Business Strategy & Growth

Why organisations work with Arnt Eriksen PayPal, American Express, Visa, Domino’s, and Salesforce all sit on his client list. His point of contact is usually the senior marketing leader carrying the number. His forthcoming book Marketing at Velocity (Kogan Page, April 2027) sets out a thesis on B2B brand compounding, with proprietary frameworks (Velocity Loops, the TRUTH Framework, the Velocity Brand Scorecard) that audiences can apply once they leave the room. Thirty years agency-side at Grey, DDB, Ogilvy, and Isobar means his frameworks come out of work that shipped and clients who renewed. He is a practitioner with a published thesis, which is rarer in this category than buyers expect. Senior marketing audiences have heard the AI-and-content pitch from a dozen other speakers. He gives them a diagnosis of why brand activity is not converting into category position, and a working set of tools for fixing it. Biography highlights Forthcoming book: Marketing at Velocity: B2B Brand Building, Momentum and Category Leadership (Kogan Page, April 2027) Author of Brand You Economics (2021) Thirty years of senior brand experience across more than 75 global brands, including PayPal, American Express, Visa, Domino’s, Salesforce, Meta, and doTERRA Senior agency career at Grey, DDB, Ogilvy, and Isobar; co-founded his first agency at twenty-five Host of the Marketing at Heart podcast Keynotes delivered across the Nordics, Europe, North America, and Australia, including for Salesforce stages Biography Most B2B brands run their marketing as a continuous feed of campaigns and content. Activity rises, dashboards look healthy, and category position barely moves. Arnt Eriksen’s argument is that this is a compounding problem, not an effort problem. For thirty years he has worked inside the marketing functions of global brands including PayPal, American Express, Visa, Domino’s, Salesforce, and doTERRA. His agency career covered Grey, DDB, Ogilvy, and Isobar; he co-founded his first agency at twenty-five. The pattern in his work is consistent. The brands that pulled away from their categories were the ones whose positioning held long enough to compound. That argument runs book-length in his forthcoming Marketing at Velocity, published by Kogan Page in April 2027. The premise is that speed wins moments and velocity wins markets. Around it sits a working set of frameworks. The One Rule (1rE²Zag), Velocity Loops, the TRUTH Framework, and the Velocity Brand Scorecard are tools senior marketers can take back into a planning cycle, not concepts that live only on a stage. Beyond the book, he hosts the Marketing at Heart podcast and runs Conquer OS, his London-based consultancy. His client work has produced concrete commercial outcomes, including a Domino’s Internet-of-Things pizza-ordering button that the company’s Digital Director, Nick Dutch, publicly credited with what he called “mind-blowing” return on investment across PR coverage and sales. Key speaking topics B2B brand building Brand velocity and category leadership Marketing strategy for senior leaders Customer relationship economics AI and the modern marketing function B2B narrative and positioning Ideal for CMOs and senior marketing leaders accountable for brand position and revenue contribution B2B leadership teams in crowded categories where differentiation is starting to blur Founders and CEOs of growth-stage businesses where marketing is being asked to translate spend into category position Audience outcomes A working diagnosis of why their B2B brand activity is not converting into category position A set of named frameworks, including Velocity Loops, the TRUTH Framework, and the Velocity Brand Scorecard, that translate directly into next-quarter marketing planning A clear read on whether their current marketing is producing speed or velocity, and what to change if the answer is speed A reframe of trust, story, and consistency as commercial assets that compound, with implications for budget allocation and channel mix

Why organisations work with Peter Fisk He brings a structured framework for business reinvention. Business Recoded sets out seven mindset shifts and 49 codes drawn from deep work with senior leaders at companies including Microsoft, Adidas and Patagonia. Senior teams leave with a shared model to argue from. He sits in the rare overlap between marketer and strategist. As former CEO of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and now Professor of Strategy and Innovation at IE Business School in Madrid, he treats marketing, customer thinking and innovation as parts of one growth discipline. Most organisations still split them across separate functions and budgets. He has worked with senior leaders across more than 300 companies in over 55 countries, with particular depth in Asian innovation and emerging-market growth. The case material is current and varied, not the same handful of examples a leadership team has already seen. As former Thinkers50 Global Director and founder of the annual European Business Forum, he has unusual curatorial access to the leading management thinkers in the world. Sessions draw on what is actually moving across the field. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of GeniusWorks, a London-based strategy and innovation consultancy Professor of Leadership, Strategy and Innovation at IE Business School, Madrid; academic director of the Global Advanced Management Program Former Chief Executive of the Chartered Institute of Marketing Former Thinkers50 Global Director; founder of the annual Thinkers50 European Business Forum Author of nine business books, including Business Recoded, Gamechangers, and the Genius series, translated into 35 languages; Business Recoded shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year Earlier commercial career at British Airways, including responsibility for the Concorde brand Biography The Chartered Institute of Marketing is the world’s largest professional marketing organisation. Peter Fisk ran it before founding GeniusWorks. He used the role to argue that marketing, customer and innovation belong inside growth strategy, where most organisations still treat them as separate functions. That argument has shaped his work since. His career started in physics, in a superconductivity lab. He moved into commercial roles at British Airways, including managing the Concorde brand, before consulting work at PA Consulting Group and Brand Finance. After CIM he founded GeniusWorks, a London consultancy, and joined IE Business School in Madrid as Professor of Strategy and Innovation. His 2020 book Business Recoded sets out seven mindset shifts and 49 codes for reinventing how a business creates value. It is built on deep interviews with leaders at companies including Microsoft, Adidas, Patagonia and Spotify. The Financial Times reviewed it as “the book you have to read now”. It was shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year. Through the Thinkers50 European Business Forum, which he founded in 2017 as Thinkers50 Global Director, he convenes the world’s leading management thinkers each year. Recent stages have brought together Michael Porter, Rita McGrath, Erin Meyer and Alex Osterwalder. That curatorial position is unusual for a working consultant. The frameworks in his sessions are continually refreshed by direct contact with the academics and practitioners writing the next generation of management ideas. Key speaking topics Growth strategy in fast-changing markets Business model reinvention Innovation strategy and execution Customer strategy and brand growth The Business Recoded framework: seven shifts for reinventing the business Asian innovation and emerging-market growth Sustainable growth and purposeful business Ideal for CEOs and boards facing slowing growth in mature markets Strategy and innovation leaders responsible for new business models or category growth CMOs and customer experience leaders rethinking how marketing connects to commercial strategy Executive leadership teams running annual strategy or transformation offsites Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for the seven shifts that separate business reinvention from incremental change Case material from Asian innovators and global category leaders that most leadership teams will not have seen A connected view of innovation, customer and marketing strategy as one growth discipline Specific direction on where to stop investing, alongside where to grow

Why organisations work with Mark Ritson His “diagnosis, strategy, tactics” framework gives marketing functions a structure for connecting brand spend to commercial outcomes – a discipline most organisations have never been taught and cannot easily develop internally. He spent 13 years as in-house brand consultant for LVMH, working with Louis Vuitton, Dom Perignon, and Hennessy. His commercial credibility comes from inside the world’s most valuable luxury portfolio, not from agency pitches or conference circuit opinion. His doctoral thesis on the social uses of advertising won the 2000 Ferber Award – the first non-US researcher to receive it – and his co-authored pricing research was cited by George Akerlof in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. No other marketing speaker working today holds that combination of peer-reviewed standing and practitioner track record. The MiniMBA, which he founded and teaches personally, has graduated more than 20,000 practitioners globally. That scale gives him a precise, evidence-based view of where marketing competence breaks down in real organisations – and what it costs them commercially. Nearly 20 years of weekly column-writing in Marketing Week – and multiple PPA Business Columnist of the Year awards – have made him the most credible dissenting voice against marketing faddism. Organisations bring him in when they need someone to challenge internal orthodoxies with evidence rather than instinct. Biography highlights PhD in Marketing, Lancaster University; doctoral thesis won the 2000 Ferber Award as the best dissertation published in the Journal of Consumer Research – the first non-US recipient in the award’s history Faculty positions at London Business School, the University of Minnesota, Melbourne Business School, MIT Sloan (visiting), and Singapore Management University (visiting); MBA Best Teacher prizes at all four institutions In-house brand consultant for LVMH from 2002 to 2015, working directly with senior executives at Louis Vuitton, Dom Perignon, and Hennessy Marketing Week columnist for approximately 20 years; multiple PPA Business Columnist of the Year awards, the highest award for magazine journalism in the UK; British Society of Magazine Editors Business Columnist of the Year in 2018 and 2022 Founder and lead instructor of the MiniMBA in Marketing and MiniMBA in Brand Management; more