Agilité organisationnelle

Why organisations work with Gianpiero Petriglieri He gives senior teams a clinical reading of leadership. Trained as a psychiatrist before joining INSEAD, he can speak about identity, authority and anxiety inside an organisation in language that a CEO recognises and a HR director can act on. He owns a named idea. “Nomadic professionalism,” developed across his Harvard Business Review essays, gives boards a clear way to think about leading people who are deeply bonded to their work but loosely tied to the company. He directs INSEAD’s Management Acceleration Programme, the school’s flagship executive development course for emerging leaders, which means his frameworks are tested every year on the next layer of senior management at global firms. He has been ranked twice in the Thinkers50 Top 50, in 2017 and 2021, and shortlisted across the Future Thinker, Leadership, Talent, and Coaching & Mentoring awards. The recognition is consistent, not a single moment. He pushes back on the wellness-industry version of leadership. His work is about humanising leadership without sentimentalising it, useful for executive teams tired of trainings that confuse care with capability. Biography highlights Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD, holding the Alumni Fund Chair in Leadership Development. Director of INSEAD’s Management Acceleration Programme, the school’s flagship executive education course for emerging leaders. Medical Doctor and Psychiatrist by training; has practised as an executive coach and psychotherapist. Thinkers50 Top 50 (2017, 2021); shortlisted for Future Thinker, Leadership, Talent, and Coaching & Mentoring awards. Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review; quoted in the Financial Times, The Economist, BBC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, and The Guardian. Former Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on New Models of Leadership; visiting positions at Harvard Business School and Copenhagen Business School. Biography Most leadership development assumes the organisation is the stable thing and the leader is the variable. That assumption no longer holds. People build careers across firms, geographies, and modes of work, and the bond they trust most is to their craft, not their employer. The work of leading anchors itself somewhere else. This is the territory Petriglieri has spent two decades mapping at INSEAD, where he is Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour and directs the Management Acceleration Programme, the school’s flagship executive education course for emerging leaders. His framing of “nomadic professionalism,” developed across essays in Harvard Business Review, gives senior teams a precise way to talk about why competent people drift, why authenticity has replaced loyalty as the language of work, and what holds them in place. The clinical training matters. Before academia, Petriglieri trained as a Medical Doctor and Psychiatrist, and has worked as an executive coach and psychotherapist. That background lets him speak about identity, authority, and anxiety inside an organisation in language that is neither clinical jargon nor corporate hygiene. His peer-reviewed research appears in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, and Organization Studies; his commentary appears in the Financial Times, The Economist, the BBC and the New York Times. He chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on New Models of Leadership and has been ranked in the Thinkers50 Top 50 in 2017 and 2021. The argument that runs through all of it is that leadership is not a set of behaviours bolted on top of a career. It is what makes a person trustworthy enough to hold authority in a workplace that no longer holds itself together. Key speaking topics Leadership development in an age of mobile careers Nomadic professionalism and meaningful work Trustworthy leadership and authority in low-trust workplaces Authenticity, identity and the practice of leading Humanising leadership in the digital age Executive development and the role of HR Self-awareness as a leadership discipline Ideal for CEOs, executive committees and boards setting leadership direction during sustained organisational change. CHROs, CLOs and heads of executive development designing senior leadership pipelines. High-potential cohorts and emerging leader programmes inside global firms. Talent and culture leaders rebuilding the relationship between the firm and people who think of themselves as professionals first. Audience outcomes A named frame, nomadic professionalism, for diagnosing why competent people stay, leave, or drift. Sharper language for talking about authority, authenticity, and trust at the top of an organisation. A more clinical view of what leadership development is actually doing to the people inside it. A useful argument against treating wellbeing programmes as a substitute for trustworthy leadership. A clearer set of questions for senior teams designing the next generation of leaders.

Why organisations work with Graeme Codrington The TIDES framework (Technology, Institutional change, Demographics, Environment, and Social values) gives leadership teams a named, structured lens for distinguishing structural disruption from short-term noise, something generic trend-watching rarely provides. His research on generational dynamics, anchored in Mind the Gap (Penguin), is one of the most analytically grounded treatments of multigenerational workforce tension available to leadership teams: it goes beyond labelling generations to explaining the mechanisms that drive the differences. Keynote insight does not stop at the room door: through TomorrowToday Global, organisations can move directly from a session to structured consulting and implementation, which means the analysis has a clear pathway to operational change. He is the only professional speaker inducted into two international speaking Halls of Fame: in South Africa and the UK/Ireland – an independently verified measure of sustained content quality across different professional and cultural contexts. His Seven Grey Elephants model and antifragility framework give boards a structured vocabulary for confronting the major forces that most organisations acknowledge but rarely analyse with discipline. Biography highlights Co-founder and lead futurist, TomorrowToday Global, a research and strategy firm operating across 150-plus countries Author of multiple Penguin bestsellers, including Mind the Gap (with Sue Grant-Marshall) and Leading in a Changing World (with Keith Coats) Guest lecturer at London Business School, Duke Corporate Education, Cornell, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science Only professional speaker inducted into two international speaking Halls of Fame: Southern Africa and UK/Ireland (Professional Speaking Association Award of Excellence) Global Certified Speaking Professional, Global Speakers Federation; Fellow and Honorary Fellow, Professional Speakers Association of UK and Northern Ireland TEDx Top Picks 2021; speaks to approximately 100,000 people annually across more than 20 countries Biography Graeme Codrington has spent over two decades arguing that most organisations are solving the