Book Mark Murphy to Speak

Companies are flattening org charts, widening spans of control, and quietly deciding that managers are overhead. Your people can feel it. The Last Manager Standing keynote gives a room full of managers and leaders something better than reassurance: a clear-eyed read on what's actually happening, why it's happened before, and the specific moves that keep good managers valuable, visible, and impossible to confuse with a cost to cut.

I'm a New York Times bestselling author, a Senior Contributor to Forbes, and the founder of Leadership IQ, and I've spent 25 years running the research on what separates the managers who get cut from the ones who get kept. I bring that research to the stage alongside something most leadership speakers can't; a candid, current take on AI, layoffs, and what it really takes to survive 2026.

Talks I'm giving right now

• Don't Get Flattened: staying valuable when companies turn against managers
• AI Should Work For You, Not Above You: protecting your career in the age of the agent
• Too Useful to Cut: turning yourself from overhead into leverage
• The NFL Knows Something Your CEO Forgot: why elite organizations invest in coaches

Where I speak

Conferences, association meetings, leadership summits, sales kickoffs, business and community organizations, and internal events that want a provocative, evidence-backed outside voice.

Inquire about my availability

Contact Adele Brighton at [email protected]