than 20,000 graduates globally AMI Sir Charles McGrath Award (the highest marketing honour in Australia); IPA Honorary Fellow (2024); co-authored pricing research cited by Nobel Laureate George Akerlof in his 2001 acceptance speech Published in Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Journal of Consumer Research, and Journal of Advertising Biography Marketing departments spend. The harder question – what that spending actually produces commercially – is the one most organisations cannot answer. Mark Ritson has spent over two decades building the frameworks that make that answer possible, working from inside business schools, luxury brand headquarters, and the pages of Marketing Week simultaneously. His academic foundation is unusually strong. His PhD thesis, “The Social Uses of Advertising,” won the 2000 Ferber Award as the best doctoral dissertation in the Journal of Consumer Research – the first time a researcher outside the United States had received the honour. A Thouron Scholar at Wharton in 1995, he went on to hold faculty positions at London Business School, the University of Minnesota, Melbourne Business School, and MIT Sloan, winning the best teacher prize at each institution. His co-authored pricing research was cited by George Akerlof during his 2001 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. What separates Ritson from other marketing academics is sustained proximity to practice. From 2002 to 2015, he served as in-house brand consultant for LVMH, working with senior executives across Louis Vuitton, Dom Perignon, and Hennessy. That access – combined with nearly two decades writing a weekly column for Marketing Week – gave him a vantage point that bridges research, boardroom, and brand operations in a way few practitioners have held at the same time. In 2019, he left academia to focus on the MiniMBA, an online platform he founded to make evidence-based marketing education available at scale. More than 20,000 practitioners have now completed the programme, built around his “diagnosis, strategy, tactics” framework. The AMI gave him the Sir Charles McGrath Award – the highest honour for marketing in Australia – and the IPA made him an Honorary Fellow in 2024. His consistent argument is that marketing’s commercial standing in the boardroom depends not on new technology or new trends, but on practitioner competence. Key speaking topics Marketing strategy and brand management Pricing strategy and commercial decision-making Marketing effectiveness and measurement Brand building versus performance marketing Marketing capability and practitioner competence Evidence-based marketing frameworks Ideal for CMOs and senior marketing leaders facing board-level scrutiny of marketing budgets and accountability Executive leadership teams seeking a commercial framework for evaluating marketing investment Organisations investing in marketing capability development at scale Strategy, brand, and commercial functions in consumer-facing businesses where the link between brand and revenue is contested Audience outcomes A working framework for connecting marketing strategy to commercial outcomes, grounded in the “diagnosis, strategy, tactics” model Clarity on the evidence base for brand building versus short-term performance marketing, and practical guidance on how to argue for the right balance internally Sharpened understanding of pricing as a strategic rather than a tactical discipline Practical tools for improving the quality of marketing decisions: briefing standards, brand positioning, and market orientation The language and evidence to challenge marketing orthodoxies and fads in their own organisations

Why organisations work with Itai Green He runs the executive playbook for open innovation, built on programmes delivered for named multinationals including Toyota, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Maccabi Healthcare, and Electra. He owns the access point to two of Israel’s largest vertical startup communities, ITTS (around 350 traveltech founders) and IITS for insurtech, which gives corporate audiences a direct route into live deal flow. His book with Business Expert Press, “Innovation or Elimination: Winning in a World of Constant Change,” codifies a two-decade framework for collaboration between corporates and startups, so the keynote carries a published thesis rather than a deck. He has briefed senior executive audiences at repeat Economist summits, UNWTO, and Amcham Brazil’s CEO Forum, which means he calibrates to board-level decision makers, not technology enthusiasts. He headed corporate innovation at Amadeus IT Group before building the consultancy, so he speaks to the internal politics of innovation programmes from the same side of the table as the buyer. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Innovate Israel (2017 to present). Co-Founder & CEO of “Global Innovation & Strategy Consulting”, since 2024. Former Head of Business Development and Innovation, Amadeus IT Group Israel. Former CEO, Maxtech Technologies; former VP Business Development, Techtium; prior roles at Elbit. Co-founder, JerusalemOnline. Author, “Innovation or Elimination: Winning in a World of Constant Change,” Business Expert Press. Founder of the ITTS and IITS startup communities covering traveltech and insurtech in Israel. Keynote speaker at Economist summits (2018 to 2022), UNWTO Tourism Startup Competition, and Amcham Brazil CEO Forum. Biography Most corporate innovation programmes fail quietly. They produce pilots, demo days, and scouting reports, but very little that reaches a P&L. The gap is not talent or budget; it is the wiring between the corporate and the outside ecosystem it claims to work with. Itai Green has spent two decades inside that wiring. As Head of Business Development and Innovation at Amadeus IT Group in Israel, and before that as a CEO and operator across Maxtech, Techtium, and Elbit, he built the internal muscle that most large organisations are still trying to grow. In 2017 he founded Innovate Israel to run that playbook for global corporates, connecting them to Israeli startups across IT, pharma, finance, travel, retail, banking, insurance, energy, and construction tech. Client work has included Toyota, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Maccabi Healthcare, and Electra. Alongside the consulting practice, he built two of the largest sector communities in Israel’s ecosystem. ITTS (Israel Travel Tech Startups) now covers around 350 founders. IITS does the same job for insurance technology. For a corporate buyer, those communities are the live deal flow behind the keynote. His book “Innovation or Elimination: Winning in a World of Constant Change,” published by Business Expert Press, sets out the framework he has been using with clients: how leadership teams structure open innovation, how they absorb external technology without breaking their core business, and how they stop confusing pilots with outcomes. Key speaking topics Open innovation and corporate-startup collaboration Generative AI in corporate strategy Israeli innovation ecosystem and ecosystem engagement Traveltech and insurtech Corporate venturing and scouting models Innovation leadership and organisational readiness Business model innovation under geopolitical and tariff pressure Ideal for Chief Innovation Officers, Heads of Corporate Venturing, and Chief Strategy Officers building or resetting an open innovation function. Executive committees in travel, insurance, pharma, retail, energy, and banking evaluating engagement with Israel’s startup ecosystem. Business development and R&D leaders who have active scouting but no reliable path from pilot to deployment. Boards and CEO forums looking for an operator’s view on turning innovation spend into commercial growth. Audience outcomes A working definition of what separates a functioning open innovation programme from a scouting theatre. A clear map of how to engage with Israel’s startup ecosystem without burning internal credibility on dead-end pilots. A perspective on where generative AI shifts the corporate-startup dynamic, grounded in live client work rather than forecasts. Specific internal structures and incentives that leaders can use to move a pilot from proof of concept to a line of business. A candid read on where open innovation tends to fail inside large corporates, from someone who has sat on both sides.

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

Why organisations work with Michael Lyon He has mentored more than 100 ventures through the Creative Destruction Lab since 2018, currently anchored in the Oceans stream at the Atlantic site. That is a working accelerator practice, not a retired one. He was Vice President and General Counsel of Space Adventures during the first private spaceflights to the International Space Station (Tito, Shuttleworth). When he talks about commercialising frontier technology, he is describing a market he helped invent. He served as Special Assistant to FDIC Chairman L. William Seidman during the Savings and Loan crisis and as an Assistant Director for Resolutions at the RTC. Few startup mentors have run a federal crisis at that level. His book Accelerating Startups: Lessons From Mentors, foreword by Professor Ajay Agrawal of the Rotman School and contributions including Professor Philip Kotler, gives boards and accelerator programmes a published reference point for what he teaches. He works comfortably in the Gulf Cooperation Council region and Asia, and has done business in more than 100 countries, which makes him useful for venture programmes thinking about international expansion from day one. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Lyon Capital Services; mentor at the Creative Destruction Lab. Former Vice President and General Counsel, Space Adventures; leadership roles at Zero Gravity Corporation. Special Assistant to the Chairman of the FDIC and Resolution Trust Corporation during the Savings and Loan crisis; Assistant Director for Resolutions at the RTC. Former General Counsel and Director of Business Development at J.E. Robert Company; former attorney at Covington and Burling. Co-founder of Xtronaut Enterprises with the leader of the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission. Author of Accelerating Startups: Lessons From Mentors (foreword by Professor Ajay Agrawal, Rotman School of Management). J.D. cum laude, Harvard Law School; B.A. summa cum laude, Brandeis University; attended London School of Economics. Biography The hardest part of building a serious venture is not the idea. It is the cluster of decisions a founder makes about regulation, capital, geography, and timing in the first three years, almost always with too little information. That is the gap that Michael Lyon has spent two decades closing for founders, first inside the companies and now from the mentor’s seat at