Change Management

Why organisations work with Darren Edwards He has led injured-veteran teams across four genuine world-first or world-record expeditions, including the 1,400 km Land’s End to John O’Groats kayak and the seven-continent World Marathon Challenge in a wheelchair. The leadership content is drawn from operations, not theory. He talks about the South Pole expedition that did not finish as openly as the ones that did, which gives senior teams a rare working example of how to make a collective stop call without losing the team. His book Strength Through Adversity, an Amazon UK bestseller, sets out the adaptive mindset framework he uses with leadership teams, giving audiences a single referenceable text after a session. He founded Adaptive Expeditions, so the work is institutional rather than personal narrative, and translates into language about team capability, not individual triumph. Biography highlights Author of Strength Through Adversity, Amazon UK bestseller, published February 2023. First wheelchair user to complete the World Marathon Challenge: seven marathons, seven continents, seven days. Led the first team to kayak 1,400 km from Land’s End to John O’Groats with injured-veteran crew. Member of the first adaptive team to cross Vatnajokull, Europe’s largest ice cap. Founder of Adaptive Expeditions. Former Army Reservist and qualified teacher. Biography A ledge gave way in North Wales in 2016. Darren Edwards fell more than 100 feet, broke his back in two places, and severed his spinal cord. He woke up paralysed from the chest down. He had been a mountaineer, an Army Reservist, and a trained teacher. None of those identities survived intact. What followed is the working material of his keynote. Inside three years he was leading a team of injured veterans on the first kayak crossing of Britain from Land’s End to John O’Groats, 1,400 kilometres through some of the country’s most exposed sea. He went on to row the English Channel, cross the Vatnajokull ice cap with the first adaptive team to do it, and in 2023 became the first wheelchair user to finish the World Marathon Challenge: seven marathons, seven continents, seven days. The expeditions are not the proof point. The proof point is what he did with them. He built Adaptive Expeditions as an organisation, wrote Strength Through Adversity in 2023, and has spent the years since refining what he calls the adaptive mindset: a working set of disciplines for leading teams through sustained uncertainty. How composure is built before it is needed. How recovery is led rather than waited out. How a team makes the call to stop. In December 2025 his Redefining Impossible team cut a 222 km sit-ski attempt on the South Pole short after a week on the ice. He talks about that decision with the same clarity as the records. For organisations under sustained pressure, that is the value. Edwards has lived the gap between the plan and what actually happens, and he can describe it in operational terms. Key speaking topics The adaptive mindset for leadership teams Leading through sustained uncertainty Team leadership across injured and mixed-ability crews Composure and decision-making under pressure Recovery as a leadership discipline Resilience after catastrophic disruption Ideal for Executive leadership teams preparing for or recovering from major disruption Senior operational leaders responsible for sustained-pressure environments Programmes for high-potential leaders building decision-making range Veteran transition, healthcare leadership, and emergency-services audiences Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for talking about composure and recovery as leadership capabilities, not personality traits A clear example of how a senior team makes a collective stop decision without losing trust The adaptive mindset framework, drawn from his book, that audiences can take into team conversations after the session An honest account of the gap between the plan and the operation, useful for risk and contingency thinking

Why organisations work with Terence Mauri He gives leadership teams a defined decision framework, DARE (Data, Agility, Risk, Evolution), drawn from his Wiley and Thinkers50 book, that turns “respond to disruption” from a slogan into a working method. His vantage point sits across operating roles, not commentary alone: founder of Hack Future Lab, Entrepreneur Mentor in Residence at MIT, visiting professor at IE Business School. Senior audiences can tell the difference. The content is built for the AI era without becoming a technology lecture. The argument is about how executives think, choose, and govern when technology cycles are shorter than planning cycles. He writes for a senior business readership through a monthly Inc.com column, “Future Proof,” which means the room hears arguments that have already been pressure-tested in print. Biography highlights Founder of Hack Future Lab, a global management think tank focused on leadership, AI, and disruption. Author of The Upside of Disruption (Wiley, in partnership with Thinkers50, 2024), centred on his DARE framework. Earlier books include The Leader’s Mindset and The 3D Leader. Entrepreneur Mentor in Residence at MIT and visiting professor at IE Business School. Inc.com columnist, author of the “Future Proof” column. Described by Thinkers50 as “an influential and outspoken thinker on the future of leadership.” Biography The hardest part of leading through disruption is not recognising that the environment has changed. It is changing the way a senior team decides while the business still has to deliver this quarter. That gap, between awareness and operating practice, is the question Terence Mauri has spent his work addressing. His most recent book, The Upside of Disruption, was published by Wiley in 2024 in partnership with Thinkers50. It introduces the DARE framework, Data, Agility, Risk, Evolution, as a way of organising executive decisions when conditions will not stabilise. Earlier books, The Leader’s Mindset and The 3D Leader, traced the same thread through the language of mindset and leadership behaviour. The institutional ground underneath the work matters. Mauri founded Hack Future Lab as a global management think tank, and holds active posts as Entrepreneur Mentor in Residence at MIT and visiting professor at IE Business School. He writes the “Future Proof” column for Inc.com, which is where many of the arguments arrive in public before they appear in a keynote. Thinkers50, the management ranking authority, has called him “an influential and outspoken thinker on the future of leadership.” For a senior team weighing whether to put a speaker in front of their own leadership, the practical question is sharper: he gives them a structured way to talk about decisions in conditions of uncertainty, drawn from a published framework rather than a slide deck. Key speaking topics Leadership in the age of AI Decision-making under uncertainty Future readiness and organisational agility Disruption as a strategic input, not a threat Executive mindset and unlearning Innovation and growth in fast-changing markets Ideal for CEOs and executive committees setting strategy in conditions where AI and market shifts have shortened planning horizons. CHROs and chief learning officers redesigning leadership development for senior cohorts. Boards and transformation leads asking how the organisation should make decisions, not just which technology to adopt. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for how senior leaders make decisions when the operating context is actively changing. The DARE framework as a structure for diagnosing where the leadership team is strong and where it is exposed. A sharper read on the difference between adopting AI and leading through the AI era. A set of named behaviours, around unlearning, calculated risk, and trust, that senior teams can return to after the keynote.

