Estratégia e Crescimento dos Negócios speakers

Why organisations work with Dominic O’Connell He chairs financial services flagship events at the level institutions trust with their reputation, including two editions of TISA’s Annual Flagship Conference. He interviews executives the way a working business journalist does, with the framing of someone who has spent twenty years inside UK corporate stories at The Sunday Times, the BBC and The Times. He won the Wincott Award in 2017, the most credible signal in UK business journalism, which buyers in financial services and the City recognise on sight. He moves between hosting, on-stage interviewing, and panel moderating without flattening any of them, which is what complex multi-stream conferences need. Biography highlights Business presenter, Times Radio (from November 2021, the station’s first business correspondent). Saturday business columnist, The Times. Business presenter on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme for five years from 2016, with regular appearances across BBC television. Business Editor, The Sunday Times, 2010 to 2016; joined the paper in 2001. Wincott Award winner, 2017. Contributing author on “Grit, Rigour & Humour: The INEOS Story” (Penguin, 2023), appraising the INEOS business alongside contributors including Sebastian Coe and Andrew Likierman. Biography UK business journalism has produced a small group of people who can chair a flagship financial services conference, interview a sitting CEO live on national radio, and write a Saturday newspaper column on the same week. Dominic O’Connell is one of them. He currently anchors business coverage on Times Radio and writes the Saturday business column for The Times. Before Times Radio he spent five years as business presenter on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, where corporate Britain went on the record before breakfast and where preparation and composure are the price of entry. He joined the BBC in 2016 from The Sunday Times, where he was business editor for six years and a senior writer on the paper from 2001. The Wincott Award in 2017, UK business journalism’s premier prize, sits behind the work. So does a longer body of corporate reporting recognised inside the City and Westminster. In 2023 he was the journalist Penguin commissioned to appraise INEOS at twenty-five in “Grit, Rigour & Humour”, alongside contributors including Sebastian Coe and Andrew Likierman. That track record is why financial services institutions hire him to chair the rooms where their boards, regulators and clients are watching. He has twice chaired TISA’s Annual Flagship Conference and has worked with firms including RSMR. The product is not a keynote thesis. It is a working business journalist running the room and keeping the agenda honest. Key speaking topics UK and global business news Financial services and investment Equity markets and corporate strategy Macroeconomics and policy Corporate leadership and CEO interviews The City of London and UK plc Ideal for Annual flagship conferences hosted by financial services trade bodies and asset managers Investor days, AGMs and capital markets events Corporate leadership summits, board offsites and CEO panels Industry awards, gala dinners and after-dinner business audiences Audience outcomes A conference programme that holds together as one editorial narrative across the day Panels that go past the prepared statements and produce something quotable A chair who can press a CEO without losing the room or the speaker Coverage that lands cleanly with a business-literate audience, on stage and in any subsequent write-up

Why organisations work with Dominique Turpin He has led two of the most internationally respected business schools, IMD and CEIBS, which gives him a rare operational read on how senior teams actually make commercial decisions under pressure. His case library, ranked by The Case Centre among the top 50 bestselling globally for several consecutive years, is taught inside the MBA programmes of the companies that buy his counsel. He combines a PhD from Sophia University Tokyo with decades of client work across Japan, China and Southeast Asia, useful to any European or North American board navigating Asian market entry or partnership. He works from named case material, not generic frameworks: Nespresso, Jollibee, Ducati, Toyota KINTO, among others, each linked to a specific brand or customer-centricity argument. His writing for Financial Times, MIT Sloan Management Review and European Business Forum gives executive audiences a concrete reference point for the arguments he develops on stage. Biography highlights Professor Emeritus of Marketing Strategy, IMD; former President and Nestle Professor, 2010 to 2016. President Emeritus of CEIBS; served as President (European) based out of the Zurich campus. PhD in Economics, Sophia University, Tokyo; MSc from ESSCA, France. Author of more than 100 books, articles and case studies, including The Essential Book of Business and Life Quotations (Anthem Press). Ranked on The Case Centre Top 50 Bestselling Case Authors for multiple consecutive years. Chairman of DAA Capital Partners; advisory and board roles across listed companies and educational institutions including Stockholm School of Economics and Waseda Business School. Biography Most global brands still describe themselves as customer-centric. Very few can show a senior leader what that actually changes inside a weekly country review. That gap between brand statement and operating behaviour is where Dominique Turpin has spent almost four decades of teaching and advisory work. Turpin joined IMD in 1986 after several years in Tokyo representing a French firm in Japan. He went on to hold the Dentsu Chair in Marketing, direct the MBA programme and serve as IMD President and Nestle Professor from 2010 to 2016. In 2022 he was appointed President (European) of CEIBS, the China Europe International Business School, a role he held until late 2025. He is now Professor Emeritus at IMD and President Emeritus at CEIBS. His case studies, taught inside companies as much as in classrooms, sit behind this body of work. Nespresso, Jollibee, Ducati, Toyota KINTO. Each uses a named company to argue a specific point about brand coherence, pricing power or customer design. The Case Centre has listed him among its top 50 bestselling case authors for several consecutive years, which is unusual longevity in a field dominated by one-off hits. The Japan and Asia dimension matters in his advisory work. Clients have included Coca-Cola, Danone, Nestle, Philips, KAO, Mondelez and Panasonic, and much of his applied research has examined how Asian firms build and defend brand equity in markets where European playbooks stall. He is Chairman of DAA Capital Partners, a Geneva-based private equity firm, and sits on boards and advisory councils including Stockholm School of Economics and Waseda Business School. Key speaking topics Brand management and brand strategy Customer centricity in multinational organisations Global marketing strategy Marketing leadership in Asia, with focus on Japan and China Corporate communications strategy Case-led executive development in commercial functions Ideal for CMOs and brand presidents inside consumer, industrial and healthcare multinationals. CEOs and group leadership teams setting Asia entry, partnership or expansion strategy. Executive development programmes for commercial and country-leadership populations. Boards and investment committees assessing brand-led businesses or consumer-facing acquisitions. Audience outcomes A working definition of customer centricity that survives contact with a country P and L. Named case examples senior teams can immediately apply to their own brand or pricing questions. A clearer view of how Japanese and Chinese firms build and defend brand equity, and what Western firms miss. Direct questions to ask marketing leadership about brand discipline, positioning and investment allocation. A vocabulary for talking about brand and customer strategy that aligns CEO, CFO and CMO.

