Organisationsdesign

Why organisations work with Nilofer Merchant Her Onlyness framework offers a structural diagnosis for why innovation stalls inside organisations: not a confidence problem or a diversity problem, but a systemic filtering-out of unconventional ideas that the existing norms were built to do. Our Best Work (HarperBusiness, 2026) names 24 specific norms – including performance reviews, servant leadership, and “move fast and break things” – that actively undermine the conditions for great work, and provides a measurable, team-applicable alternative for each one. She holds a position few speakers occupy: genuine technology executive experience (Apple, Autodesk, Symantec; 100+ products; $18B in revenues) combined with management research that Thinkers50 cited as among the five ideas most likely to shape business for the next twenty years. She reframes the productivity and innovation conversation away from individual behaviour change – where most leadership speakers operate – and onto the systems and norms that leaders themselves control, which is a more actionable entry point for a board or senior team. Ranked by Thinkers50 as the “#1 person most likely to influence the future of management in both theory and practice,” her work carries both intellectual authority and practical application at the senior level. Biography highlights Author of four books on organisational performance and work design: The New How (O’Reilly, 2010), 11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra (Harvard Business Review, 2012), The Power of Onlyness (Viking, 2017), and Our Best Work (HarperBusiness, 2026) Thinkers50 “Future Thinker” Award, 2013; ranked #22 globally in 2017 ranking; Thinkers50 Top 50, 2021; The Power of Onlyness shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award TED mainstage speaker; “Sitting Is the Smoking of Our Generation” ranks in the top 10% of TED’s most-viewed talks Harvard Business Review contributor; media coverage includes Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, Bloomberg, Fast Company, and CNN Former executive at Apple, Autodesk, and GoLive; personally launched more than 100 products generating $18 billion in revenue across 25 years in technology Teaches business strategy and collaborative management at Stanford University and Santa Clara University; MBA, Santa Clara University Founder, The Intangible Labs; top 10 HR thinker, HR Magazine Biography Nilofer Merchant starts from an observation that most organisations resist: the management tools that delivered performance in the twentieth century are actively limiting performance now. From her position as founder of The Intangible Labs and author of four books on work design, she has spent twenty-five years building an evidence base for that claim, and an alternative. Her Onlyness framework, developed in The Power of Onlyness (Viking, 2017) and cited by Thinkers50 as one of five ideas most likely to shape business for the next twenty years, holds that modern value creation flows not from hierarchy or title, but from the distinct perspective that only each individual can bring. When organisations filter out that perspective through deference, conformity, and outdated norms, they lose the one input that capital and process cannot replicate. Our Best Work (HarperBusiness, 2026) takes that argument into the operational detail boards and leadership teams can actually act on. It names 24 specific norms – from performance reviews to servant leadership to “move fast and break things” – that suppress contribution, trust, and innovation, and pairs each with a measurable alternative. The argument is structural: the problem is not the willingness of people to perform, but the systems they are asked to perform inside. Merchant’s authority on this is grounded in operating experience. A former executive at Apple, Autodesk, and Symantec, she personally launched more than 100 products generating $18 billion in revenue. She has contributed to Harvard Business Review, been ranked #22 among the world’s top management thinkers by Thinkers50, and teaches business strategy at Stanford University and Santa Clara University. Her TED talk “Sitting Is the Smoking of Our Generation” ranks in the top 10% of TED’s most-viewed talks. Key speaking topics Organisational norms and performance systems The Onlyness framework and value creation Intangible value in modern organisations Collaborative strategy and execution Innovation and idea suppression in hierarchical structures Future of work and work design Culture change as systems change Ideal for CHROs and People leaders designing or overhauling performance and culture systems CEOs and senior leadership teams asking why execution consistently falls short of strategy Chief Innovation Officers and transformation leads examining why new ideas fail to scale internally Boards and executive committees evaluating whether their management models are still fit for purpose Audience outcomes A named diagnostic framework (Onlyness) for identifying where organisational value is being systematically suppressed – and why Specific understanding of which widely adopted management practices are actively limiting innovation and contribution in their own organisations A practical model for replacing competition-based and hierarchy-based norms with trust and collaboration-based alternatives, drawn from Our Best Work‘s 24-indicator framework Language for the gap between what organisations currently measure and what actually creates value – useful for board-level and senior team conversations Concrete team-level practices applicable immediately post-session, drawn from the chapter-by-chapter practice model in Our Best Work

Why organisations work with Oliver Hart Hart’s theory of incomplete contracts and the Grossman-Hart-Moore property rights theory underpin most modern thinking on corporate governance and the boundaries of the firm. Boards working through M&A, integration, outsourcing, or governance redesign get a framework grounded in four decades of foundational research. The Hart-Zingales shareholder welfare framework gives boards a substantive third position between Friedman-style shareholder primacy and stakeholder capitalism rhetoric. It is published in peer-reviewed journals and directly applicable to live ESG and shareholder voting decisions. Hart has served as a government expert witness in major US legal cases, including Black & Decker v. USA and Wells Fargo v. USA. The framework has been tested under adversarial legal scrutiny, with high-stakes commercial outcomes turning on the economic argument. Hart’s body of work has shaped four decades of research on ownership and incentive design. The 2016 Nobel Prize and 2023 Knight Bachelor are the formal recognition of a framework that now underpins how regulators and corporate boards approach governance questions. Biography highlights Co-recipient of the 2016 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, awarded with Bengt Holmström for contributions to contract theory. Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard, the institution’s highest faculty rank. Author of Firms, Contracts, and Financial Structure (Oxford University Press), the standard reference text on the economic theory of the firm. Knight Bachelor in the 2023 King’s Birthday Honours for services to economic theory. Past president of the American Law and Economics Association and past vice president of the American Economic Association. Fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Biography What is a firm, and where should its boundaries lie? The question sits underneath most of the contested decisions facing modern boards, from M&A integration to ESG governance. The framework that lets boards answer it rigorously was largely built by Sir Oliver Hart. Hart’s contributions to contract theory, recognised with the 2016 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, centre on a foundational insight. Real contracts are incomplete: they cannot specify every contingency, and whoever holds the right to decide on the unspecified elements holds the real power. The Grossman-Hart-Moore property rights theory built on this to formalise when activities should sit inside firms and when they should sit in markets. More recently, his work with Luigi Zingales of Chicago Booth has redrawn the corporate purpose debate. The Hart-Zingales shareholder welfare framework reframes corporate objectives around the actual preferences of investors, including their non-financial concerns, and proposes shareholder voting as the mechanism for expressing them. The framework speaks directly to live disputes about ESG votes and shareholder activism on social issues. At Harvard since 1993, Hart holds the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professorship and chaired the Economics department from 2000 to 2003. Past president of the American Law and Economics Association and fellow of the British Academy, he was made a Knight Bachelor in 2023 for services to economic theory. The 1986 paper with Sandy Grossman, “The Costs and Benefits of Ownership,” remains the standard reference for how firm boundaries are analysed in modern economics. Key speaking topics Contract theory and incomplete contracts The theory of the firm Corporate governance and ownership Shareholder welfare and corporate purpose ESG governance and shareholder activism Incentive design Ideal for Boards of directors and chairs General counsel, CFOs, and corporate governance leaders Investors and asset managers grappling with ESG mandates Policymakers, regulators, and antitrust authorities Audience outcomes A working theory of where firm boundaries should lie and why, applicable to live decisions on M&A and outsourcing. A defensible position on corporate purpose that goes beyond Friedman versus stakeholder capitalism slogans. The economic logic underneath shareholder activism and ESG governance, including when shareholder voting matters and when it doesn’t. The intellectual vocabulary for thinking about ownership and incentive design with the seriousness these topics require.

Why organisations work with Peter Hinssen His Never Normal concept and the seven transformation levers of The Uncertainty Principle give leadership teams a shared language for permanent disruption and a structured way to allocate innovation effort across multiple time horizons, a practical alternative to the generic instruction to “be more innovative.” His background runs the full organisational arc, from three technology exits (including a stock-exchange listing) to an Entrepreneur in Residence role at McKinsey & Company and a former non-executive board seat at Belfius Bank, which means he speaks with equal credibility to founders, operators, and board members. The Uncertainty Principle (Lannoo, 2025), endorsed by the Chairman of MIT CISR, gives boards seven concrete levers of transformation for treating systemic uncertainty as a strategic input. His client roster spans TSMC, Novo Nordisk, AstraZeneca, BMW, Unilever, PepsiCo, LVMH, Microsoft, and Bloomberg, which gives him cross-sector pattern recognition on how the innovation-operations tension shows up differently depending on industry structure and ownership context. Biography highlights Founder, nexxworks, an innovation company that runs masterclasses and innovation tours for established organisations Author of six books, including The Uncertainty Principle (Lannoo, 2025) Serial entrepreneur: founded e-COM (acquired by Alcatel-Lucent), Streamcase (acquired by Belgacom), and Porthus (listed on the stock exchange in 2006, acquired by Descartes) Entrepreneur in Residence, McKinsey & Company, focused on digital and technology strategy Visiting Lecturer, London Business School Former Non Executive Board Member, Belfius Bank; former board member, Mediahuis LinkedIn Top Voice Biography Most companies are built to deliver predictable results, which is precisely the wrong design when disruption becomes the climate rather than the weather. Peter Hinssen calls this state the Never Normal: a condition of permanent change in which the only constant is uncertainty. And yet budget cycles reward certainty. Governance structures penalise experiments that take longer than a financial year to pay off. The result is a structural gap between operational excellence and the capacity for genuine reinvention. His body of work is a sustained answer to that gap. The Never Normal reframes constant disruption as an operating condition to design for, not an exceptional period to wait out. The Day After Tomorrow, his 2017 book, introduced a now widely used way to think across three time horizons. Leaders fund today’s operations, tomorrow’s plans, and the reinvention that decides who is still relevant a decade out. That argument carries weight because Hinssen has lived the full arc of a company’s life. He founded and scaled three technology firms, including Porthus, which listed on the Belgian stock exchange in 2006 before Descartes acquired it. He served as Entrepreneur in Residence at McKinsey & Company, was a Non Executive Board Member at Belfius Bank, and today runs nexxworks, the innovation company he founded. He is a Visiting Lecturer at London Business School. His sixth book, The Uncertainty Principle (Lannoo, 2025), makes the case most directly: uncertainty is not a risk to hedge but the raw material from which bold organisations build advantage. The book works through seven levers of transformation, including strategy, foresight, organisational design, culture, innovation, risk appetite, and the changing nature of work. Dr Peter Weill, Chairman of MIT CISR, calls it a guide to navigating between the forces of pessimism and possibility. Key speaking topics Innovation strategy and multi-horizon investment The Never Normal and permanent disruption The Uncertainty Principle and decision-making under uncertainty Organisational reinvention and the Phoenix model Artificial intelligence and augmented intelligence Digital transformation and business-model change Leadership under permanent uncertainty Ideal for Boards and C-suite teams steering established businesses through structural disruption Chief Innovation Officers and transformation leads who own the innovation-operations tension Strategy teams that need a shared basis for multi-horizon investment decisions Large incumbents across consumer goods, healthcare, financial services, technology, and industrials facing a reinvention mandate Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for investing across three time horizons: today, tomorrow, and the bolder reinvention beyond A way to treat uncertainty as a strategic input rather than a threat, drawn from The Uncertainty Principle A reframing of AI as a structural accelerant of the innovation-operations challenge, not a standalone technology decision Clarity on the organisational design and governance choices that separate companies that reinvent from those that get disrupted

Why organisations work with Peter Senge Built the framework that defined organisational learning. The Fifth Discipline has sold over two million copies; Harvard Business Review named it one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years, and the Financial Times listed it among the five most important management books ever published. Treats systems thinking as a leadership discipline. The Five Disciplines (personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking) give executives a working method for changing the structures that produce their hardest recurring problems. Three decades of applied work with Ford, Shell, BP, Unilever, Intel, and Saudi Aramco, alongside cross-sector initiatives on global food systems, climate, and education. Named “Strategist of the Century” by the Journal of Business Strategy, one of 24 figures judged to have had the greatest influence on 20th-century business strategy. The Fifth Discipline is now in its fourth decade of continuous use on MBA syllabuses and inside operating companies. Biography highlights Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Sustainability at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Founding Chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) and co-founder of the Academy for Systemic Change. Author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, with