Daniel Coyle is the award-winning, NY Times-bestselling author of several books on leadership and performance, including The Talent Code, The Little Book of Talent, and The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups. His book, The Culture Playbook: 60 Highly Effective Actions to Help Your Group Succeed (May 2022), is a handbook for fostering a strong team culture, offering sixty actionable tips and exercises.
In The Culture Code, Daniel explores high-performing organisations like Pixar, the San Antonio Spurs, and Navy SEALs Team Six, providing tools to enhance organizational culture. Bloomberg named it one of the Best Books of 2018 and Amazon's Best Business and Leadership Books of 2018.
Since 2013, Daniel has worked as an advisor with the Major League Baseball team Cleveland Guardians and has advised military special forces, professional sports teams, schools, and other organisations. He has also served as a consulting producer for ESPN documentary films. His best-selling Little Book of Talent offers 52 methods for improving skills. At the same time, The Talent Code delves into the neuroscience behind learning, focusing on habits that promote the growth of myelin, which speeds up neural pathways.
Daniel grew up in Alaska and has written for Sports Illustrated, The New York Times Magazine, and Play. He and co-author Tyler Hamilton won the William Hill Book of the Year award and have been featured in The Best American Sports Writing. He has appeared on Today, Good Morning America, ABC World News Tonight, Nightline, ESPN, CNN, All Things Considered, Charlie Rose, Weekend Edition, Talk of the Nation, and other national programmes.
In this talk, Daniel goes inside some of the most effective organizations in the world, including Pixar, Navy SEALs Team Six, IDEO, and the San Antonio Spurs, and reveals how they generate a sense of belonging in their workforce, and other organizational traits. He will not only explain what makes such groups tick, but also identify the key factors that can generate team cohesion in any walk of life. He will examine the verbal and physical cues that bring people together, and the specific strategies that encourage collaboration and build trust. This talk, based on Dan’s groundbreaking book The Culture Code, is based on a simple insight — great groups don’t happen by chance. They are built according to three universal rules.
All talent is really located in the brain. Talent hotbeds, tiny places that produce huge numbers of high performers, succeed because they capitalize on the fundamental mechanism for growing high-speed neural circuitry. The patterns of the hotbeds — of practice, motivation, and coaching — show us the blueprint for building our own talent hotbed. Daniel explains how to put this blueprint to work, drawing from his work with the U.S. Army, the U.S. Olympic High Performance Division, the British PGA, Nike, and others. Daniel gives versions of this talk relevant to both business and education audiences.
A cook’s tour through the revolutionary new science of talent development, which is far less about genes, and far more about the brain — specifically, about building the brain through certain forms of intensive practice, motivation, and coaching. Drawing on his research at a dozen of the world’s talent hotbeds, from the soccer fields of Brazil to a classical-music academy in upstate New York, Daniel Coyle identifies three essential habits for maximal talent growth, and offers simple, effective ways to put them to use.
