Strategien zur Talentbindung

Why organisations work with Julian Placino Practitioner credibility: nearly two decades inside corporate recruiting, including seven years leading talent acquisition at Bottle Rocket, a Dallas mobile development firm with an outsized reputation for hiring quality. Operating-level content. His recruiting talks address the working mechanics buyers ask about: employer value proposition, candidate pipeline, referral systems, hiring manager discipline. Not HR theory. Doubles as a host. With 220+ episodes of The Pathways to Success podcast under his belt, he is comfortable interviewing leaders on stage and moderating panels, useful when an event needs both a keynote and a host. Personal-brand and resilience material that translates for sales, recruiting, and frontline audiences who need a motivational anchor rather than a leadership framework. Biography highlights Former Head of Recruiting, Bottle Rocket (seven-year tenure) Earlier recruiting leadership at ReachLocal (Gannett) Founder, Pathways Media and the Recruitment Masterclass training programme Host and creator, The Pathways to Success podcast (220+ episodes, Apple Podcasts and Spotify) BBA, University of North Texas Commercial actor and voice-over artist with named campaigns including Microsoft, Indeed, Ford, AT&T, and the NFL Biography Most companies treat recruiting as an administrative function until a critical hire stalls. Then it becomes a board-level problem. Placino built his career inside that gap. As Head of Recruiting at Bottle Rocket, he spent seven years scaling a hiring operation at a Dallas mobile development firm whose product work for Fortune 500 clients depended on the quality of its engineering bench. That operating background is what he brings to the stage. His core keynote, Mastering the Talent Puzzle, treats employer brand and recruiting strategy as a system that can be deliberately built, not a function of headcount or agency spend. The argument is grounded in what worked inside a high-pressure tech recruiting environment, including how to design an employment value proposition, how to mobilise existing employees as a pipeline, and how to make hiring managers accountable for the people they bring in. Beyond the recruiting material, Placino runs The Pathways to Success podcast, where he has interviewed more than 220 leaders across business, sport, and the creative industries. The format gives him a working interviewer’s craft, which he extends into event hosting and panel moderation. He also delivers talks on personal branding, resilience, and stewardship, drawn from his own path as a first-generation Filipino American who built a recruiting career, a media company, and a parallel commercial acting line that includes Microsoft, Indeed, Ford, AT&T, and NFL campaigns. He is based in Dallas and holds a BBA from the University of North Texas. He is represented by multiple bureaus across the US in addition to Speakers Associates internationally. Key speaking topics Recruitment strategy and employer brand Talent acquisition operating models Personal branding and reputation Resilience and adaptability Stewardship-based leadership Event hosting and interview-format moderation Ideal for CHROs and Heads of Talent Acquisition rebuilding in-house recruiting capability Talent and recruiting team offsites Sales and revenue kickoffs that need a personal-brand or motivation anchor Conferences requiring a keynote speaker who can also host or moderate Audience outcomes A working model for designing an employer value proposition that survives contact with the labour market A specific approach to turning current employees into a recruiting pipeline Language for separating personal brand from job title, useful for sales and client-facing roles A reframing model for adversity and change drawn from the speaker’s own career history

Why organisations work with Kayleigh Fazan Her training population is store teams and frontline managers at PVH, ASICS, Rituals, Hunkemöller, B&Q and Skechers. TIRA’s field trainers work in store, alongside the people who serve the customer. Unscripted resolves into four behaviours a person can practise: Awareness, Connection, Confidence and Contribution. TIRA delivers the same material as Leadership Coaching Days, so a keynote can be the front end of a programme with the same teams. She argues the people case in commercial language. TIRA’s client programmes are built and tracked around conversion, average transaction value, membership acquisition and retention. She has lived the disruption her keynote addresses. Twenty years of career built from a £3.25-an-hour shop floor job, redundancy in 2020, and The International Retail Academy founded the same year. Biography highlights Founder and Managing Director of The International Retail Academy, a retail training and consulting firm working with Rituals, ASICS, Hunkemöller, Skechers, B&Q, Tommy Hilfiger, Gap and Crocs. Two decades in retail operations before founding TIRA, from Concession Manager at Debenhams at 19 to Area Manager and Head of Franchise across Europe and the Middle East. Hosted the closing session of the 10th Global DIY-Summit in Rome, and shared a Retail Week Live fireside in London with André Pedersen, COO of Intersport Nordics, on focusing store teams on what matters most. Also billed at the Retail Technology Show, House of Retail, and the SingularityU South Africa Summit, which ran online in 2021. Contributor to Retail Jeweller and Bizcommunity, and guest on the Shiny Happy People podcast. Co-author of Women Who Inspire, contributing the chapter “Embracing Discomfort”, and writing her first solo book. Profiled by CIO Business World in its 2025 feature “The 10 Most Iconic Women Leaders Revamping the Future”. Biography The International Retail Academy exists because retailers spend heavily on systems and thinly on the people using them. Kayleigh Fazan founded it in 2020, mid-pandemic, after twenty years running stores, areas and franchise operations across Europe and the Middle East. The method is deliberately