over two million copies sold worldwide. Co-author of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, The Dance of Change, Schools That Learn, Presence, and The Necessary Revolution. Named “Strategist of the Century” by the Journal of Business Strategy; ranked among the world’s top management thinkers by the Financial Times and BusinessWeek. Convened the Sustainable Food Lab, bringing major food companies and NGOs into shared work on sustainable agriculture. Biography The Fifth Discipline, published in 1990, gave senior executives a working vocabulary for something they kept hitting in practice but could not name: the structure of an organisation tends to produce the very problems its leaders are trying to solve. Thirty-six years later the book is still in print and still the reference text for the field. Peter Senge wrote it at MIT, where he is Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Sustainability at the Sloan School of Management. He is founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning and co-founder of the Academy for Systemic Change. The Fifth Discipline has sold more than two million copies. Harvard Business Review named it one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years; the Financial Times listed it among the five most important management books ever published. The book is organised around five disciplines: personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking. The core argument is that the only sustainable competitive advantage is an organisation’s ability to learn faster than its environment changes. Senge’s later work extended the method into education through Schools That Learn, into large-scale change through The Dance of Change, and into sustainability through The Necessary Revolution. His applied work has run through Ford, Shell, BP, Unilever, Intel, and Saudi Aramco, and across cross-sector initiatives including the Sustainable Food Lab, which brought major food companies and NGOs into shared work on sustainable agriculture, and the Compassionate Systems community in primary and secondary education. The Journal of Business Strategy named him a “Strategist of the Century,” one of 24 figures judged to have had the greatest influence on 20th-century business strategy. Key speaking topics Systems thinking Organisational learning Leadership in complex systems Sustaining change in large organisations Cross-sector collaboration Sustainability and systemic change Ideal for CEOs and senior executive teams running multi-year transformation programmes Heads of strategy and transformation leads diagnosing why change initiatives stall Chief sustainability officers and ESG leads working across sector and stakeholder boundaries Senior leaders in education, healthcare, and government addressing complex public-system challenges Audience outcomes A new vocabulary for talking about why their hardest organisational problems keep returning The Five Disciplines as a working method, applied through cases drawn from Ford, Shell, Unilever, and the Sustainable Food Lab Language to make the structural causes of organisational performance visible to senior teams A sharper read on what leadership in complex, multi-stakeholder environments demands

Why organisations work with Ravin Jesuthasan He gives boards and executive teams an actual blueprint for moving from jobs to skills, not a slide about why it matters. The Work Without Jobs framework, developed with John Boudreau, is the reference text on the subject and is taught inside MIT Sloan and Kellogg. His day job is doing this work. As Mercer’s Global Leader of Transformation Services, he advises some of the largest employers in the world on workforce redesign, so the keynote is built on live engagements, not theory. He sits where AI, automation and human capital actually intersect. His four-step framework for applying automation to work, from Reinventing Jobs, has become a standard tool for HR and operations leaders trying to decide what to automate, what to augment, and what to leave alone. He brings institutional authority that buyers can verify. World Economic Forum Steering Committee on Work and Employment, Thinkers50 Radar, FT Book of the Month, fifteen pieces in HBR and MIT Sloan Management Review. His material is built for the CHRO and the CEO in the same room. Many future-of-work speakers pitch to one or the other. He frames the work redesign question as a board-level operating decision, which is how it now needs to be sold internally. Biography highlights Global Leader of Transformation Services at Mercer. Executive Fellow and Adjunct Lecturer of Executive Education, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Author of five books including Work Without Jobs (MIT Press, 2022) and The Skills-Powered Organization (MIT Press, 2024). Wall Street Journal bestseller; Financial Times Book of the Month, October 2024. Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2020; shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Talent Award 2023. World Economic Forum Steering Committee member on Work and Employment. Over 200 published articles, including 15 in Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review; regular Forbes contributor. CFA charterholder and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA). Biography The job, as a unit of organisational architecture, is starting to look obsolete. Roles are static, skills inside them decay in months rather than years, and AI is now capable of doing chunks of work that used to define entire functions. Most large employers know this. Very few know what to replace the jobs-based model with. This is the territory Ravin Jesuthasan has spent two decades mapping. As Global Leader of Transformation Services at Mercer, he advises multinational employers on how to rebuild their workforce architecture around skills and tasks rather than fixed job descriptions. The same body of work runs through Work Without Jobs, written with John Boudreau and published by MIT Press in 2022, and its 2024 follow-up, The Skills-Powered Organization, written with Tanuj Kapilashrami and named Financial Times Book of the Month in October 2024. The institutional credentials match the intellectual claim. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Steering Committee on Work and Employment, holds an Executive Fellow and Adjunct Lecturer appointment at the Kellogg School of Management, and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2020 before being shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Talent Award in 2023. He has written more than 200 articles, including fifteen pieces for Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review, and contributes regularly to Forbes. For boards now being asked how AI will reshape headcount, productivity and capability, his contribution is not a forecast. It is an operating model: a structured way of deciding what work gets deconstructed, which tasks get automated or augmented, and how the organisation acquires the skills it will actually need next year, not the jobs it posted last year. Key speaking topics The skills-powered organisation Reinventing jobs through automation and AI The future of work and the work operating system Workforce transformation and human capital strategy Human-AI collaboration in the enterprise The future of the Chief People Officer role Sustainable digital transformation Ideal for CHROs and Chief People Officers rebuilding the workforce model around skills and AI. CEOs and boards making capital-level decisions on AI, automation and headcount. Transformation, operations and strategy leaders responsible for redesigning how work gets done. Executive teams preparing for skills-based talent markets and post-jobs operating models. Audience outcomes A working definition of the skills-powered organisation and how it differs from a jobs-based model. A four-step method for deciding what to automate, what to augment, and what to leave to humans. A board-ready argument for treating work design as a strategic operating decision, not an HR programme. Specific case examples from global employers already deconstructing jobs into tasks and skills.

