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Why organisations work with Chris Grant He has run the room with senior leadership teams across government, professional sport, the NHS, financial services, and FTSE corporates, and is unusually fluent in moving a group from comfortable discussion to actual decision. His framework on decision-making, set out in Better Decisions (Quarto, 2020), gives executives a working language for how judgement degrades under speed, fatigue, and political pressure. He has chaired one of the largest public-facing behaviour change programmes in UK history (Chip & PIN), which gives him real authority on the gap between strategy and adoption at a population scale. He brings a substantive, non-performative line on inclusion, drawn from sport governance reform and his work as Chair of the British Basketball Federation, useful when boards are tired of theatre and want operating change. Audiences describe his style as “high energy calm”. He runs interactive keynotes, not lectures, which suits leadership offsites where the brief is to shift behaviour, not deliver content. Biography highlights OBE for services to sport, 2021 Queen’s Birthday Honours. Chair of the British Basketball Federation (2022 to present). Former CEO of Sported, the UK-wide London 2012 legacy charity supporting community sport. Author of Better Decisions: Direct your life. Influence your world. (Quarto, 2020). Independent Board Member, Sport England (two terms); board member, Financial Services Culture Board. Chaired the Programme Steering Committee for the UK rollout of Chip & PIN. Mentored Olympic and Paralympic medal-winning coaches; Deputy Chair, International Inspiration (London 2012). Biography Strategy is easier than execution, and execution is easier than getting a senior team to actually change how it behaves. Most leadership teams know what good looks like. The work that closes the gap between intention and operating reality is what Chris Grant has spent his career on, across government, professional sport, the NHS, financial services, and large corporates. The credentials sit behind that argument rather than in front of it. He led Sported, the UK-wide London 2012 legacy charity, as CEO. He chaired the Programme Steering Committee for the UK introduction of Chip & PIN, one of the largest public-facing behaviour change programmes the country has run. He served two terms as an Independent Board Member of Sport England and joined the Financial Services Culture Board. He was awarded an OBE in 2021 for services to sport, and now chairs the British Basketball Federation. His 2020 book Better Decisions (Quarto) sets out a 20-lesson framework on how senior leaders can hold their judgement when pace, politics, and uncertainty are pulling against them. It draws on thousands of facilitated days with executive teams and on his work mentoring Olympic and Paralympic coaches, where decision quality is measured in seconds and consequences. Grant runs interactive keynotes rather than lectures. Audiences leave with a sharper sense of how their team makes decisions, where group dynamics are quietly costing them, and what to change on Monday. The work is most useful to organisations that already understand the diagnosis and need help moving on to the cure. Key speaking topics Decision-making under pressure Organisational change and execution Group dynamics and team performance Inclusive leadership and culture reform Behaviour change at scale Strategy facilitation for senior teams Governance reform in sport and the public sector Ideal for Executive committees and boards working through restructure, succession, or strategic reset CHROs and chief people officers tackling culture, inclusion, and engagement as operating problems Leadership offsites where the brief is to shift behaviour, not deliver content Programme leads in large public-facing behaviour change or transformation rollouts Audience outcomes A clearer view of where their team’s decision-making degrades under pressure, and what to do about it Practical language for separating change (incremental) from transformation (structural), and choosing between them Tools from Better Decisions for stress-testing judgement before acting on it A direct read on inclusion as a leadership capability, not a compliance exercise Greater willingness in the room to name what is actually slowing the organisation down

Why organisations work with Chris Heemskerk Operator credibility from inside Google, where he led Scaled Acquisitions for North America and advised the Sales Acceleration and Innovation Labs documented in the Harvard Business School case study by Linda Hill and Emily Tedards. A defined framework set, including The Innovation Scorecard and The Innovation Engine, that gives boards a way to assess innovation capability across culture, organisation, external posture and effectiveness, rather than relying on anecdote. Practical authority on AI deployment: he speaks as a practitioner who has built scaled sales and product operations, not as an external commentator on the technology. Faculty standing at the European Institute of Innovation for Sustainability, with formal innovation leadership credentials from Harvard Business School and design thinking certification from Stanford, supporting executive-level training and masterclass briefs. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, The Innovation Alliance Former Head of Scaled Acquisitions, Google North America Strategic advisor named in the Harvard Business School case “Innovation at Google Ads: The Sales Acceleration and Innovation Labs (SAIL) (A)” (Case 423-076) Faculty, European Institute of Innovation for Sustainability Author of The Innovation Scorecard and The Innovation Engine frameworks Executive Certification in Innovation Leadership, Harvard Business School; Design Thinking, Stanford University; MSc Marketing, London School of Business and Finance Biography Most large organisations now run innovation teams and AI working groups. Far fewer can name what those teams have shipped, retired, or scaled in the last year. The gap between activity and operating advantage is where senior leaders get exposed, and it is the gap Chris Heemskerk works in. His credibility on that question is operator credibility. As Head of Scaled Acquisitions for Google North America, he ran a large commercial operation inside one of the most studied innovation environments in business. He then helped initiate the partnership between Google Ads and Harvard Business School that produced the case “Innovation at Google Ads: The Sales Acceleration and Innovation Labs (SAIL) (A),” authored by Linda Hill and Emily Tedards, in which he is named as a strategic advisor on the bet-sourcing framework that vetted and accelerated new pipeline opportunities. That experience now sits behind two frameworks he uses with executive teams: The Innovation Scorecard, which assesses innovation