Intelligence culturelle

Why organisations work with Mayara Magri A first-hand account of operating at the top of one of the most ranked, publicly scrutinised performance institutions in the world, where every promotion is earned in front of an audience and a critical press. A decade-plus inside a single company, from corps to Principal, gives her unusual authority on what sustained high performance actually requires of an individual inside a team that does not change around them. Career story carries credentials that buyers recognise without explanation: Youth America Grand Prix Senior Gold, Prix de Lausanne, Principal at The Royal Ballet. The proof points do the work of the bio for her. Brings the Brazilian-trained, London-based performer perspective on adapting to a different culture, language, and working method without losing identity, useful for global mobility, integration, and inclusion conversations. Biography highlights Principal Dancer, The Royal Ballet, since 2021 Trained at The Royal Ballet School after early scholarship training in Rio de Janeiro Senior Age Division Gold Medal, Youth America Grand Prix Prix de Lausanne Scholarship and Audience Prize, 2011 Created the role of Rosaura in Christopher Wheeldon’s Like Water for Chocolate Ambassador for The Fonteyn 2025 Brazil, Royal Academy of Dance Biography The Royal Ballet promotes from inside its own ranks. A dancer who joins the Company at seventeen and reaches Principal a decade later has done so while performing publicly several nights a week, in front of the same critics, alongside the same colleagues, with no role hidden from view. Mayara Magri made that journey between 2012 and 2021. She arrived in London from Rio de Janeiro on the back of two of the strongest results in the international ballet competition circuit: the Senior Age Division at the Youth America Grand Prix and the Prix de Lausanne Scholarship and Audience Prize in 2011. The Royal Ballet School then a Company contract followed. Promotions to First Artist, Soloist, First Soloist and Principal came in 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2021. Her repertoire covers most of the senior classical canon, from Odette/Odile and Juliet to Aurora, Kitri and Cinderella, with created roles including Rosaura in Christopher Wheeldon’s Like Water for Chocolate. Outside the company she has taken on ambassador work, including for the Royal Academy of Dance’s Fonteyn 2025 Brazil. For organisations, the relevant material is the working life behind the credits. Sustained performance inside a ranked institution, the discipline of preparing roles that will be judged the same night they are danced, and the long arc of building a career inside a single company rather than across many. Key speaking topics Sustained performance inside elite institutions Composure and preparation under public scrutiny Long-career discipline and reinvention Cross-cultural adaptation in global organisations Inclusion and representation in high-performance environments Resilience as a working practice Ideal for Leadership offsites and senior team gatherings looking for a credible high-performance voice outside the standard sport-speaker pool HR, talent and L&D programmes on resilience, sustained performance and career-long development Diversity and inclusion programmes seeking authentic perspectives on representation inside elite, traditional institutions Brand, marketing and CSR audiences working with arts, culture or sustainability narratives Audience outcomes A working performer’s view of what sustained high performance asks of an individual over a decade, not a single peak moment A concrete picture of how elite institutions absorb new talent, and what that demands of the person joining A reference point for resilience that is grounded in a working career, not a recovery story A perspective on representation and adaptation drawn from a Brazilian dancer’s path into one of Britain’s oldest cultural institutions

Why organisations work with Miha Pogacnik His Macro Violin concept is cited by C. Otto Scharmer in Theory U and across MIT Sloan’s leadership writing. Senior teams engage with an arts-based framework that already has standing in serious management thought. He has worked inside the leadership floors of IBM, Microsoft, Bosch, Nike, Shell, Novartis and Porsche. The frame of reference is decades of access to people running companies that compete on judgment. His Resonance Platform method, taught at IEDC-Bled and in client sessions, moves a leadership group from positional debate into composed creative dialogue around the actual decision on the table. He has taught at Harvard, INSEAD, IMD, IESE Barcelona, CEIBS Shanghai and THNK Amsterdam, alongside his appointment at IEDC-Bled. The work is taken seriously inside management academia and in client rooms. Biography highlights Adjunct Professor of Arts and Leadership at IEDC-Bled School of Management; has taught at Harvard, INSEAD, IMD, IESE Barcelona, CEIBS Shanghai and THNK Amsterdam Macro Violin concept attributed to him is cited by C. Otto Scharmer in Theory U and across the MIT Sloan body of work on systemic leadership Founder of IDRIART (Institute for Development of Intercultural Relations through the Arts); originated the Chartres Festival d’Eté in 1981 Ambassador of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia Has worked with leadership teams at IBM, Microsoft, Nike, Shell, Novartis, Bosch, Coca-Cola and Porsche Speaker at the World Economic Forum (Davos and China), European Forum Alpbach and UN agencies; TEDx talk “A Creative Detour to Unleash Human Potential” Biography Most senior teams have absorbed every available framework for leadership. None of those frameworks change how they listen, or how they bring a room of expert voices into a coherent decision. The capacity that matters at the top is closer to conducting an orchestra than to running an analysis. That is the territory Miha Pogacnik has worked in for four decades. As Adjunct Professor of Arts and Leadership at IEDC-Bled School of Management, he uses musical performance to develop the listening and composed judgment that leadership at the top requires. His Resonance Platform method, taught in sessions with leadership teams at IBM, Microsoft, Bosch, Nike, Shell and Porsche, walks executives through the structural intelligence of a Bach fugue or a Brahms violin concerto and back to the decision on their desk. His distinctive intellectual contribution is the Macro Violin: the principle that a leader, like a violinist inside Chartres Cathedral, cannot perform on instrument alone but has to play the whole space. C. Otto Scharmer cites the concept in Theory U and across the MIT Sloan body of work on systemic leadership. That principle now sits at the centre of how arts-based leadership is taught at IEDC-Bled. The work has roots in something larger than corporate audiences. Pogacnik founded IDRIART in the early 1980s and went on to direct more than 200 intercultural festivals in crisis regions, including the Adriatic during the breakup of Yugoslavia and Central Europe in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He serves as Ambassador of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia. The first IDRIART festival ran at Chartres Cathedral in 1981, the same