deliver a set of tools that can be used to master the skills of risk and decision-making
- Design a framework to produce a steady flow of ideas to improve every aspect of an organization’s productivity
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In this keynote, Deborah explores the mindset shift necessary to thrive in the metaverse, provides reasons why employees will eventually abandon traditional employment for the bounty of Web3, and outlines practical strategies that digital-first leaders can start implementing today to take advantage of this vast new world of endless possibilities.
This interactive session cuts through the myths of web3 and explores how forward-thinking, digital first leaders can navigate the impact that the metaverse will have on the future of work, by educating them on the advances in web3 technology and providing practical strategies for them to integrate the Metaverse into their current business practices.
Take a dive into the wonderful interoperability of the metaverse and the impact it will have on the way we view employment.
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Leaders in business have two seminal jobs: to provide a vision for the business, and most importantly to create a company culture that values employees and provides customized experiences to them. Unfortunately, while most leaders provide a vision for the business, they fail at building a craveable culture. They’ve been taught to treat people like pawns on a chessboard, rather than human beings with feelings, dreams and goals. They fail to encourage risk-taking and innovation at every level of the organization.
In this keynote, Deborah helps leaders set the tone of the organization to ring loud and clear throughout the entire company, from the C-Suite to the newest entry-level employee. In the new world of work people’s emotions and ideas matter FIRST, not the mindless execution of a business leaders’ plans.
Deborah will lay out why traditional leadership strategies will continue to slip into obsolescence if they don’t transform and how digital-first leaders can adapt to the changing landscape of the Metaverse. In addition, she will make the case of how Web3 technologies will alleviate the persistent problems that employers often lose sleep to solve, such as employee engagement, productivity, innovation and growth. Participants will dig into the new dynamics of employee power and how it will reshape the employee-employer relationship for the better.
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SOME OF DEBORAH’S CLIENTS





“Deborah truly shined! I could not be happier with the choice to have her come to our event. She really impressed me and was so pleasant to work with and was so readily able to accommodate us.
– Northeastern University
– Northeastern University
Josh Drean
Josh speaks to hundreds of digital-first leaders each year to develop web3 strategies and transition smoothly to the Metaverse. He is a web3 advisor at Harvard Innovation Labs and Co-founder of DreanMedia, a web3 media agency. Josh’s work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Bostinno
WORKFORCE EXPERIENCE DESIGN IN THE ERA OF EMPLOYEE POWER
The post-pandemic workforce is empowered. They know how, where, and why they want to work and are no longer subject to employers setting the terms and conditions of their employment. Employers, then, must design meaningful experiences that are attractive to an emboldened workforce by embracing continuous feedback loops, implementing human tech, and bringing new meaning to employee experience initiatives.
In this keynote Josh addresses the shifting power dynamics of workforce experience and offers an upgraded approach for creating active channels for authentic and transparent human connection.
Learning Outcomes:
- Implement a modern, employee-centric feedback model
- Leverage HR tech to make work more human
- Embrace the new dynamics of employee power by designing better experiences
EMPLOYMENT IS DEAD: How The Metaverse Will Radically Change the Way We Work
To understand the impact of the Metaverse on the future of work, look no further than the current pains of the distributed workforce and observe the solutions a virtual world of work will provide. Realizing these possibilities will require an entirely new mentality.
It’s not about the antiquated concepts of employee engagement or even designing a better employee experience, that’s like adding Ford Mustang car parts around a Model T chassis. The fundamental structure of work is outdated. We are clogging Industrial Age systems with Information Age speeds.
The Metaverse and web3 technologies have the power to drive work forward new levels of productivity and growth by offering individual contributors greater ownership, flexibility, and agency over their work.
Learning Outcomes:
- Demonstrate how web3 allows contributors to own greater value
- Unlock unlimited flexibility to discover work streams yet to be imagined
- Why Cryptonetworks and DAOs allow for increased agency, speed and trust
Decentralized Work: Welcome to the Era of DAOs and Cryptonetworks
It may seem today that the Metaverse is a far-distant and utopian aspiration, but look closely at the real problems HR departments are facing today. Recruitment and retention, digital transformation, engagement, manager training etc…Designing better employee experiences is not enough to solve these complex problems in a rapidly evolving digital landscape where employees are taking back their power and seeking non-traditional streams of income.
Companies have been trying to solve all the persistent people problems of the corporate workplace for decades and are falling further and further behind with the acceleration of technology. It’s time to embrace an entirely new model that removes the least favorable aspects of corporate structure.
In this engaging keynote, Josh makes the argument that employees will choose the Metaverse, just as they are choosing distributed, remote opportunities instead of “returning to the office.” There are actions companies can be taking today to prepare themselves for the inevitable transition to the digital workplace known as the Metaverse.
Learning Outcomes:
- Understand new technologies that exist to day that are reshaping the way we view work
- Dive into the tangible problems HR faces today and review web3 solutions that will solve them
- Design a framework for each company to dip their toe into the metaverse
SOME OF JOSH’S CLIENTS




“There’s truth in his message and it was right on point. He gave me hope and allowed me to create a forum to enlighten my company. Thank you so much, keep walking in your gift, Josh”
– Future Workforce Conference
– Future Workforce Conference