Cultura Organizacional speakers

Why organisations work with Gillian Tett Her track record on the 2008 crisis is specific and verifiable: she conducted ethnographic research into JPMorgan’s banking culture from 2005 to 2007, published FT warnings about derivative risk before the crash, and documented the analysis in Fool’s Gold – giving organisations a concrete, tested basis for trusting her read of current systemic risk. The Anthro-Vision framework translates anthropological field methods into a practical leadership tool: a way to surface the unstated assumptions, classification systems, and cultural dynamics that standard data analysis cannot reach. The Silo Effect provides boards with a specific diagnostic – that the most dangerous organisational failure modes are cultural, not structural – and a set of case-studied arguments for why addressing them requires a different kind of analysis than process redesign. As co-founder of FT Moral Money, she has tracked the ESG movement from its earliest institutional phase, giving her a longitudinal perspective on how sustainability commitments become financial and reputational risk that few analysts or advisers can match. Her simultaneous role as an active FT journalist and Provost of King’s College Cambridge produces a form of authority that is genuinely rare: live market intelligence, editorial independence, and academic standing, without advisory-firm positioning. Biography highlights 45th Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, since October 2023 FT editorial board member and weekly columnist; former US managing editor (2013-2019) and former Chair of the FT US Editorial Board Co-founder, FT Moral Money newsletter Author of four books: Fool’s Gold (New York Times bestseller), The Silo Effect, Anthro-Vision (Porchlight best business book award; Columbia Business School Eccles prize), and Saving the Sun PhD in Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge Awards: Wincott Prize for financial journalism (2007); British Press Awards – Business Journalist of the Year (2008), Journalist of the Year (2009), Columnist of the Year (2014); British Academy President’s Medal (2011); American Anthropological Association President’s Medal (2022); OBE for services to journalism (2024) Chair of the board of trustees, Knight-Bagehot Fellowship Program in Economics and Business Journalism, Columbia University Biography Gillian Tett has spent thirty years at the Financial Times covering global markets. What she found, consistently, is that what moves them is cultural as much as numerical. The forces shaping systemic risk – tribal behaviour, unspoken institutional assumptions, rigid classification systems – are largely invisible in standard economic analysis. Her most verifiable proof point came before the 2008 financial crisis. From 2005 to 2007, she studied JPMorgan’s banking culture ethnographically and published FT warnings about the systemic risks of credit derivatives – risks that most economists and regulators had not yet identified. Fool’s Gold – a New York Times bestseller – documented that analysis and became one of the definitive accounts of how cultural insularity inside banking created the conditions for the crash. Her subsequent books formalised the method. The Silo Effect showed how cultural classification systems – not just structural inefficiencies – create the organisational blindness that precedes major strategic failures. Anthro-Vision – winner of the Porchlight best business book award and the Columbia Business School Eccles prize – translated this into a practical framework for applying anthropological field methods to business, markets, and geopolitical risk. Her current position is what makes her singular. As the 45th Provost of King’s College Cambridge and an active FT columnist, she reports on markets while leading one of the world’s most significant academic institutions. She co-founded FT Moral Money and holds the OBE for services to journalism. Key speaking topics Global economic risk and geopolitical uncertainty Financial markets and systemic risk Anthropological analysis in business and strategy Organisational silos and decision-making failure ESG and sustainable finance Political tribalism and social change Cultural dynamics of markets and institutions Ideal for Board directors and C-suite executives navigating economic and geopolitical uncertainty CFOs, CROs, and investment audiences requiring independent analysis of financial market dynamics CHROs and transformation leads addressing structural silos, organisational culture, and decision-making quality Policy, government, and public sector leaders facing complex political and economic risk Audience outcomes A framework for identifying the cultural assumptions and social dynamics that standard economic analysis tends to miss A clearer perspective on how organisational silos and cultural classification systems create the blindness that precedes strategic and financial failure Practical insight into how anthropological methods can be applied to risk assessment, market analysis, and organisational decision-making A grounded, independent reading of current global economic forces and geopolitical shifts, drawn from active FT journalism A reframing of ESG as a systemic risk discipline rather than a reputational management exercise

Why organisations work with Glenn Marsden In his hands, mental health becomes a business conversation that senior leaders take responsibility for, grounded in lived experience of body dysmorphia and the loss of a close friend. He has built and scaled a global advocacy platform from zero, the Imperfectly Perfect Campaign, which gives him direct evidence of what changes when people in positions of influence speak openly about their own pressure. His keynote treats wellbeing as a leadership issue, connecting how senior people hold identity and performance under change to the cultural cost of silence at the top. His content travels: a published book series, the ImperfectlyPerfect Podcast, and hundreds of public-figure interviews give audiences a body of work to carry on with long after the keynote. Biography highlights Founder, Imperfectly Perfect Campaign, launched 2018, a global mental wellbeing advocacy movement. Author of the Imperfectly Perfect Campaign book series, with Volume 3 released January 2026. Host of the ImperfectlyPerfect Podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, interviewing public figures on mental health and wellbeing. Has delivered speaking engagements across Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Dubai, Thailand, and Japan. Biography The cost of mental health pressure inside organisations is now showing up where it used to stay hidden. It sits with the people running them. Glenn Marsden built the Imperfectly Perfect Campaign in 2018 to make that conversation possible, starting with a question senior leaders rarely answer in public: what does it actually cost you to keep up appearances? The campaign was founded after the suicide of a close friend and Marsden’s own struggle with body dysmorphia. What began as a single advocacy project has grown into a content platform with a published book series, the ImperfectlyPerfect Podcast, and a long roster of public-figure interviews. The argument that runs through all of it is simple: when people in positions of visibility speak openly about their own pressure, the social permission for everyone else to do the same expands. What audiences get is a working argument, made by someone who has spent years getting senior people to say in public what they say to each other in private: that perfectionism is expensive, silence at the top sets the tone for the rest of the organisation, and the leaders who name the pressure first are the ones who change the culture. Key speaking topics Mental health and the cost of perfectionism Identity and self-worth through change Resilience under sustained pressure Authentic leadership and lived experience Building advocacy platforms from zero Storytelling and public influence Ideal for CHRO and chief people officer audiences setting the mental health agenda Executive leadership offsites where wellbeing is treated as a strategy issue Senior leadership development programmes addressing perfectionism and burnout in high performers Conferences on workplace wellbeing, culture, and mental health where lived experience adds credibility to the data Audience outcomes A direct, founder-led account of how mental health pressure operates at senior levels and why it stays hidden. Words for naming perfectionism and silence inside organisations, without the wellness clichés. A map of how identity loss works after disruption, and how people find direction again, drawn from what the campaign has surfaced across cultures and industries. Evidence, from the Imperfectly Perfect Campaign and the hundreds of public-figure conversations it has gathered, of what changes when people in positions of influence speak openly.