setting in which Pogacnik first identified the Macro Violin principle, and where the entire body of work begins. Key speaking topics Arts-based leadership development Listening as a leadership discipline Creativity and innovation through musical structure Cultural intelligence in international business Organisational learning through artistic practice The Resonance Platform method for senior teams The Macro Violin and ensemble leadership Ideal for CHROs and Chief Learning Officers designing executive development programmes CEOs and Chief Strategy Officers convening senior teams for board offsites or strategic dialogue Business school deans and EMBA directors integrating arts and humanities into leadership education Conference programmers leading flagship events on creativity and leadership Audience outcomes A demonstration of how musical structure reveals complex team dynamics, with a Bach fugue or Brahms violin concerto used as the diagnostic Live application of the Resonance Platform method to the strategic question the leadership team brings into the room A working vocabulary for leadership drawn from musical performance: composition, ensemble, listening from the periphery, and the macro violin The shift from treating the conductor as a metaphor to treating conducting as a working model of leadership

Why organisations work with Nadira Tudor She moderates at the level of the World Economic Forum at Davos, IBC Amsterdam, GITEX Global Dubai and the Future Investment Initiative, which means clients commissioning her are buying the same on-stage standard those programmes demand. She runs Euronews’ Baku Bureau, anchoring and producing the network’s news output from the region, so her interviewing instincts are tested daily on live international news, not refreshed once a year on the speaker circuit. Her on-camera presenting for branded content is recognised at industry award level, including a Silver Telly Award for the Shell “Decarbonisation: From What to How” interview series with ReutersPlus and a Bronze Award for IDA Ireland’s film on the country’s semiconductors cluster, with regular further work for the Financial Times, ITN Business and Business Reporter. She trains military and government communicators, including NATO, UK MOD and the Royal Navy, which sharpens her judgement on stage when conversations turn to security, geopolitics or regulated industries. Her academic seat at Cardiff JOMEC and her master’s in intercultural communication from Birkbeck give her a working theory of cross-cultural audience response, which matters for global summits where the audience is not a single market. Biography highlights Bureau Chief, Baku, for Euronews, running the bureau and its sponsored programmes hub with editorial responsibility for the full news output. Broadcast career across BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra, BBC 5 Live, BBC News, BBC Wales and BBC Asian Network, with a further spell at BBC News and Programmes (2023 to 2025), launch-team roles at News UK across Times Radio and TalkTV (2020 to 2023), and international experience at ITN, Channel 5 and Al Arabiya English. Award-winning ReutersPlus branded-content presenter: Silver Telly Award (Shell “Decarbonisation: From What to How” interview series) and Bronze Award (IDA Ireland semiconductors film). Regular further branded-content work for the Financial Times, ITN Business and Business Reporter. Visiting Lecturer at Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Culture (JOMEC); master’s in Intercultural Communication for Business and Professions, Birkbeck, University of London. Moderation credits include the World Economic Forum (Davos 2023 and 2024), GITEX Global Dubai, GITEX Africa, IBC Amsterdam, Future Investment Initiative, GMIS and T20. Communications training for NATO, UK MOD, the Royal Navy and the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps; 2015 Asian Professional Award for Media and BBC Innovation Award. Biography Most leadership content fails on stage long before the strategy fails in the market. The interview misfires, the panel drifts, the senior voice in the room sounds defensive, and the audience remembers the discomfort, not the message. The person holding the microphone decides whether that happens. Her current post is Bureau Chief in Baku for Euronews, where she runs the bureau and its sponsored programmes hub, anchors and produces key programmes for the region, and is responsible for the full news output. She came up through the BBC across Radio 4, Radio 1 and 1Xtra, 5 Live, News, Wales and the Asian Network, with a further spell at BBC News and Programmes from 2023 to 2025, and was part of the launch teams for both Times Radio and TalkTV at News UK between 2020 and 2023. International newsroom experience runs through ITN, Channel 5 and Al Arabiya English. She moderates at the most senior end of the global conference circuit, including the World Economic Forum at Davos in 2023 and 2024, IBC Amsterdam, GITEX Global, the Future Investment Initiative, the Global Manufacturing and Industrialisation Summit and the T20. The same craft underpins her communications training for NATO, the UK MOD, the Royal Navy and the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, where leadership communication is a security issue, not a presentation skill. The intellectual underpinning is her master’s in Intercultural Communication for Business and Professions from Birkbeck, University of London, and a Visiting Lecturer seat at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Culture. She also fronts award-winning branded content for ReutersPlus, the Financial Times, ITN Business and Business Reporter, with a Silver Telly Award for the Shell “Decarbonisation: From What to How” interview series and a Bronze Award for IDA Ireland’s film on the country’s semiconductors cluster. The 2015 Asian Professional Award for Media and an earlier BBC Innovation Award round out a record that rests on disciplined interviewing more than on stage presence. Key speaking topics Conference moderation and on-stage interviewing Executive communication for senior leaders Crisis and reputation communication Media and on-camera training Intercultural communication in global organisations Awards and gala hosting Panel and debate facilitation Ideal for Chief Communications Officers and Heads of Corporate Affairs commissioning a senior moderator for global summits, leadership offsites or investor days. Heads of Internal Communications running CEO town halls, all-hands and quarterly leadership broadcasts. Event directors at industry conferences who need an interviewer who can carry a multi-track programme across sectors in a single day. Public sector and defence communications leads briefing senior teams on media engagement under scrutiny. Audience outcomes A live demonstration of how a sharp interviewer turns a panel from a sequence of statements into a substantive conversation. Practical handles for senior leaders on how to answer hard questions on stage without retreating into corporate language. A clearer view of how cultural and audience context changes what counts as a strong answer, drawn from her global moderation work. For internal communications teams, a working sense of what good looks like when the CEO is in front of the room.

