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Why organisations work with Kian Bakhtiari Direct primary-source insight from a live community of 2,000+ Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha contributors across 50+ markets, rather than the lagged trend reports most boards are working from. A published, practitioner argument on purpose-led marketing through Kogan Page’s “Marketing for Social Change”, giving commercial teams a framework for purpose that survives the backlash cycle. Strategic credibility across two registers: the agency boardroom (former Head of Strategy at Dentsu Aegis Network) and the multilateral institution (WEF Agenda Contributor, UNFCCC advisor). Operating experience with consumer-facing brands that have to convert Gen-Z, including Adidas, Unilever, Diesel, L’Oreal, Danone, Innocent Drinks, Pentland Brands and Speedo. A Financial Times Top 50 Future Leaders listing, which gives a buyer external validation that the perspective is taken seriously by the business press. Biography highlights Founder of The People, a Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha cultural intelligence consultancy with contributors across 50+ markets. Author of “Marketing for Social Change: How to Turn Purpose Into Business and Social Impact”, Kogan Page (2024). Named in the Financial Times “Top 50 Future Leaders” for contributions to marketing. Agenda Contributor to the World Economic Forum; Advisor to UN Climate Change (UNFCCC). Forbes contributor on Gen-Z, brand and consumer culture; featured in Campaign, The Drum, Vogue Business and Rolling Stone. Former Head of Strategy at Dentsu Aegis Network; TEDx Brighton speaker on imagination and innovation. Biography Marketing teams have been trying to “reach Gen-Z” with the tools of the previous cycle: panels, focus groups, agency trend decks. The cohort itself has moved on, and most of the commercial signals reaching the boardroom are already a generation late. Kian Bakhtiari built The People to close that gap, running a live network of Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha contributors across 50+ markets that feeds primary cultural intelligence directly into client work. His background is unusually balanced for the field. Former Head of Strategy at Dentsu Aegis Network, he understands what the commercial brief looks like inside a holding company. As Agenda Contributor to the World Economic Forum and Advisor to UN Climate Change, he sees how the same generational questions land in policy and multilateral settings. The Financial Times named him in its Top 50 Future Leaders for marketing, an external read on where his work sits in the discipline. His book, “Marketing for Social Change” (Kogan Page, 2024), is the practitioner argument behind the consultancy. It sets out how brands can embed purpose into the operating substance of the business rather than the campaign layer, and how to avoid the backlash that hits when the two diverge. Clients he has worked with on this terrain include Unilever, L’Oreal, Diesel, Adidas, Danone, Innocent Drinks, Pentland Brands, Speedo and the BBC. What he gives a senior team is a route into a consumer base they cannot read with their existing tools, and a defensible position on purpose that holds up when scrutinised. That sits at the centre of how commercial strategy is now being rewritten for younger consumers and workers. Key speaking topics Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha consumer behaviour Purpose-led marketing and brand activism Cultural intelligence and foresight Marketing for social change The future workforce and generational diversity Brand communities and the creator economy Innovation, imagination and creativity Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and consumer insight leads recalibrating their approach to Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha audiences Chief Strategy Officers and growth leads in consumer-facing categories where younger cohorts decide the next decade of revenue Boards and executive committees stress-testing purpose, ESG and brand positioning against a more sceptical, more political consumer base CHROs and culture leads working on multigenerational workforces where Gen-Z is reshaping engagement and retention Audience outcomes A sharper picture of what Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha actually want from brands, employers and institutions, drawn from a live primary-source network rather than syndicated research. A practical test for whether a brand’s purpose can survive contact with the operating business, and where it most often breaks. A view of the commercial cost of getting generational signals wrong, and the categories where that cost is already showing up. Specific examples of brands that have moved purpose from campaign to product, and what made the difference.

Why organisations work with Kian Gohar Brings primary research, not commentary. The Ferrazzi-Gohar study of 2,000 leaders during the pandemic and his Stanford-partnered four-company experiment on AI-assisted brainstorming give boards an evidence base for decisions, not anecdote. Co-author of a Wall Street Journal bestseller, “Competing in the New World of Work” (Harvard Business Review Press, translated into seven languages), with a working framework for high-return team practices that leaders can apply directly. Operational track record from inside XPRIZE Foundation and Singularity University, where he ran innovation programmes for Fortune 500s and helped design corporate moonshot work, so the advice connects to how large organisations actually execute. Published in Harvard Business Review on the failure modes of generative AI in team creativity, with specific guidance on how to redesign ideation workflows so AI raises output rather than flattening it. Speaks five languages and has built innovation programmes across the US, Europe, and China, which translates into sharper sessions for global leadership teams than a US-only perspective offers. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Geolab, a research lab on Human-AI collaboration, future of work, and innovation. Co-author with Keith Ferrazzi of “Competing in the New World of Work” (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022), a Wall Street Journal bestseller in seven languages. Co-author of “Don’t Let Gen AI Limit Your Team’s Creativity,” Harvard Business Review, March-April 2024, with Jeremy Utley of Stanford. Former Executive Director, XPRIZE Foundation and Singularity University. Member, Council on Foreign Relations; Henry Luce Scholar in Shanghai; alumnus of Northwestern, London School of Economics, and Harvard Business School. Research and commentary featured in the Financial Times, NPR, and the Wall Street Journal. Biography Most teams adopted hybrid work and generative AI inside the same eighteen months, and most leaders are still guessing at what good looks like. Kian Gohar’s research sits in that gap. With Keith Ferrazzi he interviewed more than 2,000 leaders during the pandemic; the resulting book, “Competing in the New World of Work” (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022), became a Wall Street Journal bestseller and was translated into seven languages. His more recent work moves the same lens onto AI. With Jeremy Utley of Stanford, he ran a four-company experiment on AI-assisted brainstorming and published the findings in Harvard Business Review in 2024. The headline is uncomfortable for vendors: teams using generative AI produced only modestly more ideas, and several underperformed. The article gives leaders a specific diagnosis of why and what to change in the ideation workflow. Before Geolab, Gohar was Executive Director of the XPRIZE Foundation and Singularity University, where he built corporate moonshot and innovation programmes for Fortune 500 leadership teams. That operational background is why his keynotes carry weight in boardrooms; the advice is grounded in running real programmes, not modelling them. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Henry Luce Scholar, and a graduate of Northwestern, the London School of Economics, and Harvard Business School. For a senior team trying to work out how to make hybrid actually productive and how to introduce AI without quietly degrading creativity, Gohar offers a rare combination of evidence and operating instinct. Key speaking topics Radical adaptability and high-return team practices Human-AI collaboration in knowledge work Generative AI and team creativity Hybrid and remote workplace design Innovation strategy and corporate moonshots Future of work and workforce transformation Leadership through structural change Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers redesigning hybrid operating models Chief strategy and chief innovation officers integrating generative AI into team workflows Executive teams running enterprise-wide transformation programmes Boards and senior leadership groups setting an AI and future-of-work agenda Audience outcomes A clear read on what 2,000 leaders learned about hybrid work that actually raises team performance. Specific reasons teams underperform with generative AI and the workflow changes that reverse it. A working vocabulary for radical adaptability that senior teams can use to evaluate their own practices. Concrete examples from XPRIZE moonshot work showing how ambitious goals get organised inside large companies. A sharper sense of which AI and future-of-work investments will compound, and which will not.

Why organisations work with Kieran Gilmurray He has shipped AI and intelligent automation programmes inside named enterprises including Rapid7, Mercer, and Pearson, with documented savings in the tens of millions. That track record sits behind every framework he presents. His three books on generative AI, agentic AI, and organisational digital transformation give boards a structured reference, not a hype reel. They are written for the executive who has to decide, not the engineer who has to build. He treats agentic AI as an operating model question. The conversation moves quickly from “what is an AI agent” to which decisions an agent should own, what governance the board needs to put around it, and how the workforce is redesigned in response. Seven LinkedIn Top Voice recognitions and Thinkers360 rankings in generative and agentic AI mean the audience is hearing from a voice already widely cited in their own feeds, which lifts the in-room credibility of the conversation. Biography highlights Author of Agentic AI: A Business Leader’s Guide to the Future of Work and Digital Labour, The A to Z of Generative AI, and The A-Z of Organizational Digital Transformation. CEO and Founder, Kieran Gilmurray and Company Limited. Chief AI Innovator, Technology Transformation Group. Seven-time LinkedIn Top Voice in AI and related categories. Listed by Thinkers360 in the Top 50 Generative AI and Top 100 Agentic AI thought leaders. MBA (1st Class Distinction, Entrepreneurship Award) and MSc in Computer Science, both Queen’s University Belfast. Biography The gap between AI ambition and AI in operation has become the defining management problem of the decade. Pilots prove the technology works. Boards then struggle to convert those pilots into structural advantage, and most leadership teams still lack a clear view of which decisions an AI agent should now own. This is the territory Kieran Gilmurray works in. As CEO of Kieran Gilmurray and Company Limited and Chief AI Innovator at the Technology Transformation Group, he advises boards and executive teams on moving generative and agentic AI from concept into operating reality. His work spans finance, HR, customer service, and the wider digital labour stack. The credibility behind the advice is operational. Programmes he has led inside Rapid7, Mercer, and Pearson are referenced across his bureau profiles with quantified outcomes in the tens of millions of pounds and dollars. His three books, including Agentic AI: A Business Leader’s Guide to the Future of Work and Digital Labour, give business leaders a structured way to think about agent design, governance, and workforce redesign without retreating into engineering language. Independent recognition reinforces the position. Kieran has been named a LinkedIn Top Voice seven times and ranks on Thinkers360 leaderboards for both generative AI and agentic AI. He holds an MBA with distinction from Queen’s University Belfast and an MSc in Computer Science from the same institution, a pairing that maps directly onto the audience he writes for: business leaders who need the technology to make commercial sense. Key speaking topics Agentic AI and digital labour Generative AI for business leaders AI strategy and operating model design Intelligent automation at enterprise scale Digital transformation in regulated industries AI governance and board-level oversight Future of work in the age of AI Ideal for Boards and executive committees moving from AI pilots to enterprise deployment CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, and Chief AI Officers designing operating models around generative and agentic AI CHROs and transformation leads redesigning roles and workflows as AI agents enter the workforce Industry conferences in financial services, professional services, technology, insurance, and the public sector Audience outcomes A working definition of agentic AI that distinguishes it from generative AI and earlier automation, with examples from named enterprises A board-level view of where AI agents are already producing operating savings and where they are still pilot theatre A practical map of governance questions a leadership team must answer before scaling AI agents across functions A clear framing of workforce redesign as AI shifts which decisions sit with humans and which sit with digital labour