bottom-up. TIRA’s field trainers work in store alongside store leaders, moving them from supervising tasks to coaching behaviour. Programmes are tracked in conversion, average transaction value, membership acquisition and retention. Her argument is that being hard to replace is trainable. The signature keynote, Unscripted: How to Thrive When Everything Else Gets Automated, breaks that into four behaviours a person can be coached in. The stages have been mostly retail and franchise: the closing session of the 10th Global DIY-Summit in Rome, and a Retail Week Live fireside in London on focusing store teams on what matters most. Her keynote on The Retail Revolution went out online, to the SingularityU South Africa Summit in 2021. She started at 16 on a New Look shop floor in Barrow-in-Furness, earning £3.25 an hour, and was running a Debenhams concession by 19. Redundancy in 2020 ended the international career she had built. Her speaking fees part-fund her work supporting children living in poverty, a commitment she traces to having lived in a hostel as a child. Key speaking topics Human capability in an automating workplace Frontline behaviour and customer experience Service culture and its commercial results Leadership of store and frontline teams Confidence and presence at work Employee retention in high-turnover roles Retail transformation from the shop floor up Ideal for CHROs and L&D directors accountable for capability in large frontline workforces Chief Customer Officers, retail directors and heads of store operations Conference programmers in retail, franchise and consumer-facing sectors looking for a main stage or closing session Brand and franchise leadership teams at offsites, kick-off meetings and sales conferences Audience outcomes Four behaviours they can practise the next morning: Awareness, Connection, Confidence and Contribution An answer to what their own role becomes once the specifiable parts of it are automated The case for why the person in front of the customer is the brand, and what that changes about how teams are managed Managers able to describe the difference between supervising tasks and coaching behaviour

Why organisations work with Keely Cat-Wells She has built and sold the category. C Talent, the agency she founded in 2018, was acquired by Whalar in 2022 and remains the largest exit of a Disabled-led talent business in the sector. Her current company, Making Space, gives leaders an operating model rather than a manifesto: an employer-backed training and acquisition platform with reported lifetime earnings gains of more than $1.1M per learner. She speaks from inside the boardroom conversation, not next to it. As a Presidential Leadership Scholar, Obama Leader USA, and Forbes contributor, she carries credibility with executive audiences who are tired of generic DEI framing. She connects representation in media to talent strategy in the workforce, drawing on a roster that has placed Disabled creators in projects including The Last of Us, Avatar, and The Hunger Games. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Making Space, a venture-backed talent acquisition and learning platform for Disabled professionals. Founder of C Talent, acquired by Whalar in 2022. Co-founder, Making Space Media, with a first-look deal at Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine. 2025 Presidential Leadership Scholar, 2025 Obama Leader USA, inaugural Gloria Steinem Fellow. L’Oreal Paris 2025 Women of Worth, Forbes 30 Under 30, Diana Award, One Young World Entrepreneur of the Year 2022. Forbes contributor on disability, entrepreneurship, and inclusive workforce strategy. Biography The Disabled talent pool is one of the largest underused labour markets in the global economy. Most companies do not have a working strategy for reaching it. Keely Cat-Wells builds the infrastructure that closes that gap. She founded C Talent in 2018 after disability discrimination ended an early career in performing arts. The agency grew into the most prominent home for Deaf and Disabled creators in entertainment, placing talent in The Last of Us, Avatar, and The Hunger Games before being acquired by Whalar in 2022. It remains the largest exit of a Disabled-led talent business in the industry. Making Space, founded in 2023, is the operator-led answer to a different question: how do enterprise employers actually hire and retain Disabled professionals at scale. The platform pairs employer-backed training with talent acquisition, and closed a $2M pre-seed round led by Beta Boom in 2024. Its Ascend program reports projected lifetime earnings gains of more than $1.1M per participant. Cat-Wells writes for Forbes, sits on disability-focused boards, and was named the youngest Presidential Leadership Scholar in the program’s history. Her recognitions include the Diana Award, Forbes 30 Under 30, L’Oreal Paris Women of Worth, and Gloria Steinem Fellow. The credentials matter, but the harder evidence is the line item her work creates on a hiring scorecard. Key speaking topics Disability and workforce strategy Hiring and retaining Disabled professionals Inclusive talent acquisition platforms Representation in media and entertainment Building and scaling mission-led ventures Hidden disabilities in the workplace Founder experience in inclusive entrepreneurship Ideal for CHROs and heads of talent acquisition rebuilding disability hiring strategy Chief diversity and inclusion officers moving from awareness work to operational outcomes Boards and ELTs reviewing workforce, ESG, and human capital reporting Media, entertainment, and creative leaders accountable for on-screen and off-screen representation Audience outcomes A clearer view of where disability inclusion programmes break in practice and what to fix first. Specific tactics for sourcing, onboarding, and retaining Disabled professionals at enterprise scale. A founder’s view of how to translate inclusion strategy into measurable economic outcomes. Language and evidence senior leaders can use with their own boards on disability as a workforce issue.

