Simon Alexander Ong
Workforces are tired, distracted and disengaged, and the leaders running them are running on the same fumes. Wellbeing programmes have multiplied without changing how people actually feel about their work or themselves. The question senior teams now face is more honest: what would it take to rebuild the daily conditions under which good work, and good people, are still possible.
Simon Alexander Ong is an executive coach and bestselling author of Energize who helps organisations rebuild the personal energy, focus and engagement of leaders and employees.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Simon Alexander Ong
- A serious, published thesis on energy management as a leadership and workforce capability, anchored in Energize (Penguin, 2022) and recognised as Business Book of the Year for Wellness and Wellbeing in 2023.
- Direct credibility with global employers on people and culture briefs, with named keynote work for Microsoft, Salesforce, Unilever, EY, Adobe and Barclays.
- A coaching practice behind the content, with qualifications from The Coaching Academy and NLP training, so the material survives contact with senior audiences, not just town-hall settings.
- Endorsements from Simon Sinek, Marie Forleo and Marshall Goldsmith, giving HR and communications leads confident reference points when pitching internally.
Biography highlights
- Bestselling author of Energize: Make the Most of Every Moment (Penguin Life, 2022).
- Winner, Business Book of the Year, Wellness and Wellbeing, Business Book Awards 2023.
- Endorsed by Simon Sinek, Marie Forleo and Marshall Goldsmith.
- Keynote engagements with Microsoft, Salesforce, Unilever, EY, Adobe, Barclays and DocuSign.
- Featured on Sky News, BBC Radio London and LBC, with written contributions in Forbes, HuffPost, Virgin and The Guardian.
- BSc Economics, London School of Economics; coaching qualifications from The Coaching Academy.
Biography
Most organisations now accept that burnout, disengagement and quiet exit are not edge cases. They are showing up across leadership teams, middle management and frontline staff at the same time. The argument in Energize, published by Penguin in 2022 and named Business Book of the Year for Wellness and Wellbeing in 2023, is that this is an energy problem before it is a wellbeing problem.
Simon Alexander Ong treats energy as a managed resource. His work asks leaders to look at how attention, recovery, relationships and purpose are organised across a working week, then to redesign the parts that drain people without producing anything. The same lens is then turned on teams and on the wider employee experience.
The practitioner side keeps the material grounded. Ong is a qualified coach through The Coaching Academy, trained in NLP, and works one-to-one with senior leaders alongside the speaking work. That is why a keynote at Microsoft, Salesforce, Unilever or EY tends to land as a conversation with the room rather than a motivational set piece.
Endorsements from Simon Sinek, Marie Forleo and Marshall Goldsmith have helped place him on the same shelf as the leadership and performance authors that senior HR and culture functions already trust. For boards thinking about engagement, retention and the human cost of permanent change, his content gives a language and a set of moves that staff and leaders can actually use.
Key speaking topics
- Energy management for leaders and teams
- Sustainable high performance
- Employee engagement and wellbeing
- Purposeful leadership
- Focus and attention in a noisy work environment
- Mindset and personal growth
- Coaching cultures inside organisations
Ideal for
- CHROs, CPOs and heads of employee experience designing wellbeing and engagement strategy
- Leadership development and learning teams running senior offsites and high-potential programmes
- Internal communications and culture leads planning all-hands and kick-off events
- Sales and commercial leadership audiences working under sustained pressure and target intensity
Audience outcomes
- A clear language for energy as a managed resource at individual, team and organisational level
- Specific practices for protecting focus and recovery inside an existing diary, not in addition to it
- A more honest view of where current wellbeing efforts are working and where they are decorative
- Renewed sense of purpose and ownership for senior leaders carrying long change agendas
- Practical prompts a manager can use with a team the following Monday
Talks
A talk on why purpose has become a leadership requirement, not a values exercise, and how senior leaders can make it visible in everyday decisions.
Key takeaways:
- How purpose shapes discretionary effort and retention
- Practical ways for leaders to communicate purpose without slogans
- The link between personal clarity and organisational alignment
The core Energize talk, framing personal and team energy as the real input behind sustained performance.
Key takeaways:
- The four domains of energy and how each gets depleted at work
- Daily and weekly design choices that protect performance
- What managers can do to stop draining the people around them
A talk on attention, distraction and the cost of constant input for knowledge workers and leaders.
Key takeaways:
- Why attention is now the scarcest resource on a leader’s calendar
- Habits that rebuild focus without retreating from the job
- Reframing busyness as a signal of poor design, not effort