Organisationskultur speakers

Why organisations work with Andrew McMillan He ran customer experience for the John Lewis department store division across 26 UK shops, so he speaks from inside one of the most studied service cultures in British retail, not from a framework bought off a shelf. His central argument is operational, not motivational: customer experience is an output of employee engagement and leadership behaviour, and any programme that treats it as a frontline training problem will fail. He has tested the thesis outside retail, with Shell, Air France, United Airlines, Toyota, Barclays, Mercedes-Benz, RBS and NHS foundation trusts among the organisations he has advised through Engaging Service. He chaired Revo’s Customer Experience Committee for seven years, which gives him a sector-wide view of what separates shopping centres, high streets and service organisations that keep customers from those that do not. He is useful in the room with senior leaders because the conversation turns quickly to values, hiring, internal communication and manager behaviour, which is where service actually breaks. Biography highlights 28 years with the John Lewis Partnership, culminating in responsibility for customer experience across the department store division and its 26 UK shops. Founder of Engaging Service, a consultancy on employee engagement, customer experience and the leadership that links the two. Chair of the Customer Experience Committee at Revo from 2010 to 2017, overseeing the growth of the ACE Awards to more than 100 shopping centre entrants. Judge and adviser for the Customer Focus Award at the Lloyds Bank National Business Awards from 2015. Advised named organisations including Shell, Air France, United Airlines, Toyota, Barclays, Mercedes-Benz, RBS, Rightmove, MoneySuperMarket and the Law Society. During his tenure, John Lewis department stores were recognised for customer experience by Which?, Verdict and Retail Week. Biography Service cultures that customers notice are not built on the shop floor. They are built in hiring decisions, in what managers are promoted for, in what the organisation tolerates on a difficult Tuesday. Andrew McMillan spent nearly three decades inside a business that understood this, and now spends his time explaining to other organisations why their service programmes are not working. He joined the John Lewis Partnership as a management trainee at Brent Cross, led selling teams across several branches, headed a department at the Oxford Street flagship, and ran the department stores’ internal intelligence team before taking responsibility, from 2000, for customer experience across the entire department store division. That meant 26 shops and tens of thousands of customer-facing partners. During his tenure, the business was recognised for customer experience by Which?, Verdict and Retail Week. In 2012 he founded Engaging Service and has since worked with more than 40 organisations, among them Shell, Air France, United Airlines, Toyota, Barclays, Mercedes-Benz, RBS, Rightmove, MoneySuperMarket, the Law Society and several NHS foundation trusts. The work is consistent across sectors: diagnose the gap between the experience leaders say they want and the culture they are actually running, and rebuild the link between the two. He chaired Revo’s Customer Experience Committee from 2010 to 2017, growing its ACE Awards to over 100 shopping centre entrants, and has judged the Customer Focus Award at the Lloyds Bank National Business Awards since 2015. The through-line is practical: in an economy where product parity is the norm, the companies customers stay with are the ones whose people want to be there. Key speaking topics Customer experience as an output of culture Employee engagement and service performance Leadership behaviour and organisational values Building and sustaining a service culture at scale Retail and shopping centre customer experience Purpose, values and frontline behaviour Translating the John Lewis Partnership model to other sectors Ideal for CEOs, COOs and boards reviewing why customer experience investment is not producing the promised lift CHROs and heads of employee engagement connecting people strategy to commercial outcomes Customer experience, service and operations leaders in retail, financial services, hospitality, transport and healthcare Shopping centre and retail property leadership working on tenant mix, placemaking and visitor experience Audience outcomes A sharper view of why customer experience programmes fail when they are run as training rather than as culture change Specific, named examples from inside John Lewis of how engagement, leadership behaviour and service performance reinforce each other Practical questions to take back to their own organisation about hiring, manager behaviour and internal communication A clearer sense of where service sits in the operating model, and which leadership decisions actually move the needle

Why organisations work with Andrew McNeill He has run leadership under genuine national pressure, including UK Government assurance of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic torches and a Director role on the Building Safety Programme established after the Grenfell Tower fire. His method is published and codified. Organisational Mindfulness: A How-to Guide is one of the few practitioner books that treats mindfulness as an organisational intervention rather than an individual wellbeing benefit. He sits inside the institutional architecture of the field as Co-Director of BAMBA, the UK’s mindfulness accreditation body, and as Projects Advisor to the Mindfulness Initiative, the charity that grew out of the parliamentary All-Party group. He speaks to leadership groups, not wellbeing audiences. The work focuses on team functioning, psychological safety, and decision quality under pressure, with operational examples from running multi-billion pound programmes. Biography highlights Twenty years in senior leadership, most recently as a Director in the UK Civil Service responsible for major national programmes. Led UK Government assurance for the Olympic and Paralympic torches, London 2012. Served as Director on the Building Safety Programme set up after the Grenfell Tower fire. Co-founder of LxLeaders, a leadership consultancy working with senior teams. Author of Organisational Mindfulness: A How-to Guide (2019). Co-Director of BAMBA, the British Association of Mindfulness-Based Approaches, and Projects Advisor at the Mindfulness Initiative. Biography The Olympic and Paralympic torch relays for London 2012 were a continuous national