Why organisations work with Laura Gassner Otting She names a problem CHROs and talent leaders see every quarter but rarely have language for: the high-performer who hits the number, then quietly checks out. Wonderhell gives that pattern a vocabulary leadership teams can act on. She writes from operator experience, not theory. She built and sold a national executive search firm, served as a Clinton White House appointee on the launch of AmeriCorps, and has advised leaders across corporate, political, and nonprofit settings. Her work travels across audience seniority. The same framework speaks to high-potential talent in early career, to senior leaders rethinking what success means at the next stage, and to founders running into the wall their own ambition built. She brings genuine media reach. Wonderhell debuted at #2 on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list, Limitless debuted at #2 on the Washington Post list, and she is a regular contributor to Good Morning America, Harvard Business Review, and Oprah Daily. Biography highlights Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Wonderhell (Ideapress, 2023) and author of Limitless (2019), which debuted at #2 on the Washington Post bestseller list. Presidential appointee in the Clinton White House, working on the launch of AmeriCorps. Founder and former CEO of the Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group, a national executive search firm she sold in 2015. TEDxCambridge speaker, “Stop Asking ‘How Can I Help?'”, with millions of views to date. Contributor and featured expert across Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company, Good Morning America, the Today Show, and Oprah Daily. ABC News on-air contributor on careers, leadership, and ambition. Biography Most organisations track the moment a top performer joins. Few track the moment they hit their stretch goal and start to drift. That gap, the space between visible achievement and invisible disengagement, is the territory Laura Gassner Otting works in. Her bestselling book Wonderhell, a Wall Street Journal bestseller published by Ideapress in 2023, gave language to a pattern senior leaders had seen for years without being able to describe. Success, for ambitious people, is not a finish line. It is a doorway into a harder version of the same question: what now, and was it worth it. Her earlier book Limitless, which debuted at #2 on the Washington Post list in 2019, framed the upstream problem of how high performers define success in the first place. The argument has weight because it sits on top of a real career. She left law school to join a southern governor’s presidential campaign and ended up as a presidential appointee in Bill Clinton’s White House, working on the launch of AmeriCorps. She later founded and ran the Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group, a national executive search firm, which she sold in 2015. Her TEDxCambridge talk, “Stop Asking ‘How Can I Help?'”, has been viewed millions of times. She is an ABC News contributor and writes regularly for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company, and Oprah Daily. Inside organisations, her work shows up where talent strategy, executive development, and culture intersect, especially with the people any business can least afford to lose: the ones who already won, and are now quietly wondering what they are running toward. Key speaking topics High-performer retention and engagement The psychology of ambition and success Leadership development for emerging and senior leaders Career decision-making and purpose alignment Culture and talent strategy in mission-driven organisations Confidence and voice in leadership Sales performance through meaningful client connection Ideal for CHROs, CPOs, and talent leaders trying to retain high performers past their first big win High-potential leadership programmes and executive development cohorts Sales kickoffs and revenue leadership offsites focused on motivation and meaning Mission-driven organisations and nonprofit boards rethinking purpose and engagement Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for the discomfort that follows achievement, so teams can talk about it before people quietly leave. A sharper personal definition of success that holds up against external metrics and pressure. Practical decision-making cues for when to push, when to pause, and when to redefine the goal. Renewed clarity for senior leaders on what their highest performers actually need from them next.

