March 5, 2026 – Highly Defective Bosses Joel Hilchey and High-Altitude Entrepreneur Chris Clearfield

Joel Hilchey – Keynote Speaker, Author, “Fun-at-Work” Expert and Author of The 6-and-a-half Habits of Highly Defective Bosses: Serious Lessons for Accidental Managers 

When you need a creative solution, separate the idea generation process from your decision process.

Joel Hilchey is an ideas guy. His gift seems to stem from a strange combination of observation, insight, and blatant disregard for conventional thinking. He’s also a juggler (literally and figuratively). In addition to leading the Beanstalk Creative team, he maintains a busy schedule as a keynote speaker on workplace culture, creating unforgettable spectacles on stage. He’s the father of 3 kids, 2 of whom co-habitated a uterus, and he attempts to be a good husband. Joel has authored 4 books – most recently The 6-and-a-half Habits of Highly Defective Bosses – Serious Lessons for Accidental Managers, and he taught engineering for over a decade at McMaster University, where he was named one of the Top 150 Alumni. He’s a seasoned barbershop quartet singer, he formerly chaired the board of the world-renowned Hamilton Children’s Choir, and he’s a semi-competitive joggler (that’s right… juggling whilst jogging).

Chris Clearfield – Leadership Strategist & Author of The High-Altitude Entrepreneur: A Framework for Scaling Smarter, Leading Better, and Living Freer

The stuff that helped your business grow at the beginning, at some point, that really starts to hold you and your company back.

Chris Clearfield is a leadership strategist, author, and Harvard-trained scientist who works with high-performing entrepreneurs to help them scale without becoming the bottleneck in their own business. He has coached founders and executives at SMEs and large companies, including Netflix, Microsoft, Etsy, and ExxonMobil, helping leaders navigate complexity, redesign how decisions get made, and build teams that operate with clarity, ease and ownership. He is the co-author of Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It, winner of the National Business Book Award and the Thinkers50 Strategy Award. His new book is The High-Altitude Entrepreneur. Learn more at highaltitudebook.com.