Why organisations work with Naomi Sesay She has run inclusion from inside the commissioning machine of a major UK broadcaster, not as an external consultant, so her advice carries the weight of decisions she has actually had to make and defend. Her training portfolio inside FTSE 100 clients and at Google, YouTube, NBC Universal, Deloitte and Lloyds Bank means she has tested her approach against the realities of regulated, scaled corporate environments. She frames inclusion as a leadership capability tied to commercial output, drawing on a 30-year broadcasting career where audience, talent and brand decisions were never separable. She brings a builder’s perspective on equity through her Sierra Leone smart-city project, which gives keynotes a concrete reference point beyond the standard DEI canon. Biography highlights Head of Creative Diversity, Channel 4, 2022 to 2025; previously On Screen Diversity Executive and Interim Head of Diversity & Inclusion at the broadcaster. Earlier television career as Producer, Director and Presenter at MTV News, and among the early producers on Channel 4’s Big Brother. Former Head of Innovation and Diversity, Media Trust. Senior Lead Trainer in Race Fluency and Inclusive Leadership with APS Intelligence, delivering programmes inside FTSE 100 organisations. Training and keynote work for Google, YouTube, NBC Universal, Amazon, Deloitte, Lloyds Bank, Warner Bros, Viacom, UN Women, Harvard Medical School and the Met Police. Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; author of The Human Upgrade: The Power to Create Your Future; leads a female-centric sustainable smart-city project in Sierra Leone. Biography Most diversity work in large organisations is built by people who have never had to make a commissioning decision, hire a senior leader, or sign off a brand campaign. The view from inside those rooms is different. It is harder to be theoretical when the choice is in front of you and the budget is real. Naomi Sesay spent three years as Head of Creative Diversity at Channel 4, with two earlier spells at the broadcaster as On Screen Diversity Executive and Interim Head of Diversity & Inclusion. Her remit covered commissioning, training, talent and the broadcaster’s relationships with culturally and ethnically diverse creative communities across the UK. Before Channel 4 she ran innovation and diversity at Media Trust, and worked at APS Intelligence as a senior trainer in race fluency and inclusive leadership for FTSE 100 clients. Her television career started at MTV News during the channel’s European peak as a producer, director and presenter, and continued through one of the original production teams on Channel 4’s Big Brother. That broadcasting grounding shapes the way she talks to corporate audiences. Inclusion is not framed as a values statement; it is framed as an editorial, hiring and commercial discipline that decides which work gets made and which people get heard. Outside the broadcaster she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, author of The Human Upgrade: The Power to Create Your Future, and leads a network of architects and investors developing a female-centric sustainable smart city in Sierra Leone. The combination gives her keynotes for Google, Deloitte, UN Women, Harvard Medical School and others a practical edge: she has built things, not only advised on them. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership Diversity, equity and inclusion in practice Cultural intelligence Creative industries and representation Emotional intelligence for senior teams Storytelling and human connection Social enterprise and equitable city design Ideal for CHROs, chief people officers and heads of DEI under pressure to show operating impact, not statements. Boards and ExCos reassessing inclusion strategy after political shifts and ESG scrutiny. Commissioning, editorial and creative leaders in media, entertainment, publishing and advertising. Senior leadership programmes inside FTSE 100 and equivalent corporates rebuilding inclusive leadership capability. Audience outcomes A clearer test for distinguishing inclusion that changes decisions from inclusion that performs them. Specific language for talking to senior leaders about race, identity and culture without retreating into either jargon or platitude. Working examples from broadcasting, FTSE 100 corporates and global brand environments that translate into the audience’s own commissioning, hiring and team practices. A way to connect inclusive leadership to commercial output, audience reach and talent retention rather than to compliance reporting.

Why organisations work with Nayla Al Khaja She is the first woman to direct a feature film in the UAE, which means her observations on inclusion in restrictive professional cultures come from lived practice, not commentary. She built and runs her own production company, Nayla Al Khaja Films, and founded The Scene Club, the UAE’s first independent film club, giving her a track record of standing up creative institutions where none existed. Her debut feature Three premiered at the Red Sea International Film Festival and released theatrically across the GCC and MENA, evidence of commercial credibility alongside cultural pioneering. Variety named her one of the 50 Most Powerful Personalities in Arab Cinema, a useful external marker for buyers who want a credentialled voice on the Gulf creative economy. She works in Arabic and English at native level, which makes her usable for regional events in the UAE and Saudi Arabia as well as international audiences. Biography highlights First female film director in the United Arab Emirates and CEO of Nayla Al Khaja Films since 2005. BA in film studies, Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University), Canada, on a UAE government scholarship. Founder of The Scene Club, the UAE’s first independent film club, established 2007. Director of Three (2024), her debut feature, which premiered at the Red Sea International Film Festival and released theatrically across the GCC and MENA. Director of BAAB, scored by two-time Academy Award winner A.R. Rahman, with cinematography by Rogier Stoffers ASC. Named to Variety’s 50 Most Powerful Personalities in Arab Cinema (2020); Visionary of the Year, Arabian Business Awards (2011); TEDx speaker on women in Arab cinema. Biography The UAE had no female film director before Nayla Al Khaja. She became the first, then built the production company, the film club and the audience that the country needed for a domestic film industry to be possible at all. That is the work she draws on when she speaks. Al Khaja studied mass communication at Dubai Women’s College, then took a UAE government scholarship to Ryerson University in Toronto for a degree in film studies. She returned and founded what is now Nayla Al Khaja Films in 2005, and in 2007 opened The Scene Club, the country’s first independent film society. Both still operate. Her debut feature Three premiered at the Red Sea International Film Festival in December 2023 and released across the GCC and wider MENA region in early 2024. Her second feature, BAAB, was scored by A.R. Rahman and shot by Rogier Stoffers ASC, two collaborators with serious international standing. Variety placed her in its 50 Most Powerful Personalities in Arab Cinema. For corporate audiences, her usefulness is direct. She is asked how a woman builds a career inside an industry that has no women in it, how a creative business gets capitalised in a market that does not yet exist, and how cultural representation actually shifts when someone takes the job rather than waits for the policy. Her answers come from doing it. Key speaking topics Women in male-dominated industries Creative entrepreneurship in the Gulf Cultural representation in film and media Building a career under restrictive cultural conditions The UAE and Saudi creative economy Storytelling and brand communication Resilience and the long arc of a creative career Ideal for Conferences on women in leadership and inclusion, particularly in the GCC and Levant Corporate diversity, talent and ERG events for organisations operating across the Middle East Creative industry summits, brand and marketing leadership audiences Regional government, tourism and cultural authority programmes on the Gulf creative economy Audience outcomes A first-hand account of how women break through in industries where there is no precedent for them. A clearer view of how the Gulf creative economy actually functions, from someone who built inside it. Specific stories about getting a feature film made in a market that did not previously support one. Practical observations on cultural representation that are usable for brand, marketing and communications teams. A keynote presence that audiences in the region recognise and respond to.