wrong problem. The disruptions they face are not technical challenges requiring better execution, they are adaptive challenges requiring entirely new thinking. His co-founded firm TomorrowToday Global was built around that distinction, and around helping organisations act on it. Codrington is co-founder and lead futurist of TomorrowToday Global, a research and strategy firm tracking the disruptive forces shaping organisations since the early 2000s. His TIDES model maps five forces: Technology, Institutional change, Demographics, Environment, and Social values that drive disruption across any sector. His book Mind the Gap, published by Penguin, applied this thinking to generational dynamics and became a widely used text in leadership development programmes internationally. He lectures at London Business School, Duke Corporate Education, Cornell, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science, and speaks to roughly 100,000 people annually across more than 20 countries. His frameworks have expanded to include the Seven Grey Elephants (a structured analysis of the major forces leaders tend to acknowledge but avoid confronting directly) and an antifragility model that helps organisations move beyond resilience to building systems that actually strengthen under pressure. Codrington is the only professional speaker inducted into two international speaking Halls of Fame, in South Africa and the UK. He holds the Global Certified Speaking Professional designation from the Global Speakers Federation and is a Fellow and Honorary Fellow of the Professional Speakers Association of UK and Northern Ireland. For organisations wanting to move beyond a single session, TomorrowToday Global’s consulting team provides structured follow-through from keynote insight to practical implementation. Key speaking topics Strategic foresight and futurist methodology Future of work and workforce transformation Multigenerational leadership and generational dynamics Adaptive leadership in disruptive environments Organisational antifragility and resilience Innovation culture and next practice approaches The TIDES framework and disruptive forces mapping Ideal for C-suite and board-level leaders building adaptive strategy for permanent disruption CHROs and people leaders managing multigenerational workforce complexity Transformation leads and strategy teams moving beyond traditional planning horizons Executive development programmes at business schools and corporate leadership academies Audience outcomes A working understanding of the distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges, and practical tools for identifying which they are facing Familiarity with the TIDES framework for mapping the disruptive forces most relevant to their sector and strategic context Concrete methods for scanning the business environment for weak signals and translating them into actionable strategy Clarity on what the future of work means for their organisation’s people strategy, including multigenerational dynamics and AI integration A framework for building antifragility into their team or organisation, moving beyond survival-mode resilience

Why organisations work with Howard Webb His concept of «anonymously competent», the trained reflex to seek invisibility rather than make the decisive, visible call, names a leadership trap that senior audiences recognise on first hearing as a live problem in their own organisations – not a sports metaphor, but a precise description of how their institutions reward the wrong behaviour. His career after the pitch, spanning Technical Director at PGMOL, General Manager at the Professional Referee Organization in North America, and now Chief Refereeing Officer at PGMOL, is itself a case study in reforming institutional standards under sustained public pressure. Most sports speakers offer a performing career; Webb offers both. He led the rollout of VAR in North American soccer and returned to England to reform how the Premier League applies the same technology, giving him direct cross-jurisdictional experience in managing the gap between contested innovation and stakeholder trust. Named IFFHS World’s Best Referee in 2010 and 2013, his credentials hold in any boardroom that includes serious sports people, which makes the leadership translation sharper and harder to dismiss. His direct experience of a governance model where every decision is publicly logged, graded, and contested translates to regulated, media-facing organisations where the same conditions increasingly apply to senior leaders. Biography highlights The only referee in history to officiate both the UEFA Champions League Final and the FIFA World Cup Final in the same year (2010) Named IFFHS World’s Best Referee in 2010 and 2013; MBE in the 2011 New Year Honours for services to football First-ever Chief Refereeing Officer, PGMOL (2022), responsible for more than 600 match officials across English professional football Former General Manager, Professional Referee Organization (PRO), leading the match official programme across Major League Soccer and North American football, including the introduction of VAR Approximately 296 Premier League matches as a professional referee (2003-2014); FIFA international referee across nine major tournaments including two FIFA World Cups Former sergeant, South Yorkshire Police; broadcast analyst with BT Sport and ITV Biography Howard Webb became a Premier League referee in 2003 and a FIFA international referee two years later. By 2010, he had officiated both the UEFA Champions League Final and the FIFA World Cup Final in the same year. No referee in the sport’s history had achieved that combination before, or has since. His career after the pitch is equally instructive. As Technical Director at PGMOL and then General Manager of the Professional Referee Organization in North America, Webb led the introduction of VAR across Major League Soccer, managing the institutional resistance, stakeholder scepticism, and communication challenges that accompany contested technological change in any professional environment. His appointment in 2022 as the first-ever Chief Refereeing Officer at PGMOL placed him at the head of a reform programme for more than 600 match officials across the English professional game. Named IFFHS World’s Best Referee in 2010 and 2013 and awarded an MBE in the 2011 New Year Honours, his on-field record gives credibility to the broader argument. His concept of «anonymously competent», the trap of seeking invisibility over decisive action, names a tension that senior leadership audiences recognise immediately in their own organisations. Webb has spoken at forums including the HR Directors Business Summit. The direct parallel is between officiating, where every decision is logged, graded, and publicly contested, and leadership in regulated, media-facing organisations where the same conditions increasingly apply. Key speaking topics Decision-making under pressure Leadership under public scrutiny Accountability and governance in professional organisations High-performance team standards Institutional reform and standards development Technology adoption and stakeholder trust Ideal for Senior leadership teams and C-suite forums in regulated industries including financial services, healthcare, and professional services Boards and governance committees addressing public accountability and decision-making under scrutiny HR and L&D leaders building executive development programmes Sports organisations and governing bodies addressing officiating standards, governance, and reform Audience outcomes A concrete framework for understanding the gap between private competence and public accountability Practical perspective on what it means to make decisive calls when decisions are irreversible and publicly visible Insight into building institutional cultures that sustain performance under contested, public scrutiny A transferable case study in introducing contested technology into a resistant professional community The «anonymously competent» concept as a diagnostic for identifying leadership cultures that reward invisibility over action

