Juliet Funt
Featured in top media outlets such as Forbes, CNBC, and Fast Company, Juliet Funt is a globally renowned keynote speaker, tough-love advisor to the Fortune 500, and author of A Minute to Think.
Juliet helps attendees learn the pivotal difference between activity and productivity. She teaches them a streamlined method for personal process improvement – leading to more creativity and engagement. She helps executives, managers and teams answer the critical question “What thoughts deserve my full attention today?”
Juliet regularly wows audiences as a high-impact, high-energy speaker. Yet her deeper mission is to show organizations how WhiteSpace can change the negative patterns and behaviors that prevent them from achieving optimum results. Her clients include a number of Fortune 100 companies and span a wide array of industries, from financial services to technology, manufacturing to the military- executive workshops to audiences as large as 7,000.
Incredibly intuitive, Juliet successfully blends highly customized content with a keen understanding of clients’ needs in her programs and consulting work. With a unique blend of charisma, humor and tough love, she has the uncanny ability to connect with people at all levels, compelling them to make real, lasting change. Yet beneath her powerful assets, she is both authentic and accessible. As a busy corporate speaker and consultant, business owner, wife, and mother of three young boys, she practices on a daily basis the WhiteSpace concept she shares with clients.
Juliet Funt is a force for change in organizations around the world, helping them find their WhiteSpace, recharge their people and reclaim their passion for work.
Her book, A Minute to Think, has been nominated for the Next Big Idea Club curated by Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Pink, Susan Cain and Adam Grant. She is an evangelist for freeing the potential of companies by unburdening their talent from busywork, and she has brought her powerful concepts to Spotify, National Geographic, Anthem, Vans, Abbott, Costco, Pepsi, Nike, Wells Fargo, Sephora, Sysco, and ESPN.
DE-CRAPIFY YOUR WORKFLOW!
Boosting Employee Experience by Simplification
Are your talented teams drowning in meetings, emails, decks, and to-dos without the foggiest clue about how to reduce the pile? Today’s organizations are aggressive in their goals, and in the haste created from this pressure, often submit employees to a miserable experience of daily work. Too many conflicting priorities, unquestioned urgency, and boring, soulless work degrade the employee experience. This paradigm results in burnout, disengagement, and turnover. The solution isn’t as simple as giving them more money. Bringing employees back to vitality and meaning in their days requires a significant paradigm shift in how we perceive activity vs. true productivity. This session offers a roadmap to this shift, providing practical tools, strategies, and frameworks to reevaluate, prioritize, and streamline your team’s workload, thereby improving employee experience. Empower your teams to focus on what truly matters, and you’ll see more smiles and better results.
FEED THE FIRE
Going Upstream from Mental Health at Work
Organizations are providing resources for mental health, and that’s good. But despite all of the yoga, therapists, and puppy parties (yes, really), there’s a problem. Rarely are these solutions going upstream to address the chronic, predictable, and solvable conditions and norms that make folks so stressed in the first place. Healthcare costs soar, and people remain unhappy. As a remedy, this session shines a light on the concept of ‘white space’ - unscheduled, open sips of time that offer a much-needed breather and a platform for restoration. Drawing inspiration from Juliet Funt’s acclaimed book A Minute to Think, the session explores strategies to reclaim and make effective use of this margin. It also offers tools to alleviate burnout and exhaustion, simplify work, curb the flow of digital pestering, and reduce the weight of meetings.
STRATEGIC CHOICE
Why Your Prioritization Plan Isn’t Enough
Rarely does one encounter a professional team that isn’t overwhelmed with responsibilities. Driven by ambition and pressure, leaders often take on more than is necessary and then pass this overload on to their teams, exacting a heavy toll. Teams don’t just need to prioritize tasks; they need to strategically reduce them and allocate time where it matters most—to the essential actions that drive the business forward. This skill is what we call Strategic Choice.Many think of Strategic Choice as plastic surgery—a painful operation that nips and tucks and leaves things looking better forever. More accurate is the model of a haircut—an ongoing maintenance activity that keeps things trimmed as they grow. The corporation will always be adding, so we must always be cutting. In this session, Juliet guides participants through a series of targeted exercises to identify and eliminate the tasks, or task subsets, that consume unnecessary time and resources.