Why organisations work with Neelu Kaur She treats workplace silence as a structural problem. Most speakers in this space coach individuals to be more confident; her intervention sits in meeting design and the conversational rules that decide who gets to challenge a senior idea. The Self-Trust Recession is her named diagnosis of the moment: capable leaders, surrounded by AI and competing opinion, are second-guessing themselves and outsourcing decision authority. Her Self-Trust Reset framework is the way back. Her cross-cultural lens, the collective “we” she was raised in meeting the individualistic “I” of American corporate life, makes her credible to global and AAPI audiences who have lived that gap themselves. Her tools combine cognitive and body-based techniques. The pairing of organisational psychology training (Columbia, NYU Stern) and sixteen years of yoga and Ayurveda teaching produces practical methods her audiences can apply in the next meeting they walk into. Be Your Own Cheerleader, published by Post Hill Press in January 2023, gives her work a published thesis a senior buyer can read before commissioning. Biography highlights Author of Be Your Own Cheerleader (Post Hill Press, 2023), a guide to self-advocacy that addresses the cultural gap between collective and individualistic workplace norms. MA in Social and Organizational Psychology, Columbia University, and BS from NYU Stern School of Business. Certified NLP Master Practitioner and Coach, NLP Center of New York. Client list includes Google, Bloomberg, Sony Music, RBC, Ernst & Young, and Jefferies. Featured on Morning Brew’s Good Work and TV Asia / SEEMA Network’s Sundays with Seema. Chief Guide at Chief (NYC), with over sixteen years as a yoga teacher and Ayurveda practitioner. Biography Most organisations have more talent than they have contribution. Capable people stay quiet at exactly the moments their judgement is most needed, and what looks like alignment is often silence. This is the tension Neelu Kaur takes on. Trained as an organisational psychologist at Columbia and with an undergraduate degree from NYU Stern, she has spent over fifteen years inside Fortune 500 organisations. The question her work returns to is why capable people stay quiet in the moments that matter. Her client list, which includes Google, Bloomberg, Sony Music, RBC, Ernst & Young, and Jefferies, gives her a view across financial services, consulting, and tech. Her current diagnosis is what she calls the Self-Trust Recession. Leaders are surrounded by AI tools and competing opinion, and the quiet effect is that capable people are outsourcing their own judgement. The Self-Trust Reset framework she has built around this idea is a way to recognise when fear is shaping a decision and rebuild internal authority before acting on it. The earlier strand of her work runs through Be Your Own Cheerleader (Post Hill Press, January 2023). She wrote the book out of her own experience growing up between two cultures: Indian at home, American at work. It examines why people raised in collective ‘we’ cultures struggle to advocate for themselves in workplaces built around the individualistic ‘I’. That cultural lens still shapes her work and is part of what makes her credible to global teams and AAPI audiences who have lived the same code-switch. Key speaking topics Self-trust and decision-making in high-pressure environments Self-advocacy in the workplace Cross-cultural communication in global teams The cost of consensus and over-collaboration AAPI and underrepresented voices in corporate life Burnout and sustainable leadership Ideal for Leadership teams in Fortune 500 environments where decision speed and contribution quality are the bottleneck CHROs, Chief Learning Officers, and L&D leaders building cultures of voice and accountability DEI, AAPI, and Employee Resource Group programmes looking for content that goes beyond representation language High-potential talent and mid-career professionals working across cultures in global organisations Audience outcomes A clear way to recognise when fear, perfectionism, or comparison is shaping a decision instead of judgement Behavioural tools to speak up in high-stakes moments without overshooting or shutting down A vocabulary for the cultural gap between collective and individualistic workplace norms, useful for global team conversations A diagnostic for where consensus and over-discussion are slowing the team’s decisions

Why organisations work with Nihal Arthanayake A daily-broadcast interviewer’s instinct for live conversation. Over eight years presenting the BBC Radio 5 Live afternoon show, plus the Headliners interview series, mean panel craft built across thousands of hours of unscripted live radio. A named winner at the 2019 BBC Radio & Music Awards for Interview of the Year. The room can feel the difference when an interviewer can actually draw out a senior guest, not just read questions in order. The author of a serious trade book on conversation. Let’s Talk (Hachette, 2022) is built on interviews with figures from Mary McAleese to hostage negotiators, which gives Nihal a content keynote that other hosts simply cannot offer. Twenty-five years of cultural fluency across BBC, MTV, Channel 4 and BBC Two. Comfortable on a Hugo Boss or Mercedes stage and equally credible chairing a panel on race, identity or media. Few hosts cover both rooms. Public-trust credentials that travel well into sponsor-sensitive briefs. Appointed to the BBC’s Independent Diversity Advisory Board alongside Sir Lenny Henry and Dame Floella Benjamin; trustee at HOME Manchester; ambassador for the British Asian Trust. Biography highlights BBC Radio 5 Live presenter; eight-plus years on the afternoon show; current host of the Headliners interview series. Winner of Interview of the Year, 2019 BBC Radio & Music Awards. Author of Let’s Talk: How to Have Better Conversations (Hachette, 2022). BBC Radio 1 alumnus; co-host of Asian Beats (Sony Radio Award winner) and host of Review with Nihal. Appointed to the BBC’s Independent Diversity Advisory