Why organisations work with Sam Silverstein A 30-year body of work that treats accountability as an operating system, not a virtue. Buyers get a structured method, not a motivational reset. Founder of The Accountability Institute and creator of the Certified Accountability Advisor designation. The frameworks are productised, taught, and used inside client organisations long after the keynote. Author of 13 books on the subject, anchored by No More Excuses and The Accountability Advantage. Senior teams can verify the substance before they commission the talk. CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame inductee and past President of the National Speakers Association. The peer recognition is from people who book and brief speakers for a living. Practitioner credibility: built and sold a manufacturing business to a Fortune 500 acquirer before turning to the topic full-time. The room reads him as an operator who later became an author. Biography highlights Founder of The Accountability Institute and the Certified Accountability Advisor programme. Author of 13 books, including No More Excuses, The Accountability Advantage, No Matter What, Non-Negotiable, and Pivot!. CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame, inducted by the National Speakers Association in 2021. Past President of the National Speakers Association (2008). Named one of the World’s Top 30 Organisational Culture Professionals by Global Gurus. Former owner of manufacturing and distribution companies with combined sales over $100 million, including a successful exit to a Fortune 500 company. Biography Most organisations treat accountability as a tone of voice. Silverstein treats it as a structure. His work, developed over three decades and codified through The Accountability Institute, defines accountability as the willingness to keep commitments to others. That definition is operational, not motivational, and it changes how leaders are expected to behave when no one is watching the dashboard. The frameworks sit inside thirteen books, beginning with No More Excuses and built out through The Accountability Advantage, No Matter What, Non-Negotiable, and the Certified Accountability Advisor designation that licenses the method to practitioners. Clients use them to address the problems culture decks usually skirt: turnover that erodes margin, change programmes that lose energy after launch, and senior leaders who carry decisions that should live closer to the customer. The credentials are equally serious. The National Speakers Association inducted him into the CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame in 2021, and he previously served as the association’s President. Global Gurus has named him among the world’s top thirty organisational culture professionals. The peer recognition matters because it comes from the part of the industry that watches speakers under pressure. Before any of this, he built and ran manufacturing and distribution companies with combined sales above $100 million and sold one of them to a Fortune 500 acquirer. That history is why the room reads him as an operator first. The accountability argument lands harder because the person making it has been the one writing the cheque for the consequences of weak execution. Key speaking topics Accountability as a culture operating discipline Organisational culture and retention Values-driven leadership Change adoption and resistance Trust and team commitment Disengagement and turnover reduction Ideal for CHROs and people directors facing retention and engagement pressure COOs and operating leaders translating strategy into consistent execution CEOs leading culture or values resets after restructure, merger, or rapid growth Leadership development and L&D teams building behavioural standards across the management layer Audience outcomes A working definition of accountability that separates it from blame, compliance, or performance management A clear view of where commitments break down inside their own organisation Specific behaviours that leaders can adopt to model accountability without micromanaging A vocabulary for culture that the senior team can use in operating meetings, not just engagement surveys A defensible answer to “what would change if we actually did this?”

