Change Management

Why organisations work with Ellis Watson He has run a ten-year transformation of a family-owned media group, DC Thomson, including the digital reinvention of brands like The Beano, with full P&L accountability. Few keynote speakers can show that length of tenure inside a turnaround. He has held the top operating role in three different content businesses, newspapers, global TV formats and family-owned media, so the change playbook he offers is sector-tested, not theoretical. His current seat as Chief Business Advisor to the First Minister of Scotland gives him a live view of how policy, regulation and capital are shaping the conditions executive teams are actually working in. He is direct in a room. Boards and executive audiences book him when they want candour about cost, culture and pace, not a motivational set piece. Biography highlights Chief Business Advisor to the First Minister of Scotland, appointed January 2023. CEO and later Executive Chairman of DC Thomson, 2011 to 2020, leading the modernisation of titles including The Beano and The Press and Journal. Global CEO of Syco Entertainment under Simon Cowell in 2010, with responsibility for the X Factor and Got Talent franchises. CEO of Celador International from 2000, oversaw the international rollout of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? to around 100 territories. Managing Director of Mirror Group Newspapers from 2003 to 2005, accountable for five national and around 240 regional titles. Non-executive director of FirstGroup plc from 2009, with North American Greyhound responsibility, and a former Marketing Director of News International reporting to Rupert Murdoch. Biography DC Thomson is the kind of business that does not usually survive a digital decade. A family-owned publisher in Dundee, built on print titles like The Beano, The Sunday Post and The Press and Journal, it carried a cost base shaped by an industry that no longer existed. Between 2011 and 2020 it was rebuilt from the inside, with a third of the staff gone and the consumer brands repositioned for digital. Ellis Watson ran that decade as CEO and then Executive Chairman. That was not an unfamiliar problem to him. He had already taken Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? out to roughly 100 territories as CEO of Celador, run five national newspapers and around 240 regional titles at the Mirror Group, and spent 2010 as global CEO of Simon Cowell’s Syco Entertainment, holding the X Factor and Got Talent franchises. The earlier ground had been News International, as Marketing Director reporting to Rupert Murdoch. What that career produces, in a board context, is an unusually long lens on the same problem. Legacy businesses tend to be governed by people who have never personally rebuilt one. Ellis has, in three sectors, and he is now sitting inside Scottish Government as the First Minister’s Chief Business Advisor, a role created in January 2023 to bring private sector judgement into policy decisions. The result is a speaker who is most useful to executive teams in the middle of structural change, where the questions are about cost, talent and tempo, and where a generic transformation framework is not enough. Key speaking topics Leadership through structural change in legacy businesses Turnaround and brand revitalisation Building and holding high-performance cultures Engaging younger workforces inside traditional organisations Disruption as an operating discipline, not a slogan Governance and stakeholder trust during transformation Ideal for Boards and executive teams of legacy or family-owned businesses facing structural decline CEOs, COOs and transformation directors running cost and culture programmes in parallel CHROs and senior people leaders rebuilding engagement during restructure Senior leadership audiences in media, publishing, transport and consumer brands Audience outcomes A clear-eyed read on how long real turnaround actually takes inside a legacy business Specific operator decisions, on cost, talent and brand, drawn from DC Thomson, Mirror, Celador and Syco A working argument for why culture is the binding constraint in any transformation, not strategy A view from inside government on the conditions UK businesses are operating against A different vocabulary for talking about disruption with a board, less abstract, more accountable

Why organisations work with Nicky Moffat Direct experience of leading 4,500 officers and soldiers at the Army Personnel Centre, giving her a practical authority on leadership at scale that few civilian speakers can match. A working definition of inclusive leadership built inside an institution where she was, for years, the only woman in the room at her level. Not a theoretical position. A track record of supporting ministerial decision-making during live operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone, which translates into credibility with senior leaders facing high-stakes calls under public scrutiny. Story-led delivery grounded in named events and decisions, so the leadership argument lands as a worked example rather than a model on a slide. Biography highlights Brigadier, British Army, 2009 to 2012; highest-ranking woman in the service during that period. Appointed CBE in the 2012 New Year Honours. Former military Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Defence, Geoff Hoon. Named among BBC’s 100 Women in 2014. Primary instructor on BBC’s Secret Agent Selection: WW2 (2018), released on Netflix as Churchill’s Secret Agents: The New Recruits. Founder of What Good Leadership Looks Like, working with organisations in financial services, energy, law, healthcare, construction, transport and media. Biography Leading 4,500 people through continuous restructure tests every assumption a leader has about authority, communication and the limits of their own composure. Nicky Moffat did exactly that as the most senior woman the British Army had, running the Army Personnel Centre and serving as Brigadier from 2009 to 2012. Her career before that was unusual in its proximity to live decisions. As military Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Defence, she was in the room as ministers made calls on operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone, and during the UK’s Foot and Mouth response. That work shaped a view of leadership as something that has to function under public scrutiny, not in a workshop. She was appointed CBE in 2012. Since leaving the Army she has built What Good Leadership Looks Like, a practice that works with senior teams in financial services, energy, law, healthcare, construction, transport and media. The work centres on a question most large organisations now have to answer: how do you keep a workforce engaged and performing through restructure after restructure? She approaches inclusion as part of the answer rather than a parallel conversation, having spent much of her own career as the only woman of her rank in the room. She was named among BBC’s 100 Women in 2014 and was the primary instructor on the BBC series Secret Agent Selection: WW2, broadcast in 2018 and released internationally on Netflix as Churchill’s Secret Agents: The New Recruits. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership Leading through transformational change Building leadership culture at scale High-performing teams Career transition and self-leadership Women in senior leadership Ideal for CEOs and executive committees holding the line through restructure CHROs and people directors rebuilding leadership benches Senior women’s networks and emerging leader programmes Boards and partnerships in financial services, energy, law, healthcare, construction, transport and media Audience outcomes A sharper read on what inclusive leadership actually requires of senior leaders, beyond statements of intent Specific behaviours to keep teams engaged through repeated structural change A reference point for leading at scale drawn from inside one of the UK’s largest hierarchical institutions Practical language for the harder parts of senior leadership, including being the only one of your kind in the room

Why organisations work with Paul McGee He gives organisations a single, named, portable language for resilience. SUMO has been translated into more than 20 languages and used inside global brands, which means the ideas travel beyond the keynote into how teams actually talk about setbacks. His behavioural-psychology background turns wellbeing content into something a senior buyer can defend commercially. The argument is rooted in cognition and behaviour change, not motivation. His track record sits in serious operating environments: Harrods, GSK, Adidas, Virgin, Lloyds Bank, NHS, Manchester City FC and Specsavers have all booked him for change, performance and confidence work. Self-Confidence held number one on the WHSmith Business Book chart for 24 weeks, which is unusual evidence that the content lands with a workplace audience and not only a self-help one. Visiting Professor at the University of Chester Business School, a role held since 2019 and awarded for translating academic behavioural research into practical use. The credential supports the seriousness of the work without academic detachment. Biography highlights Visiting Professor, University of Chester Business School (visiting professorship held since 2019) Creator of the SUMO Method (Shut Up, Move On); Sunday Times bestseller, translated into 20+ languages Author of Self-Confidence, which reached number one and held the WHSmith Business Book chart for 24 weeks Capstone-published author of nine titles, including How to Speak So People Really Listen, How Not to Worry, How to Succeed with People, and YESSS! Delivered keynotes for 1,000+ organisations across 40+ countries, including Harrods, GSK, Adidas, Virgin, Lloyds Bank, NHS, Manchester City FC and Specsavers Background as a behavioural psychologist with more than 30 years of applied practice Biography Most organisations underestimate how much of their performance problem is a confidence problem. Strategy is rarely the missing ingredient. What gets in the way is the personal cost of repeated change, knocks to self-belief, and the quiet drain of pressure that nobody names. SUMO (Shut Up, Move On) gave that problem a vocabulary. It is a behavioural framework that asks people to stop, examine the thinking that holds them back, and choose a different response. The framework belongs to Paul McGee, a former behavioural psychologist who now sits as Visiting Professor at the University of Chester, an appointment made in 2019 to recognise his work translating academic research into practical use. SUMO became a Sunday Times bestseller and has been translated into more than 20 languages. His follow-up, Self-Confidence, spent 24 weeks at number one on the WHSmith Business Book chart, a result that is hard to fake and tells you who the content actually serves. Nine books for Capstone, the Wiley business imprint, sit behind the keynote work. They cover communication, worry, confidence and resilience, but the through-line is behaviour change inside ordinary working lives. The delivery is known for humour, which is what lets the behaviour-change content land rather than lecture. The argument is consistent: small, repeatable mental habits compound into the resilience that organisations now need from their people, especially under sustained change. The client list reads as a workplace one rather than a wellness one. Harrods, GSK, Adidas, Virgin, Lloyds Bank, NHS, Manchester City FC and Specsavers have all commissioned McGee for change, performance and confidence work. Across 40+ countries and more than 1,000 organisations, the brief is usually the same: give our people something that holds up after the keynote ends. Key speaking topics Resilience and personal performance under pressure Confidence and self-leadership at work Behaviour change and the SUMO framework Leading through change and uncertainty Communication and influence Wellbeing as an operating capability Ideal for HR and people leaders building resilience capability across the workforce Senior leadership teams managing fatigue from repeated change programmes Customer-facing and high-pressure functions where confidence directly shapes performance Learning and development heads commissioning durable, named frameworks rather than one-off motivational content Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary, drawn from SUMO, for naming and interrupting unhelpful thinking patterns Specific behavioural habits to rebuild confidence and composure after setbacks A practical way to separate the parts of a problem people can act on from the parts they cannot A clearer view of how individual resilience translates into team performance and customer outcomes

Why organisations work with Poppy Murray She built the BE LADS Campaign on a single operational question, what can men and boys do to help women feel safer, and turned it into training that police forces, regulators, and large employers buy. Her consultancy, Transformative Culture Consultancy, is one of the few in the market designed specifically around the Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act) duty that came into force in October 2024. She has delivered to Tesco Mobile, WSP, Butterfield Bank, the Chelsea FC Foundation, the Royal British Legion, and the City of London Crime Prevention Association. The client list crosses corporate, sport, charity, and policing. The National Police Chiefs’ Council named her runner-up in Making Safer Spaces in 2024, one of only two civilians recognised from 170 nominations. The credential is operational, not honorary. She works without blame or division. Audiences of men leave with something to do, which is why HR and culture leaders book her where other formats have stalled. Biography highlights Founder, BE LADS Campaign, 2021 Co-founder and Director, Transformative Culture Consultancy Global Ltd, 2024 UN Women UK Delegate, 68th Commission