Leadership Keynote Speaker | Author
Cross-examiner. 41 years getting experts to say what they actually knew.
Mentalist. 48 years reading what people aren’t saying.
Leader. More than 20 years running a law firm. Fourteen board and trustee seats.
Negotiator. A lifetime of finding the piece nobody brought to the table.
Anybody can run a meeting. Running a room means knowing who hasn’t spoken, and why.
The engineer sees the risk.
The lawyer sees the exposure.
The frontline team sees the friction.
The designer sees the big picture.
Each is right.
The answer is usually already in the room.
It just never reaches the decision.
That is the Integration Gap, and giving leaders the tools to close it is the foundation of every keynote I deliver.
I have been a trial lawyer, negotiator, civil engineer, CEO, government advisor and professional mentalist. (And yes, the mentalism comes in handy in court, in negotiations and on stage.)
It wasn’t a string of unrelated careers. It was one long education as a generalist: getting fluent enough in other people’s work to see where it meets, and getting people who know different things to put it together.
Each one taught me to get fluent enough in someone else’s world to ask the question they hadn’t asked themselves.
And every one of them ended at the same table.
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Engineer. Trial lawyer. Mentalist. Restaurateur. Artist…
Nobody warned me that was a contradiction.
…I guess Whitman already had.
“I’ve spent my life moving between worlds: the courtroom, the boardroom, and the stage. Forty-one years of one, forty-eight of another, and a long time figuring out they were never separate.”
I live near Hershey, Pennsylvania, and I run on caffeine, curiosity, and the belief that the best ideas show up where disciplines overlap.
Book me, and your audience leaves with tools they are still using weeks later.
Your planning team gets a partner every step of the way.
What Makes Joe Different
I don’t come from one narrow lane. Engineer and builder. Prosecutor, trial lawyer and juvenile judge. Head of a law firm for more than 20 years, advisor to executives, and a seat on 14 boards. Restaurateur, artist, mentalist and author.
I have performed since I was a teenager. I served as president of the Psychic Entertainers Association, an international organization of professional mentalists, and received its Founders Life Membership Award, the organization’s highest honor.
Mentalism is the craft of reading what people aren’t saying. I used it on witnesses and juries. On stage, it is what makes the message stick. I know what to do with a room.
My keynotes give audiences words and tools they can use right away, in meetings, in decisions, and in the conversations they have been avoiding.
The courtroom, the stage, the pivots between them. Joe’s complete career journey is documented here.
For those who want the specifics on Joe’s career, association leadership, and civic record, his full CV is available here.