Why organisations work with Lecyca Curiel A first-person Gen Z voice grounded in anthropological field research, rather than a marketing-agency reading of survey data. Affiliation with WHETSTON, the Dutch strategic foresight house that briefs senior leaders across Europe, gives her work analytical weight beyond the usual “young person on stage” booking. Track record of putting the Gen Z question in front of buyers who are unusually demanding: Walmart international executives, Google marketing managers, the European Parliament Youth Outreach Unit, BDO Norway. Recognised by Het Financieele Dagblad in its 2019 list of 50 most promising young talents in the Netherlands, a credential that signals she was taken seriously inside Dutch business media before the speaking circuit picked her up. Brings an inclusion lens shaped by Indonesian and Dutch Caribbean heritage and a Humanity in Action fellowship, so DEI inside her sessions reads as substance, not decoration. Biography highlights Generation Z researcher and keynote speaker with WHETSTON, the strategic foresight think tank founded by Thimon de Jong. Selected by Het Financieele Dagblad as one of 50 promising young talents in the Netherlands, 2019. Studied Liberal Arts and Sciences with a Cultural Anthropology focus at Erasmus University College, Rotterdam. 2019 Amsterdam Fellow with Humanity in Action; co-author of an action project on inclusive Dutch national remembrance. Speaking clients include Walmart, Google, the European Parliament Youth Outreach Unit, BDO Norway, FRED Leadership Forum, and Institute for the Future. Working anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, with projects on cultural heritage, decolonisation, and intergenerational memory. Biography Generation Z is the first cohort that grew up entirely inside the platforms most companies are still learning to manage. The numbers are familiar to any CHRO. The interpretation of those numbers, almost without exception, is filtered through people who are not part of the cohort. Lecyca Curiel works on the other side of that filter. She joined WHETSTON, the Amsterdam-based strategic foresight think tank founded by Thimon de Jong, after he scouted her at age seventeen following a public talk at the IMC Weekendschool. She has been delivering keynote work and strategic research for the firm since, with clients that include Walmart international executives, Google marketing managers, the European Parliament Youth Outreach Unit, BDO Norway, and FRED Leadership Forum. Het Financieele Dagblad named her one of 50 promising young talents in the Netherlands in 2019. Her academic grounding is in Cultural Anthropology at Erasmus University College, and she works in parallel as a documentary filmmaker on questions of heritage, memory, and decolonisation. As a 2019 Amsterdam Fellow with Humanity in Action she co-led a project on whether Dutch national remembrance is genuinely inclusive. The combination matters in the room. When she discusses what young employees actually want from work, it lands as field observation, not opinion. The argument she brings to leadership teams is narrower and harder than the usual generational keynote. Stereotypes about Gen Z are inexpensive to repeat and expensive to act on. What organisations need, on her reading, is a working model of intergenerational collaboration that makes sense to a 58-year-old executive and a 24-year-old engineer in the same conversation. That is the work she does on stage and in the strategy rooms WHETSTON is invited into. Key speaking topics Generation Z in the workforce Intergenerational collaboration Diversity, equity and inclusion from a Gen Z perspective Mental health across generations Future of work and talent retention Strategic foresight on cultural and demographic change Ideal for CHROs and heads of talent designing retention and engagement strategy for a multigenerational workforce. Boards and executive committees stress-testing assumptions about younger consumers and younger employees. DEI leads moving from awareness programmes to operational change. Leadership development teams building cross-generational management capability. Audience outcomes A clearer, evidence-based picture of what Gen Z employees and consumers actually expect, sourced from inside the cohort. Specific entry points for retention and engagement work in organisations with four or five active generations. A working language for intergenerational conversations that does not collapse into stereotype. A sharper read on where DEI commitments stall between stated policy and daily management.

Why organisations work with Liz Wiseman She runs two distinct, primary-research-backed frameworks, Multipliers and Impact Players, that name behaviours leaders can change on Monday morning, not abstractions they have to translate. Her Accidental Diminisher diagnostic gives senior leaders a mirror most are not expecting: the well-intentioned habits, rescuing, idea-spraying, pacesetting, that quietly shrink their teams. The Impact Players research, drawn from 170 executives across ten countries, isolates the behaviours of the contributors managers actually depend on, which CHROs use to recalibrate performance criteria and promotion decisions. Seventeen years inside Oracle, including VP of Oracle University, mean she frames leadership in operating terms a senior corporate audience recognises immediately. Named the top-ranked leadership thinker by Thinkers50 in 2019 and recipient of the Thinkers50 Talent Award in 2023, with continued presence on the ranking. Biography highlights CEO of The Wiseman Group, Silicon Valley leadership research and executive development firm. Author of Multipliers (New York Times bestseller), Rookie Smarts (Wall Street Journal bestseller), and Impact Players (Wall Street Journal bestseller). Thinkers50 Leadership Award winner (2019); Thinkers50 Talent Award winner (2023). Former Vice President of Oracle University and global leader for Human Resource Development across a 17-year Oracle career. Contributor to Harvard Business Review and Fortune; guest lecturer at Brigham Young University and Stanford University. Advises and speaks for clients including Apple, Disney, Google, Microsoft, Nike, Salesforce, and Tesla. Biography The leader who is the smartest person in the room is often the reason no one else in the room is contributing. Liz Wiseman’s research into what she calls Multipliers and Diminishers, published in Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, isolates the specific habits that determine which one a manager becomes, often without realising. The Accidental Diminisher diagnostic that accompanies