on the Status of Women, 2024 Runner-up, Making Safer Spaces, National Police Chiefs’ Council VAWG Recognition Event, 2024 Founder, SafetyNet Guernsey Trustee, Lloyds Bank Foundation for the Channel Islands, since December 2021 Biography The Worker Protection Act put a positive duty on UK employers to prevent sexual harassment before it happens. It moved the question from “how do we handle a complaint” to “how do we change the culture that produced it,” and most organisations are now working out what that means in practice. Poppy Murray works in that gap. She co-founded Transformative Culture Consultancy Global with Brooke Jarvis in 2024, building prevention training that maps directly onto the new legal duty and the operational reality of the workplaces buying it. The firm’s clients sit across corporate, sport, charity, and policing, including Tesco Mobile, WSP, Butterfield Bank, the Chelsea FC Foundation, the Royal British Legion, and the City of London Crime Prevention Association. Her authority on the subject is built on the BE LADS Campaign, which she founded in March 2021 after the murder of Sarah Everard. The campaign asked a precise question, what can men and boys actually do to help women feel safer, and turned the answer into training that engages men without blame. The National Police Chiefs’ Council named her runner-up in Making Safer Spaces in 2024, one of only two civilians recognised from 170 nominations. Her professional background spans journalism, law, finance, and retail, which shapes how she handles sensitive material in front of mixed audiences. She is a UN Women UK Delegate, a trustee of the Lloyds Bank Foundation for the Channel Islands, and the founder of SafetyNet Guernsey, where her “It’s only a touch” campaign placed the criminal penalties for sexual assault in front of the night-time economy in plain language. Key speaking topics Sexual harassment prevention and the Worker Protection Act Workplace culture and safety as a leadership responsibility Engaging men as allies in gender safety Violence against women and girls in corporate and public settings Behavioural change and bystander intervention Inclusion without blame or division Ideal for CHROs and Heads of People preparing for the Worker Protection Act duty DEI, culture, and ER leads designing harassment prevention beyond e-learning Boards and ExCos in regulated and customer-facing industries reviewing safeguarding exposure Police, justice, and public safety leaders working on VAWG prevention Audience outcomes A clear read of what the Worker Protection Act actually requires of employers and where most are still under-prepared A practical framing of male allyship that male audiences engage with rather than resist Specific bystander and intervention behaviours that translate from keynote to workplace A way to talk about VAWG in a corporate setting without losing half the room A model for connecting culture, safety, and inclusion as one operating question, not three

Why organisations work with Karen Eber She has run culture and learning inside two of the largest professional environments in the world, GE and Deloitte, so her storytelling work is built around how decisions actually get made in a 90,000-person organisation. Her Perfect Story method is grounded in neuroscience, including how attention, empathy, and trust are formed in the brain during a story, giving leaders a defensible reason to invest in communication craft beyond presentation polish. She works fluently across storytelling for leadership, storytelling for change, and storytelling with data, which means a single engagement can serve a town hall, a board update, and a sales conversation. Her book carries genuine third-party validation: Axiom Business Book Award Silver Medal, International Book Awards winner, and Next Big Ideas Club selection, signalling editorial quality rather than self-published reach. Biography highlights Author of The Perfect Story: How to Tell Stories that Inform, Influence, and Inspire, HarperCollins Leadership / Harper Horizon. TED speaker: “How your brain responds to stories, and why they’re crucial for leaders”. Former Head of Culture and Head of Leadership Development at General Electric. Former Chief Learning Officer / Head of Leadership Development at Deloitte. Guest lecturer at London Business School, MIT, and Stanford. Featured in Fast Company, Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur, NPR, CNBC, Quartz, and Business Insider. Biography Most internal communication inside large organisations is information transfer in slide form. Strategy is announced, change is rolled out, performance is reported, and almost none of it changes how a manager behaves on a Tuesday morning. Karen Eber’s work begins from that problem. She spent two decades inside the kind of environment where this matters most. At General Electric she led Culture and Leadership Development across a global workforce. At Deloitte she ran leadership development for the firm. Those roles required her to land complex messages, on diverse audiences, in cultures that were already crowded with corporate noise. Her book The Perfect Story sets out a practical neuroscience-based method for how leaders find, shape, and deliver stories that hold attention and shift behaviour. It has been recognised with an Axiom Business Book Award Silver Medal, an International Book Awards win, and a Next Big Ideas Club “Must-Read” selection. Her TED talk on the neuroscience of leadership storytelling extended the argument to a public audience. What buyers tend to remember from her sessions is that the craft is teachable. She separates storytelling from charisma, breaks down the brain mechanics of attention and trust, and gives senior people specific tools they can use the same week, whether the audience is a board, a sales team, or a hundred frontline managers reading a town hall transcript on a phone. Key speaking topics Storytelling for leadership and influence Storytelling with data Culture change and communication Executive presence and communication craft Neuroscience of attention, trust, and persuasion Employee engagement and internal communication Ideal for CHROs, Chief Learning Officers, and Heads of Leadership Development designing executive communication and culture programmes. Chief Communications Officers and internal communication leaders responsible for change narratives and town hall content. Sales and marketing leadership teams who need to convert data into narrative buyers act on. Senior leadership teams preparing for major strategy, restructure, or integration announcements. Audience outcomes A working neuroscience-based model for how stories hold attention and create trust. Specific techniques for turning data and strategy slides into narratives that move an audience. A clearer separation between what is rhetoric, what is communication craft, and what is leadership behaviour. Tools senior leaders can apply immediately to town halls, board updates, and customer conversations.