Why organisations work with Janine Hamner Holman She translates neuroscience into HR-grade interventions, drawing on more than a decade studying brain science alongside a SHRM-CP and SHRM Inclusive Cultures certification, which gives operational HR teams a usable language rather than a TED-style abstraction. Her Mind The Gap: A Thought Leader’s Guide to 21st Century Conscious Leadership gives buyers a defined thesis on the distance between stated values and observed leadership behaviour, useful for boards trying to diagnose culture programmes that stall. She speaks credibly to both nonprofit and Fortune 200 contexts, having spent twenty years in nonprofit leadership followed by close to a decade inside a Fortune 200, which makes her unusual in audiences that mix public-sector, mission-driven, and corporate buyers. Her Cost of Not Paying Attention podcast and signature talk on civility give her a sustained body of public material on workplace incivility as a P&L line, not as a tone-of-voice issue. Biography highlights CEO, J&J Consulting Group; 30+ years as executive and consultant. Author, Mind The Gap: A Thought Leader’s Guide to 21st Century Conscious Leadership; contributing author, On The Shoulders of Mighty Women. Host, The Cost of Not Paying Attention podcast. Named a USA Today Keynote Speaker to Watch in 2024 and LA Weekly Top 10 Trailblazing Entrepreneur in 2023. Winner of the CXO 2.0 Leadership Award. Certified in the Psychology of Leadership (Cornell); SHRM-CP and SHRM Inclusive Cultures certified; Certified Practitioner in Emotional Intelligence. Biography Workplace culture is now a measurable variable on the P&L. Engagement, attrition, and incivility numbers move customer outcomes, and senior leaders increasingly want interventions that change behaviour, not posters. The cost of getting it wrong has stopped being soft. J&J Consulting Group, the firm Janine Hamner Holman leads as CEO, sits in that gap. Her professional history runs across twenty years of nonprofit leadership and almost a decade inside a Fortune 200, with close work alongside the public sector. That mix lets her talk to mission-driven and commercial audiences without flattening either. The intellectual spine of the work is applied neurobiology. More than a decade studying brain science, plus a Cornell certification in the Psychology of Leadership, sits underneath her practice on psychological safety, belonging, and conscious leadership. Her book Mind The Gap sets out the thesis: the distance between stated leadership values and observed leadership behaviour is where culture programmes fail. Public recognition tracks the same content. USA Today named her a Keynote Speaker to Watch in 2024, LA Weekly placed her in its 2023 Top 10 Trailblazing Entrepreneurs, and she won the CXO 2.0 Leadership Award at the CXO2 Conference in Las Vegas. Her podcast, The Cost of Not Paying Attention, gives buyers a sustained sense of the argument before they book the room. Key speaking topics Conscious leadership Organisational culture change Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging Psychological safety at work Employee engagement and retention Workplace incivility and its commercial cost Change management and neurobiology Emotional intelligence Ideal for CHROs and Heads of People wrestling with engagement, attrition, and DEIB delivery Executive teams running culture transformation programmes that have stalled at policy level Boards and CEOs treating culture as a commercial variable rather than a values statement Nonprofit and mission-driven leadership teams managing growth and professionalisation Audience outcomes A working definition of psychological safety that HR and line managers can operationalise A practical view of how incivility shows up on the P&L through retention, customer experience, and productivity A neuroscience-grounded model for why change resistance is predictable, and what to do about it A clearer separation between DEIB as compliance theatre and DEIB as belonging that affects performance A diagnostic for the gap between stated leadership values and observed leadership behaviour

Why organisations work with Mark Noon He has built leadership benches inside two of the most accountability-driven environments in American working life: the U.S. Air Force medical system and Studer Group’s healthcare client base. Senior teams get someone who has run the work, not described it. His signature framework, Set Up To Step In, gives organisations a concrete method for preparing successors before the seat opens, drawn from his book Set Up: Timeless Leadership Skills for Your Success. He has coached and presented inside more than 300 organisations across 43 states and several countries, which means the playbook has been pressure-tested across hospital systems, military units, and civilian operating environments. He treats employee engagement as a discipline rather than a sentiment, anchored in structured one-on-one rounding practices that frontline managers can repeat weekly. He pairs Studer Group’s service excellence lineage with first-hand command experience, a combination that lands credibly with clinical leaders who are sceptical of theory imported from outside healthcare. Biography highlights Retired U.S. Air Force Major after roughly 20 years of service, including 12 years as a commissioned officer and clinical lab director. Career path moved from enlisted laboratory technician to officer with immediate appointment to a lab management role. Served across nine assignments in seven U.S. states and a tour of duty in the Middle East. Spent approximately eight years as a coach with Studer Group, working with healthcare systems on operational and service excellence. Currently a Professional Speaker, Executive Coach and Developer of Leaders with LeadershipTen. Author of Set Up: Timeless Leadership Skills for Your Success (T.H.E. Studer Group, 2018). Biography The hardest moment in any organisation is the one nobody schedules: a seat opens, and the person expected to fill it is not ready. That gap is rarely a hiring problem. It is the cumulative result of small leadership habits that were never made routine. Mark Noon spent 20 years inside the U.S. Air Force watching that pattern up close, then nearly a decade at Studer Group helping healthcare leaders fix it. He retired as a Major after 12 years as a commissioned officer and clinical lab director, with assignments across seven states and a tour in the Middle East. The path from enlisted lab technician to officer running a lab gave him a working theory of leadership grounded in operational reality rather than abstraction. That theory became Set