About Dain
Dain Dunston helps people live more rewarding leadership lives and build great cultures of innovation. For 30 years, he’s coached leaders on how to communicate with their people to build teams that are branded to the bone. Dain has worked with leaders in many of the world’s high-tech, health care, retail, automotive, and hospitality companies, helping them link purpose to performance, inspiring game-changing thought and building great brands. His work focuses around a simple question: what if we came to work as though it were a path to enlightenment?
Along with his corporate work, Dain writes and speaks on businesses that are radically disrupting their industries with new ideas and cultures. He is the author of The Downside of Up: A Comic Novel of Outrageous Fortune, which offers a business fable as a leadership case study. And he’s the co-author of Nanovation, How A Little Car Can Teach The World To Think Big, with best-selling authors Drs. Kevin and Jackie Freiberg (Nuts! Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success). It’s a three-year case study of the wave of less-is-more innovation that is dramatically challenging innovators.
A fifth generation San Franciscan, Dain studied classics at UC Santa Cruz. Today, he lives in the hills outside of Austin, Texas, with his wife, writer and art dealer Jean Compton, where they are surrounded by fine wine and fine dogs.
Keynotes
Books
Our Team
Dain fields a network of the most respected executive coaches, management gurus, writers, designers and producers. They’re located in Austin, Dallas and New York. They’re the best in the business at what they do. And they play well with others.
Agency Work
Dain is proud of the A-list agencies he works with, including (in alphabetical order):
- Blueprint, New York, NY
- BI Worldwide, Minneapolis, MN
- Gotham Ghostwriters, New York, NY
- Jack Morton Worldwide, London, UK
- Like Minds Communications, Dallas, TX
- Sunstate Communications, Phoenix, AZ
- toddstreet, New York, NY
Accolades & Honors
2016 Cicero Grand Award, the international speechwriting prize from the Professional Speechwriters Association.
University of Virginia Darden School of Business Leadership Communications Council.
Ocean Exchange Conference, Savannah, Georgia: Emcee and meeting host 2014–2017.
Mississippi State University New Narrative Festival — Founding member of steering committee.
Praise from Clients
“For ten years, through two companies and two of the most iconic brands, Dain has been there shoulder to shoulder with the leadership helping us find the very essence of what our business stands for, and most important, helping us to communicate that essence clearly and simply across the organization and across the world. Talk is cheap and easy, clarity is priceless and hard. Dain provoked us all the way to clarity.”
Nick Shepherd, former CEO, TGI Fridays
“How do you keep 100,000 team members focused on one thing: taking care of the guest? You do it with stories, stories that build a culture of welcome in a sea of sameness. Dain never fails to find the right way to frame a story so people understand not just what they should do it but why they want to and how it will change their life.”
Doug Brooks, former Chairman and CEO, Brinker International