Why organisations work with Rene Godefroy He brings a named, ownable philosophy. The “Village Hero” frame gives leaders a vocabulary for belonging that survives the keynote and shows up in daily behaviour. His client roster is unusually concentrated in frontline, customer-facing organisations. Coca-Cola, Aflac, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Marriott, Hyatt, the U.S. Army. He speaks to the people who actually carry the brand. The resilience material is grounded in a specific lived narrative, not borrowed research. That gives the message authority with audiences who have heard the standard motivational circuit. He writes and speaks for retention and morale outcomes, not abstract inspiration. The brief he answers best is the one that mentions turnover, change fatigue, or a workforce that has stopped believing the slogans. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Village Hero, Inc., Atlanta. Author of Kick Your Excuses Goodbye: No Condition Is Permanent. Keynote work for Coca-Cola, AT&T, Aflac, Verizon Wireless, Marriott Hotels, Hyatt Hotels, and the U.S. Army. Speaker at the National Association for Pupil Transportation and the Michigan Assisted Living Association annual conference. Recognised by the City of Smyrna, Georgia with a dedicated “Rene Godefroy Day”; granted a key to the city by Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Runs humanitarian work supporting orphanages and health clinics in Haiti, partly funded by program fees. Biography Most workplace culture problems are not really about culture. They are about belonging. People decide to stay, contribute and look out for one another long before any engagement survey captures it, and they decide on the basis of small, daily signals from the people above them. That is the territory the “Village Hero” philosophy sits in. The frame comes from a specific origin. Godefroy grew up in a rural Haitian village, arrived in the United States as a young man with almost nothing, and worked through janitorial and service jobs before building a speaking practice. The argument he draws from that life is not biographical theatre. It is a working theory of how belonging is built one act at a time, and how leaders carry disproportionate responsibility for those acts inside an organisation. That theory has been tested against a particular kind of audience. His client list, Coca-Cola, AT&T, Aflac, Verizon Wireless, Marriott, Hyatt, the U.S. Army, is heavy on frontline and customer-facing workforces, where morale, retention and belief in the mission show up directly in operational performance. Kick Your Excuses Goodbye: No Condition Is Permanent extends the same material into individual accountability for change, particularly under pressure and constraint. He is most useful to organisations that have already tried the values posters and the engagement task force, and are now asking a more honest question. What behaviour, repeated daily by managers, would actually rebuild the social contract here. The Village Hero framework gives them a starting answer, and the City of Smyrna, Georgia, which declared a “Rene Godefroy Day” in his honour, gives a small civic indicator of the impression that practice has left. Key speaking topics Resilience and change leadership Workplace culture and belonging Employee engagement and morale Team performance under pressure Frontline leadership Purpose-driven leadership Personal accountability and mindset Ideal for HR, people and culture leaders rebuilding engagement and retention in frontline-heavy workforces Operations and customer experience leaders in retail, hospitality, telecoms, insurance, and logistics Sales kick-offs and dealer or franchisee networks that need a morale reset, not a tactics talk Defence, public sector and uniformed services audiences with high-pressure operating conditions Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for belonging that managers can use the next day, anchored in the “Village Hero” frame A direct, personal challenge to the stories teams tell themselves about change and constraint Concrete behaviours that lift morale and retention without waiting for a new culture programme A renewed sense of purpose for workforces fatigued by repeated restructuring and uncertainty

Why organisations work with Mike Evans He gives an audience a defence plan for AI disruption, not a forecast. The 7-Sided Pincer Movement maps the forces reshaping work, and the 5-Ingredient Kryptonite Defence sets out the capabilities that keep people and teams hard to replace. He has worked these forces since the 1990s, inside Kotter International, FranklinCovey, and Tom Peters Company, which puts three decades of change practice behind a topic most speakers picked up after 2023. He built and tested the frameworks inside 34 of the Fortune 50, with named results such as shorter decision cycles at Intel and a rebuilt pilot training pipeline at the US Army Aviation Center. He builds each keynote backward from a structured discovery call with the client, so the room gets its own challenges addressed rather than a stock talk. His Kryptonite Scorecard, a 30-behaviour diagnostic, and the distributed ownership thesis in Achieve with Accountability give a leadership team a way to keep working the plan after the session. Biography highlights Author of two books: Distinct or Extinct: Future-Proofing People and Organizations in the Age of AI (Pincer Press, 2026) and Achieve with Accountability (Wiley). Founder of Pincer Press; works full-time as a keynote speaker and author. Former senior consultant at Kotter International, FranklinCovey, and Tom Peters Company, working alongside John Kotter, Stephen Covey, and Tom Peters. Clients include 34 of the Fortune 50, among them Intel, Apple, PepsiCo, Caterpillar, Cargill, Capital One, and Pfizer. Developer of the 7-Sided Pincer Movement and the 5-Ingredient Kryptonite Defence, with the Kryptonite Scorecard diagnostic. Biography Seven forces are reshaping how organisations work at the same time: software, robotics, globalisation, outsourcing, digital transformation, disruptive competition, and AI as the accelerant that multiplies the rest. Most organisations defend one flank while the other six go unguarded. Mike Evans has worked these forces since the 1990s, well before AI made them urgent. He built his frameworks inside Kotter