Agilità organizzativa

Why organisations work with David Marquet The framework comes from an operational turnaround inside a high-consequence command environment. The crew of a nuclear submarine cannot afford the kind of leadership failure a corporate team can absorb, and the system Marquet built was tested against that standard. Intent-Based Leadership replaces the request for permission with a statement of intent, which is a specific behavioural change a leadership team can implement on Monday morning. It is a working method, not a philosophy. “Turn the Ship Around!” became a reference text inside US Navy submarine command, technology firms, manufacturers and healthcare systems. Adoption across that range of industries is rare for a leadership book. “Leadership is Language” gives senior leaders specific verbal moves to dismantle the industrial-age meeting culture that still produces compliant teams and over-burdened decision-makers. Stephen R. Covey studied Santa Fe directly and called it the most empowering organisation he had encountered. The endorsement carries weight because Covey rarely attached his name to operational case studies of this kind. Biography highlights Commanded USS Santa Fe (SSN-763) from 1999 to 2001, taking it from the lowest-rated submarine in the fleet to the highest in retention and operational evaluations. 1981 graduate of the US Naval Academy, top of class; 28 years of service in the US submarine force. Author of “Turn the Ship Around!” (Penguin Portfolio, 2013), foreword by Stephen R. Covey, called by Fortune “the best how-to manual anywhere for managers on delegating, training, and driving flawless execution.” Author of “Leadership is Language” (Penguin Portfolio, 2020), setting out six leadership plays for dismantling industrial-age meeting culture. Founder of Intent-Based Leadership International, the consulting firm operationalising the framework inside corporate, healthcare and government organisations. Named to Inc. Magazine’s Top 100 Leadership Speakers. Biography The USS Santa Fe was the lowest-rated nuclear submarine in the US fleet when David Marquet took command in 1999. Within two years it had the highest retention and operational evaluations in the force. Over the following decade, a disproportionate number of its officers were selected for submarine command of their own. The shift began with a single moment. Marquet gave an order that could not be executed on his class of submarine, and the watch officer relayed it anyway. When asked why, the answer was: because you told me to. Marquet stopped giving orders. He built a system in which crew members stated intent (“I intend to surface the boat at 0300”) and the officer’s job was to certify competence and clarity, not to authorise the decision. He calls this Intent-Based Leadership. It is now used inside manufacturers, healthcare systems, technology companies, professional sports teams and government agencies that face the same structural problem: decision-makers too far from the information, and a workforce trained to wait for instruction. Stephen R. Covey spent time aboard Santa Fe and wrote about it in “The 8th Habit”, calling it the most empowering organisation he had observed. His second book, “Leadership is Language”, extends the framework into the meeting room. Marquet argues that industrial-age verbal habits (“Does anyone have any concerns?”, “Sounds good to me”) manufacture compliance and silence dissent at the moment leaders need it most. The six plays in the book give senior teams specific replacement language, tested in environments where the cost of an unchallenged bad decision is operational rather than theoretical. Key speaking topics Intent-Based Leadership Distributed decision-making in high-consequence environments Leadership language and meeting design Psychological safety and high-reliability teams Cultural transformation in command-and-control organisations Leader development and succession at scale Ideal for CEOs and senior operating leaders rebuilding decision rights after a period of centralisation COOs and operations leaders in regulated or high-consequence industries (energy, healthcare, defence, manufacturing) CHROs and chief learning officers designing leadership development programmes that change behaviour, not vocabulary Boards and executive teams reviewing why their organisation is slow to act on information the workforce already has Audience outcomes A working language for replacing requests for permission with statements of intent, usable inside the next leadership meeting. A diagnostic for where in the organisation control, competence and clarity are out of balance. The six plays from “Leadership is Language” as a structured alternative to industrial-age meeting habits. A clearer view of which decisions a senior leader should still own, and which have been hoarded by default. Evidence, drawn from a documented operational turnaround, that distributed authority improves performance under pressure rather than weakening it.

Why organisations work with Dean van Leeuwen His Grey Elephant framework gives boards a named, structured radar for seven megatrends – distinguishing the forces that demand a strategic response from background noise and positioning leaders to act before disruption arrives, not after His McKinsey consulting background means the output of his foresight work is strategic choices, not predictions – he applies commercial strategy discipline to futures thinking in a way that most futurists do not His book “Quest: Competitive Advantage and the Art of Leadership in the 21st Century” codifies a three-quality leadership model drawn from case research on high-performing organisations, giving teams a shared model they can apply after the event He teaches in executive leadership programmes at Saïd Business School, Henley Business School, and CEDEP, Fontainebleau – his frameworks are tested against senior leadership cohorts, not developed solely for conference stages He co-hosts the “Elephants in the Boardroom” podcast, a named monthly research output that applies the Grey Elephant framework to live signals – keeping his content current and substantiated rather than recycled from a fixed talk Biography highlights Co-founder of TomorrowToday Global, a futurist and strategy consultancy operating across more than 50 countries; founder of TomorrowToday UK Former consultant at McKinsey and Company, with work that included advising on South Africa’s largest bank merger Executive lecturer at Saïd Business School (University of Oxford), Henley Business School, and CEDEP, Fontainebleau Author of “Quest: Competitive Advantage and the Art of Leadership in the 21st Century” (self-published, available on Amazon) TEDx speaker MSc in Business Strategy, Henley Management College; undergraduate background in economics and law Named clients include L’Oreal, Anglo American, BNP Paribas, GSK, John Lewis Partnership, and Deloitte Biography Most organisations have access to trend data. What they are missing is a structured way to turn that data into decisions their boards will commit to and their teams will execute. Dean van Leeuwen, co-founder of TomorrowToday Global, has spent two decades building exactly that – a practical bridge between foresight and strategic action. His most distinctive intellectual contribution is the Grey Elephant framework, a proprietary megatrend radar developed by TomorrowToday and built around seven named forces identified as highly probable, high-impact, and consistently