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.

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

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.

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.

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