International, FranklinCovey, and Tom Peters Company. He worked directly with John Kotter on change acceleration, with Stephen Covey on personal effectiveness, and with Tom Peters on operational excellence. His 2026 book, Distinct or Extinct, turns that history into a method. It argues that people and organisations survive disruption by becoming hard to replace, through five capabilities: ideas, speed, talent, distinction, and leadership at all levels. Evans founded Pincer Press to publish it, choosing speed to market over a traditional deal so it reached leaders inside the 2026 disruption window. The frameworks were tested inside 34 of the Fortune 50, including Intel, Apple, PepsiCo, and the US Army Aviation Center. His Wiley book, Achieve with Accountability, supplies the execution layer beneath them, the distributed ownership that lets a workforce act on a plan rather than receive one. At Intel the work shortened decision cycles; at the US Army Aviation Center it rebuilt a pilot training pipeline under a constrained budget. Key speaking topics AI disruption and the future of work Future-proofing people and organisations The 7-Sided Pincer Movement and converging disruptive forces Distributed accountability and execution discipline Change leadership under permanent disruption Personal and organisational distinctiveness Resilience under repeated disruption Ideal for Boards and executive teams deciding how AI changes their workforce and operating model Chief People Officers and Chief Transformation Officers redesigning roles and accountability for an AI-shaped workforce Leadership conferences, annual meetings, and sales kickoffs in sectors under pressure from AI, such as financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, pharma, and technology Associations running “future of the industry” programmes where members are anxious about staying relevant Audience outcomes A map of the seven forces hitting their organisation at once, and which ones they are currently leaving unguarded The five capabilities that keep people and teams hard to replace as AI absorbs routine work A working model for distributing accountability so a workforce can act on the plan rather than receive it Specific changes leaders can put in motion within the week, beyond general AI awareness Shared language senior teams can use after the session to hold momentum

Why organisations work with James Peach Twenty years of senior in-house brand work at Innocent, Coca-Cola, Uber and Vinted, including running a 120-person team across 18 countries through Vinted’s first profit milestone. He speaks from the operator’s seat, not the consultant’s chair. The Growth Project, his own framework, replaces the generic growth-mindset language most leadership programmes default to with a behavioural model built around how teams actually break and recover. A solo unsupported world cycle of 41,000km across 38 countries gives him a working laboratory for sustained performance under pressure that most performance speakers do not have. The expedition material is evidence, not metaphor. Active ambassadorship for CALM and visible mental health advocacy mean he can speak honestly about burnout and recovery without slipping into the wellness-industry register that senior audiences reject. Equally credible on brand and marketing strategy when the brief calls for it, drawing on direct accountability for some of the most-watched consumer brands of the last two decades. Biography highlights Former Global Brand Director, Vinted, leading a team of 120 across 18 countries during the platform’s path to first profit Former Head of Brand & Campaigns UKI, Uber, and former UK Senior Brand Manager, Innocent Drinks Career experience also includes Coca-Cola, alongside founder mentoring from seed to scale-up Founder of The Growth Project, a proprietary framework on resilience, performance and team growth Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society; Ambassador for CALM, the Campaign Against Living Miserably Cycled 41,000km solo and unsupported around the world over two years, across 38 countries; completed the UK’s first full-country triathlon spanning its length, width and height Biography Most senior teams are not short of strategy. They are short of the human bandwidth to execute it after three years of restructure, cost programmes and AI-driven redesign. Resilience, in that context, is not a wellness benefit. It is whether your leadership bench can still make sharp decisions on a Friday afternoon in month thirty of permanent change. That is the working problem James Peach addresses. Twenty years inside Innocent, Coca-Cola, Uber and Vinted, including a Global Brand Director role at Vinted leading 120 people across 18 countries through the platform’s first profit milestone, gave him a direct view of how brand-led businesses hold together when growth flattens and pressure builds. The Growth Project, his own framework, sits on that experience. The expedition record is the second source. Two years cycling 41,000km solo and unsupported across 38 countries, hikes across South and Central America and Scandinavia, and the first full-length, full-width, full-height triathlon of the United Kingdom are not anecdotes in his talks. They are case material on sustained performance, recovery cycles, and decision quality when conditions degrade. His Royal Geographical Society fellowship sits behind that work. The third strand is his ambassadorship for CALM, the Campaign Against Living Miserably. It lets him speak about burnout, recovery and mental health in operator language, with the credibility of someone who has done the corporate hours and the physical extremes, and stayed honest about both. Key speaking topics Resilience and performance under sustained pressure Team and culture leadership through change Brand-led business growth and reinvention Mental health, burnout and recovery in senior leadership Lessons from extreme endurance applied to commercial teams High-performance team behaviours Building cultures that compound growth Ideal for CHROs, transformation leads and senior HR teams running multi-year change programmes CMOs and brand leaders rebuilding marketing functions for relevance and growth Executive teams entering a profitability or efficiency phase after a long growth cycle Leadership offsites and senior all-hands focused on team performance and wellbeing Audience outcomes A working definition of resilience that holds up in operating reviews, not only in HR comms A concrete read on what changes inside a high-performing team when pressure becomes constant Specific behaviours leaders can name and reinforce to stop quiet attrition and burnout in senior layers Honest language for talking about mental health with senior people without defaulting to wellness cliches A renewed argument for why brand and culture are operating assets, drawn from inside Innocent, Uber and Vinted