Why organisations work with Donald Miller He built the most widely adopted messaging framework in the market. Over a million business leaders have used the StoryBrand SB7 model, and companies including Chick-fil-A, Intel, TOMS Shoes, Tempur Sealy, and Trek Bicycles have applied it to live commercial work. He gives marketing and sales teams a shared vocabulary. The hero, guide, plan, and call-to-action structure gets a CMO, a founder, and a field rep aligned on the same customer story inside one session. He is a practitioner, not a consultant-at-a-distance. Miller runs StoryBrand, Business Made Simple, and Coach Builder, and the frameworks he teaches from stage are the ones his own companies run on. He translates narrative theory into revenue mechanics. The work connects story structure directly to website copy, sales emails, and lead generation assets that teams can ship the week after the keynote. He is a New York Times bestselling author whose books have stayed on the list collectively for more than a year, which means a room of senior marketers arrives already familiar with the thesis. Biography highlights CEO of StoryBrand, Business Made Simple, and Coach Builder. Author of Building a StoryBrand (2017) and Building a StoryBrand 2.0 (HarperCollins Leadership, 2025). Author of Marketing Made Simple and How to Grow Your Small Business: A 6-Step Plan. New York Times bestselling author; books have sold millions of copies and spent more than a year on the list collectively. StoryBrand framework adopted by Chick-fil-A, Intel, TOMS Shoes, Trek Bicycles, Tempur Sealy, Pantene, Zaxby’s, and Ford/Lincoln. Earlier bestselling memoirs include Blue Like Jazz, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and Scary Close; Blue Like Jazz was adapted for film and premiered at SXSW. Biography Most companies talk about themselves when they should be talking about their customer. The StoryBrand framework, built by Donald Miller and laid out in Building a StoryBrand and its 2025 revision, forces that correction by borrowing the mechanics of narrative: a hero with a problem, a guide with a plan, a call to action, and stakes on both sides of the decision. The framework is now standard equipment in growth teams. More than a million leaders have run their messaging through the SB7 model, and named companies including Chick-fil-A, Intel, TOMS Shoes, Trek Bicycles, and Tempur Sealy have used it on live commercial work. What distinguishes the approach is not the use of story as metaphor, it is that the output is operational: a BrandScript that rewrites a homepage, a sales email, and a lead magnet in the same language. Miller runs the companies that teach it. He is CEO of StoryBrand, Business Made Simple, and Coach Builder, and the playbooks he takes to the stage are the ones his own businesses use to acquire customers. That closes the gap between theory and execution that most marketing speakers leave open. Before StoryBrand, Miller wrote the New York Times bestsellers Blue Like Jazz, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and Scary Close. Blue Like Jazz was adapted for film and premiered at SXSW. The craft training those books represent is what makes the business work land: a CEO learning StoryBrand is being taught by someone who spent two decades writing narrative for general readers before applying it to commercial messaging. Key speaking topics StoryBrand messaging framework Marketing and customer acquisition Sales communication and conversion Brand clarity Small business growth Narrative in commercial strategy Ideal for CMOs, marketing directors, and brand leads responsible for messaging across a product or service portfolio Founders and CEOs of small and mid-sized businesses where the leader still owns the brand voice Sales leaders whose teams need a shared structure for prospect conversations and follow-up Agency and consulting networks who want a common framework across client engagements Audience outcomes A working vocabulary, hero, guide, problem, plan, stakes, for diagnosing any piece of marketing that is not converting A clear view of why customer-centric messaging outperforms feature-led messaging in measurable sales terms Practical editing instincts that apply immediately to websites, email sequences, and sales scripts A shared internal language that aligns marketing, sales, and leadership on the same customer story Confidence to cut the clutter from existing brand assets rather than adding more of it

Why organisations work with Dorie Clark A defined methodology, Content Creation, Social Proof, and Network, that turns reputation-building from a vague aspiration into a sequenced commercial discipline. Author of The Long Game, the HBR Press book that reframed strategic thinking as a multi-year horizon problem, used by leaders managing pressure to deliver short-term results. Named #1 Communication Coach in the world by the Marshall Goldsmith Leading Global Coaches Awards, an external benchmark of the craft she teaches. Direct experience advising Google, Microsoft, FedEx, Fidelity, the World Bank, Morgan Stanley, the IMF, the Ford Foundation, and Yale University on thought leadership and brand positioning. A 2M+ view TED talk, four Thinkers50 listings, and a Wall Street Journal bestseller in The Long Game signal a body of work that has compounded credibility, the same outcome she teaches clients to build. Biography highlights Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author of The Long Game, and author of Entrepreneurial You, Reinventing You, and Stand Out, all published by Harvard Business Review Press. Four-time Thinkers50 ranked among the top 50 management thinkers in the world, most recently in 2025. Named #1 Communication Coach by the Marshall Goldsmith Leading Global Coaches Awards. TED speaker. “The Real Reason You Feel So Busy (and What to Do About It)” has over 2 million views. Stand Out named #1 Leadership Book of 2015 by Inc. magazine and a Washington Post bestseller. Frequent Harvard Business Review contributor since 2010; clients include Google, Microsoft, FedEx, Fidelity, the World Bank, Morgan Stanley, the IMF, and the Ford Foundation. Biography Most strategy advice rewards the immediate move: the quarter, the launch, the campaign. The Long Game, Clark’s HBR Press book, argues the opposite case. Senior leaders who outperform over a decade make small, deliberate bets that compound, and they accept long stretches where the work is invisible. That argument is the spine of how Clark advises both individuals and the organisations that employ them. The argument is backed by an unusual depth of credentials for a personal-brand and thought-leadership speaker. Clark previously taught executive education at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and at Columbia Business School. Thinkers50 has ranked her among the world’s top 50 management thinkers four times, most recently in 2025. The Marshall Goldsmith Leading Global Coaches Awards named her the #1 Communication Coach in the world. She is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author. The Long Game, Entrepreneurial You, Reinventing You, and Stand Out are all