capability across culture, organisation, external posture and effectiveness, and The Innovation Engine, which sets out the operating system for sustained innovation output. As Founder and CEO of The Innovation Alliance, and as faculty at the European Institute of Innovation for Sustainability, he works with senior teams on the same question he faced as an operator: how to turn ambition into a managed capability. For boards looking at their AI agenda, the value is specific. Heemskerk speaks as someone who has built scaled commercial operations and has the structured material to translate AI ambition into how a function actually runs, what it measures, and what it discards. Key speaking topics Innovation strategy Innovation culture AI deployment in large organisations Operating models for scaled innovation Digital transformation Executive masterclasses on innovation leadership Ideal for CEOs and C-suite leaders setting AI and innovation strategy Chief Innovation Officers and heads of strategy operationalising new capability Boards reviewing innovation governance and AI exposure Senior commercial and digital transformation leaders moving beyond pilots Audience outcomes A defined view of where the organisation sits on the four pillars of innovation capability Practical reference points from inside Google for how scaled operations adopt new technology A sharper distinction between innovation theatre and innovation that produces operating output Frameworks executives can return to after the keynote, including the Innovation Scorecard and Innovation Engine

Why organisations work with Chris Hirst He has actually run a 10,000-person global P&L. The leadership argument comes from a CEO seat, not a research role. He took Grey London from underperformer to a business that tripled in size and quadrupled profit in five years, then took Havas from also-ran to second in Campaign Magazine’s global rankings in three. That is the exact operating story most boards are asking for. No Bullsh*t Leadership won UK Business Book of the Year, an independently awarded credential rather than self-published positioning. The argument now runs across three books, on leadership, change, and career, together selling more than 100,000 copies in seven languages. His content travels into operating environments because it was built for one. Recent clients include Google, PepsiCo, PwC, Deloitte, Nissan, and Warner Music Group. He gives leadership teams a shared language for the small, repeatable behaviours that determine whether change actually happens, not another model to put on a slide. Biography highlights Former Global CEO, Havas Creative Group, leading more than 10,000 people across more than 100 countries. Took Havas from also-ran to second in Campaign Magazine’s global network rankings in three years; shortlisted by Campaign as Global CEO of the Year, 2022. Former UK CEO of Grey London (WPP); the agency tripled in size and quadrupled profit during his tenure. Author of three books, No Bullsht Leadership (UK Business Book of the Year 2020), No Bullsht Change, and Indispensable (Pan Macmillan), together selling more than 100,000 copies in seven languages. Host of the No Bullsht Leadership podcast (with Intelligence Squared), more than 500,000 downloads, and founder of the No Bullsht Leadership Academy. Now a Fractional Chair and Non-Executive Director to scaling companies; graduate of Brasenose College, Oxford (Engineering Science) and Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program. Biography Grey London was a struggling agency inside WPP when Chris Hirst took over as UK CEO. Five years later it had tripled in size and quadrupled profit. He then ran Havas Creative Group globally, more than 10,000 people across more than 100 countries, taking the network from also-ran to second in Campaign Magazine’s global rankings in three years. Campaign shortlisted him as Global CEO of the Year in 2022. That operating record is the foundation of his leadership work. No Bullsht Leadership, published by Profile Books in 2019, was named UK Business Book of the Year 2020. It argues that leadership is a small set of repeatable behaviours, not a personality type, and is written for people running things rather than studying them. The argument now runs across three books, No Bullsht Leadership, No Bullsht Change, and Indispensable, together selling more than 100,000 copies in seven languages. It also reaches a podcast made with Intelligence Squared, a monthly Management Today column, and the No Bullsht Leadership Academy. Organisations that have worked with him include Google, PepsiCo, PwC, Nissan, and Warner Music Group. He still runs businesses too, now as a Fractional Chair and Non-Executive Director to scaling companies. What he gives a serious audience is rare on the leadership circuit: a former Global CEO who reduces leadership to behaviours a team can use the same week. His own equation, Impact equals Clarity times Action, is the spine of it, tested across more than a decade of running businesses and a billion-dollar global P&L. Key speaking topics Practical leadership and decision-making Leading transformational change Building high-performing cultures Turnaround and growth leadership Leading teams through AI-driven change Executive presence and credibility The behaviours of effective CEOs Ideal for CEOs, CHROs and executive teams running through restructure or growth Senior leadership populations inside large organisations rebuilding culture High-potential leadership programmes and talent cohorts Boards and partner groups in professional services and agencies Audience outcomes A working definition of leadership stripped of jargon and slogans His core equation for impact, Clarity times Action, and what it means when either side falls to zero A way to read culture as the behaviour of leadership, not a values poster, and to spot a culture problem before it becomes a performance one The 40/70 rule for making decisions without waiting for complete information A direct, occasionally uncomfortable challenge to current leadership habits