Up: Timeless Leadership Skills for Your Success, published by T.H.E. Studer Group in 2018. The book and its companion keynote, Set Up To Step In, treat succession as a daily discipline, not an annual planning exercise. Leaders are not chosen, they are prepared, through repeatable habits that show up in how meetings are run, how feedback is given, and how one-on-one rounding is conducted with the people closest to the work. His client work now runs through LeadershipTen, where he coaches and speaks inside hospital systems, military units, and operationally demanding civilian organisations. The footprint covers more than 300 organisations across 43 states and several countries, which gives senior teams something useful: a coach who has seen which engagement and culture practices survive contact with a stretched workforce, and which do not. Key speaking topics Leader development and succession readiness Employee engagement and one-on-one rounding Culture aligned to strategy Healthcare leadership and service excellence Managing up and team reliability Lessons from military command for civilian leaders Ideal for Healthcare CEOs, COOs, and chief nursing officers building leader benches across hospital systems Heads of leadership development and learning leaders responsible for succession and frontline manager capability Senior military and veteran-serving organisations translating command experience into civilian operating practice Operationally complex organisations where frontline leadership turnover threatens service quality Audience outcomes A clear, named set of habits that distinguish leaders who are setting up successors from those who are not A working method for one-on-one rounding that frontline managers can run inside their existing week Language for talking about engagement as an operational discipline, not a survey result A frame for connecting daily leader behaviours to the strategy and culture senior teams have already committed to Confidence that the practices have been tested across military, healthcare, and civilian operating environments

Why organisations work with Thom Mayer He has commanded medical operations during three of the defining crises of the modern era: the Pentagon on 9/11, the 2001 US Capitol anthrax attacks, and the early months of the war in Ukraine. The lessons are not theoretical. As NFLPA Medical Director, he authored the concussion protocols now used across professional football, demonstrating how to rebuild a safety system inside an institution that did not want it rebuilt. His book “Leadership Is Worthless…But Leading Is Priceless” is built on eleven principles drawn directly from those crises, including the distinction between holding the title and doing the work. He won the 2018 James D. Mills Award, ACEP’s highest honour, and has been recognised three times with the College’s “Over-the-Top” award. The clinical community considers him a peer, not a celebrity. He runs a working executive role at LogixHealth alongside his speaking calendar, which keeps the case studies current rather than retrospective. Biography highlights Medical Director, NFL Players Association, appointed by Gene Upshaw in 2002 Command Physician, Pentagon Rescue Operation, 11 September 2001 Founder, BestPractices, Inc.; Executive Vice President of Leadership, LogixHealth Clinical Professor of Emergency Medicine, George Washington University; Senior Lecturing Fellow, Duke University School of Medicine Author, “Leadership Is Worthless…But Leading Is Priceless” (Berrett-Koehler, 2023); co-author of “Battling Healthcare Burnout” and “Hardwiring Flow” 2018 James D. Mills Outstanding Contribution to Emergency Medicine Award (ACEP’s highest honour); USA Today “100 Most Important People in the NFL”; Pro Football Hall of Fame nominee for sports medicine safety reform Biography The Pentagon was struck at 09:37 on 11 September 2001. By the time the rescue operation was running, Mayer was the command physician on site, coordinating medical assets across federal, military, and civilian teams that had never trained together. Three weeks later, with anthrax-laced letters circulating through the US Capitol, his BestPractices physicians at Inova Fairfax became the first in the country to successfully diagnose and treat inhalational anthrax. The pattern holds across his career. Gene Upshaw appointed him Medical Director of the NFL Players Association on the day Korey Stringer died of heat stroke in 2002, asking him to build a safety function the league did not yet have. Mayer wrote the original NFL Concussion Guidelines, which reshaped diagnosis and management of head injuries in professional football and, through that, across global contact sport. USA Today later named him among the 100 most important people in the NFL. His clinical and academic standing sits behind all of it. He holds the 2018 James D. Mills Award, ACEP’s highest honour for contribution to emergency medicine, alongside Clinical Professor and Senior Lecturing Fellow appointments at George Washington University and Duke University School of Medicine. He has served on Department of Defense Science Board Task Forces covering bioterrorism, homeland security, and weapons of mass destruction. His 2023 book “Leadership Is Worthless…But Leading Is Priceless” frames the argument that runs through the speaking work: eleven principles drawn from the Pentagon, the NFL, the anthrax crisis, and a mobile emergency mission into Ukraine in 2022. The thesis is that titles and frameworks do not survive contact with a real crisis, but a small set of disciplines does. Boards and executive teams hire him because the source material is not borrowed. Key speaking topics Crisis leadership and command decision-making Servant leadership in high-stakes environments Burnout and resilience for clinical and corporate teams Building safety culture inside resistant institutions Operational flow and frontline performance Innovation and trust under pressure Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and executive committees preparing for crisis response, business continuity, or major change Healthcare leadership: CMOs, CNOs, hospital executives, clinical directors Boards reviewing safety, risk, or duty-of-care frameworks Senior leadership development programmes that need a credible voice on decision-making under pressure Audience outcomes A set of leadership principles tested in conditions most executives will never face, made transferable to commercial settings A clearer model of the difference between holding a leadership role and performing the work of leading Specific decision-making heuristics for moments when information is incomplete and the cost of waiting is high A practical view of how safety culture is rebuilt inside organisations that resist the work