Why organisations work with Reed Hastings The «Freedom and Responsibility» framework – documented in the Netflix Culture Deck and codified in No Rules Rules – gives organisations a named, sequenced model for replacing bureaucracy with accountability: not a philosophy, but a tested operating system built across a 200-person startup through to a 300-million-subscriber global company. Hastings applied the same cultural principles across four distinct business-model transitions at Netflix – DVD rental, streaming, original content production, and global expansion into 190 countries – providing evidence that the model holds across radically different operating contexts, not just favourable ones. His 2025 appointment to the board of Anthropic by its Long Term Benefit Trust positions him to speak directly to AI governance challenges at board level, based on direct engagement with one of the sector’s leading AI safety organisations – not commentary from the outside. He has publicly documented a major failure – the 2011 Qwikster decision, widely covered in the press – as a case study in what his own cultural model gets wrong under pressure, giving audiences honest access to failure alongside success. A $50 million commitment to Bowdoin College’s AI and Humanity research programme gives him a substantive, funded position on AI’s workforce and societal impact – relevant to CHROs, boards, and executive teams now building their own AI governance frameworks. Biography highlights Co-founder and executive chairman of Netflix; CEO from 1998 to 2023 – led the company through four business-model transformations, from DVD rental to global streaming platform and original content studio Co-authored No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention (2020) with INSEAD professor Erin Meyer – New York Times bestseller, shortlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award Two published TED talks: «How Netflix changed entertainment – and where it’s headed» (TED2018) and «3 secrets to Netflix’s success» (TED2020) Former board member of Microsoft (2007–2012) and Facebook/Meta (2011–2019); current board member of Bloomberg and Anthropic (appointed 2025) President of the California State Board of Education (2000–2004); current board member of KIPP, City Fund, and the Charter School Growth Fund BA in Mathematics, Bowdoin College; MSCS in Artificial Intelligence, Stanford University; Peace Corps mathematics teacher in Swaziland Biography Reed Hastings built the management case at Netflix – across 25 years and four business-model transitions – that organisations scale best when they remove controls, not add them. The result was the «Freedom and Responsibility» framework, first documented in an internal Culture Deck made public in 2009. Hastings and INSEAD professor Erin Meyer later codified it in No Rules Rules (2020), a New York Times bestseller shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year. The framework’s argument runs in sequence: high talent density creates the conditions for radical candor, which in turn enables leaders to eliminate policies, approval layers, and bureaucratic controls. This ordered logic is what separates the Netflix model from generic arguments for employee autonomy. It was not derived from a single favourable configuration – it was tested across DVD, streaming, original production, and international expansion simultaneously, and it broke and was rebuilt along the way. Hastings has spoken publicly about the Qwikster decision as a case in what the model costs when applied badly. Before Netflix, Hastings founded Pure Software in 1991, took it public in 1995, and sold it to Rational Software. That experience of scaling an engineer-led startup into a public corporation shaped his understanding of what happens to culture as organisations grow and complicate. It is the origin of the argument, not merely its backdrop. Hastings sits on the board of Anthropic, appointed in 2025 by its Long Term Benefit Trust to help guide AI development for long-term societal benefit. A $50 million gift to Bowdoin College to establish an AI and Humanity research programme adds institutional weight to that engagement. For boards and leadership teams now navigating AI governance, he brings a practitioner’s perspective – not an observer’s. Key speaking topics Organisational culture and management design The Freedom and Responsibility framework Talent density and high-performance teams Scaling technology-driven businesses AI governance and the societal impact of technology Corporate governance and board-level leadership Education reform and systemic institutional leadership Ideal for CEOs and executive leadership teams navigating growth, culture change, or organisational redesign CHROs and people leaders building high-performance cultures at scale Board directors and governance leads in technology, media, and high-growth organisations Senior leadership teams with active AI governance or AI adoption agendas Audience outcomes A concrete understanding of the «Freedom and Responsibility» framework – and the specific conditions (talent density, radical candor) required before eliminating controls, not after Clarity on how Netflix’s cultural principles functioned as a sequenced system across multiple business-model transitions, including where the model failed A working frame for evaluating which management policies and controls serve organisational performance and which impede it Board-level perspective on AI governance and the human-impact questions that senior leaders now need to address with institutional seriousness Practical reference points from a 25-year operating record – including documented failures – for leadership teams working through their own culture and performance challenges