Why organisations work with Chris Roebuck He designed and ran the leadership programme for UBS’s top 500 that is now taught at Harvard Business School as UBS: Towards the Integrated Firm. Few speakers can point to a live HBS case as evidence that their approach works at scale. He coined the corporate application of entrepreneurial leadership and has spent twenty years refining it in banks, government, healthcare, and the military. The Wikipedia entry on entrepreneurial leadership cites his definition. He operates as a practitioner first and a speaker second: former British Army officer, Head of Management Development at HSBC Investment Bank, Global Head of Leadership at UBS, Head of Culture Change at London Underground. The credibility in a boardroom is built in. HR Magazine named him one of HR’s Most Influential Thinkers ten times between 2009 and 2021, and inducted him into the HR Hall of Fame in 2025. That is the longest sustained recognition of any thinker on the list. Biography highlights Global Head of Leadership and Talent, UBS (2004 onward), leading the development programme for the bank’s top 500 leaders that became Harvard Business School case UBS: Towards the Integrated Firm Honorary Visiting Professor of Transformational Leadership, Cass Business School (2009–2021, the institution later rebranded Bayes) Inducted into the HR Hall of Fame by HR Magazine, July 2025; named one of HR’s Most Influential Thinkers ten times between 2009 and 2021, a record on the list Author of five leadership books, including Lead to Succeed (2014) and Strategic Leadership Development, co-authored with Professor Colin Carnall Expert panel member for the UK Government’s Engaging for Success review (2009), and author of The King’s Fund report on NHS leadership (2011) Contributor to Newsweek; quoted on leadership and organisational performance in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review China; 350+ television interviews across BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, Sky, and Al Jazeera Biography UBS between 2002 and 2006 is a useful place to start. A newly integrated global bank, 70,000 staff, a top team of 500 whose behaviour had to shift if the merger was going to hold. Chris Roebuck was the person, as Global Head of Leadership and Talent, who designed and ran the programme that got that behavioural shift. The work is now a Harvard Business School case study, UBS: Towards the Integrated Firm, and it is where the concept of entrepreneurial leadership, taking the behaviours of successful entrepreneurs and transplanting them into a large corporate, was first systematically applied in the corporate world. That practitioner record sits behind everything he now says from a stage. Before UBS, he was Head of Management Development at HSBC Investment Bank and ran culture change at London Underground during the partial privatisation. After UBS, he was commissioned by The King’s Fund to report to the UK Government on leadership in the NHS, and sat on the expert panel behind Engaging for Success, the UK Government’s review of employee engagement. He was Honorary Visiting Professor of Transformational Leadership at Cass Business School, now Bayes, from 2009 to 2021. The argument Roebuck brings to senior audiences is a hard one, because it refuses the usual levers. He tells leaders that the performance they are looking for is not hiding in a new strategy, a new tech stack, or a restructure. It is hiding in the way their top 200 people behave on a Tuesday morning. His Accelerate Your Success approach is built to make that behavioural gap visible, then close it, with the bottom line as the test. HR Magazine has named him one of its Most Influential Thinkers ten times; in July 2025 it inducted him into the HR Hall of Fame. The rare thing he does is connect that leadership argument to hard numbers. He is a trained economist, not a behavioural coach; he served as an officer in the British Army before moving into business; he has run programmes inside a global bank, the UK Civil Service, and a 1.4-million-person healthcare system. When he says ten percent of organisational performance is sitting unused, the claim is backed by work done at UBS, in the NHS, and at KPMG rather than by a slide deck. Key speaking topics Leadership during integration, transformation, and culture change Entrepreneurial leadership in large organisations Senior team behaviour and executive performance Talent identification and leadership pipelines Employee engagement as an organisational lever Leadership in conditions of uncertainty Human leadership in the AI era Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and C-suite teams running integrations, post-merger transformations, or major operating model change CHROs and Chief People Officers building a leadership and talent strategy that senior business leaders will take seriously Board and executive committee offsites where the subject is how top leadership needs to behave differently for the organisation to perform Public sector and military audiences looking at leadership reform in large, complex institutions Audience outcomes A clear view of where performance is being lost inside their own organisation, and which leadership behaviours are causing it The specific mechanics of how entrepreneurial leadership was built at UBS, and which elements transfer to their own sector A short set of actions senior leaders can take in the weeks after the session, tied to business outcomes rather than general development A more useful language for talking about leadership with their board, their HR function, and their top 100

Why organisations work with Christian Byrge He treats creativity as a skill that can be coached into a team, not a culture project. Leaders leave with specific habits they can run on Monday morning, not a manifesto. He has a working position on AI in the creative process, grounded in current research, that goes beyond the prompt-engineering surface most innovation talks stop at. His research base is unusually deep for a speaker in this category: 70+ academic publications and a full professorship, paired with operational training inside LEGO, Maersk, Novo Nordisk, Grundfos, and the Danish Armed Forces. He is comfortable in front of an executive audience and inside a workshop room. Same content holds at both altitudes, which makes him useful when the brief is a keynote that has to seed follow-on internal work. Biography highlights Full Professor of Business Creativity, Vilnius University Business School. PhD in Creativity and Business, Aalborg University. Author of Everyday Innovator (BIS Publishers), How to Teach Creativity, and Enhancing Creativity for Individuals, Groups and Organizations. 70+ academic publications across creativity, team creativity culture, creative self-efficacy, and AI creativity. Worked with LEGO, Maersk, Novo Nordisk, Velux, Grundfos, Danfoss, Siemens, Kompan, TotalEnergies, and the Danish Armed Forces. Trained creative practice with practitioners across engineering, law, healthcare, software, education, and film production. Biography Innovation programmes inside large organisations tend to fail in the same way. They start with energy, produce a portfolio of pilots, and stall when the original sponsor moves on. The diagnosis is usually written as a cultural problem. Christian Byrge’s research argues something more precise: the failure point is that idea generation was never built as a team skill in the first place. That argument is the core of his three books and seventy-plus academic publications. Everyday Innovator, published by BIS Publishers, names four habits that turn creative output into a repeatable behaviour rather than a mood. How to Teach Creativity and Enhance Creativity for Individuals, Groups, and Organizations