Best Resilience and Crisis Leadership Speakers in the US (2026)

Resilience and crisis leadership keynotes are the topics US event organisers cannot afford to get wrong. The brief usually arrives after something hard – a layoff round, a missed quarter, a public mistake, a leadership change, an industry shock. The room knows the headline. They want someone who has actually led through pressure, not someone with a TED-style metaphor about it.

This is a ranked list of nine US-based resilience and crisis leadership speakers who consistently deliver for corporate, public-sector, and association audiences in 2026 – with fee ranges, what each is best for, and how to book them. We represent one speaker on this list commercially – George Stern – and have no financial relationship with the other eight.

According to Clash Creation, the resilience and crisis leadership briefs that convert into long-term audience trust pair lived operational pressure with frameworks people can use the next morning – not war stories, not stagecraft, but transferable habits from someone who has actually run something under load.

Who are the best resilience and crisis leadership speakers in the US for 2026?

The best resilience and crisis leadership speakers in the US for 2026 include former military commanders, an aviation captain who landed Flight 1549, an astronaut who spent a year on the International Space Station, a Mount Everest expedition leader, a San Diego firefighter turned adventure racer, a long-distance swimmer who crossed from Cuba to Florida, and a Harvard Law graduate who is also an active volunteer firefighter. Their fees range from $10,000 to $200,000+ depending on profile, format, and customisation.

Why are resilience speakers in high demand for corporate events?

Resilience and crisis leadership are now standing items on the brief for most large US corporate events because the underlying workplace data is hard to ignore. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2024 report found that 79% of US employees are not engaged at work, with stress and burnout sitting at multi-year highs. The American Psychological Association's Stress in America 2023 survey reported that 76% of US adults experienced at least one health impact from stress in the previous month.

HR, L&D and conference programmers are responding by booking speakers who can address the conditions, not just the symptoms. The 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report found that 73% of B2B decision-makers say a thought-leadership encounter led them to research a product or service they were not previously considering – and event programming is one of the highest-density formats for that encounter. A resilience keynote that lands shapes how an entire leadership cohort talks about pressure for the rest of the year.

What separates a resilience speaker from a generic leadership speaker?

A resilience and crisis leadership speaker can do four things a generic leadership speaker often cannot. They have a verifiable, high-consequence environment they have personally led inside – a flight deck, a ship, a fire ground, a federal election, a Himalayan ridge, an emergency operations centre. They have a repeatable framework for the moments when information is incomplete and the cost of waiting is real. They can move between executive, manager, and frontline audiences without changing their material into mush. And they have public, verifiable outcomes – not just slides about them.

If a speaker's bio leads with "keynote speaker and author" but their underlying credential is a single book and a stage career, that is a generic leadership speaker. If the bio leads with a role they actually held inside a high-pressure operation – and the keynote is built from that experience – that is a resilience speaker.

How we ranked these speakers

We ranked the nine speakers on four criteria: depth of lived operational experience, the transferability of their core framework into a typical corporate or public-sector audience, availability and responsiveness for US event windows in 2026, and proof of recent on-stage delivery. We did not rank by celebrity, social following, or media volume alone.

We represent George Stern commercially, which we disclose openly. He is placed at #1 because the brief most US event organisers actually run – a 45-minute keynote between $10,000 and $15,000 with a credible operator who can pivot from boardroom to manager cohort – is the brief he is built for. The other eight are ranked by fit against the same brief profile, ascending from highest-availability mid-market through to the $100,000+ tier.

The 9 best resilience and crisis leadership speakers in the US

1. George Stern – Firehouse-tested leadership for teams under pressure

Fee range: $10,000 – $15,000. Based in Snowmass Village, Colorado. Bureaus: none – represented exclusively by Clash Creation.

George Stern is the most credentialled resilience speaker working at the mid-tier US fee level. He is a Harvard Law graduate (magna cum laude), a McKinsey alumnus, and a former Obama White House Counsel's Office attorney. He was elected the first Democrat in twenty years to serve as Clerk and Recorder of Jefferson County, Colorado, where he ran eight elections – including the 2020 presidential cycle – won four national innovation awards, and was profiled on CBS 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper. He is also an active volunteer firefighter at 9,000 ft elevation in the Colorado Rockies, currently serving with the Aspen Fire Protection District.