Why organisations work with Howard Yu The Future Readiness Indicator – a quantitative, publicly available benchmark developed by Yu’s Center at IMD – gives boards an industry-specific measure of strategic preparedness, replacing intuition with verifiable data and enabling direct comparison with the leading companies in their sector. His LEAP thesis makes a specific and testable claim: competitive longevity depends not on refining the current knowledge base but on deliberately crossing into adjacent disciplines before copycats commoditise what already exists. This is a named argument with an empirical track record, not a generic innovation position. His case material spans century-old incumbents (P&G, Novartis) and recent disruptors (BYD, WeChat) across industries – giving leadership teams cross-sector evidence for what strategic transformation actually looks like, rather than analogies drawn from a single sector. His doctoral research at Harvard Business School was supervised by Clayton Christensen and Joseph Bower – grounding his frameworks in a rigorous empirical tradition and a direct intellectual lineage from the two most cited strategy thinkers of their generation. He co-directs IMD’s Future-Ready Enterprise programme, run jointly with MIT, and has designed and delivered strategic transformation work for organisations including ABB, Novo Nordisk, Heineken, Bosch, and Maersk – his content is tested in demanding executive contexts, not developed for stage consumption alone. Biography highlights LEGO Professor of Management and Innovation, IMD Business School, Switzerland Director, IMD Center for Future Readiness – established with funding from the LEGO Brand Group Creator of the Future Readiness Indicator, a publicly available composite index benchmarking seven industries on long-term strategic preparedness Author of LEAP: How to Thrive in a World Where Everything Can Be Copied (2018) – Axiom Business Book Award winner; named to Inc.’s Best Strategy Books of 2018 Thinkers50 Strategy Award, 2023; included in the Thinkers50 global management thinkers ranking DBA, Harvard Business School, supervised by Clayton Christensen and Joseph Bower Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Forbes; frequent commentator on Bloomberg, BBC, and CNBC Named among the world’s top 40 business professors under 40 by Poets&Quants Biography Yu holds the LEGO Chair in Management and Innovation at IMD Business School and directs the Center for Future Readiness. His research addresses a recurring failure that most strategy teams prefer not to name: the slow commoditisation of the capabilities that once guaranteed advantage, and the organisational inertia that makes it so hard to act before the damage is visible. His book LEAP, winner of the Axiom Business Book Award and named by Inc. as one of the best strategy books of 2018, argues that competitive longevity requires deliberate moves across knowledge disciplines. Companies must leap from the domain that built today’s advantage to the one that will define tomorrow’s, before competitors close the gap. The case material runs from P&G’s sequential moves through manufacturing, consumer psychology, and biotechnology to pharmaceutical firms navigating organic chemistry, microbiology, and genomics over more than a century. That historical argument has a quantitative counterpart. The Future Readiness Indicator, developed by Yu’s Center, is a composite index benchmarking seven industries using publicly available data on R&D investment, revenue generation, and innovation behaviour. At IMD, he co-directs the Future-Ready Enterprise programme, run jointly with MIT, working directly with leadership teams from ABB, Novo Nordisk, Heineken, Bosch, and Maersk. His doctoral work at Harvard Business School was supervised by Clayton Christensen and Joseph Bower. In 2023, he received the Thinkers50 Strategy Award. He writes regularly for Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Forbes, and appears frequently on Bloomberg, the BBC, and CNBC. Key speaking topics Competitive advantage in commoditising markets Strategic leaps and knowledge discipline transitions Future readiness measurement and benchmarking Business model resilience and transformation Innovation strategy in incumbent organisations Long-term value creation under disruption Ideal for Board and C-suite teams confronting decisions about strategic transformation or competitive commoditisation Chief Strategy Officers and heads of corporate development Senior leadership teams at large incumbents in sectors facing digital or technological disruption Executive education cohorts focused on long-term strategy and innovation capability Audience outcomes A specific vocabulary for diagnosing where competitive advantage is in the process of commoditisation, before the position has fully eroded Practical application of the LEAP framework to identify which knowledge discipline transitions are most relevant to their industry and timeline Understanding of how the Future Readiness Indicator works and what the leading companies in their sector are doing differently on the dimensions it measures A shift from generic innovation language to a structured argument about which strategic bets are worth making and when Clarity on the distinction between strategic planning and forward-looking capability-building – and the leadership behaviours that drive the difference

