Organisationskultur speakers

Why organisations work with Morten Toft Two decades of repeat innovation facilitation work for Grundfos, Danfoss and other large Danish manufacturers, which is unusual longevity for a process consultant. Author of Innovationsrecepten (The Innovation Recipe), Jyllands-Postens Forlag, a text used as a teaching reference on Danish innovation and entrepreneurship programmes, giving his methodology a documented, teachable form. Operating background as sales and marketing director at Photo Experten across 146 stores, so the co-creation work is grounded in line-management experience, not pure consultancy. Initiator of Danske Hospitalsklovne and the MAD House Denmark Innovation Centre, which gives him a track record of building functioning organisations from a standing start, not only advising existing ones. Sessions are designed for engagement and recall, with humour and physical staging used deliberately to lock in concepts that pure presentation tends to lose. Biography highlights Author of Innovationsrecepten (The Innovation Recipe), Jyllands-Postens Forlag, 2007, with Ole Vestergaard Poulsen, used as a teaching text on Danish innovation and entrepreneurship programmes. Author of To Be Perfectly Honest (Aschehoug, 2001) on authentic leadership, and Changemakers (2020, with Rachel Rouncefield). Co-developer with Rachel Rouncefield (De Montfort University) of the Changemakers youth empowerment programme, building on the Butterfly Project in Peterborough. Long-running innovation facilitator for Grundfos and Danfoss. Initiator of Danske Hospitalsklovne (Danish Hospital Clowns), founded after working with Patch Adams at the Gesundheit Institute in West Virginia. Co-initiator of the MAD House Denmark Innovation Centre in Middelfart. Former sales and marketing director at Photo Experten across 146 Danish stores; earlier consultant at GREY. Biography Innovation in large industrial businesses tends to fail in a specific way. Ideas accumulate in the central team. Adoption stalls at the operating units. The work that reaches customers is a thin version of what was originally proposed. Morten Toft has spent over twenty years working inside that gap, mainly with Danish manufacturing groups including Grundfos and Danfoss, designing co-creation processes that bring stakeholders into the work early enough to own it. His methodology is documented in Innovationsrecepten (The Innovation Recipe), co-authored with Ole Vestergaard Poulsen and published by Politikens Forlag. The book is used as required reading on Danish innovation and entrepreneurship programmes, which gives his approach a teachable structure rather than the personality dependence common to facilitator-consultants. The work draws on a line operating background. Before consultancy, Toft was sales and marketing director at Photo Experten, with responsibility across 146 retail stores in Denmark. That experience, alongside earlier work at GREY, shapes a facilitation style oriented to commercial outcomes and to the practical question of who actually executes the change. He is also the initiator of Danske Hospitalsklovne, founded after a period with Patch Adams at the Gesundheit Institute in West Virginia, and a co-initiator of the MAD House Denmark Innovation Centre. Alongside the innovation work, Toft has written on authentic leadership and personal development, including a forthcoming memoir, Journey Out to Find Home (Danish edition August 2026, English edition planned). He also runs Changemakers, a youth empowerment programme co-developed with Rachel Rouncefield of De Montfort University and grounded in the Butterfly Project in Peterborough, which involved several thousand young people over eight years. The connecting argument across his output is straightforward: organisations get more from their people, and societies more from their young people, when those involved feel they built the answer themselves. Key speaking topics Co-creation and stakeholder-led innovation Innovation process design in industrial organisations Authentic leadership Personal development and purpose at work Building healthy organisational cultures Youth empowerment and the changemaker concept Ideal for Innovation, R&D and product directors in industrial and manufacturing businesses HR and learning leaders running leadership development programmes C-suite and senior teams setting direction for cultural change Founders and entrepreneurial leaders running participation-led organisations Audience outcomes A working model for designing innovation processes that build adoption alongside ideas. Specific tools for involving operating-unit stakeholders before, not after, decisions are made. A clearer view of the link between authentic leadership behaviour and commercial culture. Practical examples drawn from long-running work with Grundfos, Danfoss and Danish retail.

