Culture organisationnelle speakers

Why organisations work with Kanika Chadda Gupta A live interviewer who can carry a senior-leader fireside, a customer panel and an all-hands Q&A inside the same event, with the journalistic preparation of a network anchor rather than a generalist host. A working-parent and caregiver lens grounded in years of conversations with the audience itself, through the That’s Total Mom Sense podcast and its named guests including Chelsea Clinton, Kelly Rowland and America Ferrera. AAPI and South Asian heritage programming led by someone with cultural authority, not a borrowed brief, useful for Heritage Month moments where credibility is what makes the session land. Recognised by JPMorgan Chase, Industrious and KNOW Women as a 2023 100 Women to KNOW Across America honouree, which travels well with internal sponsors who want a credentialled external voice on women’s progression. A second business as founder of Kronologie Agency, so brand, storytelling and marketing-to-mothers content is delivered with operator credibility, not theory. Biography highlights Former television journalist and anchor, with CNN India reporting credits including coverage of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks. Host of That’s Total Mom Sense, featured in Forbes and on ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and Cheddar. 2023 honouree, 100 Women to KNOW Across America, presented by JPMorgan Chase, Industrious and KNOW Women. Director for Women in Media at HeyMama; Official Podcast Partner of Mom 2.0 with Everyday Health and BabyCenter. Founder and CEO of Kronologie Agency, a New York digital marketing and branding firm. Trained Kuchipudi classical dancer and Hindustani vocalist; former Miss India Maryland and Miss India East Coast. Biography Working parents are the silent majority inside most large employers, yet leave, benefits and culture programmes still treat them as a special case. That mismatch is where Kanika Chadda Gupta does her most useful work. Her years interviewing CEOs, founders and public figures on That’s Total Mom Sense gave her a clear view of what working parents actually need from their employer, and what they quietly resent. The journalism credential is not decoration. She trained as a broadcast journalist and anchored at CNN, including coverage of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, before moving into long-form interviewing. On stage that shows up as preparation: she reads in, asks the question the audience wanted asked, and does not let a panel drift. Forbes, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and Cheddar have all featured the podcast and her guest list runs from Chelsea Clinton to Kelly Rowland to America Ferrera. Her topical authority sits on three tracks. Working-parent and caregiver policy, anchored in interview evidence and her role as Director for Women in Media at HeyMama. Women’s progression, recognised by JPMorgan Chase, Industrious and KNOW Women in their 2023 100 Women to KNOW Across America cohort. And AAPI and South Asian heritage, delivered with the cultural authority of someone trained in Kuchipudi classical dance and Hindustani vocal music since childhood. She also runs Kronologie Agency, a New York branding and digital marketing firm, which gives her a second register: marketing-to-mothers content delivered by an operator who has built campaigns, not just talked about them. Employers booking her for a Heritage Month moment, a working-parent ERG event or a customer fireside get a host who has done the reading and a topical voice who has done the work. Key speaking topics Working parents and caregivers in corporate culture Women’s progression and leadership development AAPI and South Asian heritage programming Marketing and brand storytelling for mother-led households Interview craft and on-stage moderation Storytelling for television, podcast and new media Ideal for CHROs, DEI leads and ERG sponsors designing working-parent, women’s and AAPI heritage programming CMOs and brand teams targeting mother-led household decision-making Internal communications and event leads booking a fireside, customer panel or all-hands moderator Heads of talent and culture running employee summits where journalistic interview craft matters more than a keynote Audience outcomes A clearer read on where current working-parent policy is failing in practice and which fixes employees actually value Specific language for sponsoring women’s progression and AAPI heritage moments without slipping into compliance theatre A marketing perspective on mother-led households that goes beyond demographic data A session moderated or hosted with network-journalist preparation, not generalist host energy Direct exposure to interview-based insight from named senior figures the audience would recognise

Why organisations work with Karen Blackett She ran WPP in the UK during the COVID turnaround, responsible for around US$2 billion of revenue and 13,000 people, which gives her authority on what cultural change at FTSE scale actually requires. During her five years as CEO of MediaCom UK, ethnic diversity moved from 11% to 19% and women in senior management reached 44%, the kind of attributable shift most leadership talks cannot reference. As the UK government’s Race Equality Business Champion under the Race at Work Charter, she has worked across sectors on the specific mechanics of progression, not the rhetoric of inclusion. Her current Diageo board seat and her co-founder role at the Black Equity Organisation give her a live view of how the same questions land in a FTSE 10 boardroom and in national civil society. Biography highlights Former UK President, WPP, with responsibility for around