Why organisations work with Kristel Bauer A medical practitioner’s lens on workplace wellbeing. Her clinical background in integrative psychiatry means audiences hear evidence-based content on stress, sleep, and mental health, not motivational generalities. A published thesis on work-life harmony. Work-Life Tango (John Murray Business, 2024) replaces the binary of balance with a more usable operating model for hybrid teams. Credibility with both wellbeing leads and commercial leadership. Bauer translates clinical evidence into language that resonates with operations and people functions in the same room. Track record across regulated and Fortune 500 environments, including AbbVie, Bank of America, bp, General Mills, Home Depot, Santander, TIAA, and the U.S. Census Bureau. Media reach that extends authority beyond the keynote. Forbes, Entrepreneur, NBC News Daily, ABC News Live, and the Live Greatly podcast give clients a speaker whose ideas circulate well after the event. Biography highlights Author of Work-Life Tango: Finding Happiness, Harmony and Peak Performance Wherever You Work (John Murray Business, 2024) Integrative Medicine Fellow and former Physician Assistant with clinical experience in integrative psychiatry Creator and host of the Live Greatly Podcast, ranked in the top tier of self-improvement category globally Contributing writer for Entrepreneur; named a Forbes Top 10 Social Media Influencer 2026 Top Impact Speaker, Real Leaders Broadcast features on NBC News Daily, ABC News Live, FOX Weather, ABC 7 Chicago, WGN Daytime Chicago TEDx speaker: “Redefining Work-Life Balance in a COVID-19 World” Corporate clients include AbbVie, Bank of America, bp, Cognizant, General Mills, Home Depot, Northwestern University, Santander, TIAA, U.S. Census Bureau Biography Workplace wellbeing has become an operating cost line that few organisations know how to manage. Engagement scores stay flat, mental health claims rise, and the hybrid debate consumes leadership attention. The clinical evidence on what actually moves the dial sits outside most HR functions. Kristel Bauer brings that evidence into the room. She practised as a Physician Assistant with clinical experience in integrative psychiatry and completed an Integrative Medicine Fellowship before founding Live Greatly in 2019 to focus full time on workplace wellbeing and performance. Her book, Work-Life Tango: Finding Happiness, Harmony and Peak Performance Wherever You Work, was published by John Murray Business in November 2024. The thesis replaces the static idea of balance with a more dynamic operating model: harmony as something teams design for, not something individuals struggle to achieve. The Live Greatly podcast has carried that argument into a wider audience, with conversations across leadership, behavioural science, and performance. Bauer has presented for AbbVie, Bank of America, bp, Cognizant, General Mills, Home Depot, Santander, TIAA, and the U.S. Census Bureau, among others. She is a contributing writer for Entrepreneur, a Forbes Top 10 Social Media Influencer, a 2026 Top Impact Speaker by Real Leaders, and a TEDx speaker. Key speaking topics Workplace wellbeing as an operational discipline Mental health and stress at work Peak performance and high-performance habits Work-life harmony in hybrid and distributed teams Burnout prevention and recovery Leadership and emotional intelligence Employee engagement and culture Ideal for CHROs, heads of people, and wellbeing leads commissioning credible mental health content Learning and development functions building manager capability around stress and performance Leadership offsites where wellbeing needs clinical grounding, not motivational framing Sales kick-offs and all-hands events that need a high-energy, evidence-led performance keynote Audience outcomes A clinically grounded model for distinguishing healthy pressure from harmful stress at work A practical operating definition of work-life harmony that managers can apply with their teams Specific habit-level interventions for sustained performance under sustained load Language for talking about mental health at work that lands with commercial as well as people leaders Confidence to treat workplace wellbeing as a measurable strategic lever, not a perks question

Why organisations work with Lauren Ducrey Seven years inside Google as a senior UX content strategist, writing the conversational personality of Google Assistant and Bard/Gemini. When she talks about what AI can and cannot do with language, she is describing a system she helped build. The Humanifesto is a six-stage method that runs from 45 minutes to half a day, at a 25-person Google Cloud offsite or a 500-person UNOi México keynote, in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. Every session produces a written piece per attendee and a gallery of those pieces the internal comms team can publish afterwards. Tongues Tied (2021), the EP Cordes sensibles with Paris guitarist Hadrien Remy (2022), and laureate of the 2022 Moving Words competition for “The Second Cactus”. She also writes bespoke opening and closing pieces to a client’s brief. Indeed programmed her Humanifesto session as an interactive breakout at FutureWorks in Phoenix, September 2026, where it carries SHRM recertification credit. At AXA, the session sold out fast enough that the team ran it again the same week. Biography highlights Senior UX content strategist at Google for seven years, designing the conversational personality of Google Assistant and, later, Bard and Gemini Author of Tongues Tied (2021) and creator of Cordes sensibles (2022), an EP of poetry set to guitar with Paris musician Hadrien Remy, and laureate of the 2022 Moving Words competition Interviewed by Le Monde, Bloomberg QuickTake and The Huffington Post on the Assistant’s personality, which she was then leading for French-speaking markets Sessions delivered for Meta Creative Shop, Google Cloud, AXA, PepsiCo, Renault, Squarespace and Editora Moderna in Brazil Has taught and performed at Columbia University, IRCAM Paris, The Shed in New York and Maison de la Conversation in Paris HEC Paris graduate, with master’s degrees in literature and social innovation, and a former political speechwriter Biography Someone had to decide how the Google Assistant apologises. For