Doug Manuel

Why you should book Doug Manuel for your next event

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 has now done it more than a thousand times, for over 500 organizations on five continents, in rooms of ten people and rooms of three thousand, and across those events his sessions have held a Net Promoter Score above ninety percent. If you need an opening that gets an audience out of spectator mode in the first five minutes, or a closing that people are still talking about at breakfast the next day, this is the session that does it.

The creator of the From Me To We™ Methodology

Doug is the creator of the From Me To We™ Methodology, which he pioneered in corporate work in 2000 and has refined every year since. It runs in three steps. Awareness of Self settles the nervous system through breath and an ancient acupressure-based tapping sequence. Awareness of Others is the part that matters most to leaders, because empathy stops being a value on a wall and becomes something two colleagues have just done. Collective Synergy closes it, with body percussion and voice layered one part at a time until the whole room is holding a piece of music that none of them could hold alone. He has taught the methodology at IMD every year since 2002, and at CEIBS in China, HEC Paris and INSEAD, and it is endorsed in IMD’s book Mastering Executive Education.

An interactive experience, not a talk about one

Most speakers on connection describe it. Doug builds it, in the room, while everyone is watching. Nobody is asked to perform, nobody is put on the spot, and nobody is left out, which is the entire point of a session about belonging. No musical ability is required and, for the keynote, no instruments either, which is why it works in an auditorium, in fixed rows, at any scale from ten people to five thousand. It works as a conference opener, a leadership kick-off, or the close of a strategy offsite where the message needs to stick. Organizers consistently report it as the most photographed part of the event, which matters more than it should to the people who have to prove the event worked.

He knows the problem from the inside, because he was it

Loneliness is the defining condition of modern working life, and Doug did not come to it through research. 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, and audiences can tell the difference within two minutes.

Thirty years between the villages and the stages

Doug was running his own sessions within two years of arriving in West Africa, and has spent the thirty years since doing both at once. 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, keeps a home in Abéné in Senegal, and is producing a documentary about the cure to the loneliness epidemic.

Trusted by the world’s leading organizations

Harvard Business School books him, as do the World Economic Forum, Google, McKinsey, PwC, LVMH, Oracle, Shell, Nestlé, Accenture and BMW. 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 based in Miami, so US events involve no transatlantic travel.

Book Doug Manuel for your event

Doug delivers the methodology in three formats: The Keynote, for an auditorium of any size and with no instruments needed; The Drums, where every person in the room receives a djembe; and The Workshop, a half day built from scratch around the client’s brief. All three are tailored to the client’s theme beforehand, so the session carries their words rather than his.