Why organisations work with Kevin Ahmaad Jenkins He grounds inclusion work in peer-reviewed research on bias and clinical outcomes, not in opinion or training-industry frameworks, which gives senior teams a defensible footing when DEI is contested. The RETINA Framework, his own intervention model, gives healthcare and high-regulation organisations a structured way to address how bias affects decisions, processes and outcomes. His Penn lectureship in Medical Ethics and Health Policy means he can hold a room of clinicians, executives and policy leaders with equal credibility. He has worked across more than 35 hospital associations and health systems, so the material is tested against operational reality, not just conference audiences. His delivery is calibrated for high-stakes rooms where the topic is uncomfortable, which is where most inclusion conversations now sit. Biography highlights Lecturer, Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. Developed the Racism-Focused Trauma Informed Care (RETINA) Framework, used in patient-provider settings. Fellow, Veterans Health Administration Office of Minority Health. Member, National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Roundtable on Health Equity. National Minority Quality Forum 40 Under 40 Leader in Health, 2017. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation New Connections Award recipient. Biography Most inclusion content in circulation is built on values and training language, not on evidence about how bias actually shapes outcomes. That is the gap Jenkins’s work occupies. As a lecturer in Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, he studies how racism functions inside clinical processes, from algorithmic decisions to the quality of patient-provider interactions, and translates the findings into something organisations can act on. The RETINA Framework, which he developed, is a patient-provider intervention that treats racism as a measurable variable in care delivery rather than a cultural sentiment. It has informed equity work across more than 35 hospital associations and health systems. His standing as a Fellow within the Veterans Health Administration’s Office of Minority Health and as a member of the National Academies’ Roundtable on Health Equity puts him inside the institutions that set the national agenda on this question. For non-healthcare audiences, the value is the operating model. Jenkins treats inclusion the way a clinician treats a diagnostic problem: define the mechanism, measure the effect, intervene with something specific. That posture is recognisable to executives in banking, insurance and consumer-facing organisations that need an inclusion conversation grounded in evidence rather than in slogans. The National Minority Quality Forum named him a 40 Under 40 Leader in Health in 2017; the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation backed his early research through its New Connections Award. What organisations get when they put him in front of a senior audience is a researcher who can hold the room on a topic most speakers reduce to platitudes. He is fluent in the politics of the current moment, but his authority is not political. It is built on what the data actually shows about how organisations include or exclude their people and customers. Key speaking topics Inclusion as an operating discipline Bias in decision-making and clinical processes Health equity and the business of healthcare Inclusive management practice Culture change in high-regulation organisations Difficult conversations in the workplace Algorithmic bias and equity in service design Ideal for CHROs and Chief Diversity Officers rebuilding inclusion strategy after political backlash. Healthcare boards, hospital association leadership, and clinical executives addressing equity in care delivery. Banking, insurance and consumer-services leadership teams needing an evidence-based inclusion conversation. Senior-team offsites and leadership development programmes where the brief is to raise the standard of internal dialogue on race and bias. Audience outcomes A working definition of inclusion that can be operationalised inside an existing management system. A view of where bias sits inside specific organisational processes, not as an abstract cultural risk. Language and structure for conducting hard conversations on race without producing defensive responses. A clearer line between equity work that is defensible to a board and work that is performative. For healthcare audiences, exposure to the RETINA Framework and its application to patient-provider interactions.

Why organisations work with Dr Ted James His concurrent roles – co-directing a Harvard Medical School executive programme and leading enterprise transformation across an 8-hospital health system – mean the frameworks he delivers are being tested in live operational conditions, not drawn from retrospective case studies. He holds a Master of Science in Healthcare Management from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health alongside a surgical oncology career, which means he translates between clinical and executive registers without simplifying either. His advisory work with biotech and medical device companies, including a fractional CMO role at Perimeter Medical Imaging AI guiding FDA strategy for AI-enabled surgical technology, gives him a vendor-facing perspective that most health system speakers cannot offer. He built an NIH-funded research portfolio while simultaneously holding senior clinical governance roles at a Harvard-affiliated academic medical centre. His Harvard Global Health Care Leaders Program draws participants from more than 200 countries, which means his analysis of healthcare leadership is genuinely comparative rather than US-centric. Biography highlights System Physician Executive, Endeavor Health Cancer Institute, leading clinical strategy and care transformation across an 8-hospital integrated health system Co-Director, Global Health Care Leaders Program, Harvard Medical School Executive Education which draws participants from more than 200 countries Faculty, Harvard Medical School; former Associate Professor of Surgery Former Chief of Breast Surgical Oncology, Vice Chair of Academic Affairs in Surgery, and Medical Director of the Breast Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Fractional Chief Medical Officer, Perimeter Medical Imaging AI, guiding medical and regulatory strategy for AI-enabled breast cancer surgery technology Master of Science in