Board in 2014 by the BBC Director General. Trustee, HOME Manchester. Former trustee, Southbank Centre and British Council. Ambassador, British Asian Trust. Biography Live conversation is harder than it looks on a run sheet. A guarded executive answers in talking points. A four-person panel splinters. An awards stage drifts by the third category. The job of the host is to recover all of that without the audience noticing. That is the craft Nihal Arthanayake has spent twenty-five years building. Eight years presenting the afternoon show on BBC Radio 5 Live, plus the Sunday interview series Headliners, mean a live-radio interviewer who reads a room in real time. The 2019 BBC Radio & Music Award for Interview of the Year recognised the same skill in a different setting: a candid, on-the-record conversation that other interviewers could not have got. That craft is the subject of his 2022 Hachette book, Let’s Talk: How to Have Better Conversations. The book draws on conversations with former Irish president Mary McAleese, Professor Tanya Byron, Lorraine Kelly and Johann Hari, plus hostage negotiators and clinicians, to ask what actually changes when two people listen to each other properly. It gives organisations a content keynote on dialogue, listening and disagreement that most hosts cannot offer. The broader public-trust footprint is what makes the work travel into sponsor-sensitive briefs. Appointed to the BBC’s Independent Diversity Advisory Board in 2014 by the Director General, alongside Sir Lenny Henry, George the Poet and Dame Floella Benjamin. Trustee at HOME Manchester. Ambassador for the British Asian Trust. Corporate hosting clients include Adobe, Google, X, GQ, Hugo Boss, Mercedes-Benz, Tottenham Hotspur and Boots. Key speaking topics Conference and awards hosting Panel moderation and on-stage interviewing The craft of conversation and dialogue Communication and listening as leadership skills Diversity, representation and identity in media Cultural commentary and the public conversation Ideal for Senior corporate awards, summits and gala dinners that need a host who can carry a long-form running order Town halls, leadership conferences and offsites where a CEO or chair will be interviewed live on stage Panel sessions on culture, identity or representation that need an experienced moderator on contested ground Internal communication, L&D and people-team events on listening, dialogue and conversation skills Audience outcomes A live event that holds energy from welcome to close, with senior guests drawn out rather than read at A clearer practical sense of what makes a conversation actually work, drawn from Let’s Talk and twenty-five years of interviewing A panel that moves, with a moderator who reads the room and lets the strongest contributions land A host who is credible on both commercial and culture-and-identity briefs, without switching register awkwardly between them

Why organisations work with Nina Moghaddam Two decades of live broadcast and corporate event hosting across Super RTL, RTL, RTLZWEI, ProSieben, VOX, Sat.1 and WDR, including current presentation of Lokalzeit OWL and the consumer affairs programme Servicezeit on WDR. Fluent in six languages (German, English, French, Spanish, Farsi and Mandarin), which means she can hold a multilingual room without flipping to translation. Particularly useful for international audiences and for German-Persian programmes. A corporate moderation portfolio across automotive, FMCG, foundation and public-sector clients. Includes Audi, Porsche, MAN, FERRERO, the Liz Mohn Stiftung at Bertelsmann (Zeitenwende on tour) and the City of Cologne (Viva la Green). A personal sustainability practice running back to 2014 (her HappyAndFitDIY YouTube channel, focused on homemade sustainable beauty products), which gives her honest footing on climate-themed agendas without playing the substantive expert. Works as a Moderationstrainerin, coaching others in presentation and moderation craft. For internal events, this means she can prep speakers and panel chairs ahead of the day, not only host the room. Biography highlights Current presenter of Lokalzeit OWL on WDR (since February 2024) and Servicezeit on WDR (since 2025). Two-decade run as a presenter on Super RTL, RTL and RTLZWEI, including Toggo TV, WOW Die Entdeckerzone, Kiddy Contest, Deutschland sucht den Superstar Das Magazin, Das Supertalent Backstage, and Wohnen nach Wunsch Das Haus on VOX. Adolf-Grimme-Preis nominee in 2005 (Spezial category) for her work on Super RTL’s youth programming. Studied Regional Studies East Asia (China focus) at the University of Cologne. Speaks German, English, French, Spanish, Farsi and Mandarin. Corporate event portfolio includes Audi, Porsche, MAN, REWE Group, FERRERO, Vodafone, UNESCO, the Liz Mohn Stiftung at Bertelsmann (Zeitenwende on tour) and the City of Cologne (Viva la Green). Operates the HappyAndFitDIY YouTube channel since 2014, focused on homemade and sustainable beauty products. Also coaches presenters as a Moderationstrainerin. Biography Most corporate sustainability programmes share the same failure mode: a celebrity host who introduces but cannot moderate, and a panel that reverts to talking points by question two. The organisations doing this work seriously want a different kind of room, one where a host knows the territory well enough to ask the right second question. Moghaddam has spent more than twenty years on German live television. She presented Toggo TV, WOW and Kiddy Contest on Super RTL in the early 2000s, work that earned her a Grimme-Preis nomination in 2005. From there she moved to RTL, anchoring the backstage magazines for Deutschland sucht den Superstar and Das Supertalent. She now presents Lokalzeit OWL and Servicezeit on WDR. That broadcast spine carries into a corporate setting. Live television teaches four habits: hold a drifting panel, keep an executive answer crisp, recover from a missed cue, and never let the room feel the strain. Her client list reflects where this lands: Audi, Porsche, MAN, FERRERO, REWE Group, UNESCO and the