Why organisations work with James Henderson He treats strategy as a sequence of staged commitments, not a single plan, which is what boards facing capital decisions in volatile sectors actually need. His teaching draws on more than 50 published case studies built with named companies, so the room is working with operating examples, not abstractions. He has run IMD’s Strategic Partnerships and Leading Sustainable Business Transformation programs, giving him a working view of how ecosystems and sustainability commitments are reshaping competitive strategy. As a former Dean of Programs and Innovation at IMD, he has built and led large executive programs himself, which translates into sessions designed for senior decision-makers rather than classroom delivery. Biography highlights Professor of Strategic Management, IMD Lausanne, since 2006. Program Director of IMD’s Strategic Partnerships course; Co-Director of Leading Sustainable Business Transformation. Former Dean of Programs and Innovation at IMD (2012 to 2016); launched the Global Leadership in the Cloud online portfolio. Co-edited Restructuring Strategy (Strategic Management Society, 2005); editorial board, Strategic Management Journal. EFMD Excellence in Practice Gold Award (2018); Academy of Management Carolyn Dexter Award (2009); ECCH Best Selling Case in Europe. PhD, INSEAD; MBA, Ivey School of Business; BA Economics, University of Western Ontario. Biography Strategy textbooks describe choices that have already been made. The harder work is the period before, when leaders must commit capital, build partnerships and reshape portfolios while the underlying competitive logic is still moving. That is the territory Henderson has spent twenty years teaching at IMD. He treats strategy as a discipline of staged commitment. Where many frameworks assume a stable view of advantage, his work focuses on options-based investment, corporate venturing, and the timing of moves into new positions. The argument is that senior teams overestimate the cost of acting early and underestimate the cost of waiting for clarity that does not arrive. That work is grounded in operating cases. Henderson has developed more than 50 published case studies, including the Heineken Buckler Beer case that became ECCH’s best-selling case in Europe. He co-edited the Strategic Management Society’s Restructuring Strategy and sits on the editorial board of the Strategic Management Journal, the field’s flagship journal. Inside IMD he has carried operating responsibility as well as faculty responsibility. As Dean of Programs and Innovation he launched the school’s Global Leadership in the Cloud online portfolio. He directs the Strategic Partnerships course and co-directs Leading Sustainable Business Transformation, two of IMD’s anchor programs on how ecosystems and sustainability are reshaping commercial strategy. Key speaking topics Strategy under uncertainty Strategic agility and options-based investment Corporate strategy and portfolio decisions Strategic partnerships and ecosystems Strategy execution Sustainable business transformation Corporate entrepreneurship and new growth platforms Ideal for Boards and executive committees facing capital allocation decisions in volatile or transitioning markets. CSOs, heads of corporate development and strategy teams running portfolio and partnership reviews. CEOs and senior leadership teams working through sustainable business transformation. Senior leadership programs and offsite agendas focused on commitment and execution under uncertainty. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for staging strategic commitments rather than treating strategy as a single decision. A sharper read of when to invest early, when to hold optionality, and when waiting becomes the costlier choice. Operating examples from named companies that map onto the audience’s own portfolio and partnership questions. A view of how ecosystem and sustainability pressures are restructuring competitive advantage in capital-intensive industries.

Why organisations work with Jef Staes He gives leaders a working language for the conflict at the heart of innovation: the Red Monkey model treats the awkward, radical idea as the asset, and the cultural reflex to suppress it as the real problem to solve. His 2D to 3D framework names the specific shift companies are stuck in, from organisations built on standardised competence to ones that run on passion and continuous learning. He has lived both sides of the argument. Two decades inside Siemens and GTE ATEA as software designer, training manager and Corporate Learning Officer, then twenty more building the Red Monkey Company around what he learned was missing. His work is grounded in the academic mainstream of Belgian management education, with visiting lectureships at Vlerick, UAMS and EHSAL, but his delivery is built for general audiences, including four TEDx stages. He addresses culture and innovation as one problem, not two. Most speakers pick a side; Staes argues you cannot fix one without rewiring the other. Biography highlights Author of the Red Monkey trilogy: “I was a sheep”, “My manager is a hero”, and “My organisation is a jungle”. Founder of Red Monkey Company, where he develops the Red Monkey Story and the Engine of Innovation Mindset with client organisations. Former Corporate Learning Officer at Siemens Belgium; earlier career as software designer at GTE ATEA in Belgium and the USA. Visiting lecturer at Vlerick Business School, the University of Antwerp Management School (UAMS), and EHSAL. TEDx speaker on multiple occasions, including TEDxUtrecht with “Behave, brake for red monkeys”. Recurring keynote at OEB Global (Online Educa Berlin), including the Spotlight Stage session “Red Monkey Disruption”. Biography Most organisations are not built to change. They are built to standardise, to repeat, to filter out the awkward. That is the tension Jef Staes has spent four decades inside, first as a software designer at GTE ATEA, then as a training manager and Corporate Learning Officer at Siemens Belgium, and now as the founder of Red Monkey Company. His central argument is that innovation does not fail because organisations lack ideas. It fails because the cultural reflex of any mature company is to reject the radical idea and the person who carries it. The Red Monkey is his name for both. The work, then, is not to generate more ideas, but to redesign the conditions under which a Red Monkey can survive long enough to be tested. Around that core sit two sharper frames. The 2D to 3D shift describes how companies move from running on standardised competence to running on passion-fed expertise. The Power Defect names the structural mismatch between formal authority and actual capability in an information-rich economy. Together they give leaders a vocabulary for problems they usually only feel. Staes writes in metaphor on purpose. The trilogy (“I was a sheep”, “My manager is a hero”, “My organisation is a jungle”) is built for the operator, not the academic, and his TEDx and OEB Global stages reach the same audience. The argument lands because it is unsentimental about how organisations really behave when something new walks in. Key speaking topics Innovation culture and the management of disruptive ideas The 2D to 3D organisational shift The Red Monkey conflict model Learning organisations in the information age Leadership in environments resistant to change Talent, passion and the limits of standardised competence Ideal for Boards and executive teams whose innovation programmes consistently stall after launch CHROs and Chief Learning Officers redesigning learning and talent systems for a knowledge economy Transformation leads and innovation directors trying to protect radical ideas inside conservative cultures Leadership conferences in technology, manufacturing, financial services and the public sector Audience outcomes A working model for why their best ideas keep dying inside their own organisation Language to describe the conflict between standardised competence and passion-driven expertise A clear position on what 3D leadership demands of managers, and where most stop short Recognition of the Power Defect inside their own structure and where it is costing them speed A reframing of resistance to change as an organisational design problem, not a people problem