event under media and security scrutiny. Andrew McNeill ran the UK Government’s assurance of them. A few years later, after the Grenfell Tower fire, he served as a Director on the Building Safety Programme established to respond to it. Both roles required senior leadership inside conditions where the cost of a wrong decision was public and immediate. That operational record is the spine of what he now does with private and public sector leadership teams. He is the co-founder of LxLeaders, a consultancy that works with senior groups on team functioning, psychological safety, and self-leadership under pressure. Alongside the consultancy, he has built a position inside the field itself. He is Co-Director of BAMBA, the UK’s mindfulness accreditation body, and lead Projects Advisor at the Mindfulness Initiative, the charity that emerged from the UK Parliament’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Mindfulness. His 2019 book Organisational Mindfulness: A How-to Guide is one of the few practitioner texts that treats mindfulness as a method of organisational design rather than an individual intervention. Speaking clients to date include Dell Technologies, Experian, RSM US, Allianz Technology, LexisNexis, and the NHS. The brief is consistent: senior teams operating under repeated pressure who need a credible, plain-spoken voice on how composure and team functioning actually work in practice. Key speaking topics Self-leadership under pressure Psychological safety in senior teams Empathetic leadership Burnout recognition and recovery Team collaboration under sustained change Organisational mindfulness as practice Ideal for Senior leadership teams and executive committees facing continuous change loads CHROs and people directors commissioning beyond standard wellbeing programming Public sector and regulated industry leaders working in high-scrutiny environments Programme and transformation leads running multi-year delivery under public pressure Audience outcomes A working language for psychological safety inside a senior team, separated from HR theatre A read on burnout signals at team level before they show up in attrition data Specific practices senior leaders can use to hold composure across long decision cycles A clearer view of how mindfulness functions as an operational discipline, not a benefit

Why organisations work with Sir Andrew Strauss He led England to the world Test No. 1 ranking in 2011, a position the team had not held for three decades, and can speak specifically to what it takes to move a group from mid-table to the top of its field. He has sat on both sides of the performance question: as the captain inside the team, and later as Director of Cricket at the ECB responsible for the system that selects, develops and accounts for that team. His 2022 ECB High Performance Review, convened with Sir Dave Brailsford and Rob Key after the 4-0 Ashes defeat, is a named case study in structural reform of an underperforming elite system. He founded the Ruth Strauss Foundation in 2019 and can speak from experience to leading people and commitments through personal crisis without collapsing the standards he asks of others. Biography highlights 100 Test matches for England, 7,037 runs at an average above 40, 21 Test centuries. England captain in 50 Tests; Ashes winner in 2009 and 2010-11, and architect of England’s rise to world No. 1 in 2011. Director of Cricket, England and Wales Cricket Board, 2015-2018. Chair of the ECB High Performance Review, 2022, with Sir Dave Brailsford and Rob Key on the panel. Knight Bachelor, 2019 Resignation Honours, for services to sport and charity. OBE, 2011. Founder and chair of the Ruth Strauss Foundation, established 2019. Author of Driving Ambition: My Autobiography (Hodder). Biography England were ranked the best Test side in the world in August 2011, for the first time in thirty years. The captain who took them there, over a four-year rebuild, had replaced an injured Michael Vaughan on debut seven years earlier and opened with a century at Lord’s. The gap between those two facts is where the substance of Strauss’s leadership argument sits. The captaincy is the obvious credential: 50 Tests in charge, the 2009 Ashes at home, the 4-0 series win in Australia in 2010-11, the first there in twenty-four years. The less-told part is what happened after the playing career ended. Strauss returned to the England and Wales Cricket Board in 2015 as Director of Cricket, where he was responsible not for one dressing room but for the pipeline, culture and selection architecture behind the national side. That dual perspective, captain inside the system and later the executive above it, sharpened after the 2021-22 Ashes collapse. Strauss chaired the ECB’s High Performance Review, working with Sir Dave Brailsford and Rob Key, and produced recommendations for the structure of domestic cricket intended to reset England’s standing across all three formats. It is a recent, named piece of work on the harder problem leaders actually face: reforming an institution that is failing on its most public measure. The private context matters too. Strauss founded the Ruth Strauss Foundation in 2019 in memory of his wife, who died of a non-smoking lung cancer, and has built it into a significant charity for bereavement support and rare-cancer research. It is the part of the story that gives the leadership material its weight in the room. Key speaking topics Leadership under sustained pressure Building and rebuilding high-performance team culture Captaincy, accountability and honest feedback Reforming underperforming institutions Decision-making in elite sport Resilience through personal crisis The transition from practitioner to system leader Ideal for CEOs and executive committees managing a performance turnaround or a credibility rebuild Senior leadership offsites focused on team culture, selection and accountability Sales and commercial leadership audiences that operate under repeated public scorecards Boards and HR directors working on succession, captaincy, and leadership development Audience outcomes A working model for how a captain or senior leader holds standards when results are against them. Specific examples from the 2009 and 2010-11 Ashes rebuilds of how team culture was reset. A view from inside the ECB High Performance Review on what reforming an elite system actually requires. Language for talking honestly about pressure, scrutiny and personal loss in a leadership context. A sharper question set for their own team: who owns standards, who gives honest feedback, and who decides when the group is failing.

