Name: Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence
Author: Erica Dhawan

Speaking Fee Starts at $52,000

Named the “Oprah of Management Thinkers,” Erica Dhawan is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, top-rated keynote speaker, founder & CEO of Cotential, and the world’s leading authority on 21st-century collaboration and connectional intelligence.

Meet Erica Dhawan

When leaders want to break team silos, drive exponential growth, and innovate through teamwork, they call Erica Dhawan.

Erica is an internationally recognized authority, bestselling author, and advisor on 21st century teamwork, collaboration, and innovation. Named by Thinkers50 as the “Oprah of Management Thinkers,” she is the author of three books: Use Your Brain, Digital Body Language, and Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence.

The world of business is increasingly digital, and work practices have changed at a blistering rate. Erica shares innovative strategies to unlock the collective power of teams, build a culture of trust across any distance, and create authentic engagement that keeps organizations competitive and original in the age of AI. Rated #1 on the Top Women Keynote Speakers list and featured among the top 50 management thinkers most likely to shape the future of business, Erica appears frequently in Harvard Business Review, New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. She pairs storytelling and humor with research to give audiences interactive, refreshing, practical strategies for modern, innovation-driving teamwork.

She holds degrees from Harvard, MIT, and Wharton.

Erica Dhawan is available to be booked for corporate and private events. Contact the Mollie Plotkin Group today to inquire about Erica Dhawan’s fees.

Want to book Erica Dhawan for an event?

Contact the Mollie Plotkin Group at 215-995-0905 to book Erica Dhawan for a keynote speech, corporate event, leadership program, workshop, fireside chat, virtual appearance, or other private or professional event.

Our team will help confirm Erica Dhawan’s availability, speaking fee, travel requirements, and fit for your audience. To start the booking process, please share your event date, location, audience size, event format, and the type of presentation you are looking for.

The Mollie Plotkin Group is a full-service keynote speaker agency and entertainment bureau that helps organizations secure keynote speakers, entertainers, athletes, celebrities, and thought leaders for corporate meetings, conferences, fundraisers, and special events.

Biography

21st Century Teamwork & Collaboration

As a shy, introverted Indian-American girl growing up in Pittsburgh, Erica Dhawan struggled to find her voice. She juggled two languages and two cultures, but, eventually, learned the skills needed to build connections across differences. Since then, she’s been fascinated with human connection and studying 21st-century teamwork and collaboration.

For over 20 years, Erica has studied human innovation and collaboration.

She has degrees from Harvard, MIT Sloan, and The Wharton School, teaching courses in leadership and collaboration as a research fellow at Harvard and MIT as well. Her research during this time motivated her to start a speaking business which took off after her book Get Big Things Done became a best-seller.

Suddenly, she was a sought-after keynote speaker, addressing global leaders at the World Economic Forum, getting interviewed by Good Morning America host Robin Roberts, and teaching twenty-first-century collaboration skills to thousands of leaders across various industries, companies, and countries.

Media

In addition to Get Big Things Done, Erica has written a second WSJ bestselling book – Digital Body Language. While Get Big Things Done challenges audiences and organizations to innovate faster and further, together, Digital Body Language teaches audiences new means of effective collaboration and teamwork in a digital-first human workplace.

Erica also regularly contributes to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Fast Company. Her research on 21st-century teamwork has also been featured in the New York Times, WSJ, and World Economic Forum at Davos.

Hire Erica Dhawan

The business world is increasingly digital and work practices are changing at a blistering rate.

Erica uses the power of storytelling, humor, and key research findings to provide audiences with interactive, refreshing, practical strategies for modern innovation-driving teamwork. She was named by Thinkers50 as “The Oprah of Management Ideas,” featured as one of the Top 20 Management Experts around the world by GlobalGurus, and been ranked as a top female keynote speaker.