City of Cologne (Viva la Green). Foundation work includes Zeitenwende on tour for the Liz Mohn Stiftung at Bertelsmann. Her sustainability footing comes from personal practice. She has run the HappyAndFitDIY YouTube channel since 2014, focused on homemade sustainable beauty products, which gives her honest credibility on climate-themed agendas. The booking is for moderation craft. Senior corporate audiences on values-led programmes get a host who has run live television for two decades and works in six languages including Farsi and Mandarin. Key speaking topics Corporate event moderation and hosting Awards ceremonies and gala moderation Sustainability and conscious consumption Climate-themed corporate programmes Multilingual and cross-cultural events Presentation and moderation coaching Ideal for Sustainability summits, ESG awards programmes, climate-themed corporate forums and foundation-led panels needing a moderator with broadcast credibility and topical fluency International or multilingual corporate gatherings with German, English, French, Spanish, Farsi or Mandarin audiences CHRO, Head of Communications, and CSR/Foundation leads commissioning senior-audience programmes where the moderator has to do real work Awards ceremonies, gala dinners and after-dinner programmes for German-speaking corporate audiences Audience outcomes A programme that finishes on time, with senior speakers having said what they came to say Honest panel exchanges that do not drift into talking points, because the moderator pushes when a question gets dodged Broadcast-quality opening and closing that hold the room without feeling like corporate set-piece Content delivered cleanly across language groups, including mixed German-English audiences and wider international rooms

Why organisations work with Omer Wilson He has run the brand function inside three of the most consequential data centre platforms of the last decade, including Digital Realty in EMEA and APAC, giving him a working model of how technical infrastructure businesses actually win category leadership. He has been voted Datacloud Marketer of the Year on two separate continents, in Monaco in 2015 and Singapore in 2018, which is a rare double inside the industry’s only credible peer-voted award. He builds brand strategy that translates between cultures, with operational experience in the UK, Singapore and now Portugal, and a Turkish-British background that informs his work on Asia and emerging-market positioning. He is currently leading marketing for a 1.2 GW, EUR 8.5 billion AI-era data campus in Sines, which means his commentary on the next decade of digital infrastructure marketing is grounded in a live programme, not retrospective analysis. Biography highlights Chief Marketing Officer, Start Campus, leading brand and go-to-market for the SINES DC campus in Portugal. Former Chief Marketing Officer at Qarbon Technologies and Pure Data Centres Group. Senior marketing leadership at Digital Realty across EMEA and APAC, joining the company in 2011 in London. Datacloud Data Centre Marketer of the Year 2015, Monaco. Datacloud Asia Marketer of the Year 2018, Singapore. Founder and Chief Strategist, Anatolia.Asia Consulting Group; trained on the IBM Global Graduate Scheme; former Head of Corporate Solutions Marketing for Jones Lang LaSalle EMEA. Biography The data centre industry built its commercial story on power, cooling and square metres. As AI workloads have changed what hyperscale customers actually need, the buying conversation has shifted to sustainability, sovereignty and brand trust. The companies winning that conversation are doing marketing work most of the sector still treats as overhead. Wilson has been one of the operators inside that shift. At Digital Realty he ran marketing across EMEA and later APAC after joining the firm in London in 2011, then took the CMO seat at Pure Data Centres Group and Qarbon Technologies. He is now Chief Marketing Officer at Start Campus, the operator behind the 1.2 GW SINES campus in Portugal, an EUR 8.5 billion programme positioned as one of Europe’s most sustainable AI data centres. His professional voice was shaped early by the IBM Global Graduate Scheme and then by running corporate solutions marketing at Jones Lang LaSalle across EMEA. That mix matters, because he treats brand as a commercial system: pricing, sales enablement and customer narrative working as one engine. He has been voted Datacloud Marketer of the Year twice, in Monaco in 2015 and Singapore in 2018, the industry’s clearest peer signal that the work travels. He also founded Anatolia.Asia Consulting Group, advising technology and infrastructure clients on positioning across Europe and Asia, and is a regular keynote speaker at Cloud Expo Asia, Data Centre World and DCD events. The through-line in his work is category creation: helping technical businesses build brand authority before commodity pressure forces a price conversation. Key speaking topics Brand strategy in technology and digital infrastructure Marketing leadership in data centres and hyperscale Category creation in B2B technology Cross-cultural positioning between Europe and Asia Sustainability and AI as commercial narratives Go-to-market for capital-intensive technology businesses Ideal for CMOs and senior marketing leaders inside technology, infrastructure and capital-intensive B2B businesses CEOs and founders of scale-up technology companies preparing a category narrative Sales and commercial leadership teams in data centres, cloud, energy and adjacent infrastructure sectors Industry conferences in digital infrastructure, AI, cloud and sustainability Audience outcomes A clearer model for how brand work compounds commercial value inside technical categories. Examples from inside the data centre industry of how marketing has shifted from spec-led to narrative-led selling. Practical perspectives on positioning sustainability and AI claims so they hold up with sophisticated buyers. A sharper view of how Asia, Europe and emerging markets behave differently as B2B technology audiences.