underacted upon. The framework helps leadership teams name the forces they can already see coming and design responses before the window closes. He also applies the BANI diagnostic – Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible – as a lens for teams operating in conditions where cause and effect no longer follow predictable patterns. Earlier in his career, he worked at McKinsey and Company, where his work included advising on South Africa’s largest bank merger. That grounding in commercial strategy discipline is what separates his foresight practice from abstract futurism where the output is decisions and trade-offs, not trend catalogues. He now teaches in senior executive programmes at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, Henley Business School, and CEDEP in Fontainebleau. He is the author of “Quest: Competitive Advantage and the Art of Leadership in the 21st Century,” which decodes what leaders at high-performing organisations actually do through a three-quality model grounded in case research. He co-hosts the “Elephants in the Boardroom” podcast with Graeme Codrington, applying the Grey Elephant framework monthly to live signals across geopolitics, technology, and the global economy. Key speaking topics Strategic foresight and megatrend analysis Leadership decision-making under uncertainty Innovation as organisational capability Strategic transformation and competitive advantage The BANI operating environment Antifragility and organisational resilience Human-technology collaboration Ideal for Boards and C-suite leadership teams facing strategic inflection points, technology shifts, or competitive disruption Strategy, transformation, and innovation directors responsible for long-range planning Organisations navigating sector disruption, regulatory change, or structural market shifts Executive education cohorts focused on future-ready leadership and strategic foresight Audience outcomes A named framework for distinguishing megatrends that demand a strategic response from trends that can safely be monitored Shared language for leading teams in conditions where cause and effect are nonlinear and outcomes are hard to predict Practical tools for converting trend intelligence into decisions that commit direction and resources A clearer view of the specific forces most likely to reshape their competitive environment in the near and medium term Improved confidence in making strategic choices under uncertainty without waiting for conditions to stabilise

Why organisations work with Deborah Rowland Her 2015/16 global research, conducted through Behavioural Event Interviews with senior leaders across industries, quantified that leader inner capacities account for over half the success or failure of large complex change – a finding that directly challenges how most organisations design transformation programmes. The Still Moving framework and Change Vitality model give organisations a specific diagnostic language for the leadership dimension of change: eight interconnected skills with a clear evidence base, not another generic competency framework. She spent the first half of her career inside the systems she now advises, as VP of Organisational and Management Development at PepsiCo, Change Lead at Royal Dutch Shell, and People Director at BBC Worldwide. She understands the constraints of the position, not just its theory. Four Wiley-published books, articles in the Harvard Business Review and LSE Business Review, and papers accepted at the Academy of Management give her frameworks independent credibility beyond the consulting relationship. Her most recent book, From Ought to Is (Wiley, 2025), applies the Still Moving thinking directly to polarisation and systemic inertia – relevant to organisations managing post-merger integration, contested cultural change, or restructuring in divided environments. Biography highlights Author of Still Moving: How to Lead Mindful Change (Wiley, 2017, bestseller) and From Ought to Is: Catalysing Change and Movement in a Polarised World (Wiley, 2025); co-author with Professor Malcolm Higgs of Sustaining Change: Leadership That Works (Wiley, 2008) Named on Thinkers50 Radar 2017; ranked 31st on HR Magazine Most Influential Thinkers list 2021 Contributor to Harvard Business Review and LSE Business Review; original research accepted at the 2016 Academy of Management and 2019 European Academy of Management Former VP of Organisational and Management Development at PepsiCo; Change Lead at Royal Dutch Shell; People Director at BBC Worldwide; earlier senior roles at Gucci Group Founder of Still Moving change consultancy; advisory clients include RWE, GlaxoSmithKline, Rolls-Royce, Diageo, Unilever and De Beers Faculty contributor at Henley, Imperial, Tuck and Bath business schools; Advisory Board member, International Institute for Leadership and Safety Culture Double First in Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge University Biography Most large-scale transformation programmes fall short not because the strategy is wrong, but because the leaders running them revert to familiar patterns when complexity peaks. Deborah Rowland has devoted three decades to studying that specific failure mode. Her research, conducted through Behavioural Event Interviews with senior leaders across industries and geographies, found that four inner capacities of the leader – staying present, responding intentionally, tuning into the system, and acknowledging the whole – explained over half the reason why big complex change either succeeds or fails. That research was not produced from the outside. Rowland spent the first half of her career as a practitioner, serving as VP of Organisational and Management Development at PepsiCo, Change Lead at Royal Dutch Shell, and People Director at BBC Worldwide, with earlier senior roles at Gucci Group. She has led major restructurings from within, and understands directly the conditions under which change leaders default to unhelpful patterns. That experience is embedded in every practical element of the Still Moving framework she subsequently developed. The intellectual architecture behind the framework spans four published Wiley books. Sustaining Change (2008, with Professor Malcolm Higgs) identified four external practices of effective change leadership. Still Moving (2017) showed that four inner capacities must precede those practices – and that this inner dimension accounted for over half the variance in change success. From Ought to Is (2025) extends the argument to address polarisation and systemic inertia as the specific obstacles leaders now face. Named on the Thinkers50 Radar in 2017 and a contributor to the Harvard Business Review and LSE Business Review, she has also taught at Henley, Imperial, Tuck and Bath. She holds a Double First in Archaeology and Anthropology from Cambridge University – a training in systemic observation that continues to shape how she reads organisations and the people leading them. Key speaking topics Large-scale organisational transformation The inner capacities of change leadership The Still Moving framework and Change Vitality model Systemic change approaches Leading through polarisation and organisational inertia Culture change and movement Executive leadership development in complex environments Ideal for Executive leadership teams and boards sponsoring or overseeing major transformation programmes CHROs and senior HR leadership communities Leaders at the top of organisations navigating post-merger integration, major restructuring, or contested cultural change Business school executive education participants on leadership and change programmes Audience outcomes A clear understanding of why leader inner state – not change methodology – is the primary driver of transformation success or failure Practical exposure to the Still Moving eight-skill framework and Change Vitality model as a leadership diagnostic tool Ability to identify specific leadership behaviours that correlate with success in large and complex change Approaches for leading systemic change without defaulting to controlling or directive patterns under pressure A more honest assessment of personal leadership habits that may be slowing organisational change