Why organisations work with Dr Alan O’Neill The 7-Steps to Profit is a named, proprietary framework built from a multi-year consulting engagement at Selfridges, where annual profit grew from £45m to £200m. Audiences leave with a structured path they can map to their own organisation, not a set of principles they have to interpret. His central argument, that culture and customer experience are a single commercial mechanism, not parallel HR and marketing initiatives, gives boards a specific reframing of a decision they are typically making in silos. As Managing Director of Kara Change Management, he draws content from active client engagements across retail, hospitality, FMCG, financial services, and the public sector. The material is current, not archival. Four published books provide a body of work that extends well beyond the session: “Premium Is the New Black” on customer experience as competitive differentiation; “Culture Matters” on the four values that underpin high performance; “Show Me the Lid on the Box” on reducing change resistance; and “The Leader’s Six-Pack” on balancing leadership competencies with emotional intelligence A business columnist for the Sunday Independent and Gulf based publications, his frameworks are tested continuously against live commercial situations across multiple sectors and geographies. Biography highlights Founder and Managing Director, Kara Change Management Creator of the 7-Steps to Profit framework; deployed across client organisations including Selfridges, Toyota, Intel, Primark, Moët Hennessy, Dubai Duty Free, Getty Images, and the United Nations Author of three books: Premium Is the New Black, Culture Matters, and Show Me the Lid on the Box Business columnist, Sunday Independent (Ireland) and Gulf Business Non-executive director across multiple sectors in Europe and the Middle East 30+ years of consulting practice spanning retail, hospitality, FMCG, financial services, manufacturing, and public sector organisations across EMEA Biography Selfridges’ annual profit grew from £45m to £200m across several years of structured transformation, and the business went on to win multiple ‘Best Department Store in the World’ awards. The consulting framework behind that journey, Dr Alan O’Neill’s 7-Steps to Profit, is what organisations now bring him in to share. The 7-Steps to Profit is built on a specific argument: that culture, customer experience, and commercial performance are not parallel workstreams but a single, interdependent system. Culture is not the backdrop to strategy, it is the delivery mechanism. O’Neill formalised this thinking across three books: Premium Is the New Black addresses customer experience as competitive differentiation; Culture Matters defines the four values (Customer Centricity, Respect, Accountability, and Agility) that underpin a high-performance culture; Show Me the Lid on the Box provides a framework for leading change with reduced resistance. As Managing Director of Kara Change Management, he has applied the framework with organisations across retail, hospitality, FMCG, financial services, and the public sector, from Toyota and Intel to Dubai Duty Free and the United Nations. The Selfridges story transfers well: the structural argument it illustrates is as relevant to a B2B services firm or a public institution as it is to a department store. O’Neill continues to practise as an active consultant and non-executive director. He writes regular business commentary for the Sunday Independent and Gulf Business, keeping his frameworks in direct conversation with the commercial challenges organisations are currently navigating. Key speaking topics Change management and organisational transformation Culture as commercial strategy Customer experience and service excellence The 7-Steps to Profit Premium brand positioning and margin protection Values-led leadership Retail reinvention and the future of physical retail Ideal for CEOs and senior leadership teams managing a cultural transformation alongside a commercial or strategic pivot Chief Customer Officers and Chief Marketing Officers seeking to embed customer-centric behaviour across the full organisation CHROs and HR Directors designing culture programmes that connect directly to business performance Executive conferences in retail, hospitality, consumer goods, and financial services Audience outcomes A working understanding of the 7-Steps to Profit framework and how to map its logic to their own organisational context A reframing of culture and customer experience as a single commercial lever, not separate functional priorities Concrete examples drawn from the Selfridges engagement and other named client organisations that show how the framework operates under real conditions Greater clarity on where resistance to change typically originates and how structured approaches reduce it at scale A sharper diagnostic lens for identifying the gap between leadership intent and frontline behaviour