the Creative Destruction Lab. His commercial track record is in the part of the economy where regulation, capital intensity, and frontier technology meet. As Vice President and General Counsel of Space Adventures he helped organise the first private spaceflights to the International Space Station, the Tito and Shuttleworth missions. He held leadership roles at Zero Gravity Corporation and co-founded Xtronaut Enterprises with the lead scientist of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. Before the space sector he was Special Assistant to the Chairman of the FDIC during the Savings and Loan crisis and an Assistant Director for Resolutions at the Resolution Trust Corporation, working on failed thrifts of more than 500 million dollars in assets. He has also been General Counsel and Director of Business Development at the J.E. Robert Company and an attorney at Covington and Burling. The legal training is from Harvard, cum laude. Since 2018 he has mentored more than 100 ventures at the Creative Destruction Lab across the space, ocean, and emerging technology streams. His book Accelerating Startups: Lessons From Mentors carries a foreword by Professor Ajay Agrawal of the Rotman School of Management, who founded CDL, and a contribution from Professor Philip Kotler. It is the most direct expression of what a buyer is hiring when they put him in front of founders or a corporate innovation team. Key speaking topics Commercialising frontier technology in regulated markets Mentorship and founder decision-making inside accelerator programmes The commercial space sector and lessons from the first private orbital flights International market entry, with a focus on the Gulf and Asia Crisis resolution lessons from the Savings and Loan era Corporate innovation, intrapreneurship, and venture building Ideal for Founders and CEOs of early-stage ventures in space, ocean, and other regulated frontier sectors. Corporate innovation, R&D, and venture-building teams setting up accelerator or incubator programmes. Investors, family offices, and government innovation funds backing technology commercialisation. Universities, accelerators, and policy bodies running founder education at scale. Audience outcomes A working playbook for how founders extract real value from accelerators, incubators, and government innovation programmes. A grounded view of how commercial space and ocean ventures actually get built when regulation, capital, and timing are all moving at once. Lessons from the inside of a federal financial crisis applied to how founders and boards should think about risk and resolution today. Specific guidance on entering Gulf and Asian markets without burning the first eighteen months on the wrong structure.

Why organisations work with Chris Endersby He treats a brand as an internal operating system before he treats it as a marketing asset, so the work changes how the leadership team behaves, not just how the company looks. The DARE methodology he co-developed at Firestarter gives founders a structured way to test whether their positioning is genuinely differentiated, authentic to the team, resonant with the buyer, and expressed consistently across every touchpoint. His background sits at the intersection of corporate change work at JP Morgan, KPMG, UBS and Barclays and front-line risk management in child safeguarding, which gives him a non-marketing read on how people actually respond to disruption and uncertainty. He is registered in both coaching psychology and psychotherapy, which means he can hold the harder conversations that surface when a founder’s stated brand and the team’s lived experience do not match. Biography highlights Co-founder and COO of Firestarter, a London brand consultancy for purpose-led scale-up B2B businesses. Co-developer of the DARE methodology (Differentiation, Authenticity, Resonance, Expression). Corporate change and consulting experience with JP Morgan, KPMG, UBS and Barclays. Dual professional registration in coaching psychology and psychotherapy. Earlier career as a front-line child safeguarding practitioner, manager and researcher. Biography Scale-up B2B brands tend to fail in the same way. The founder’s original conviction gets diluted in committee, the language drifts toward whatever the competitor set is saying, and the team can no longer explain in plain terms why a customer should choose them. Chris Endersby’s work starts from that failure pattern, and from the observation that brand is rarely a marketing problem first. It is a leadership and behaviour problem that surfaces as a marketing problem. Endersby co-founded Firestarter, a London consultancy that works with founders of scale-up B2B businesses to rebuild that conviction. Alongside his business partner he co-developed the DARE methodology, which moves a brand through four practical tests: is it genuinely Differentiated in its market, Authentic to the people who have to live it, Resonant with the audience it is trying to reach, and Expressed consistently in everything the company does. The methodology is designed to make brand work auditable rather than aesthetic. His credibility for this work comes from an unusual stack. He has spent years inside corporate change programmes at JP Morgan, KPMG, UBS and Barclays, where he learned how large organisations actually metabolise new strategy. Before that he worked in child safeguarding as a practitioner, manager and researcher, which gives