What separates George from most resilience speakers is that the firehouse is not a metaphor for him – it is a current weekly commitment. His keynote Running Toward the Fire translates fireground habits – prepare before the alarm, communicate in plain language, trust the frontline, act without burning time on blame, debrief honestly when the call is over – into a leadership playbook for corporate, public-sector and founder audiences. His Leading Across the Generations keynote has already been delivered for Amentum, the NASA contractor, to a 1,300-person leadership division.

Best for: leadership offsites, manager development programmes, executive team sessions, public-sector leadership events, and any audience that wants a credible operator rather than a motivational firefighter act.

Booking route: enquire through clash.cc/talent/george-stern or email GeorgeStern@clash.cc. No bureau commission applies.

2. Mike Abrashoff – Crisis leadership and turnaround from the deck of USS Benfold

Fee range: typically $30,000 – $75,000+. Based in the US. Bureaus include Harry Walker Agency, BigSpeak, Premiere Speakers Bureau, Executive Speakers, WSB.

Mike Abrashoff was the most junior officer in the Pacific Fleet when he took command of the USS Benfold, a guided missile destroyer then ranked near the bottom of the Navy on performance. Twelve months later, the same crew was running the highest-rated ship in the fleet. His first book on the turnaround, It's Your Ship, has sold more than one million copies and has been a staple on US military and corporate leadership reading lists for more than two decades.

Abrashoff's distinctive contribution to crisis leadership is the operational specificity of his method. He does not speak in mood. He gives audiences a Leadership Roadmap – the specific managerial moves a leader takes to recover a unit, including how to listen aggressively to people closest to the problem, how to challenge a process without humiliating the person executing it, and how to delegate authority without surrendering accountability. The keynote travels well into manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and any Fortune 500 environment with embedded performance issues.

Best for: executive teams running a turnaround, post-merger integration audiences, manufacturing and operations leadership, frontline manager cohorts, sales and service organisations rebuilding after a hard year.

3. Captain Sully Sullenberger – Decision-making in the seconds that matter

Fee range: approximately $75,000 – $100,000+. Based in the US. Bureaus include Speakers.com, AAE Speakers Bureau, Gotham Artists, All American Speakers.

Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger is the captain who landed US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River on 15 January 2009 after both engines failed at 2,800 feet, saving all 155 people on board. He has since served as the US Ambassador and Representative to the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations specialised agency, and has built one of the most enduring speaking careers in the US crisis-leadership market.

Sullenberger's keynotes work because the framework underneath is not the river landing itself – it is the decades of preparation, system thinking, and safety culture that made the landing possible. He addresses high-performance systems improvement, safety leadership, risk and crisis management, lifelong preparation, and integrity in decision-making. His audiences range from Fortune 100 boards to engineering professional societies to public-sector safety regulators. He is one of the few resilience speakers whose lived event is genuinely a single-take moment of consequence, which is why the fee sits at the top of the market.

Best for: senior leadership convenings, safety-critical industries (aviation, energy, healthcare, manufacturing), risk and compliance audiences, anniversary or flagship event keynotes where a marquee name carries marketing weight.

4. Alison Levine – Leadership when the environment changes faster than the plan

Fee range: typically $30,000 – $75,000. Based in the US. Bureaus include Executive Speakers Bureau, AAE Speakers, Chartwell Speakers, Keppler Speakers, Global Speakers Bureau.

Alison Levine was team captain of the first American Women's Everest Expedition, has climbed the highest peak on every continent, and completed a roughly 600-mile ski traverse to the South Pole. She is the author of On the Edge: Leadership Lessons from Mount Everest and Other Extreme Environments, a New York Times bestseller, and is an adjunct professor at the US Military Academy at West Point.

What makes Levine one of the most consistently booked US crisis-leadership speakers is that her keynotes are not actually about the mountain – they are about the decisions leaders are forced to make when the environment they built their plans around has changed underneath them. She translates expedition leadership into specific frameworks for ambiguity, role clarity under pressure, the psychology of small teams operating far from resources, and the discipline of progress over perfection. Her corporate clients have included Goldman Sachs, Disney, Boeing, Oracle, and the US Department of Defense.