published by Harvard Business Review Press and translated into more than ten languages. Stand Out was named the #1 Leadership Book of 2015 by Inc. and was a Washington Post bestseller. Her TED talk, “The Real Reason You Feel So Busy (and What to Do About It),” has over 2 million views. She has been a Harvard Business Review contributor since 2010 and has been quoted by NPR, the BBC, and the New York Times, which described her as “an expert in self-reinvention and helping others make changes in their lives.” The client list is where the work becomes operational: Google, Microsoft, the World Bank, Morgan Stanley, the Ford Foundation, Yale. Through her Recognized Expert curriculum she has codified a three-part method, Content Creation, Social Proof, and Network, that organisations and senior individuals use to turn deep expertise into recognised market position. Key speaking topics Long-term strategic thinking Personal branding and reputation Thought leadership and content strategy Self-reinvention and career strategy Recognised expertise as a commercial asset Communication and executive presence Entrepreneurial career models Ideal for CEOs, founders, and partners building firm reputation as a growth channel CMOs and heads of communications shaping enterprise thought-leadership programmes CHROs and learning leaders running senior executive development on visibility and influence Professional services and partner-led firms where individual reputation drives pipeline Audience outcomes A method for sequencing reputation-building work over a multi-year horizon, not a campaign cycle A clearer view of which content, networks, and proof points actually convert into client trust Direct exposure to The Long Game thesis and its application to senior decision-making Tools for leaders to position themselves as recognised voices in their domain without performative visibility

Why organisations work with Dr Alan O’Neill The 7-Steps to Profit is a named, proprietary framework built from a multi-year consulting engagement at Selfridges, where annual profit grew from £45m to £200m. Audiences leave with a structured path they can map to their own organisation, not a set of principles they have to interpret. His central argument, that culture and customer experience are a single commercial mechanism, not parallel HR and marketing initiatives, gives boards a specific reframing of a decision they are typically making in silos. As Managing Director of Kara Change Management, he draws content from active client engagements across retail, hospitality, FMCG, financial services, and the public sector. The material is current, not archival. Organisations that have already bought the tools and run the pilots need adoption, not awareness. His keynote AI Won’t Transform Your Business. Your People Will. sets out why AI and other change programmes stall below the C-suite, and which leadership behaviours make adoption hold. Four published books (Premium Is the New Black, Culture Matters, Show Me the Lid on the Box, The Leader’s Six-Pack) give organisations a structured body of work to continue with after an engagement: the thinking does not begin and end in the room. A business columnist for the Sunday Independent and Gulf based publications, his frameworks are tested continuously against live commercial situations across multiple sectors and geographies. Biography highlights Founder and Managing Director, Kara Change Management Creator of the 7-Steps to Profit framework; deployed across client organisations including Selfridges, Toyota, Intel, Primark, Moët Hennessy, Dubai Duty Free, Getty Images, and the United Nations Author of four books: Premium Is the New Black, Culture Matters, Show Me the Lid on the Box, and The Leader’s Six-Pack: How to Balance Grit and Grace (Orpen Press) Business columnist, Sunday Independent (Ireland) and Gulf based publications Non-executive director across multiple sectors in Europe and the Middle East 35+ years of consulting practice spanning retail, hospitality, FMCG, financial services, manufacturing, and public sector organisations across EMEA Biography Selfridges’ annual profit grew from £45m to £200m across several years of structured transformation, and the business went on to win multiple ‘Best Department Store in the World’ awards. The consulting framework behind that journey, Dr Alan O’Neill’s 7-Steps to Profit, is what organisations now bring him in to share. The 7-Steps to Profit is built on a specific argument: that culture, customer experience, and commercial performance are not parallel workstreams but a single, interdependent system. Culture is not the backdrop to strategy, it is the delivery mechanism. O’Neill formalised this thinking across three of his books: Premium Is the New Black addresses customer experience as competitive differentiation; Culture Matters defines the four values (Customer Centricity, Respect, Accountability, and Agility) that underpin a high-performance culture; Show Me the Lid on the Box provides a framework for leading change with reduced resistance. As Managing Director of Kara Change Management, he has applied the framework with organisations across retail, hospitality, FMCG, financial services, and the public sector, from Toyota and Intel to Dubai Duty Free and the United Nations. The Selfridges story transfers well: the structural argument it illustrates is as relevant to a B2B services firm or a public institution as it is to a department store. O’Neill continues to practise as an active consultant and non-executive director. He writes business commentary for the Sunday Independent and Gulf based publications, keeping his frameworks in direct conversation with the commercial challenges organisations are currently navigating. Key speaking topics Change management and organisational transformation Culture as commercial strategy Customer experience and service excellence The 7-Steps to Profit Premium brand positioning and margin protection Retail reinvention and the future of physical retail AI adoption and the behaviours that make it stick Building enterprise value ahead of an exit Ideal for CEOs and senior leadership teams managing a cultural transformation alongside a commercial or strategic pivot Chief Customer Officers and Chief Marketing Officers seeking to embed customer-centric behaviour across the full organisation CHROs and HR Directors designing culture programmes that connect directly to business performance Executive conferences in retail, hospitality, consumer goods, and financial services Business owners and founders considering an exit in the next few years, and the leadership teams around them Audience outcomes A working understanding of the 7-Steps to Profit framework and how to map its logic to their own organisational context A reframing of culture and customer experience as a single commercial lever, not separate functional priorities Concrete examples drawn from the Selfridges engagement and other named client organisations that show how the framework operates under real conditions Greater clarity on where resistance to change typically originates and how structured approaches reduce it at scale A sharper diagnostic lens for identifying the gap between leadership intent and frontline behaviour