Why organisations work with Myrto Legaki She translates clinical mindfulness research, trained at the University of Massachusetts and Brown University programmes, into language and practice that corporate leaders accept and apply She speaks to senior audiences as a former MBA-trained consultant who spent 15 years in marketing and consulting roles across New York, London and Athens, not as an external wellness coach Her programmes have been deployed inside Microsoft, Google, GlaxoSmithKline, Nestlé, Roche, Novartis, AbbVie, Bayer and Coca-Cola HBC, giving her a working view of what corporate wellbeing actually requires at scale She treats psychological safety as a leadership behaviour problem, with specific practices, rather than a culture-survey output Biography highlights Founder and director, One Breath Mindfulness Center, Athens Certified MBSR instructor, trained at the University of Massachusetts (OASIS Mindfulness Center) and the Brown University Mindfulness Center Trained directly by Jon Kabat-Zinn and Saki Santorelli, the clinical founders of the MBSR field TEDx speaker, TEDxUniversityofMacedonia, on the role of silence and mindfulness in leadership MBA, Boston University; BSc Corporate Finance, University of Piraeus Member of the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council Implemented leadership and wellbeing programmes inside Microsoft, Google, GlaxoSmithKline, Nestlé, Roche, Novartis, AbbVie, Bayer, MSD, Philip Morris and Coca-Cola HBC Biography Most corporate wellbeing programmes do not change leadership behaviour. They sit alongside it. Yoga sessions, app subscriptions and resilience workshops run in parallel with the same executive operating norms that produce the stress in the first place. The gap between wellbeing spend and wellbeing outcome is, in practice, a gap in what leaders model and reward. Myrto Legaki works in that gap. After 15 years in management consulting and marketing across New York, London and Athens, including senior roles at multinationals, she trained as a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction instructor at the University of Massachusetts and the Brown University Mindfulness Center, under Jon Kabat-Zinn and Saki Santorelli. She founded One Breath Mindfulness Center in Athens to bring that clinical training into corporate leadership programmes. Her work integrates neuroscience, applied psychology and contemplative practice into formats senior leaders accept: programmes on self-leadership, psychological safety, stress regulation, communication under pressure and team culture. Inside organisations such as Microsoft, Google, GlaxoSmithKline, Nestlé, Roche, AbbVie and Bayer, she has worked with leaders and teams on the specific behaviours that determine whether a culture supports performance or quietly erodes it. She is a TEDx speaker, a member of the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council, and holds an MBA from Boston University and a finance degree from the University of Piraeus. The combination matters: corporate audiences engage with her because she has held the operating roles they hold now, and applies clinical wellbeing science with the precision a senior buyer expects. Key speaking topics Mental health in the workplace Psychological safety and trust Self-leadership and executive composure Resilience and stress regulation Mindful leadership Inclusive leadership and unconscious bias Women’s leadership Ideal for CHROs and heads of people designing leadership and wellbeing programmes with measurable behavioural outcomes C-suite and senior leadership teams under sustained delivery pressure Heads of culture, DEI and learning embedding psychological safety into management practice Audience outcomes A clear distinction between wellbeing as a perk and wellbeing as a leadership operating capability Specific, evidence-based practices for stress regulation and composure under pressure A working vocabulary for psychological safety that connects daily leadership behaviour to mental health outcomes Confidence to address mental health and burnout in their organisation without defaulting to programme-speak

Why organisations work with Naomi Sesay She has run inclusion from inside the commissioning machine of a major UK broadcaster, not as an external consultant, so her advice carries the weight of decisions she has actually had to make and defend. Her training portfolio inside FTSE 100 clients and at Google, YouTube, NBC Universal, Deloitte and Lloyds Bank means she has tested her approach against the realities of regulated, scaled corporate environments. She frames inclusion as a leadership capability tied to commercial output, drawing on a 30-year broadcasting career where audience, talent and brand decisions were never separable. She brings a builder’s perspective on equity through her Sierra Leone smart-city project, which gives keynotes a concrete reference point beyond the standard DEI canon. Biography highlights Head of Creative Diversity, Channel 4, 2022 to 2025; previously On Screen Diversity Executive and Interim Head of Diversity & Inclusion at the broadcaster. Earlier television career as Producer, Director and Presenter at MTV News, and among the early producers on Channel 4’s Big Brother. Former Head of Innovation and Diversity, Media Trust. Senior Lead Trainer in Race Fluency and Inclusive Leadership with APS Intelligence, delivering programmes inside FTSE 100 organisations. Training and keynote work for Google, YouTube, NBC Universal, Amazon, Deloitte, Lloyds Bank, Warner Bros, Viacom, UN Women, Harvard Medical School and the Met Police. Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; author of The Human Upgrade: The Power to Create Your Future; leads a female-centric sustainable smart-city project in Sierra Leone. Biography Most diversity work in large organisations is built by people who have never had to make a commissioning decision, hire a senior leader, or sign off a brand campaign. The view from inside those rooms is different. It is harder to be theoretical when the choice is in front of you and the budget is real. Naomi Sesay spent three years as Head of Creative Diversity at Channel 4, with two earlier spells at the broadcaster as On Screen Diversity Executive and Interim Head of Diversity & Inclusion. Her remit covered commissioning, training, talent and the broadcaster’s relationships with culturally and ethnically diverse creative communities across the UK. Before Channel 4 she ran innovation and diversity at Media Trust, and worked at APS Intelligence as a senior trainer in race fluency and inclusive leadership for FTSE 100 clients. Her television career started at MTV News during the channel’s European peak as a producer, director and presenter, and continued through one of the original production teams on Channel 4’s Big Brother. That broadcasting grounding shapes the way she talks to corporate audiences. Inclusion is not framed as a values statement; it is framed as an editorial, hiring and commercial discipline that decides which work gets made and which people get heard. Outside the broadcaster she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, author of The Human Upgrade: The Power to Create Your Future, and leads a network of architects and investors developing a female-centric sustainable smart city in Sierra Leone. The combination gives her keynotes for Google, Deloitte, UN Women, Harvard Medical School and others a practical edge: she has built things, not only advised on them. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership Diversity, equity and inclusion in practice Cultural intelligence Creative industries and representation Emotional intelligence for senior teams Storytelling and human connection Social enterprise and equitable city design Ideal for CHROs, chief people officers and heads of DEI under pressure to show operating impact, not statements. Boards and ExCos reassessing inclusion strategy after political shifts and ESG scrutiny. Commissioning, editorial and creative leaders in media, entertainment, publishing and advertising. Senior leadership programmes inside FTSE 100 and equivalent corporates rebuilding inclusive leadership capability. Audience outcomes A clearer test for distinguishing inclusion that changes decisions from inclusion that performs them. Specific language for talking to senior leaders about race, identity and culture without retreating into either jargon or platitude. Working examples from broadcasting, FTSE 100 corporates and global brand environments that translate into the audience’s own commissioning, hiring and team practices. A way to connect inclusive leadership to commercial output, audience reach and talent retention rather than to compliance reporting.

Why organisations work with Natalie Johnson The CultureJourney™ framework gives senior teams a working model for how culture is actually produced, organised around three named levers: energy, connection, and courage. Combines a science foundation in human performance and resilience with three decades of corporate performance coaching. Few speakers in this space work from both traditions. Certified Dare to Lead™ Facilitator licensed by Brené Brown’s organisation, which means buyers can book her for a keynote and for the full leadership programme from a single practitioner. Track record with organisations where performance under pressure is the basic operating condition, including NASA, the U.S. Department of Defense, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Deloitte, and Ascension Healthcare. Biography highlights Co-founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Vidl Work, the consulting and keynote firm she leads Co-author of Leading the Culture Journey: Elevating Everyday Actions to Create Extraordinary Workplaces (Wiley, August 2026) Co-creator of the CultureJourney™ framework, used to guide culture transformation inside client organisations Performance Coach with the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute Certified Dare to Lead™ Facilitator licensed by Brené Brown’s organisation, and a Wellcoaches® Certified Coach BSc in Human Performance and Nutrition; MSc in Wellness Promotion Co-host of the Energy, Connection & Courage at Work podcast Biography Most organisations describe their culture in terms they cannot define. Engagement scores climb and wellbeing budgets grow each year, yet senior teams still cannot explain why some groups sustain high performance while others burn out. This is the gap that the CultureJourney™ framework was built to close. Natalie Johnson developed it with her team at Vidl Work, the firm she co-founded and now leads as Chief Visionary Officer. The framework treats culture as the product of three working systems: how leaders elevate energy, how teams prioritise connection, and how leaders choose courage. The