YOU’RE ON MUTE
Strategies for Communicating in a Hybrid World
Hybrid work is here to stay, as are the communication challenges accompanying it. As teams spread geographically, the dynamics of interpersonal communication morph, necessitating
a transformation in our traditional strategies to maintain connection and efficacy. Additionally, leaders must set shared norms that streamline the quantity of information and allow for the boundaries that keep teams vital and engaged. This session delves into the fundamental aspects of communication crucial for hybrid work success. It provides insights into our virtual presence, expressing ideas clearly and persuasively across various mediums and on strategies to foster a cohesive team dynamic that transcends geographical dispersion.
The session also outlines the perfect balance between synchronous and asynchronous communication, optimizing productivity while mitigating the risks of communication overload in a hybrid work environment.
WOW THEM!
Present Like a Pro Every Single Time
In today’s competitive business landscape, and after years going numb while staring at screens, audiences need to be WOWED. More than ever, professionals of all kinds must be able to communicate their ideas and messages effectively. They must be able to connect, inspire, and charm - even on the driest topics. Creating compelling presentations that resonate with clients, stakeholders, and employees is critical to achieving business objectives and driving growth.
Effective presentation and storytelling skills build credibility, establish trust, and inspire action among target audiences. With the rich menu of skills taught in this fast-paced session, your teams can develop the skills necessary to create engaging presentations and stories that capture the attention of their listeners – leaving a lasting impression.
HOW TO NOT BE BORING
Virtual Presence Skills for an Online World
Many executives, sales teams, and other professionals have spent decades learning to be engaging and effective in front of others—in person, that is. But when presenting, or even conversing, through the tiny, intimidating lens of a webcam, many find their impact evaporates. They distract with body movements, fail to make eye contact, show up in dark, cluttered, or unprofessional settings, and drone on while reading slides to people who can read.Creating
a connection and logical content flow in a virtual meeting is harder than it looks. Incomplete learning plans to correct this deficit often focus on technology or sales flow but fail to upgrade the presenters’ talents, charisma, and capabilities. This course teaches every professional to be in control, confident, and capable virtually. It’s perfect for any professional whose online presence affects the brand or bottom line.
Juliet Funt makes a compelling case for a tactic that’s both critically important and distressingly overlooked: the strategic pause. If you regularly feel overwhelmed by your work, read this book!
Cal Newport, New York Times Best-selling author of A World Without Email and Deep Work
I absolutely loved A Minute to Think. It’s one of the most captivating and relevant approaches to solving busyness I’ve read. Juliet’s energetic style and practical insights play a pivotal role as we long to pause yet be more productive and creative in this next decade of hybrid working.
Angela Ahrendts DBE, former SVP Apple Retail and CEO Burberry
This smart, funny business book is brimming with actionable tools. It’s certain to make any team stronger.
Patrick Lencioni, president, The Table Group; New York Times bestselling author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
My decades of experience in the productivity arena have taught me you don’t need more time—you need more room— room to be creative , to be strategic, and simply to be present in whatever you’re doing. Juliet provides a clear warning of why that’s so critical these days and an elegant and easily followed manual of how to achieve it.
David Allen, international best-selling author of Getting Things Done
Rarely has an author produced something so immediately relevant and profoundly important to balancing my life and to my daily practices at work. Reading A Minute to Think is an investment in getting the most out of our most precious of commodity—time. Bravo.
Nicholas Drake, vice president of Global Marketing, Google
Juliet Funt is a master of time management. She recognizes the need to attack busyness with a vengeance and has helped organizations and leaders reclaim their productivity for years. If you find yourself with too much to do and needing A Minute to Think, this book will help you refocus, realign, and reenergize.
Craig Groeschel, pastor of Church and New York Times best-selling author
Like many, I spent most of my life convinced that busy was the same as productive. That’s how I fed my self-esteem for years. But reading A Minute to Think, I have finally and fully understood what Aristotle said, “the quality of life is determined by its activities.
Bradley Preber, CEO, Grant Thornton LLP
I wish I wrote this book.
John Cleese, comedy legend
A Minute to Think