Why organisations work with Andy Bass His Suits & Geeks Trap framework gives leaders a named, structured diagnosis for one of the most persistent and underacknowledged barriers to growth in technology-driven businesses – the breakdown between commercial and technical functions – and a clear method for resolving it. His Start With What Works thesis (Pearson) challenges the default assumption that growth requires new investment; the argument is that most organisations are sitting on underused capabilities, relationships and knowledge that can be mobilised before new capital is sought. His C.E.O. Roadmap from Committed Action – Curiosity, Exploration, Ownership – gives leaders a specific, repeatable method for moving people from passive compliance to genuine ownership of strategic priorities. His PhD in Software Engineering and early career at BT Research Labs give him standing inside technical organisations that a leadership generalist cannot credibly claim – he can hold the room with engineers and commercial directors simultaneously. Inducted into the Million Dollar Consulting Hall of Fame (2017) and named to Ogilvy’s #ogilvychange Big Thinkers panel – external recognitions of consulting practice, earned outside the speaking circuit. Biography highlights Founder and principal of BassClusker Consulting; advisory work spanning more than 30 industries across 12 countries PhD in Software Engineering and BSc in Computer Science and Ergonomics, both from Aston University; career began at BT Research Labs, Human Factors Division Executive educator at Oxford Saïd, Warwick, Aston and Strathclyde Business Schools; Visiting Professor in Consulting Practice, Birmingham City University Inducted into the Million Dollar Consulting Hall of Fame (2017) by Alan Weiss Author of five books including The Suits & Geeks Trap, Start With What Works (Pearson) and Committed Action Named to Ogilvy’s #ogilvychange ‘Big Thinkers’ panel of experts Corporate clients include L’Oréal, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, KPMG and International Automotive Components Group Biography In technology-driven organisations, one of the most consistent barriers to growth is not the strategy, it is the relationship between the people who build things and the people who sell them. Andy Bass, founder of BassClusker Consulting and author of The Suits & Geeks Trap, has spent over two decades working on that specific problem: helping senior leaders diagnose and close the gap between strategic intent and organisational execution. His Suits & Geeks Trap framework identifies a pattern that recurs across industries: commercial and technical teams defaulting to stereotyping and blame, with leaders drawn into refereeing internal politics rather than facing the market. The framework, developed through advisory work with organisations ranging from Deutsche Bank and L’Oréal to mid-sized growth businesses across 12 countries, gives leaders a structured way to reverse that dynamic and redirect energy toward the customer. His parallel argument, developed in Start With What Works (Pearson), challenges what he calls one of the most persistent thinking traps in business: that growth requires new investment. Bass makes the case (supported by client work across 30 industries) that most organisations have more usable capability than they recognise. The book presents practical tools for identifying and deploying those hidden assets before leaders turn to capital-intensive alternatives. His third major framework, the C.E.O. Roadmap from Committed Action, addresses the question leaders ask most consistently: why their people do not engage with strategic priorities as fully as intended. Bass’s answer, structured around Curiosity, Exploration and Ownership, gives leaders a repeatable method for building genuine commitment rather than managed compliance. His credentials span both sides of the technical-commercial divide he studies: a PhD in Software Engineering from Aston University, an early career at BT Research Labs, executive education delivered at Oxford Saïd, Warwick, Aston and Strathclyde business schools, and induction into the Million Dollar Consulting Hall of Fame in 2017. Key speaking topics Commercial and technical team alignment Organisational learning and execution Growth strategy using existing resources Leadership and committed action Change management and strategic engagement Organisational culture in technology-driven businesses Executive decision-making and capability development Ideal for CEOs and MDs of technology-driven, engineering-led or innovation-focused organisations managing persistent commercial-technical friction Senior leadership teams where execution consistently falls short of strategic ambition CHROs and organisational development leads working on engagement, ownership and culture in mixed commercial-technical workforces Professional services, financial services, manufacturing and growth-stage businesses navigating rapid change Audience outcomes A named framework for diagnosing commercial-technical team friction – and a clear method for resolving it before it becomes a leadership crisis Practical tools for identifying underused organisational assets and applying them to growth priorities, before seeking new capital or resource The C.E.O. Roadmap – a three-stage method for building genuine team commitment rather than surface-level compliance Sharper understanding of how leadership behaviour, not strategy alone, determines whether execution succeeds Specific questions and diagnostic approaches leaders can apply immediately to unlock stalled priorities or disengaged teams

Why organisations work with Andy Milligan Seven books across Kogan Page and Financial Times imprints, including Bold (CMI Management Book of the Year, e-book category, 2012) and On Purpose with Shaun Smith, give him a documented track record on brand-led growth that consultants without published evidence cannot match. He works the full chain from purpose to promise to operational delivery, which is rare. Most advisors stop at strategy or stop at touchpoint design. He has spent thirty years on the connection between them. Client work spans Nissan, McLaren, Barclays, Unilever, FIFA, IHG, Roche and WWF across Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the USA and Europe. The breadth of categories and geographies means his examples land with audiences in heavily regulated, consumer, and B2B sectors equally. His starting position is that brand lives in employee behaviour before it lives in customer perception. For leaders trying to align a fatigued workforce behind a customer promise, that is the more useful framing. Biography highlights Founding partner of The Caffeine Partnership, the UK brand and growth consultancy he co-founded in 2006. Began his career at Interbrand in London; ran the firm’s Singapore office and later led its Internal Brand Management practice. Co-author of On Purpose (Kogan Page, 2015) and Bold: How to be Brave in Business and Win with Shaun Smith. Bold won the CMI Management Book of the Year award in the e-book category in 2012. Co-author of Myths of Branding with Simon Bailey (Kogan Page, 2017; second edition 2022). Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; media commentator for BBC, Sky and CNN on brand issues. Biography Brand is an operating discipline, not a marketing one. That has been the thesis of Andy Milligan’s work since his time at Interbrand in the 1990s, where he ran the Singapore office and later led the firm’s Internal Brand Management practice. The argument is now unfashionable enough to be useful again: customers do not experience strategy decks, they experience employees, products and service moments. In 2006 he co-founded The Caffeine Partnership, a brand and growth consultancy that has advised Nissan, McLaren, Barclays, Unilever, FIFA, IHG, Roche, WWF and Thai Airways across Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the USA and Europe. The work moves between purpose definition, customer experience design and employee engagement, treated as one connected problem rather than three departmental ones. The same argument runs through seven books. Uncommon Practice and See, Feel, Think, Do with Shaun Smith examined the link between corporate culture and brand experience. Bold: How to be Brave in Business and Win won the CMI Management Book of the Year in the e-book category in 2012. On Purpose (Kogan Page, 2015) set out a practical framework for translating purpose into a branded customer experience. Myths of Branding with Simon Bailey, now in its second edition with Kogan Page, dismantles the assumption that brand work is a logo problem. Milligan is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and comments regularly for BBC, Sky and CNN. The reason senior teams bring him into commercial growth conversations is straightforward: he has spent thirty years arguing that organisations get the customers their employees deserve, and he can show them where the gap is. Key speaking topics Brand-led business growth Customer experience strategy Employee engagement and brand Purpose and commercial strategy Brand culture and organisational alignment Marketing and brand myths Ideal for CMOs, CCOs and brand directors aligning marketing with operational delivery CHROs and CPOs connecting employee engagement to customer outcomes CEOs and boards repositioning a business around a sharper purpose Customer experience and transformation leads moving from strategy to execution Audience outcomes A clearer view of where brand promise and customer experience are diverging in their own organisation A working definition of purpose that can be tested against employee and customer behaviour, not slogan Named case examples across consumer, financial services, automotive and sport that translate to the audience’s category A short list of brand myths their leadership team is probably still operating under

Why organisations work with Anna Hemmings A high-performance specialist with a six-time world champion’s record behind her. Fifteen years coaching senior teams, with a method built as much on the psychology of performance as on sport. She has reached the top, lost it, and got back. Diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome at her competitive peak and told she would not race again, she returned to win three more world titles. That comeback is how she teaches recovery as a performance strategy rather than a wellbeing exercise. Her focus is the repeat, not the one-off peak. She works on the behaviours and culture that let teams perform at the highest level and hold it year after year, which is the question most leadership teams actually face. Accredited delivery that runs past the keynote. As a qualified high-performance and leadership coach and an accredited Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team trainer, she takes leadership teams at IBM, Unilever, Novartis, Deloitte, and NatWest through masterclasses and team development. Biography highlights Six-time Marathon Kayak World Champion, including three consecutive titles from 2005 to 2007; Britain’s most successful female marathon kayaker. Two-time Olympian for Great Britain: Sydney 2000 and Beijing 2008. MBE, 2010 New Year Honours, for services to sport. Founder and Managing Director of Beyond the Barriers, a high-performance consultancy she has run since 2009. Accredited High Performance and Leadership Coach and accredited Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team trainer. Has now spent as long developing senior leaders and teams as she spent competing, with clients including IBM, Unilever, Novartis, Deloitte, British Airways, and NatWest. Biography Reaching the top of a field is hard. Staying there, year after year, while the pressure becomes permanent, is harder, and it is the problem most leadership teams underestimate. It is also the one Anna Hemmings spent her sporting career solving in public. She won six marathon kayak world titles, three of them in consecutive years, and competed at two Olympic Games. The detail that matters most came in between. Diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome at her peak and told she might not race again, she came back to win three more world titles and qualify for Beijing 2008. She treats that comeback as evidence that recovery can be engineered as a performance strategy. The second half of her career has now run longer than the first. Since 2009 she has built Beyond the Barriers into a high-performance consultancy, coaching senior leaders and teams at IBM, Unilever, Novartis, Deloitte, and NatWest. Her method pairs what works at elite level with an applied reading of human behaviour and the psychology of performance. That is why it holds up with executives who have no interest in sport. She is an accredited high-performance and leadership coach and a Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team trainer, so her work runs from keynote into masterclass and team development. She has now spent more years coaching leaders and teams than she spent winning titles, and that is the half of the story that earns her the room. Key speaking topics Achieving and sustaining high performance High-performance culture and world-class teams Resilience and performance under pressure Recovery and refocus as a performance strategy Mindset for thriving under constant demand Leadership and high-performing teams Ideal for Executive and leadership teams under pressure to perform at a high level and repeat it CEOs and senior leaders who have reached a peak and need to sustain it without burning out the team Sales and commercial leadership operating in demanding, target-driven cycles HR and L&D leads designing high-performance and leadership development programmes Audience outcomes What it actually takes to reach a high level and hold it, beyond a single peak The specific behaviours that separate the best teams from the merely good Recovery and refocus methods they can use under pressure, treated as a performance tool, not a wellbeing add-on A first-hand account of being written off at her peak and coming back, used as working material on how resilience is built Language for talking about high performance and its disciplines with their own teams

