Simon Walker
Senior leaders are being asked to hold composure, judgement and crew confidence under conditions they were never trained for. Most leadership development was built for stable command, not for prolonged disruption, generational friction inside the team, and decisions made on incomplete information. The gap shows up in how a leadership team behaves on the third bad week, not the first.
Simon Walker is a leadership and future-of-work advisor who helps senior teams build the composure, judgement and crew dynamics that hold up when conditions stop being predictable.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Simon Walker
- Operational leadership credibility, not metaphor. Walker took Toshiba Wave Warrior to second place in the BT Global Challenge as the fleet’s youngest skipper, then ran the company that organised the race. Boards hear leadership lessons drawn from a record, not an anecdote.
- Twenty years of practice inside corporate leadership development through his own firms, talentsmoothie and my360plus, including 360-degree feedback systems used inside live executive programmes.
- Academic anchoring at Henley Business School and Southampton Business School as a Visiting Executive Development Fellow, which gives the work a research spine that withstands scrutiny from heads of L&D and CHROs.
- A coherent point of view on generational dynamics, grounded in his co-authored “Generation Y: what they want from work” research, that helps leadership teams stop treating generational friction as an HR irritation and start treating it as a leadership question.
- Range across formats. Walker is commissioned for keynote, masterclass, mentoring and senior-team facilitation, which suits buyers who need the same voice across a multi-touch leadership programme rather than a one-off platform speech.
Biography highlights
- Skipper of Toshiba Wave Warrior, BT Global Challenge 1996/97, second place, youngest skipper in the fleet.
- Former CEO of Challenge Business, organiser of the 2000/01 and 2004/05 Global Challenge round-the-world yacht races.
- Co-founder of talentsmoothie, a leadership and people development consultancy.
- Co-founder of my360plus, an online 360-degree feedback and executive coaching platform.
- Visiting Executive Development Fellow, Henley Business School and Southampton Business School.
- Co-author, “Generation Y: what they want from work.”
- Featured in Fast Company’s “Who’s Fast 2001” leadership profile.
Biography
Most leadership lessons come from books. A smaller number come from a documented record under conditions that punish poor judgement. The 1996/97 BT Global Challenge sent fourteen identical yachts the wrong way around the world against the prevailing winds, and a 28-year-old skipper named Simon Walker brought Toshiba Wave Warrior home in second place, the youngest in the fleet. Fast Company later profiled him under the line, “I can only compete through my crew.”
That insight, that a leader competes through other people, has shaped the rest of his career. After the race he ran Challenge Business, organising the 2000/01 and 2004/05 Global Challenges, then turned full-time to corporate leadership development. He co-founded talentsmoothie, a research-based consultancy, and my360plus, an online 360-degree feedback and coaching platform now used inside executive programmes.
His academic anchoring sits at Henley Business School and Southampton Business School, where he is a Visiting Executive Development Fellow. The work covers leadership behaviour under pressure, the practical mechanics of executive development, and the generational shifts reshaping how teams form and commit, ground he covered first in the co-authored report “Generation Y: what they want from work.”
What buyers tend to remember after a session is the specificity. The detail of how a crew breaks down on the seventh gale of a Southern Ocean leg maps closely onto how a leadership team breaks down in the third quarter of a difficult restructure. The diagnostic is the same. Walker’s value to a senior audience is that he has run both kinds of crew and can talk about each in the language of the other.
Key speaking topics
- Leadership under sustained pressure
- Executive development and 360-degree feedback
- Future of work and the changing employment contract
- Generational diversity in senior teams
- Team dynamics and crew leadership
- Technology and the behavioural shift inside organisations
- Talent attraction and retention
Ideal for
- CEOs, CHROs and heads of leadership development designing senior leadership programmes
- Boards and executive teams entering or recovering from a sustained period of change
- Talent and L&D leaders rethinking executive development for a multigenerational workforce
- Senior leadership offsites where the brief is composure, judgement and crew dynamics rather than a single topic
Audience outcomes
- A clearer read on how leadership behaviour shifts when pressure becomes sustained rather than episodic
- A sharper diagnostic for where a senior team is likely to break down before it does
- A practical view of how 360-degree feedback and structured executive development translate into changed behaviour
- A more grounded conversation about generational expectations inside the leadership pipeline
- Reference points and language that senior leaders can use back at work, drawn from a documented offshore command record rather than abstraction