Berättande och affärskommunikation
Talare som använder berättande för att förmedla komplexa idéer med klarhet, emotion och långsiktig affärspåverkan
Speakers Associates represents 446 speakers on Berättande och affärskommunikation, including Arnt Eriksen, Mark Stevenson, Purna Virji, Lucy Bullivant, Jennifer Willey, Shela Gobertina von Trapp, Neelu Kaur, James Haskell, Shil Shanghavi och Professor Maja.
Senior teams under public pressure freeze. They soften the position, hedge the language, and lose the audience they were trying to keep. Holding a line in front of a hostile room, with cameras running, is a skill most leaders never practise until the moment arrives.
Polarisation has moved inside the organisation. Leaders are now asked to hold teams together across values, identity, and politics that used to stay outside the office, and most have no practical method for doing it. The usual tools, policy statements, training modules, town halls, do not change the quality of the conversation in the room.
Boards know AI will reshape their operating model. They do not yet know how to make defensible decisions about deployment, workforce displacement and public legitimacy at the same time. The leaders who launched the current AI systems are now the ones warning about where they lead, and the gap between corporate ambition and public trust is widening faster than governance can close it.
Audiences have stopped trusting brand messages and started rewarding the brands that behave like creators. Marketing budgets keep climbing while attention, retention and loyalty keep falling. The organisations winning that gap have figured out how to build their own narrative engine, at studio scale, on a creator economics base.
Major product launches, awards and brand events stand or fall on the person holding the room. A weak host turns a serious commercial moment into background noise; a strong one keeps the audience with the brand from first cue to closing line. Few presenters can interview a sceptical executive on stage one minute and run a slick awards script the next without losing pace.
Boards built their growth strategies for a world that no longer exists. The China relationship is now a board-level risk, supply chains have to be re-engineered around political fault lines, and reputation in one capital can damage the licence to operate in another. Decisions taken with last decade’s mental model now produce the wrong answers faster than ever.
Most organisations can produce content. Very few can build an audience that comes back daily. The gap between publishing and habit is where budgets quietly disappear, and it is rarely closed by adding channels or hiring more creators. It is closed by people who know how to design a format, pick the right voices, and run the commercial side of attention.
Brands keep claiming relevance to youth culture and keep getting it wrong. The people who built the scenes the brands now want to borrow from are rarely in the room when those decisions are made. Without that voice, partnerships look opportunistic and cultural campaigns age badly.
The clearest pitch wins the deal, not the most expert one. Technical specialists struggle to distil what they know into a board paper or a 20-minute presentation. The cost lands on senior leaders as lost deals and delayed decisions.
Boards and investor audiences want a chair who can take a packed conference programme on financial services, markets or corporate strategy and make it land. Most moderators either default to the script or lose control of the room when a CEO goes off-message. The gap is someone who can interrogate a panel of executives with the authority of a working business journalist, then keep the day moving without losing the audience.
Leadership teams are pattern-matching to a present that feels unprecedented, but most of what they are facing is not new. Inflation, energy shocks, industrial conflict, technological disruption and political fragmentation have all shaped earlier eras of corporate decision-making, and the leaders who handled them well drew on a longer view than their successors usually do. The senior question is whether your organisation has the historical literacy to see the present clearly enough to act.
Most companies cannot explain what they sell in a sentence a customer will repeat. Internal language creeps into external messaging, websites get cluttered, sales teams improvise, and the cost shows up in conversion rates and wasted media spend. The tension is not creative, it is operational: every day without a clear message is a day competitors look easier to buy from.