Why organisations work with Diana Renner Her book Not Knowing (CMI Management Book of the Year, translated into 15+ languages) makes a specific, counterintuitive argument: that the pressure to project expertise and have answers actively impairs leadership in genuinely complex situations. This is a diagnosis most leadership development programmes avoid, and a conversation senior leadership teams rarely have with rigour. She works at the intersection of three distinct bodies of knowledge – adaptive leadership, adult development theory, and process oriented psychology – a combination that addresses not only what organisations need to do differently, but how leaders must develop as people. This is not available from single-discipline practitioners. Her guest faculty roles at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and the University of Texas LBJ School of Government confirm that her frameworks hold up in rigorous, peer-reviewed executive education settings alongside practitioner application. Through the Uncharted Leadership Institute and programme partnerships with Melbourne Business School, Monash Business School, the University of Adelaide, and the Australian Institute of Police Management, she has built and tested leadership development approaches across commercial, government, and community contexts at scale. Her personal biography – leaving Romania in 1987, professional reinvention across law, refugee advocacy, and leadership development – gives the Not Knowing framework lived authority that purely academic treatments of the same topic cannot match. Biography highlights Co-author of Not Knowing: The Art of Turning Uncertainty into Opportunity (LID Publishing) – CMI Management Book of the Year 2015; translated into 15+ languages Co-author of Not Doing: The Art of Effortless Action (LID Publishing, 2018) Director and co-founder, Uncharted Leadership Institute (est. 2016); creator, Not Knowing Lab Senior Lecturer, Monash University; adjunct lecturer, University of Adelaide; associate, Melbourne Business School Guest faculty, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government and University of Texas LBJ School of Government 2017 Monash University Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award (Global Challenges Honours Program teaching team) Biography Diana Renner’s book Not Knowing: The Art of Turning Uncertainty into Opportunity, co-written with Steven D’Souza, won the Chartered Management Institute’s Management Book of the Year in 2015. Its thesis is direct: the pressure to project expertise and certainty is often what makes complex adaptive challenges harder to navigate, not easier. Translated into more than fifteen languages, it has become a reference for leadership development practitioners and senior teams working with genuine strategic uncertainty. The book draws on a distinction most leadership frameworks collapse: technical problems can be solved with existing expertise, while adaptive challenges require new thinking and development. Renner’s work through the Uncharted Leadership Institute, which she co-founded in 2016, is built around helping senior leaders recognise which they are facing – and develop the capacity to engage productively with the latter. Her practice draws on three distinct disciplines: adaptive leadership, adult development theory, and process oriented psychology. Together, these address not only what organisations need to do differently, but how leaders need to develop as people to lead well in conditions of genuine uncertainty. Programme partnerships with Melbourne Business School, Monash Business School, the University of Adelaide, and the Australian Institute of Police Management have tested these frameworks across commercial, government, and community contexts. Renner holds a Senior Lectureship at Monash University and has served as guest faculty at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and the University of Texas LBJ School of Government. Her second book, Not Doing: The Art of Effortless Action (2018), extends the Not Knowing argument into the territory of executive effectiveness – examining how excessive busyness and compulsive doing undermine the quality of leadership in complex environments. Key speaking topics Adaptive leadership in uncertainty and complexity Not Knowing – leading beyond expertise Not Doing – effortless action and the limits of busyness Distinguishing adaptive from technical challenges Adult development theory and leadership growth Deliberately developmental organisational cultures Complexity theory and strategic resilience Ideal for CEOs and C-suite executives leading organisations through complex change or strategic inflection points CHROs and heads of leadership development designing senior leadership programmes Senior executives and leadership teams in government and public sector organisations Board-level strategy and scenario planning forums Audience outcomes A clear distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges, with practical language for applying it in real organisational conversations Greater self-awareness about how the pressure to have answers shapes individual leadership behaviour and team dynamics Practical frameworks from Not Knowing and Not Doing for leading through uncertainty without forcing premature resolution A more explicit understanding of how adult development theory applies to the daily practice of leadership Approaches to building team and organisational cultures that can hold complexity and sustain productive engagement over time

Why organisations work with Didier Marlier Co-author of Engaging Leadership (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), which set out the Logos, Ethos and Pathos framework now used inside executive programmes at IMD, INSEAD, Nyenrode and Fundação Dom Cabral. Three decades of close work with European industrials, financial institutions and professional service firms, including BASF, Credit Suisse, Bank Julius Baer, Dow Chemical, Firmenich, KPMG and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. Founded and ran the Enablers Network for almost thirty years before donating the brand to an independent association in 2024, an unusual signal of operating from conviction rather than commercial capture. Teaches change leadership across four continents in French, English and Portuguese, with deep practical exposure to Brazilian as well as European corporate cultures. Brings the same engagement methodology into professional sports environments, where the cost of disengagement is measurable on the scoreboard, and translates those lessons back into corporate boardrooms. Biography highlights Co-author of Engaging Leadership: Three Agendas for Sustaining Achievement, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Faculty