Why organisations work with Andrew Ng His AI Transformation Playbook – a named, five-step framework derived directly from building AI teams at Google and Baidu – gives organisations a structured implementation path, not principles. It is the difference between a direction and a plan. He has operated on both sides of the AI adoption challenge: as the person responsible for making two of the world’s largest technology companies into AI-first organisations, and as the founder of platforms that have trained more than 8 million people in AI skills. The failure modes at both ends are not theoretical to him. His “AI is the new electricity” thesis reframes AI as general-purpose infrastructure rather than a feature or a product – a distinction that changes how boards allocate capital and how leadership teams structure accountability. Named to Time’s inaugural Time100 AI list (2023) – recognising active, current influence in the field – and to Amazon’s board of directors. The former signals peer standing; the latter signals boardroom credibility. Through AI Aspire, developed in partnership with Bain & Company, he advises enterprises moving from AI experimentation to scalable transformation – giving organisations access to a perspective tested across venture building, hyperscale operations, and mass education. Biography highlights Co-founded Google Brain – the research team credited with reshaping Google’s approach to artificial intelligence VP and Chief Scientist at Baidu, leading a 1,300-person AI team responsible for the company’s global AI strategy Co-founder and Chairman of Coursera (NYSE: COUR), now serving 150 million+ registered learners globally Founder of DeepLearning.AI – over 8 million people have completed AI courses through his programmes Named to Time100 Most Influential People (2012), Fast Company’s Most Creative People (2014), and Time100 AI (2023) Member of Amazon’s board of directors (appointed April 2024) Author of the AI Transformation Playbook and Machine Learning Yearning, both in wide circulation Holds a BSc from Carnegie Mellon, MSc from MIT, and PhD from UC Berkeley; co-authored over 200 research papers Biography Most AI pilot projects never become AI companies. Andrew Ng has spent years examining why – first as the founding lead of Google Brain and then as VP and Chief Scientist at Baidu, where he built a 1,300-person AI team. The gap between isolated AI experimentation and enterprise-wide capability is the problem he has studied from the inside. His AI Transformation Playbook – drawn directly from that experience – sets out a five-step framework for taking AI adoption from initial momentum to company-wide infrastructure. It circulates widely because it treats AI transformation as an operational challenge, not a technology question. His thesis that AI is infrastructure the way electricity was infrastructure gives boards a strategic frame that holds across industries and business models. Ng co-founded Coursera, which now serves over 150 million registered learners, and founded DeepLearning.AI, through which more than 8 million people have trained in AI skills. Building AI literacy at that scale – and measuring what works – gives him a concrete, tested perspective on what workforce transformation in practice actually requires. Few speakers can point to comparable operational evidence. He holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and UC Berkeley, has co-authored over 200 research papers, and sits on Amazon’s board of directors. Named to Time’s inaugural Time100 AI list in 2023 – recognising current influence rather than historical contribution – he continues to co-found AI companies through AI Fund and advise enterprises on AI strategy through AI Aspire, a firm he built in partnership with Bain & Company. Key speaking topics Enterprise AI adoption and transformation AI strategy for boards and C-suite leaders Agentic AI and the next phase of AI systems AI workforce development and capability building Responsible AI development and regulation Machine learning fundamentals and applied AI The economics of AI as general-purpose infrastructure Ideal for C-suite executives and boards setting AI strategy and capital allocation Chief Technology Officers and Chief Digital Officers leading enterprise AI programmes CHROs and people leaders responsible for AI upskilling and workforce transformation Transformation leads and innovation teams moving from AI pilots to scaled deployment Audience outcomes A structured framework for diagnosing where enterprise AI adoption is stalling and what to do next Clarity on how to build internal AI capability – teams, workflows, and governance – rather than relying on isolated project-by-project approaches A board-level frame for AI as infrastructure, with implications for investment, talent, and competitive positioning Practical understanding of what large-scale AI workforce development requires, drawn from programmes that have trained millions A more grounded view of responsible AI development – distinguishing credible risk from speculative concern – from a practitioner who has argued these positions in public and in policy

Why organisations work with Dr Darren Coleman He treats brand as an investment asset with measurable commercial return, giving CMOs and CFOs a shared language for defending budget when growth tightens. His Brand Experience Blueprint maps the path from strategy to frontline delivery, closing the gap between what marketing promises and what operations execute. Twenty-five years of B2B and services brand work across Europe, the Middle East, South East Asia and Japan, with named delivery for Johnson & Johnson, Singapore Airlines, Goldman Sachs, FUJIFILM, Nikon and Maybank. A doctoral grounding in B2B services brand performance, peer-reviewed publication in Industrial Marketing Management and the European Journal of Marketing, and a Kogan Page book in three languages. Visiting lecturer at the University of Warwick, with a teaching practice that keeps the frameworks tested against current MBA cohorts and corporate clients in parallel. Biography highlights Founder and Managing Consultant, Wavelength Marketing. Author, Building Brand Experiences: A Practical Guide to Retaining Brand Relevance (Kogan Page); translated into Korean, Turkish and Mandarin. PhD in B2B services brand performance; MA in marketing. Visiting Lecturer in Corporate Brand Management, University of Warwick. Peer-reviewed publication in Industrial Marketing Management and European Journal of Marketing. Keynote speaker at Electronic World Marketing Summit (Kotler Impact), Brand Week Istanbul, B2B Marketing Ignite and Fifteen Seconds Graz. Biography Service brands sell something customers cannot pick up, weigh or return. What they buy is an experience, and the gap between what marketing promises and what operations actually delivers is where loyalty, pricing power and referral are won or lost. Closing that gap is the work Dr Darren Coleman has spent twenty-five years on. His Brand Experience Blueprint is built around three operating layers: the environment shaping customer perception, the strategic essentials that anchor the brand, and the enablers that translate strategy into frontline delivery. Clients including Johnson & Johnson, Singapore Airlines, Goldman Sachs, FUJIFILM, Nikon, Maybank and Orange have used it to rebuild positioning, justify brand investment to finance, and make service consistent across markets. The intellectual foundation is academic. Coleman holds a PhD in B2B services brand performance, has published in Industrial Marketing Management and the European Journal of Marketing, and teaches Corporate Brand Management at the University of Warwick. The applied output is Building Brand Experiences, published by Kogan Page and now in Korean, Turkish and Mandarin editions, used by marketing teams and MBA programmes as a working operating manual rather than a theory text. What CMOs and CEOs take from him is a way to argue for brand investment in commercial terms. He reframes brand from a cost centre defended on faith into a measurable asset that protects margin when competitors discount and acquisition costs rise. Key speaking topics Brand experience strategy and execution Brand-driven growth for service organisations B2B services branding Brand as a commercial investment asset Customer experience and brand relevance Employer brand and internal alignment Sustainable brand differentiation Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and marketing leadership teams in B2B and service businesses C-suites in financial services, professional services, technology and healthcare evaluating brand investment Customer experience and operations leaders responsible for closing the strategy-to-delivery gap Executive education and senior leadership programmes covering brand, growth and customer strategy Audience outcomes A commercial argument for brand investment that holds up in a finance conversation A working model for translating brand strategy into operational customer experience Diagnostic clarity on where the brand promise and the customer reality currently diverge Practical reference points from Johnson & Johnson, Singapore Airlines, Goldman Sachs and other named service brands

Why organisations work with Dr Gaia Grant A working University of Sydney Business School researcher whose doctoral thesis on sustainable innovation drew on 70+ global leader interviews and 4,000+ survey responses, so the frameworks she presents are tested data, not opinion. Two Wiley-published books, “The Innovation Race” and “Who Killed Creativity?”, that give buyers a defined intellectual position they can preview before booking. Proprietary diagnostics, the Innovative Change Leader Profile (iCLi) and the Polar Positioning tool, that let an executive team locate where their own innovation culture is breaking down rather than receive a generic talk. Two decades of advisory work with Google, JP Morgan, Visa, Salesforce, Boeing, Deloitte Digital and KPMG, which means the examples in the room land at the level senior teams operate at. A specific argument on ambidextrous leadership, the discipline of running today’s business and tomorrow’s at the same time, which is the actual problem most innovation programmes fail on. Biography highlights Researcher and lecturer in innovation, University of Sydney Business School, Discipline of Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Co-author of “The Innovation Race” (Wiley, 2016) and the international bestseller “Who Killed Creativity?” (Wiley). Executive Director of Tirian, an international consultancy with client work across more than 30 countries. Creator of the Innovative Change Leader Profile (iCLi) and the Polar Positioning (PoP) tool, used inside corporate innovation and leadership programmes. Featured in Harvard Business Review, BBC, ABC TV, Reuters, Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal. Speaker and facilitator for Salesforce, Gartner Symposium, the World Presidents Organization, Google, JP Morgan, Boeing, KPMG and Deloitte Digital. Biography Innovation budgets keep rising while breakthrough output keeps falling. The gap is not a creativity problem; it is a culture and leadership problem, and that is the territory Dr Gaia Grant has spent her career mapping. Her doctoral research at the University of Sydney Business School, drawing on more than 70 interviews with global innovation leaders and over 4,000 survey responses, set out to identify what actually makes innovation sustainable inside large organisations. The work produced a set of diagnostics, the Innovative Change Leader Profile (iCLi) and the Polar Positioning tool, that locate where a leadership team is collapsing into one mode (efficiency, control, short-term certainty) at the expense of the other (exploration, risk, long-horizon bets). That argument runs through her two Wiley books. “Who Killed Creativity?”, co-authored with Andrew Grant, became an international bestseller by treating the loss of creative capacity as an organisational and cultural diagnosis rather than a personal failing. “The Innovation Race” extends the analysis to whole companies and economies, framing the central problem as ambidextrous leadership: the practical discipline of running the existing business and the next one at the same time. As Executive Director of Tirian, she works with Google, JP Morgan, Visa, Salesforce, Boeing, Deloitte Digital and KPMG, which gives her the rarer asset in this field: live evidence of where the published frameworks hold up under operating pressure and where they have to be retuned. Her commentary and research have appeared in Harvard Business Review, BBC, Reuters, Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal. Key speaking topics Innovation leadership and culture Ambidextrous leadership and the explore/exploit tension Sustainable innovation and purpose-driven growth Creative thinking inside large organisations Change leadership and cultural transformation Responsible decision-making about new technologies, including AI Future-proofing leadership for digital transformation Ideal for CEOs, CSOs and innovation leads commissioning enterprise innovation programmes that need to move past pilot stage. CHROs and chief learning officers building leadership development around adaptive and ambidextrous capability. Boards and executive teams confronting the trade-off between core-business performance and long-horizon investment. Transformation and culture leads inside professional services, financial services and technology firms. Audience outcomes A clear diagnosis of where their own organisation’s innovation culture is breaking down, framed against the iCLi and Polar Positioning models. A working vocabulary for the explore/exploit trade-off that leadership teams can apply to specific portfolio decisions. Evidence-based examples from Google, JP Morgan, Salesforce, Boeing and similar firms on what works and what fails. A defensible position on responsible adoption of new technologies, including AI, inside an existing operating culture. Confidence to challenge the assumption that “more creativity training” will fix what is fundamentally a leadership and structural problem.

