Adam Markel

Resilience Researcher, AI, Future of Work and Change Management Expert; #1 WSJ Bestselling Author of "PIVOT" and "Change Proof: Leveraging Uncertainty to Build Long-Term Resilience

Adam Markel, JD, is a #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling author, resilience researcher, TEDx speaker, and Co-Founder and Chief Researcher at WORKWELL, a research and advisory firm focused on workplace resilience, culture, and sustainable performance. A former commercial attorney and C-suite leader, he brings more than two decades of experience advising Fortune 500 organizations such as Citigroup, Home Depot, CVS Health, and Cisco. His research and advisory work is informed by years of organizational engagements and a growing body of workplace resilience data collected from more than 27,000 participants across leadership, practitioner, operational, and frontline roles. His work integrates neuroscience, behavioral science, and organizational psychology to help leaders and organizations understand how people adapt under pressure, sustain performance, and respond to ongoing disruption.

  • Adam Markel Keynote Speaker Fee Fee range is for U.S. events, depending on location and organization type

    $20,001 - $30,000

  • Languages Spoken

    English

  • Travels From

    Massachusetts, California, USA

  • Adam Markel Keynote Speaker Fee Fee range is for U.S. events, depending on location and organization type

    $20,001 - $30,000

  • Languages Spoken

    English

  • Travels From

    Massachusetts, California, USA

Suggested Keynote Speaker Programs

Adapt to Win: Unlocking the Power of Strategic Resilience to Lead Change & Fuel High Performance

The pace of disruption is now outpacing the pace of organizational adaptation and the leaders who win are the ones who embed strategic resilience into the DNA of their culture. In this high-impact keynote, Adam Markel shows organizations how to move beyond reactive fire-drills...

The pace of disruption is now outpacing the pace of organizational adaptation and the leaders who win are the ones who embed strategic resilience into the DNA of their culture. In this high-impact keynote, Adam Markel shows organizations how to move beyond reactive fire-drills and build a proactive capability for absorbing shocks, accelerating intelligent adaptation, and emerging stronger from every challenge. Drawing on insights from Re-Culture and two decades of research, Adam illustrates exactly how high-performing organizations operationalize resilience as a strategic advantage across leadership, team dynamics, and decision-making.

This keynote gives your people a clear, repeatable blueprint for building systems, habits, and cultures that thrive in uncertainty. Attendees walk away equipped to lead with greater confidence, elevate team performance, and future-proof the business in a world where the only constant is change.

Key Outcomes for Your Audience:

  • Understand the critical difference between operational resilience and strategic resilience, and why long-term success requires both.
  • Learn leadership practices proven to increase adaptability, psychological safety, and team-wide agility.
  • Gain frameworks to embed resilience into culture, strategy, and operations for consistent high performance during transformation.
  • Leave with a practical roadmap for building organizations that don’t just withstand change, they capitalize on it.

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Resilience by Design: How to Future-Proof Teams &
Thrive Through Uncertainty

Today’s workforce is under unprecedented pressure, rising expectations, constant change, and near-continuous transformation. Performance now requires more than skills; it requires Change Resilience, the ability to adapt, recover, and excel in real time. In this ...

Today’s workforce is under unprecedented pressure, rising expectations, constant change, and near-continuous transformation. Performance now requires more than skills; it requires Change Resilience, the ability to adapt, recover, and excel in real time. In this energizing keynote, Adam Markel delivers a powerful, research-backed approach to building resilient people and resilient cultures that perform at the highest levels without burning out. Through compelling stories and actionable tools, your organization will learn how to elevate well-being as a business strategy, reduce turnover, and create a culture where people consistently bring their best, because they have the capacity to do so.

This talk is designed for leaders and individual contributors alike, giving everyone a common language and a shared framework for sustainable, repeatable high performance.