the work is now used by leadership teams across global corporations. Before The Wiseman Group, she spent seventeen years inside Oracle, latterly as Vice President of Oracle University and global head of Human Resource Development. That operating background runs through the work. Her frameworks are written for executives who have to act on them, not academics describing them. Impact Players, drawn from interviews with 170 executives across ten countries and surveys of 350 managers, asks a different question: what distinguishes the individual contributors that senior leaders actually rely on in high-stakes moments? The findings reshape how CHROs think about promotion, performance criteria, and the behaviours organisations should be selecting for. She was named the top-ranked leadership thinker on the Thinkers50 list in 2019 and received the Thinkers50 Talent Award in 2023. She contributes to Harvard Business Review and Fortune, and lectures at Brigham Young University and Stanford. Her client roster, Apple, Disney, Google, Microsoft, Nike, Salesforce, Tesla, reflects an unusual fact: organisations with deep internal leadership capability still bring her in. Key speaking topics Multiplier leadership and the Diminisher effect Accidental Diminisher behaviours in senior leaders Impact Players and high-contribution mindsets Leveraging collective intelligence inside teams Rookie Smarts and learning agility under uncertainty Talent identification, promotion, and performance criteria Executive development and leadership capability building Ideal for CHROs redesigning leadership development, promotion criteria, or performance frameworks CEOs and senior leadership teams reviewing how they get more from existing talent Heads of talent and L&D building enterprise leadership programmes Leadership offsites for executive committees and senior management cohorts Audience outcomes Recognition of the specific Diminisher behaviours senior leaders default to under pressure A working vocabulary for the team behaviours that drive disproportionate impact Diagnostic tools, including the Accidental Diminisher profile, that leaders can apply to their own management style Criteria for identifying and developing high-contribution individual contributors A revised view of where untapped capacity sits inside the existing workforce

Why organisations work with Lizzy Yarnold One of two athletes in history to defend an Olympic skeleton title, and the only British Winter Olympian ever to retain a gold. The credibility of repeating the result, not just achieving it once, is the central proof point. Speaks from a sport where mistakes are measured in hundredths of a second and decisions happen at 80mph. The transfer to high-stakes commercial decision-making is direct, not metaphorical. Brings the inside view of UK Sport’s Girls4Gold talent-identification programme, a system designed to find and develop performers from outside the obvious pipeline. Useful for HR and talent leaders thinking about non-traditional pathways. Comfortable in honest territory: she retired after a vestibular disorder, a chest infection at the Games, and surgery on her knee and back. The story of what high performance costs is part of the offer, not glossed over. Sits on the British Olympic Association athlete commission and works as a BBC analyst, so the perspective is current rather than retrospective. Biography highlights Olympic gold, women’s skeleton, Sochi 2014 – winning margin of 0.97 seconds, the largest in Winter Olympic skeleton history. Olympic gold, women’s skeleton, PyeongChang 2018 – the first British athlete to retain a Winter Olympic title. World Championship gold (Winterberg, 2015) and European Championship gold (Igls, 2015), completing skeleton’s grand slam alongside Olympic and World Cup titles. Overall Skeleton World Cup winner, 2013-14 season. OBE for services to skeleton (2018), upgraded from MBE awarded in 2014. Honorary doctorate of science, University of Kent (2018). BBC analyst for Winter Olympic skeleton and luge coverage. Member of the British Olympic Association athlete commission. Biography The 2014 Sochi gold was won by 0.97 seconds. In a sport where podium positions are usually settled by hundredths, that margin is closer to a different category of performance than a different result. Lizzy Yarnold won that race after fewer than four years on the international circuit. Then she did it again in PyeongChang, the first British athlete to retain a Winter Olympic title. The route in is worth noting. Yarnold was a club-level heptathlete identified by UK Sport’s Girls4Gold programme in 2008, a scheme built specifically to find Olympic-level athletes from outside the established sporting pipeline. She went from sled debut to Olympic champion in roughly five years, trained at Team Bath, and read Geography and Sport & Exercise Science at the University of Gloucestershire. What organisations get from her is the part of high performance that does not photograph well. The 2018 campaign was run through a vestibular disorder that affected her balance, a chest infection during the Games, and surgery on her knee and back shortly afterwards. The lesson she draws from it is operational rather than inspirational: how to keep making the right small decision when the conditions for the right big one have disappeared. Since retiring she has worked as a BBC analyst for Winter Olympic skeleton and luge coverage and sat on the British Olympic Association athlete commission. Corporate audiences have included Deloitte, Jaguar Land Rover, Eli Lilly, The Pipeline, and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Key speaking topics Sustained high performance Resilience under pressure Talent identification and non-traditional pathways Goal setting and execution discipline Team performance in elite environments Leadership through preparation Managing change after peak success Ideal for Senior leadership teams entering a second strategic cycle after a major win High-performance and sales teams operating in narrow-margin environments HR and talent leaders rethinking pipelines and identification Graduate, leadership development and emerging-talent programmes Audience outcomes A grounded view of what defending a position takes once the original conditions have changed A specific account of how elite athletes structure preparation, recovery and competition decisions An honest framing of the cost of high performance, useful for wellbeing and retention conversations A model for talent identification drawn from a programme designed to find outliers, not develop incumbents A compelling, named-stakes story of two Olympic finals, told first-hand