US$2 billion of revenue and 13,000 people. Former CEO of MediaCom UK and CEO of GroupM UK; MediaCom named Campaign Agency of the Year in 2013 and 2014 under her leadership. Non-Executive Director, Diageo plc, since June 2022; member of the Nomination and Remuneration Committees. Non-Executive Director, Cabinet Office Board; previously UK Race Equality Business Champion under the Race at Work Charter. Co-founder, Black Equity Organisation (2021), alongside David Lammy, David Olusoga, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Ric Lewis and Dame Vivian Hunt. Chancellor of the University of Portsmouth, the first alumna to hold the position. Awarded CBE (2025) for services to Advertising and the Creative Industries; OBE (2014); first businesswoman to top the Powerlist. Biography Running a marketing services group of 13,000 people through a pandemic exposes whether a leader’s cultural language is operational or decorative. WPP UK was Karen Blackett’s brief for four years, with around US$2 billion of revenue under her remit and a workforce that needed to be both held together and pushed forward. She came to the role after running MediaCom UK as CEO, where the agency was named Campaign Agency of the Year in 2013 and 2014. The MediaCom record is the one she is most often asked about. Across her five years as CEO, ethnic diversity in the business moved from 11% to 19% and women in senior management reached 44%. Those numbers are unusual because they exist at all. Most senior leaders speaking on culture cannot point to a specific business they changed by a specific amount. That track record is why government and boards now use her. She was appointed UK Race Equality Business Champion in 2018 by Prime Minister Theresa May, working through the Race at Work Charter with Business in the Community. She sits on the Cabinet Office Board as a Non-Executive Director, and on the Diageo board as a Non-Executive Director, where she is a member of the Nomination and Remuneration Committees. In 2021 she co-founded the Black Equity Organisation with David Lammy, David Olusoga, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Ric Lewis and Dame Vivian Hunt, an independent national civil rights body for Black Britons. She was awarded an OBE in 2014 and a CBE in the 2025 King’s New Year Honours. She was the first businesswoman to top the Powerlist of Britain’s 100 most influential Black people, in 2015. Key speaking topics Leadership at scale through periods of disruption Culture as an operating system, not a statement Inclusion as a measurable business outcome Board-level race equity and the Race at Work agenda Future of work in marketing and creative industries Brand, growth and consumer change Ideal for CEO and board audiences considering how to make culture or inclusion commitments measurable CHROs, CPOs and group HR directors responsible for senior progression data Marketing and communications leadership teams in FTSE-scale businesses Networks and councils focused on Black leadership progression in UK corporates Audience outcomes A board-level frame for treating culture as part of operating performance rather than a separate workstream. A specific worked example of how senior leadership composition changes when progression mechanics are redesigned. A clearer view of where Race at Work Charter commitments most often fail and what holds them in place. Sharper language for talking about inclusion in a contested external environment without retreating to compliance speak.

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

Why organisations work with Karl Burrows He turns abstract values into a physical, shared act. Teams leave having done something together, not just heard about it. His framing of authenticity as ego-aware self-leadership cuts through the usual corporate language and gives senior leaders a more honest vocabulary for how they show up. The cultural source material is genuine. Burrows is of Maori and European descent, learned haka and te reo through his Taranaki tribal connection, and treats the practice with the seriousness that distinguishes it from team-building theatre. His commercial track record speaks to a range. Hakaworks has worked with IBM, Vodafone, BP, Shell, Philips, BT, Deloitte, GSK and American Express across keynote, workshop and after-dinner formats. He brings a corporate operator’s lens. An MBA from Cranfield and years as a commercial lawyer for Procter and Gamble, DHL and Equifax mean he speaks the language of the room he is working with. Biography highlights Founder and Managing Director of Hakaworks, London. Co-founder of Manaia, the performance and education company established in London in 2004. MBA, Cranfield University. Former commercial lawyer and negotiator for Procter and Gamble, DHL and Equifax. Corporate engagements include IBM, Vodafone, BP, Shell, Philips, BT, Deloitte, GSK and American Express. Host of the Haka Works Talks podcast; podcast guest on The New P&L Principles and Leadership and TeamBonding. Biography Most corporate culture work happens in slides and surveys. Hakaworks works in the body. The London-based company Karl Burrows founded uses Maori cultural practice, including haka, to make team identity something a group does together rather than describes to itself. The methodology has taken Hakaworks into IBM, Vodafone, BP, Shell, Deloitte, GSK and American Express. The grounding is genuine. Burrows is of Maori and European descent, learned te reo and the haka of his Taranaki tribal area, and co-founded Manaia in London in 2004 as a way for haka performers to share the practice. Hakaworks grew from that, and the seriousness of the cultural source is what separates the work from generic team-building. The