Erica’s Past Clients Include:

Coldwell Banker
McDonald’s
World Economic Forum Annual Meeting at Davos
Google
The Walt Disney Company
Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield
The United States Army
Bank of America
The Miami Heat
The Association for Talent Development
Lockheed Martin
and more

How to Hire Erica Dhawan

To hire Erica Dhawan for an event, contact the Mollie Plotkin Group with the proposed event date, location, audience size, event format and program goals. Erica Dhawan is available for corporate events, conferences, leadership meetings, private events, workshops, fireside chats and virtual programs.

After receiving your request, a Mollie Plotkin Group booking agent will review Erica Dhawan’s availability, discuss the event details and get back to you within 48 hours with next steps for securing Erica Dhawan for your program.

Erica Dhawan Booking Fee

The cost to book Erica Dhawan depends on the event date, location, format, audience size and scope of the appearance. Erica Dhawan’s speaking fee starts at $52,000, while virtual programs typically start at $30,000. Speaking fees may vary for keynote speeches, workshops, fireside chats, private events, corporate meetings and virtual programs.

For the most accurate Erica Dhawan booking fee, contact the Mollie Plotkin Group with your event details. Our team will help confirm availability, pricing and the best format for your event.

Speaking Topics & Programs

Erica tailors her program to each audience and industry she speaks with so if you would like to discuss tailoring his keynote further, schedule a Zoom call with Erica and the MPG team.

Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence

Two teams have been working on the same problem for six months. Neither knows the other exists. That is what endless meetings, cross-team dysfunction, duplication, and delay actually cost you. And it isn’t a tools problem. Your people can find any document, any dataset, any answer in seconds. So why is collaboration still hard?

Because what actually moves work forward is their human relationships across silos. The colleague who tried this years ago and watched it fail. The client relationship that makes a hard conversation possible. Tools can retrieve everything your company recorded. It cannot reach what only your people know.

When every organization has the same tools, the edge belongs to those who connect across the lines that divide them. Function to function. Region to region. Level to level.

Erica Dhawan, global expert on 21st century teamwork and innovation and author of Get Big Things Done, named this Connectional Intelligence, which turns people into superconnectors who break silos and drive breakthrough impact. She shows leaders and teams how to surface what no system captured, build trust fast across boundaries, and unlock the collective expertise of the whole enterprise.

Learning Outcomes:

Surface the tacit knowledge and relationship capital no AI system can retrieve
Diagnose where collaboration stalls in your organization, and unstick it
Break silos and keep teams aligned, accountable, and motivated
Build trust across functions, geographies, and reporting lines without adding meetings

Use Your Brain: Critical Thinking Intelligence for the Era on Autopilot

Your people aren’t using AI. They’re agreeing with it. We stopped drafting and started approving. We stopped wrestling with the idea and started accepting the summary. It feels like productivity. It’s cognitive surrender, and it’s quietly flattening originality, weakening recall, and producing decisions no one in the room can actually defend.

Erica Dhawan, global expert on 21st century teamwork and innovation and author of Use Your Brain, argues that Critical Thinking Intelligence is to this decade what Emotional Intelligence was to the ’90s: the differentiator between the leaders who compound and the ones who get automated.

This is a keynote about running at full speed without outsourcing the original thinking that makes your people worth paying for. Based on case studies and practical storytelling, Dhawan sends audiences home with team rituals they can run the next morning: the Think Sandwich, where human judgment opens and closes every AI-assisted task, the Friction Meeting, where someone is assigned to argue how the work is wrong; and a Decision Filter for what to automate, what to augment, and what stays non-negotiably human.

Interactive, immediately usable, and built for teams that think originally and creatively in our modern age.

Learning Outcomes:

Catch themselves and their teams on autopilot, and put real thinking back around the machine in their organization and with customers/clients
Pressure-test technology output, stop AI slop, separate signal from noise, and decide what to automate, augment, and protect
Own high-stakes decisions they can explain, defend, and recall

Collaborate Faster and Further, Together

Every message is now well-written. Warm opener. Clean structure. Thoughtful closing line. And you have no idea whether the person actually read your note, cared about your problem, or was even the one who wrote it. That’s the new trust problem.