seven years that was part of Lauren Ducrey’s job as a senior UX content strategist at Google, writing conversational personality into the Assistant and later into Bard and Gemini. Every phrasing was a design decision, worked out with psychologists and tested against how people actually talk to machines. That work left her treating language as operating infrastructure. Before she left, she was running workshops inside Google that used poems to practise listening and productive disagreement. A leader who cannot describe their own contribution has little to defend when the restructure arrives. One of Google Cloud’s Partners leaders put the condition to her plainly at an offsite: no time to reflect, multitasking as a permanent fact of the job. The format she built for this is the Humanifesto, six stages from an opening poem to a send-off. In the middle, everyone spends fifteen minutes using AI to draft a statement of what they bring that a machine cannot. Meta Creative Shop gave it the closing slot of a full-day global offsite, and volunteers queued to read their pieces aloud to 130 colleagues. At Editora Moderna’s product launch in Brazil, it held 150 school directors past 7:30pm on a Monday. Tongues Tied came out in 2021, followed in 2022 by Cordes sensibles, an EP of poems set to guitar; her piece “The Second Cactus” took the 2022 Moving Words award. She has read at The Shed in New York and taught at Columbia University and IRCAM in Paris. In September 2026, Indeed placed her Humanifesto session on the FutureWorks programme in Phoenix, where it carries SHRM recertification credit. Key speaking topics Human capability in an AI-enabled workforce Language as organisational infrastructure Emotional intelligence and leadership under automation Generative AI as a reflection tool Employee engagement at offsites, all-hands and leadership summits Creativity and expression inside technical teams Poetry as a workplace practice Ideal for CHROs and heads of L&D rebuilding employee development around AI capability Internal communications and culture leads running offsites, all-hands and leadership summits with AI-heavy agendas Conference programmers who need one booking to cover a panel, a workshop and the opening and closing slots Creative, marketing and product directors whose teams are questioning their own value against generative tools Audience outcomes A written Humanifesto: a short personal statement of what each person contributes that AI cannot reproduce One concrete use for generative AI they can apply immediately, prompting it to reflect their own thinking back to them rather than to write on their behalf Shared language for what a team does well, drawn from what people in the room actually wrote Vocabulary for naming what they are experiencing during restructures and AI rollouts, which is the precondition for raising it with a manager A gallery of attendee-written pieces the organisation can publish internally afterwards

Why organisations work with Léa Steinacker Her “Code Capital” framework, developed through her University of St. Gallen doctorate and published by Nomos Verlag, gives executive teams a structured way to analyse what is embedded in AI systems from design through deployment, something most AI governance conversations currently lack. Her peer-reviewed research covers specific, contested AI applications, including cross-national surveys of facial recognition acceptance published in Government Information Quarterly and Public Understanding of Science, which gives her arguments empirical grounding rather than assertion. Her 2024 book co-authored with Prof. Dr. Miriam Meckel (Rowohlt Verlag) reached both the Spiegel and Manager Magazin bestseller rankings, evidence that her framing of AI’s organisational and societal consequences resonates with senior business audiences, not only specialist ones. As co-founder of ada Learning, which has equipped thousands of employees from DAX companies, SMEs, and governments with AI transformation skills, she has tested her frameworks inside major institutions at scale, not only described them from the outside. Board-level experience at Weleda AG and active leadership as CEO of GaiaLogic AG mean her perspective on AI governance comes from someone directly accountable for it, not only someone who analyses it. Biography highlights PhD from the University of St. Gallen; doctoral thesis “Code Capital” published as an academic monograph by Nomos Verlag (2022) Co-author with Prof. Dr. Miriam Meckel of “Alles überall auf einmal” (Rowohlt Verlag, 2024), ranked on both the Spiegel and Manager Magazin bestseller lists; published in English as “Everything Everywhere All At Once: How Artificial Intelligence Impacts Our World” and in Korean CEO of GaiaLogic AG; co-founder and former Executive Chairwoman of ada Learning GmbH, which has equipped thousands of employees from DAX companies, SMEs, and governments with AI transformation skills Member of the Board of Directors of Weleda AG; former member of the AI Advisory Board of Ringier AG Lecturer at the University of St. Gallen, teaching “Social and Economic Impacts of Artificial Intelligence” Peer-reviewed publications in Government Information Quarterly, Electronic Markets, Public Understanding of Science, and Data and Policy (Cambridge Core) Degrees from Princeton University (A.B.), Harvard Kennedy School of Government (MPP), and the University of St. Gallen (PhD) Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe; Medium Magazine Top 30 Under 30 Journalists; BCG Thought Leader; Atlantik-Brücke Young Leader; Munich Young Leader (Munich Security Conference and Körber Stiftung); Henry Richardson Labouisse Prize, Princeton University Biography Organisations moving quickly on AI adoption are finding that their governance structures are not keeping pace. Boards are increasingly accountable for what AI systems do to their decisions and their people, yet most lack the analytical frameworks to evaluate it. Léa Steinacker has spent a decade building exactly those frameworks. Her doctoral research at the University of St. Gallen produced Code Capital, a sociotechnical framework for analysing AI systems from design through deployment. Published by Nomos Verlag in 2022, it gives leaders a structured way to identify what AI systems actually contain, from design assumptions to deployment risks. Her peer-reviewed work, covering facial recognition adoption across four countries and published in journals including Government Information Quarterly and Public Understanding of Science, brings empirical grounding to arguments that too often stay at the level of principle. Her 2024 book with Prof. Dr. Miriam Meckel (Rowohlt Verlag) became an immediate Spiegel and