intellectual frame underneath the practice is authentic leadership. Burrows argues that authenticity demands self-awareness about ego and the discipline to set it aside, so leaders respond from values rather than identity defence. The argument lands harder because it is paired with a physical act that asks a room to commit visibly to a shared intent. He brings a corporate operator’s vocabulary to the work. An MBA from Cranfield and years as a commercial lawyer for Procter and Gamble, DHL and Equifax mean he understands the rooms he is invited into, and reads what a leadership team actually needs from a session rather than delivering a fixed set piece. Key speaking topics Authentic leadership and ego Team unity and trust Organisational culture and values in practice Purpose and collective performance Ritual as a leadership tool Maori cultural practice in business contexts Ideal for CHROs and culture leads running team-bonding offsites or culture interventions Senior leadership teams working through trust and unity issues Sales kickoffs, all-hands moments and conferences that need a shared experience rather than another panel Executive development programmes focused on authentic leadership Audience outcomes A shared physical experience the team can refer back to long after the room empties A more direct vocabulary for talking about ego, authenticity and how leaders show up under pressure A practical sense of how ritual and ceremony can be used to mark commitment to a strategy or change A felt understanding of what collective intent looks like, beyond a values poster

Why organisations work with Kate Cook Twenty-five years running a Harley Street nutrition practice gives her a clinical evidence base that most wellbeing speakers do not have. Audiences hear from a practitioner, not a motivational presenter. A defined corporate proposition built around three named talks (Sugar Bites Back, Genes Load the Gun, Lifestyle Pulls the Trigger, Vibrant Energy) rather than a single generalist wellness keynote. Author of The Corporate Wellness Bible, a workplace-specific text that frames nutrition and energy as organisational concerns, not personal lifestyle advice. Track record with demanding employers, including Bank of England, JP Morgan, Shell, Accenture and GE Healthcare, where the audience is sceptical and time-poor. TEDx speaker for Fidelity International, with a media presence in The Sunday Express, Marie Claire and Red that gives her communication credibility outside the wellness echo chamber. Biography highlights Founder of The Nutrition Coach, Harley Street, since 2000. Trained at the Institute for Optimum Nutrition; Master’s in the Anthropology of Food; undergraduate degree from Royal Holloway, University of London. Author of The Corporate Wellness Bible, Get Healthy for Good and Be Incredibly Healthy (with Sally Brown). TEDx speaker for Fidelity International on workplace wellness. Corporate clients include Bank of England, JP Morgan, EDF Energy, Accenture, Shell, GE Healthcare and Pret a Manger. Columnist for The Sunday Express and Marie Claire; television appearances, including The Truth of Beauty. Biography Corporate wellbeing is one of the easier line items to fund and one of the harder ones to measure. Programmes proliferate, engagement stays patchy, and the link between workforce health and commercial output remains anecdotal. Kate Cook has spent twenty-five years working on that gap from the practitioner side. She founded The Nutrition Coach on Harley Street in 2000 and has since worked with more than 7,000 individual clients alongside an international corporate practice. The mix matters. Clinical work with senior professionals informs the corporate sessions; the corporate sessions stress-test what actually changes behaviour at scale inside a working week. Her writing reflects the same orientation. The Corporate Wellness Bible treats workplace nutrition, energy and stress as organisational concerns rather than personal projects. Get Healthy for Good and Be Incredibly Healthy, co-authored with Sally Brown, sit alongside columns for The Sunday Express and Marie Claire and a TEDx talk delivered for Fidelity International. The audience she is built for is an employer trying to make wellbeing operational. Clients have included Bank of England, JP Morgan, Shell, EDF Energy, Accenture and GE Healthcare, organisations where the standard for an external voice is high and the tolerance for generic wellness messaging is low. Key speaking topics Workplace wellbeing and productivity Nutrition and sustained energy at work Sugar, stress and behavioural change Lifestyle, genetics and long-term health Corporate wellness strategy and programme design Mental and physical health in high-pressure roles Ideal for CHROs, heads of wellbeing and culture leads are designing or refreshing corporate wellness programmes. Senior leadership offsites where energy, focus and resilience are part of the agenda. Employee conferences in high-intensity sectors such as financial services, professional services and energy. Health and wellbeing weeks where the brief calls for clinical credibility alongside accessible delivery. Audience outcomes A working understanding of how nutrition, sleep and stress interact to shape daily performance. Practical changes audiences can make the same week, drawn from clinical practice rather than wellness trend cycles. A clearer organisational case for why wellbeing investment should be measured against engagement and productivity, not participation. Specific tools for managing energy through long days, travel and high-cognitive-load periods. Confidence to challenge the sugar, caffeine and convenience defaults built into corporate working life.