Why organisations work with Jeff de Kleijn Two decades inside HP and Canon across Asia Pacific and Europe, including running HP’s Large Format Printing business for APJ, gives him operating credibility with senior leaders who have lived through global restructures. Works fluently across Western systems thinking and Chinese strategic philosophy, useful for European and US executive teams navigating Asia exposure without simplifying it. Frames leadership as an operating system question, where decision rights, rhythm and supervisory clarity are the variables, not personality or style. Brings a working executive’s vantage point through his current role leading Dilaco, so the room hears a peer, not a retired commentator. Biography highlights Former General Manager, Large Format Printing Division, HP Asia Pacific and Japan. Senior executive roles at Canon across Europe and Asia. Chief Executive of Dilaco Group since 2019. Founder of Cortlandt Gulch, his leadership advisory and writing platform. Forthcoming book, Postmodern Leadership: Navigating Crises and Complexity in the Information Era. Trained in theatre and improvisation at the Bruges Conservatory of Music & Arts; works in English, Dutch and Chinese. Biography Most large organisations are still wired to push decisions up and instructions down. That structure is breaking against the speed and interdependence of the systems leaders now operate in. Jeff de Kleijn’s work begins from that mismatch, and from the specific question of how senior teams behave once they accept it. His authority on the subject is operational, not theoretical. He spent two decades in senior roles at HP and Canon, including running HP’s Large Format Printing business across Asia Pacific and Japan, before taking over Dilaco, a Belgian IT services group, in 2019. The throughline is leading commercial organisations through restructure, geographic complexity and technology shifts while the formal authority structure was always slightly behind events. He writes and advises through Cortlandt Gulch, and is finishing a book, Postmodern Leadership: Navigating Crises and Complexity in the Information Era, that sets out his core argument. Power inside large organisations has already moved from position to network connectivity. The leaders who are getting traction are the ones rebuilding their operating rhythm, supervisory cadence and decision rights around that fact, rather than working harder inside the old chart. What he brings to a room is the combination of a sitting executive’s vocabulary, exposure to both European and Asian operating cultures, and a stage discipline shaped by training in theatre at the Bruges Conservatory. Senior audiences leave with a sharper view of where their own authority architecture is misfiring, and a vocabulary for fixing it. Key speaking topics Networked and decentralised leadership Decision rights and supervisory clarity in complex organisations Leadership operating models under systemic uncertainty AI as an institutional, not technological, force Eastern and Western strategic thought in executive practice Restructuring and post-transformation leadership Ideal for Boards and executive committees redesigning how authority and decision rights operate post-restructure CEOs and group MDs of multi-region businesses with significant Asia exposure Private equity portfolio leadership teams under pressure to operate with fewer layers Transformation and strategy leads working on the leadership operating model, not just structure Audience outcomes A clearer read on where their current authority structure is the bottleneck, not the workload Specific language for separating control, coordination and supervision as distinct leadership tasks A working frame for combining Western strategic analysis with Chinese strategic thinking in real decisions A more honest internal conversation about what their organisation actually needs from its top team

Why organisations work with Jeff DeGraff He brings a tested intellectual frame, the Competing Values Framework, that gives executives a shared language for the trade-offs they already feel but cannot resolve. His Innovatrium has built innovation programmes inside more than half the Fortune 500, including Google, Apple, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, NASA and Microsoft, so the methods are stress-tested in real operating conditions. The work crosses sectors that rarely share a stage: commercial, military (US Air Force, NATO, Singapore Armed Forces), academic and mission-driven, which sharpens his diagnosis of what is structural and what is industry-specific. He treats innovation as a system of competing roles (Artist, Engineer, Athlete, Sage), so leaders leave with a way to staff and sequence change, not a motivational pep talk. The Ross School base and the Certified Professional Innovator programme give buyers a credible academic anchor when they need to sell the engagement internally. Biography highlights Clinical Professor of Management and Organizations, University of Michigan Ross School of Business, since 1990. Co-creator of the Competing Values Framework, with Robert Quinn, Kim Cameron and John Rohrbaugh. Founder of the Innovatrium Institute for Innovation, working with Fortune 500 firms, NASA and allied military commands. Author of The Art of Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2025), The Creative Mindset, The Innovation Code, Leading Innovation and Competing Values Leadership. Host of the PBS programme Innovation You and contributor to Michigan Public’s The Next Idea. Former Vice President of Communications and New Ventures at Domino’s Pizza during the period the company scaled from a regional chain to a global brand. Biography Innovation inside large organisations rarely fails for lack of ideas. It fails because the same organisation rewards efficiency, control and reliability while asking a small group to break those very rules. That tension is the subject Jeff DeGraff has spent his career mapping, first as a co-creator of the Competing Values Framework alongside Robert Quinn, Kim Cameron and John Rohrbaugh, and then as the architect of a more applied body of work on innovation as a system. The academic anchor is the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, where he has been Clinical Professor of Management and Organizations since 1990. The applied side is the Innovatrium, the institute he founded to put the theory into contact with operating reality. Through Innovatrium and direct consulting, his methods have been used inside more than half the Fortune 500, including Google, Apple, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, Microsoft and NASA, and inside the US Air Force, NATO and the Singapore Armed Forces. His three most recent books, The Innovation Code (2017), The Creative Mindset (2020) and The Art of Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2025), form a single argument. Innovation is not a personality trait, it is a discipline of holding competing values long enough to produce something new. The Innovation Code translates that into roles and team design. The Creative Mindset