Why organisations work with Griselda Togobo She brings an engineer’s and chartered accountant’s bias for measurement to inclusion work, which is unusually rare in the field and lands credibly with operational and finance audiences. She has run a 20,000-member women’s professional network (Forward Ladies, now Novi) for over a decade, so her view of where female and minority talent gets stuck is grounded in pipeline data, not anecdote. Her client list, Boeing, Shell, HSBC, NatWest, Sage, Cambridge University, Oxford University, indicates senior buyers in technically demanding, male-dominated environments hire her back. Her style is direct and based in psychology rather than moral pressure, which is the only register that survives in rooms where DEI is now politically contested. Biography highlights MPhil, Industrial Systems, Manufacture and Management, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. Chartered Accountant (ACA); former management consultant at Deloitte LLP. CEO of Forward Ladies (now Novi), a 20,000-member women’s professional network since 2014. Author, Unstoppable Women: Female Entrepreneurs’ Stories to Inspire and Motivate. Founder of Advancing Futures, a non-profit on education and economic empowerment in Ghana. Board member, Northern School of Contemporary Dance; Fellow of the Girls’ Schools Association. Biography The hard part of inclusion inside large organisations is not policy. It is what senior leaders do in the small moments: who they sponsor, who they interrupt, whose ideas they credit, and how they decide who is “ready” for the next role. Togobo’s work sits exactly there. She came to that work through an unusual route. She trained as an electrical and electronic engineer in Ghana, took an MPhil at Cambridge in Industrial Systems, Manufacture and Management, then qualified as a chartered accountant at Deloitte LLP. That technical and financial grounding shapes how she briefs executives. She uses data and behavioural psychology rather than moral argument, which travels better in operations, finance and engineering audiences than the standard DEI register does. Since 2014 she has led Forward Ladies, now relaunched as Novi, growing it into a 20,000-member professional development network for women across the UK. That platform gives her a continuous read on where mid-career women actually stall, which feeds the diagnostic work she does inside client organisations including Boeing, Shell, HSBC, NatWest, Sage, ASDA and Yorkshire Water. Her own writing extends the same theme. Unstoppable Women, published in 2022, profiles female entrepreneurs as case studies in commercial decision-making rather than personal struggle. Outside her commercial practice she founded Advancing Futures to support girls’ education in Ghana and sits on the board of the Northern School of Contemporary Dance. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership inside FTSE-100 organisations Women in STEM and the senior pipeline Behavioural psychology of bias in promotion and sponsorship Building and sustaining women’s professional networks Female entrepreneurship and scale-up leadership Cross-cultural leadership and the global workforce Ideal for CEOs and executive committees who have run DEI programmes and are not seeing pipeline movement. CHROs and heads of talent designing succession and sponsorship into senior leadership. Engineering, energy, financial services and industrial businesses with gender-imbalanced senior cohorts. Boards reviewing inclusion strategy in markets where DEI language is now politically contested. Audience outcomes A clearer view of which leadership behaviours actually move representation, and which are theatre. A working diagnostic for where female and minority talent stalls inside their own organisation. Language for inclusion that holds up in finance, engineering and commercial audiences. A more honest read on the gap between stated DEI commitments and how senior leaders behave in week-to-week decisions.