Why organisations work with Keith Ferrazzi He works at the level above leadership development: the operating system of the senior team itself, where most strategy execution actually breaks down. Twenty years of applied research at Ferrazzi Greenlight, including the dataset behind Never Lead Alone, gives him a defensible model of what the top 15 percent of teams do differently. He named and codified co-elevation, a vocabulary CEOs and CHROs already use to describe peer accountability without formal authority. Five New York Times bestsellers, including Never Eat Alone and Never Lead Alone (USA Today bestseller, Forbes Top 10 Business Books of 2024), give him reach and credibility with senior audiences before he walks on stage. His sessions are diagnostic rather than inspirational: leadership teams typically leave with a read on their own performance against the teamship shifts and a starting point for what to change. Biography highlights Founder and chairman of Ferrazzi Greenlight, a research and consulting firm focused on executive team performance and the future of work. Founder of the Radical Innovators Collaborative, a peer network of Fortune 500 CIOs and CHROs working inside live enterprise transformation. Author of five New York Times bestsellers, including Never Eat Alone, Leading Without Authority, Competing in the New World of Work, and Never Lead Alone. Never Lead Alone (HarperCollins, 2024): USA Today bestseller and one of Forbes’ Top 10 Business Books of 2024. Former Chief Marketing Officer of Deloitte and Starwood Hotels and Resorts. Named a Global Leader of Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum. Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, Inc., and the Wall Street Journal. Biography Most senior teams are designed to report, not to collaborate. Members are accountable to the CEO, not to each other, and that asymmetry shows up the moment the organisation tries to move at speed. This is the problem Ferrazzi Greenlight has been studying for two decades, and it is the territory Keith Ferrazzi has made his own. The work began with relationships. Never Eat Alone, published in 2005, became a business classic by treating networking as a discipline of generosity rather than transaction. Three books later, the focus has shifted from individual influence to what happens between peers at the top of an organisation. Leading Without Authority introduced co-elevation as the mechanism. Never Lead Alone, a USA Today bestseller and a Forbes Top 10 Business Book of 2024, sets out ten specific shifts that distinguish the highest-performing teams in his research dataset. The same logic now sits behind the Radical Innovators Collaborative, a peer community Ferrazzi convenes for Fortune 500 CIOs and CHROs working through AI-driven transformation. The credibility behind that work is operational, not academic. Ferrazzi was Chief Marketing Officer of Deloitte and then of Starwood Hotels and Resorts, after Yale and Harvard Business School. He was named a Global Leader of Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum and contributes regularly to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, and the Wall Street Journal. What he brings to a senior audience is not a talk on collaboration in the abstract. It is a diagnostic frame for the team in the room: where peer accountability is real, where it is theatre, and which of the teamship shifts would change the most about how the organisation actually executes. Key speaking topics Executive team performance Teamship and co-elevation Leading without authority Peer-to-peer accountability Future of work and radical adaptability Organisational collaboration across silos AI and the redesign of team operating models Ideal for CEOs and executive committees are rebuilding how the top team works together CHROs and chief people officers leading culture and leadership transformations Boards and senior leadership offsites focused on execution speed Transformation leads inside organisations, breaking down functional silos Audience outcomes A clear read on where their own senior team sits against the teamship shifts that distinguish the top performers in Ferrazzi’s research. Specific behaviours that move accountability from vertical to peer-to-peer without dismantling the reporting line. A working vocabulary of co-elevation that senior teams can use to call out unhelpful patterns in real time. A view of how AI-native ways of working are changing what a high-performing leadership team looks like.

Why organisations work with Keith Wyche He has actually run the P&L. Former President of Cub Foods and ACME Markets, former President of US Operations at Pitney Bowes, and a retired Walmart Vice President. His view on change comes from someone who has signed off on it. He sits on corporate boards today. As an Independent Director at The Brink’s Company since 2022, and now at Internet Sciences, he speaks to senior leaders from inside their own governance world. His argument on trust has an operating record behind it. Uncommon Leadership sets out how leaders rebuild credibility through integrity and people-centred performance, which carries more weight from someone who led large-scale operations than from a podium. He reached the most senior ranks of corporate America, recognised twice over by Black Enterprise and Savoy. That lived authority changes how a room of executives hears him on culture and accountability. Biography highlights Retired Vice President, Community Engagement and Support, Walmart Inc. (2020 to 2024); earlier played a hands-on role in Walmart’s shift from brick-and-mortar retail to omni-channel e-commerce Former President of Cub Foods and ACME Markets (SuperValu); former President, US Operations, Pitney Bowes Management Services Independent Director, The Brink’s Company (NYSE: BCO), and Internet