Jim Lawless

Once the enterprise strategy is clear, Jim rolls up his sleeves with the CEO and exec to architect and deliver the Second Strategy: the route to mobilising tens of thousands of employees globally to turn that slide deck into action at scale.

His client list includes Apple, Microsoft, Diageo, Bayer, BAE Systems, Novartis and VW Group. He is the author of the global bestseller Taming Tigers (Penguin Random House).

He has delivered DARE Loop and Second Strategy keynotes to well over a million people across five continents and is ranked among the world’s leading business speakers by Global Gurus. Jim’s credo is that performance and change are extremely emotionally testing for the individual and for those who would lead them, with discipline, through uncertainty to bold new ambitions.

They are not academic pursuits or cascaded strategy decks. He tests his frameworks at the extreme edge. He became the deepest freediver in British history in just eight months with a dive to 101 metres on a single breath; he moved from non-rider to televised jockey in twelve months.

Both were deliberate applications of the DARE Loop methodology. Both ran alongside his day job and his most important role, fatherhood. Both give him extreme credibility onstage.

As a speaker, Jim leaves behind a precise, practical and simple map that audiences use to navigate uncertainty, swapping ownership and action for hesitation and escalation, for many years after the event. As an architect of strategy implementation, he walks beside clients to create tangible success stories, together.

Jim worked as a City of London commercial solicitor before moving into high-performance and change. He was elected a Fellow of the UK’s Royal Society for the Arts in recognition of his business writing.

Speaking Topics

Consistently voted the top Speaker outside of the US, Jim has spoken to well over a million people on five continents. 

Jim turns a superb event into a commercial and strategic turning point. Normalising and explaining change, adaptability and uncertainty, Jim gives leaders at every level fresh, vital insights, a new mental model to take away and an immediate shift in how they think about ownership, decision-making and action.

Keynote Topics

THE DARE LOOP

The unit of transformation in a knowledge economy is the human. Velocity is achieved when our people have the courage, clarity and skills to do new things, fast, to deliver the strategy. Yet nobody teaches your people the map to ‘outside the comfort zone’ so that they can navigate confidently through the self-doubt and emotional turmoil it will bring.

The DARE Loop is the mental model for adopting a growth mindset, designing from the future backwards to build tomorrow’s action list and taking accountability for your results.

Jim’s keynote – which takes people from their own ambitions and fears to 101m under the ocean, challenges their limiting beliefs, make high performance accessible and lights up your delegates with energy, laughter and confidence in their ability to deliver the ambition.

THE SECOND STRATEGY

The enterprise strategy, the ‘behaviours’ and the instruction that people are ‘empowered’ have all been rolled out. Yet there is no change. You have a ‘wicked’ problem to solve and ‘The Second Strategy’ is a proven way to approach it.

Humans cannot be commanded into being empowered. People need specific things before they will leave their comfort zone, enter uncertainty and become vulnerable to self doubt, failure and criticism: at their workplace.

A disciplined Second Strategy is how to deliver the enterprise strategy at the speed required to win today. Every leader from the CEO down needs to be able to understand it, regulate emotion, deliver consistency and nurture the courageous action you need for progress to accelerate. 

INSPIRE: Leading High Performance

The team leaders who make it real. Team leaders are the most consequential people in delivering high performance and the enterprise strategy. They translate executive intent into daily reality for the people doing the work. And in most organisations, they have been trained, by education, by role modelling, by every system around them, to tell people what to do.

INSPIRE rewires that relationship into one of empowerment, clarity and speed to deliver higher performance. No management theory. Real tools, real skills, and an honest confrontation with self that produces a fundamentally different kind of leader.

If you are interested in booking the motivational speaker Jim Lawless please email us at enquiries@scampspeakers.co.uk