Why organisations work with Guenther Steiner He built a Formula One team from scratch – conceived at his kitchen table during the 2008 financial crisis, brought to the F1 grid seven years later as the first American constructor in thirty years. No other motorsport speaker can talk about team-building from that starting point. His account of accountability is grounded in an environment where failure is timed, televised, and scored. The feedback loop for culture and decision-making in F1 is compressed to minutes, not quarters, which makes his observations directly transferable to any organisation managing high-visibility performance. The Netflix series Drive to Survive documented his leadership style across multiple seasons before a global audience. Organisations booking Steiner get a speaker whose directness and authenticity are already known – the profile is established, not claimed. His perspective spans the full leadership lifecycle – from mechanic to technical manager to managing director (Jaguar Racing), to founding principal (Haas F1), to team owner (Tech3 MotoGP). That breadth is unusual among elite sport speakers who typically occupy a single role. Surviving to Drive, his account of a full F1 season from inside the principal’s office, reached No.1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list. The book provides a structured intellectual foundation for his speaking that event organisers can build audience preparation around. Biography highlights Team Principal, Haas F1 Team, 2014-2023 – led the organisation from formation through eight seasons, including a 5th-place Constructors’ Championship finish (2018) and the team’s first pole position (2022) Managing Director, Jaguar Racing (2001-2003), recruited by Niki Lauda; Technical Operations Director, Red Bull Racing (2004-2006) More than a decade in the World Rally Championship, working with multiple manufacturers including Mazda, Prodrive, and M-Sport Ford, alongside drivers Colin McRae and Carlos Sainz Sr Founder and President of Fibreworks Composites, a carbon composites engineering and manufacturing business Author of Surviving to Drive (2023, Sunday Times No.1 bestseller) and Unfiltered: My Incredible Decade in Formula 1 (2024) Led acquisition of Tech3 MotoGP team in September 2025; assumes CEO role from 2026 – his first major ownership position in motorsport Biography Guenther Steiner wrote his first Haas business plan at his kitchen table during the 2008 financial crisis. Seven years later, the team made its Formula One debut at the 2016 Australian Grand Prix, scoring points in its first race – the most successful debut by a new constructor in F1 this century. That founding story is the foundation of his organisational argument. Building a competitive F1 team with limited resources, in a field where performance is measured to thousandths of a second and broadcast to a global audience, produces a specific kind of leadership discipline. Accountability cannot be deferred. Culture either holds under pressure or it does not. Steiner ran that environment for a decade. His career before Haas is equally instructive. He came up through the World Rally Championship as a mechanic and technical manager – working with championship-winning teams at Mazda, Prodrive, and M-Sport Ford – before Niki Lauda recruited him as Managing Director of Jaguar Racing in F1 in 2001. The transition from engineering discipline to senior management, and eventually to team ownership, gives his perspective a structural credibility that purely managerial career paths rarely provide. In September 2025, Steiner led a consortium to acquire the Tech3 MotoGP team, taking on the CEO role from 2026. The move signals a deliberate expansion of his leadership platform from management to ownership – and adds a new chapter to a practitioner argument about building and scaling competitive motorsport organisations that is already two books and one Netflix series deep. Key speaking topics High-performance team leadership Founding and scaling organisations under resource constraints Accountability and decision-making under competitive pressure Performance culture in high-stakes environments Managing risk and failure Operational resilience in elite sport Leadership transition and team ownership Ideal for Senior leadership teams and C-suite audiences navigating competitive or high-accountability environments CHROs and transformation leads working on performance culture and ownership Boards and executive teams in capital-intensive, operationally complex sectors (manufacturing, technology, professional services) Corporate audiences familiar with Drive to Survive seeking direct engagement with a practitioner whose leadership style is already known Audience outcomes A concrete framework for the relationship between culture, accountability, and performance – drawn from an environment where those variables are tested in real time Specific examples of leadership decisions made under resource constraints and public scrutiny, with the reasoning behind them A clearer understanding of what founding and scaling a high-performance operation actually requires, distinct from received management theory Practical perspective on managing failure productively – how teams that lose well build the foundation for winning Direct insight into what separates declared performance standards from lived performance culture

Why organisations work with Hannah Ubl She runs primary research on generational cohorts, including original work comparing Early Millennials, Recessionist Millennials and Gen Z, and brings the data into the room rather than recycling commentary She wrote the operating manual on the first wave of this problem. Managing Millennials For Dummies (Wiley, 2017) is still the most-cited mass-market field guide for line managers running mixed-generation teams Her follow-up book, The Future of Work is Human, gives HR and people leaders a framework for rebuilding trust, psychological safety and belonging when half the workforce is remote and the other half is fatigued She speaks to the layer most generational speakers skip. Audiences from new hires to C-suite at Cisco, Kraft Heinz, Sodexo and Springer Nature, with the same material translating across all of them A decade inside BridgeWorks as Research Director, then six years building Good Company Consulting, gives her the rare combination of researcher discipline and operator instinct on culture problems Biography highlights Co-founder, Good Company Consulting Co-author, Managing Millennials For Dummies (Wiley, 2017) with Lisa X. Walden and Debra Arbit Co-author, The Future of Work is Human: Transforming Company Culture for a Post-Pandemic World, with Lisa X. Walden Former Director of Research and Director of Keynote Speaking, BridgeWorks BS, Communications Studies (Advertising), Boston University Clients include Cisco, Kraft Heinz, Sodexo, Springer Nature, Applied Materials and NACS Biography Five generations now work alongside one another, and the assumptions each generation brings about communication, authority and loyalty no longer overlap. That gap is where Good Company Consulting was built. Ubl co-founded the firm after a decade at BridgeWorks, where