extends the same logic into education and organisational design. The thread across all three is treating creativity as a trainable capability with named components, not an ambient quality of the workplace. He holds a full professorship in Business Creativity at Vilnius University Business School and a PhD from Aalborg University. The academic base matters because his recent work on AI in the creative process is one of the few executive-level treatments grounded in current research rather than vendor framing. He has trained creative practice inside LEGO, Maersk, Novo Nordisk, Velux, Grundfos, Siemens, and the Danish Armed Forces, which gives the research weight in front of an operating audience. The room he is most useful in is the one where leadership has decided innovation matters, but cannot describe what their teams should actually do differently on Tuesday. He gives them the answer in specific behaviours, not in a vision deck. Key speaking topics Team creativity as a trainable discipline Innovation capability inside operating teams AI-supported creative process Creative confidence and self-efficacy Idea generation and development practice Creative culture in regulated and engineering environments Ideal for CHROs and L&D leaders building innovation capability across the workforce Heads of innovation, R&D directors, and transformation leads Executive teams in engineering, life sciences, and industrial sectors, where creativity is treated as soft Educators and learning system leaders are responsible for creative competence development Audience outcomes A working definition of team creativity is a set of named behaviours, not a personality trait The four habits from Everyday Innovator are mapped to the audience’s own operating context A grounded view of where AI helps and where it flattens the creative process Specific practices senior leaders can install in standing meetings to lift idea quality A clear separation between creative culture rhetoric and creative output discipline

Why organisations work with Christopher Howell He makes creativity visible as a method, not a mood. Magic gives the audience a direct experience of being wrong about what they just saw, which is a short route into discussions of assumption, bias and fixed thinking. His Project Illusions workshops have been booked into hard commercial environments, including a session for 25 senior leaders at Linklaters, then recognised as the FT’s most innovative law firm. He combines performer craft with coaching training, which means the content lands as a workshop, not a cabaret. Participants leave with techniques they can rehearse, not a memory of a show. His client list spans regulated professional services, global consumer brands and technology, including KPMG, Google, Procter and Gamble, BBC, Volkswagen, Danone and Arup. The material travels across sector and seniority. The format is unusually memorable in a category where most innovation keynotes blur together. For audiences that have sat through too many decks on disruption, his session is the one they still quote a year later. Biography highlights Member of The Magic Circle and Equity, trained under Jeff McBride and the late Eugene Burger, two of the most influential figures in late twentieth century stage magic. Founder of Project Illusions, a creativity and innovation programme delivered to BBC, Google, KPMG, Procter and Gamble, Volkswagen, Arup, Danone and Linklaters. Delivered a senior leadership workshop at Linklaters during the firm’s tenure as the Financial Times’ most innovative law firm, with a named endorsement from its Director of Strategy. Co-producer of the touring variety show Norvil and Josephine with Guinness World Record acrobat Desiree Kongerod. Performed at The Magic Castle (Hollywood), Wintergarten (Berlin), Hackney Empire and the Houses of Parliament. Holds a BA in Theatre Arts from Richmond University, London, classical singing training from Accademia Filarmonica, Bologna, and a Diploma in Life Coaching from Newcastle College. Supporter of Breathe Arts Health Research, which uses magic as occupational therapy for children with hemiplegia. Biography Creativity is the word every strategy deck asks for and every operating model quietly punishes. The gap between what leadership says it wants and what the working week actually rewards is where innovation programmes tend to die. Howell’s work starts in that gap. Project Illusions, the enterprise he founded, is built on a simple claim that is harder than it sounds: creativity is a skill, not a personality trait, and skills can be taught. The method uses magic as the teaching instrument. A trick lands because the audience held an assumption the performer quietly reframed. That mechanic, made explicit, becomes a workable model for how people get stuck on problems at work and how they get unstuck. The material has been delivered inside some of the less forgiving rooms in corporate life. BBC, Google, KPMG, Procter and Gamble, Volkswagen, Arup, Danone and Linklaters have all booked it. The Linklaters session, run for twenty-five senior leaders during the firm’s tenure as the Financial Times’ most innovative law firm, produced a named on-record endorsement from its Director of Strategy. Howell brings the training of a Magic Circle performer with mentors including Jeff McBride and Eugene Burger, a classical theatre and singing background, and a coaching qualification that keeps the sessions oriented around participant practice rather than spectacle. What separates his sessions from the usual innovation keynote is the evidence of change in the room. People who have just watched an assumption of their own dismantled in front of colleagues tend to hold their next assumption more lightly. That is the point. The magic is the teaching aid. The outcome is a group that leaves with a rehearsed way to question how they think. Key speaking topics Creativity as a trainable skill Innovation and change Problem solving under constraint Creative leadership Assumption and bias in decision making Personal and professional development Performance and presence Ideal for Senior leadership groups running innovation, transformation or strategy offsites Partners and directors in professional services firms facing commoditisation pressure Communications, marketing and brand teams looking for a culture-shifting plenary session Conferences and internal events where the brief is to make creativity stick rather than sound good Audience outcomes A working definition of creativity as a skill, with techniques that can be practised rather than admired. A shared language in the room for spotting assumptions, biases and default patterns in how teams approach problems. Specific methods for breaking fixed thinking, drawn from the craft of stage illusion and tested in coaching practice. A memorable shared experience that anchors follow-up work on innovation and change long after the session ends.

