FROM ME TO WE™ – Connection, Belonging & Collaboration
Doug Manuel knows the problem from the inside, because he was it. He was six when he watched his father have a heart attack. His father survived, but his parents were separating, and he was shuttled between two homes until he was eight, when he was sent away to boarding school, surrounded by other boys at every hour of the day and lonelier than he had ever been.
It cost him years. He drifted from job to job, and could not build a relationship that felt truly authentic. He became a BBC filmmaker with a career other people envied, and still nobody in his life really knew him. One drumming workshop in Oxford in 1996 began to undo it, and within a year he had left television for West Africa, where village life gave him what no career had: people who knew him. He is not offering a cure he read about. He is offering the one that worked on him.
He was running his own sessions within two years, and has spent the thirty years since doing both at once, the villages and the stages. The villages he returns to every year have almost none of what a Western organization would call an advantage, and not one of them has a loneliness problem. That is the whole argument of the work, and it is why the methodology is built on what those communities actually do rather than on what a management book says.
He founded the not-for-profit Lighting Up Lives, which works with rural villages across West Africa, and keeps a home in Abéné in Senegal. He is also producing a documentary about the cure to the loneliness epidemic, filmed in Senegal and Guinea, with a nationwide US impact campaign in planning. The film is an entirely separate venture from the speaking business.
Doug Manuel’s Keynote Topics
- FROM ME TO WE™ – THE KEYNOTE: The Cure for the Loneliness Epidemic
What if the thing quietly costing you your best people has nothing to do with pay, pipeline or process? Loneliness does not stay at home. It walks into the building every morning, and Cigna puts the cost to US employers at $154 billion a year. This is not a talk about connection. It is connection, built live, in front of the room. Doug opens with his own story, told without softening, and by the time he reaches what actually worked for him the audience has stopped listening politely and started listening personally. Then the room gets up and moves through the three steps of the methodology, closing with the whole room holding a piece of music that none of them could hold alone. No instruments are needed, which is why it works in an auditorium, in rows, at any scale.
Thirty to seventy-five minutes, for ten people to five thousand, in person or virtual, in English or French.
- FROM ME TO WE™ – THE DRUMS: Collaboration a Team Can Feel in Their Hands
You can tell a team to collaborate. You cannot tell them what it feels like. Ten, five hundred or three thousand people each receive a djembe, and within minutes they are doing the thing everybody has been talking about all day: listening before contributing, holding their own part while somebody else takes the lead, and noticing the instant a voice goes missing. Not one of them needs to have played before, because Doug teaches the rhythms with the voice first, so by the time the drums come into it the room is not learning music, it is recognizing something it already knew. Instruments are hired locally wherever possible, delivered the day before and collected the day after, never on show day, and Doug travels with support musicians and handles the logistics end to end.
Fifteen to ninety minutes, for ten to three thousand people.
- FROM ME TO WE™ – THE WORKSHOP: Turning Insight Into Operating Habit
A keynote moves a room. A workshop changes how it works on Monday. This is the half day for the teams that actually have to live with each other: smaller groups, more time, and the collaboration practices worked through properly rather than demonstrated from a stage. Every workshop is built from scratch around the client’s brief, and that decides the shape of the session, the group sizes, and whether there are drums in the room at all. Teams map where their own communication really breaks down, which is rarely where the org chart says it does, they practise the listening work inside their real working groups, and they leave with commitments they have written themselves.
Half a day, for ten to two hundred people, in person or online, with or without drums, in English or French.
Who is Doug Manuel?
Doug Manuel doesn’t just talk about performing as one. He creates it live, in real time. A room walks in as individuals. It walks out as one.
He is the creator of the From Me To We™ Methodology, which he pioneered in corporate work in 2000, and he has now delivered it more than a thousand times, for over 500 organizations on five continents, in rooms of ten people and rooms of three thousand. Across those events his sessions have held a Net Promoter Score above ninety percent.
Harvard Business School books him, as do the World Economic Forum, Google, McKinsey, PwC, LVMH, Oracle, Shell, Nestlé and BMW. He has taught at IMD every year since 2002, and at CEIBS in China, HEC Paris and INSEAD, with the methodology endorsed in IMD’s book Mastering Executive Education. Oprah Winfrey chose him to open her third Super Soul Sessions, and he has performed at TED Global and at TEDx Hollywood.
He works in English and French, and is now based between Miami and Switzerland, which makes him straightforward to book on either side of the Atlantic.
Testimonials:
“Doug drove an audience of over 600 people to team up and achieve what seemed totally impossible to every one of them before.” – Michel Clement, Senior Director, Oracle
“One of a kind: inspiring, participative, informative, and above all authentic. The perfect prelude for my first Executive Leaders Meeting.” – Klaus Peter Feld, Senior Vice President HR, BMW Group
“The best speaker so far.” – Group HR lead, Carlsberg