she ran the national research programme comparing how millennial sub-cohorts and Gen Z behave inside organisations. The research feeds the keynotes directly. Managing Millennials For Dummies, written with Lisa X. Walden and Debra Arbit and published by Wiley in 2017, set the early reference text for line managers handling mixed-age teams. The Future of Work is Human, her second book with Walden, picks up the thread post-pandemic and reframes culture work as a question of trust, psychological safety and belonging across hybrid teams. What buyers commission her for is the translation layer. She turns cohort data into specific manager moves: how to give Gen Z feedback that lands, how to redesign hybrid rituals so they produce connection rather than performance, how to talk about AI without losing the human contract that holds a team together. Cisco, Kraft Heinz, Sodexo and Springer Nature have all used her to do the same job inside very different cultures. The reason her work travels is research discipline rather than charisma. She earned her stripes inside a research firm before she earned them on stage, and audiences from new hires to senior executives respond to the same material because the underlying argument is empirical, not motivational. Key speaking topics Generational integration in mixed-age teams Gen Z in the workplace Hybrid work and the rebuild of psychological safety Manager capability across generations Employee engagement and the post-pandemic social contract Compassionate leadership in practice Human connection in the age of AI Ideal for CHROs and Heads of People rebuilding engagement and manager capability across generations Leadership development and L&D teams designing programmes for new and mid-level managers Internal communications and culture leads redesigning hybrid rituals Sector audiences with five-generation workforces, including healthcare systems, retail, hospitality and manufacturing Audience outcomes A working understanding of what Gen Z actually wants from an employer, separated from the social media caricature Specific manager behaviours that close the friction between generational cohorts in day-to-day work A clearer view of which hybrid-work rituals build trust and which performatively waste time Language for talking about AI and automation without breaking the employee social contract A research-grounded position to take back to the executive team on engagement and culture investment

Why organisations work with Hasnain Kazim He has spent a decade testing, in public, what actually works when people shout at you. “Post von Karlheinz” turned his replies to hate mail into a national bestseller, and the method underneath it travels directly into how leaders and communications teams handle hostile audiences. He reports from inside the conditions most executives only read about. Six years as a Der Spiegel foreign correspondent in Islamabad and Istanbul, ended by the Turkish state refusing to renew his press credentials, gives him concrete material on authoritarian drift, migration and press freedom rather than abstract commentary. He speaks and writes in German and English with equal fluency, which matters for DAX and European-headquartered organisations briefing a single voice across jurisdictions on identity, integration and public discourse. He works as both author and moderator. The same person who wrote the argument can host the board dinner, chair the panel, or carry an awards night, which reduces briefing overhead for events that need a serious thinker on stage. His published rhetorical guide, “Auf sie mit Gebruell!”, is specifically about how to argue in public against populism without losing the room. That is a usable internal-comms and leadership-communication frame, not a lecture topic. Biography highlights Der Spiegel South Asia correspondent, Islamabad, 2009 to 2013. Der Spiegel Turkey correspondent, Istanbul, 2013 to 2016; left after the Turkish government refused to renew his press credentials. CNN Journalist Award winner, 2009. Bestselling author with Penguin Verlag, including “Post von Karlheinz” (2018) and “Auf sie mit Gebruell!” (2019). Studied political science in Hamburg; served as an officer in the German Navy, 1994 to 2000. Keynote speaker at re:publica 2022 on language in times of division; regular contributor to IPS Journal and Goethe-Institut publications. Biography The Turkish government refused to renew his press credentials in 2016, and with them his legal residency. Hasnain Kazim had been Der Spiegel’s Istanbul correspondent for three years. He moved his reporting on Turkey, and later on identity and migration across Europe, to Vienna. The work before and after that moment is unusually concrete. Four years as South Asia correspondent in Islamabad, three in Istanbul, a CNN Journalist Award in 2009, and a German Navy officer’s commission before any of that. For organisations trying to understand what authoritarian pressure, migration and press freedom actually look like on the ground, this is first-hand material rather than commentary. The second arc of the career is what makes him useful in a room of executives. Since 2018, as a full-time author with Penguin Verlag, he has built a public method for responding to hostility. “Post von Karlheinz” collected his replies to racist and abusive reader mail, became a long-running bestseller, and turned him into a case study for the Dangerous Speech Project. “Auf sie mit Gebruell!” followed, a rhetorical handbook for arguing with populists without surrendering the tone. That body of work gives him something most geopolitics speakers do not have: a practical grammar for how leaders, communications teams and frontline staff should actually speak in a climate where silence reads as complicity and escalation damages the brand. He writes and speaks in German and English, and works as both keynote speaker and moderator for events that need a single serious voice to carry the evening. Key speaking topics Counterspeech and responding to online hostility Language, polarisation and public discourse Migration, identity and integration in Europe Populism, extremism and democratic resilience Press freedom and authoritarian pressure Germany, Turkey and South Asia in geopolitical context Ideal for CHROs and internal-communications leaders dealing with polarisation inside the workforce. External communications, public affairs and brand teams briefing leaders on migration, identity and reputational risk. Boards and executive committees at European-headquartered organisations working through integration, DEI or social-cohesion questions in their markets. Conference organisers and awards committees looking for a serious bilingual moderator or host. Audience outcomes A concrete method for replying to hostile or abusive communication, drawn from a published and tested body of practice. A clearer read on how language choices in internal and external communication either defuse or deepen division. First-hand perspective on Turkey, South Asia and migration into Europe from someone who reported on them under pressure. A sharper sense of what leaders can say in public on contested social questions without conceding ground to populism.

