Dave Evans
Co-author of the #1 New York Times-bestselling book Designing Your Life
Bill Burnett
Executive Director of the Design Program at Stanford and co-author of the #1 New York Times-bestselling book Designing Your Life
“You never finish designing your life—life is a joyous and never-ending design project of building your way forward.
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Photo provided by speaker.
Bill Burnett is an award-winning Silicon Valley designer and the Executive Director of the renowned Design Program at Stanford University. He is the co-author of the #1 New York Times-bestselling book Designing Your Life, which has created a global movement with 1 million copies sold and over 400 Life Design programs established around the world. A thoughtful and motivational speaker, Burnett emphasizes actionable tools in his lectures and workshops from life design to the art of innovation and creativity.
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About Bill Burnett
Bill Burnett’s penchant for drawing and building things began at a very early age. Today, he is a very successful designer, having worked at start-ups and Fortune 100 companies, including Apple. His innovative thinking helped create award-winning products such as PowerBook laptops and the original Hasbro Star Wars action figures.
Burnett then turned his passion for design into a career as an Adjunct Professor of Mechanical Engineering and the Executive Director of the Product Design Program at Stanford University. There, with his colleague Dave Evans, Burnett created a Life Design class that Fast Company has called “a course that’s part throwback, part foreshadowing of higher education’s future.” Inspired by the demand for this course, Burnett and Evans published Designing Your Life to teach readers how to use design thinking to build meaningful, fulfilling lives and establish a growth mindset. The book struck a chord, becoming an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. Designing Your New Work Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness—and a New Freedom—at Work applied that transformative thinking to the place we spend more time than anywhere else: work.
In thought-provoking lectures, Bill Burnett brings the principles from his bestselling books to larger audiences—proving that the same design thinking used to create amazing technology, products, and spaces can also be used to design and build a person’s career and life.
Burnett earned his Bachelors of Science and Masters of Science in Mechanical Engineering, Product Design at Stanford. He holds a number of mechanical and design patents as well as design awards and advises several other internet start-ups. He lectures around the country on design thinking and offers a popular e-course on the subject through Creative Live with Dave Evans.
Download our Designing Your Life Company Reads discussion guide.
Contact us for more information about booking Bill Burnett for your next event.
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Speaking Topics
Designing Your Life
The question “What do I want to be when I grow up?” is one that never truly goes away. Whether you are a college grad entering the workforce, a forty year-old shifting careers, or a sixty-eight year-old trying to define an encore career, the search for a fulfilling life never stops. In this riveting keynote that can also be combined with an interactive workshop, award-winning product designer Bill Burnett teaches audiences how to look at career and life planning through the lens of design. Participants are given the tools to build their way forward and to develop various life scenarios just like a designer tests multiple prototypes. This approach fosters creativity and adaptability and allows audiences to accept that there is never just one right path.
The Solution to Non-Stop Disruption is Non-Stop Design
Life-altering disruptions can be personal, regional or global and are increasingly part of modern life—the rapid expansion of A.I. being a prime example. We all need to know how to design our way through them. When a disruption arrives, it ends the way things were and throws life into a confusing latent zone before the new world begins. The only way out of the waiting room is through generative acceptance. Bill Burnett teaches how to turn the ambiguity of disruption into design freedom by generatively engaging the new reality and staying ahead of the unpredictable. Disruption Design is a new core competency for modern life that can not only help us learn to survive disruption, but to find new opportunities within the uncertainty.
The Human in the Room: Make Work More Meaningful
Traditional, hierarchical relationships between employers and employees are shifting rapidly, and the future of talent retention across generations lies in keeping employees engaged. Bill Burnett helps organizations adopt design thinking strategies, integrating managers’ personal development conversations with employees’ life design goals so that each employee can actively co-create his or her experience within the company. Burnett demonstrates how this change in relationships offers the potential to make work a more human experience for all of us and warns against the danger for business leaders who ignore this shift in the culture.
The Art of Innovation
In today’s fast-paced markets, every organization needs to master the Art of Innovation. Stanford’s Design Group has been teaching and researching this topic for over 50 years. Executive Director Bill Burnett can help your team understand how to organize for innovation and teach you how to create a Culture of Creativity. His talks include some neuroscience, some theory, and some very practical ideas for how to shift your thinking to make innovation a regular part of your portfolio.
Categories: Business + Entrepreneurship Speakers, Art + Design Speakers, College + University Speakers, Commencement + Convocation Speakers, Employee Engagement + Development Speakers, First-Year Experience Speakers, Future of Work Speakers, Innovation + Creativity Speakers, Motivational + Inspirational Speakers, Wellness + Personal Growth Speakers -
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Praise for Bill Burnett
Dave and Bill perfectly hit the balance for the audience and spoke to the crowd in a targeted way. I couldn’t have hoped for anything more. The room was packed and in spite of being early in the morning, about 1000 people attended. Smashing success.
— Clio Cloud ConferenceBill was great!! His content was right on target with what we requested and received very well by the audience. It really helped deepen our understanding of design thinking.
— Center for Creative Arts. . . Bill was engaging, humorous, and fearless in taking our questions and scenarios, and also in sharing his views of other processes for attaining creativity and innovation. We put ourselves in his hands for 4 hours, and emerged more thoughtful and energized than I could have hoped for. I highly recommend engaging with Bill to get a different way of thinking about life’s important questions and a different pathway to solving them.
— PanasonicPraise for Designing Your Life
Designing Your Life walks readers through the process of building a satisfying, meaningful life by approaching the challenge the way a designer would. Experimentation. Wayfinding. Prototyping. Constant iteration. You should read the book. Everyone else will.
— Daniel Pink, bestselling author of DriveThe prototype for a happy life…Burnett and Evans show how to apply Stanford’s famous design principles to finding your place in the world, as a recent graduate or mid-career.
— NPR’s Brian LehrerLife has questions. They have answers…Learn how to find a fulfilling career…learn how to better navigate life’s big moment decisions and kill your ‘wicked problems dead.'
— The New York TimesPerhaps the book’s most important lesson is that the only failure is settling for a life that makes one unhappy. With useful fact-finding exercises, an empathetic tone, and sensible advice, this book will easily earn a place among career-finding classics
— Publishers Weekly -
Books by Bill Burnett
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Media About Bill Burnett
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and Availability
- 212 572-2013
- Bill Burnett travels from San Francisco, CA
Featured Title
Designing Your Life
“Life has questions. They have answers.”
—The New York Times
“[T]he go-to book that is read as a rite of passage whenever someone is ready to create a life they love.”
—David Kelley, Founder of IDEO
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