thinking is set out in Leading the Culture Journey, her 2026 book with Rebecca Johnson, published by Wiley. Her authority on the topic comes from a combination of training that few culture speakers share. Johnson holds a BSc in Human Performance and Nutrition and an MSc in Wellness Promotion. She is a Wellcoaches® Certified Coach, a Performance Coach with the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute, and a certified Dare to Lead™ Facilitator. The Dare to Lead credential licenses her to deliver Brené Brown’s full leadership programme inside client organisations. Her client list spans organisations where performance under pressure is the basic operating condition: NASA, the U.S. Department of Defense, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Deloitte, Ascension Healthcare, and the American College of Surgeons. The HR profession books her too: she has delivered keynotes for SHRM, the largest professional association for human resources. She also sits on the board of the Kidney Cancer Association and is a member of the International Women’s Forum. Key speaking topics Workplace culture and culture transformation Human performance and energy management Trust and courageous conversation in teams Resilience and sustainable high performance Employee wellbeing as a performance lever Dare to Lead leadership development Ideal for Chief executives and senior leadership teams setting culture as a strategic priority CHROs and Chief People Officers running culture, engagement, and wellbeing portfolios Cross-functional teams operating under sustained change cycles: post-merger integrations, restructures, transformation programmes Leadership teams in high-pressure operating environments such as healthcare, defence, and regulated industry Organisations running Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead programme that want a licensed facilitator with deep performance science background Audience outcomes A working model for culture that names where it gets built and where it breaks down Language for linking employee wellbeing and engagement spend to commercial performance A method for holding the courageous conversations that team trust depends on, drawn from Dare to Lead Approaches for managing human energy and recovery at both individual and team level

Why organisations work with Naya Antoniou She brings dual training in organisational psychology and integrative psychotherapy to workplace mental health, which sharpens her work on burnout beyond surface-level wellbeing programmes. Her career-transition practice with vulnerable populations through Doctors of the World and ActionAid Hellas gives her direct evidence of how work loss, identity and recovery interact, which translates into how she advises corporate clients on restructuring with humanity. She works across the full multigenerational stack, from Gen Z entrants to senior leaders, and treats generational tension as a culture-design question, not a stereotype-management exercise. As a Lean In Greece Circle Leader and Women on Top mentor, she has a substantive track record on women in workplace mental health and HR, useful for organisations whose inclusion work has stalled at policy level. Biography highlights Postgraduate Degree in Organisational Psychology Postgraduate Degree in Career, Executive and Business Coaching MSc in International Relations, University of Piraeus Evidence-Based Coaching certification, Athens Coaching Institute Circle Leader, Lean In Greece Network (Mental Health and HR circle) Career coach with Doctors of the World and ActionAid Hellas career transition programmes Biography Burnout has stopped being an individual diagnosis. Organisations now carry it as an operating cost: turnover, presenteeism, project slippage, the quiet attrition of people who never quite leave. Naya Antoniou’s work sits inside that operating cost, with the tools of organisational psychology and evidence-based coaching applied directly to how teams are structured, led and supported. Her training combines a postgraduate degree in Organisational Psychology with a postgraduate qualification in Career, Executive and Business Coaching, anchored by an MSc in International Relations from the University of Piraeus. Ongoing postgraduate training in Integrative Psychotherapy gives her practice a clinical grounding that is unusual in corporate coaching. The applied work spans corporate culture transformation, leadership development, and career transition programmes. With Doctors of the World, she has coached women asylum seekers rebuilding work identities from zero. With ActionAid Hellas, she has run career transition programmes for vulnerable groups facing displacement from the labour market. That work shapes how she advises corporate clients on restructure, redeployment and the human side of workforce change. Within Greece, she leads the Mental Health and HR circle of Lean In Greece and mentors with Women on Top on workplace equality. The through-line across her practice is concrete: cultures hold people when they are designed to, and fall apart when wellbeing is treated as a benefit rather than a system. Her speaking work brings that argument into rooms where leaders are deciding which to choose. Key speaking topics Multigenerational teams and Gen Z engagement Burnout and workplace mental health Psychological safety as a leadership practice Culture change in high-performance organisations