Key Outcomes For Your Audience:

  • Break through change resistance and empower teams to embrace innovation instead of fearing it.
  • Learn the four domains of resilience, mental, emotional, physical, and spirit-driven, and how they drive sustainable performance.
  • Discover practical strategies to increase energy, focus, and productivity without sacrificing health or engagement.
  • Reinforce a culture where well-being is viewed not as a perk, but as a performance multiplier.

This is the keynote that transforms how teams work, lead, and grow, not by doing more, but by becoming more resilient by design.

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Bouncing Forward: How to Turn Adversity into Growth,
Agility & Innovation

Resilient organizations don’t “bounce back.” They bounce forward, using challenge as fuel for growth, reinvention, and innovation. In this inspiring and highly practical keynote, Adam Markel reframes resilience as a strategic capability that enables individuals and ...

Resilient organizations don’t “bounce back.” They bounce forward, using challenge as fuel for growth, reinvention, and innovation. In this inspiring and highly practical keynote, Adam Markel reframes resilience as a strategic capability that enables individuals and organizations to leverage adversity rather than simply endure it. Audiences learn how to transform pressure into performance, uncertainty into opportunity, and setbacks into momentum.

With actionable frameworks from Adam’s research and bestselling books, this keynote empowers teams to meet disruption with confidence and creativity, unlocking new levels of agility, engagement, and innovation.

Key Outcomes for Your Audience:

  • Shift from a survival mindset to a growth-oriented, future-focused perspective.
  • Build the capacity to adapt quickly, intelligently, and sustainably in any environment.
  • Use challenge and constraint as catalysts for innovation and opportunity.
  • Cultivate a culture where resilience fuels high performance, trust, and alignment.

This is the mindset shift your organization needs to thrive, especially when conditions are tough, unpredictable, or rapidly changing.

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The Change-Proof Advantage: Equipping Teams to Embrace Change, Recover Smarter & Create What’s Next

Change is no longer an event, it’s the environment. In this top-rated keynote, Adam Markel equips organizations with the proven strategies needed to embrace uncertainty, reduce burnout, and build teams capable of sustained high performance in the face of nonstop change....

Change is no longer an event, it’s the environment. In this top-rated keynote, Adam Markel equips organizations with the proven strategies needed to embrace uncertainty, reduce burnout, and build teams capable of sustained high performance in the face of nonstop change.

Drawing from Change Proof and decades of leadership experience, Adam reveals how the world’s most adaptable organizations cultivate resilience across every level of the business, mental, emotional, physical, relational, and cultural. He shows leaders how to create a “Got Your Back” culture of trust and support that accelerates collaboration, innovation, and long-term success.

Key Outcomes for Your Audience:

  • Foster innovation by creating conditions where creativity thrives, even in pressure-filled environments.
  • Identify and prevent burnout using practical tools your leaders and teams can implement immediately.
  • Build individual and collective resilience to perform at a high level during continuous change.
  • Strengthen team cohesion, trust, and accountability through a “Got Your Back” cultural framework.
  • Drive consistent success with systems that create sustainable, repeatable performance.

This keynote transforms how organizations approach change, moving from reactive to proactive, from stressed to strong, and from disrupted to change-proof.

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Re-Culture: The “Got Your Back” Blueprint Building Trust-Driven Teams That Attract, Retain & Truly Thrive

At a time when talent is scarce, burnout is rising, and engagement is declining, organizations need more than perks or policies, they need a culture that creates belonging, trust, and loyalty. In this transformative keynote, Adam Markel delivers the central message of his new ...

At a time when talent is scarce, burnout is rising, and engagement is declining, organizations need more than perks or policies, they need a culture that creates belonging, trust, and loyalty. In this transformative keynote, Adam Markel delivers the central message of his new book Re-Culture: the most successful organizations are those that intentionally design a “Got Your Back” culture, where people feel supported, valued, and safe to perform at their highest level.