Why organisations work with Connie Dieken The Influence360° assessment is the only validated psychometric instrument built specifically to measure how individual leaders influence stakeholders. Organisations gain hard data on a capability they have previously only been able to assess anecdotally – or not at all. The Connect-Convey-Convince® methodology, developed through more than 15 years of research with over 20,000 participants, gives leadership teams a shared, actionable language for a problem most organisations misdiagnose as a personality issue rather than a learnable skill gap. Twenty years interviewing presidents and global CEOs for ABC and NBC gave Dieken direct observational data on how influence operates under pressure and at scale. That empirical foundation is not available from the executive coaching mainstream. Her training programmes are licensed in corporate universities worldwide and both her Wiley books reached No. 1 on Amazon and Audible – which means her frameworks carry weight in the room before she enters it. Membership of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches, a highly selective global practitioner community, places her within the most rigorously vetted executive coaching cohort in the world and signals peer-level recognition, not self-designation. Biography highlights Founder of Influence360°, a validated leadership influence assessment, and The Dieken Group, a C-suite executive advisory firm operating on five continents Author of two Wiley bestsellers: Talk Less, Say More (Connect-Convey-Convince® methodology) and Become the Real Deal (Three Layers of Presence and Return on Influence® framework) Five-time Emmy Award winner and inductee of the Radio/Television Broadcasters Hall of Fame, the National Speakers Association Speakers Hall of Fame, and the Million Dollar Consulting Hall of Fame Named Top 10 Executive Coach globally by the Global Gurus organisation; member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches (2019) Guest lecturer in executive education and MBA programmes at Case Western University, Indiana University, and Ohio State University Thought leadership featured in The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times Biography Most leaders believe they are more persuasive than others experience them. Connie Dieken, a broadcast journalist for ABC and NBC for two decades, built her career on closing that gap. Interviewing presidents and global CEOs, she identified the patterns that divided leaders who drove genuine action from those who merely spoke at people. That observation became a research project. Fifteen years of structured study involving more than 20,000 participants produced the Influence360° assessment, a validated instrument for measuring how leaders influence stakeholders. Two Wiley bestsellers followed: Talk Less, Say More, built on the Connect-Convey-Convince® methodology, and Become the Real Deal, which introduced the Three Layers of Presence and the Return on Influence® concept. The Dieken Group now advises C-suite executives at organisations including Coca-Cola, HP, Nestlé, BNP Paribas, and The Cleveland Clinic. Her influence training programmes are licensed in corporate universities on five continents. She is a guest lecturer in executive education at Case Western, Indiana, and Ohio State universities, and a member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches. Dieken has been inducted into the Radio/Television Broadcasters Hall of Fame, the National Speakers Association Speakers Hall of Fame, and the Million Dollar Consulting Hall of Fame. She has been named a Top 10 Executive Coach globally by the Global Gurus organisation and has delivered keynotes on four continents to audiences numbering in the thousands. Key speaking topics Leadership influence and stakeholder commitment Executive presence and authentic authority Influential communication under pressure Change leadership and stakeholder buy-in Human influence and decision-making in AI-shaped organisations Presentation strategy and persuasion Leadership assessment and behavioural diagnostics Ideal for Senior leadership teams navigating change, mergers, or strategic realignment where stakeholder buy-in is the critical variable CHROs and talent leaders designing executive development programmes where influence and presence are identified capability gaps Sales leadership and commercial functions where the ability to earn commitment is a direct performance driver Boards and executive committees seeking a research-grounded framework for developing leadership effectiveness at the top Audience outcomes A clear diagnostic of their personal influence pattern, including where they are most likely to lose stakeholder commitment and why A three-step methodology – Connect, Convey, Convince – they can apply immediately to high-stakes conversations, presentations, and change initiatives Understanding of the Three Layers of Presence and how inner, outer, and verbal presence affect their credibility with senior stakeholders Frameworks to distinguish between genuine influence and manipulation, and to lead without coercion or compliance-seeking Practical tools for navigating resistance from difficult stakeholders, including those who are dominant, anxious, or disengaged

Why organisations work with Costas Andriopoulos He has built one of the most cited academic foundations for organisational ambidexterity, the discipline of running exploitation and exploration in parallel, and translates it into language a leadership team can act on rather than admire. His 2009 Organization Science paper with Marianne Lewis is on most senior reading lists in the field, which gives the boardroom conversation a defensible reference point when innovation budgets come under pressure. “Purposeful Curiosity” gives leaders a working method for the awkward middle of an innovation cycle, where the question is not whether to explore but how to keep the inquiry productive when results are slow. As founder of Bayes X, he runs a live research programme on disruption with corporate partners, so the case material he brings to a session is current rather than historical. He has acted as thematic advisor on the Amundi (Lyxor) MSCI Disruptive Technology ETF, giving him a working view of how capital markets currently price the very disruption that operating leaders are trying to manage. Biography highlights Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Bayes Business School, City, University of London Associate Dean for MBA Programmes, Bayes Business School Founder and Director, Bayes X, the school’s Research Centre for Innovation and Disruption Director, Avyssos Advisors Ltd., innovation management consultancy Author, “Purposeful Curiosity” (Yellow Kite/Hachette, 2022), endorsed by Adam Grant Co-author, “Managing Change, Creativity and Innovation” (5th edition, Sage, 2024) Research published in Organization Science, Human Relations, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Long Range Planning, and California Management Review Thematic advisor to the Amundi (Lyxor) MSCI Disruptive Technology ETF Biography The hardest problem inside an established