Sciences, Inc. (appointed 2026) Author of Uncommon Leadership (2026), Diversity Is Not Enough (2021 NAACP Image Award nominee), Good Is Not Enough (2009 NAACP Image Award nominee), and Corner Office Rules Named to the Top 100 African American Executives list by Black Enterprise and Savoy National media on leadership and careers, including NBC’s Today Show, Fox Business, and USA Today Biography Cub Foods was a multi-billion dollar grocery business when Keith Wyche was recruited to run it, one of two SuperValu banners he led as President before joining Walmart. That operating record, built across Pitney Bowes, SuperValu, and a long Walmart career, is what everything else rests on. At Walmart he moved from running operations to helping shift the retailer from brick-and-mortar stores toward an omni-channel, e-commerce business. He then led Community Engagement and Support until he retired in 2024. He now sits as an Independent Director on the board of The Brink’s Company, appointed in 2022, and joined the board of the technology firm Internet Sciences in 2026. The board seats change the room he speaks into. He is in the same governance conversations as the senior leaders he addresses, which is why his read on change and accountability carries weight with a C-suite audience. His fourth book, Uncommon Leadership, published in 2026, grew out of a conversation with his teenage grandson about the run of leaders losing public trust. It follows Good Is Not Enough and Diversity Is Not Enough, both NAACP Image Award nominees. The new book makes a blunt case: strong results do not create followership, and leaders who want to be followed earn it through integrity and how they treat people. Key speaking topics Leadership integrity and rebuilding organisational trust People-centred leadership and accountability Change, resilience, and transformation management Leading through restructure and disruption Career progression, visibility, and personal brand for senior talent Board-level perspective on leadership and organisational performance Ideal for Executive leadership teams and boards setting the tone on culture and accountability CHROs and senior HR leaders rebuilding leadership credibility during change Leadership conferences and senior executive communities across corporate and association audiences High-potential and emerging leaders being prepared for senior executive roles Audience outcomes A frank account of what it takes to keep people committed through restructure and change How trust and accountability get rebuilt after they erode, drawn from real leadership failures and recoveries he has seen and led Specific career and visibility moves, from building sponsors to reading company culture, for leaders aiming at executive roles A board-level read on how culture, performance, and integrity connect at the top of an organisation

Why organisations work with Kelly Mackin A research instrument leaders can actually use. The Motives Met Human Needs Assessment surfaces the 28 psychological, emotional, and social needs that drive a specific employee, team, or culture, replacing one-size-fits-all engagement scores with personalised data. A direct challenge to universal hierarchy thinking. Mackin’s research argues that Maslow-style and engagement-survey frameworks misrepresent how needs actually distribute across a workforce, and gives leaders a defensible alternative. Award-winning published work. Work Life Well-Lived is a Nonfiction Authors Association Bronze Award winner and an Amazon best-seller in its category, giving senior buyers a citable reference point. Practical depth beyond keynote theatre. Mackin trained as a cognitive behavioural coach and meditation teacher and runs assessments, workshops, and leadership accelerators, so the keynote connects to a delivery system the organisation can run after she leaves. Biography highlights CEO and co-founder, Motives Met, the workplace well-being platform behind her research. Author of Work Life Well-Lived: The Motives Met Pathway to No-B.S. Well-Being at Work (Greenleaf Book Group, 2024). Nonfiction Authors Association Bronze Book Award winner. Creator of the Motives Met Human Needs Assessment, identifying 28 motives that drive thriving at work. BA in Communications, Wittenberg University; certified cognitive behavioural therapy practitioner and meditation teacher. Host of DisruptHR San Diego; featured in Authority Magazine and the Human Capital Innovations webinar series. Biography Most workplace well-being programmes assume that everyone is motivated by the same things in roughly the same order. That assumption shapes every engagement survey, every wellness benefit, every “top reasons people quit” list. It is also wrong. Kelly Mackin’s research at Motives Met identifies 28 distinct psychological, emotional, and social motives, and shows that the ranking varies sharply between individuals, teams, and roles. The work sits inside Motives Met, the platform she co-founded and leads as CEO. Its core instrument, the Human Needs Assessment, surfaces an individual’s top motives and maps them against the conditions a manager or organisation is actually providing. The output is a usable diagnostic for leaders who have run out of patience with engagement scores that do not tell them what to do next. Her 2024 book, Work Life Well-Lived: The Motives Met Pathway to No-B.S. Well-Being at Work, became an Amazon category best-seller and won a Bronze Book Award from the Nonfiction Authors Association. The technical foundation comes from her training as a cognitive behavioural therapy practitioner and meditation teacher, which she pairs with quantitative research methods to keep the framework empirical rather than inspirational. For HR and culture leaders, the relevance is operational. Mackin gives them a vocabulary for the gap between what a workforce