Why organisations work with Karen Nelson-Field She runs Amplified Intelligence, the company whose eye-tracking dataset of 55,000+ panellists sits behind the IAB and MRC’s 2025 attention measurement accreditation standards. The category she explains is the category she helped define. Her three books, published by Oxford University Press and Springer, give CMOs and media leads a defensible academic spine for redirecting budget away from cheap reach and toward attention-weighted media. A decade inside the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute means her commercial advice rests on the same evidence base as How Brands Grow, the most influential marketing science framework of the last twenty years. Her client list, Google, Meta, Snapchat, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Mars, Unilever, OMD, means she addresses media owners and advertisers using the same vocabulary, neither captured by either side. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Amplified Intelligence (founded 2016) Industry Professor of Media Innovation, The University of Adelaide Former Senior Research Associate, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science Author of three books on media science, published by Oxford University Press and Springer Judge, IPA Effectiveness Awards 2022 Work covered in The New York Times, Bloomberg, CNBC, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, The Drum, WARC Biography For two decades, advertising spent more on media than on any other line of marketing investment, and verified less of its return than almost any other category of corporate spend. The industry standard for measuring whether an ad worked was whether the pixels were technically on screen. Whether a human looked at them was a separate question, mostly unasked. Karen Nelson-Field is the researcher who turned that question into a measurable category. As Founder and CEO of Amplified Intelligence, she built the eye-tracking and machine-learning infrastructure that quantifies active and passive attention across TV, digital, and social environments. The company now operates the largest human attention panel in the world, and its data informed the IAB and MRC’s 2025 attention measurement accreditation standards. Her authority predates the company. A decade at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, working alongside Byron Sharp on buyer behaviour and brand growth, gave her the evidence-based grounding that distinguishes her from attention commentators who appeared after the category became fashionable. Her three books, Viral Marketing, The Attention Economy and How Media Works, and The Attention Economy: A Category Blueprint, are read as the field’s reference texts rather than its trade press. For boards and CMOs, the practical value is direct. She names where current media metrics are misleading, what the replacement looks like, and how to allocate budget against the new evidence. Clients including Google, Meta, PepsiCo, Mars, and Unilever commission her not for trend commentary but for the underlying mathematics of where their advertising money actually performs. Key speaking topics Attention as a media currency The economics of advertising effectiveness Brand growth and buyer behaviour Media planning under digital fragmentation AI and machine learning in audience measurement Marketing science and evidence-based strategy Ideal for CMOs and marketing directors reassessing media investment frameworks Media agency leadership renegotiating attention-based trading models Platform and media owner executives benchmarking against new measurement standards Board-level conversations on marketing accountability and budget governance Audience outcomes A working definition of attention that distinguishes it from viewability, reach, and exposure Specific evidence on which formats and platforms convert attention into commercial outcome A clear view of where IAB and MRC 2025 measurement standards change buyer obligations Direct guidance on reallocating media budget against attention-weighted metrics An evidence base drawn from the same school as How Brands Grow, applied to current media conditions

Why organisations work with Shameen Prashantham Owns a defined intellectual territory, corporate-and-startup partnering, that almost no other senior strategy academic has built a 15-year body of fieldwork around. Wrote the practitioner book on the subject. Gorillas Can Dance (Wiley, 2021) sets out a tested framework of synergy, interface and exemplar drawn from work with Microsoft, SAP, Bayer, Bosch, BMW, Cisco, Ford, IBM, Intel, Unilever, Walmart and others. Brings genuinely first-hand China and emerging-market perspective to Western boards. Based at CEIBS in Shanghai, with active fieldwork across Bangalore, Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley, he can discuss what Chinese firms actually do, not what Western analysts assume. Writes for the audience he speaks to. Recent contributions to Harvard Business Review, including a June 2024 piece on safe engagement with China, give a buyer confidence the keynote will land at board level rather than in academic register. As CEIBS Associate Dean (Africa) and former MBA Director, he is one of a small group of strategy academics with substantive operating insight into both China and Africa, the two markets large corporations most often handle badly. Biography highlights Professor of International Business and Strategy, China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), Shanghai. Associate Dean (Africa), CEIBS. Previously Associate Dean and MBA Director, 2020 to 2024. Author of Gorillas Can Dance: Lessons from Microsoft and Other Corporations on Partnering with Startups (Wiley, 2021). Author of Born Globals, Networks, and the Large Multinational Enterprise (Routledge). Research published in Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Management Studies, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and Organization Studies. Contributor to Harvard Business Review, Financial Times and the Brightline-Thinkers50 volume Strategy@Work. Biography Microsoft, SAP, Bayer, BMW, Walmart and Unilever have all built programmes to partner with startups. Few of those programmes work as designed. The reason is rarely strategy. It is the operating asymmetry between a $200 billion balance sheet and a 30-person company, and almost no one has studied that asymmetry as carefully or for as long as the author