Adam reveals a practical, evidence-based blueprint for building cultures that attract top talent, strengthen engagement, reduce turnover, and unlock innovation. These are the cultural foundations that turn organizations into talent magnets, and teams into communities that thrive.

Key Outcomes for Your Audience:

  • Build resilience into your culture, enabling employees to navigate pressure and change with confidence.
  • Discover why trust and psychological safety are the ultimate differentiators in today’s talent marketplace.
  • Learn how to significantly boost engagement through belonging, communication, and shared purpose.
  • Identify early signs of burnout and deploy systems for creating sustainable, high-performing teams.
  • Activate a culture where retention is the outcome, not the goal.

This keynote is a culture-shaping experience that helps organizations create environments where people don’t just stay, they grow, contribute, and thrive.

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The Adaptability Advantage: Why Resilience Will Determine Who Wins in the Age of AI

In today’s environment, the pace of change isn’t just accelerating, it’s compounding. Artificial intelligence is reshaping how decisions are made, how work gets done, and how value is created across industries. And yet, across even the highest-performing companies, a...

In today’s environment, the pace of change isn’t just accelerating, it’s compounding. Artificial intelligence is reshaping how decisions are made, how work gets done, and how value is created across industries. And yet, across even the highest-performing companies, a familiar pattern is emerging: The technology is moving faster than the organization’s ability to adapt.

For CEOs leading high-growth companies, and the investors backing them, this gap has become one of the most significant determinants of performance. Because when stakes are high, success doesn’t go to the organizations with the best strategy or the most advanced tools. It goes to those that can evolve the fastest.

In this thought-provoking keynote, resilience expert Adam Markel reframes adaptability as a strategic capability – one that can be operationalized across teams, cultures and leadership systems. Drawing on his Change Proof framework, Adam explores why AI adoption and other forms of disruption often stall – not due to lack of vision or investment, but because of unseen resistance at the human and cultural level.

Through powerful storytelling and practical insight, Adam shows how leaders can build organizations that don’t just respond to change, but leverage it. He outlines how to create resilient teams that remain focused under pressure, make better decisions in uncertainty, and view disruption not as a threat, but as a catalyst for innovation and growth.

Because in a Darwinian business landscape, the ultimate competitive advantage isn’t intelligence. It’s adaptability.

And adaptability when built intentionally is resilience.

Key Outcomes for Your Audience:

  • The Adaptability Gap: Why Execution Lags Behind Innovation – Understand why even well-resourced, high-growth organizations struggle to fully adopt AI and other emerging technologies and how that gap impacts performance, scalability, and valuation.
  • Resilience as a Strategic Capability: Learn how to operationalize resilience across your organization, building the mental, emotional and cultural capacity required to adapt quickly and effectively under pressure.
  • Leading Through High-Stakes Change Without Triggering Resistance: Discover how leaders can align teams, reduce friction, and accelerate adoption during periods of rapid transformation, without creating burnout, fear, or disengagement.
  • Turning Disruption into a Performance Advantage: Explore how organizations can train their people to interpret change differently, shifting from reactive to proactive, and from risk avoidance to opportunity creation.

Learn More

About Keynote Speaker Adam Markel

Adam Markel, JD, is a #1 Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and Publishers Weekly bestselling author, resilience researcher, organizational strategist, TEDx speaker, and Co-Founder and Chief Researcher at WORKWELL, a research and advisory firm focused on workplace resilience, culture, and sustainable performance. A former commercial attorney and C-suite leader, he brings more than two decades of experience helping organizations navigate change, lead under pressure, and strengthen performance and adaptation in high-stress, high-stakes environments. His research and advisory work is informed by years of organizational engagements and a growing body of workplace resilience data collected from more than 27,000 participants across leadership, practitioner, operational, and frontline roles.