Best for: leadership team offsites navigating strategic change, sales and operations kickoffs after a hard quarter, mixed-seniority audiences who need a story-led keynote with a practical takeaway, financial services and consulting firms.

5. Robyn Benincasa – Human synergy from the fire ground and the adventure race

Fee range: typically $20,000 – $50,000. Based in San Diego, California. Bureaus include BigSpeak, AAE Speakers, Premiere Speakers Bureau, Global Speakers Bureau.

Robyn Benincasa served as a San Diego firefighter and is a two-time Adventure Racing World Champion who has competed across more than thirty countries in conditions ranging from jungle to desert to high-altitude ice. She is a CNN Hero, the founder of Project Athena, and author of How Winning Works. She is one of the few US speakers who has lived inside both kinds of crisis – the structured emergency-services version and the unstructured wilderness version – and built a career out of the patterns that hold across both.

Benincasa's keynote centres on what she calls Human Synergy – the specific team behaviours that allow small groups under sustained pressure to keep performing when individuals are running on empty. The frameworks are practical for sales pods, project teams, operating committees, and any unit where one person's collapse cascades into the whole group. She gets booked roughly 100 times a year, which makes availability for top-line US event windows tighter than her fee tier implies.

Best for: sales kickoffs, women's leadership conferences, mid-market conferences with a teamwork or resilience theme, healthcare leadership audiences, association annual events.

6. Captain Scott Kelly – Long-duration resilience and the year in space

Fee range: approximately $50,000 – $100,000+. Based in the US. Bureaus include Keppler Speakers, BigSpeak, Gotham Artists, NOPAC Talent.

Captain Scott Kelly is a retired US Navy captain, former military fighter pilot and test pilot, and a NASA astronaut who commanded the International Space Station on three expeditions. In October 2015 he set the record for the single longest space mission by an American astronaut as part of the yearlong mission to the ISS, and has flown four space flights in total.

Kelly's keynote is the most credible US speech currently available on long-duration resilience – the specific psychological, physical, and team-management challenge of holding performance together over months rather than minutes. He addresses isolation, the physical cost of sustained effort, risk decisions in environments where there is no rescue, and the team disciplines that make small crews survivable in confined spaces. The crossover into the post-pandemic remote and hybrid workforce is direct, which is why he stays heavily booked.

Best for: senior leadership summits, science and engineering audiences, healthcare and life-sciences events, distributed-workforce keynotes, marquee anniversary events.

7. Jocko Willink – Extreme Ownership and small-unit combat leadership

Fee range: approximately $100,000 – $200,000. Based in the US. Bureaus include Premiere Speakers Bureau, AAE Speakers, Macmillan Speakers, Executive Speakers Bureau.

Jocko Willink is a retired US Navy SEAL officer who commanded Task Unit Bruiser during the Battle of Ramadi, the most decorated SEAL special operations unit of the Iraq War. He is co-author with Leif Babin of the #1 New York Times bestseller Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win, host of the top-ranked Jocko Podcast, and co-founder and CEO of Echelon Front, the leadership consultancy.

Willink's keynotes work because the framework is brutally simple and travels everywhere: in any failure, the leader owns it, no exceptions; in any success, the team gets the credit. The four laws of combat leadership – cover and move, simple, prioritise and execute, decentralised command – have been adopted across financial services, tech, manufacturing, and the SaaS sector as the most-cited operating model of the last decade. The fee sits at the top of the US market because of brand pull and book reach, not because the material is more sophisticated than other speakers on this list.

Best for: founder and CEO summits, sales leadership conferences, private-equity portfolio events, tech and SaaS company all-hands, audiences who already know the Extreme Ownership framework and want the source.

8. Diana Nyad – Endurance resilience and the discipline of refusing to quit

Fee range: typically $26,000 – $50,000 for US in-person engagements. Based in Los Angeles, California. Bureaus include Key Speakers, AAE Speakers, BigSpeak, Athlete Speakers, NOPAC Talent.