him a working understanding of risk, human behaviour under pressure, and the gap between what institutions say they do and what they do. He is registered in both coaching psychology and psychotherapy. The result is a speaker who can sit in front of a founding team and ask the questions that brand agencies usually avoid: whether the leadership group actually believes its own positioning, where the team’s behaviour contradicts the stated values, and what the cost of that contradiction is in hiring, pricing and retention. Key speaking topics Brand differentiation for scale-up B2B Authentic positioning and purpose Founder-led brand strategy Organisational behaviour and brand Change and transformation in growth-stage businesses Coaching psychology applied to leadership teams Ideal for Founders and CEOs of Series A to Series C B2B businesses approaching a rebrand or repositioning Chief marketing officers and brand leads inside scale-ups where the brand has outgrown its origin story Leadership teams preparing for a funding round, acquisition or international expansion where positioning is under scrutiny Audience outcomes A clearer test for whether their current positioning is actually differentiated or just well-written A working understanding of why brand work fails when it stays inside the marketing function Specific questions to take back to their own leadership team about the gap between stated values and lived behaviour A framework (DARE) for auditing brand expression across product, sales, hiring and internal communication

Dr Karen Nelson-Field: Redefining the Future of Attention Measurement in Media Dr Karen Nelson-Field is a globally recognised media scientist, author, and entrepreneur who has revolutionised how the advertising world defines and measures attention. As the Founder & CEO of Amplified, she has led the movement to replace outdated metrics with science-driven attention measurement, empowering brands, media agencies, and platforms to understand what truly drives engagement and business impact. Pioneering the Attention Economy With over 20 years in research, Karen has shaped a new era of evidence-based advertising. Her groundbreaking studies on human visual attention have informed global debates on media quality and advertising effectiveness. Her early research in 2012 on social engagement challenged assumptions about Facebook’s ad performance, drawing international attention. Today, her company Amplified operates in over 15 markets, collecting billions of attention data points and providing advanced AI models for media planning and activation—now used by the world’s biggest brands to optimise campaigns across TV, digital, and social channels. Always thinking in the future, Amplified is the first to move into generative audiences for the AI era of attention. Author and Educator Karen is the author of three acclaimed books published by Oxford University Press and Palgrave Macmillan—Viral Marketing: The Science of Sharing, The Attention Economy: How Media Works, and The Attention Economy: A Category Blueprint—which serve as foundational texts for marketers, academics, and media strategists. Her work is frequently cited in publishers such as The New York Times, Bloomberg Business, CNBC, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal, reinforcing her status as a thought leader in the global attention economy.

Why organisations work with Danny Rensch Inside view of a bootstrapped consumer platform that reached a billion-dollar valuation with no venture capital, told by the operator who built its content, events and media strategy from the inside. Direct authorship of Chess.com’s signature commercial properties, including the Speed Chess Championship, the PRO Chess League, Titled Tuesday, and the PogChamps streamer events that opened chess to a non-chess audience. A working framework for using a 1,500-year-old game as a commercial asset: turning a niche pastime into a streaming category, an esports format, and a content engine for 40 million monthly users. Memoir-grade material on resilience and self-leadership grounded in a specific, publicly documented personal history, published by Hachette in 2025 and endorsed by Jeannette Walls and Ben Mezrich. Biography highlights Co-founder and Chief Chess Officer, Chess.com, the platform with over 225 million registered members and roughly 40 million monthly active users. International Master (FIDE) and former Arizona youngest National Master (1999); 1998 Elementary National Champion, 2000 Junior High National Champion, 2004 National High School Co-Champion. Author of Dark Squares: How Chess Saved My Life (Hachette Book Group, 2025), reviewed by Kirkus as “A winning memoir” with endorsements from Jeannette Walls and Ben Mezrich. Created and hosted the 2016 $40,000 GM Blitz Battle Championship featuring Magnus Carlsen, the format that became the Chess.com Speed Chess Championship. Hosted PogChamps, the streamer chess tournament credited with bringing chess to mainstream Twitch and YouTube audiences during 2020. Speaker at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference; profiled by Fortune in 2025 on the Chess.com growth story. Biography Chess.com is one of the few consumer platforms of its scale that never took venture capital. Over fifteen years, the company grew from a small bootstrapped operation into a service with more than 225 million registered members, around 40 million monthly active users, and