His work integrates neuroscience, behavioral science, and organizational psychology to help leaders and organizations understand how people adapt under pressure, sustain performance, and respond to ongoing disruption.. Across industries, his work is especially relevant where uncertainty, rapid decision-making, workforce strain, and continuous transformation shape outcomes for people, teams, and organizations. Adam translates resilience science, stress physiology, nervous system regulation, and behavior change into practical, research-informed strategies that leaders and teams can apply in real time. His frameworks help organizations build clarity, trust, and adaptability in environments defined by complexity, urgency, and change, while reducing burnout risk and supporting sustainable performance. 

With more than two decades of experience advising Fortune 500 organizations such as Citigroup, Home Depot, CVS Health, and Cisco, as well as institutions across healthcare, financial services, technology, government, education, energy, manufacturing, and professional services, Adam brings a systems-level perspective to culture, leadership, and organizational resilience. His background in law and executive leadership adds depth in risk management, decision-making under pressure, and navigating complex, high-consequence environments. These parallels resonate across sectors facing disruption, workforce fatigue, and accelerating operational demands. 

He is the best-selling author of Pivot, Change Proof and Re-Culture, books that have established him as a leading voice on resilience, change leadership, and the future of work. He is also the host of The Change Proof Podcast, where he explores how individuals, teams, and organizations can build the capacity to navigate uncertainty and perform sustainably without compromising well-being.

Earlier in his life, Adam served as an ocean first responder, where he developed a deep understanding of team coordination, situational awareness, and rapid response in life-critical conditions. Those principles continue to inform his work today. 

Testimonials

The unthinkable and impossible become logical and attainable when you listen to the inspirational messages Adam delivers. He’s a guy with big dreams for the world and the passionate personality to inspire to share in his dreams and to dream bigger themselves. Read More

Steve Olenski

Director of CMO Content & Strategy Oracle

We were so happy with Adam! He really nailed the brief unlike any other speaker we’ve had before and gave our participants wonderful, tangible tips on building resilience. We’re looking forward to the next time!

BEAM SUNTORY

 

We made the right call in having Adam as our keynote!! He was great! The team loved him and his message resonated very well. The assessment that he had us do was also very insightful, both on an individual and group level. Read More

ECHO GLOBAL LOGISTICS

 

From my first conversation with Adam I knew we were going to have an incredible event today. There was some chemistry on the phone and I have to say today absolutely held up to the high expectations I had for what we were going to do. Read More

ZIMMER BIOMET

 

Adam was very well received and his messaging was right on target. He and his team were a dream to work with – professional, organized, and committed to our event’s success. Read More

TEXAS MUNICIPAL LEAGUE (TML)

 

Adam was a fantastic addition to our Operations Leadership Conference. Adam’s attention to detail and ability to tailor his messaging to our audience really came through in his keynote address. His energy was contagious, and our audience was eager to participate and learn from him. Read More

DUNKIN’ | INSPIRE BRANDS

 

Adam is an amazing speaker who is able to keep the audience engaged all the time even in a virtual session. He goes beyond by sharing his unique resilience assessment tool which is a huge takeaway for everyone. We are super glad we decided to invite Adam to our event, he simply delivered great learnings in a true storytelling experience. Read More

Procter & Gamble

 

His energy and transparency was contagious and the best way to end our session. There was something for everyone in the material he presented and the stories he shared. I know my tank was completely filled after hearing his message.

NORTH EAST FLORIDA EDUCATIONAL CONSORTIUM

 

We were looking for something that was different for our A/E/C Thrive Conference – something out of the box, that would change the way people think. Adam delivered all that in spades. He gave us so many interesting things to think about. The audience loved it – they were talking, engaging and interacting with each other. Read More

PSMJ RESOURCES

 

Adam’s presentation was super energetic and well received by our manager population. The way he presented far exceeded what I thought was possible for a Zoom experience, and the interactivity and dynamism stood out.

ALEXION

 

Media

Article

Nov 15, 2018

Do This 1 Thing To Strengthen Your Life And Career

This article was originally published by David K. William at Forbes This week I had the chance to visit with Adam...

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