of Gorillas Can Dance. Based at CEIBS in Shanghai, Shameen Prashantham has spent more than fifteen years inside this question. His fieldwork runs across Silicon Valley, Bangalore, Tel Aviv, Beijing, Berlin, Lagos, Nairobi and Accra. The book sets out three pillars, synergy, interface and exemplar, that distinguish corporate partnership programmes that produce real innovation from those that produce press releases. His academic credibility is straightforward. PhD from the University of Strathclyde. Research in the Journal of International Business Studies, the Journal of Business Venturing, the Journal of Management Studies, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and Organization Studies. The work translates into Harvard Business Review, where his June 2024 piece on safe engagement with China ran in the print edition. What buyers tend to value most is the geography. He sits in Shanghai, runs CEIBS engagement in Africa, and has serious working knowledge of Indian and Israeli innovation ecosystems. For a Western board trying to decide whether and how to partner in or from emerging markets, that combination is rare and expensive to replicate. Key speaking topics Corporate-startup partnerships Innovation strategy in large corporations Doing business in and with China Emerging-market growth strategy Africa as a strategic market Corporate entrepreneurship Sustainable Development Goals partnerships Ideal for CEOs, chief strategy officers and chief innovation officers running corporate venturing or startup-engagement programmes. Boards reassessing China exposure or considering operating commitments in Africa or India. Heads of M&A, partnerships and corporate development designing the next phase of inorganic growth. Executive audiences inside multinationals where emerging-market strategy is on the agenda. Audience outcomes A clear test for whether an existing corporate-startup partnership programme is structurally set up to produce results. Three operating levers, synergy, interface and exemplar, to apply to live partnership decisions. A grounded read on what is actually happening inside Chinese firms and Chinese innovation, beyond Western commentary. A working frame for sequencing entry, partnership and growth decisions in emerging markets. Concrete examples drawn from named programmes at Microsoft, SAP, Bayer, Unilever, Walmart and others.

Why organisations work with Duncan Wardle His Theory of Creativity™ is a named, commercially tested framework – not a philosophy but a practical toolkit developed and stress-tested across Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Disney Parks before being applied with post-Disney clients including Apple, the NBA, Coca-Cola, and NBCUniversal. He treats creativity as a repeatable operational habit rather than a talent or a culture programme – giving leadership teams a concrete, tool-based answer to the question of how to make innovation everyone’s job, not a department’s. Specific tools within the framework – the “What If” method and the “Rivers of Thinking” model – address the cognitive and structural barriers that prevent established organisations from generating genuinely new ideas. These are actionable instruments audiences can use immediately, not post-event reading lists. He is one of the few speakers in this space who built an innovation function from the inside of a major global brand, rather than studying one from outside – a distinction that matters to senior audiences who have heard the Disney case study told at second hand. Author of The Imagination Emporium: Creative Recipes for Innovation (2024), a practitioner resource designed to be used independently by organisations after an engagement, extending the shelf life of the session beyond the room. Biography highlights VP of Innovation and Creativity at The Walt Disney Company; previous VP roles include VP Global Public Relations and VP International Marketing and Sales, with postings across London, Paris, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Mumbai, and Shanghai Founded Disney’s Creative Catalyst Team, responsible for embedding innovation across Imagineering, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Disney Parks Founder and CEO of iD8 & innov8, a design thinking consultancy; clients include Apple, Coca-Cola, NBA, PepsiCo, IBM, NBCUniversal, and Spotify Author of The Imagination Emporium: Creative Recipes for Innovation (Benbella Books, 2024) Contributor to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Fast Company; member of the Fast Company Executive Board Multiple TEDx speaker, including “The Theory of Creativity” (TEDxAUK) and “Creating Relationship Magic” (TEDxBocaRaton) Honorary Doctorate in Business Administration, Edinburgh Napier University (2014); White House American Citizen Award (2008); Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award; 2022 Nordic Business Forum Speaker Contest Winner Teaches Innovation Masterclasses at Yale and Harvard Biography Duncan Wardle joined The Walt Disney Company as an intern in the London office in 1987. Over the following 30 years he progressed through VP roles in global public relations, international marketing and sales, and ultimately VP of Innovation and Creativity – the function he built from scratch, founding Disney’s Creative Catalyst Team and deploying it across Imagineering, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Disney Parks. His central argument is that creativity is not a talent distributed unevenly across the workforce. It is a capability that corporate structures systematically suppress – and one that can be restored with the right tools. The framework he developed inside Disney, the Theory of Creativity™, includes specific instruments: the “What If” method, used by Walt Disney himself to pivot the company from an animation studio to an entertainment and theme park pioneer, and the “Rivers of Thinking” model, which identifies the expertise-driven habits that stop large organisations from generating genuinely new ideas. Since founding iD8 & innov8, Wardle has applied these methods with clients including Apple, Coca-Cola, the NBA, PepsiCo, and NBCUniversal – demonstrating that a toolkit built for an entertainment brand translates across sectors where creative problem-solving is structurally harder. His 2024 book, The Imagination Emporium: Creative Recipes for Innovation, packages the methodology as a practical resource organisations can use independently. He