Why organisations work with Richard Sennett A longitudinal sociological lens almost no other living speaker offers. Five decades on the same questions about what work does to people, running from The Hidden Injuries of Class (1972) through The Corrosion of Character (1998) to Building and Dwelling (2018). Reframes employee engagement as a question of craft. The Craftsman (2008) advanced the thesis that “making is thinking” and treats the desire to do a job well for its own sake as a workplace asset organisations either nurture or destroy. A serious framework for cooperation as a workplace skill. Together (2012) argues that cooperation is a craft learned through structured practice, and shows why short-term teams and constant reorganisation erode the conditions that make it possible. Direct involvement in shaping how cities and labour are governed. Sennett wrote the mission statement for UN Habitat III, helped organise COP26 work on cities and climate, and chaired the LSE Cities programme. Credentials at a level few corporate speakers reach: the Hegel Prize, the Spinoza Prize, the Centennial Medal from Harvard, an OBE for services to design and Fellowship of the British Academy. Biography highlights Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics; former University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. Author of The Hidden Injuries of Class, The Fall of Public Man, The Corrosion of Character, The Craftsman, Together, Building and Dwelling and The Performer. Founding director of the New York Institute for the Humanities (with Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky); former President of the American Council on Work; founder and chair of Theatrum Mundi. Senior Advisor to the United Nations Council on Urban Initiatives; wrote the mission statement for UN Habitat III; helped organise COP26 work on cities and climate. OBE for services to design (2018); Fellow of the British Academy; Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; recipient of the Hegel Prize, the Spinoza Prize and the Centennial Medal from Harvard. Senior Fellow at the Center on Capitalism and Society, Columbia University; Honorary Professor at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture and Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Biography The promise of flexible capitalism was that workers would gain real control of their own time and direction. The Corrosion of Character, published in 1998, showed in granular ethnographic detail what actually happened to dismissed IBM executives, Boston bakers and a barmaid turned advertising executive. The book established a thesis that has only sharpened with time: an economy built around “no long-term” produces people who struggle to sustain identity and craft over a working life. That argument matured over two decades into a trilogy on what Sennett calls Homo Faber, or “man the maker.” The Craftsman (2008) advanced a single thesis: making is thinking. It treated the desire to do a job well for its own sake as a workplace capacity organisations either nurture or destroy. Together (2012) extended the argument into the social. Cooperation is a craft, Sennett argued, learned through structured practice and degraded by short-term teams and constant reorganisation. Building and Dwelling (2018) carried the same lens into urbanism, distinguishing the ville (the built city) from the cité (how people actually live in it). Sennett’s intellectual lineage runs directly through David Riesman, John Rawls and Hannah Arendt at Harvard, where he took his PhD in 1969. Few living sociologists carry that depth of connection to the most serious thought of the twentieth century into corporate and policy conversations of the present. In 2024 he published The Performer: Art, Life, Politics, the opening volume of a new trilogy on performance, narration and image-making. Key speaking topics The future of work in flexible capitalism Craftsmanship and the conditions for good work Cooperation as a workplace skill Character and the personal consequences of “no long-term” employment Urbanism and the ethical city Public culture and authority in modern organisations Ideal for CHROs and senior people leaders moving past trend diagnostics into the deeper drivers of engagement and workforce design. Executive teams contending with the cultural costs of reorganisation, short-term teams and high turnover. Boards, CEOs and strategy leaders commissioning long-horizon work on the human foundations of organisational change. City leaders, urbanists and real-estate strategists working on the ethics and design of public space. Audience outcomes A vocabulary for what short-termism and perpetual reorganisation actually do to character and craft inside organisations. The “making is thinking” framework, which puts employee skill and the conditions for good work at the centre of strategic conversation. Cooperation reframed as a workplace craft, built through specific practices and degraded by structures many organisations now treat as normal. The ville/cité distinction as a tool for thinking about the human and built dimensions of any large environment, from offices to city districts. A historical lens on flexible capitalism that sets present-day workforce challenges in their actual fifty-year arc.