Why organisations work with Lorraine Hariton Six years leading Catalyst, the global nonprofit whose research and benchmarks Fortune 500 boards already use to evaluate their own progress on women’s advancement. Operating background that buyers in male-dominated executive teams take seriously: 15 years at IBM, CEO of two Silicon Valley start-ups, Obama-appointed State Department official. Specific authority on the measurement question. Catalyst’s frameworks on emotional tax, empathic leadership, and inclusion assessment were developed and scaled during her tenure. Credible on the intersection of bias and emerging technology, including how gender and racial bias enter AI systems through data and design choices. Biography highlights President and CEO of Catalyst from 2018 to 2024. Special Representative for Commercial and Business Affairs at the US State Department under President Obama. CEO of two venture-backed Silicon Valley companies, Beatnik and Apptera. Senior Vice President of Global Partnerships, New York Academy of Sciences; co-founder of the Global STEM Alliance and the 1000 Girls, 1000 Futures programme. Inaugural Women’s Leadership Champion Award, University of Virginia Darden School of Business, 2022. Crain’s New York Business Women of Influence, 2023. BS Stanford University, MBA Harvard Business School. Biography Catalyst is the research organisation whose data Fortune 500 boards quote back to themselves when they discuss the women-in-leadership gap. For six years that organisation was run by Lorraine Hariton, an operator with credentials those same boards understand: fifteen years at IBM, two CEO roles at venture-backed Silicon Valley companies, an Obama-administration appointment representing US commercial interests at the State Department. That mix matters because the audience for serious DEI work has shifted. Senior teams now want practitioners who can speak the language of operating performance and capital discipline, not advocacy. At Catalyst, Hariton oversaw the development of frameworks used inside member companies on emotional tax, empathic leadership, and inclusion measurement, the kind of artefacts that survive contact with a sceptical executive committee. Her work addresses the credibility gap between public DEI commitments and observable workplace outcomes. She speaks directly to the failure mode senior leaders fear most, performative policy that produces no change and erodes employee trust. She also works on how gender and racial bias enter AI systems through training data, an issue most executive teams are still under-prepared for. The University of Virginia Darden School of Business presented her with its inaugural Women’s Leadership Champion Award in 2022. Crain’s named her to its Women of Influence list the following year. Her holistic view of where women’s advancement sits within an organisation, alongside compensation strategy, capital allocation, and technology governance, is what makes her useful in a boardroom rather than at a conference panel. Key speaking topics Gender equity and women’s advancement in senior leadership Inclusion measurement and DEI accountability Bias in artificial intelligence and emerging technology Workplace culture transformation Future of work and flexible workplace design Empathic and inclusive leadership practice Ideal for CHROs, Chief Diversity Officers, and CEO offices commissioning a measurable advancement strategy for women in senior leadership Boards and nominating committees evaluating their own pipeline credibility Senior leadership teams in male-dominated industries (financial services, technology, energy, industrials) working on inclusion outcomes that hold up to scrutiny Companies building governance around bias and fairness in AI deployment Audience outcomes A clearer picture of what credible DEI measurement looks like, drawn from Catalyst’s published frameworks A sharper grasp of where bias enters AI systems and what executive teams should be asking about it Direct exposure to a practitioner who has worked with the leadership teams of many of the world’s largest employers on this agenda A more confident vocabulary for senior leaders, particularly men in executive roles, to engage with women’s advancement as a business strategy issue rather than a compliance one

Why organisations work with Lucy Adams A people strategy argument built from running HR at the BBC through the Savile crisis, executive pay-off scandals and the move to Salford, not from a consultancy slide deck. A clear, named thesis from HR Disrupted: treat employees as adults, as consumers and as humans, and rebuild HR practice around those principles rather than legacy process. Practical credibility with HR audiences: Disruptive HR runs ongoing training programmes, a membership community and toolkits, so the keynote is connected to a method leaders can adopt afterwards. A track record of reducing management layers and cost at scale, useful for organisations rethinking structure as well as culture. Direct experience of leading the people function through repeated public crisis, relevant to boards considering reputational and workforce risk together. Biography highlights CEO and founder of Disruptive HR, established 2014. Former Director of HR and executive board member at the BBC. Previously Group HR Director at Serco plc and at law firm Eversheds. Author of HR Disrupted: It’s Time for Something Different (Practical Inspiration Publishing, 2nd edition 2021) and The HR Change Toolkit. Co-host of the Disruptive HR podcast. Led HR through the BBC’s move to MediaCityUK in Salford and the opening of the multi-media newsroom in Broadcasting House. Biography Conventional HR was built for stable organisations, predictable careers and a workforce that did what it was told. That world has gone, but most of the apparatus, the annual appraisal cycle, the nine-box grid, the competency framework, the compliance-led policy stack, is still in place. Adams’ work starts from that mismatch and argues the function has to be rebuilt around how people actually work, not how organisations would like them to. The credibility behind the argument is operational. Adams was Director of HR at the BBC from 2009, sitting on the executive board through a period that included the move to Salford, the opening of the multi-media newsroom in Broadcasting House, executive pay-off scandals and the Savile crisis. She reduced the corporation’s management layer by more than 30%. Before the BBC she was Group HR Director at Serco plc and at the law firm Eversheds. In 2014 she founded Disruptive HR, an agency that now runs training, keynotes and a membership