also contributes to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Fast Company, and teaches Innovation Masterclasses at Yale and Harvard. His formal recognition includes a White House American Citizen Award (2008), an Honorary Doctorate in Business Administration from Edinburgh Napier University (2014), a Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award, and the 2022 Nordic Business Forum Speaker Contest. He is a multiple TEDx speaker, with talks including “The Theory of Creativity” and “Creating Relationship Magic.” Key speaking topics Innovation strategy and the Theory of Creativity™ Design thinking and creative problem-solving Organisational barriers to creative thinking Customer experience innovation Human creativity and competitive advantage in the age of AI Building innovation culture at scale Creative leadership and entrepreneurial thinking Ideal for C-suite and senior leadership teams responsible for growth and competitive strategy Chief Innovation Officers, Chief Strategy Officers, and transformation leads Large organisations seeking to embed innovation beyond a dedicated function Conference audiences in technology, consumer, media, and professional services sectors Audience outcomes A named set of practical innovation tools – including the “What If” method and the “Rivers of Thinking” model – that teams can apply immediately A framework for identifying and removing the cognitive and structural barriers that block creative thinking in established organisations Clarity on how to separate the creative process from the operational process, and why the two must be managed differently An understanding of why human creativity is not threatened by AI – and how to build it as a source of commercial competitive advantage Concrete methods for making innovation a daily habit rather than a quarterly initiative

Why organisations work with Elena Boheme She has run the full development lifecycle, from hotel operator design management and fit-out contracting through to property M&A and family office advisory. That breadth is rare; most advisors sit on one side of the design, build, or operate split. She co-founded Metrix Projects and Metrix Advisory in the Kingdom, and sits on the advisory board of RED Summit KSA and the Modern Building Summit KSA. That places her inside the rooms where Saudi development decisions are made, not adjacent to them. She works credibly across the capital stack, advising AETOS MFO on luxury asset and yacht financing and Triversa Holding at executive board level. International family offices use her to translate Gulf real estate exposure into something they can actually govern. She operates in English, French, and Russian fluently, with working Arabic and Mandarin, and has executed projects in China, Macau, Korea, Monaco, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. Cross-cultural deal structuring is a practised skill, not a claim. Biography highlights Co-founder and Development Director, Metrix Projects; co-founder, Metrix Advisory and AETOS MFO. Executive Board Member, Triversa Holding. Strategic Advisor on Project Management, Coldwell Banker Commercial Saudi Arabia. Advisory Board member, RED Summit KSA, and Advisory Board member plus moderator, Modern Building Summit KSA 2025. Speaker and moderator across AlMashtal Knowledge of Design 2024, Cityscape Saudi Arabia 2024, Hospitality Leadership and F&B Forum UAE 2025, Furtech Show Dubai 2025, and Women in Private Equity Forum London 2025. Host of LinkedIn Live series Development Dialogues and author of the LinkedIn newsletter Project Within. Biography Saudi Arabia’s development pipeline is the largest in the world and the least forgiving. International capital arrives expecting Dubai and discovers a market with its own regulatory architecture, its own localisation requirements, and its own definition of what delivered means. Elena Boheme’s work sits inside that translation problem. She co-founded Metrix Projects and Metrix Advisory in Riyadh to do one specific job: take hospitality and residential developments from concept through to operational handover without the gaps that quietly consume budget. Before that, she spent a decade on hotel operator design management, fit-out contracting, and property development across China, Macau, Korea, Monaco, and the UAE, including hospitality projects valued at over two billion US dollars in Korea and Macau. A second strand of her work runs through capital. She co-founded AETOS MFO, a multi-family office advising on luxury real estate and yacht financing, and sits as an executive board member at Triversa Holding and strategic advisor on project management to Coldwell Banker Commercial Saudi Arabia. The combination matters: developers usually understand bricks, family offices usually understand money, and Saudi-bound investors need someone who can hold both sides of the conversation at once. She moderates and chairs across the Kingdom’s main industry platforms, including the RED Summit KSA advisory board, the Modern Building Summit KSA, Cityscape Saudi Arabia, and AlMashtal Knowledge of Design, and hosts the LinkedIn Live series Development Dialogues. The track record is operational rather than academic. For a leadership team weighing a Vision 2030 entry, that is the more useful kind of credibility. Key speaking topics Project deliverability in Saudi Arabia Localisation and market entry strategy for the Kingdom Real estate development lifecycle, from design through operations Cross-cultural deal structuring in the Gulf Women in real estate development and leadership Family office exposure to Gulf real estate Ideal for International hospitality operators and developers planning entry into Saudi Arabia Family offices and private investors building Gulf real estate exposure Boards of project management, design, and construction firms expanding into the Kingdom C-suite teams at firms shifting from regional MENA presence to substantive KSA delivery Audience outcomes A clear-eyed view of what separates a signed Saudi deal from a delivered asset The localisation choices that decide whether a foreign operator can actually execute in the Kingdom A working map of how design, build, operate, and capital decisions interact across a Gulf development Specific failure modes she has seen at the hand-off between international design teams and local execution A perspective on Saudi development from someone embedded in it, not commenting from outside