Why organisations work with Dame Heather Rabbatts She co-founded TIME’S UP UK in 2018 and played a founding role in establishing CIISA, the Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority – a track record of translating accountability advocacy into operational governance infrastructure rather than policy recommendations. As the first woman on The Football Association board in its more than 150-year history, she has direct experience of governance cultures structurally resistant to inclusion – and of the specific mechanisms through which that resistance operates and where it can be broken. Non-executive experience across Associated British Foods, M&C Saatchi, and Bloomsbury Publishing, alongside earlier roles at the Bank of England, the BBC, and Crossrail, gives her a governance perspective formed across very different ownership structures and operating environments. Her legal training as a barrister and her track record as a public-sector CEO who led the turnaround of the London Borough of Lambeth give her a precise understanding of what accountability looks like when it is working – and when it is not. Her experience stepping up from non-executive to executive chair of a listed company during a period of CEO succession and commercial pressure is a live credential on what active board oversight requires in practice. Biography highlights Barrister qualified in 1981; educated at the London School of Economics Chief Executive of the London Borough of Lambeth; youngest local authority chief executive in the UK at time of appointment First woman appointed to the board of The Football Association in its history (2011); resigned from FIFA’s anti-discrimination taskforce on principle following Sepp Blatter’s re-election (2015) BBC Governor (1999-2001); Managing Director of 4Learning, Channel 4’s education arm; former Chair of Shed Media, overseeing its sale to Time Warner Executive Chair, M&C Saatchi; Senior Independent Director, Associated British Foods; Non-Executive Director, Bloomsbury Publishing; former non-executive roles include the Bank of England, Crossrail, and the Royal Opera House Co-founder and Chair, TIME’S UP UK (since 2018); founding Chair, Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority (CIISA); Chair, Soho Theatre; DBE awarded in 2016 New Year Honours for services to football and equality Biography Boards rarely lack formal structures – what they frequently lack is the culture, diversity, and accountability practice to make those structures function as designed. Dame Heather Rabbatts has spent three decades working at exactly that intersection. Her career spans barrister practice, the CEO role at the London Borough of Lambeth, and non-executive directorships across sport, media, and listed companies. Her 2011 appointment as the first woman on The Football Association board placed her inside one of the most structurally resistant governance environments in British sport. She used the role publicly – criticising the composition of the FA’s commission on diversity, and resigning from FIFA’s anti-discrimination taskforce in 2015 following Sepp Blatter’s re-election. Her broader media career included serving as BBC Governor and Managing Director of Channel 4’s education business, 4Learning, and subsequently chairing Shed Media through its sale to Time Warner. She serves as Executive Chair of M&C Saatchi, Senior Independent Director at Associated British Foods, and Non-Executive Director at Bloomsbury Publishing. She co-founded TIME’S UP UK in 2018 alongside Barbara Broccoli. Together they played a founding role in establishing CIISA, the Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority, which provides an operational framework for handling misconduct across film and television. The unifying thread across her career – council chambers, listed company boards, football administration, and film production – is a single practical question. What does genuine accountability at board level actually require? Her answer is grounded in experience of governance under real pressure, not governance in theory. Key speaking topics Board governance and accountability Inclusion in corporate leadership Governance in sport and football administration Culture change in creative industries Ethical oversight and organisational standards Non-executive leadership and board composition Public sector leadership and institutional reform Ideal for Boards and non-executive directors navigating governance reform, composition review, or accountability challenges CHROs and Chief People Officers building the case for inclusion at board and senior leadership level Sport governing bodies and rights holders managing governance and inclusion reform Senior leadership teams in media, creative, or public institutions undergoing culture change Audience outcomes A clearer understanding of where formal governance structures typically fail to produce actual accountability – and what intervention at board level usually requires Insight into inclusion as a governance discipline, drawn from direct experience of institutional resistance and cultural change in high-profile organisations Practical perspective on how organisations can move from policy-level commitments on DEI to embedded board-level practice Clearer framing of the non-executive role in holding executive teams to account on culture, ethics, and standards An understanding of how industry standards bodies can translate advocacy into operational governance infrastructure, illustrated by the development of CIISA

Why organisations work with Helen Richardson-Walsh A first-hand account of the cultural reset that took GB women’s hockey from Olympic underachievers to Rio 2016 gold, told by a senior player who was inside the leadership group for 11 years. A working performance psychologist’s view of how psychological safety, belonging and honest feedback are engineered in a daily training environment, drawn from her current role with Tottenham Hotspur Women. A credible voice on mental health at the top of high-pressure environments, grounded in her own documented recovery from clinical depression and career-threatening back surgery between London 2012 and Rio 2016. A practical perspective on inclusion as a performance variable, informed by being part of the first same-sex married couple to win Olympic gold on the same team and the cultural work that made that possible inside the squad. Co-author of “Winning Together” (Hachette, 2020), a book leaders cite as a tactical, behaviour-level account of building a winning team, not a memoir. Biography highlights Olympic gold medallist, Rio 2016, with Team GB women’s hockey; one of only two players to score in the shootout that beat the Netherlands in the final. Youngest woman ever to represent GB hockey at an Olympic Games, on debut at Sydney 2000, aged 18. Olympic bronze, London 2012; European champion, 2015; 293 caps for England and Great Britain across four Olympic Games. MBE for services to hockey, 2017 New Year Honours. Co-author of “Winning Together: An Olympic-Winning Approach to Building Better Teams” (Hachette, 2020), with Kate Richardson-Walsh. Performance Psychologist with Tottenham Hotspur Women since 2021; holds a Master’s in Organisational Psychology from City, University of London, and trains as a sport psychologist with elite teams. Biography GB women’s hockey arrived at London 2012 with a bronze medal and