and guest professor on executive programmes at IMD, INSEAD, Nyenrode, NEOMA and Fundação Dom Cabral. Founder of the Enablers Network, a European partnership of leadership and change practitioners, donated to the Enablers Association in 2024. MBA from IMD; law degree from Université de Lausanne. TEDx speaker and keynote at the GBTA Europe Conference 2013 in Prague. Long-standing client work with BASF, Credit Suisse, Dow Chemical, KPMG, Bank Julius Baer, Firmenich, Solvay, SAP and Total. Biography Strategy decks rarely fail on their logic. They fail because the people expected to deliver them never genuinely sign up. That gap, between the intellectual case for change and the behavioural reality of an organisation, is the territory Didier Marlier has worked in for three decades. His framework, set out with Chris Parker in Engaging Leadership (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), borrows from classical rhetoric. Logos is the strategic argument. Ethos is the behaviour and tone leaders model day to day. Pathos is the emotional commitment that turns compliance into ownership. The book argues that serious change requires all three running together, not strategy first and culture later. The client list reflects the breadth of that idea in practice: BASF, Credit Suisse, Bank Julius Baer, Dow Chemical, Firmenich, KPMG, Solvay and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer among them. He teaches the same material on executive programmes at IMD, INSEAD, Nyenrode and Fundação Dom Cabral, which gives him an unusually direct read on how European and Latin American executives experience change differently. In 2024 he donated the Enablers Network brand, which he had built over almost thirty years, to an independent association, and now works through DMD. He also applies the same engagement methodology inside professional sports teams, where disengagement shows up immediately in performance data and feeds back into how he advises corporate clients. Key speaking topics Leadership in the disruption economy Engagement through strategic, behavioural and emotional change Post-merger and post-acquisition integration Cultural transformation in multinational organisations Board and executive team effectiveness Change leadership across European and Latin American contexts Ideal for CEOs, executive committees and boards leading strategic, cultural or post-merger transformation CHROs and transformation leads responsible for behavioural adoption of new strategies Senior leadership programmes in multinational organisations with cross-cultural workforces Professional service firm partnerships managing change without command authority Audience outcomes A working language for diagnosing why a current change initiative is stalling A clearer line of sight between the strategic case for change and the day-to-day behaviour leaders must model Specific signals to watch for when intellectual buy-in masks emotional disengagement Cross-cultural reference points from European and Brazilian corporate practice

Why organisations work with Dominic Alldis His sessions place executives inside a live orchestra or jazz band, making the dynamics of leadership – alignment, trust, listening under pressure – physically felt rather than conceptually described. No other leadership format uses professional live performance as the working medium in this way. The classical-vs-jazz framework gives organisations a precise vocabulary for a problem most struggle to name: when to follow the score and when to improvise – the alignment-versus-autonomy tension that runs through every complex team. The Orchestra Experience has been part of Columbia Business School’s Senior Executive Program since 2008, with endorsement from the programme’s Kravis Professor of Business – giving his approach academic standing alongside conference-format delivery. As an active professional musician and faculty member at the Royal Academy of Music since 1991, he brings current, first-person experience of high-performance ensembles – not a career retrospective applied to business. His client base runs from Microsoft, Google and Deutsche Bank to the United Nations, with executive education work at INSEAD, IMD Lausanne, London Business School and Columbia – evidence of trust from serious institutions across sectors and formats. Biography highlights Jazz pianist, orchestral conductor, arranger and singer; professional career began in Paris in 1982 and spans jazz clubs, concert halls and festival stages internationally Founder and Director of Music & Management, delivering music-based leadership development programmes for corporations and business schools worldwide Faculty member at the Royal Academy of Music in London since 1991, teaching jazz improvisation to classical pianists and opera singers; Honorary Associate since 2000; Steinway Artist since 2010 Music & Management has delivered the Orchestra Experience to Columbia Business School’s Senior Executive Program since 2008; executive education work also includes INSEAD/CEDEP, IMD Lausanne and London Business School Corporate clients include senior teams at Microsoft, WPP, Google, eBay, Deutsche Bank, LVMH, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, BCG, PwC, Mandarin Oriental and the United Nations Author of two books published by Hal Leonard Corporation: «A Classical Approach to Jazz Piano Harmony» and «A Classical Approach to Jazz Piano Improvisation» Founder of the Canzona Chamber Orchestra (2010), performing classical repertoire and jazz crossover projects Biography The tension between structure and spontaneity runs through every high-performing team. An orchestra delivers the score with precision; a jazz band improvises around shared norms. Dominic Alldis is a jazz pianist, conductor, and founder of Music & Management and has spent more than two decades translating this contrast into a direct learning experience for executives. The question he brings to business audiences is concrete: when should a team follow the score, and when should it improvise? His framework draws from a professional career that spans both traditions. Alldis studied composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, played jazz residencies in Paris and London, conducted orchestras across four continents, and has taught improvisation to classical pianists and opera singers at the Royal Academy of Music in London (where he holds the title of Honorary Associate) since 1991. That dual expertise is the engine of his practice: not music as illustration, but musical performance as a live laboratory for the dynamics organisations actually need to develop. Music & Management has embedded the Orchestra Experience in Columbia Business School’s Senior Executive Program since 2008 – endorsed by Paul Ingram, Kravis Professor of Business. Corporate clients include senior teams at Microsoft, WPP, Google, Deutsche Bank, LVMH and the United Nations. His executive education work spans INSEAD, IMD Lausanne and London Business School. Testimonials from CHROs, managing partners and CEOs consistently name the sessions as the most memorable leadership experience their organisations have produced. His books – «A Classical Approach to Jazz Piano Harmony» and «A Classical Approach to Jazz Piano Improvisation», both published by Hal Leonard Corporation – reflect the same bridging instinct: rigorous musical thinking made accessible to practitioners who come from a different tradition. Key speaking topics Leadership through musical performance