Manager Magazin bestseller and was subsequently translated into English and Korean. It moved the question of what AI means for people, organisations, and societies from ethical debate into practical leadership conversation. She now carries that perspective directly into practice as CEO of GaiaLogic AG and as a lecturer at the University of St. Gallen. As a member of the Board of Directors of Weleda AG, her perspective on AI governance is shaped by institutional accountability, not only academic analysis. She co-founded ada Learning, which has equipped thousands of employees from DAX companies, governments, and civil society organisations with AI transformation skills. She holds degrees from Princeton University, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and the University of St. Gallen. Key speaking topics AI governance and responsible deployment The societal and organisational implications of AI Code Capital and sociotechnical analysis of AI systems AI regulation and the European policy framework Workforce transformation and AI readiness Human-AI collaboration and decision-making AI and the future of knowledge work Ideal for Boards and C-suite executives evaluating AI governance and accountability structures Chief Technology Officers, Chief Digital Officers, and transformation leads navigating AI adoption Policy, legal, and compliance teams working on AI regulation and enterprise risk Senior HR and people leaders managing workforce readiness and AI-driven organisational change Audience outcomes A framework, grounded in the Code Capital model, for evaluating what AI systems do to organisations beyond their stated technical capabilities Clearer understanding of where AI governance risk accumulates before it becomes visible at board level Practical grounding in European AI regulation and what it means for organisational decision-making and liability A more precise vocabulary for asking the right questions about AI in leadership and governance contexts Greater clarity on how to structure workforce readiness initiatives that treat AI transformation as an organisational challenge, not only a skills one

Why organisations work with Lecyca Curiel A first-person Gen Z voice grounded in anthropological field research, rather than a marketing-agency reading of survey data. Affiliation with WHETSTON, the Dutch strategic foresight house that briefs senior leaders across Europe, gives her work analytical weight beyond the usual “young person on stage” booking. Track record of putting the Gen Z question in front of buyers who are unusually demanding: Walmart international executives, Google marketing managers, the European Parliament Youth Outreach Unit, BDO Norway. Recognised by Het Financieele Dagblad in its 2019 list of 50 most promising young talents in the Netherlands, a credential that signals she was taken seriously inside Dutch business media before the speaking circuit picked her up. Brings an inclusion lens shaped by Indonesian and Dutch Caribbean heritage and a Humanity in Action fellowship, so DEI inside her sessions reads as substance, not decoration. Biography highlights Generation Z researcher and keynote speaker with WHETSTON, the strategic foresight think tank founded by Thimon de Jong. Selected by Het Financieele Dagblad as one of 50 promising young talents in the Netherlands, 2019. Studied Liberal Arts and Sciences with a Cultural Anthropology focus at Erasmus University College, Rotterdam. 2019 Amsterdam Fellow with Humanity in Action; co-author of an action project on inclusive Dutch national remembrance. Speaking clients include Walmart, Google, the European Parliament Youth Outreach Unit, BDO Norway, FRED Leadership Forum, and Institute for the Future. Working anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, with projects on cultural heritage, decolonisation, and intergenerational memory. Biography Generation Z is the first cohort that grew up entirely inside the platforms most companies are still learning to manage. The numbers are familiar to any CHRO. The interpretation of those numbers, almost without exception, is filtered through people who are not part of the cohort. Lecyca Curiel works on the other side of that filter. She joined WHETSTON, the Amsterdam-based strategic foresight think tank founded by Thimon de Jong, after he scouted her at age seventeen following a public talk at the IMC Weekendschool. She has been delivering keynote work and strategic research for the firm since, with clients that include Walmart international executives, Google marketing managers, the European Parliament Youth Outreach Unit, BDO Norway, and FRED Leadership Forum. Het Financieele Dagblad named her one of 50 promising young talents in the Netherlands in 2019. Her academic grounding is in Cultural Anthropology at Erasmus University College, and she works in parallel as a documentary filmmaker on questions of heritage, memory, and decolonisation. As a 2019 Amsterdam Fellow with Humanity in Action she co-led a project on whether Dutch national remembrance is genuinely inclusive. The combination matters in the room. When she discusses what young employees actually want from work, it lands as field observation, not opinion. The argument she brings to leadership teams is narrower and harder than the usual generational keynote. Stereotypes about Gen Z are inexpensive to repeat and expensive to act on. What organisations need, on her reading, is a working model of intergenerational collaboration that makes sense to a 58-year-old executive and a 24-year-old engineer in the same conversation. That is the work she does on stage and in the strategy rooms WHETSTON is invited into. Key speaking topics Generation Z in the workforce Intergenerational collaboration Diversity, equity and inclusion from a Gen Z perspective Mental health across generations Future of work and talent retention Strategic foresight on cultural and demographic change Ideal for CHROs and heads of talent designing retention and engagement strategy for a multigenerational workforce. Boards and executive committees stress-testing assumptions about younger consumers and younger employees. DEI leads moving from awareness programmes to operational change. Leadership development teams building cross-generational management capability. Audience outcomes A clearer, evidence-based picture of what Gen Z employees and consumers actually expect, sourced from inside the cohort. Specific entry points for retention and engagement work in organisations with four or five active generations. A working language for intergenerational conversations that does not collapse into stereotype. A sharper read on where DEI commitments stall between stated policy and daily management.