an open question about whether the squad could ever win at the level its talent suggested. The four years that followed were not a story of more training. They were a story of a deliberate cultural rebuild: explicit team values, leadership shared across the senior players, hard conversations about behaviour, and a willingness to treat psychology as a daily performance system. Rio 2016 produced the first Olympic gold for British women’s hockey. Helen Richardson-Walsh made her Olympic debut at Sydney 2000 as the youngest woman ever to represent GB hockey, and sat inside that leadership group for 11 of her 18 years in the squad. Her experience is unusually specific. Between the two Olympics she also went through two ruptured discs, multiple back and ankle surgeries, and a period of clinical depression severe enough to require professional treatment. The Rio gold was won by a player who had been told she might not play again, who had used therapy and mindfulness to come back, and who was one of only two players to score in the shootout that won the final against the Netherlands. That combination of operating inside an elite team culture and rebuilding her own performance from the inside is the content she now works with. She is co-author, with Kate Richardson-Walsh, of “Winning Together” (Hachette, 2020), a working manual on team building drawn directly from the Rio cycle. She is a Performance Psychologist with Tottenham Hotspur Women, where her brief includes individual mindset work and squad culture, and she holds a Master’s in Organisational Psychology from City, University of London. For senior teams the value is in the precision of her examples. How psychological safety actually shows up in a meeting. What belonging looks like when a married couple are competing for the same shirt. How a high performer talks about depression without losing their place in the team. What inclusion does to performance when the pressure is on. The credibility is the medal; the substance is what she did to get there and what she does now. Key speaking topics High-performance team culture Psychological safety and belonging Inclusion in elite performance environments Resilience after injury, setback and depression Mental health and wellbeing at senior level Leadership inside high-pressure teams Performance mindset Ideal for CHROs, heads of talent and culture leads building team norms in pressured commercial environments. Executive teams and senior leadership groups going through performance reset or post-restructure rebuild. Wellbeing, DEI and people leaders working on inclusion and psychological safety as performance issues, not compliance. Sales, trading floor and operating leadership groups where sustained pressure is the working environment. Audience outcomes A concrete account of how an elite team rebuilt its culture in four years, with the specific behaviours that changed. A working definition of psychological safety drawn from a team where the cost of getting it wrong was visible in performance. Language for talking about mental health and recovery at senior level without softening or sensationalising it. A view of inclusion as a performance variable, not a values statement. Practical mental tools used by elite athletes that translate to commercial high-pressure roles.

Why organisations work with Henry Timms He has operated at the top of two of the most scrutinised cultural institutions in the United States, Lincoln Center and 92nd Street Y, and can speak to legacy transformation from inside the seat, not from a consulting deck. “New Power,” co-written with Jeremy Heimans, was a Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year finalist and is now one of the standard references for leaders thinking about participatory influence. Buyers get the author, not a secondary interpreter. He built GivingTuesday from a single idea at 92Y into a movement operating in 100 countries that has generated over $13 billion in giving. That is hard evidence of how the framework works in practice. As CEO of Brunswick Group, he now advises global boards and CEOs on exactly the reputational and influence problems the framework was built to address, which keeps the material current rather than retrospective. Biography highlights Chief Executive Officer, Brunswick Group (2024 to present) President and CEO, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (2019 to 2024); oversaw the $550 million renovation of David Geffen Hall Co-founder of GivingTuesday (2012), active in 100 countries Co-author, “New Power” (2018, Doubleday), Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year shortlist Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to the arts and to philanthropy (2022) Hauser Leader, Harvard Kennedy School; Senior Fellow, Stanford University and the United Nations Foundation; member, Council on Foreign Relations Biography Most legacy institutions are not structured for participation. They are structured for authority that flows one way, from the board and the executive outward, and that structure is now breaking in public. The problem Henry Timms works on is what leaders do about it. Timms and Jeremy Heimans gave the shift a name in their 2018 book “New Power,” shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year. Old power, in their argument, is held like a currency: hoarded, closed, pushed down. New power operates like a current: open, participatory, shaped by the many. The point is not that one replaces the other. It is that serious leaders now have to run both systems at once. He has done this in practice. At 92nd Street Y he co-founded GivingTuesday in 2012, a movement that now operates in 100 countries and has generated over $13 billion for charitable causes. At Lincoln Center, where he was President and CEO from 2019 to 2024, he oversaw the $550 million renovation of David Geffen Hall and repositioned one of America’s most visible cultural institutions for a more participatory era. As CEO of Brunswick Group, he now advises global boards and CEOs on reputation, influence and institutional trust, with affiliations at Harvard Kennedy School, Stanford, Oxford and the Council on Foreign Relations. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2022 for services to the arts and to philanthropy. Key speaking topics New power and the shift in how influence operates Leading legacy institutions through transformation Building and scaling participatory movements Reputation and trust in a networked era AI and the future of institutional authority Philanthropy, purpose and stakeholder engagement Ideal for CEOs and boards of legacy institutions facing relevance or trust challenges Chief communications, marketing and brand officers rethinking stakeholder influence Foundation and nonprofit leadership teams designing participatory programmes Senior leadership offsites on culture, reputation and institutional change Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for distinguishing old power and new power inside their own organisation Named examples of how global institutions have built participatory strategies without surrendering discipline A clearer read on where their organisation’s authority is eroding and where it can be rebuilt Practical reference points from GivingTuesday, Lincoln Center and Brunswick client work