In the past, the signals were sloppy but real. A rushed reply meant something. A typo at 11pm meant something. A long thoughtful message meant someone spent time on you. Effort used to be visible in the writing. Now polish is free.

Erica Dhawan, global expert on 21st century teamwork and innovation and author of the WSJ bestseller Digital Body Language decodes what actually signals care, credibility, and commitment. Specificity is the new sincerity. Response time is the new eye contact. Showing your reasoning is the new showing your work. And the fastest way to rebuild trust with a client, a peer, or a direct report is to be unmistakably human in a channel where everyone else sounds like a machine.

This keynote will name the norms that are quietly eroding trust, and leave audiences with shared communication rules and guidelines for what gets automated, what gets drafted, and what has to come from a person.

Learning Outcomes:

Read the signals that still carry meaning, and stop trusting the ones AI made worthless
Create cultures of maniacal clarity across email, phone, IM, text, video and even live meetings
Rebuild credibility with clients and colleagues in channels flooded with perfect, forgettable communication

Erica’s presentation was an absolute hit. – Erik Spoelstra, Head Coach of Miami Heat

Erica offers a profound look at how to foster inclusion and better leadership in our digital world. – Billie Jean King, American Tennis Star, Founder, Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative

Terrific. Our leaders were very engaged and had immediate practical takeaways. Erica made a big impact. – Mike Fucci, Chairman Emeritus, Deloitte

Non-verbal cues are vital to understanding each other. Now that so much communication happens online–and with the massive shift to distance learning and remote workplaces–we need Erica Dhawan’s book more than ever. In Digital Body Language, Erica shares tips and strategies for communicating effectively on chats, emails, and video calls, so everyone can successfully share and connect in the digital age. – Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook

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Featured Book

Use Your Brain: Think Deeper in a World on Autopilot

When was the last time you thought something through by yourself, without a screen?

There is a version of you that has stopped thinking; you just haven’t noticed yet. It happens quietly. You stop drafting emails and start approving them. You cannot answer a question without checking your phone. You stop wrestling with the idea and start accepting the summary. Every shortcut feels like a win until you’ve outsourced your mind to machines that don’t doubt, don’t feel, and don’t care.

The atrophy is subtle; the cost is staggering. It’s the promotion lost to the person who can still reason out loud. It’s your child freezing at an open-ended question because no one ever let her sit in the discomfort of not knowing. We are becoming a generation that prompts brilliantly and thinks almost nothing, and the most dangerous part is how good it feels on the way down.

But you don’t have to go down. Use Your Brain is a field guide for revitalizing your creativity and original thinking when the generic answer is always a tap away, whether it’s in the boardroom or around the kitchen table. From CEOs to artists to students to parents, the most effective navigators of the modern era have one thing in common: they aren’t afraid to pick up a new tool, but they know exactly when to put it down and think for themselves.

Drawing on years of research, globally-recognized leadership expert Erica Dhawan delivers common-sense habits for protecting your judgment in the age of AI that you can start building tonight. You will learn how to catch yourself on autopilot before you act, how to interrogate an answer that looks finished, how to separate signal from noise under pressure, and how to own a decision instead of laundering it through a machine.

The thinking class and the prompting class are separating in real time, and the gap is going to be brutal. The window to keep your edge is still open. It won’t stay open long.

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Also by Erica Dhawan

Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance

St. Martin's Press · 2021

Digital Body Language explains how trust, clarity and connection change when communication moves from rooms to screens. The book decodes the signals carried by email, messaging, video calls and response patterns, showing how seemingly small digital behaviors can create confidence or confusion. It offers practical rules for communicating more intentionally across remote and hybrid teams where traditional body language is often missing.

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Also by Erica Dhawan

Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence

St. Martin's Press · 2026

Get Big Things Done introduces connectional intelligence: the ability to combine people, ideas, knowledge and networks to create results that would be difficult to achieve alone. The book examines how modern connectivity can become more than a large contact list by turning relationships into meaningful collaboration. It offers a framework for mobilizing diverse resources around ambitious goals in an increasingly networked world.

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