Classical and jazz models of organisational alignment Collaboration and collective decision-making Listening as a leadership competency Creativity and improvisation in organisations Change and adaptability in complex environments Team dynamics and organisational trust Ideal for Senior executive teams at strategic off-sites, leadership summits, and cultural transformation programmes CHROs and L&D Directors designing experiential leadership development at executive level Business schools and executive education programmes seeking immersive, non-traditional learning formats CEOs and boards seeking a high-impact, memorable format that connects music, leadership, and organisational performance Audience outcomes A direct, experiential encounter with how alignment, trust, and collective decision-making operate in real time – not as concepts, but as felt dynamics A working vocabulary for the tension between structured coordination and creative autonomy in teams Greater awareness of listening as an operational leadership practice, not only a communication skill New perspective on how change and improvisation can be navigated without losing coherent direction Personal observations about their own leadership behaviour, prompted by the musical experience rather than delivered through instruction

Why organisations work with Eddie Obeng He has spent thirty years on a single, consequential argument: that the management playbook built for a slower world now actively harms organisations trying to move at current speed. Boards get a framework, not a pep talk. His project typology (Painting by Numbers, Quest, Film, Foggy Project) gives leadership teams a language for matching management style to the kind of uncertainty a project actually contains, instead of defaulting to one method for every initiative. He built and runs QUBE, one of the earliest avatar-based virtual campuses, used to teach and coach distributed executive teams. He is speaking about distributed leadership from inside a working example, not from theory. The 2011 Sir Monty Finniston Award from the Association for Project Management recognises a lifetime contribution to how organisations deliver complex work, which is the substance underneath his keynotes. He is genuinely provocative in a room. The Financial Times called him “an agent provocateur” for a reason; he is comfortable telling a senior audience that what they are doing will not work. Biography highlights Founder and Executive Director of Pentacle (The Virtual Business School), established 1994. Professor at Henley Business School’s School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation; previously Executive Director at Ashridge Business School. 2011 Sir Monty Finniston Award for lifetime achievement, Association for Project Management. Author of All Change! The Project Leader’s Secret Handbook (Financial Times Pearson), Perfect Projects, Making Re-Engineering Happen and New Rules for the New World. TED Global 2012 speaker, “Smart failure for a fast-changing world”. Creator of QUBE, a virtual learning and collaboration environment covered by The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. Biography The gap between how quickly the world changes and how quickly organisations learn has been widening for three decades. Eddie Obeng has built a career arguing that this gap, more than any single technology or disruption, is the defining problem of modern management. He calls the condition the “New World After Midnight”. Pentacle, the business school he founded in 1994, was an early attempt to answer the problem practically. Its teaching is built around immediate application rather than case-study reflection, and it runs on QUBE, an avatar-based virtual campus Pentacle developed in 2010 that The Wall Street Journal described in its coverage of virtual workplaces and The Economist flagged as a future digital place to work. Running it means he has been leading distributed teams for longer than most of the organisations he advises. The intellectual spine of his work sits in project management, where he is credited with the four-type model (Painting by Numbers, Quest, Film, Foggy Project) that reframes delivery around how much is known at the start rather than how big the budget is. The Association for Project Management gave him its Sir Monty Finniston Award for lifetime achievement in 2011. His books, beginning with All Change! The Project Leader’s Secret Handbook in 1995, translate that model for practising leaders. He also holds a chair at Henley Business School’s School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and has sat on the UK Design Council board. In front of an audience he is sharp and direct; the Financial Times has used the words “leading revolutionary” and “agent provocateur”, which is closer to the experience of being in the room than the usual speaker billing. Key speaking topics Leading organisations in a fast-changing environment Project leadership and delivery under uncertainty Distributed and virtual team leadership Innovation and smart failure Organisational change and transformation The future of work and digital collaboration Ideal for Boards and executive committees confronting a change agenda that their current operating model cannot support Transformation, strategy and innovation leaders responsible for delivery across distributed teams Project and programme leadership communities inside large, complex organisations Partner meetings and leadership offsites where the brief is to unsettle assumptions, not confirm them Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for the types of change a leadership team is actually managing, rather than treating every initiative as the same problem A sharper view of why current planning and governance rituals slow organisations down in fast-moving conditions Permission and structure for “smart failure” as a deliberate mechanism for learning, not a slogan A working sense of what leading a distributed team looks like when it is built from scratch, not retrofitted onto office norms A harder question to take back into the next executive meeting

Why organisations work with Farid Tabarki A coherent thesis on how power, work, and value are moving away from the middle, set out in his book The End of the Middle and extended in his 2025 co-authored book The Acceleration Effect, on how organisations should navigate when change itself is speeding up. The vocabulary of radical transparency, radical decentralisation, and the liquid society, which gives leadership teams a shared frame for shifts they already feel but cannot yet name. Studio Zeitgeist’s Transformation Playground whitepaper, with seven organising principles that move the conversation from trend description to operating choice. Direct comparative observation from 195 countries, which gives him a working library of how different political, economic and cultural systems respond to the same structural pressures and feeds the comparisons that land with board audiences. A weekly column in Het Financieele Dagblad and standing on De Volkskrant‘s top 200 most influential people, which signals he is read by the same Dutch business audience clients are trying to reach. Biography highlights Founding director of Studio Zeitgeist, an Amsterdam-based research and strategy practice. Author of The End of the Middle: What a Society of Extremes Means for People, Politics and Business (English edition, 2017) and co-author with Joey Hullegie of Het versnellingseffect (The Acceleration Effect, Atlas