Why organisations work with Howard Schultz He is one of the only major executives to have led a full crisis turnaround at the same global company twice. That longitudinal experience produces a very different quality of insight than a single transformation story. His 2011 number-one New York Times bestseller “Onward” presents a specific and testable argument: recovering a business means restoring what people came for, not restructuring around it. Within three years of his 2008 return to Starbucks, the stock had risen more than five times from its crisis low. His case for employee investment is built on commercial evidence, not values rhetoric. Starbucks under Schultz was among the first U.S. companies to extend healthcare to part-time workers and to offer equity participation to hourly employees. He presents attrition, service quality, and customer loyalty as the direct outputs. Named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year in 2011 and included in Time’s “Time 200” most influential people, he holds ethics recognition from Columbia Business School, Notre Dame’s Mendoza College, and UCLA Anderson – providing academic validation of a practical executive record. As co-founder of Maveron, a consumer-focused venture capital firm with $1.3 billion in assets under management, he brings pattern recognition on consumer brand durability well beyond the Starbucks story. Biography highlights Chairman and CEO of Starbucks across three leadership periods (1986-2000, 2008-2017, 2022-2023), growing the company from 11 stores to 28,000 locations across 77 countries Took Starbucks public in 1992; oversaw nearly $100 billion added to the company’s market capitalisation between 2008 and 2017 Author of four books including “Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul” (2011), a number-one New York Times bestseller Named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year in 2011; included in Time magazine’s “Time 200” most influential people Ethics and leadership awards from Columbia Business School (Botwinick Prize), Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business (Hesburgh Award), and UCLA Anderson (John Wooden Global Leadership Award) Co-founder of Maveron (1998), a consumer-focused venture capital firm with $1.3 billion in assets under management and early investments including eBay and Zulily Biography The most destructive leadership decisions at scale are rarely made during crises. They accumulate during the growth years, when speed and efficiency gradually crowd out the cultural foundations that made a business worth building. Howard Schultz experienced this from the inside, as the architect of Starbucks’ global expansion and the executive who had to reverse the damage when it became visible. His 2008 return as CEO is documented in “Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul,” a number-one New York Times bestseller. The argument at the centre of the book is precise: the path back to financial health ran directly through culture, not around it. Employee retraining, the restoration of the in-store experience, and a deliberate recalibration of what Starbucks stood for came before the financial metrics recovered. Within three years of his return, the stock had risen more than five times from its crisis low. His approach to employees follows the same logic. Starbucks under his leadership was among the first U.S. companies to extend healthcare benefits to part-time workers, and it offered equity participation to hourly employees through a programme called Bean Stock. Schultz presented these not as social obligations but as commercial decisions: loyalty, retention, and service quality are measurable outputs of how people are treated, not side effects of good intentions. Named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year in 2011 and included in Time magazine’s “Time 200,” Schultz holds ethics recognition from Columbia Business School, Notre Dame’s Mendoza College, and UCLA Anderson. As co-founder of Maveron, a consumer-focused venture capital firm with $1.3 billion in assets under management, he has extended this analysis of brand durability well beyond the Starbucks story. His perspective reaches audiences navigating growth, crisis recovery, and the sustained tension between operational efficiency and cultural health. Key speaking topics Values-based leadership at scale Crisis leadership and organisational recovery Brand culture and long-term commercial performance Global consumer brand strategy Employee investment as competitive strategy Entrepreneurship and growth Corporate responsibility and business ethics Ideal for CEOs and executive leadership teams navigating rapid scaling decisions or organisational turnaround Chief People Officers and HR leadership examining employee value proposition at scale Brand, marketing, and commercial leadership in consumer-facing organisations Boards and senior leaders weighing cultural priorities against short-term commercial pressure Audience outcomes A tested framework for treating culture and commercial performance as mutually reinforcing, not competing priorities Concrete, sequenced lessons from a live turnaround at global scale – what decisions were made, in what order, and why A reframe of employee investment from a cost line to a commercial variable with traceable outcomes Perspective on how a brand’s identity is preserved or eroded through the decisions made at pace and scale Practical insight into leading across multiple organisational phases, including growth, institutional crisis, and recovery

Why organisations work with Imran Rehman He runs a working team-measurement platform, Kokoro, so his sessions draw on live data from teams rather than abstract models. His thesis reframes the problem: fix the environment, not the individual. That shift gives HR and transformation leaders a more tractable lever than personality interventions. He combines executive coaching practice with product building, which gives senior teams a rare mix of one-to-one diagnostic instinct and systems thinking in the same room. He works fluently in English and German and operates across European corporate and multinational contexts, which suits international leadership audiences. His book “Sum of Many” gives the work a named, published argument leaders can reference after the session. Biography highlights Co-founder of Kokoro (Kokoro GmbH, Vienna), a real-time team and leadership analytics platform founded in 2018. Author of “Sum of Many,” featured on the Chapters Of My Life podcast (Life Book 45). Certified business and executive coach, European Business School (EBS). Bilingual working languages: English and German; based in Vienna, Austria. Signature talks include “The Science of Great Teams,” “The Myths of Measuring Humans,” and “Preventing Team Burnout: 6 Evidence-Based Actions for Success.” Professional coaching practice spanning multiple sectors and geographies, with a focus on senior leadership teams and organisational development. Biography Most teams are not underperforming because the people in them are weak. They are underperforming because the environment around them quietly punishes candour, overload is treated as a personal resilience problem, and the signals that matter are read too late. This is the terrain Imran Rehman works in. He is co-founder of Kokoro, a Vienna-based platform that measures psychological safety, belonging, and the conditions of healthy high performance in real time. Kokoro was founded in 2018, and