Why organisations work with Annicken R. Day She built the culture inside Tandberg, the Norwegian video conferencing company acquired by Cisco for $3.5 billion, which gives her a rare operator’s view of what a high-trust, high-performance culture actually looks like at scale. She held the Chief Culture Officer role before the title was fashionable, so she speaks about culture as a built system, not a brand exercise. Her Scandinavian leadership lens gives executive teams a working alternative to command-and-control models, grounded in trust, autonomy and psychological safety as commercial mechanisms rather than soft values. She is a published thinker as well as a practitioner, with co-authorship of Creative Superpowers, a bestselling novel translated into multiple languages, and columns in Forbes, Business Insider and Huffington Post. She is fluent in the hybrid and remote question, having advised leadership teams in over 50 countries on how culture survives when proximity disappears. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Corporate Spring, advising leadership teams from startups to Fortune 500 organisations. Former Chief Culture Officer at Tandberg, the Norwegian technology company acquired by Cisco for $3.5 billion in 2010. Co-author of Creative Superpowers: Equip Yourself for the Age of Creativity. Author of the bestselling novel Fly, Butterfly, translated into multiple languages. TEDx speaker and speaker at the United Nations. Columnist for Forbes, Business Insider and Huffington Post. Biography Most companies talk about culture. Far fewer can show the operating choices, leadership habits and team rituals that produce one. Annicken R. Day spent the formative part of her career inside that gap. As Chief Culture Officer at Tandberg, the Norwegian video conferencing business later acquired by Cisco for $3.5 billion, she helped build a workplace that won repeated Best Place to Work recognition while the company became a global category leader. That experience shaped her thesis. Culture is not the residue of value statements. It is a deliberate system of leadership behaviour, communication norms and trust mechanisms that determines whether strategy converts into performance. Her work at Corporate Spring, the consultancy she founded after Tandberg, applies that thesis to executive teams in more than 50 countries. Her writing has reached a wider audience. She co-authored Creative Superpowers: Equip Yourself for the Age of Creativity and wrote the bestselling novel Fly, Butterfly. She has contributed columns to Forbes, Business Insider and Huffington Post, and spoken at TEDx and the United Nations on culture, creativity and the human side of business. What sets her apart in a crowded culture-and-leadership field is the combination of operator credibility and a Scandinavian frame. Trust, autonomy and joy show up in her work as commercial levers, with the trail of retention, engagement and performance to back them up. Key speaking topics Culture as a strategy for growth High-trust, high-performance teams Scandinavian leadership models Hybrid and remote culture design Employee engagement and retention Creativity and innovation in the workplace Executive leadership development Ideal for CHROs, Chief People Officers and CEOs reframing culture as a commercial mechanism Leadership teams managing distributed and hybrid workforces across geographies Founders and executive teams in scale-up companies are inheriting a culture they did not design Boards and executive committees preparing for, or recovering from, post-acquisition cultural integration Audience outcomes A working definition of culture as a system of behaviours, decisions and rituals, not a values statement Leadership habits that build trust at the speed required by hybrid and distributed teams A view of Scandinavian leadership principles, including autonomy and psychological safety, as commercial mechanisms Concrete examples from a $3.5 billion exit story of how culture compounded into competitive advantage A vocabulary for diagnosing where culture is undermining strategy and what to address first

Why organisations work with Anton Gunn He has operated at the level his audiences operate at. Advising a President on national health policy and running diversity and external affairs inside a federal department is not a case study he read; it is the room he was in. His World-Class Culture framework gives executives a named, structured approach to retention and culture rather than another values poster. It has been applied inside Pfizer, KPMG, Microsoft, HCA Healthcare and Mercedes-Benz Vans. He talks about inclusion as an operating capability, not a political position. For boards navigating contested ground on DEI, that distinction is the reason he gets booked. His credibility carries on both sides of the executive table: a Harvard Institute of Politics fellow with a Certified Speaking Professional designation, an MSW, and seven years inside senior healthcare leadership at MUSC. Biography highlights Former senior advisor to President Barack Obama; Director of External Affairs, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, leading stakeholder engagement for Affordable Care Act implementation Former Executive Director and Chief Diversity Officer, Medical University of South Carolina Resident Fellow, Harvard Institute of Politics Bestselling author of Just Lead, The Presidential Principles, and The Audacity of Leadership Certified Speaking Professional, a designation held by fewer than 10 percent of professional speakers worldwide Featured in TIME, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, NPR, BBC and Good Morning America Biography The Affordable Care Act needed people to believe in it before it could function. As Director of External Affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Anton Gunn led the stakeholder engagement that turned a contested federal statute into something hospitals, employers and citizens could act on. That work, advising