Contact, 2025), a Dutch business bestseller on the Managementboek Top 100. Trendwatcher of the Year, Netherlands, 2012-2013. Long-running columnist at Het Financieele Dagblad and listed in De Volkskrant‘s top 200 most influential people in the Netherlands since 2013. Author of the Studio Zeitgeist whitepaper The Transformation Playground, Reinventing Business Principles. Has travelled to 195 countries as part of an ongoing project to visit every country in the world, drawing on the comparative material for his work on institutions and structural change. Supervisory and advisory roles across culture, housing, health and education, including Stadgenoot, the Prince Bernhard Culture Fund, International Theatre Amsterdam, and Platform Onderwijs 2032 for the Dutch government. Named as “Minister of AI” in a hypothetical cabinet by Dutch current affairs programme WNL op Zondag. Biography The middle layer of modern economies is thinning out. Travel agents, retail bankers, mid-tier publishers, and many salaried roles in between have lost the ground they were built on. Power, value, and attention are moving to the edges, towards platforms, networks, and individuals. That is the argument at the heart of The End of the Middle, Farid Tabarki’s book on what a society of extremes means for people, politics, and business. He sets out three structural shifts: the rise of online platforms that absorb intermediary work, technology that hollows out educated jobs, and the decline of the nation state as the central seat of power. The book reads as a working manual for leaders who can feel these shifts in their own businesses but lack the language to act on them. His 2025 book Het versnellingseffect, co-authored with Joey Hullegie and published by Atlas Contact, extends the thinking. The argument is that change is no longer punctuated by single technologies but by the rate of change itself, and that authority, place, value, and the human scale are all coming under pressure as a result. It is written as a navigation guide for organisations that can no longer assume a new equilibrium will arrive. Tabarki has been researching the European zeitgeist since 2000 through Studio Zeitgeist, the Amsterdam practice he founded. The studio’s Transformation Playground whitepaper lays out seven organising principles for companies operating in a more decentralised, more transparent, more liquid environment. He has also spent two decades travelling to 195 countries as part of a project to visit every country in the world. That comparative material, covering how different systems handle urbanisation, technology, governance, and economic pressure, sits behind the case studies he uses with boards. He is read weekly in Het Financieele Dagblad, sits on De Volkskrant‘s top 200 most influential people in the Netherlands, and was named Dutch Trendwatcher of the Year for 2012-2013. The work that earns him a board hearing is the same work that earns him those columns: a willingness to push past the trend label and ask what the shift actually changes for the next strategic decision. Key speaking topics The end of the middle and the liquid society The acceleration effect and strategic navigation Radical transparency in organisations Radical decentralisation of power and work Strategic foresight and structural shifts Liquid leadership Reinventing business principles for a post-middle economy Platforms, networks, and the redistribution of value Ideal for Boards and executive committees confronting structural change in their sector Strategy and transformation leads setting medium-term direction under uncertainty Senior leadership conferences where the brief calls for both a sharp keynote and a credible moderator Audience outcomes A clearer reading of which parts of their business sit on the disappearing middle A working vocabulary for shifts in transparency, decentralisation, and liquidity that staff already sense Specific organising principles to test against their current structure and strategy A sharper view of where customer and employee power is moving next

Why organisations work with Fons Trompenaars His Seven Dimensions of Culture model gives boards and integration teams a shared vocabulary for diagnosing where global strategies break down, drawn from research across more than a hundred thousand managers. Dilemma reconciliation moves leaders past the false choice between universal standards and local adaptation, which is the recurring failure mode in M&A integration, joint ventures, and global rollouts. Thinkers50 Hall of Fame status places him in the same tier as Drucker, Porter, and Peters, useful credibility when the audience is a sceptical executive committee. Three decades of advisory work with Shell, BP, Heineken, Philips, Nike, General Motors, IBM, Johnson and Johnson, and Pfizer mean the case material is operational, not academic. He is one of the few cultural theorists whose framework is built around action: every dimension comes with a method for resolving the tension, not just naming it. That method now runs inside AI-enabled tools, including a Dilemma Solver trained on a proprietary database of more than 60,000 leadership dilemmas. Biography highlights PhD in social systems sciences, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 1983. Co-founder of Trompenaars Hampden-Turner with Charles Hampden-Turner in 1989; acquired by KPMG in 1998. Author of Riding the Waves of Culture, named to the Thinkers50 top ten Management Classics list in 2024 and translated into more than twenty languages. Co-author of Nine Visions of Capitalism, 21 Leaders for the 21st Century, Building Cross-Cultural Competence, and Servant Leadership Across Cultures. Co-authoring Tension to Traction with Bas Kemme, a forthcoming book built on CEO interviews that extends the reconciliation argument of “21 Leaders for the 21st Century.” Inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2017; ranked among the most influential management thinkers in 2011, 2013, and 2015. Recipient of the ASTD International Professional Practice Area Research Award (1991) and the WFPMA George Petitpas Award (2023). Biography Most cross-cultural frameworks describe difference. They tell leaders that the Dutch are direct and the Japanese are deferential, then leave the leader to work out what to do about it. Trompenaars’ contribution is the next step: a method for reconciling competing cultural values rather than choosing between them. The Seven Dimensions of Culture, developed with Charles Hampden-Turner over a decade of empirical research, identifies the underlying tensions that surface when global organisations try to operate as one. Universal rules against particular relationships. Individual achievement against collective ascription. Sequential time against synchronous time. The model is built on data from over a hundred thousand managers and has anchored consulting engagements at Shell, BP, Heineken, Philips, Nike, IBM, Johnson and Johnson, and Pfizer. The intellectual foundation runs deep. A doctorate from Wharton, nine years inside Shell across nine countries, and the 1989 founding of the consultancy that became Trompenaars Hampden-Turner, later acquired by KPMG. “Riding the Waves of Culture” is a Thinkers50 Management Classic. The Hall of Fame induction in 2017 placed him alongside Drucker, Porter, and Peters. What makes the work commercially useful is dilemma reconciliation. Competing values, results and relationships, standards and local fit, individual and collective, are not