the product sits behind his speaking: the data he references is the data his clients are generating, not borrowed survey research. His book “Sum of Many” argues the same point in long form. Stop trying to fix individuals. Build environments where ordinary people can do unusually good work together. It is a direct challenge to a lot of standard leadership development, and it gives his keynotes a single, testable claim rather than a list of tips. He is a certified executive coach through the European Business School and works fluently in English and German across European and multinational organisations. The coaching practice and the product are not separate lives. One informs the other, which is why his sessions land with HR directors and operating leaders who have already sat through the generic version of this topic. Key speaking topics Psychological safety in teams Belonging and team dynamics Data-informed team performance Healthy high performance and burnout prevention Leadership development and coaching Organisational development and culture Ideal for CHROs, CPOs, and heads of organisational development responsible for team effectiveness at scale Senior leadership teams preparing for a step-change in performance expectations Transformation and change leaders who need measurable people indicators alongside operational ones International and German-speaking leadership audiences in multinational corporate settings Audience outcomes A working definition of psychological safety that is specific enough to act on, not just reference A shift in framing from individual performance fixes to environmental design A view of what can and cannot be usefully measured in team behaviour, and why most surveys fail Evidence-based moves for preventing team burnout before it shows up in attrition figures A shared language for senior teams to diagnose their own dynamics in the weeks after the session

Why organisations work with Isabel Behncke Her evidence base is unusually direct. More than 3,000 kilometres tracking wild bonobos in Congo gave her the first comprehensive field study of adult play in our closest living relatives, which anchors every claim she makes about creativity and social bonding in observed behaviour rather than metaphor. She translates evolutionary biology into practical arguments about culture. Her framing of play as a core adult competence, not a perk, gives leaders a defensible language for investing in creativity, psychological safety and informal connection inside performance-driven cultures. She moves between serious scientific and serious commercial settings. TED main stage twice, WIRED, Google Zeitgeist, SXSW, the House of Lords, the United Nations General Assembly and the G20, which means she is used to calibrating the same argument for scientists, policymakers and executives. She holds institutional credibility across three continents. Oxford DPhil, Gruter Institute fellowship, PERC board seat and a research post at Universidad del Desarrollo’s Social Complexity Research Center, plus advisory work on Chile’s long-term science and innovation strategy. She sits outside the behavioural economics cohort. Her discipline is field ethology, which gives her arguments about trust, risk and collaboration a biological depth that lands differently with leaders who have already heard the standard behavioural science keynote. Biography highlights DPhil in Evolutionary Anthropology from the University of Oxford, with the first comprehensive scientific study of adult play behaviour in wild bonobos at the Wamba research site in Congo. MPhil in Human Evolution from the University of Cambridge; BSc in Zoology and MSc in Wildlife Conservation from University College London. TED Fellow and TED Resident; two main-stage TED talks including «Evolution’s gift of play, from bonobo apes to humans» and «Does nature have a sense of humor?». Researcher at the Social Complexity Research Center (CICS), Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago; Fellow of the Gruter Institute for research on human behavior and institutions; board member at PERC. Advisory roles in Chile’s long-term strategy for science, technology, innovation and knowledge, with affiliations including the Centro de Estudios Publicos. Platform work includes WIRED, Google Zeitgeist, SXSW, the United Nations General Assembly, the House of Lords and the G20, alongside features in BBC and National Geographic documentaries and The Tim Ferriss Show. Biography Most organisations talk about creativity and collaboration as if they were cultural aspirations. Field ethology treats them as biological functions. Isabel Behncke built her career studying how social mammals, and specifically wild bonobos in the Congo, generate trust, creativity and resilience through play, risk-taking and informal bonding. Her DPhil at Oxford produced the first comprehensive scientific study of adult play behaviour in wild bonobos, based on more than 3,000 kilometres of field observation at the Wamba research site. That field base shapes how she works with organisations. Her argument is that adult play is not a soft concept but an adaptive mechanism that underpins learning, social bonding and innovation in every species that depends on flexible behaviour, humans included. Leaders hear a case for culture that is rooted in evolutionary evidence rather than slogans, delivered by someone who has watched these behaviours in the wild. Her institutional footprint runs across science, policy and public platforms. She is a researcher at the Social Complexity Research Center at Universidad del Desarrollo in Santiago, a Fellow of the Gruter Institute, a board member at PERC and an adviser on Chile’s long-term science and innovation strategy. She is a TED Fellow and TED Resident, has spoken twice from the main TED stage, and has appeared at WIRED, Google Zeitgeist, SXSW, the House of Lords, the United Nations General Assembly and the G20. For senior leaders grappling with how to build adaptive, creative teams under pressure, she offers a rare combination: the rigour of a field scientist, the clarity of a seasoned public communicator, and a set of questions most boards have never asked about why their best work tends to happen in their least controlled rooms. Key speaking topics Play as a driver of adult creativity and adaptation Trust, risk-taking and social bonding inside teams Evolutionary perspectives on organisational culture Human behaviour, complexity and change Creativity and the science of collaboration Rituals and informal structure in working life Ideal for CEOs, Chief People Officers and culture leads rethinking collaboration, creativity or psychological safety Leadership and talent development programmes that want a serious scientific frame rather than another behavioural economics keynote Innovation, R&D and design leaders examining how team environments shape creative output Organisations rebuilding rituals and informal structure after hybrid and remote disruption Audience outcomes A clear evolutionary case for why adult play, humour and informal bonding shape performance, not just morale Language for talking about trust, risk and creativity that rests on observed behaviour in social mammals A sharper read on which cultural habits accelerate adaptation and which quietly suppress it Fresh questions to ask about how teams learn, collaborate and recover under sustained pressure