firm is not whether to innovate. It is how to keep the innovation agenda alive against the gravitational pull of the existing business. Costas Andriopoulos has spent two decades building the academic and practical answer to that question. His 2009 paper with Marianne Lewis in Organization Science set out how ambidextrous firms hold exploitation and exploration in productive tension rather than collapsing one into the other. The work has become a reference point for how senior teams discuss the paradox of running today’s business while building tomorrow’s. He has continued that line of research through articles in Human Relations, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Long Range Planning and California Management Review. At Bayes Business School he holds the chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, serves as Associate Dean for MBA Programmes, and founded the Bayes X Centre for Innovation and Disruption. Through Avyssos Advisors he works with founders and corporate leadership teams; through the Amundi (Lyxor) MSCI Disruptive Technology ETF advisory work he sees the same disruption priced by capital markets. “Purposeful Curiosity,” published by Yellow Kite in 2022 and endorsed by Adam Grant, took that research base to a wider audience. Its argument is operational rather than inspirational: curiosity becomes useful only when it is structured, directed, and protected against the day-to-day demands that crowd it out. That is the brief he brings into a leadership room. Key speaking topics Organisational ambidexterity Disruptive innovation in established firms Purposeful curiosity as a leadership discipline Innovation portfolio management Entrepreneurial mindset inside corporates Leading creative teams The paradox of exploitation and exploration Ideal for CEOs and executive committees holding both a profitability and a growth mandate Chief Innovation Officers and heads of R&D under board pressure to show returns from exploration CHROs and learning leaders building leadership development programmes that include innovation capability Founders and senior leadership teams of scale-ups moving from a single product to a portfolio Audience outcomes A clear vocabulary for the paradox of running today’s business while building the next one A defensible reference framework, drawn from peer-reviewed research, for protecting the exploration agenda inside an established firm A working method for converting individual curiosity into a managed organisational practice Examples of how ambidextrous firms structure decisions, incentives and team design to hold both modes at once

Why organisations work with Csaba Toth He runs ICQ Global, a people development business with more than 200 licensed partners across 45-plus countries, which means his methods have been pressure-tested in genuinely multicultural settings rather than theorised in one market. The Global DISC model is ICF and CPD-accredited and gives leaders one common language for personality, generation, profession, and nationality differences inside the same team. He measures and benchmarks psychological safety, motivational drivers, and cognitive diversity, so the conversation moves from cultural awareness slogans to specific data leaders can act on. His credential stack is unusually substantive: John Mattone Intelligent Leadership coach, Hofstede Insights Associate Partner, Richard Lewis-certified behavioural consultant, three Master’s degrees and an Executive MBA. He co-authored Uncommon Sense in Unusual Times with contributions from Marshall Goldsmith and John Mattone, a credibility marker for senior HR and L&D buyers familiar with that lineage. Biography highlights Founder of ICQ Global, a people development organisation with over 200 licensed partners across more than 45 countries. Developer of the Global DISC model, an ICF and CPD Standards-accredited intercultural behavioural framework. Author of Uncommon Sense in Unusual Times, with contributions from Marshall Goldsmith and John Mattone. Forbes Coaches Council member and Harvard Business Review Advisory Council member. Hofstede Insights Associate Partner and Richard Lewis Communications-certified cross-cultural trainer. Holds three Master’s degrees (Italy, UK, Hungary) and an Executive MBA from Quantic School of Business and Technology. Biography Diversity strategies fail at the level of daily team interaction. People with different nationalities, professions, generations, and personalities sit in the same meeting, draw different conclusions from the same words, and lose trust in each other long before anyone names the problem. That is the gap Csaba Toth set out to close. He founded ICQ Global to make cognitive and cultural diversity measurable. The company now operates with more than 200 licensed partners across 45-plus countries, and its core asset is the Global DISC model, an ICF and CPD-accredited framework that extends the most widely used behavioural model in business with a layer for cultural intelligence. Leaders get a single language for the differences that actually slow teams down. The credentials behind the work are unusually deep. Toth is certified through John Mattone’s Intelligent Leadership programme, holds Human Synergistics accreditation, is a Hofstede Insights Associate Partner and a Richard Lewis Communications-certified behavioural consultant, with further certification in CBT, NLP, and Positive Intelligence. He sits on the Forbes Coaches Council and the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council, holds three Master’s degrees from Italy, the UK and Hungary, and an Executive MBA from Quantic School of Business and Technology. His book, Uncommon Sense in Unusual Times, published with contributions from Marshall Goldsmith and John Mattone, sets out how leaders stay relevant when the people around them increasingly do not think, decide, or communicate the same way they do. That is the practical question he answers in a room. Key speaking topics Cultural intelligence and the Global DISC model Psychological safety in multicultural teams Cognitive diversity and team performance Inclusive leadership across generations and nationalities Communication breakdown in global organisations Motivational drivers and behavioural difference Coaching and people development at scale Ideal for CHROs, Heads of L&D, and Heads of Talent leading global or multicultural workforces. DEI and Inclusion leads moving past awareness work into measurable team outcomes. Leadership development and coaching faculties inside multinational businesses. Senior leaders of cross-border teams where communication and trust have stalled. Audience outcomes A common vocabulary for cultural, generational, and personality differences that a team can use the next day. A clearer read on where psychological safety is breaking down inside their own teams and why. The Global DISC lens applied to a real internal dynamic the audience already recognises. Specific behavioural shifts leaders can make when working across cultures, professions, and generations. A more honest assessment of how cognitive diversity is helping or hurting performance in their organisation.