Why organisations work with Oscar van Weerdenburg He brings a published, evidence-based diagnostic. The Intercultural Readiness Check, co-developed with Ursula Brinkmann and built on a dataset of roughly 30,000 international respondents, lets leaders move from impression to assessment. He is part of the Trompenaars lineage. His work began with Fons Trompenaars at the University of Amsterdam in 1992, and his frameworks sit inside the Trompenaars Hampden-Turner network rather than alongside it. His M&A and integration track record is operational. He has been brought into post-deal integration work at major European and global firms to handle the cultural friction that derails synergy targets. He teaches inside INSEAD Executive Education and has lectured at Michigan Business School and Rotterdam School of Management, so the same content runs in front of senior leaders before it reaches their teams. His delivery is Anglo-Dutch in register: direct, often dryly funny, low on jargon. Buyers report sessions that are usable on Monday morning, not just well-received in the room. Biography highlights Co-author, Intercultural Readiness: Four Competences for Working Across Cultures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), with Ursula Brinkmann. Co-founder and Managing Director, Intercultural Business Improvement (IBI), founded 1996. Co-creator of the Intercultural Readiness Check, drawn from a 15-year research programme of roughly 30,000 respondents. Visiting professor, INSEAD Executive Education; former lecturer at Michigan Business School and Rotterdam School of Management. Long-standing partner in the Trompenaars Hampden-Turner network, with collaboration with Fons Trompenaars dating to 1992. Lecturer of the Year 2008, Chalmers Professional Education. Biography Most cross-border failures inside multinationals are not strategic. They are cultural. Synergy targets in M&A slip, global rollouts stall, and senior hires struggle because the assumptions people carry about hierarchy, conflict, and time were never made visible. That is the territory Oscar van Weerdenburg has worked in for more than three decades. He began this work in 1992 with Fons Trompenaars at the University of Amsterdam, the partnership that became the foundation of modern intercultural management consulting. In 1996 he co-founded Intercultural Business Improvement with the psychologist Ursula Brinkmann. Together they built the Intercultural Readiness Check, a diagnostic drawn from a fifteen-year research programme of roughly thirty thousand respondents across four continents and published as Intercultural Readiness: Four Competences for Working Across Cultures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). The IRC is what separates his practice from consulting impressionism. It gives leaders a measurable read on four competences that predict whether their teams can actually work across cultures, and it sits inside the Trompenaars Hampden-Turner network rather than competing with it. He teaches the underlying material on INSEAD Executive Education programmes and has lectured at Michigan Business School and Rotterdam School of Management, with a client list that includes Shell, HSBC, Qantas, BASF, PepsiCo and Goldman Sachs. What buyers tend to value is the operational edge. He has been brought into post-merger integrations and global team builds where cultural friction was already costing money, and he leaves leaders with vocabulary and a diagnostic, not abstractions. Chalmers Professional Education named him Lecturer of the Year in 2008 for the same reason: the room walks out with something usable. Key speaking topics Cultural intelligence as a measurable capability Leading multicultural and global teams Cultural integration in mergers and acquisitions International negotiation Strategic dilemmas in global business Cross-cultural leadership development The Intercultural Readiness Check as a leadership diagnostic Ideal for CHROs and global L&D leads building intercultural capability across regions M&A integration leads and post-deal sponsors handling cultural fit and synergy execution Global team leaders, country heads, and matrixed senior managers with cross-border accountability Executive education and leadership programme directors at multinationals Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the cultural assumptions that drive most cross-border friction Familiarity with the four intercultural competences measured by the IRC and how to apply them A clearer read on where their own team or deal is most exposed to cultural breakdown Practical moves for international negotiation, integration, and global team design they can use the following week

Why organisations work with Padma Lakshmi Her seven-year documentary project across immigrant and Indigenous communities in America (the foundation of both Taste the Nation and the 2025 Knopf cookbook Padma’s All American) gives her argument about diversity and belonging an evidential weight that most cultural voices cannot offer. Her DEI perspective is not theoretical: she co-founded an organisation that passed state legislation and helped establish the first interdisciplinary gynepathology research centre in the US, at MIT, demonstrating what sustained, policy-level advocacy actually produces. As UNDP Goodwill Ambassador and ACLU Artist Ambassador, she operates at a level of formal institutional credibility that separates her from celebrity advocates; she has testified, lobbied, and built coalitions, not just spoken. She offers one of the few genuinely non-confrontational pathways into difficult conversations about immigration, identity, and women’s health – using food as the entry point makes these subjects accessible in rooms where they are otherwise contested. Named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People and recipient of the UNCA Advocate of the Year Award, she brings independent, multi-sector validation that extends well beyond the entertainment industry. Biography highlights Host and executive producer of Bravo’s Top Chef for 19 seasons; four-time Emmy nominee as Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality-Competition Program Creator, host, and executive producer of Hulu’s Taste the Nation; James Beard Foundation Award winner, Visual Media – Long Form (2022) Author of Padma’s All American (Knopf, 2025), named a Best Cookbook of 2025 by the Washington Post and Boston Globe; New York Times bestselling author of memoir Love, Loss, and What We Ate and children’s book Tomatoes for Neela Co-founder, EndoFound; instrumental in establishing the first US interdisciplinary gynepathology research facility (Harvard Medical School and MIT joint project) and passing New York State Senate legislation on teen health education Visiting scholar, MIT Center for Gynepathology research UNDP Goodwill Ambassador; ACLU Artist Ambassador; TIME 100 Most Influential People (2023); UNCA Advocate of the Year (2021) Biography When organisations talk about inclusion, the conversation often stalls at the data. Padma Lakshmi has spent two decades building a different kind of argument; one that begins at the dinner table. As creator and host of Hulu’s Taste the Nation, she spent seven years embedded in immigrant and Indigenous communities across America, documenting how culinary traditions carry identity, history, and a sense of belonging that policy language rarely captures. The 2025 Knopf cookbook Padma’s All American, named a Best Cookbook of the year by the Washington Post and Boston Globe, extends that fieldwork into a mainstream cultural and business conversation: that diversity is not a management challenge to be solved but a generative force that shapes every aspect of how people live and work. Her advocacy has produced