reports on a survey and what individual people actually need from their work, and a measurement layer they can act on across hybrid teams, multigenerational workforces, and post-restructure cultures. Key speaking topics Workplace well-being and the science of thriving at work Psychological needs and motivation at work Human-first leadership and management practice Stress, burnout, and work-life harmony Psychological safety and emotional inclusion Culture design for hybrid and multigenerational teams Ideal for CHROs and heads of people redesigning engagement and well-being strategy Culture, DEI, and talent leaders responsible for retention and inclusion outcomes Senior managers and team leaders running large or multigenerational teams Leadership development and L&D heads designing manager capability programmes Audience outcomes A working understanding of the 28 motives framework and how it differs from Maslow and engagement-survey models Specific questions leaders can ask their teams to surface individual motives, not just aggregate sentiment A diagnostic lens on where current well-being and engagement spend is misaligned with actual employee needs Language and structure for conversations on burnout, work-life harmony, and psychological safety A clearer link between well-being investment and performance outcomes leaders can defend internally

Why organisations work with Ken Schmidt He sat inside the room when Harley-Davidson went from near-collapse to one of the most emotionally bonded brands in American business, and he can describe what changed in the company’s positioning rather than what got written about it afterwards. He frames customer loyalty as an operating decision, not a marketing output. His Noise Cubed Trilogy gives leadership teams a structured way to interrogate how they are heard, remembered and chosen. Make Some Noise: The Unconventional Road to Dominance (Simon and Schuster, 2018) gives leaders a written, reusable method for moving a company from product-first to people-first positioning. He works in the language operators use. Sales teams, dealer networks, franchisees and frontline staff respond to him because he treats reputation as something the whole organisation builds, not a head-office function. He is consistently booked for annual sales kickoffs, dealer conferences and leadership offsites where the brief is to change how a workforce thinks about its own market position, not to deliver a generic motivational talk. Biography highlights Director of Corporate and Financial Communications at Harley-Davidson Motor Company, 1990 to 1997; joined the company in 1985. Primary spokesperson to media and financial communities during Harley-Davidson’s turnaround years. Author of Make Some Noise: The Unconventional Road to Dominance, Simon and Schuster, November 2018. Co-creator of 100 Years of Harley-Davidson, an official centenary motorsports title. Founder of Ken Schmidt Company (1999); co-founder of Torque Sessions Leadership Training. Host of the Tailgating with Geniuses business podcast; previously held an ownership stake in Chicago marketing firm VSA Partners. Biography Harley-Davidson was effectively a dying American manufacturer in the mid-1980s. The bikes had reputation problems, the financials were thin, and the brand was the punchline of its own segment. The work that pulled the company out was not a product fix. It was a deliberate reconstruction of how customers, dealers and the financial community thought and talked about the company, and Ken Schmidt was inside that work from 1985. By 1990 he was Director of Corporate and Financial Communications, working directly with the CEO and CFO and serving as the primary voice to the media and investment community during the years sales and brand equity recovered. That seat gave him a particular vantage on how reputation actually gets engineered inside a company under pressure, and on how leadership decisions about positioning translate into customer behaviour on the ground. After leaving Harley in 1997 he took an ownership position at Chicago marketing firm VSA Partners, then founded Ken Schmidt Company in 1999. Make Some Noise: The Unconventional Road to Dominance (Simon and Schuster, 2018) sets out his method for moving a company from product-first to people-first positioning; his Torque Sessions training format and Tailgating with Geniuses podcast extend the same operating logic. The argument he brings to a leadership room is that competitive advantage built on product specifications is now mostly perishable, and the durable form of advantage is being chosen on purpose by customers who feel something specific about the company. That is a hard claim to make credibly. It is harder to make from the inside of a brand that did it. Key speaking topics Customer loyalty and advocacy Brand positioning and reputation Competitive differentiation People-first organisational culture Storytelling and corporate voice Sales force and dealer-network alignment Ideal for Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Brand Officers and customer-experience leadership teams. Sales leadership at companies running annual kickoffs, dealer conferences or franchise summits. CEO and executive teams in mature categories where product parity is eroding margins. Membership organisations, associations and trade bodies needing to reset how they are perceived. Audience outcomes A sharper internal language for what their company is actually known for, versus what it claims to be known for. Schmidt’s three-question Noise Cubed framework, useable as a working tool on positioning decisions. A concrete view of how the Harley-Davidson turnaround changed customer behaviour, with the operator-side mechanics named. A reframing of customer loyalty as something every part of the business builds, not a marketing or CX function output.