Why organisations work with Dame Katherine Grainger Her perspective on high performance is not borrowed from sport – it is built from two decades of competing at the Olympic level and then eight years as the senior leader responsible for the entire British elite sport system as Chair of UK Sport. The result is a rare, system-level view of what makes performance culture work. She completed a PhD at King’s College London – in law, on whole life sentencing – while training for and winning Olympic gold. That combination is not incidental. It gives her a credible argument about how sustained focus, long-term discipline, and intellectual rigour reinforce rather than compete with each other. Her autobiography Dreams Do Come True is built around the specific psychology of returning to compete after three consecutive near-misses. For any organisation struggling with how to sustain commitment after a setback, or how to build a team that performs when the moment actually comes, this is directly applicable material. As the first female Chair of the British Olympic Association in its 120-year history – and a crossbench Life Peer since 2025 – she carries institutional authority that extends well beyond the speaking circuit. Boards and senior leadership teams treat her not as an external voice but as a peer. She speaks to the leadership question that Olympic sport uniquely tests: how do you create the conditions for someone else to succeed, rather than performing yourself? Her shift from competing to governing elite sport is the lived version of a challenge every senior leader faces. Biography highlights Olympic gold medallist (London 2012) and four-time Olympic silver medallist – the only British woman to win medals at five consecutive Olympic Games (2000-2016) Six-time World Champion with eight World Championship medals; voted Britain’s first “Olympians’ Olympian” by fellow Olympians Chair of UK Sport 2017-2025; Chair of the British Olympic Association from 2025 – the first female chair in the BOA’s 120-year history DBE 2017 for services to sport and charity; Life Peer (Baroness Grainger, crossbench) from 2025 PhD in law (the sentencing of homicide), King’s College London; Fellow of King’s College London; first female Chancellor of the University of Glasgow (2020-) Author of Dreams Do Come True (2013), self-written autobiography reviewed by the Financial Times and The Observer; BBC broadcaster for Rowing World Cup coverage and the 2014 Commonwealth Games Biography Katherine Grainger won an Olympic gold medal at London 2012 – alongside Anna Watkins, setting an Olympic record in the double sculls – after three consecutive Olympic silvers. She then returned to the water, two years after considering retirement, and won a fourth silver in Rio in 2016. Across those sixteen years, she also completed three law degrees, including a PhD at King’s College London, written during the same period she was training for Olympic gold. That combination is her argument. The discipline required to stay in pursuit of a goal across multiple cycles of failure and recommitment – and to do so while building intellectual capability in parallel – is not an athletic phenomenon. It is a leadership one. Her speaking draws directly on that experience: not as inspiration, but as a practical framework for what organisations actually need to sustain performance at the highest level. Her post-competitive career has given that argument institutional weight. As Chair of UK Sport from 2017 to 2025, she was responsible for the strategy and governance of British elite sport as a whole – funding decisions, performance standards, safeguarding, inclusion. As Chair of the British Olympic Association from 2025, the first woman in the role since the BOA’s founding in 1905, she now leads the organisation that governs Team GB’s Olympic programme. She is also Chancellor of the University of Glasgow and, since 2025, a crossbench Life Peer. The result is a speaker who can address boards and senior leadership teams not as a visiting athlete with a story, but as a serious institutional figure with a tested view of what leadership culture requires at the level where it actually matters. Key speaking topics Sustained high performance and long-cycle leadership Resilience and recommitment after setback High-performance team culture Leadership in governance and elite institutions The parallel demands of intellectual and physical excellence Women in leadership and sport governance Purpose, values, and legacy in leadership Ideal for C-suite and board-level audiences wrestling with questions of culture, sustained performance, and long-term strategic commitment CHROs and people leaders building high-performance frameworks that endure beyond individual leadership cycles Leadership development programmes for senior executives seeking a model of performance that integrates governance, accountability, and personal resilience Organisations navigating leadership transition, post-merger culture alignment, or the challenge of maintaining standards after a period of peak achievement Audience outcomes A clearer understanding of why most performance cultures produce one-off results rather than sustained excellence – and the specific conditions that change that Practical perspective on how to lead a team through extended periods of uncertainty and near-miss, without losing commitment or direction A reframed view of setback as structural to high performance, not a deviation from it – with concrete examples of how elite athletes and institutions manage that cycle Insight into what governance of high-performance systems actually requires, drawn from eight years leading UK Sport Renewed clarity on the relationship between personal discipline, intellectual rigour, and sustained team performance

Why organisations work with Dan Clark He is one of fewer than 250 speakers ever inducted into the National Speakers Association Speakers Hall of Fame, a peer-voted recognition that signals craft at the level of Zig Ziglar, Colin Powell, and Earl Nightingale. His Art of Significance framework gives leadership teams a language for the difference between hitting targets and building something people want to stay inside. It travels well in family business, sales, and military leadership settings. He was a primary contributing author to the first twelve volumes of Chicken Soup for the Soul, including the number two New York Times bestseller Chicken Soup for the College Soul. His stories are already in the bloodstream of audiences who did not know his name. He works at the top end of storytelling as a business discipline, teaching sales leaders and executives to construct narrative arcs that land without veering into motivational cliche. He has a long track record with U.S. military leadership audiences and with Fortune 500 sales organisations, which gives him a wider room to work than most motivational keynoters. He has closed the main platform at Million Dollar Round Table, the global summit for top-producing financial advisers, which is the room sales organisations most want a keynote to hold. Biography highlights Inducted into the National Speakers Association Speakers Hall of Fame, 2005. Earned the Certified Speaking Professional designation from the National Speakers Association in 1987. Primary contributing author to the first twelve volumes of Chicken Soup for the Soul; author of Chicken Soup for the College Soul, a number two New York Times bestseller. Author of The Art of Significance: Achieving the Level Beyond Success, and further