Why organisations work with Stéphane J.G. Girod Co-author of Resetting Management (Kogan Page, 2021), shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2022 in Change & Sustainability, with diagnostic tools tested against the agility journeys of LEGO, General Electric, LVMH and ING. Co-edited the Summer 2023 California Management Review special issue on business agility with Julian Birkinshaw of London Business School and Christiane Prange, placing him at the academic centre of how agility is studied and taught. Directs IMD’s Luxury 2050 initiative and the Reinventing Luxury Lab, with named C-suite client work at Richemont, La Prairie, Cartier, PUIG, Mazda and Telenor. His Harvard Business Review article “Restructure or Reconfigure?” (with Samina Karim of Northeastern) gives executives the working distinction that one in three reorganisations get wrong: when to change the underlying structure and when only to recombine units within it. Biography highlights Professor of Strategy and Organizational Innovation at IMD Business School, Lausanne. Co-author, Resetting Management: Thrive with Agility in the Age of Uncertainty (Kogan Page, 2021); shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2022 in Change & Sustainability. Co-editor of the Summer 2023 California Management Review special issue on business agility, with Julian Birkinshaw and Christiane Prange. Forbes columnist on innovation and transformation in luxury industries. Research published in Harvard Business Review, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal and Long Range Planning. DPhil in Strategic Management, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford; MBA, Aalto University; speaks seven languages. Forthcoming with Wiley: Purposeful Luxury, on positive-impact sustainability strategies in luxury industries. Member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Entertainment and Lifestyle Economy, 2025 to 2026. Biography Most large organisations are not built for the speed at which their markets now change. Strategy cycles run on multi-year horizons. Org charts assume stable competitive advantage. Both premises are under sustained strain in consumer goods, banking, retail and luxury. Stéphane Girod has spent his academic career on the diagnostic question this raises: when planning fails, what replaces it? His book Resetting Management, co-authored with Martin Králik and shortlisted for the 2022 Business Book Awards in Change & Sustainability, sets out a framework for business agility tested against case studies of LEGO, General Electric, LVMH and ING. Agility, in his account, lives at three distinct levels: strategic, organisational, and leadership. Most companies confuse one for another. His base is IMD, where he is Professor of Strategy and Organizational Innovation, leads the Luxury 2050 initiative, and directs the Reinventing Luxury Lab. He works directly with executive teams at Richemont, La Prairie, Cartier, PUIG, Mazda and Telenor on strategy and transformation. His sectoral focus on luxury, retail and consumer goods places him close to the industries where the agility question has become most urgent, where consumer behaviour, digital channels and sustainability pressure are now moving faster than strategic planning can absorb. His research has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal and Long Range Planning. With Samina Karim of Northeastern University, his 2017 HBR article “Restructure or Reconfigure?” gave executives a working distinction between two organisational change strategies that produce very different financial results. He co-edited the Summer 2023 California Management Review special issue on business agility with Julian Birkinshaw of London Business School and Christiane Prange. Girod holds a DPhil from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, and speaks seven languages. He writes a Forbes column on innovation and transformation in luxury industries. His forthcoming book with Wiley, Purposeful Luxury, addresses how luxury houses move sustainability from brand narrative into operating substance. Key speaking topics Business agility in established organisations Strategy under uncertainty Organisational design and reconfiguration Digital execution in large companies Innovation and disruption in the luxury sector Sustainability strategy in luxury and consumer goods Leading large-scale transformation Ideal for Executive teams in luxury, consumer goods, retail and banking facing structural disruption Chief strategy officers and transformation leads designing the next planning cycle Boards of luxury and premium brands navigating polarisation, sustainability pressure and shifts in the Chinese market C-suites running a major reorganisation who need to choose between restructuring and reconfiguring Audience outcomes A working distinction between strategic, organisational and leadership agility, with a diagnostic for which one their company needs first A test for whether the next reorganisation should be a restructure or a reconfiguration, and what each implies financially Specific examples of how LEGO, ING, LVMH and General Electric have succeeded and failed at agility, with the lessons that travel across sectors A sector-specific read on how luxury and consumer-goods incumbents are responding to digital channels, sustainability pressure and shifts in the Chinese market

Why organisations work with Stephen Frost He has run inclusion at a scale almost no other practitioner can claim, leading diversity and inclusion across the 200,000-strong workforce of the London 2012 Olympics and afterwards heading the function at KPMG. He treats inclusion as a system to be engineered into hiring, promotion and decision-making, not a values campaign, an approach laid out in The Inclusion Imperative and Building an Inclusive Organization. His teaching positions at Harvard Business School, Sciences Po and Singapore Management University give boards confidence that the methodology stands up to academic scrutiny as well as commercial pressure. He brings a record of building inclusion infrastructure that outlives him, including Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index, now used by most leading UK employers. He is one of a small number of DEI voices able to hold the line on substance while a political backlash makes many DEI conversations harder to have at board level. Biography highlights Head of Diversity and Inclusion for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Former Head of Diversity and Inclusion at KPMG. Founder and CEO of Included, a global diversity and inclusion consultancy. Teaches Inclusive Leadership at Harvard Business School, Singapore Management University and Sciences Po. Author of The Inclusion Imperative, Inclusive Talent Management and Building an Inclusive Organization; editor of The Key to Inclusion. All published by Kogan Page. Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum (2011); recipient of the 2010 Peter Robertson Award for Equality and Diversity Champions. Biography The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games employed close to 200,000 people. Running diversity and inclusion across that operation was not a values exercise. It was a delivery problem under intense political and media scrutiny, and Stephen Frost was the person who owned it. The workforce that resulted was 46 per cent female, 40 per cent from minority ethnic backgrounds and 9 per cent with a disability, on numbers that few corporates have come close to since. After the Games, he was hired by KPMG as Head of Diversity and Inclusion, where he set the firm’s targets on gender, ethnicity, social mobility and sexual orientation. He went on to found Included, a global consultancy that now advises governments, multinationals, media organisations and universities. Earlier in his career he had built much of the modern UK D&I infrastructure at Stonewall, including the Workplace Equality Index now used as a benchmark across most leading employers. The argument in his four Kogan Page books is consistent. Inclusion is a decision-making system, not a culture campaign. The Inclusion Imperative draws on the Olympic work to set out how it can be embedded into procurement, recruitment, leadership and operations. Building an Inclusive Organization, co-authored with Raafi-Karim Alidina, extends the case into the cognitive and behavioural mechanics of how inclusion succeeds or fails inside a firm. That body of work is reinforced by teaching positions at Harvard Business School, Singapore Management University and Sciences Po, and by his selection as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. For boards under pressure on inclusion at the same time as they are under pressure on cost, regulation and political risk, the value of Frost’s perspective is that it treats inclusion as an operating capability that can be measured, defended and improved. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership Embedding inclusion into organisational strategy The business case for diversity and inclusion Inclusive talent management and hiring Culture change and behaviour design Cognitive load and decision-making in diverse teams Building an inclusive organisation at scale Ideal for CHROs and Chief Diversity Officers under pressure to show measurable outcomes from inclusion investment. Boards and executive committees navigating DEI in politically contested or regulatory-heavy environments. Talent, recruitment and leadership development leads redesigning processes around inclusion. Senior leadership teams in firms scaling internationally across multiple cultural and legal contexts. Audience outcomes A working definition of inclusion as a decision-making discipline, not a values statement. Specific levers leaders can pull inside recruitment, promotion and team design to improve inclusion outcomes. A clearer language for defending inclusion work to sceptical boards and shareholders. Examples drawn from enterprise-scale deployments at the London Olympics, KPMG and Included’s client base. A grounded view of where inclusion programmes commonly fail and how to design them to last.