breaks creative work into six trainable skills. The Art of Change reframes paradox itself as the engine of transformation. The career arc explains the bias toward application. He earned his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985 and went directly into industry as Vice President of Communications and New Ventures at Domino’s Pizza, where the nickname “Dean of Innovation” stuck. The work since has kept the same shape: a serious framework, tested against organisations that cannot afford abstractions. Key speaking topics Innovation strategy and operating models Competing Values Framework in practice Creative leadership and team design Organisational change and transformation Culture and capability for sustained innovation Cross-sector innovation: commercial, public, military Paradox and decision-making under competing priorities Ideal for CEOs and executive teams under pressure to deliver core performance and a credible innovation agenda at the same time Chief Innovation Officers, CSOs and heads of strategy designing or rebuilding innovation operating models CHROs and learning leaders building creative capability across senior cohorts Public-sector, defence and mission-driven leadership groups that need a private-sector grade innovation method Audience outcomes A shared language for the competing demands inside the business and a way to talk about them without picking sides A working model for staffing innovation teams across distinct creative roles rather than relying on a few “creative” individuals A practical sequence for turning paradoxes (efficiency versus experimentation, control versus autonomy) into design decisions Confidence that innovation can be built as a repeatable system, not a personality-driven exception Examples drawn from companies, NASA and military commands that translate cleanly back to the audience’s own context

Why organisations work with Jeffrey Pfeffer His research quantifies what most HR functions treat as intangible: the measurable physical health cost of management decisions on job insecurity, autonomy, and workload – giving boards and CHROs a data-backed case for structural change rather than wellness programmes. “Leadership BS” provides executives with a named, argued critique of why leadership development investment typically fails – and a framework for what evidence-based practice looks like instead, which is directly usable in programme redesign conversations. His Stanford elective “Paths to Power” distils decades of research on how organisational power actually operates – not how it should – giving senior leaders an accurate map of the dynamics shaping their own institutions. He is one of the few management academics whose work has been covered seriously in both peer-reviewed journals and mainstream business media, making his arguments accessible to boards and executive committees without losing analytical credibility. His willingness to argue positions that contradict the consulting and coaching industry – on leadership myths, on power, on workplace harm – makes him a genuinely disruptive voice in executive conversations where polished consensus is the norm. Biography highlights Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior, Stanford Graduate School of Business – one of the institution’s longest-serving faculty members in that department Author of approximately 15 books including “Dying for a Paycheck” (HarperBusiness, 2018), “Leadership BS” (HarperBusiness, 2015), and “Power: Why Some People Have It – and Others Don’t” (HarperBusiness, 2010) Co-author with Robert Sutton of “Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense” (Harvard Business School Press, 2006) – a foundational text in evidence-based management Creator and long-running instructor of the Stanford MBA elective “Paths to Power” Published in and extensively covered by Harvard Business Review across multiple decades Recognised on the Thinkers50 ranking of global management thinkers Biography Jeffrey Pfeffer has spent five decades at Stanford asking an uncomfortable question: if organisations invest heavily in leadership development, why do workplaces keep producing the same failures? His answer, built across roughly 15 books and more than 150 academic articles, is that most management practice is not grounded in evidence – it is grounded in optimism, ideology, and the preferences of an industry that profits from selling aspiration. His 2015 book “Leadership BS” made this argument directly and with data. The leadership development industry, Pfeffer argued, systematically teaches qualities – humility, authenticity, servant leadership – that do not predict outcomes in real organisations, while ignoring what the evidence actually shows about how power and authority work. “Power: Why Some People Have It – and Others Don’t” offered the corrective: a clear-eyed, research-based account of how influence is built and exercised, drawn from his long-running Stanford MBA elective “Paths to Power.” “Dying for a Paycheck,” published in 2018, extended the argument into territory most organisations find harder to discuss. Pfeffer documented, with epidemiological and workplace data, that management decisions on job insecurity, autonomy, long hours, and benefits have direct, measurable effects on employee health – making the workplace, he argued, the fifth leading cause of death in the United States. The implication for senior leaders is significant: workforce wellbeing is not a culture initiative, it is a consequence of operational and strategic choices made at the top. As Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford GSB, Pfeffer brings this body of work directly into executive conversations. His value is not a programme or a model – it is a sustained, evidence-based argument that organisations routinely make avoidable, costly mistakes about people, and a clear account of what taking the evidence seriously would require. Key speaking topics Evidence-based management and leadership practice Organisational power and influence The economics of workplace health and employee wellbeing Leadership development – what works and what does not Workplace conditions and workforce performance Decision-making under organisational pressure Strategy execution and the role of power dynamics Ideal for CHROs and CPOs reviewing the design and ROI of leadership development programmes CEOs and boards seeking an evidence-based challenge to prevailing management assumptions Transformation leads and organisational development functions designing large-scale change Executive education programme directors at business schools and corporate universities Audience outcomes A grounded, data-backed critique of standard leadership development assumptions – with specific alternative approaches A clearer understanding of how power and influence actually operate in organisations, distinct from how formal authority is structured Practical framing for the business case linking management decisions to workforce health and productivity outcomes Sharper questions to apply to existing people strategy, programme design, and organisational structure A working vocabulary for distinguishing evidence-based management practice from received wisdom