Healthcare Management, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Co-author, The OAS CAHPS Compendium: A Guidebook for Improving Patient Experience and Outcomes Across the Ambulatory Surgery Continuum Biography Ted James spent the first part of his executive career doing something most physician leaders are never asked to do at the same time: running a nationally accredited multidisciplinary breast programme, leading academic affairs for a surgery department, and building an NIH-funded research portfolio – all within a Harvard-affiliated academic health system. That compression of roles at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is the biographical fact most relevant to why health organisations bring him in. He has worked the intersection of clinical governance, academic leadership, and service-line management from the inside. He is now System Physician Executive for the Endeavor Health Cancer Institute, responsible for clinical strategy and enterprise-wide care transformation across eight hospitals. Alongside that operational role, he co-directs the Global Health Care Leaders Program at Harvard Medical School: a flagship executive education programme with a global participant base spanning more than 200 countries. His Harvard-based work focuses on the mechanics of how healthcare leaders design care models, adopt digital health technology, and lead transformation in systems that resist it. His commercial advisory work adds a third register. As fractional Chief Medical Officer at Perimeter Medical Imaging AI, he is helping advance AI-enabled surgical imaging technology toward FDA approval; work that gives him first-hand knowledge of how healthcare technology moves from clinical concept to operational deployment. It is a vantage point most hospital executives simply do not have. His co-authored book, The OAS CAHPS Compendium, anchors the academic dimension of his work in something measurable: patient experience and outcomes in ambulatory surgery. The through-line across all three roles is the same question: how do you build organisations in which clinical excellence and operational performance reinforce each other rather than compete? Key speaking topics Healthcare transformation and system leadership Physician and clinical leadership development Organisational culture in complex health systems Digital health strategy and technology adoption Cancer care innovation and oncology strategy Patient experience and quality improvement Clinician resilience and workforce performance Ideal for Hospital and health system CEOs, CMOs, and boards navigating transformation programmes Physician and clinical leaders developing executive capability Biotech, medical device, and digital health organisations seeking clinical strategic credibility Academic medical centre leadership teams managing the tension between research, education, and care delivery Audience outcomes A diagnostic framework for identifying where clinical culture is enabling or blocking organisational change Practical tools for developing physician leaders within complex, resource-constrained systems Clarity on evaluating and deploying digital health and AI-enabled technology against real clinical workflows An understanding of how academic, operational, and innovation goals can be aligned within a single leadership approach Approaches for addressing clinician burnout while maintaining performance standards

Why organisations work with Ben Hines A signature programme, Know the Score, delivered with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and other professional ensembles, that puts senior leaders in the room with a world-class team operating in real time. Faculty appointments at Henley Business School and Korn Ferry International, anchoring the experiential work in a credible leadership development frame. Eighteen years in financial and legal services, including strategic marketing leadership at Barclays PLC, which keeps the corporate translation grounded rather than theatrical. A coaching credential (ACC, International Coach Federation) and a music degree from the University of York, sitting behind a method that other speakers cannot replicate. Biography highlights Founder of Moving Performance (2009), a leadership development firm using music and live musicians as the medium for senior team work. Creator of Know the Score, the first leadership programme to be developed in partnership with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Senior Associate faculty at Henley Business School, Korn Ferry International, and Altitude Leadership Partners. Associate Certified Coach, International Coach Federation. BA (Hons) Music, University of York. Earlier career as a strategic marketer at Barclays PLC and advisor to CPA Global. Biography A high-performing orchestra and a high-performing executive team face the same problem. Many specialists, one shared outcome, no rehearsal time. Most leadership development programmes describe that problem in abstract terms. Ben Hines puts it on a stage and lets leaders watch it solved in front of them. Moving Performance, the firm he founded in 2009, places professional musicians inside leadership sessions for serious organisations. The signature programme, Know the Score, runs in partnership with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and was the first leadership format developed with that orchestra. Senior teams observe how a group of experts coordinates without verbal instruction, then translate what they have seen into their own decision rhythms, listening habits, and roles under pressure. The credibility of the work rests on the corporate spine behind it. Eighteen years inside financial and legal services, including strategic marketing leadership at Barclays PLC across multiple international markets and an advisory role at CPA Global, sit underneath the musical method. Senior Associate faculty appointments at Henley Business School and Korn Ferry International, and an ACC coaching credential from the International Coach Federation, place the practice inside recognised leadership development infrastructure. Clients to date include Accenture, BP, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Deutsche Borse, Jaguar Land Rover, PwC, Telekom Austria, Thames Water, and Wise. Key speaking topics High-performing teams Leadership and team development Change leadership Emotional intelligence in senior teams Communication and listening Executive presence Ideal for Chief Executives and executive committees running team off-sites and leadership conferences Heads of Leadership Development and CHROs commissioning senior team programmes Transformation leads using a leadership intervention to reset team behaviour during change Conference organisers needing a substantive keynote that doubles as a shared experience for the room Audience outcomes A common reference point for how an expert team coordinates without hierarchy interrupting the work Specific behavioural cues from professional musicians that translate into meeting and decision rhythms Sharper attention to listening, non-verbal signals, and timing in senior team interaction A shared experience the group keeps referring back to long after the session

