Short Bio

Dan Rust is the Vice President of Global Leadership Development for Infopro Learning, Inc. He’s the author of Workplace Poker and The Unbearable Lightness of Leading, and host of the Leadership, Disrupted and Jobsmacked podcasts.

Medium Bio

Dan Rust has spent his career watching how work actually works — which is rarely how the org chart says it should.

His first book, Workplace Poker, named the game most people don’t realize they’re playing: the unspoken politics, the invisible alliances, the reasons capable people stall while others somehow keep climbing. It hit a nerve. Readers have been writing to him ever since with their own stories of bad bosses, impossible coworkers, and jobs that quietly grind people down.

He’s spent the years since making sense of that messy, human, stubbornly un-tidy reality — first through a decade building leadership development at GE, and today as VP of Global Leadership Development at Infopro Learning, where his days are spent with senior leaders inside Fortune 500 companies. He carries a working-class allergy to corporate buzzwords and an equally stubborn belief that most workplaces are far more fixable than they look. The through-line of everything he does — the books, the stages, the two podcasts — is simple: the stuff that happens between people is the real work, and pretending otherwise is how organizations lose the good ones.

Long Bio

Dan Rust freely admits he’s a bit of an odd goose to be writing about leadership and workplace dynamics. He’s the son and grandson of farmers, ranchers, and coal miners in North Dakota — descended, as he likes to point out, from Norwegian Vikings of the dirty, weathered, farming kind, not the sexy sailing-and-battling kind.

His has been a working life, not a speaking-consulting-pontificating life. He served in the U.S. Navy’s nuclear submarine service. He’s worked for small businesses and global enterprises. He’s sold vacuum cleaners in people’s living rooms and financial securities from a shiny office tower. He’s coached executives, launched startups, and put in time in factories, fields, cubicles, and eventually a corner office. By his own accounting, he’s failed and been fired more times than he can remember. His career strategy, to the degree he had one, was to survive first and do interesting work when he could.

Corporate training became his thing mostly because he was a good explainer — he could take complicated ideas and make them land. That led to a decade running commercial leadership development at GE, and today he’s VP of Global Leadership Development at Infopro Learning, a corporate training company serving Fortune 500 clients. Which means most days he’s across the table from senior leaders — the people responsible for developing other leaders — hearing firsthand what’s breaking, what’s shifting, and what keeps them up at night.

His first book, Workplace Poker, prompted a flood of readers writing in with their own war stories about bad bosses, abrasive coworkers, and demeaning work — which became the Jobsmacked podcast. He also hosts Leadership, Disrupted, where he interviews the thinkers with their fingers on the pulse of today’s workforce. His new book, The Unbearable Lightness of Leading, turns the lens inward: it’s less about what’s happening around you as a leader than what’s happening inside you.