Why organisations work with Kevin Brown He brings the operator’s view. Twenty years inside SERVPRO’s leadership team, helping build a franchise system into a billion-dollar category leader, gives him direct credibility with sales, service, and franchise audiences that academic culture speakers cannot match. The HERO Effect is a usable framework, not a slogan. It gives frontline teams and managers a shared language for personal accountability that survives the flight home from the conference. He sits comfortably in front of mixed audiences: sales kick-offs, franchisee conventions, dealer meetings, and customer-experience summits. The same material lands with technicians, agents, and senior leaders. Repeat-booking proof. His client list, which includes American Express, Delta Air Lines, PayPal, ExxonMobil, Chick-fil-A, and Ernst and Young, reflects organisations that buy speakers on outcomes, not on novelty. Recognition from buyer-facing bodies. Global Gurus Top 30 Motivational Speakers (2024), SpeakInc Top 10 Keynote Speakers (2021), and NorthStar Meetings Group Best Keynote Speakers (2019). Biography highlights Author of The Hero Effect: Being Your Best When It Matters the Most (2017) and Unleashing Your Hero (HarperCollins Leadership, 2021). Spent more than 20 years on the senior leadership team at SERVPRO, helping grow the franchise system into a billion-dollar category leader. Creator of the HERO Effect framework, used as the basis of his keynote programmes and books. Named to Global Gurus’ Top 30 Motivational Speakers list (2024). Selected to SpeakInc’s Top 10 Keynote Speakers (2021) and NorthStar Meetings Group’s Best Keynote Speakers (2019). Keynote client list includes American Express, Delta Air Lines, PayPal, ExxonMobil, Chick-fil-A, Verizon Connect, O’Reilly Automotive, Ernst and Young, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Merck. Biography Service-led businesses spend heavily on customer-experience programmes and still lose customers at the moment of contact. The reason is rarely strategy. It is the daily, individual choices of the people closest to the customer, and most cultures do not equip those people to choose well under pressure. That is the territory Kevin Brown has worked in for thirty years, first as an operator and now as a keynote speaker. Two decades of his corporate career were spent on the senior leadership team at SERVPRO, where the team built the franchise system into a billion-dollar category leader. He learned culture from the inside, in a network of independent operators where consistency had to be earned every day rather than mandated from headquarters. Out of that experience came the HERO Effect, the framework that anchors his keynotes and his two books, The Hero Effect (2017) and Unleashing Your Hero (HarperCollins Leadership, 2021). The argument is straightforward. Excellence is a personal practice before it is an organisational outcome, and leaders who treat culture as a behavioural discipline, not a values poster, get measurably different results from their frontline teams. His client list reflects who that argument lands with: American Express, Delta Air Lines, PayPal, ExxonMobil, Chick-fil-A, Verizon Connect, Ernst and Young, Booz Allen Hamilton. Global Gurus named him to its Top 30 Motivational Speakers list in 2024. The work is not theory borrowed for a stage. It is a set of operating principles taken back into the room they came from. Key speaking topics Service excellence and customer experience Culture and frontline accountability Leadership at every level Personal performance and ownership Sales-team motivation and consistency Franchise and dealer-network performance Ideal for CHROs, customer-experience leads, and operations leaders running cultural change inside service-led organisations. Sales kick-offs, dealer conferences, and franchisee conventions where the audience is mixed-seniority and outcome-focused. Front-line and customer-facing teams in retail, hospitality, financial services, and field service. Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for personal accountability that managers can keep using after the keynote. A clearer line between individual behaviour and customer-experience results, made concrete with examples from inside a billion-dollar franchise system. Renewed energy in mixed-audience settings such as sales kick-offs and dealer meetings, where engagement is the usual brief. Practical prompts for managers on how to coach service consistency rather than mandate it.

Why organisations work with Kit Symons and Holly Sedlacek A genuine dual lens on performance under pressure. A former Wales international and Fulham manager works alongside a chartered organisational psychologist, delivered as a two-voice session. Sport shows up as evidence. Symons speaks from the dressing room of a Premier League club, and Sedlacek translates what happened there through psychology a board will recognise. Content that moves past cliche on the topics leadership teams quietly struggle with: imposter feelings at executive level, handling failure in public, and the emotional cost of transitions. Formats built for different rooms: motivational keynote, fireside conversation, masterclass, and follow-up team coaching through Know Your Pace. Biography highlights Kit Symons: 36 caps for Wales; 100+ league appearances each at Portsmouth, Manchester City, and Fulham. Kit Symons: Fulham manager from October 2014; assistant to Chris Coleman with the Wales national team from January 2012. Holly Sedlacek: MA in Industrial and Organisational Psychology; ICF ACC coach. Holly Sedlacek: certified in Hogan, EQi 2.0, DiSC, and Transactional Analysis. Holly Sedlacek: 14+ years in Learning and Talent Development across consulting, insurance, and asset management before founding Know Your Pace. Co-founders of Know Your Pace, a London-based leadership coaching practice working with leaders in sport and business. Biography Elite football teams are not built by talent alone. They are built by how a group handles the week after a bad result, the player who loses form, the dressing room conversation no one wants to have. That is the same territory executive teams live in, and it is where Kit Symons and Holly Sedlacek work. Symons spent more than two decades inside professional football, with more than 300 league appearances across Portsmouth, Manchester City, and Fulham, and 36 caps for Wales. He went on to manage Fulham and to coach the Wales national team alongside Chris Coleman. He speaks from the dressing room. Sedlacek brings the discipline that makes the sport insight transferable. She holds an MA in Industrial and Organisational Psychology, an ICF coaching credential, and certifications in Hogan, EQi 2.0, DiSC, and Transactional Analysis. Before founding Know Your Pace, she spent 14 years in talent and leadership development inside consulting, insurance, and asset management. Together they work with leadership teams on the parts of performance that rarely sit on an org chart: belonging, self-doubt, emotional range, what happens after a mistake. The format is deliberately two-voice, a practitioner and a psychologist in the same room, and that structure is what lets a session move past anecdote into behaviour change. Key speaking topics Resilient leadership in adversity High-performing teams Culture of belonging Emotional capacity in leadership Authentic connection and trust Self-doubt and imposter syndrome at senior levels Learning from mistakes and failure The emotional process of career and organisational transitions Ideal for Executive teams and C-suite offsites CHROs and people leaders investing in leadership development Managers of high-stakes, high-scrutiny teams Sport and performance organisations looking at leadership and culture Audience outcomes A sharper read on how individual and team behaviour shifts under pressure, and what to do about it. Practical language for the emotional work of leadership: trust, belonging, failure, transition. A shared reference point for senior teams to discuss performance without reverting to sport cliches or wellness tropes. Tools drawn from recognised psychometric frames (Hogan, EQi 2.0, DiSC) that sit alongside existing leadership programmes.