titles including Influential Impact, Making of a Champion, and Transference of Trust. His short story Puppies for Sale was adapted into a 1998 Paramount short film starring Jack Lemmon, directed by Ron Krauss, with a score by Elmer Bernstein. International Board of Governors member, Operation Smile; National Advisory Board member, Operation Kids. Author of Story Selling: How to 5x Your Value, 10x Your Influence, and Turn Your Words into Wealth, built on a six-neurochemical model of narrative persuasion. Biography Most leadership keynotes run on frameworks. Clark runs on stories, and that choice is the argument. The Art of Significance separates successful people, who get what they think they want, from significant people, who want what they get. Clark treats that distinction as the working problem of senior leadership, not as motivational dressing. The credential stack sits behind the craft. He was inducted into the National Speakers Association Speakers Hall of Fame in 2005, a peer-voted designation held by fewer than 250 speakers in the association’s history. He earned the Certified Speaking Professional mark in 1987. Before that, he was a scholarship athlete at the University of Utah whose football career ended with a spinal injury in a tackling drill, which is where the speaking work began. Clark’s reach into general audiences predates the keynote career by a decade. He was a primary contributing author to the first twelve volumes of Chicken Soup for the Soul, and author of Chicken Soup for the College Soul, which reached number two on the New York Times bestseller list. His short story Puppies for Sale was produced as a 1998 Paramount short film starring Jack Lemmon. The stories travel on their own, which is why the keynote lands inside corporate, military, and family business audiences that would otherwise resist the form. The work for serious organisations is not the motivation. It is the transfer. Clark teaches sales and leadership teams to build narrative arcs their own people can retell without losing the point. For organisations trying to tie culture, performance, and purpose together in front of a leadership audience, that is a specific craft, and there are very few speakers at this level still actively working the room. Key speaking topics The Art of Significance and leadership character Storytelling as a sales and leadership discipline Resilience after setback Team building and high performance culture Executive communication and platform skills Purpose-driven leadership Workplace safety culture and human factors Ideal for CEO and senior leadership offsites where the goal is shared conviction, not a content download Sales leadership kickoffs and top-performer incentive events Family business and family office leadership gatherings Military, public sector, and values-led organisations looking for a Hall of Fame keynote headliner Audience outcomes A working distinction between success and significance that leadership teams can apply to their own decisions. A repeatable approach to building and telling a business story so that it lands with a customer, a team, or a board. A renewed sense of standard inside senior teams that have drifted into transactional mode. Specific, retellable stories that give a leadership event a centre of gravity long after the session ends.

Why organisations work with Dan Hunt He has built the performance engine, not just coached inside one. The GB women’s endurance programme he took over in 2005 went from uncompetitive to delivering Olympic medals in under three years. His career is a rare controlled experiment in whether performance infrastructure transfers. He has run it in track cycling, professional road cycling at Team Sky, Premier League academy football, Olympic snow sports, and now GB Surfing. Q Division, the innovation unit he set up at British Ski and Snowboard, is a concrete example of how a small, properly scoped R and D function finds gains a larger organisation would miss. He speaks with specific case material from environments where the scoreboard is public and unforgiving, which is closer to the conditions a senior leadership team actually operates in than most sport-to-business framing allows. Biography highlights Led the turnaround of the Great Britain women’s endurance cycling programme from 2005, contributing to Olympic medals at Beijing 2008. Coached the GB men’s team pursuit to Olympic gold at London 2012. Appointed Sports Director at Team Sky for the 2013 season, during the period of consecutive Tour de France wins. Head of Elite Performance at the Premier League, working on academy performance systems. Performance Director at British Ski and Snowboard across alpine, freestyle, snowboard, cross-country, ski jumping, speed skiing and telemark; founded Q Division, the federation’s innovation unit. Executive Performance Director of GB Surfing from 2023. Biography Most organisations can point to a period of good results. Far fewer can explain why those results held, or why they did not. The distinction matters because the job of a senior leader is rarely to produce a single peak. It is to build the thing that produces peaks repeatedly. That is the problem Hunt has spent his career on. In 2005 he took over a Great Britain women’s endurance cycling programme that was not competitive, and inside three years it was delivering Olympic medals. He then switched to the men’s team pursuit and the group won gold at London 2012. The common thread across both was not a single charismatic intervention. It was an explicit, transferable system for how talent, coaching, data and decision rights fit together. Team Sky appointed him Sports Director for the 2013 season, a period that coincided with consecutive Tour de France wins. He went on to run elite performance at the Premier League, working on academy-stage talent systems, and then joined British Ski and Snowboard as Performance Director. There he built Q Division, a small innovation unit focused on the kind of marginal gains that a federation structure usually cannot produce on its own. In 2023 he took on the Executive Performance Director role at GB Surfing, now building the same architecture in a sport with almost no existing elite infrastructure in Britain. What makes Hunt useful in a boardroom is not a stock set of sport analogies. It is that he has rebuilt performance systems in five very different contexts, and can be specific about what travels, what does not, and why senior teams routinely misread the difference. Key speaking topics High-performance systems design Leadership under competitive pressure Talent pathways and academy development Culture change in medal-winning environments Marginal gains and performance innovation units Coaching teams through succession and reinvention Transfer of elite-sport practice to business leadership Ideal for CEO and board offsites framing a multi-year performance or culture reset CHROs and talent leads rebuilding pathways, academies, or internal development systems Leadership teams under acute competitive pressure where results are public Transformation leads accountable for sustained, not one-off, performance uplift Audience outcomes A sharper distinction between one-off results and a system that produces them repeatedly Specific case material from five elite programmes, not generic sport-to-business analogy A clearer view of how small innovation units earn their keep inside a larger organisation A working mental model for the handover points where high-performance cultures most often break