verifiable institutional outcomes. In 2009 she co-founded EndoFound, which helped establish the first interdisciplinary gynepathology research facility in the US – a joint Harvard Medical School and MIT project – and successfully drove legislation through the New York State Senate on teenage health education. She holds a visiting scholar appointment at MIT’s Center for Gynepathology Research. As UNDP Goodwill Ambassador and ACLU Artist Ambassador, she operates at the intersection of cultural influence and formal policy rather than occupying the softer territory of celebrity activism. For leadership teams where DEI initiatives have plateaued, or where women’s health and workplace wellbeing require a more credible and personal voice, Lakshmi’s combination of documentary rigour, scientific partnership, policy track record, and media reach offers something genuinely difficult to replicate. Key speaking topics Cultural identity and immigrant experience in America Diversity, equity, and inclusion through lived narrative Women’s health advocacy and public health policy Food, storytelling, and cross-cultural connection Using platform and media for social and civic impact Representation and belonging in public life Ideal for CHROs and people leaders seeking a non-confrontational, narrative-led entry into DEI at company-wide events Boards and executive teams navigating the political and cultural dimensions of workforce diversity Consumer, hospitality, or media brands whose audiences span diverse cultural communities Organisations with active women’s health or workplace wellbeing commitments seeking credible, policy-informed voices Audience outcomes A reframing of diversity from institutional obligation to cultural asset – grounded in specific, documented community experience rather than theory Deeper understanding of how immigrant and Indigenous communities shape the cultural contexts organisations operate in Practical perspective on what sustained advocacy – from grassroots education to legislative success – actually requires Greater awareness of women’s health as a workplace issue with measurable productivity and retention implications A model for using storytelling and platform to make complex social arguments land with mainstream audiences

Why organisations work with Pankaj Mishra His Age of Anger thesis ties populist nationalism in the US, Britain, India, Russia and Turkey to the same 19th-century intellectual origins, giving boards a single coherent frame for what most analysts treat as separate national stories. He brings the perspective of the world’s majority, drawn from original archival work across India, China, Iran and Turkey, into rooms where geopolitical analysis is still calibrated to a Western-led order. He works at the level of cause. Most commentary explains what just happened; his books explain why this kind of thing keeps happening across very different countries. Yale’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, the Weston International Award and a Royal Society of Literature fellowship sit behind two decades of essays in the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, Foreign Policy and the Guardian. The name carries weight in senior rooms. His 2025 book, The World After Gaza, is one of the most discussed treatments of the moral rupture in the global order since October 7, useful for any leadership team weighing reputational and political risk in a polarised market. Biography highlights Author of From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (2012), winner of Germany’s Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding in 2014, the first non-Western writer to take the prize. Author of Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017), Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race and Empire (2020) and The World After Gaza: A History (Penguin Press, 2025). Recipient of Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for nonfiction (2014) and the Weston International Award for career achievement in nonfiction (2024). Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Long-form contributor to the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Foreign Policy and Harper’s. Previously a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. Past visiting fellowships at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library and the Department of English at University College London. Biography The populist nationalism remaking democracies from Washington to Delhi to Ankara to Moscow is usually told as four separate stories. The argument running through Pankaj Mishra’s books is that they share a single 18th-century origin. A slow global civil war over the meaning of progress has been underway ever since. In Age of Anger (2017), he traced the rage and resentment of the present to Rousseau’s quarrel with Voltaire and the disappointed promises of European modernity. From the Ruins of Empire (2012), which won Germany’s Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding, ran the same exercise in reverse. It followed the Asian intellectuals (Tagore, Liang Qichao, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani) who watched their civilisations being subordinated by the West. The intellectual apparatus they built shapes everything today, from Chinese state strategy to political Islam. His latest book, The World After Gaza (Penguin Press, 2025), reads the post-1945 moral order through the present war and the global response to it. It has placed him at the centre of one of the most consequential intellectual debates of the moment. The book builds on the body of nonfiction that won Yale’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prize and the 2024 Weston International Award for career achievement. For senior audiences, the value is not commentary on the news. Mishra works the level beneath it: the long-running shifts in power and legitimacy that determine where capital and credibility actually go. The Weston jury described him as “a writer for and of this difficult and complex world we are creating.” That captures why his analysis is in demand whenever the meaning of the present moment is genuinely in question. Key speaking topics The roots of populism and political anger Geopolitical risk and the post-1945 global order The view from the global majority Nationalism, identity and the politics of resentment India under Modi and the geopolitics of South Asia The intellectual history of modernity Decolonisation and its long aftermath Ideal for Boards and CEOs setting strategy in markets where political risk and the shifting balance between Western and non-Western centres of power materially affect long-horizon decisions Investment committees, sovereign wealth funds and family offices with significant exposure across emerging markets and the wider Global South Senior leadership off-sites where the geopolitical context of capital allocation and major strategic decisions is on the agenda Audiences in financial services, energy, media, foreign policy and academia who buy serious intellectual content over motivational commentary Audience outcomes A unified intellectual frame for the populism and political anger reshaping major democracies. Most coverage offers separate national stories; Mishra shows them as one connected phenomenon. A clearer sense of how the rest of the world reads the same shift in the global order, and what that means for organisations operating across the West and non-West. Historical context for the present moment that goes well beyond the news cycle, with arguments built from original archival research. Sharper questions to take into long-horizon strategic discussions, particularly on political risk and on operating in markets aligned to non-Western centres of power.