President Obama and Secretary Sebelius, is the reference point his clients hire him for. He has since spent close to a decade translating that experience into a body of executive practice. As Chief Diversity Officer and Executive Director at the Medical University of South Carolina, he ran inclusion as an operating function inside a complex healthcare institution, not as a communications exercise. His framework, World-Class Culture, codifies the seven behaviours he saw separate retention-positive cultures from the rest. His three books trace the same argument from different angles. The Audacity of Leadership set out the principles. The Presidential Principles distilled what he learned watching Obama lead in real time. Just Lead, his 2022 bestseller, gave operators 44 specific actions for retention and culture. Pfizer, KPMG, Microsoft, T-Mobile, SHRM and Mercedes-Benz Vans have all brought him in to apply that work. He is a Harvard Institute of Politics fellow and a Certified Speaking Professional, a designation held by under 10 percent of speakers globally. The combination buyers respond to is rarer than either credential alone: a former White House operator who has also run culture and inclusion inside a 17,000-person institution, and who can talk to a board in the language of accountability rather than aspiration. Key speaking topics Values-based leadership Workplace culture and retention Inclusive leadership Trust as an executive capability Crisis leadership and recovery Talent strategy in healthcare and regulated industries Ideal for Boards and CEOs navigating culture and retention under restructure CHROs and Chief Diversity Officers building inclusion as an operating discipline Senior leadership teams in healthcare, financial services and regulated industries Public sector and policy audiences working at the boundary of government and enterprise Audience outcomes A named, repeatable framework for diagnosing and rebuilding workplace culture A clearer view of where executive trust is earned and where it is forfeited Concrete actions for retention drawn from the Just Lead framework A working definition of inclusive leadership that holds up in front of a sceptical board An inside view of decision-making at the senior levels of the Obama administration

Why organisations work with Arsène Wenger He is the only senior practitioner in any field who built and led a team through an entire unbeaten top-flight league season – a 38-game case study in what sustained, system-level performance actually requires, fully documented and independently verifiable. His most instructive period for organisations is arguably not the Invincibles season but the decade that followed: leading under financial constraint, serial talent loss, and rivals with structurally larger budgets, while still maintaining Champions League qualification and winning trophies. This is the pressure most organisations recognise. His framework for leadership – distinguishing clearly between the structural long-term work of the manager and the motivational short-term work of the coach, and insisting both must operate simultaneously – gives senior leaders a concrete architecture for their own role, not a motivational analogy. Cross-cultural management experience across France, Japan, and England, combined with an economics degree from the University of Strasbourg, means his account of how performance systems are built is structural and comparative, not anecdotal. His current role at FIFA – overseeing global coaching standards, the IFAB rules-making body, and technical analysis of international tournaments – extends his perspective from club performance to institutional design and global governance, a dimension no other speaker in this market shares. Biography highlights Managed Arsenal for 22 years (1996-2018) – the longest tenure in the club’s history and in the history of the Premier League; won 3 Premier League titles and a then-record 7 FA Cups Architect of the 2003-04 Arsenal “Invincibles” – the only team to complete an unbeaten top-flight English league season in the modern era (38 matches) Previously managed AS Monaco (Ligue 1 title 1988; Coupe de France 1991) and Nagoya Grampus Eight, Japan (Emperor’s Cup; J-League Manager of the Year, 1995) Three-time Premier League Manager of the Season (1997-98, 2001-02, 2003-04) FIFA Chief of Global Football Development (appointed 2019); chairs the FIFA Technical Study Group and oversees IFAB and global coaching education Awarded the Légion d’honneur (2002) and an Honorary OBE (2003); inducted into the English Football Hall of Fame (2006) Autobiography My Life in Red and White (Orion, 2020) – Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller; the second football manager ever to reach No. 1 overall Economics degree, University of Strasbourg; fluent in six languages Biography The 2003-04 Arsenal season – 38 Premier League matches, zero defeats – remains the only unbeaten campaign in English football’s modern era. What made it possible was not an exceptional squad alone, but a system: nutritional standards that transformed player fitness, analytical scouting methods, and a culture whose values were defined by players and coaching staff together at the start of each season. Arsène Wenger’s career was cross-cultural long before that was a leadership virtue. He won the French league title with AS Monaco in 1988, then moved deliberately to Japan – taking Nagoya Grampus Eight to the Emperor’s Cup and the J-League Manager of the Year award in 1995. Managing across France, Japan, and England gave him a comparative framework for what in performance systems is universal, and what depends on context. At Arsenal, the decade after the Invincibles season is often more instructive for organisations than the unbeaten campaign itself. Wenger sustained Champions League qualification and FA Cup success while operating under severe financial constraint and losing key talent to better-funded rivals – conditions organisations recognise more readily than an anomalous trophy season. His autobiography, My Life in Red and White (Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller, 2020), and public appearances – including at the Bank of America Global Investor Summit and the Gartner IT Symposium – return consistently to a single structural argument: effective leadership requires the manager’s long-term, institutional work and the coach’s short-term, motivational work to operate simultaneously, not in sequence. Since 2019, Wenger has served as FIFA’s Chief of Global Football Development, overseeing global coaching education, the IFAB rules-making panel, and technical analysis of international tournaments. He holds an economics degree from the University of Strasbourg, France’s Légion