Caspar Craven
Most organisations know the goals they want to achieve. Fewer have the thinking required to pursue them when conditions deteriorate or complexity compounds. Leaders default to what worked before. Teams fragment when pressure peaks rather than cohere when it matters most. The gap between strategic ambition and actual execution is rarely a skills problem, it is a mindset and behaviour problem that standard leadership development does not address.
Caspar Craven, Bloomsbury author, former KPMG Associate Director and CFO, helps leadership teams close the gap between the ambitious goals they set and the thinking and team behaviours required to achieve them, drawing on frameworks built across corporate finance, a technology exit, and two round-the-world sailing voyages.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Caspar Craven
- His Big Bold Mindset® and Big Bold Circle give leadership teams a named, structured framework for changing how they think and act under pressure, not a set of borrowed principles, but a system built and tested through his own experience of pursuing extreme goals in commercial and offshore environments.
- His background as a KPMG Associate Director and CFO, including a technology business exit to a listed company, grounds the material in commercial and financial reality, making it credible with boards, finance teams and senior executive audiences, not only culture or L&D audiences.
- The argument he makes is unusual: that the behaviours required to hold a team together on a two-year ocean voyage are the same behaviours that determine whether a leadership team delivers or stalls, and he can evidence that claim from both sides of the equation.
- The Big Bold Circle’s 20 principles connect individual mindset to team behaviour to organisational execution, giving buyers a framework that extends beyond the event into coaching, offsites and leadership programmes.
- Organisations including Johnson & Johnson, GSK, Boston Consulting Group and Burberry rebook him, evidence that the material holds up under repeated use with commercially sophisticated audiences.
Biography highlights
- Author of three Bloomsbury-published books: Where the Magic Happens, Be More Human: Rethinking the Rules of High-Performance Teamwork, and The Big Bold Mindset: Re-thinking the Rules of Leadership
- Former Associate Director at KPMG; former CFO in the technology sector, including a business sold to Private Equity
- Built, scaled and sold a technology business to a stock market listed company
- Team leader on trophy-winning yacht in the BT Global Challenge (2000/01)
- Captain of family circumnavigation (2014/16), leading a crew that included three children under ten
- Speaker for global organisations including Johnson & Johnson, GSK, Boston Consulting Group, Burberry, Standard Life and BAE Systems
Biography
Most leadership teams do not lack ambition. They lack the thinking that holds when ambition meets sustained pressure. Caspar Craven has spent three decades studying that gap, in FTSE-boardroom pressure, in the execution risk of building and selling a technology business, and in the conditions of offshore sailing, and building the frameworks that close it.
His commercial background is foundational. As an Associate Director at KPMG and then CFO of a technology business sold to Private Equity, Craven worked inside the financial and strategic pressures that boards and senior leadership teams actually face. He then built and exited his own technology company, selling it to a listed firm for a seven-figure sum. That sequence – corporate discipline, then ownership, then entrepreneurial risk – is the basis of his credibility with finance, commercial and executive audiences.
The two round-the-world sailing voyages are not adventure narrative. The first, as a team leader on a trophy-winning yacht in the BT Global Challenge (2000/01), tested leadership under competitive pressure and physical exhaustion. The second (2014/16), as captain of a family crew including three young children, tested something harder: sustaining shared values, clear roles and collaborative decision-making over two years in an environment where the cost of poor leadership is immediate and real. Both voyages provided the evidence base for the frameworks he now teaches.
That evidence base is formalised in the Big Bold Mindset® and the Big Bold Circle, 20 principles connecting individual mindset to team behaviour to organisational execution, published across three Bloomsbury books. The framework has been applied with leadership teams at Johnson & Johnson, GSK, Boston Consulting Group, Burberry and Standard Life, among others. The core argument is practical: that the gap between ambitious goals and actual delivery is a thinking and behaviour problem, and that it can be addressed systematically.
Key speaking topics
- Leadership mindset and behavioural change
- High-performance team dynamics
- Goal-setting and execution under pressure
- Decision-making in uncertainty
- Resilience and organisational adaptability
- Entrepreneurship and business growth
- Culture change and human-centred leadership
Ideal for
- Senior leadership teams and executive committees setting ambitious growth or transformation targets
- CHROs and L&D leaders designing leadership development programmes, particularly for high-potential talent or senior cohorts
- Commercial and sales organisations at annual kick-offs or strategic resets
- Boards and C-suite audiences navigating significant change, M&A, or sustained performance pressure
Audience outcomes
- A named, structured framework (The Big Bold Mindset® and Big Bold Circle) applicable immediately to their own goals, team dynamics and leadership behaviours
- Clearer understanding of why leadership teams stall under pressure, and what specifically needs to change in how they think and make decisions
- Practical approaches to aligning teams around ambitious goals, reducing execution friction and sustaining momentum through setbacks
- A shared vocabulary for discussing leadership mindset and team behaviour that moves beyond generic or abstract concepts
- Renewed confidence in pursuing bold goals, grounded in evidence and principle rather than motivation alone
Talks
Draws on the principles and frameworks of The Big Bold Mindset® to make the case that leading through disruption and ambitious change requires a fundamentally different kind of thinking, not an optimised version of existing thinking.
Key takeaways:
- A clear set of principles for rethinking leadership mindset in times of change and disruption
- Practical frameworks to tackle hard challenges and move from incremental thinking to bold execution
- Guidance on leading yourself and others when pursuing goals that most people would dismiss as impossible
Makes the case that the most powerful performance lever in any organisation is the quality of human connection within its teams, and provides a structured approach to building it.
Key takeaways:
- Practical techniques for shaping daily team habits that strengthen resilience and collaboration
- Clear approaches to aligning individuals behind shared objectives and encouraging brave decision-making
- The 20 principles of the Big Bold Circle, applied to team leadership and execution
A focused session on the leadership and cultural shifts required to move ambitious goals from aspiration to delivery, with direct application to the team’s current strategic challenges.
Key takeaways:
- Insight into the mindset and culture shifts that separate ambitious execution from incremental change
- Practical approaches to building engagement around a shared future vision
- Methods for handling setbacks that strengthen rather than derail team performance