a valuation above one billion dollars by 2023. Danny Rensch co-founded the company in 2009 and built its content, events and media operations. The competitive layer of the business is his work. He created and hosted the 2016 $40,000 GM Blitz Battle Championship featuring Magnus Carlsen, the format that grew into the Speed Chess Championship. He hosted the first PogChamps in 2020, the streamer tournament that pulled a non-chess audience onto the platform and re-cast a 1,500-year-old game as a streaming category. The PRO Chess League and Titled Tuesday sit in the same portfolio. Before the company, there was a player. Rensch is a FIDE International Master and a former scholastic champion: Elementary National Champion in 1998, Arizona’s youngest National Master in 1999, Junior High National Champion in 2000, and National High School Co-Champion in 2004, the year he earned his first IM norm. His memoir, Dark Squares: How Chess Saved My Life, was published by Hachette in 2025 and describes a childhood inside the Church of Immortal Consciousness, an Arizona cult, and chess as the route out. Kirkus called it “A winning memoir.” The commercial argument and the personal argument reinforce each other. A board considering how a niche product becomes a global consumer category, or a leadership team studying the discipline required to operate without external capital for fifteen years, will find specific operating material in the Chess.com story. A management audience working on resilience and decision-making under pressure has, in the same speaker, a primary source. Key speaking topics Bootstrapped consumer platform growth Building category-defining digital products Content, community and commercial events strategy Lessons from chess for business strategy and decision-making Resilience and self-leadership through adversity Streaming, esports and the modernisation of legacy categories Ideal for CEOs and founders of consumer platforms, marketplaces and subscription businesses CMOs, CCOs and heads of content building community-led growth Boards and leadership teams of bootstrapped or founder-led companies Conferences on entrepreneurship, scale-up leadership, sports business and digital media Audience outcomes A concrete view of how a bootstrapped consumer platform compounds product, content and events decisions over fifteen years. Operating examples of turning a legacy category into a streaming-first business, drawn from the Speed Chess Championship and PogChamps. A working language for applying chess concepts (anticipation, calculated risk, pattern recognition) to commercial strategy without metaphor inflation. A grounded perspective on resilience, decision-making and personal recovery, sourced from a published memoir rather than generic motivational material.

John Mackey: From Whole Foods to Whole Living John Mackey is an entrepreneur and the co-founder and visionary of Whole Foods Market. In his 44 years of service as CEO, the natural and organic grocer grew from a single store in Austin, Texas, to 540 stores in the U.S., U.K., and Canada with annual sales exceeding $22 billion and more than 105,000 Team Members. A pioneer of natural and organic foods and a passionate advocate for capitalism as a force for good, Mackey has focused on building a more conscious way of doing business. His vision inspired the Whole Planet Foundation to help end poverty in developing nations, the Local Producer Loan Program to help local food producers expand their businesses, the Global Animal Partnership’s rating scale for humane farm animal treatment, and the Total Health Immersion program to promote health and wellness with Whole Foods Market Team Members. A strong believer in free market principles, Mackey co-founded the Conscious Capitalism Movement and co-authored a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling book entitled Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business to boldly defend and reimagine capitalism and encourage a way of doing business that is grounded in ethical consciousness. In his follow-up, Conscious Leadership: Elevating Humanity through Business, Mackey provides a roadmap for innovative, values-based leadership. Mackey has been recognized as one of Fortune’s “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders,” Ernst & Young’s “Entrepreneur of the Year Overall Winner for the United States,” Institutional Investor’s “Best CEO in America,” Barron’s “World’s Best CEO,” MarketWatch’s “CEO of the Year,” and Esquire’s “Most Inspiring CEO,” while Whole Foods Market was named to Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work for” list for 20 consecutive years. A mission-driven entrepreneur, Mackey is deeply passionate about the connection between food and health. His business venture, Love.Life, unites the power of nourishing food, holistic medical care, and precision wellness therapies to make optimal, lasting health and vitality achievable. Mackey currently serves on the board of directors for Conscious Capitalism, The Motley Fool, The Cato Institute, Institute for Cultural Evolution, and Students for Liberty. His book, The Whole Story: Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism, invites readers on the adventure of building Whole Foods Market: the colorful cast of idealists and foodies who formed the company’s DNA, the many breakthroughs and missteps, the camaraderie and the conflict, and the narrowly avoided disasters.

