Michael Hebb

Michael and the team at Life Over Dinner have spent the past 25 years creating powerful experiences to build deep connection and community over shared meals in the workplace and at leadership gatherings around the world. Their initiatives have gathered millions of folks to connect deeply over the topics we often avoid. There are two ways they work: customizing an existing Life Over Dinner model (Generations Over Dinner, Drug, AI Over Dinner, etc.) for your organization or building a new model that reflects your specific needs. Michael’s work has had significant impact at organizations such as The Obama Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, The Aspen Institute, LinkedIn, Chevron, Uber, Cleveland Clinic, TEDMED. This customizable format creates a transformative experience and better connection for audiences.

The pandemic revolutionized how the world thinks, experiences and talks about grief and death. We witnessed grief become a public conversation across social platforms, in the workplace and among family and friends. Facing our mortality and learning how to work with grief are essential tools that we unfortunately do not teach, even in professions that often work in these areas. Michael has spent the past decade sitting down with thousands of regular people and esteemed leaders at dinner parties around the world, as part of his initiative Death Over Dinner and bestselling book Let’s Talk About Death, to develop a deeper understanding of how to extract meaning and purpose from our grief and mortality. His clear tools for integrating the taboo of death and grief have been utilized by organizations such as Deloitte, Cleveland Clinic, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Vitas Hospice, Alma Therapy, TEDMED and thousands of other organizations. This talk is perfect for a conference or within an enterprise organization and has the ability to transform the attendees' relationship to grief and end of life planning.

Our society, our workplace and our personal lives face a critical deficit of age diversity. When the young and the old are no longer connected and sharing ideas and life experience, culture is in peril. The combination of wisdom of our older generations and the passion and innovation of the young have always been where humanity finds solutions to the critical issues we face. Michael and Chip Conley developed Generations Over Dinner in collaboration with Stanford Center on Longevity to reconnect this missing link. This interactive talk, workshop and immersive experience has successfully been integrated into organizations such as Uber, Chevron, Linkedin and hundreds of Senior Living locations around the world. This session brings together attendees from various generations to build bridges and create strong tools for collaboration, and help deepen employee dedication and sustained investment in the culture of the workplace.

Our culture is suffering from an epidemic of separation and isolation. How we gather and connect as humans is one of the most critical questions we face as individuals, communities, organizations and countries. Michael has spent the past 25 years building initiatives that challenge the status quo and has helped redefine how leaders and the general public gather. This talk, workshop and immersive experience is a journey into the core principles of how to build emergent strategies to break through isolation and profoundly connect the people in your sphere of influence. Discover the work that has impacted The Obama Foundation, The Aspen Institute, The World Economic Forum and a long list of organizations. Attendees will learn clear and applicable tools to significantly impact how your organization gathers employees, partners and the public you serve.