Why organisations work with Jennifer Jordan Her seven tensions framework, built from surveys of more than 1,000 senior executives and published in Harvard Business Review with Michael Wade, gives leadership teams a shared language for the contradictions that actually slow them down. She directs IMD’s Leading Digital Execution and Leadership Essentials programmes, so the work she brings to a boardroom is the same work she runs with executive cohorts every month. Her doctoral training at Yale in social psychology means the advice on power, influence, and ethical lapse rests on peer-reviewed research, not anecdote. She translates academic findings into operational decisions: when to slow a leader down, when to add a shadow board, when a decision should be made by data and when by judgment. Recognised by Poets&Quants on its 2019 Best 40 Under 40 list and the Thinkers50 Radar in the same year, she sits in the small group of leadership researchers whose work senior executives are actively asking for. Biography highlights Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior, IMD Business School, Lausanne. Director of IMD’s Leading Digital Execution and Leadership Essentials programmes. PhD in Psychology, Yale University; postdoctoral fellow at Kellogg School of Management and Tuck School of Business. Co-author with Michael Wade of “Every Leader Needs to Navigate These 7 Tensions,” Harvard Business Review, 2020. Named by Poets&Quants to its 2019 Best 40 Under 40 business school professors list and nominated to the Thinkers50 Radar in the same year. Research published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Psychological Science, Journal of Management, and Business Ethics Quarterly. Biography Most leadership advice still asks executives to pick a side. Be visionary or be operational. Trust the data or trust your gut. Hold authority or share it. The senior leaders Jennifer Jordan studies do not have that luxury, and her research is built around the cost of pretending they do. Jordan is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IMD in Lausanne, where she directs the Leading Digital Execution and Leadership Essentials programmes. Her 2020 Harvard Business Review piece with Michael Wade, drawn from surveys of more than 1,000 senior leaders, set out seven tensions that define the modern executive role, from expert to learner, from controller to architect, from constant to adaptor. The framework is now used inside leadership development at major firms. Trained as a social psychologist at Yale, she works on the harder edge of the leadership question: power, influence, and the conditions under which capable people make ethical mistakes. That research is published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Psychological Science, and the Journal of Management, and it underpins her work on leadership transitions, family business succession, and women on boards. Her recognition is concrete. Poets&Quants placed her on its 2019 Best 40 Under 40 list of business school professors, citing close to 1,500 academic citations of her work. Thinkers50 named her to its Radar list of management thinkers to watch in the same year. With Mahwesh Khan, she has argued in HBR for shadow boards as a structural answer to generational distance at the top of organisations, a recommendation that several large European firms have since adopted. Key speaking topics Leadership in the digital age Power, influence, and ethics Leadership transitions and succession Decision-making under contradiction Women on boards and inclusive leadership Family business leadership Shadow boards and intergenerational governance Ideal for CEOs and executive committees are navigating contradictory strategic demands. CHROs and heads of leadership development are designing senior leader programmes. Board chairs and nominating committees are working on succession and governance. Family business principals and next-generation leaders are preparing to take over. Audience outcomes A direct read on the seven tensions that define senior leadership today, with practical tests for which behaviour each situation calls for. A clearer view of how power changes a leader’s judgement, and the routines that keep that change in check. Sharper questions for succession and leadership transitions, including how shadow boards and reverse mentoring change board-level perspective. A research-grounded account of why digital execution stalls at the top of organisations, and what senior leaders can do about it.

Why organisations work with Jennifer Vessels The P.E.A.C.E. Framework gives transformation a structured language and methodology: not abstract change theory, but a tested roadmap built from live engagements inside organisations including Adobe, Cisco, and Novartis She brings Silicon Valley operational experience applied globally. Having led transformation programmes across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, she translates insider knowledge of how the world’s most innovation-intensive organisations actually work into practical approaches for complex, multinational businesses She is an active CEO running transformation programmes concurrently with her speaking engagements, meaning her insights reflect current deployments, not retrospective case studies Her work on generational integration, aligning Gen Z talent, AI capability, and experienced human capital, addresses a workforce tension that most change and transformation speakers do not tackle with equivalent specificity Through the Executive Growth Alliance (EGA), she connects audiences to a live community of F100 leaders navigating the same challenges, giving organisations access to a peer learning network beyond the event itself Biography highlights CEO of Next Step, Silicon Valley consulting firm leading business transformation for global enterprises since 2006 Founder, Executive Growth Alliance: a global peer community of Fortune 100 leaders focused on future-of-work and AI adoption Creator of the P.E.A.C.E. Framework (Purpose, Exploration, Action, Collaboration, Empowerment), deployed across organisations including Adobe, Cisco, Google, IKEA, Microsoft, Novartis, and Schneider Electric Awarded “Best Technology Speaker ’24” (IOFM, Diversified Communications) Author of No Clue, No Fear: Navigating Storms of Change; new book Emergence: How Leaders Break Free from Outdated Thinking (Wiley, October 2026) Featured by EFMD, the World Economic Forum, the Institute of Directors, the San Jose Mercury News, and The New York Times MBA, San Jose State University; MS Occupational Psychology, University of London; INSEAD board governance certification Early career: international business development at Tandberg (acquired by Cisco); Director of Global Sales Operations at Tandem Computers Biography Leadership thinking built for the Industrial Age is not built for what organisations are experiencing now. Most change programmes assume that if the strategy is sound and the technology is right, transformation will follow. It does not. The missing variable is almost always how leaders are thinking, and what they are willing to let go of. Jennifer Vessels has spent two decades inside that gap, working as CEO of Next Step across Silicon Valley, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Her