Adam Braun

Adam Braun is a New York Times bestselling author and the founder of Pencils of Promise, an award-winning organisation that is well on its way to achieving its goal of making a quality education a possibility for everyone. He is also one of the US’s leading speakers on purpose-based leadership and innovation.

Adam Braun has been a featured speaker at The White House, the United Nations and the Clinton Global Initiative. With more than 500,000 followers he is one of the country’s most engaging entrepreneurs and is a highly sought-after speaker at major conferences and with Fortune 500 companies.

At the age of just 31, he was named to Business Insider’s 40 Under 40, Wired magazine‘s 50 People Who Are Changing the World, and was selected as one of the World Economic Forum’s first ten Global Shapers. Adam was previously nominated for the TED Prize and has received his nation’s oldest and most prestigious award for public service, the Jefferson Award. In 2015 he joined a coalition to address high-level challenges with Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu and several Nobel Peace Prize winners.

Adam Braun’s book The Promise of a Pencil is a New York Times, Amazon.com and Wall Street Journal bestseller.

Adam Braun’s inspiring story proves that anyone can take small steps to lead a successful and significant life.

Adam’s story is how one young man turned $25 into more than 300 schools, serving more than 30,000 students around the world and built a global community. While travelling abroad Adam met a young boy begging on the streets of India. When Adam asked him what he wanted most in the world, he simply answered, ‘a pencil’. This small request became the inspiration for Pencils of Promise, the organisation Adam would leave a successful Wall Street career several years later to launch.

Adam Braun talks about:

• For-Profit, For-Purpose: New Currency in a Borderless World – Using his unique “for-purpose” approach, Adam Braun meshed for-profit business acumen with non-profit idealism and created a model now followed by a mission driven generation. Adam shares his experience as a model for how to get ‘unstuck’, outlining the key steps that can actively transform even the smallest ideas into a big reality. In this engaging journey-filled presentation, he explains the chances he took early on in his entrepreneurial journey, placing his bets on what he foresaw as an upcoming significant rise in the ‘profitable purpose’, which also harnessed the power of Millennials entering the workforce, and how together they realised that the most valuable currency we each possess is our commitment to a shared mission.

• Ordinary Person, Extraordinary Change: How to Affect the Masses – Adam Braun captivates audiences with his story of being an ordinary person, creating extraordinary change – something he believes everyone can do. In this inspirational presentation, Braun shares five key phrases that will serve as guideposts when facing the most challenging moments in our careers and lives. This talk takes your audience on an unforgettable and inspiring journey that is sure to leave them buzzing and eager to consider the following questions with a new lens:
– How do you discover your next big idea?
– How do you turn a passion into action?
– How do you use social media to build a movement?
– How do you empower and inspire others?

• The Alpha Effect: How Great Leaders Invest in Others – While most think of an alpha leader as the dominant figure in every room, true alpha males and females in nature are only successful because of the empathy they display towards others in their tribe and the investments they make in strengthening each member of their pack. In this talk, Adam unveils the surprising traits of a new type of enduring leadership that focuses on collective team success and the exact tactics to make it happen. By explaining the best practices of the world’s greatest alpha leaders in creating workplace culture, he unveils the actions you can take today to build teams that reach their greatest potential together.