Why organisations work with Chad Foster He pairs a personal resilience story with a Fortune 500 sales record, which means he lands with revenue leaders, not only HR and culture audiences. The Blind Ambition Framework gives sales and operating leaders a structured five-step model rather than an inspirational set piece, and it has been delivered to 175,000+ attendees across six continents. He is credible on technology and commercial execution because he built the first CRM software for visually impaired users, a project Oracle had judged impossible. His Harvard Business School leadership credential, the first awarded to a blind executive, gives buyers cover when programming a resilience speaker for senior commercial audiences. Named client list includes Google, Salesforce, IBM, Microsoft, GE, Caterpillar and Nestle Purina, which signals comfort with the standards of large enterprise commercial events. Biography highlights First blind executive to graduate Harvard Business School’s leadership program. Author of Blind Ambition: How to Go from Victim to Visionary, HarperCollins Leadership, 2021. Creator of the Blind Ambition Framework, a five-step methodology applied across sales, leadership and culture programmes. Fortune 500 finance and sales executive credited with directing strategies tied to $45 billion in technology contracts. Built the first CRM software for visually impaired users. Keynote clients include Google, Salesforce, IBM, Microsoft, GE, Caterpillar, Nestle Purina and Amgen. Biography Resilience as a commercial topic has a credibility problem. Most speakers in the category sit on the personal side of the stage, helpful for a culture day, harder to programme into a sales kickoff or a senior leadership offsite. Chad Foster sits on the other side of that line. Foster lost his eyesight at twenty-one and went on to become the first blind executive to graduate from Harvard Business School’s leadership program. He then spent his career inside Fortune 500 technology companies, directing financial and sales strategies tied to $45 billion in contracts and building the first CRM software designed for visually impaired users, a project Oracle had said was not feasible. His book, Blind Ambition: How to Go from Victim to Visionary, was published by HarperCollins Leadership in 2021 and sets out the Blind Ambition Framework, a five-step methodology now used inside Google, Salesforce, IBM, Microsoft, GE, Caterpillar and Nestle Purina. He has delivered it more than 200 times to over 175,000 attendees across six continents. The reason buyers programme him into senior commercial settings is that the framework is presented as an operating discipline for performance under pressure, not a story about overcoming adversity. The personal account is the proof. The argument is about how leaders sustain judgement and revenue when the conditions stay hard for longer than the playbook assumes. Key speaking topics Resilience as a commercial leadership capability Performance under sustained pressure Sales leadership and revenue under disruption Mindset and decision-making for senior teams Inclusion and diversity as competitive advantage Change leadership and culture under strain Ideal for Sales kickoffs and CRO-led revenue events Senior leadership offsites and executive development programmes Culture, inclusion and people leadership conferences with a commercial audience Technology and financial services firms running multi-year transformation Audience outcomes A structured five-step framework for sustaining performance through disruption. A clearer language for resilience that travels into a sales and commercial setting. Specific tools for reframing setbacks into operating decisions. Renewed conviction at senior level on the link between mindset and revenue performance.

Why organisations work with Jim Davidson Two decades inside a regulated, risk-driven scientific career sit behind the climbing stories, so the language of preparation, hazard analysis and recovery lands with operational, safety and engineering audiences who usually distrust adventure speakers. Two named, public disasters on his record, the 1992 Mount Rainier crevasse fall and the 2015 Everest earthquake at base camp, give him specific case material to teach from rather than generic survivor framing. Co-authored The Ledge won the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award for Outdoor Literature, and The Next Everest is a published St. Martin’s Press title, so the underlying material is editorially vetted, not bureau copy. Twice recognised by the U.S. National Park Service for volunteer high-altitude rescues, which gives him a credible voice on team trust, mutual reliance and judgement at altitude that is hard to manufacture. Books to senior corporate audiences with a track record of named clients, including Marriott, National Geographic, UPS, Nationwide Insurance and the U.S. Army, so the room calibration is already proven across sectors. Biography highlights Co-author, The Ledge: An Inspirational Story of Friendship and Survival (Ballantine / Penguin Random House), with journalist Kevin Vaughan. Author, The Next Everest: Surviving the Mountain’s Deadliest Day and Finding the Resilience to Climb Again (St. Martin’s Press). Winner, 2012 National Outdoor Book Award for Outdoor Literature, for The Ledge. B.S. and M.S. in environmental geology; roughly 20 years as a practising environmental geologist before full-time speaking. Summited Mount Everest in 2017, two years after surviving the April 2015 Nepal earthquake at base camp. Recognised twice by the U.S. National Park Service for volunteer high-altitude rescue work in Colorado and Alaska. Biography A snowbridge collapsed under Jim Davidson on Mount Rainier in June 1992. He fell roughly 80 feet into a glacial crevasse with his climbing partner, Mike Price. Price did not come out. Davidson did, and spent the next 20 years working as an environmental geologist while quietly building the body of climbing experience that would later put him on Everest. That two-track career is the point. Davidson is not a