Why organisations work with Rita McGrath The transient advantage framework directly challenges an assumption most leadership teams still operate on: that the goal of strategy is to build and protect durable competitive positions. McGrath makes the cost of that assumption explicit, and offers a named, practitioner-tested alternative. Discovery-driven planning, co-created with Ian C. MacMillan and introduced through the Harvard Business Review, gives organisations a structured methodology for committing to uncertain growth initiatives: one that Clayton Christensen described as among the most important management tools ever developed. She holds the Thinkers50 #1 Strategy Award (2013) alongside four subsequent Thinkers50 Strategy Awards and a 2025 global ranking of #6, a record of credentials in strategy thinking that is without parallel on the conference circuit. Her Seeing Around Corners framework provides a concrete vocabulary for the specific problem boards face most acutely: detecting the leading indicators of strategic inflection before they become corporate crises. As a regular HBR contributor whose work is cited in the FT, WSJ, and New York Times, her ideas arrive in board rooms before she does: senior audiences already speak her language. Biography highlights Professor of Management and Academic Director in Executive Education, Columbia Business School; leads Leading Strategic Growth and Change executive programme Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award in Strategy (2013); five-time Thinkers50 Strategy Award winner; ranked #6 globally on the Thinkers50 overall list (2025) C.K. Prahalad Award (2022), Strategic Management Society: awarded for scholarly impact on practice; inducted into the Business Excellence Hall of Fame (2022) Author of five books including The End of Competitive Advantage (HBR Press) and Seeing Around Corners (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); Discovery-Driven Growth named to Thinkers50 Management Classics Booklist Co-creator of discovery-driven planning, introduced through the Harvard Business Review (1995); cited by Clayton Christensen as among the most important management and strategy tools ever developed Ph.D., Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania); honours degrees from Barnard College and Columbia School of International and Public Affairs Work covered by the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, CNN Business, and NPR Marketplace; one of HBR’s most frequent contributors Biography Competitive advantage used to be the organising idea behind business strategy. Build it, protect it, sustain it. In markets defined by rapid technology cycles, boundary-free competition, and compressing product lifecycles, that idea has become a liability, and most organisations do not realise it until the decision has already been made for them. Rita Gunther McGrath has spent three decades at Columbia Business School building the alternative. Her framework of transient advantage, set out in The End of Competitive Advantage, argues that the objective of strategy must shift from sustaining positions to developing the organisational capacity to find, exploit, and exit advantages on the organisation’s own terms. Discovery-driven planning provides the operational methodology: a structured process for committing to growth initiatives under uncertainty without betting the business on invalid assumptions. Her intellectual standing in strategy is well-documented. Thinkers50 awarded her the #1 Strategy Award in 2013 and has continued to recognise her work across four subsequent award cycles, ranking her sixth globally in 2025. The Strategic Management Society’s C.K. Prahalad Award (2022) recognised her scholarly impact on practice, a distinction that acknowledges both rigour and application. Clayton Christensen placed her discovery-driven growth tools among the most important management tools ever developed. McGrath directs Columbia’s Leading Strategic Growth and Change executive programme and founded Valize, a platform that operationalises the discovery-driven methodology for organisations at scale. Her advisory work runs into the C-suites of Fortune 1,000 companies: helping boards and senior leadership teams navigate the specific transition her research describes: from the strategy they were trained to run, to one that fits the market they are actually in. Key speaking topics Transient advantage and the limits of competitive positioning Strategic inflection points and early warning signals Discovery-driven planning and growth under uncertainty Business model evolution and renewal Organisational agility in volatile markets Strategic decision-making under ambiguity Innovation as a managed, repeatable discipline Ideal for CEOs, CSOs, and board members wrestling with strategy refresh in disrupted or fast-moving sectors Strategy and corporate development teams whose existing planning frameworks are producing diminishing returns Senior leadership teams in large incumbents facing the transition from mature to declining competitive positions Executive education participants on leadership programmes where strategic thinking is the primary development objective Audience outcomes A clear understanding of why durable competitive advantage is an increasingly dangerous strategic objective, and what to replace it with Practical command of the discovery-driven planning process for evaluating and resourcing uncertain growth initiatives A named framework for identifying strategic inflection points before they become visible to the wider market Language and tools to initiate an honest internal conversation about which parts of the current business model are in decline Sharpened criteria for strategic resource allocation when outcomes cannot be forecast with confidence

Mickey Wilson is the CEO, founder, and creative force behind Firestarter, a brand consultancy renowned for fusing ingenuity with psychology to build standout B2B brands. With over thirty years of experience, she has guided brand strategy and creative leadership for industry giants like Samsung, Tesco, CIMA, and Ocado. Mickey developed Firestarter’s DARE Formula—Differentiation, Authenticity, Resonance, and Expression—helping brands unlock growth through clarity and resonance.​ Her passion lies in helping rebellious scale-ups and purpose-led SMEs forge impactful brands in a landscape dominated by automation and sameness. She uniquely combines strategic frameworks, behavioural insight, and AI to drive authentic creativity and commercial success. Mickey Wilson also collaborates with Chris Endersby, Firestarter’s co-founder and expert business psychologist, to give inspiring keynotes that unite brand psychology, creative strategy, and transformational insight for entrepreneurial audiences.