Why organisations work with Lisa Bodell She attacks the root cause most innovation programmes ignore. Her thesis is that complexity, not a lack of ideas, is what stops large companies from changing. She brings a tested operational toolkit, including the “Kill a Stupid Rule” exercise and the Why Simple Wins toolkit, that teams can run inside the business the week after the keynote. Her client list runs through hard-to-move organisations such as Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, Bloomberg, Google, SAP and Citigroup, where the simplification argument has to survive contact with regulated, matrixed environments. Her two Routledge books, Kill the Company (Axiom Best Business Book Award, 2014) and Why Simple Wins, give leadership teams a shared language and a structured method that outlasts the session. She is a working operator, not only a writer. She has run FutureThink for more than two decades and writes monthly for Forbes, so the material is being pressure-tested in the field continuously. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of FutureThink, an innovation and simplification training firm working with global enterprise clients since 2003. Author of Why Simple Wins (Routledge) and Kill the Company (Routledge / Bibliomotion), the latter an Axiom Best Business Book Award winner. Monthly contributor to Forbes; quoted or published in Fast Company, WIRED, The New York Times, Inc., Bloomberg Businessweek, Harvard Business Review, FOX News and CNN. TEDxNormal speaker, “How Simplification is the Key to Change”. Named to the Forbes “50 Leading Female Futurists” list in 2020. Has taught innovation at American University and Fordham University, and worked with clients including Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, Bloomberg, Google, SAP and Citigroup. Biography Most innovation problems inside large companies are not idea problems. The pipeline is full. The strategy decks exist. What is missing is room to act on any of it, because calendars, approval chains and legacy rules have absorbed the working week. This is the territory Lisa Bodell has built a career on. She is the founder and CEO of FutureThink, which she launched in 2003 to do something narrower and more useful than most innovation consulting. Rather than add another framework, FutureThink helps leadership teams remove. Remove low-value meetings, remove obsolete rules, remove the tasks that consume capacity without producing decisions. The argument is that simplification is the precondition for innovation, not a side benefit. That argument runs through her two books with Routledge, Kill the Company and Why Simple Wins. Kill the Company, which won the 2014 Axiom Best Business Book Award, is built around a simple inversion: instead of asking how to grow, ask how a competitor would put you out of business, and act on the answer. Why Simple Wins extends the method into a practical toolkit for stripping out the work that does not matter, with exercises like “Kill a Stupid Rule” that have been used inside companies including Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, Bloomberg and Google. Bodell writes monthly for Forbes and has been featured in Fast Company, WIRED, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review and Bloomberg Businessweek. Forbes named her to its 2020 list of 50 Leading Female Futurists. The reason senior teams keep booking her is narrower than that profile suggests. She gives leaders a defensible reason, and a method, for taking things off the plate. Key speaking topics Organisational simplification Innovation and disruption Killing complexity in large organisations Future of work and ways of working Change and culture transformation Provocative questioning as a leadership tool Creating capacity for higher-value work Ideal for CEOs and executive teams trying to free up capacity inside complex, matrixed organisations. Chief Strategy, Transformation and Innovation Officers running enterprise-wide change programmes. Operations and HR leaders auditing meetings, rules and processes that no longer earn their place. Leadership offsites and innovation summits where the brief is to provoke, not to inform. Audience outcomes A direct case for treating complexity, not idea generation, as the binding constraint on innovation. A set of named exercises, including “Kill a Stupid Rule” and the Why Simple Wins toolkit, that teams can run on Monday morning. A sharper question set for leadership meetings, modelled on the Kill the Company method. A shared language for distinguishing low-value busywork from work that produces decisions and outcomes. Permission, from a credible outside voice, to remove rather than add.

Why organisations work with Lisa Walden She translates over a decade of qualitative research on generational sociology into culture decisions a CHRO can actually defend at board level, not survey commentary. Two published books, including The Future of Work is Human and the Wiley “For Dummies” field guide on managing millennials, give her arguments a public, citable spine. She tackles the contested ground of hybrid work, return-to-office friction and Gen Z expectations without retreating into either nostalgia or hype. Her work on trust and psychological safety reads as operational, not therapeutic: barriers named, ingredients specified, applied across in-person, virtual and hybrid teams. She customises through pre-event interviews with client teams, so the keynote lands on the organisation’s specific cultural tension rather than a generic future-of-work narrative. Biography highlights Co-founder of Good Company Consulting, a workplace culture and future-of-work advisory firm. Co-author of The Future of Work is Human: Transforming Company Culture for a Post-Pandemic World (with Hannah L. Ubl). Co-author of Managing Millennials for Dummies, part of Wiley’s “For Dummies” series. Advisor to organisations including BMW, Siemens, HP, Syntellis, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and Texas A&M University System. Over a decade of qualitative research on generational dynamics and employee experience. Speaker on culture, trust, hybrid work, AI and human judgement, and cross-generational collaboration. Biography Five generations now share the same payroll, and the cultural assumptions each one brought to work have stopped quietly cohabiting. Trust expectations differ. Communication norms differ. The unwritten contract between employer and employee, the one that held through most of the late twentieth century, no longer carries the room. This is the territory Lisa Walden has spent more than a decade studying as a generational sociologist and workplace strategist. As co-founder of Good Company Consulting, Walden advises organisations on how to redesign culture for a workforce that no longer agrees on what work is for. Her clients include BMW, Siemens, HP, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Syntellis and Texas A&M University System. The work focuses on the connective tissue of an organisation: trust, psychological safety, communication norms, and the specific operating shifts that make a hybrid or multigenerational workforce coherent rather than fractious. Her two books anchor the public argument. The Future of Work is Human, co-authored with Hannah Ubl, sets out a post-pandemic culture playbook built around compassionate leadership and person-first management. Managing Millennials for Dummies, published in Wiley’s “For Dummies” series, gave her the early platform on generational management and remains a working reference for HR and people leaders. What distinguishes her on a stage is the refusal to default to either the wellness register or the technology register when discussing culture. She treats generational difference as a design input for operating decisions, not a personality theme, and she addresses the friction points that senior teams usually avoid in public: return-to-office disagreement, Gen Z expectations of managers, and what AI adoption does to the human texture of a team. Key speaking topics Future of work and post-pandemic culture Multigenerational workplace dynamics Trust and psychological safety Hybrid and remote work design Employee engagement and motivation Human-centred AI adoption Leadership communication across generations Ideal for CHROs, people leaders and heads of culture redesigning post-pandemic operating norms. Executive teams confronting return-to-office friction and hybrid policy disagreement. Boards and CEOs of organisations with significant Gen Z and millennial workforces. Leadership development and talent programmes inside large, multi-generational employers. Audience outcomes A clearer view of where generational friction is actually costing the organisation, and where it is noise. A working vocabulary for trust and psychological safety that managers can apply on Monday. Specific operating moves for hybrid and in-person team design, not policy slogans. A way to talk about AI adoption that treats human judgement as a capability, not a leftover. Confidence to make culture decisions defensible to both a board and a Gen Z hire.