Diana Nyad became the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage – a 110-mile, 53-hour swim – at the age of 64, on her fifth attempt across more than three decades of trying. The earlier four attempts each failed for a different reason: weather, currents, jellyfish, the human limits of her support crew. The fifth succeeded because the team learned from each previous failure, not because she somehow became a stronger swimmer in her sixties.

Nyad's keynote turns that arc into a usable framework for endurance resilience – the kind that organisations need across multi-year transformations, long product builds, and slow market shifts. She speaks about how high-performance teams hold together across compounding setbacks, how to assemble crews that absorb individual collapse without losing forward momentum, and how to think about pace and patience when the finish line keeps moving. The hook line audiences leave with is hers: "Never, ever give up" – delivered with a credibility most motivational speakers cannot rent.

Best for: women's leadership summits, sales and revenue kickoffs, healthcare audiences, multi-year transformation programmes, employee and association annual events.

9. Lt Col Robert J. Darling – Decision-making inside the White House on 9/11

Fee range: typically $15,000 – $30,000. Based in the US. Bureaus include The Keynote Curators and direct booking via robertjdarling.com.

Lt Col Robert J. Darling is a retired US Marine Corps officer with more than twenty years of active-duty service. On 11 September 2001 he was the action officer supporting the President, Vice President, and National Security Advisor inside the President's Emergency Operations Center beneath the White House. His memoir 24 Hours Inside the President's Bunker is one of the few first-person records of senior crisis decision-making during that day.

Darling's keynote works because it is mechanically specific. He walks audiences through how a senior team actually made calls under conditions of incomplete information, hostile time pressure, and competing chains of command – then translates those moves into a framework that executives, hospital incident commanders, public-safety leaders, and corporate crisis-response teams can apply. He is the strongest fit on this list for audiences who deal with mid-market crisis management as a discipline, rather than as a once-in-a-career event.

Best for: crisis management and incident response audiences, public-sector leadership events, healthcare emergency-management conferences, security and risk professional bodies, government and federal contractor events.

How to book a resilience speaker for your US corporate event

Booking a US resilience or crisis leadership speaker comes down to three routes. The first is direct management – contact the speaker's management company (for George Stern, that is Clash Creation) and there is no bureau commission. The second is speaker bureau – BigSpeak, Harry Walker, Premiere Speakers Bureau, AAE Speakers, Keppler, Executive Speakers, and others handle logistics and pull from broad rosters but typically add a 20% – 30% commission on top of the speaker fee. The third is direct-to-speaker through a personal website, which works for some independents but tends to be slower and less reliable on contracting.

Whichever route you use, the brief that gets the best result names three things up front: the outcome you want the audience to leave with, the seniority and size of the room, and the level of customisation you expect (a 30-minute briefing call versus pre-event interviews with attendees versus bespoke proprietary content). Our full booking workflow lives in our companion guide: How to book a leadership keynote speaker in the US.

What does a US resilience keynote speaker cost?

US resilience and crisis leadership speaker fees in 2026 sit on a roughly four-tier ladder. Emerging and mid-market speakers (newer to the circuit, often direct-managed) sit between $10,000 and $20,000 – George Stern is in this bracket. Established speakers with one bestseller or a major bureau placement sit between $20,000 and $50,000 – Diana Nyad and Robyn Benincasa sit here. Senior-tier speakers with multiple bestsellers or a marquee operational backstory sit between $50,000 and $100,000 – Alison Levine, Mike Abrashoff in some formats, and Scott Kelly sit here. Top-tier speakers with national or global brand recognition sit between $100,000 and $200,000+ – Captain Sully Sullenberger and Jocko Willink are at this level.

Customisation, recording rights, exclusivity, and international travel each move the fee up. Virtual delivery typically moves it down. For the full cost breakdown, including bureau commissions and budgeting templates, see our pricing teardown: How much does a keynote speaker cost in the US in 2026.

About this guide

This guide is published by Clash Creation, a media management company that grows founders and leaders through organic content, digital credibility, and real-world authority. We represent George Stern commercially for speaking engagements, brand partnerships, and appearances – enquiries through clash.cc/book-keynote-speaker. The other eight speakers on this list are included because they deliver outstanding resilience and crisis leadership keynotes to US audiences and we have no commercial relationship with them. Fees and bureau listings are accurate to May 2026 and may shift through the year.