community for HR leaders and senior executives. The method is set out in HR Disrupted: It’s Time for Something Different, published by Practical Inspiration and now in its second edition, with a follow-up volume, The HR Change Toolkit, focused on implementation. The thesis: treat employees as adults, as consumers and as humans, and design people practice accordingly. What separates the work from most “future of work” commentary is that it speaks to the people who own the operating model. The audience is HR directors, COOs and CEOs deciding what to keep, what to discard and what to rebuild in the function that ultimately decides whether strategy gets delivered through people or in spite of them. Key speaking topics Modern HR and people strategy Leading change in complex organisations Employee engagement and the new social contract Leadership through crisis and public scrutiny Culture and organisational reinvention Future of work and workforce design Ideal for CHROs and senior HR leaders rebuilding the people function CEOs and COOs reviewing how the operating model is delivered through people Boards and executive teams navigating reputational or workforce crisis Leadership conferences focused on culture, engagement and change Audience outcomes A clear view of which inherited HR practices are creating drag and which are worth keeping. A named framework for redesigning people practice around adults, consumers and humans rather than legacy process. Practical reference points from running HR through sustained organisational crisis at a public institution. A sharper line between people strategy and the broader business strategy it is meant to deliver.

Why organisations work with Lynda Gratton A research base CHROs cannot replicate in-house: the Future of Work Research Consortium has run for over a decade with executives from more than 60 companies, generating comparative evidence on what is actually working in hybrid, skills and workforce design. Co-author of The 100-Year Life with economist Andrew Scott, the book that reframed longevity as a workforce and strategy issue and was shortlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year. Practical playbook for hybrid: her HBR cover piece How to Do Hybrid Right and Redesigning Work give leadership teams a four-lens method (jobs, employee preferences, projects, inclusion) rather than a slogan. Policy-grade credibility: co-chair of the WEF Global Future Council on Work, Wages and Job Creation, and adviser to the Japanese Prime Minister’s council on a 100-year-life society. Thinkers50 Hall of Fame member, which signals to a board that the perspective in the room has been independently judged against a global field over more than a decade. Biography highlights Professor of Management Practice in Organisational Behaviour, London Business School. Founder of HSM Advisory and the Future of Work Research Consortium, working with executives from more than 60 companies. Author and co-author of ten books, including The 100-Year Life (with Andrew Scott), Redesigning Work, The Shift, Glow and Hot Spots. Thinkers50 Hall of Fame inductee; long-running presence in the Thinkers50 ranking since 2011. Co-chair, WEF Global Future Council on Work, Wages and Job Creation; former chair of the WEF Council on Leadership. Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Financial Times and The Times. Biography Most large organisations are running 2025 strategies on a workforce model designed for 2015. Roles, careers and contracts assumed predictable lifespans, fixed locations and a clear line between work and the rest of life. None of those assumptions hold, and the cost of pretending they do shows up in attrition, productivity disputes and stalled transformation programmes. This is the territory Lynda Gratton has worked in for more than two decades from London Business School, where she is Professor of Management Practice in Organisational Behaviour. Through HSM Advisory and the Future of Work Research Consortium she founded in 2009, she has built a continuous comparative dataset on how more than sixty global companies are redesigning jobs, hybrid arrangements and skills, and what separates the redesigns that hold from the ones that quietly revert. Her books anchor the argument. The 100-Year Life, written with economist Andrew Scott, became a bestseller in Japan and was shortlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year, reframing longevity as a strategic issue for governments and employers, not a personal finance question. Redesigning Work translates the same rigour into a four-lens method for hybrid: jobs and tasks, employee preferences, projects and workflows, inclusion and fairness. Her Harvard Business Review cover piece How to Do Hybrid Right and her ongoing MIT Sloan Management Review column put that method into the hands of operators. Boards engage her when they need to move past slogan-level answers on hybrid, skills and longevity. Her co-chairmanship of the WEF Global Future Council on Work, Wages and Job Creation, and her advisory work with the Japanese Prime Minister’s office on a 100-year-life society, are evidence that the same frameworks travel from a single CHRO conversation to national policy. Key speaking topics Future of work and hybrid organisational design Redesigning jobs, careers and skills for longer working lives The 100-year life and longevity as a workforce strategy Workforce transformation in large, complex organisations Hybrid work productivity, fairness and inclusion Leadership in the post-pandemic operating model Talent, retention and the changing employee contract Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers leading hybrid, skills and workforce redesigns. CEOs and executive committees stress-testing their operating model against longer careers and tighter talent markets. Boards and remuneration committees confronting longevity, retention and multi-generational workforce questions. Government, public-sector and policy audiences working on labour market and ageing-society agendas. Audience outcomes A clear method for redesigning hybrid work across jobs, employee preferences, projects and inclusion, drawn from her HBR and MIT Sloan research. A sharper read on what longevity does to careers, learning and talent pipelines, grounded in The 100-Year Life evidence base. Comparative benchmarks from the Future of Work Consortium on what more than sixty global companies are doing on hybrid, skills and workforce design. A board-ready language for distinguishing surface adjustments from genuine workforce redesign. Concrete prompts for the next ninety days of CHRO and ExCo workforce decisions.