Why organisations work with Lorraine Hariton Six years leading Catalyst, the global nonprofit whose research and benchmarks Fortune 500 boards already use to evaluate their own progress on women’s advancement. Operating background that buyers in male-dominated executive teams take seriously: 15 years at IBM, CEO of two Silicon Valley start-ups, Obama-appointed State Department official. Specific authority on the measurement question. Catalyst’s frameworks on emotional tax, empathic leadership, and inclusion assessment were developed and scaled during her tenure. Credible on the intersection of bias and emerging technology, including how gender and racial bias enter AI systems through data and design choices. Biography highlights President and CEO of Catalyst from 2018 to 2024. Special Representative for Commercial and Business Affairs at the US State Department under President Obama. CEO of two venture-backed Silicon Valley companies, Beatnik and Apptera. Senior Vice President of Global Partnerships, New York Academy of Sciences; co-founder of the Global STEM Alliance and the 1000 Girls, 1000 Futures programme. Inaugural Women’s Leadership Champion Award, University of Virginia Darden School of Business, 2022. Crain’s New York Business Women of Influence, 2023. BS Stanford University, MBA Harvard Business School. Biography Catalyst is the research organisation whose data Fortune 500 boards quote back to themselves when they discuss the women-in-leadership gap. For six years that organisation was run by Lorraine Hariton, an operator with credentials those same boards understand: fifteen years at IBM, two CEO roles at venture-backed Silicon Valley companies, an Obama-administration appointment representing US commercial interests at the State Department. That mix matters because the audience for serious DEI work has shifted. Senior teams now want practitioners who can speak the language of operating performance and capital discipline, not advocacy. At Catalyst, Hariton oversaw the development of frameworks used inside member companies on emotional tax, empathic leadership, and inclusion measurement, the kind of artefacts that survive contact with a sceptical executive committee. Her work addresses the credibility gap between public DEI commitments and observable workplace outcomes. She speaks directly to the failure mode senior leaders fear most, performative policy that produces no change and erodes employee trust. She also works on how gender and racial bias enter AI systems through training data, an issue most executive teams are still under-prepared for. The University of Virginia Darden School of Business presented her with its inaugural Women’s Leadership Champion Award in 2022. Crain’s named her to its Women of Influence list the following year. Her holistic view of where women’s advancement sits within an organisation, alongside compensation strategy, capital allocation, and technology governance, is what makes her useful in a boardroom rather than at a conference panel. Key speaking topics Gender equity and women’s advancement in senior leadership Inclusion measurement and DEI accountability Bias in artificial intelligence and emerging technology Workplace culture transformation Future of work and flexible workplace design Empathic and inclusive leadership practice Ideal for CHROs, Chief Diversity Officers, and CEO offices commissioning a measurable advancement strategy for women in senior leadership Boards and nominating committees evaluating their own pipeline credibility Senior leadership teams in male-dominated industries (financial services, technology, energy, industrials) working on inclusion outcomes that hold up to scrutiny Companies building governance around bias and fairness in AI deployment Audience outcomes A clearer picture of what credible DEI measurement looks like, drawn from Catalyst’s published frameworks A sharper grasp of where bias enters AI systems and what executive teams should be asking about it Direct exposure to a practitioner who has worked with the leadership teams of many of the world’s largest employers on this agenda A more confident vocabulary for senior leaders, particularly men in executive roles, to engage with women’s advancement as a business strategy issue rather than a compliance one

Why organisations work with Lucy Adams A people strategy argument built from running HR at the BBC through the Savile crisis, executive pay-off scandals and the move to Salford, not from a consultancy slide deck. A clear, named thesis from HR Disrupted: treat employees as adults, as consumers and as humans, and rebuild HR practice around those principles rather than legacy process. Practical credibility with HR audiences: Disruptive HR runs ongoing training programmes, a membership community and toolkits, so the keynote is connected to a method leaders can adopt afterwards. A track record of reducing management layers and cost at scale, useful for organisations rethinking structure as well as culture. Direct experience of leading the people function through repeated public crisis, relevant to boards considering reputational and workforce risk together. Biography highlights CEO and founder of Disruptive HR, established 2014. Former Director of HR and executive board member at the BBC. Previously Group HR Director at Serco plc and at law firm Eversheds. Author of HR Disrupted: It’s Time for Something Different (Practical Inspiration Publishing, 2nd edition 2021) and The HR Change Toolkit. Co-host of the Disruptive HR podcast. Led HR through the BBC’s move to MediaCityUK in Salford and the opening of the multi-media newsroom in Broadcasting House. Biography Conventional HR was built for stable organisations, predictable careers and a workforce that did what it was told. That world has gone, but most of the apparatus, the annual appraisal cycle, the nine-box grid, the competency framework, the compliance-led policy stack, is still in place. Adams’ work starts from that mismatch and argues the function has to be rebuilt around how people actually work, not how organisations would like them to. The credibility behind the argument is operational. Adams was Director of HR at the BBC from 2009, sitting on the executive board through a period that included the move to Salford, the opening of the multi-media newsroom in Broadcasting House, executive pay-off scandals and the Savile crisis. She reduced the corporation’s management layer by more than 30%. Before the BBC she was Group HR Director at Serco plc and at the law firm Eversheds. In 2014 she founded Disruptive HR, an agency that now runs training, keynotes and a membership community for HR leaders and senior executives. The method is set out in HR Disrupted: It’s Time for Something Different, published by Practical Inspiration and now in its second edition, with a follow-up volume, The HR Change Toolkit, focused on implementation. The thesis: treat employees as adults, as consumers and as humans, and design people practice accordingly. What separates the work from most “future of work” commentary is that it speaks to the people who own the operating model. The audience is HR directors, COOs and CEOs deciding what to keep, what to discard and what to rebuild in the function that ultimately decides whether strategy gets delivered through people or in spite of them. Key speaking topics Modern HR and people strategy Leading change in complex organisations Employee engagement and the new social contract Leadership through crisis and public scrutiny Culture and organisational reinvention Future of work and workforce design Ideal for CHROs and senior HR leaders rebuilding the people function CEOs and COOs reviewing how the operating model is delivered through people Boards and executive teams navigating reputational or workforce crisis Leadership conferences focused on culture, engagement and change Audience outcomes A clear view of which inherited HR practices are creating drag and which are worth keeping. A named framework for redesigning people practice around adults, consumers and humans rather than legacy process. Practical reference points from running HR through sustained organisational crisis at a public institution. A sharper line between people strategy and the broader business strategy it is meant to deliver.