Why organisations work with Jim Carroll He builds each keynote around the client’s own industry data, not a generic deck. NASA, Pfizer, the World Bank, and the PGA of America have brought him in to map their specific sector horizon, from space to pharma acceleration to manufacturing in emerging economies. BusinessWeek named him one of four leading sources of insight on innovation and creativity, a credential that travels well in C-suite rooms where buyers want an outside voice with editorial standing. He pairs futurist work with a CPA background and a decade inside large advisory firms. That combination tends to land with CFOs and operating leaders who push back on speakers without commercial grounding. Two million-plus attendees across thirty years of corporate, institutional, and conference platforms, including the World Government Summit and the Swiss Innovation Forum, give him a pattern library few peers can match. His column work for the Globe and Mail and trade titles such as Profit and Marketing established an independent public record of trend calls, useful when boards want a speaker whose views predate the engagement. Biography highlights Named by BusinessWeek as one of four leading sources of insight on innovation and creativity. Lifetime Achievement Award, Canadian New Media Awards (2002), for pioneering work in the digital industry. Named “One of 50 International Names to Know” by the Online Journalism Review. Keynote engagements for NASA, The Walt Disney Company, Pfizer, the World Bank, the PGA of America, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, BlackRock, the Swiss Innovation Forum, and the World Government Summit. Author of titles including “The Future Belongs To Those Who Are Fast”, “Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast”, and “Dancing in the Rain: How Bold Leaders Grow Stronger in Stormy Times”. Former national columnist for the Globe and Mail; columns in Profit, Marketing, and hiTech Careers; CPA with prior advisory, tax, and audit experience at predecessor firms of KPMG and EY. Biography The hardest call in any boardroom is timing. Most leadership teams can describe the trend lines reshaping their industry. Far fewer can say, with conviction, which curve bends in the next eighteen months and which is still a decade out. That gap is where Carroll’s work lives. He has spent more than thirty years building a library of industry-specific futurist research, then translating it into keynotes for the executive teams making capital and portfolio decisions. NASA brought him in twice for sessions on the future of the space industry. Pfizer engaged him on the acceleration of medical science. The PGA of America used him to rethink innovation in golf. The World Bank asked him to look at manufacturing in emerging economies. Each engagement is built from the client’s own sector data rather than a generic trends deck. The credentials behind that work matter. BusinessWeek named him one of four leading sources of insight on innovation and creativity. The Canadian New Media Awards gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002. The Online Journalism Review listed him among “50 International Names to Know”. A CPA designation and roughly a decade in advisory, tax, and audit roles at predecessor firms of KPMG and EY underwrite the commercial register he speaks in. His books, from “The Future Belongs To Those Who Are Fast” through to “Dancing in the Rain: How Bold Leaders Grow Stronger in Stormy Times”, argue a consistent line: the organisations that win in volatile decades are the ones that compress decision cycles, treat optimism as a strategy, and refuse to let the planning calendar set the pace of change. Key speaking topics Industry-specific trend forecasting Innovation and disruption Strategic foresight and scenario planning Acceleration and decision velocity Future of healthcare, manufacturing, and financial services Leadership in volatile markets Workforce and skills transformation Ideal for Boards and executive committees setting three-to-five-year strategy in industries facing structural disruption CEOs, CSOs, and innovation leads commissioning offsites that need an outside trend voice anchored in their sector Conference programmes for healthcare, manufacturing, energy, financial services, and technology that need a headline futurist with sector range Audience outcomes A clearer view of which trends in the audience’s specific industry are accelerating, which are overhyped, and which are mispriced by current strategy. A sharper internal language for talking about decision speed, with examples drawn from sectors as varied as space, pharma, and manufacturing. Confidence to challenge planning cycles and capital allocation assumptions that quietly assume a slower world. Concrete reference points from named organisations (NASA, Pfizer, the PGA of America, the World Bank) that have used the same lens.

Why organisations work with Anelia Uzunova A corporate operator’s read on wellbeing. She has run point for a CEO at Galderma and managed global innovation projects at Novartis, so the inner-leadership conversation lands as an executive discipline rather than a soft-skills add-on. Founder of the wellbeing community at the World Economic Forum, which gives her a credible vantage point on how peer organisations are actually structuring this work, not just how they describe it on their careers page. A structured method, the RISE Inner Leadership framework, that gives leadership teams something concrete to take back to their day-to-day, rather than a workshop afterglow. A bilingual, cross-cultural speaker with working experience across Switzerland, the US, and the UK, well suited to executive audiences in pharma, healthcare, and globally distributed corporate teams. INSEAD-trained executive coach who lectures on Leading for Wellbeing to its MBA audience, which translates into content that survives a sceptical senior room. Biography highlights Chief of Staff to the CEO, Galderma Global Leadership Fellow, World Economic Forum; founder of the WEF wellbeing community Former global digital innovation project lead at Novartis, Switzerland MBA and executive coaching certification, INSEAD Executive Masters in Global Leadership, World Economic Forum programme Lecturer to INSEAD MBA audiences on Leading for Wellbeing Biography Pharma is a useful test case for the limits of conventional wellbeing programmes. The work is high-stakes, the regulatory load is heavy, and the senior teams running global functions tend to be senior precisely because they absorb pressure for everyone else. That is the environment Anelia Uzunova has worked inside for most of her career, first at Novartis in Switzerland and then as Chief of Staff to the CEO of Galderma. Her shift from operating roles to coaching and speaking was not a reinvention away from corporate life. It was a decision to teach explicitly what she saw working at the top of complex organisations. The Global Leadership Fellows Programme at the World Economic Forum gave her a comparative view across industries; founding the WEF’s wellbeing community gave her a structured one. Both inform a body of work focused on the inner