trade-offs to be balanced but tensions to be integrated. For boards working through merger integration, global expansion, or post-acquisition culture programmes, that shift in framing is what turns cultural awareness into operational performance. The method now runs inside AI-enabled tools and underpins Tension to Traction, a forthcoming book with Bas Kemme on how CEOs turn competing pressures into a path forward. Key speaking topics Cross-cultural leadership and global team effectiveness Dilemma reconciliation as a leadership method Cultural due diligence in mergers and acquisitions The Seven Dimensions of Culture Leading change across multinational organisations Servant leadership across cultures Cultural reconciliation in the age of AI and polarisation Ideal for Executive committees and boards leading multinational integration, joint ventures, or post-acquisition culture work CHROs and global HR leaders responsible for leadership development across multiple regions Transformation leads running global change programmes where local resistance is the recurring blocker Leadership development programmes for newly international senior leaders Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the seven cultural tensions that surface inside global teams A method for reconciling competing values rather than defaulting to head office standards Diagnostic clarity on why specific global initiatives have stalled or fragmented Case material from Shell, Heineken, Philips, and other multinationals that can be applied to the audience’s own integration challenges

Why organisations work with Freek Vermeulen He has built a specific, named argument that “best practices” are frequently bad practices in disguise. Leaders leave with a method for stress-testing the practices their company has stopped questioning. His book Breaking Bad Habits, published by Harvard Business Review Press, is built on empirical research across industries from newspapers to IVF clinics to West End theatre. The examples carry, because they are not from the usual case-study roster. He bridges academic rigour and operating language better than most. Published in Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science and Strategic Management Journal, but read in the boardrooms of Bosch, BP, Goldman Sachs, Maersk and Vodafone. He was the first recipient of LBS’s Excellence in Teaching Award and named to the 2016 Thinkers50 Radar. The audience signal: he is among the management thinkers actively shaping how strategy is taught at senior level. Biography highlights Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, London Business School. PhD, Tilburg University. Author of Breaking Bad Habits (Harvard Business Review Press) and Business Exposed (FT Prentice-Hall). Translated into seven languages. Named to the Thinkers50 Radar list, 2016. First recipient of the LBS Excellence in Teaching Award; also recipient of the school’s Best Teacher Award. Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review; one of his 2025 HBR articles was named among HBR’s Most Popular Articles of 2025. Academy of Management Journal Best Paper Award; INFORMS/ISA Best Paper Award; Vienna University of Economics and Business Theory-to-Practice Award. Biography Industries inherit habits. A newspaper prints on broadsheet because newspapers print on broadsheet. A consultancy charges by the day because that is what consultancies do. Most of these habits started with a reason. Most have outlived the reason. Almost none are questioned, because everyone in the industry is still doing them. This is the territory Freek Vermeulen has spent his academic career mapping. His book Breaking Bad Habits, published by Harvard Business Review Press, argues that the most damaging strategic mistakes are not bold moves that fail. They are conventions that nobody is auditing. The same logic appears across his Harvard Business Review writing, where he has been a regular contributor, including a 2025 piece with a London Business School colleague that was named among HBR’s Most Popular Articles of 2025. Vermeulen is Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School, where he has chaired the Strategy and Entrepreneurship department and served on the school’s Management Board and Board of Governors. He was the first person to receive the school’s Excellence in Teaching Award, and the 2016 Thinkers50 Radar list identified him as one of the management thinkers most likely to shape the next decade of organisational practice. The work is academic in origin, with Best Paper Awards from the Academy of Management Journal and INFORMS, and it has translated into a client list that includes Bosch, BP, GE, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Lufthansa, Maersk, Novartis, Roche, Toshiba and Vodafone. The reason for the breadth is the angle. Vermeulen does not tell senior leaders what to do next. He tells them which of the things they are already doing have stopped earning their place. Key speaking topics Strategic innovation and corporate transformation Why “best practices” become bad practices Strategy execution and making strategy happen Profitable growth and international expansion Acquisitions, alliances and corporate scope Organisational learning and industry evolution Ideal for CEOs, CSOs and corporate strategy teams in mature industries facing flatlining growth Board and ExCo audiences re-examining what their company does because it has always done it M&A, post-acquisition integration and corporate development leaders Strategy and transformation conferences at multinational scale Audience outcomes A specific method for distinguishing practices that create value from practices that have simply been inherited A sharper view of how industry conventions form, persist and quietly damage performance Worked examples drawn from research across multiple industries, not the usual handful of case studies A frame for strategy execution that treats the deletion of bad habits as seriously as the launch of new initiatives

Why organisations work with Gary Hamel He gives leadership teams the vocabulary to see their own bureaucracy. Terms he co-introduced, core competence, strategic intent and now humanocracy, are the language many boards already use to argue about strategy and design. He pushes past the innovation-theatre version of transformation. His work with Michele Zanini on Humanocracy is a data-backed argument that most large companies are organised to slow people down, and it offers a specific model for dismantling that. He sits at the intersection of strategy and organisation design that few thinkers occupy. Most strategists stop at the market; most organisation specialists stop at culture. Hamel argues the two are the same problem. He brings credentials senior buyers recognise on sight: more than three decades on the London Business School faculty, the most reprinted author in Harvard Business Review, Thinkers50 Hall of Fame inductee. Biography highlights Visiting Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, London Business School, for more than 30 years Most reprinted author in Harvard Business Review history Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, inducted 2022; ranked inside the global top 30 management thinkers across five successive Thinkers50 lists Co-author with C.K. Prahalad of “Strategic Intent” (1989) and “The Core Competence of the Corporation” (1990), two of the most cited HBR articles ever published Author or co-author of Competing for the Future, Leading