Why organisations work with Lynda Gratton A research base CHROs cannot replicate in-house: the Future of Work Research Consortium has run for over a decade with executives from more than 60 companies, generating comparative evidence on what is actually working in hybrid, skills and workforce design. Co-author of The 100-Year Life with economist Andrew Scott, the book that reframed longevity as a workforce and strategy issue and was shortlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year. Practical playbook for hybrid: her HBR cover piece How to Do Hybrid Right and Redesigning Work give leadership teams a four-lens method (jobs, employee preferences, projects, inclusion) rather than a slogan. Policy-grade credibility: co-chair of the WEF Global Future Council on Work, Wages and Job Creation, and adviser to the Japanese Prime Minister’s council on a 100-year-life society. Thinkers50 Hall of Fame member, which signals to a board that the perspective in the room has been independently judged against a global field over more than a decade. Biography highlights Professor of Management Practice in Organisational Behaviour, London Business School. Founder of HSM Advisory and the Future of Work Research Consortium, working with executives from more than 60 companies. Author and co-author of ten books, including The 100-Year Life (with Andrew Scott), Redesigning Work, The Shift, Glow and Hot Spots. Thinkers50 Hall of Fame inductee; long-running presence in the Thinkers50 ranking since 2011. Co-chair, WEF Global Future Council on Work, Wages and Job Creation; former chair of the WEF Council on Leadership. Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Financial Times and The Times. Biography Most large organisations are running 2025 strategies on a workforce model designed for 2015. Roles, careers and contracts assumed predictable lifespans, fixed locations and a clear line between work and the rest of life. None of those assumptions hold, and the cost of pretending they do shows up in attrition, productivity disputes and stalled transformation programmes. This is the territory Lynda Gratton has worked in for more than two decades from London Business School, where she is Professor of Management Practice in Organisational Behaviour. Through HSM Advisory and the Future of Work Research Consortium she founded in 2009, she has built a continuous comparative dataset on how more than sixty global companies are redesigning jobs, hybrid arrangements and skills, and what separates the redesigns that hold from the ones that quietly revert. Her books anchor the argument. The 100-Year Life, written with economist Andrew Scott, became a bestseller in Japan and was shortlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year, reframing longevity as a strategic issue for governments and employers, not a personal finance question. Redesigning Work translates the same rigour into a four-lens method for hybrid: jobs and tasks, employee preferences, projects and workflows, inclusion and fairness. Her Harvard Business Review cover piece How to Do Hybrid Right and her ongoing MIT Sloan Management Review column put that method into the hands of operators. Boards engage her when they need to move past slogan-level answers on hybrid, skills and longevity. Her co-chairmanship of the WEF Global Future Council on Work, Wages and Job Creation, and her advisory work with the Japanese Prime Minister’s office on a 100-year-life society, are evidence that the same frameworks travel from a single CHRO conversation to national policy. Key speaking topics Future of work and hybrid organisational design Redesigning jobs, careers and skills for longer working lives The 100-year life and longevity as a workforce strategy Workforce transformation in large, complex organisations Hybrid work productivity, fairness and inclusion Leadership in the post-pandemic operating model Talent, retention and the changing employee contract Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers leading hybrid, skills and workforce redesigns. CEOs and executive committees stress-testing their operating model against longer careers and tighter talent markets. Boards and remuneration committees confronting longevity, retention and multi-generational workforce questions. Government, public-sector and policy audiences working on labour market and ageing-society agendas. Audience outcomes A clear method for redesigning hybrid work across jobs, employee preferences, projects and inclusion, drawn from her HBR and MIT Sloan research. A sharper read on what longevity does to careers, learning and talent pipelines, grounded in The 100-Year Life evidence base. Comparative benchmarks from the Future of Work Consortium on what more than sixty global companies are doing on hybrid, skills and workforce design. A board-ready language for distinguishing surface adjustments from genuine workforce redesign. Concrete prompts for the next ninety days of CHRO and ExCo workforce decisions.