d’honneur, an Honorary OBE, and a place in the English Football Hall of Fame. His perspective on competitive sustainability is drawn from specific, verifiable decisions made under extreme and sustained pressure – which is precisely what distinguishes it. Key speaking topics Sustained high performance and competitive advantage Talent identification, development, and succession systems Organisational culture and values-based leadership Long-term strategy under short-term performance pressure Cross-cultural team management Performance science and the modernisation of professional sport Global football governance and institutional development Ideal for C-suite and board-level leaders accountable for long-term competitive positioning CHROs and people directors designing talent development and succession pipelines Senior leadership conferences in financial services, professional services, and sport Transformation leaders managing performance culture through periods of resource constraint or competitive disruption Audience outcomes A clear, applicable distinction between managing (structural, long-term) and coaching (motivational, short-term) – and why both must run in parallel rather than sequence A concrete, verified case study in what sustained competitive advantage looks like in practice: the talent, culture, and decision-making systems behind it Practical perspectives on leading through constraint and transition – not just peak success – drawn from a decade of performing under significant competitive disadvantage An understanding of how cross-cultural experience informs more resilient, adaptive performance systems A framework for building culture from the inside: how shared values, standards, and accountability are established, maintained, and renewed across successive generations of people

Why organisations work with Ayse Birsel She brings a method, not a mood. Deconstruction: Reconstruction is a four-step process (deconstruct, point of view, reconstruct, express) developed across two decades of paid client work, and groups can run it on a real problem in the room. Her design credentials are commercial, not theoretical: products and systems for Herman Miller, Toyota, Amazon, IKEA, Knoll, GE and Colgate-Palmolive, with Resolve for Herman Miller named by The New York Times among the defining furniture pieces of the last 100 years. She bridges product innovation and people innovation. The same method behind the Zoë Washlet for TOTO underpins Design the Work You Love, which is why teams leave with a tool they can apply to org design, not just to creativity. She is one of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches, and the cohort itself was formed inside her Design the Life You Love process. That credential signals trust from the most senior coaching network in business. Recognised by Fast Company as one of the Most Creative People in Business and by Thinkers50 on its Radar list of thinkers most likely to shape the future of organisations. Biography highlights Co-founder and Creative Director, Birsel + Seck, New York. Master’s in Industrial Design, Pratt Institute, on a Fulbright Scholarship; undergraduate in Industrial Design at Middle East Technical University. Author of “Design the Life You Love” (Penguin Random House, 2015) and “Design the Long Life You Love” (Running Press, 2022). Thinkers50 Radar list of 30 thinkers most likely to shape the future of organisations. One of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business (2017); member of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches. Work in the permanent collections of MoMA, Cooper Hewitt and the Philadelphia Museum of Art; clients include Herman Miller, Toyota, Amazon, GE, IKEA, Knoll, Staples, Colgate-Palmolive and TOTO. Biography Most organisations treat innovation as a personality trait. Ayse Birsel treats it as a process. Deconstruction: Reconstruction, the method she has used at Birsel + Seck for two decades, is built around four steps: take the problem apart, change the point of view, put it back together within real constraints, and give the result a clean form. It is the same logic she has applied to a Herman Miller workstation, a Toyota concept car and a TOTO washlet. Her credentials are commercial. Birsel + Seck, the New York studio she runs with Bibi Seck, has produced work for Amazon, GE, IKEA, Staples, Knoll and Colgate-Palmolive. The Resolve System for Herman Miller has been cited by The New York Times among the defining furniture pieces of the last 100 years, and her work sits in the permanent collections of MoMA, Cooper Hewitt and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She trained at Middle East Technical University and took a master’s at Pratt Institute on a Fulbright Scholarship. The translation from product to people came through her books. “Design the Life You Love” (Penguin Random House, 2015) and “Design the Long Life You Love” (2022) take the same four-step method and apply it to careers, relationships and ageing well. Marshall Goldsmith ran the program himself, and the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches network was formed inside it. She is a member of that cohort and on the Thinkers50 Radar list of thinkers most likely to shape the future of organisations. For corporate audiences, this matters because the method is the product. Teams do not leave with a story about creativity. They leave having deconstructed a real brief, tested a different point of view and reconstructed an option they can take back to the operating model on Monday. Key speaking topics Innovation method and design thinking in practice Deconstruction: Reconstruction as a creative process for teams Designing the work, not just the workplace Life design and career reinvention for senior leaders Creativity under constraint Human-centred product and service design Long-life and longevity design Ideal for Innovation, R&D and product leaders looking for a repeatable creative method. CHROs and learning leaders running senior leadership offsites or executive development programs. Boards and executive teams working through reinvention, succession and second-act questions. Design, marketing and customer experience functions translate creativity into operating decisions. Audience outcomes A working knowledge of the four-step Deconstruction: Reconstruction process applied to a real organisational brief. A different point of view on a problem the team came in with, tested in the room. Language and structure for talking about creativity that does not depend on individual talent. A personal life-design or career-design artefact that senior leaders can take away from the session. Confidence that innovation can be run as a discipline, not staged as a culture programme.

