Tom Kolditz: Crisis Leadership
Crisis leadership keynote speaker Tom Kolditz equips leaders with proven strategies for trust, resilience, and decisive action learned from decades of military command and leadership research.
Quick Facts:
- Highlights:
- Retired Brigadier General with 34+ years of U.S. Army leadership
- Founding Director of the Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University
- Author of In Extremis Leadership, a foundational text on high-stakes leadership
- Former Director of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at West Point
- Formats: Keynote speaker and crisis leadership expert
- Audiences: Executives, government leaders, organizational teams, and mission-driven organizations seeking stronger crisis readiness, trust-building, and resilient leadership
- Outcomes:
- Proven frameworks to lead decisively and confidently through pressure and uncertainty.
- Tools to cultivate trust and strengthen team resilience in high-stakes environments.
- Evidence-based strategies to navigate complexity while maintaining clarity and composure.
- Travels from:
- **Fee range: $20,001 - $35,000
Talent Services
Keynote Topics:
In Extremis Leadership
Leading As If Your Life Depended On It
Operating environments for both government and business are characterized by volatility, complexity, and uncertainty—perfect conditions for crises to emerge. Brigadier Gen. Tom Kolditz, author of In Extremis Leadership: Leading as if Your Life Depended on It, shows how extreme life-and-death situations can offer profound lessons for leaders in any setting.
Tom’s research reveals that the leadership skills and principles evident in dangerous settings also apply to leading in business and everyday life, making this program applicable to both personal and professional success.
Failure
Failure: Why You Can Survive Big Mistakes
Fear of failure holds companies back. General Kolditz shows anxious employees, particularly young people, that failures, even big ones, do not necessarily end one’s career IF handled properly. He reviews a number of colorful mini-case studies of significant failures, then stuns the audience with the reveal that the failures were all his.
He unpacks how fear affects leadership, and discusses how firing vs. retaining personnel really works. His direct professional experience at managing failure, yet becoming highly successful, is both informative and inspirational to all for whom fear that a single failure is a career ender.
Measure What Matters
Measure What Matters: Innovate With OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)
If you can’t measure it, how do you know it’s working? With four successful start-ups, and as the founding executive director of the Ann & John Doerr Institute for New Leaders, Tom shares specific techniques for sparking innovation, tracking outcomes, and achieving real results.
Management by OKRs has been extraordinarily successful in stand-alone start-ups, but it also energizes innovation and initiative in established organizations. Tom can lay out the “how.”
Hope Is not a Method
Hope Is not a Method: 40 years of Leadership Takeaways
Too often, leaders hope for success without using specific techniques for leading effectively. After leading dozens of organizations on 4 continents, and teaching leaders and leadership for 25 years, Tom distills eight proven techniques he uses regularly to get the job done as a leader. This presentation is extremely pragmatic and will allow for immediate application in peoples’ professional and personal lives.
Dodging Bullets
Dodging Bullets: How to Prepare Your Organization for the Next Crisis
Few people want to be put into a position of being crisis managers. So how can leaders prepare organizations to avoid crises before they occur? In this engaging talk, Brigadier Gen. Tom Kolditz will take the audience through specific processes and techniques to help leadership anticipate and prevent crises and have a more effective, more empowered workforce every day.
Leading by Serving
Leading by Serving: The Principles of Servant Leadership
While traditional leadership generally involves the accumulation and exercise of power by one at the top of the pyramid, “servant leadership” is different. The servant-leader shares power, puts the needs of others first, and helps develop the team to perform as high as possible.
In this keynote, Brigadier Gen. Tom Kolditz outlines the most prominent servant leader approaches, and how all leaders can adopt servant-leader behaviors to impact the growth and well-being of other leaders, team members, and the organizations to which they belong.
Talent Short Bio
Tom Kolditz is a globally recognized leadership expert, retired Brigadier General, and award-winning architect of modern leadership development. Renowned for his pioneering work in crisis leadership and leading under pressure, Tom draws on more than 34 years of distinguished service in the U.S. Army and an influential academic career to help organizations navigate complexity with clarity and confidence. His groundbreaking book, In Extremis Leadership: Leading as If Your Life Depended on It, is regarded as a seminal text on leadership in high-stakes environments, blending empirical research with hard-earned battlefield insights.