Future skills for emerging leaders Career transition and workforce change Women in mental health and HR Ideal for CHROs and heads of people redesigning engagement strategy across five generations Leadership teams managing burnout risk during restructure or rapid growth HR and DEI leads building culture programmes that move past policy statements Founders and senior leaders of mid-sized organisations in Southern Europe scaling their first formal people function Audience outcomes A clearer view of how generational expectations shape engagement, retention and management overhead Specific moves leaders can make to install psychological safety as a working condition, not an annual survey question A working diagnostic for burnout that distinguishes individual recovery from structural cause Practical reframing of culture change as a design problem with measurable inputs

Why organisations work with Neil Laybourn He runs Neil Laybourn Consultancy as a functioning advisory business, with frameworks and partner networks built around measurable workplace outcomes, not as a retainer attached to a keynote. The story is widely known. The corporate value sits in what he built afterwards: This Can Happen as the workplace mental health conference, the This Can Happen Awards as the practice benchmark, and the consultancy that operationalises both. He sits at the centre of the UK workplace mental health network as founder of This Can Happen, Ambassador for Mental Health UK, former Heads Together collaborator, and the UK LinkedIn Changemaker for Mental Health in 2021. The credibility chain is unusual for the category. The University of Bristol awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in 2018; the Pride of Britain Award (2014) and the Mind Media Award (2015) recognised the campaigning work; Channel 4 commissioned the Stranger on the Bridge documentary. He has addressed leadership teams at Bank of Ireland UK, HSBC, Coutts, Direct Line Group, Ticketmaster, BlackRock, and Yale School of Management. Biography highlights Founder of This Can Happen, the workplace mental health conference, and director of the This Can Happen Awards. Founder of Neil Laybourn Consultancy, a workplace mental health advisory firm. Co-founder, with Jonny Benjamin MBE, of Beyond, the youth mental health charity. Honorary Doctorate, University of Bristol; Pride of Britain Award; Mind Media Award for Making a Difference (with Jonny Benjamin). LinkedIn Changemaker for Mental Health (2021); LinkedIn Top Voice and Creator. Ambassador for Mental Health UK; subject of the Channel 4 documentary Stranger on the Bridge. Biography Workplace mental health is a category that absorbs budget and produces awareness, without reliably producing managers who know what to do when a colleague is in distress. The gap between corporate policy and operational practice is where the value sits, and where most programmes fail. On 14 January 2008, Neil Laybourn was walking across Waterloo Bridge to work when he saw a stranger preparing to jump into the Thames. He stopped, talked to him for half an hour, and persuaded him to step back. Six years later that stranger, Jonny Benjamin MBE, launched the #FindMike campaign on social media to find the man who had saved his life. The campaign reached over 300 million people and became the subject of the Channel 4 documentary Stranger on the Bridge. That intervention is the entry point. The offering, built over the decade since, is unusually operational for the workplace mental health category. He founded This Can Happen, the conference convening employers around what works, and the This Can Happen Awards that recognise the practice. Through Neil Laybourn Consultancy he advises organisations on the design and measurement of mental health programmes. He has delivered over 250 keynotes to more than 200 organisations across 25 sectors. Clients include Bank of Ireland UK, HSBC, Coutts, Direct Line Group, and Ticketmaster, with international audiences at Yale School of Management and BlackRock in New York. The University of Bristol awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in 2018, and LinkedIn selected him as the UK Changemaker for Mental Health in 2021. With Jonny Benjamin MBE he co-founded Beyond, the youth mental health charity, and remains an Ambassador for Mental Health UK. Key speaking topics Workplace mental health strategy Suicide intervention and prevention Manager capability for mental health conversations Employee wellbeing programme design Stigma in corporate environments Mental health and senior leadership Ideal for CHROs and Heads of People setting workplace wellbeing strategy HR Directors implementing or auditing mental health programmes CEOs and executive teams accountable for culture as a board-level outcome Line managers and people leaders who need usable tools for difficult conversations Audience outcomes A clear sense of why most workplace wellbeing programmes plateau, and where the operational gaps actually sit Practical language and protocols for managers in the moments that matter, from a colleague in distress to a return-to-work conversation A grounded view of what mental health strategy looks like at scale, from a practitioner who runs the conferences and advises the boards The confidence to talk about mental health at senior leadership level without retreating into corporate jargon

