About

Forward-thinking founders turn to Jeffrey Van Dyk for one thing: Innovating the Invisible™.

Jeffrey Van Dyk smiling, seated with the ocean behind him

Known for an innate sense of what's true and what's off in a leader's vision and calling, Jeffrey has a rare discernment for the essence of visionary work and how it wants to be expressed in the world. The result is work that arrives in the market in its truest, most potent form — commanding attention and creating new markets where none existed before.

While at Microsoft, Jeffrey designed speaker training systems for executives and leaders at some of the world's most influential organizations, including Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Honeywell, Sun Microsystems, Autodesk, Cisco Systems, Salesforce, Deloitte Consulting, and KPMG.

Jeffrey has brought his work to audiences ranging from intimate leadership gatherings to conferences of thousands, in boardrooms and on stages across five continents. His global contributions include co-founding the True Purpose Institute in Israel and collaborating with business and political leaders in Colombia to foster national healing.

Broadcasting, One to Many

When I look back at my career, I can see I've been broadcasting messages one-to-many the whole time. I was on stages as a singer, performer and actor throughout the '80s and '90s. In college, I had the privilege to sing with the St. Olaf Choir, a renowned ensemble widely credited with bringing a cappella singing to the United States, touring nationally and internationally every year. At the same time, I worked as a recording engineer at WCAL, 89.3 FM in Minnesota, broadcasting lectures, symphonies, and choral performances to listeners across the country.

In 2000, at the height of the dot-com boom, I became employee 134 at a web conferencing startup called PlaceWare — one of the first two companies to establish the field of web conferencing. I got to watch up close that a market doesn't adopt something new just because it exists. It has to be broadcast and land in front of the people who are hungry for it.

Back then, almost nobody knew what web conferencing was, or why they'd use it. In fact, in 2001, the San Jose Mercury News ran a front-page business section story about me, highlighting "new economy careers," because my job was one you couldn't have trained for — it didn't exist two years earlier. By 2003, Microsoft acquired us, and I spent the next chapter designing speaker training systems for global leaders such as Bill Gates, Marc Benioff, Peter Jennings, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and former French President Jacques Chirac.

That's the same sequence I see with my clients now. They're carrying a calling that wants to do more than enter a market — it wants to shift the conversation happening inside it.

The Leadership Work Beneath the Work

From the outlier to the wayshower.

When I was 13, I was at the beach with my older sister and her friends. Looking up, I saw one of the boys my sister was talking to and felt something inside stir with attraction. I felt something I knew I wasn't supposed to feel, and a pang of terror settled in as I recognized what it meant.

I grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in a conservative evangelical church where being gay was considered a disgusting sin I'd burn in hell for. So the moment this realization hit, it became my secret. I didn't tell a soul — not my family, not my friends, not anyone — for nearly a decade.

I share this because I've worked with visionary leaders for over 20 years, and one of the unspoken aspects of being a visionary in business is that for you to be true to yourself and your calling, you have to come out. Come out about how you see the world, the values you lead by, and the vision you are here to bring to it.

Visionary leaders, universally, have spent their lives being outliers. We've never fit neatly into "how things are done." And you know what? We aren't meant to. The gift visionaries bring to leadership is precisely the fact that we are outliers, with a vantage point others simply don't have. But leading as an outlier requires a big move — from the outlier to the wayshower. The one illuminating a new path for those you're meant to lead.

The capacity to stand fully in your vision, your voice, and your leadership — to stop translating yourself into something more palatable, and start letting the full truth of your work be shared — that's not a soft add-on to the strategic work. It's where it starts.

What's Next

Curious what this could look like for you?

The inner journey and the outer strategy are not separate things. See the ways we might work together.

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JEFFREY VAN DYK

Innovating the Invisible™

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