Tom served as the Director of the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point, shaping generations of military leaders and advancing the science of leadership education. Following his military career, he founded the Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University, transforming it into one of the most respected leadership development centers in the world. Under his guidance, the institute created measurable, scalable leadership growth programs grounded in research and real-world application.
As a keynote speaker, Tom delivers compelling, evidence-based frameworks that empower leaders to build trust, stay resilient, and perform effectively during uncertainty.
Read Full Bio
Tom Kolditz is a distinguished leadership expert and keynote speaker renowned for his unparalleled insights into crisis leadership, resilience, and leading under pressure. With decades of experience in both military and academic spheres, Tom brings a unique, evidence-based perspective to the art and science of leadership. His dynamic presentations inspire individuals and organizations to thrive in the most challenging environments, making him a sought-after voice for leaders across industries. Whether addressing corporate executives, government leaders, or non-profit changemakers, Tom’s thought-provoking content and engaging style leave a lasting impression on audiences worldwide.
As a retired Brigadier General and the founding director of the Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University, Tom has dedicated his career to empowering leaders at every level. His groundbreaking book, In Extremis Leadership: Leading as If Your Life Depended on It, is a seminal work in the field, drawing on his firsthand experiences leading teams in life-and-death scenarios. Through his talks, Tom equips leaders with actionable strategies to build trust, foster resilience, and navigate complexity with confidence.
Tom Kolditz’s career is a testament to his deep expertise and unwavering commitment to leadership excellence. A retired Brigadier General, Tom served over 34 years in the U.S. Army, culminating in his role as the Director of the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. During his tenure, he shaped the leadership development of thousands of cadets, preparing them for the complexities of modern military and civilian leadership.
Hashtags:
#LeadershipExpert, #CrisisLeadership, #TomKolditz, #KeynoteSpeaker, #ResilientLeadership, #InExtremisLeadership, #DoerrInstitute, #LeadershipDevelopment
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Talent Videos
Tom Kolditz — Leadership in Crisis: Trust, Influence & Extreme Performance
In this leadership highlight, retired Brigadier General Tom Kolditz explains that trust is the foundation of effective leadership and shares core principles leaders need when navigating crisis and uncertainty — drawn from military and organizational experience.
Video Summary & Key Moments
In this leadership-focused video, Tom Kolditz emphasizes that trust is the essential backbone of leadership, especially in high-stakes or crisis environments. He explains that effective leaders build influence not through authority alone, but by demonstrating willingness to stand with their people and share risk, creating a psychological bond of trust that enables teams to follow in uncertainty.
Kolditz connects insights from extreme contexts — such as military command and crisis situations — to everyday leadership challenges, showing that the same dynamics that enable survival also foster organizational resilience and performance. The video highlights that leaders who understand human behavior and adaptive response can bridge intention and action even when the stakes are high
Key Moments
- 00:46–01:30 Trust as the currency of influence — people follow leaders who share risk and demonstrate presence.
- 01:31–02:15 Leadership principles from life-and-death settings applied to organizational performance.
- 02:16–03:00 How leaders bridge intention and reality through consistent, trust-based action.
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**Overview of User Reviews for General Thomas Kolditz**
General Thomas Kolditz has received overwhelmingly positive feedback from various organizations regarding his leadership presentations. Reviewers praised his engaging speaking style, ability to draw real-world connections between military leadership and corporate environments, and his insightful, inspirational content. Many noted that his unique perspective and universal principles of leadership were refreshing and thought-provoking, leading to meaningful discussions among attendees.
**Strengths:**
– Engaging and inspirational speaker
– Ability to connect military operations to corporate leadership
– Content that sparks discussion and reflection
– Positive reception from multiple attendees across different organizations
**Weaknesses:**
– None mentioned in the reviews
Overall, General Kolditz is highly recommended for his ability to inspire and inform leaders on effective leadership strategies.
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