Why organisations work with Tammy Erickson A trilogy of Harvard Business Review Press books on Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y built on primary research, not commentary, giving leaders a defensible base for talent and engagement decisions. A McKinsey Award-winning HBR article (“It’s Time to Retire Retirement”) that reframed how Fortune 500 employers think about late-career workers, still cited in CHRO conversations. Five appearances on the Thinkers50 ranking, evidence that her ideas have stayed relevant across more than a decade of workforce change. Operating credibility from board seats at PerkinElmer and Allergan, plus client work with General Electric, Bank of America and Novartis, so the workforce arguments land with senior commercial leaders, not just HR. Co-direction of London Business School’s “Leading Businesses into the Future” programme, which keeps her arguments calibrated to current senior-executive challenges rather than past research. Biography highlights Adjunct Professor of Organisational Behaviour, London Business School; co-director of the “Leading Businesses into the Future” programme. Founder and CEO of Tammy Erickson Associates, a workforce and engagement advisory firm. McKinsey Award winner, Harvard Business Review, for “It’s Time to Retire Retirement.” Author of the HBR Press generational trilogy: “Retire Retirement,” “Plugged In,” and “What’s Next, Gen X?” Co-author of “Workforce Crisis” (Harvard Business School Press) and “Third Generation R&D.” Former director of Fortune 500 corporations PerkinElmer and Allergan. Ranked on Thinkers50 five times, including 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017. Biography Most workforce strategies still treat the employee base as one undifferentiated group with a single set of motivations. That worked when one or two cohorts dominated the org chart. It does not work now, with Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z sharing teams and reporting lines, each carrying different assumptions about authority, loyalty and what work is for. Erickson built her career on closing that gap. Her Harvard Business Review article “It’s Time to Retire Retirement” won the McKinsey Award and reframed how large employers thought about late-career talent. The argument was not nostalgic or motivational. It was an operating case for redesigning roles, hours and contracts to retain expertise that the demographics said would otherwise walk out. The HBR Press trilogy that followed, “Retire Retirement,” “Plugged In” and “What’s Next, Gen X?,” gave leaders something most generational commentary lacks: a research base built cohort by cohort, with practical implications for engagement, team design and career architecture. Her companion book “Workforce Crisis,” with Ken Dychtwald and Bob Morison, set the broader demographic context. “Leading Across the Ages” was named a Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea of 2008. That research sits on top of a working role at London Business School, where she co-directs “Leading Businesses into the Future,” and a track record of Fortune 500 board service at PerkinElmer and Allergan. The result is a voice on workforce questions that boards and executive teams take seriously, because it carries both the scholarship and the operating context. Key speaking topics Multi-generational workforce strategy Employee engagement and the changing employer-employee contract Workforce planning and talent shortage Collaboration in complex organisations Innovation in the intelligent economy Twenty-first century organisational design Future of work and changing assumptions about careers Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers redesigning engagement and retention strategy Boards and executive teams setting talent and workforce policy Heads of organisational development and learning leading multi-generational team programmes Leadership development faculty and HR conferences Audience outcomes A clearer read of how each generational cohort actually behaves inside organisations, beyond the stereotypes Specific implications for talent retention, engagement and team design across cohorts A reframed view of late-career workers as a retention and capacity question, not a cost question An organising frame for redesigning roles, hours and contracts to fit a five-generation workforce Vocabulary senior leaders can use in board and executive conversations on workforce strategy

Why organisations work with Wael Khoury He has sat on both sides of transformation: advising as an EY and Deloitte consultant, then running HR inside Ooredoo and Al Mana. He can tell a leadership team where execution will break down, because he has owned the outcome. His delivery is built to outlast the engagement. At Dukhan Bank he built performance-management capability across more than 500 leaders. At Aspire Katara Hospitality his leadership programme reached more than 80 managers and drew 96% participant satisfaction. He convenes the room he speaks to. As founder of the GCC HR & Leadership Center, he stays connected to more than 1,000 senior HR and business leaders across the Gulf, so his examples come from the market his audience is operating in. He reads the GCC as an operating environment. Nationalisation policy and workforce capability sit inside his practice, and he has delivered transformation work across government, financial services, telecommunications, and hospitality. Biography highlights Founder and Managing Director of Lopez Khoury & Associates, a Qatar Financial Centre-licensed human capital advisory firm founded in 2024. Former Big Four consultant with EY and Deloitte, and a contributor to the Deloitte Human Capital Trends report for the Middle East. Former in-house HR leader at Ooredoo and Al Mana, with work spanning the Middle East, Europe, and North America. Founder of the GCC HR & Leadership Center, a peer network of more than 1,000 senior HR and business leaders across the Gulf. Qatar Chapter Lead for Hacking HR and Doha Lead Ambassador for Transform. Advisor, speaker, and silver sponsor of HR Forum Qatar, where he chaired sessions at the 2024 edition and has delivered keynote and panel contributions. Delivers in English and Arabic across the GCC and internationally. Biography The strategy is usually sound. Transformation programmes stall in execution, because leadership and organisational structure never move in step. Wael Khoury built his practice around closing that gap. He has watched this fail from the adviser’s chair and from inside the business. At EY and Deloitte he advised organisations across the Middle East, Europe, and North America. Then, running HR inside Ooredoo and Al Mana, he owned the outcomes he had once recommended. That dual vantage shapes how he talks to senior teams. He starts at the point where execution stalls. In 2024 