Why organisations work with Azeem Rafiq Primary-source authority on how a major British institution mishandled a discrimination complaint, with the parliamentary record, Cricket Discipline Commission outcomes, and governance changes to evidence it. A working answer to the question every CHRO privately asks: what happens to the person who reports, after they report? Rafiq describes the years that followed his disclosure, not only the moment of speaking out. Lived credibility on the gap between policy and practice. The policies at Yorkshire existed. They were not implemented. The reform conversation he triggered is now standard reading for sport, regulators, and corporate ER teams. A name that lands with sceptical audiences. Boards and senior teams who have seen too many polished DEI keynotes engage differently with a speaker whose testimony is a matter of parliamentary record. Biography highlights Former professional cricketer for Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire CCC; captained England under-15 and under-19 sides. Appointed Yorkshire CCC’s youngest captain and first of Asian heritage in 2012. Gave evidence to the DCMS Select Committee in November 2021; witness statement published by the committee. Triggered a Cricket Discipline Commission process that upheld charges and led to the resignation of Yorkshire’s chair and a board reset under Lord Kamlesh Patel. Author of It’s Not Banter, It’s Racism (Hachette, 2024), longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2024. Submitted further written evidence to Parliament’s Sport Governance inquiry in 2022. Biography Yorkshire County Cricket Club had policies for racism, bullying and player welfare. They were not enforced. When a complaint was raised internally in 2018, the institutional response was to manage the complainant rather than the complaint. That is the gap most organisations underestimate, and it is the gap Azeem Rafiq has spent the past five years describing in evidence. His professional record is on the public file: junior international captain for England, professional contracts at Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire, and the youngest captain in Yorkshire’s history. The reason senior audiences listen now is not the career. It is the witness statement, published by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, and the Cricket Discipline Commission findings that followed. The reform consequences are documented. Yorkshire’s chair resigned. Lord Kamlesh Patel was installed to rebuild the board. The England and Wales Cricket Board was forced to confront governance failures it had previously minimised. Rafiq’s 2024 book with Hachette, It’s Not Banter, It’s Racism, was longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year and remains one of the more honest published accounts of what happens after a whistleblower stops being useful to the institutions briefly aligned with them. What he offers senior audiences now is closer to a case study than a story. He talks about the specific points at which a complaint becomes politically inconvenient, about the role of HR, legal and PR functions in absorbing or deflecting it, and about the human cost on the person at the centre. It is the content most diversity programmes do not have access to. Key speaking topics Institutional racism and culture reform Whistleblowing and speak-up systems in practice Inclusion when policy and practice diverge Governance and accountability in sport Mental health and family impact of public disclosure The aftermath of speaking out Ideal for CHROs, employee relations leads and DEI heads in organisations re-examining their speak-up architecture. Boards and audit committees with whistleblowing oversight responsibilities. Sports governing bodies, regulators and member organisations confronting culture inquiries. Senior leadership offsites where the inclusion conversation has gone stale. Audience outcomes A concrete picture of how a major institution failed to act on its own policies, and the operational reasons why. A more accurate read on what protection a whistleblower actually receives once a complaint enters the system. Specific questions to test inside their own organisation, drawn from cricket’s governance failures. Renewed seriousness about the personal cost of disclosure, useful for anyone designing or sponsoring a speak-up channel.

Why organisations work with Beatrice Kabutakapua A journalist’s discipline applied to leadership voice. A decade as a London-based foreign correspondent gives her a working method for turning messy human material into a clear, defensible narrative that holds up in a boardroom. A published methodology, not a workshop format. Lead With Your Story sets out a usable framework for converting lived experience into leadership content, which DEI and L&D teams can build a programme around rather than a single session. Harvard’s “Public Narrative” training behind the work. The frame she uses sits inside an established discipline of civic and organisational storytelling, not a personal brand exercise. A specific answer to the diversity-at-the-top problem. She works with the leaders companies have invested in for years and still struggle to promote, and gives them language for authority on their own terms. A multilingual operator. Sessions delivered in English, French and Italian, with experience across European, North American and Middle Eastern audiences (Los Angeles to Istanbul). Biography highlights Founder and CEO of The Business Storytelling Centre. Author of Lead With Your Story: How to Turn Your Lived Experience Into Your Leadership Superpower (Amazon bestseller, 2025). Harvard University certificate in Public Narrative: Leadership, Storytelling and Action. MA in international journalism, Cardiff University; MSc in social research methods, University of Sussex. Former foreign correspondent covering human rights, international development and African affairs. Client roster includes WPP Media, Aviva, Save the Children, Booking.com, Holland & Barrett, the Lankelly Chase Foundation and the Pacific Council on International Policy. Biography Most diversity strategies stop working at the threshold of the senior team. The pipeline is full, the sponsorship budget is spent, and yet the same kind of leader keeps getting promoted. The block is rarely capability. It is that the people coming through have spent their careers translating themselves into a voice the organisation already trusts, and that translation runs out at the point where authority needs to feel personal. Beatrice Kabutakapua works on that exact gap. Trained as a journalist at Cardiff, with a Harvard certificate in public narrative and a decade as a London-based foreign correspondent behind her, she founded The Business Storytelling Centre to give senior and emerging leaders a method for leading from their own material rather than someone else’s template. Her 2025 book Lead With Your Story, an Amazon bestseller, sets out the system she uses with clients. Her client roster is built around the buyers who feel this problem most directly. WPP Media, Aviva, Save the Children, Booking.com, Holland & Barrett, the Lankelly Chase Foundation, the European Journalism Centre and the Pacific Council on International Policy all sit inside her recent work, typically commissioned through DEI, People and Culture, or L&D leads. Sessions run in English, French and Italian. The editorial background matters. She does not treat storytelling as motivation. She treats it as a discipline for extracting the specific, defensible argument inside a leader’s experience and giving it commercial form, which is why her sessions tend to land with senior audiences who are sceptical of softer leadership content. Key speaking topics Business storytelling for leaders Authentic leadership and lived experience Visibility and voice for under-represented leaders Inclusive leadership pipelines Internal communication and culture Coaching for newly promoted leaders Cross-cultural leadership communication Ideal for CHROs and Chief People Officers redesigning the senior leadership pipeline Heads of DEI and inclusion leads commissioning substantive, capability-led inclusion work L&D directors building authentic leadership and executive presence programmes Internal communication leads working on leader visibility and culture narrative Audience outcomes A working method for turning their own lived experience into a leadership argument that holds up with a senior audience Specific language for the moments where existing executive communication training falls short A clearer view of why their current diversity-at-the-top interventions are not converting, and what to change Practical structures for coaching newly promoted leaders through the visibility threshold A vocabulary for inclusion work that senior leaders can use without political signalling