climber who picked up a corporate vocabulary, he is a working scientist who spent two decades on industrial sites assessing oil and gasoline contamination, writing remediation plans and answering to regulators. The risk language he uses with executive audiences, hazard recognition, contingency design, post-incident learning comes from that work as much as from the mountains. The mountains supplied the case studies. Co-authored with journalist Kevin Vaughan, The Ledge took the Rainier accident through judgment, friendship and recovery and won the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award for Outdoor Literature. The Next Everest, published by St. Martin’s Press, covers the 2015 Nepal earthquake, which struck while Davidson was on Everest, and his return to the summit in 2017. Both books are written, not ghosted around a brand. For corporate audiences, the value is specific. He has briefed Marriott, National Geographic, UPS, Nationwide Insurance and the U.S. Army on what disciplined teams actually do when the plan stops matching the terrain, drawn from rescues he has been part of and the U.S. National Park Service has formally recognised, twice. The talks work because the material is real, the science is honest about luck, and the decisions get named. Key speaking topics Resilience under pressure Decision-making in high-consequence environments Risk recognition and hazard preparation Team trust and mutual reliance Recovery after setback Leadership in crisis conditions Change and uncertainty Ideal for Senior leadership offsites where the agenda is preparation, recovery and judgment, not motivational storytelling. Safety, risk, engineering and operations functions in industries where consequence is physical, including energy, construction, utilities, life sciences and defence. Annual sales kickoffs and field-leader gatherings that need a credible non-business voice on resilience. HR and learning leaders are building a leadership programme around decision-making under uncertainty. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for talking about hazard, judgement and recovery that doesn’t collapse into platitude. Two specific case studies, Mount Rainier 1992 and Everest 2015, are used as decision artefacts that the audience can argue with. A clearer separation between things a team can prepare for and things it can only respond to. Practical questions to take back into post-incident reviews, planning sessions and team debriefs. A sharper view of what trust between teammates is actually built from when the consequences are real.

Why organisations work with Heather Moyse She has competed at Olympic level in three sports she did not start as a child, including learning bobsleigh from scratch and winning gold in her first Games. That gives her a credible voice on rapid capability acquisition under high stakes. Her occupational therapy training (Master’s, University of Toronto) gives her a clinical frame for human performance rather than the standard motivational-athlete narrative. She talks about the mechanics of resilience, not the feeling of it. She is the first Canadian woman inducted into the World Rugby Hall of Fame and one of only two Canadians inducted. The credential is rare enough to anchor a senior audience that has heard many Olympic stories. She has worked with senior corporate audiences including CIBC, BMW, Sun Life Financial, Fidelity Investments, the Royal Canadian Mint, and the Canadian Armed Forces, so the translation from sport to commercial leadership is already calibrated. Biography highlights Two-time Olympic gold medallist in women’s bobsleigh (Vancouver 2010, Sochi 2014, pilot Kaillie Humphries). Four-time Olympian. World Rugby Hall of Fame, inducted 2016. First Canadian woman, second Canadian overall. Master’s in Occupational Therapy, University of Toronto. BSc (Honours Kinesiology), University of Waterloo. Author, Redefining ‘Realistic’ (2017), with foreword by John C. Maxwell. Order of Prince Edward Island (2014); inaugural Randy Starkman Olympian Humanitarian Award (2014). Biography Bobsleigh is not a sport you take up casually. Heather Moyse was recruited into the Canadian programme as an adult, learned the discipline from a standing start, and won Olympic gold in Vancouver in 2010 with pilot Kaillie Humphries. Four years later, in Sochi, the same pair defended the title. She is also a World Rugby Hall of Famer, one of two Canadians ever inducted, and competed internationally in track cycling after taking up the sport during a rugby injury recovery. Three sports, all picked up later than the orthodox path allows, all carried to international level. The story is not about innate talent. It is about how a person decides what is realistic. That decision sits at the centre of her work with organisations. Her keynote and coaching content draws on a Master’s in Occupational Therapy from the University of Toronto, which gives her a clinical vocabulary for performance most athletes do not have. She talks about how leaders narrow their own range of options under pressure, how recovery is engineered rather than waited for, and how the gap between current capability and the next required capability is closed in practice. Her book Redefining ‘Realistic’ sets out the argument in long form, with a foreword by John C. Maxwell. The corporate work, with audiences at CIBC, BMW, Sun Life Financial, Fidelity Investments, the Royal Canadian Mint, the Canadian Armed Forces and others, applies it to leaders who are being asked to recalibrate their assumptions about what their teams can do, and how quickly. Key speaking topics Self-leadership under pressure High-performance mindset and recovery Resilience as an operational discipline Goal-setting and capability acquisition Leading through uncertainty and setback Personal accountability and authentic leadership Ideal for Executive leadership teams facing prolonged change or post-restructure recovery Sales and commercial leadership audiences where sustained performance under pressure is the central question Senior women’s leadership programmes and high-potential development cohorts Conferences where the closing keynote needs an authority voice on composure and reinvention Audience outcomes A direct account of how elite performers manage themselves before, during, and after high-stakes moments A working definition of what counts as “realistic” and how that judgment limits or extends what teams attempt Specific tools for breaking large objectives into the next executable step under time pressure A clearer view of how recovery and preparation interact, drawn from Olympic-level practice rather than metaphor