Why organisations work with Marcus Buckingham He is the source, not a secondary interpreter, of the strengths-based management research that now sits inside most large engagement and performance programmes. His HBR cover story with Ashley Goodall, “The Feedback Fallacy,” was named by HBR as one of the most influential articles of its first century, and gives executives a defensible reason to dismantle conventional review cycles. He brings a working evidence base from the ADP Research Institute, which gives boards a global, current dataset on engagement and team performance rather than another set of opinions. First, Break All the Rules is one of the most widely read management books in circulation; senior audiences arrive already familiar with the argument, which lets a session move quickly from premise to application. Few speakers can stand on a body of work that has reshaped how Cisco, Deloitte and other large employers redesigned performance management; Buckingham is one of them. Biography highlights Co-author of First, Break All the Rules (1999) and Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001), foundational texts of strengths-based management and the basis for the StrengthsFinder assessment. Head of People and Performance Research at the ADP Research Institute. Co-author with Ashley Goodall of Nine Lies About Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019), named best management book of 2019 by Strategy+Business. HBR cover authorship includes “Reinventing Performance Management” (April 2015) and “The Feedback Fallacy” (March/April 2019), the latter selected by HBR as one of the most influential articles of its first hundred years. Author of Love + Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022), a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Thinkers50 ranked thinker, peaking at #8 in 2011 and shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Leadership Award the same year. Cambridge University, MA in Social and Political Sciences. Biography The orthodoxy of corporate performance management is built on premises that the evidence does not support. Marcus Buckingham’s research at Gallup, and later at the ADP Research Institute, has spent more than three decades testing those premises against what the highest-performing teams actually do. His finding, in short form, is that performance is local, individual and rooted in what people do best, not in what an annual review tells them to fix. That argument first reached scale through First, Break All the Rules, co-written with Curt Coffman in 1999 and built on Gallup’s global manager interviews. Now, Discover Your Strengths followed in 2001 with Donald O. Clifton and introduced the StrengthsFinder assessment. Together they reframed the conversation in HR from competency gaps to talent deployment. The work has continued to land where senior leaders are paying attention. “Reinventing Performance Management,” his 2015 HBR cover with Ashley Goodall, documented Deloitte’s redesign of its review system. “The Feedback Fallacy,” their 2019 cover, was later named by HBR as one of the most influential articles of its first century. Their book Nine Lies About Work was named best management book of the year by Strategy+Business. Buckingham now heads people and performance research at ADP, with access to one of the larger live datasets on engagement and team behaviour anywhere in business. His most recent book, Love + Work, published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2022, extends the strengths argument into the question of how individuals build careers around the activities that genuinely energise them. The work in front of leaders today is the same work that produced StrengthsFinder: identify what each person does best, then organise around it. Key speaking topics Strengths-based leadership Performance management redesign Employee engagement and team effectiveness Future of work and workforce research Talent strategy and career design Manager development Ideal for CHROs and senior people leaders rebuilding performance management or engagement frameworks Executive teams whose growth strategy depends on retaining and deploying skilled talent Boards reviewing the evidence base behind their human capital reporting Leadership development audiences inside large, multi-location workforces Audience outcomes A clear account of which assumptions inside conventional performance management the data actually supports, and which it does not. Specific design principles, drawn from Gallup and ADP research, for how teams should be measured and led. A working definition of strengths that is operational at the level of an individual conversation, not just a slogan. An evidence-based case for replacing annual feedback rituals with a different cadence of attention from managers.

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