client list includes Adobe, Cisco, Google, IKEA, Microsoft, Novartis, and Schneider Electric: organisations navigating business model change, AI adoption, and leadership redesign at scale. From that operational experience, she developed the P.E.A.C.E. Framework: a structured methodology giving leaders a repeatable roadmap through disruptive change rather than a case for why change is necessary. What distinguishes her position is its currency. She is not drawing on past engagements. As an active CEO running transformation programmes alongside her speaking work, the examples she brings to audiences reflect live challenges rather than archived successes. She also founded the Executive Growth Alliance, a community of F100 leaders using collaborative challenge-resolution as a vehicle for building future-readiness collectively. Her book Emergence: How Leaders Break Free from Outdated Thinking (Wiley, October 2026), endorsed by Thinkers50 co-founder Stuart Crainer, extends the framework into a broader argument about the leadership models that are no longer fit for purpose, and what replaces them. Key speaking topics AI Adoption and Human-Centred Integration Change Leadership and Organisational Transformation Future of Work and Generational Integration The P.E.A.C.E. Framework for Leading Through Change Silicon Valley Innovation Applied to Global Business Business Model Redesign in an AI Era Ideal for CEOs and senior leadership teams navigating business model transformation or AI adoption programmes Boards and executive committees seeking a working practitioner’s perspective on AI-era leadership CHROs and people leaders managing generational integration, workforce redesign, and future-of-work strategy Transformation leads and change management functions inside large multinational organisations Audience outcomes A structured, repeatable framework (P.E.A.C.E.) that gives teams shared language for leading through uncertainty, usable Monday morning A clear diagnosis of why AI adoption and transformation programmes stall at the leadership level, with specific approaches to address it Practical tools for integrating generational diversity, particularly Gen Z talent alongside experienced human capital and AI capability A first-hand view of how organisations including Adobe, Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia are integrating people with advanced technology, applied to the audience’s own market A mindset shift from defending what is crumbling to building what is emerging, positioning disruption as a source of competitive advantage

Why organisations work with Jeremy Blain He has published the operating detail behind distributed leadership, including a five-point organisational blueprint and a 90-day implementation roadmap, so the conversation moves past intent into execution. His OpenHR framework, co-authored with Dr. Rochelle Haynes, gives HR and people leaders a working model for designing a workforce that blends employees, contractors, and open talent without losing coherence. Twenty-five years operating as a CEO and board officer across the UK and Asia, including seven years running an international consultancy from Singapore, mean the boardroom register is native, not learned. Recognition from credible third parties, Gold at the 2024 Global Book Awards for Unleash the Inner CEO and ACQ5 International Gamechanger of the Year 2023, confirms the work has been independently judged on substance. He brings frameworks that travel beyond the keynote, with diagnostic tools and culture-building activities organisations can take into their own leadership development programmes. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Performance Works International, advising boards and executive teams on leadership and digital transformation. Author of The Inner CEO and the second edition Unleash the Inner CEO, both award-winning titles on distributed leadership. Co-author with Dr. Rochelle Haynes of OpenHR: The Human Capital Framework for the Blended Workforce. Fellow of the Institute of Directors, London since 2003; senior board advisor to WDHB and co-founder of the Transformational Leadership Acceleration Institute. Named International Gamechanger of the Year by ACQ5 in 2023. Featured in Forbes, The Times of London, CEO Today, Dialogue by Duke CE, and Business Matters; host of the Rethink Leadership podcast. Biography Distributed leadership has been talked about for two decades. What has been missing is a working model that boards and operating committees can actually run. Jeremy Blain has spent his career building that model, first as a CEO and board officer in the UK and Asia, and now as the founder of Performance Works International. The argument is set out in The Inner CEO and its updated second edition, Unleash the Inner CEO, which won Gold in the Business Leadership category at the 2024 Global Book Awards. The book offers a five-point blueprint for the conditions, structures, and processes that make distributed leadership operational, plus a 90-day roadmap for managers and individual contributors. It is closer to an implementation manual than a thesis. A second strand of the work, OpenHR, co-authored with Dr. Rochelle Haynes, addresses what happens when the workforce itself is no longer a single category. As organisations blend employees, contractors, freelancers, and open talent, traditional human capital systems strain. OpenHR offers a framework, glossary, and templates for designing people strategy across that mix. The credibility behind the frameworks is operational. Seven years running an international consultancy from Singapore. Twenty-five years in corporate learning and human capital. Senior board roles at WDHB and the Intercontinental School of Economics and Applied Sciences. ACQ5 named him International Gamechanger of the Year in 2023, and his commentary appears in Forbes, The Times of London, and Dialogue by Duke CE. Boards work with him because the prescriptions come with the receipts. Key speaking topics Distributed leadership as an operating model Digital and AI transformation for boards and executive teams Human capital strategy for the blended workforce Empowerment and accountability at scale Leadership development across multinational and multi-generational teams Culture and capability for hybrid, AI-enabled organisations Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and executive committees rewiring decision rights and accountability across the organisation CHROs and chief people officers designing for a workforce that combines full-time, contract, and open talent Boards reviewing the leadership and culture preconditions for digital and AI transformation Transformation, change, and leadership development leads building scalable programmes across regions Audience outcomes A clearer view of where authority and accountability are misaligned in their own organisation A practical reference model for distributing leadership without losing strategic coherence A framework for designing human capital strategy across employees, contractors, and open talent Specific diagnostic questions to take into the next executive committee or board agenda Language for confronting the gap between stated leadership values and observed leadership behaviour