he founded Lopez Khoury & Associates, a Qatar Financial Centre-licensed firm working in HR strategy, organisational design, and leadership development. Its stated measure of success is what capability remains after the advisers leave. At Dukhan Bank the work was performance management, embedded across more than 500 leaders. At Aspire Katara Hospitality it was a leadership programme for more than 80 managers. His reach now extends past client work. He founded the GCC HR & Leadership Center, a Gulf network of more than 1,000 senior HR and business leaders, and he leads Hacking HR’s Qatar chapter and Transform’s Doha chapter. Those roles keep him current on what Gulf organisations are preparing for: AI adoption, nationalisation, and workforce capability. Key speaking topics Human capital transformation Organisational design and governance Change management and execution Leadership capability building HR’s role in business strategy AI and the future of work in HR High-performing cultures Workforce planning and nationalisation in the GCC Ideal for CHROs and HR directors turning a support function into a driver of business strategy CEOs and boards midway through a restructure or operating-model change Government entities and family businesses in the GCC modernising HR and governance Gulf leadership and HR conferences needing a senior chair or keynote on transformation Audience outcomes A clear account of why transformation efforts stall, and where their own is most exposed The difference between issuing recommendations and building capability that outlives the project A regional frame for change, grounded in GCC governance norms and nationalisation policy Language to align a leadership team around governance, decision rights, and execution before restructuring begins

Why organisations work with Yves Morieux Smart Simplicity® is a proprietary BCG framework built on social science – game theory, organisational sociology, economics – not management intuition. Leaders take away a testable model, not a set of principles. His argument is counter-intuitive and specific: the problem is not complexity itself, but the organisational response to it. That reframe changes where leadership teams look for solutions. His two TED talks on the subject have exceeded 5 million views, which means senior audiences often arrive having already encountered the framework and wanting to operationalise it. Six Simple Rules, published by Harvard Business Review Press, gives organisations a durable reference point that outlasts a single event and shapes how teams implement change. His 2019 BCG Fellow research introduced “Relational Productivity”, extending the Smart Simplicity model into how digital ways of working reshape cooperation and output. Organisations dealing with hybrid work and digital transformation get a framework grounded in his earlier work but updated for current conditions. Biography highlights BCG Fellow since 2008; Managing Director and Senior Partner at Boston Consulting Group; Director of the BCG Institute for Organization Creator of Smart Simplicity®, BCG’s registered framework for managing organisational complexity and rebuilding cooperation Author of a second BCG Fellow research concept, Relational Productivity, developed in 2019 Co-author of Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014), with Peter Tollman Two TED talks on organisational complexity and workplace effectiveness, collectively exceeding 5 million views Published in Harvard Business Review, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Le Monde; author of more than 45 articles and book chapters Lecturer in the advanced sociology programme and professor in the master of public affairs programme at Sciences Po, Paris PhD in industrial marketing, University of Strathclyde; DEA in organisational sociology, Sciences Po Biography Organisations under pressure tend to reach for familiar tools: clearer accountability frameworks, more robust reporting, additional coordination structures. Yves Morieux has spent his career at BCG demonstrating that this instinct is the source of the problem, not the solution. The more complex the operating environment, the more those tools erode the cooperation that performance actually depends on. His framework, Smart Simplicity®, was developed through research at the BCG Institute for Organization where he has served as a BCG Fellow since 2008, and grounded in social science disciplines unusual in consulting: game theory, organisational sociology, economics. The six rules at its core are not management principles but structural interventions that change the conditions under which people decide whether to cooperate. His 2019 BCG Fellow work extended the model into Relational Productivity, examining how digital ways of working reshape those same dynamics. Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated, co-authored with Peter Tollman and published by Harvard Business Review Press, codified the framework for practitioner use. His two TED talks on the subject, delivered as part of a series curated with BCG, have collectively exceeded 5 million views, making Smart Simplicity one of the most widely seen management arguments of the past decade. Morieux also lectures in the advanced sociology programme and the master of public affairs at Sciences Po in Paris. His work has been covered and published in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Fast Company, and Le Monde, and spans more than 45 articles and book chapters. Key speaking topics Organisational complexity and its management Smart Simplicity® framework and the Six Simple Rules Cooperation as a performance driver Relational Productivity and digital ways of working Organisational design and behavioural architecture Leadership under complexity Productivity, engagement, and the failure of conventional management tools Ideal for C-suite and senior executive teams undertaking transformation or restructuring CHROs and people function leaders diagnosing engagement and performance gaps Strategy and organisational design leaders evaluating how structure is shaping behaviour Leadership teams navigating post-merger integration, scaling, or operating model change Audience outcomes A concrete diagnosis of how conventional management responses to complexity generate the performance and engagement problems they were designed to solve Understanding of the six Smart Simplicity® rules and how each changes the structural conditions for cooperation A framework to identify which processes, metrics, and accountabilities in their own organisation are creating complicatedness rather than managing complexity Exposure to the Relational Productivity concept and its implications for hybrid and digital-first operating environments Practical language to take back to leadership teams for evaluating organisational design decisions