Jeff Havens
Most leadership teams have stopped trying to fix the generational friction in their workforce and started managing around it. The dominant frame, four or five distinct generations with incompatible values, has produced training programmes that confirm stereotypes rather than reduce conflict. The result is a culture problem that gets named every year and resolved by none of them.
Jeff Havens is a keynote speaker and author who helps organisations rethink generational conflict, leadership behaviour and innovation through a stand-up structure that holds a senior audience for an hour without losing the argument.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Jeff Havens
- A defined thesis on generational workplaces, set out in his Pearson FT Press book “Us vs. Them,” that there are not four or five generations at work and that most generational training reinforces the problem it claims to solve.
- A keynote portfolio that covers four distinct organisational tensions, change (“Conquering Tomorrow”), leadership (“Unleash Your Inner Tyrant”), innovation (“Uncrapify Your Future”) and generations (“Us vs. Them”), each anchored in a published book or a defined argument.
- Built and runs Levity University, a microlearning platform of more than 400 courses serving over half a million learners a year, so the keynote sits on top of an operating training business, not just a speaking practice.
- A working comedian’s structure applied to a serious management argument, which is why CNBC and Fox Business book him as a recurring guest and why named clients including Ford, General Electric, JP Morgan, McDonald’s and Berkshire Hathaway use him at conferences where attention fatigue is the main risk.
Biography highlights
- Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Vanderbilt University.
- Author of “Us vs. Them” (Pearson FT Press), “Unleash Your Inner Tyrant!” and “Uncrapify Your Life!”
- Founder of The Jeff Havens Company and Levity University, with 400+ microlearning courses and 500,000+ annual learners.
- Recurring guest on Fox Business (including The Willis Report) and CNBC.
- Published in The Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, Fast Company and BusinessWeek.
- Delivered over 1,000 keynotes to organisations including General Electric, Ford, US Bank, McDonald’s, JP Morgan, Honeywell, Berkshire Hathaway and Caesars.
Biography
Generational training is one of the most-bought and least-effective categories of corporate learning. Most of it asks employees to memorise the supposed traits of Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z, then sends them back to the same teams with the same friction. The conflict is real. The frame is wrong.
That is the argument behind “Us vs. Them,” published by Pearson FT Press, in which Jeff Havens makes the case that there are not four or five distinct generations in the workplace, and that the visible conflict is better explained by age and life stage than by birth cohort. The book sits alongside “Unleash Your Inner Tyrant!” on leadership behaviour and “Uncrapify Your Life!” on innovation, three published positions on three of the most-requested categories in corporate keynotes.
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Vanderbilt and a former high school English teacher, Havens works at the intersection of stand-up comedy and management argument. The result is a presentation craft that holds a senior audience for a full hour. CNBC and Fox Business book him as a recurring guest for the same reason. His client list, General Electric, Ford, US Bank, McDonald’s, JP Morgan, Honeywell, Berkshire Hathaway, Caesars, is a list of organisations that buy attention as a scarce resource at their conferences.
Beyond the keynote, he runs Levity University, a microlearning platform with over 400 courses and more than 500,000 annual learners. That operating business gives the speaking work a depth that pure-platform speakers rarely match: he is a practitioner who tests his content against a paying audience every week.
Key speaking topics
- Generational dynamics in the workplace
- Leadership behaviour and management failure modes
- Innovation as an everyday discipline
- Change management and resistance
- Customer experience
- Corporate culture and communication
Ideal for
- HR and L&D leaders running generational, culture or engagement programmes at scale
- Senior leadership conferences where attention fatigue across a long agenda is the main risk to the message
- CEO and divisional offsites looking to anchor a change, innovation or culture theme with a memorable plenary
- Industry association conferences (SHRM, ATD, MPI and equivalents) where mixed-seniority audiences need a single keynote that lands across the room
Audience outcomes
- A working argument for why standard four-generations training does not reduce workplace friction, and what to do instead
- A clear language for naming leadership behaviours that quietly damage teams, drawn from “Unleash Your Inner Tyrant”
- A practical view of innovation as a habit available to every employee, not a function reserved for an R&D group
- A more confident stance for managers asked to lead change against fatigue and resistance
- A shared reference point, and shared humour, that a leadership team can take back into the room the next morning
Talks
A keynote on generational dynamics built on the argument that there are not four or five distinct generations in the workplace and that most generational conflict is better explained by age and life stage.
Key takeaways:
- Why the dominant generational frame produces more friction, not less
- How to name and resolve the recurring inter-generational tensions in a team
- A more durable basis for designing cross-generational engagement and retention
A leadership keynote that inverts the format, teaching audiences how to be a worse boss, in order to surface the behaviours that quietly damage culture, communication and crisis response.
Key takeaways:
- The recurring behaviours that erode trust between managers and their teams
- A working framework for culture, employee relations and crisis behaviour
- A vocabulary leaders can use to coach each other on their own management failure modes
An innovation keynote arguing that innovation is a discipline available to every employee, not a function reserved for R&D or a specialist team.
Key takeaways:
- Why most innovation programmes underuse most of the workforce
- A practical model for surfacing usable ideas from operational teams
- The conditions that let those ideas survive contact with the existing business
A change management keynote focused on the predictable shapes of resistance and what leaders can do to move teams through them.
Key takeaways:
- The predictable points at which change programmes lose the workforce
- How to read resistance as information, not obstruction
- The communication moves that reset momentum once a change has stalled