HOW CAN GENEROSITY BECOME YOUR DISRUPTIVE STRATEGY?
From Intention to Impact: Making Generosity a Cultural Strategy
A keynote presentation with live exercises, customized (every time!) to your audience, industry, and need.
Key takeaways include:
Learn
The social science and real life stories emerging from the Drop Dead Generous global experiment.
CODIFY
Our playbook is underpinned by our 4 Cs framework that’s easy to remember and execute.
ACTIVATE
Positive behaviour change for any team or org seeking to jumpstart wellbeing, leadership, and productivity.
OUR Speakers
Our speakers are the team behind Drop Dead Generous. Each have their own unique personal stories and corporate experiences. Combined they have spoken at hundreds of events across industries and regions.
John M Sweeney
Before co-founding Drop Dead Generous, John set up Suspended Coffees, a global pay-it-forward movement and community of 500,000 people. He is a prolific speaker both on stage and everywhere else.
Tom Cledwyn
Tom founded Drop Dead Generous after roles as Global Creative Strategist at Meta and Managing Director of the Infectious Generosity initiative at TED. In 2012 he became the youngest person in the UK to donate a kidney to a stranger.
John J Sweeney
The second John Sweeney in our team has delivered keynotes and workshops to more than 130 of the Fortune 500. He's been changing human behaviours on stage through improv, innovation and also as a viral social media sensation, Jiggly Boy.
THE RESEARCH JOUNREY
Our talks are grounded in research, tested through real-world experiments, and refined through practice. This timeline shows how generosity moved from academic insight to applied framework—one organisations can actively use.
The Impetus
Run out of TED and known as ‘The Mystery Experiment’, two wealthy donors gave $10,000 to 200 people across seven countries and on average, an extraordinary two-thirds of the money was then given away. Published in PNAS, the the takeaway is simple and radical: generosity begets generosity and total human happiness grows.
The Inspiration
If generosity spreads, what happens when you release it into the world on purpose? In 2024, Head of TED, Chris Anderson writes ‘Infectious Generosity’ as a follow up to the ripple effects of the Mystery Experiment. In it, he proposes how to catalyse generosity in today's connected world.
The Experimentation
In 2025, Drop Dead Generous was launched to take Chris’s blueprint into the real world. We’re giving $500 to 1,000 people with a single brief: do something generous with it. What has followed isn’t a campaign, but an ongoing social science experiment crowd sourcing ideas and stories of real life generosity in action.
The Analysis
In partnership with the Centre for Research on Kindness at the University of Sussex, we identified four core attributes that make generosity effective. Together, they underpin prosocial behaviours that drive happier, healthier, and more cooperative company cultures. These ‘4Cs’ are the framework our talks to your audiences.
How generosity becomes culture: The Four Cs
Together, the Four Cs form a repeatable pattern: notice, imagine, act, and invite others in. That’s how generosity becomes culture—not a one-off, but a way of working.
Curiosity
Every act of generosity starts with noticing. In Drop Dead Generous projects around the world, the first step is never money or ideas—it’s attention.
Someone sees a person, a gap, or a quiet struggle and allows empathy to form. As Chris Anderson writes in Infectious Generosity, attention is the first gift. Without it, generosity can’t be designed or scaled.
- Curious teams make better decisions because they make fewer assumptions about customers and colleagues
- Curiosity helps leaders spot burnout, disengagement, and risk earlier
- A culture of noticing increases trust, psychological safety, and inclusion
Creativity
When people are given a clear brief and a simple constraint, creativity flourishes. With just $500, grantees don’t default to generic help—they design thoughtful, specific acts that genuinely matter.
Creativity here isn’t about artistry; it’s about asking, given this person and this moment, what is the most generous thing we could design?
- Creative generosity leads to more human-centred products, services, and policies
- Constraints fuel innovation by forcing teams to think beyond standard solutions
- Employees who feel free to imagine better ways of helping are more engaged and motivated
Courage
Between intention and action, most generous acts quietly die. Courage is the moment someone decides to move anyway—to send the message, make the call, or step into uncertainty. Across Drop Dead Generous stories, courage is rarely dramatic; it’s small, human, and decisive. And without it, generosity stays theoretical.
- Courage enables honest conversations before problems escalate
- Teams that normalise courageous kindness recover faster from mistakes
- Psychological courage strengthens accountability, integrity, and performance
Collaboration
The most powerful insight came last. Again and again, individual acts of generosity became shared efforts. Neighbours got involved. Colleagues pitched in. Communities formed. Collaboration is where generosity becomes contagious—moving through networks rather than stopping with one person. This is how generosity scales.
- Collaborative generosity strengthens cross-team relationships
- Shared ownership increases momentum and follow-through
- Cultures that reward collective generosity outperform those built on individual heroics
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Our Shared Impact
100% of our speaking fees go directly into funding more acts of generosity through the Drop Dead Generous experiment.
Make anEnquiry
Ready to explore what generosity could unlock for your organisation? Share a few details and we’ll start the conversation.
FAQs
This keynote is designed for senior leaders, founders, HR and People teams, and organisations navigating growth, change or cultural reset.
It works particularly well for leadership conferences, company-wide gatherings, and executive offsites where culture, performance and behaviour are central themes.
Audiences leave with:
- A clear understanding of what “generosity” means in a business context
- Practical leadership behaviours that build trust and performance
- A framework for turning values into consistent cultural action
- Language and tools to embed generosity into everyday decision-making
This isn’t theory. It’s applicable the next day.
It’s a strategic examination of how generosity functions as a behavioural multiplier inside organisations. The talk connects generosity to performance, retention, innovation, and leadership credibility.
It is grounded in evidence, lived experience, and real-world application. Not sentiment. Ok, a little bit of sentiment.
Yes.
We offer pre-event briefings to understand your context, challenges and priorities. Where appropriate, the talk can incorporate industry-specific framing, relevant case studies, or themes aligned with your strategic goals.
The aim is always relevance, not repetition.
Yes we do.
In addition to the keynote, we can offer:
- Leadership workshops
- Facilitated strategy sessions
- Culture design discussions
- Smaller group deep-dives
These sessions help translate insight into implementation.
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