the Revolution, The Future of Management, What Matters Now and Humanocracy Founder of Strategos and the Management Lab; Fellow of the Strategic Management Society and the World Economic Forum Biography Strategy schools teach leaders to study their markets. Hamel’s career has been a long argument that the harder problem sits inside the building. Competing for the Future, written with C.K. Prahalad in 1994, reframed competitive advantage around distinctive capability rather than market position, and the HBR articles behind it, “Strategic Intent” and “The Core Competence of the Corporation”, remain fixtures on executive reading lists three decades later. That work made him one of the defining strategy voices of the 1990s. What he did next is the part senior leaders tend to value most now. Across The Future of Management and Humanocracy, written with Michele Zanini, he has turned the same analytical lens on the management model itself, arguing that the structures most companies rely on were built for compliance and control and are actively hostile to the initiative, agility and judgement those same companies say they want. Humanocracy is the sharp edge of that argument. Drawing on data from more than 10,000 employees and a set of named case companies, the book sets out what it takes to replace bureaucratic routines with a model in which people are the point rather than the resource. It became a Wall Street Journal bestseller and anchors his current speaking work with boards and executive committees. The credentials behind that argument are unusually thick. Hamel has been on the London Business School faculty for more than thirty years, is the most reprinted author in HBR’s history, and was inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2022. Fortune has called him the world’s leading expert on business strategy; the Financial Times calls him a management innovator without peer. Key speaking topics Management innovation and the future of the management model Humanocracy and post-bureaucratic organisation design Strategic intent and core competence in contested markets Organisational agility and resilience at scale Building innovation capability inside large incumbents Leadership for strategic renewal Ideal for CEOs and executive committees wrestling with strategy-to-execution drift CHROs and chief transformation officers redesigning operating models Board conversations on long-horizon competitiveness and management capability Leadership programmes inside large, bureaucratic incumbents Audience outcomes A sharper read on where their own management model is costing them speed and initiative Specific language, core competence, strategic intent, humanocracy, that senior teams can use to argue about strategy the next morning Named case examples of companies that have dismantled bureaucratic routines and what it took A clearer line between strategy work and organisation design, and why treating them as separate projects fails A view of innovation capability as a systems problem, not a culture slogan

Why organisations work with Gary Pisano He gives leaders a framework for diagnosing why innovation investment is not compounding, and a language for fixing it at the level of strategy rather than process. His work on industrial commons, developed with Willy Shih in Producing Prosperity, explains how manufacturing and R and D decisions shape long-term competitive capacity, a lens most strategy advisors do not carry. The thesis of Creative Construction reframes scale as a potential innovation asset, which is directly relevant to incumbents under pressure from smaller, faster rivals. The 1997 Dynamic Capabilities paper he co-authored is foundational reading in corporate strategy; buyers get the person whose ideas their strategy team has already been citing. Board experience at Axcella Health and Celixir, plus advisory work across aerospace, biotech, pharma, medical devices, semiconductors and financial services, grounds the academic argument in operator reality. Biography highlights Harry E. Figgie, Jr. Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School; on faculty since 1988. Former Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Promotion and Tenure at HBS (2018 to 2023). Author of Creative Construction: The DNA of Sustained Innovation (PublicAffairs, 2019) and Science Business (HBS Press, 2006); co-author of Producing Prosperity (HBS Press, 2012). Won the 2009 McKinsey Award for best HBR article for Restoring American Competitiveness with Willy Shih. Co-author of Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management (1997), one of the most cited papers in the management literature. PhD from UC Berkeley; BA in Economics from Yale. Biography Innovation spend in large organisations often grows faster than any measurable return on it. The reason is rarely a failure of execution. It is a failure to define what innovation is supposed to do for the business in the first place. This is the problem Gary Pisano has spent three decades unpicking at Harvard Business School. As the Harry E. Figgie, Jr. Professor of Business Administration, Pisano has published over 100 scholarly articles and case studies and written six books. Creative Construction, his 2019 book, argues that large firms are not condemned to be outrun by start-ups. Scale is an asset when strategy, systems, and culture are set up to use it. The argument cuts directly against the disruption orthodoxy that has shaped a generation of boardroom thinking. His earlier work reaches further back into the industrial architecture of competitiveness. Producing Prosperity, co-written with Willy Shih, shows how outsourced manufacturing hollows out the capability to invent. Science Business, his study of biotech, explains why a whole industry built on extraordinary science has struggled to translate it into sustained commercial performance. The 1997 Dynamic Capabilities paper, written with David Teece and Amy Shuen, is one of the most cited in the history of strategic management. That research base is matched by three decades of direct advisory work across aerospace, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, semiconductors, software, and financial services, plus board seats at Axcella Health and Celixir. Leaders come to him when the innovation portfolio looks busy but the competitive position is not improving, and they leave with a sharper account of why. Key speaking topics Innovation strategy Sustained innovation in large organisations Competitive strategy and dynamic capabilities Growth and the limits of scale Manufacturing, industrial commons and national competitiveness Science-based business models R and D and intellectual property strategy Ideal for CEOs, CSOs and heads of strategy in incumbent firms losing ground on innovation Boards overseeing large R and D portfolios that are not compounding into advantage Executive teams in biotech, pharma, medical devices and advanced manufacturing Policy and industry leaders working on national competitiveness and supply chain capability Audience outcomes A sharper diagnosis of why innovation spending is not producing durable advantage A working definition of innovation strategy that ties R and D choices to business strategy An argument for when scale helps innovation and when it quietly kills it A clear view of how manufacturing and process capability feed, or starve, future product innovation Language senior teams can use to challenge an innovation portfolio without defaulting to start-up envy