Why organisations work with Kwame Onwuachi He has built an inclusive kitchen at the top of fine dining, an industry structurally hostile to it, and can speak to the practical mechanics of who gets hired, who gets mentored, and who stays. His entrepreneurial track record is concrete: multiple restaurant openings, public failure with Shaw Bijou, and the rebuild that produced Tatiana, named #1 in New York by The New York Times two years running. The Family Reunion, his annual hospitality industry summit with Salamander and Sheila Johnson, gives him standing as a convenor of the diversity conversation in food, not just a participant in it. Two best-selling books with Penguin Random House, a James Beard Rising Star Chef award, and a Food & Wine executive producer role mean his narrative is documented and credible to a corporate audience. Biography highlights James Beard Foundation Rising Star Chef of the Year, 2019. Chef and owner of Tatiana at Lincoln Center, named #1 Restaurant in New York by The New York Times in 2023 and 2024, and “One to Watch” by World’s 50 Best Restaurants. Author of “Notes from a Young Black Chef” (2019) and “My America: Recipes from a Young Black Chef” (2022) with Penguin Random House. Founder of The Family Reunion, an annual hospitality diversity event in partnership with Salamander Hotels & Resorts. Contributing executive producer at Food & Wine; named one of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs. Trained at The Culinary Institute of America, Per Se, and Eleven Madison Park; Top Chef finalist. Biography The fine-dining industry has spent decades discussing diversity without changing very much about who runs its kitchens. Onwuachi is one of the few chefs operating at the top of that industry who can describe, from the inside, why that gap exists and what it takes to close it. Tatiana, his Lincoln Center restaurant, has been named the number one restaurant in New York by The New York Times for two consecutive years. His route there was not linear. He sold candy on subway platforms in the Bronx to fund a catering business, cooked on a boat serving the Deepwater Horizon clean-up crews, trained at the Culinary Institute of America, and worked the line at Per Se and Eleven Madison Park. His first solo restaurant, Shaw Bijou in Washington DC, closed within months. The James Beard Foundation named him Rising Star Chef of the Year in 2019, the year his memoir “Notes from a Young Black Chef” was published. The substance of his corporate work sits in what he built next. The Family Reunion, his annual industry event with Salamander Hotels & Resorts, brings together chefs and hospitality leaders to address representation in food. His cookbook “My America” reframes the question of what American cuisine actually is by tracing the Caribbean, African, and southern Black culinary lineages that produced it. As a Food & Wine contributing executive producer, he sits inside the editorial conversation rather than outside it. For a corporate audience, the value is specific. He has hired, trained, and retained an unusually diverse senior team in an industry where attrition for those workers is severe. He talks about the operational decisions that produced that outcome, not the ideology behind it. Key speaking topics Inclusion and culture in fine dining and hospitality Entrepreneurship through failure and recovery The food of the African Diaspora as American cuisine Storytelling, identity, and brand Building creative teams in exclusionary industries Ideal for CHROs and DEI leads facing pressure to move beyond programmatic inclusion Hospitality, food, and consumer brand leadership teams Founder and entrepreneur audiences working through scale and reinvention Off-sites and conferences seeking a credible voice on culture without corporate framing Audience outcomes A concrete account of what inclusive hiring and retention look like inside a high-pressure operating environment A founder’s view of public failure and the discipline required to rebuild A more honest reading of what American food culture actually is and who built it Renewed appetite for cultural specificity as a commercial asset, not a compliance category