James ‘Jay’ Guilford keynote speaker

Jay Guilford is helping transform a quirky, bohemian circus founded by street performers into an optimized, monetized, strategically managed global entertainment brand.

-Michal Lev-Ram, Fortune Magazine, “If I Ran the Circus”

James “Jay” Guilford once worked with a bunch of clowns. Literally. At Cirque du Soleil, Jay devised an innovative approach to leadership development by creating Cirque’s corporate training experiences, called SPARK.

With SPARK, Jay strapped executives into Cirque apparatuses and flew them high across Cirque’s theaters and training rooms. Thus, instead of simply discussing trust, creativity, and healthy risk taking, participants experienced these concepts in real time.

In his 15+ years designing leadership and teambuilding solutions for top-performing companies, Jay has always combined conventional methods with out-of-the-box approaches.  As a leadership strategist, Jay puts a new twist on an old adage: he helps organizations do things differently  in order to get different – and better – results.

Jay’s wealth of experience advising executives and teams in top-performing companies has shown him the hard impact so-called “soft skills” have on the bottom line.  Jay focuses on helping leaders develop these skills because – as he has seen from his experience working with 100+ companies across a wide range of industries – leaders have an outsized impact on results.

Currently, Jay is Founder and CEO of CoWorks Leadership Strategists.  At CoWorks, Jay and team combine innovative training methodologies with conventional approaches and data-driven insights to help leaders and teams exceed their goals.

Jay has a BA from Emory University and an MA from Columbia University.