Juliet Funt

Juliet Funt is the founder and CEO of the Juliet Funt Group (JFG), a consulting and training firm that helps organizations remove low-value work and recover employee capacity. She speaks to corporate, government, and military audiences on reducing busyness, including excess meetings, email, and competing priorities, so teams can protect the work that produces results.

Funt is a repeat keynote speaker at the Global Leadership Summit. Her book on creating strategic thinking time at work is taught at the U.S. Army War College and Joint Special Operations University. Her clients include Spotify, National Geographic, Costco, Pepsi, Nike, and Wells Fargo, and her work has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, CNBC, and NPR.

Her keynotes teach a reductive approach to work: deciding what to stop doing rather than ranking an ever-longer list. She gives leaders methods for evaluating commitments, cutting low-value activity, and restoring the unscheduled thinking time that strategy and creativity depend on.

Through JFG, Funt and the firm’s certified presenters deliver keynotes, workshops, eLearning, and enterprise-wide efficiency programs for midsize and large organizations.

Categories: Innovation and Creativity, Workforce Issues

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Videos

Topics

The De-Selection Advantage: Why Having 151 “Priorities” Is Killing Your Execution, and How to Fix It

Organizations are not failing from a lack of ambition. They are being crushed by an excess of it.

Most leaders, in their drive to achieve, treat work like a pie-eating contest, where the goal is always MORE. More initiatives, more meetings, more metrics, more work about work. Volume becomes the measure of true commitment. But the result of “more” is not, always momentum. It is often fragmentation, decision fatigue, and execution that slows to a crawl while teams heroically absorb the weight.

This paradigm is broken, and it’s expensive. In more than twelve years of research across industries, the Juliet Funt Group has proven that employees report spending 23% of their time on low-value work, at a cost of $1,000,000 annually for every 50 people. Much of this wasted payroll cascades down from over-planning at the top, in the form of too many different priorities and projects. Nobody wins. Execution slows. The best people burn out or check out.

The skill that we pretend to have, but do not, is that of de-selection. Teams orchestrate stop-start-continue exercises but never actually stop anything. But there is a way out of this vice grip of intensity, and it’s not even complex. All that is required is the decision to shift the goal from volume to value.

In this signature keynote, Juliet Funt introduces the Reductive Mindset: a practical operating philosophy for leaders who want to protect the work that actually produces results. With humor, precision, and examples drawn from real organizations, she shows why complexity gets rewarded, why excess gets normalized, and most importantly, how to fix these issues.

In this session, Juliet Funt takes us on a 5-Stage Journey from fragmented to focused:
*Less Fatigue: reclaim the vitality needed to take the next step
*Less Volume: the overflowing pile of low-value work finally shrinks
*Less Drift: time-waste and distractions are vanquished
*Less Email: because it’s become everyone’s primary mission
*Less Meetings: so there is time to do actual work

Audiences leave with a concrete framework for evaluating commitments, cutting low-value activity, and recovering the decision quality that overload destroys. This talk lays a clear and simple path to doing what matters most every day.

The highest-performing leaders are often the ones most willing to stop, remove, and reduce. In a business environment addicted to accumulation, the ability to cut with intelligence is not a soft skill, but a competitive advantage.

Books

A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

In A Minute to Think, Juliet Funt has created a powerful and inspirational guide that will give you the permission, framework, and specific direction you need to regain control of your overloaded, caffeinated, inbox-worshipping workday and find your precious minute.

You can purchase this book here

Testimonials

On stage, Juliet is a force of nature.

Angela Ahrendts DBE, Former SVP, Apple, and former CEO, Burberry

We were able to manage an impossible business triad as a result of this program.

Josh Grote, Executive Director, Chick-fil-A Supply

JFG helps talent stay creative and passionate about their efforts.

Ken Priyadarshi, Head of Engineering, IBM High-Tech & Electronics

(Juliet Funt’s) book is more than a first-rate guide to getting more and better work done.

Daniel H. Pink, Author of When, Drive, and To Sell Is Human

Juliet Funt makes a compelling case for a tactic that’s both critically important and distressingly overlooked.

Cal Newport, Author of A World Without Email and Deep Work

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