state of the leader as an operational variable. The teachable form of that work is the RISE Inner Leadership framework, organised around four stages: Root, Ignite, Surrender, Embody. It is used with executive audiences and with the INSEAD MBA cohort she lectures to on Leading for Wellbeing. The framing is not therapeutic. It is closer to executive coaching with a clear curriculum, designed for senior leaders who have already tried the surface interventions and want something that holds up under pressure. Her credentials sit across INSEAD, the World Economic Forum, and a fifteen-year corporate track record in pharma and healthcare. The reason this matters for serious organisations is straightforward: when wellbeing is treated as an HR programme, it stays peripheral. When it is treated as a leadership capability, it changes how people work. Uzunova argues, and demonstrates, that the second framing is the one that pays back. Key speaking topics Inner leadership and executive composure Wellbeing as a leadership capability Personal transformation and reinvention for senior leaders Leading through change and uncertainty Purpose and alignment in executive careers Mindful leadership for high-pressure industries Women in senior leadership Ideal for CHROs and Chief People Officers building wellbeing into the leadership agenda rather than the benefits stack C-suite and senior leadership offsites in pharma, healthcare, and other high-pressure regulated industries Executive development programmes and high-potential cohorts Women’s leadership and senior talent forums Audience outcomes A working definition of inner leadership that an executive team can use, not a wellness vocabulary The four-stage RISE framework as a reference structure for how senior leaders manage their own state A sharper view of how composure, alignment, and presence affect team performance and retention Practical anchors for executives navigating role transitions, restructure, or extended pressure A frame for treating wellbeing as a leadership discipline that boards and CEOs can sponsor with confidence

Why organisations work with Andreas Welsch Two decades inside SAP, including a vice president role connected to its Global AI Center of Excellence, give him a working knowledge of enterprise AI at the scale Fortune 500 boards actually operate. His AI Leadership Handbook is built on 60+ named interviews with AI leaders and offers a practitioner framework rather than commentary on the market. The 9 Steps to Successful AI Projects gives leadership teams a sequence to challenge stalled programmes against, covering ownership, strategy alignment, cross-functional delivery and governance. His What’s the BUZZ? podcast, running since 2021 with hundreds of AI executives, keeps his material grounded in what is currently working inside enterprises, not what was true 18 months ago. Named LinkedIn Top Voice, Thinkers360 Top 10 in AI, Generative AI and Agentic AI, and DataIQ Data & AI Leader of the Year Finalist 2025, which signals he is taken seriously by the audiences that book him. Biography highlights Founder and Chief AI Strategist, Intelligence Briefing Former Vice President at SAP, with leadership roles connected to its Global AI Center of Excellence and Business AI go-to-market function Author of AI Leadership Handbook and The HUMAN Agentic AI Edge Host of What’s the BUZZ? AI in Business podcast since 2021 Adjunct Professor at West Chester University of Pennsylvania; Editorial Board member, Journal of AI, Robotics, and Workplace Automation LinkedIn Top Voice; Thinkers360 Top 10 in AI, Generative AI and Agentic AI; DataIQ Data & AI Leader of the Year Finalist 2025; PEX Network Top 30 AI Leader 2025 Biography Enterprise AI has moved past the question of whether to invest. The harder question now is why most programmes never leave pilot. Welsch’s work answers it from the operator’s seat. Over two decades at SAP, including a vice president role connected to its Global AI Center of Excellence, he watched Fortune 500 organisations buy capability and fail to convert it into operating advantage. That experience is the substrate of the AI Leadership Handbook, his best-selling book drawn from 60+ interviews with AI leaders. The book sets out a practitioner sequence, The 9 Steps to Successful AI Projects, that leadership teams use to challenge stalled programmes against ownership, strategy alignment, cross-functional delivery and governance. Through Intelligence Briefing, the advisory he founded after SAP, Welsch now works with senior teams on agentic AI specifically: where autonomous systems sit on the org chart, how accountability survives when decisions are delegated to machines, and what workforce design looks like when AI agents are colleagues rather than tools. His second book, The HUMAN Agentic AI Edge, makes that argument in book form. His What’s the BUZZ? podcast, running since 2021, keeps the material fresh by putting him in regular conversation with named AI leaders inside Accenture, IBM, NVIDIA, PwC, SAP and Siemens. Thinkers360 ranks him in their top 10 globally on AI, Generative AI and Agentic AI; DataIQ named him a Data & AI Leader of the Year finalist in 2025. Key speaking topics Enterprise AI strategy and operating advantage Agentic AI and autonomous systems in the enterprise AI governance and responsible adoption Generative AI for business outcomes Workforce design for the AI-ready organisation AI leadership and executive readiness Change management for AI programmes Ideal for Boards, CEOs and executive committees commissioning enterprise-wide AI strategy CIOs, CTOs, CDOs and Chief AI Officers responsible for moving AI from pilot to operating model CHROs and people leaders redesigning roles around AI capability Industry conferences and leadership summits in technology, financial services, manufacturing and professional services Audience outcomes A sharper read on why most enterprise AI programmes stall and what changes when they do not Familiarity with The 9 Steps to Successful AI Projects as a diagnostic for their own programme A working position on agentic AI: where it belongs in the operating model and where it does not Specific governance questions to take back to the board on accountability, data privacy and risk A view of what other Fortune 500 AI leaders are actually doing now, from Welsch’s podcast research