Why organisations work with Nick Ferrari A daily live audience of more than a million listeners on LBC means the interviewing reflex is current, not nostalgic. The questions land because they were sharpened that morning. Thirty years inside national news, from The Sun and the Daily Mirror to the launch of Sky News and Fox TV in New York, gives him a working knowledge of how organisations get covered and where their messaging breaks. Sony Radio Academy Awards for Breakfast Show of the Year and Speech Broadcaster of the Year are external markers of broadcasting craft, not bureau adjectives. He is comfortable with contested material. Politicians, regulators and CEOs have all sat across from him on air, which is the relevant experience for chairing a panel where audiences expect more than sponsor-friendly questions. Biography highlights Presenter, Nick Ferrari at Breakfast, LBC (since 2004; first LBC breakfast slot in 2001) Launch Editor, Sky News, 1989 Vice President of News and Programming, Fox TV, New York Sony Radio Academy Award, Breakfast Show of the Year, 2006 Sony Speech Broadcaster of the Year, 2009; Arqiva Breakfast Show of the Year, 2010 Former editor of The Sun’s Bizarre column and Deputy Editor of the Daily Mirror Biography National breakfast radio is the hardest live format on British media. Three hours, five days a week, with politicians, regulators, listeners on the line and no script. Nick Ferrari has held the LBC breakfast slot since 2004 and has been awarded Sony Radio Academy honours including Breakfast Show of the Year in 2006 and Speech Broadcaster of the Year in 2009. The journalism behind the broadcasting is unusually broad. Ferrari was Launch Editor of Sky News in 1989, then Vice President of News and Programming at Fox TV in New York. Before that he edited The Sun’s Bizarre column and was Deputy Editor of the Daily Mirror. The sequence matters for organisations: he has run rooms in tabloid Fleet Street, in start-up television and in network American news, and knows how each treats a corporate story. That background is what makes him useful in front of a corporate audience. He chairs panels with regulators, ministers and chief executives without slipping into either deference or grandstanding. He hosts award dinners with the timing of a daily presenter rather than a guest speaker. The reason organisations book him is not access to a thesis; it is access to an interviewer who knows how to keep a senior panel honest and a room awake. Key speaking topics Conference hosting and chairing Panel moderation with senior public figures After-dinner speaking and corporate awards hosting Broadcasting and journalism Media, politics and current affairs Interviewing and on-stage Q&A Ideal for Annual conferences and senior leadership offsites that need a chair, not a keynote Corporate award dinners and gala evenings looking for a known broadcaster as host Regulator, financial services and public-sector events with politically sensitive panels Internal town halls or executive forums where leaders need to be interviewed in front of staff Audience outcomes A panel that produces real answers rather than rehearsed lines, because the chair pushes back An evening or conference paced with broadcast timing, on the clock and on the brief Senior executives interviewed in a way that feels credible to staff, journalists and clients in the room A host the audience already knows from national radio, which lifts the perceived authority of the agenda

Why organisations work with Nick Leeson He is the named primary actor in the most studied operational-risk failure in modern banking history, which means his account of how account 88888 was opened, fed and hidden carries weight no consultant can replicate. He breaks the polite fiction that rogue trading is rare. Subsequent losses at Allied Irish, Societe Generale, UBS and others have proved his core point that the conditions which produced Barings are still live in trading-floor and middle-office design. His 2023 appointment to Red Mist Market Enforcement Unit puts him on the investigator side of financial misconduct, giving compliance and audit audiences a rare voice that has worked both sides of the control line. He addresses the human variables that risk frameworks assume away: pressure, ego, fear of admitting a small loss, and the speed at which a contained problem becomes terminal. For boards and senior leaders, he is the named cautionary case, sitting in the room and answering questions, rather than a slide in an audit deck. Biography highlights Caused the £827m collapse of Barings Bank in February 1995 through unauthorised futures and options trades booked to error account 88888 on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange. Convicted in Singapore and held at Changi Prison from December 1995 until July 1999. Author of Rogue Trader (1996) and co-author of Back from the Brink: Coping with Stress (2005, with psychologist Ivan Tyrrell). Subject of the 1999 film Rogue Trader, starring Ewan McGregor, with rights optioned by Sir David Frost. CEO of Galway United Football Club, 2007 to 2011. Investigator at Red Mist Market Enforcement Unit, the London corporate intelligence firm, since 2023, working financial misconduct cases for investors. Biography A 25-year-old derivatives trader on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange held the positions of chief trader and head of settlements at the same time, and used that conflict to bury an initial £20,000 error inside an account numbered 88888. Three years later, that account held £827m of concealed losses, and Barings, the bank that had financed the Louisiana Purchase, was insolvent. The mechanics of that failure remain the most cited operational-risk case study in financial services. The point of hearing it directly from Leeson is not the drama. It is the precision. He can describe the specific control breaches, the cultural signals that allowed them, and the day-by-day choices that kept the losses hidden, including the short straddle on the Nikkei placed the day before the Kobe earthquake of 17 January 1995. Risk and compliance teams use that detail to test their own supervisory architecture. The post-Barings career adds the second half of the argument. Six and a half years in Changi, a colon cancer diagnosis served out in prison, a psychology degree, the CEO seat at Galway United, and the books Rogue Trader and Back from the Brink with Ivan Tyrrell. The last of those titles is the one risk professionals tend to underestimate. Pressure, isolation and the fear of admitting a contained loss are the human inputs that no governance framework prices correctly. In 2023 Leeson joined Red Mist Market Enforcement Unit, the London corporate intelligence firm that investigates financial misconduct on behalf of wronged investors. For audiences in banking, insurance and regulated industries, that role is the salient point: the man who once defeated the controls is now being hired to detect the people doing it next. Key speaking topics Operational risk and rogue trading Compliance, supervision and the limits of policy Corporate governance and board oversight of trading risk Internal controls, segregation of duties and concealment behaviour Organisational culture in high-pressure environments Resilience, stress and decision-making under pressure Financial crime detection and investigation Ideal for Boards, audit committees and risk committees in banking, asset management and insurance Chief risk officers, compliance heads, internal audit leads and operational risk teams Regulators, supervisors and financial crime units Senior leaders in any business with material market, trading or treasury exposure Audience outcomes A first-hand account of how concealment actually works inside a trading operation, beyond the textbook description Specific signals that supervisors, risk teams and auditors should treat as warnings rather than reassurance A clearer view of the human conditions, pressure, ego, fear, that turn a recoverable error into a terminal loss A sharpened sense of where a control framework on paper diverges from the behaviour on the desk Renewed attention to segregation of duties, error-account governance and exception handling

Why organisations work with Nicklas Pyrdol He brings a working sport psychology background, including consulting to Olympians and world champions, into the language of corporate hiring and team performance, which most HR-stage speakers cannot. His operator track record is unusual for a speaker in this space: Executive HR Manager inside a tech company and partner in a tech startup, so the recommendations land for line leaders, not just HR. The client list is a credibility anchor on its own. LEGO Group, Maersk, Novo Nordisk, Orsted, Lundbeck, HubSpot, Dynatrace, SimCorp and Vivino have used him for the same recurring problem: serious hiring that holds up under scale. Through Beyond Talents and “The Recruitment Equation” podcast with Pil Byriel, he is in continuous dialogue with senior talent acquisition leaders, including Lundbeck’s Head of Global Talent Acquisition, which keeps the material current rather than recycled. He treats inclusion as a hiring quality issue, not a politics issue, which is the framing senior buyers want when DEI has become contested ground inside their own organisations. Biography highlights Founder of Beyond Talents, a Copenhagen-based talent acquisition advisory and speaking practice. Former sport psychology consultant to Olympians and world champions before moving into corporate HR leadership. Co-host of “The Recruitment Equation” podcast with Pil Byriel, featuring senior talent acquisition leaders from companies including Lundbeck. Co-author of a Danish book on motivation, “Motivation. Naa i maal med din traening”. Published academic work on talent development environments, including the Ajax Amsterdam academy, using the holistic ecological approach. Engaged as a keynote speaker by HubSpot, Dynatrace, SimCorp, Vivino, Maersk, LEGO Group, Lundbeck, Novo Nordisk and Orsted across Europe, Asia and the United States. Biography Hiring is where most organisations leak their strategy. Pipelines are narrow, interview panels reward familiarity, and the people who arrive cannot deliver what the plan assumed. Pyrdol’s career has been a long argument that this is fixable, and that the fix is mostly process and psychology rather than budget. His starting point was elite sport. Before moving into business, he worked as a sport psychology consultant with Olympians and world champions, and published research on talent development environments using the holistic ecological approach, including work on the Ajax Amsterdam academy. The premise from that period stayed with him: talent is a function of environment, not a fixed property of the individual. He then moved inside companies, first as an Executive HR Manager in a tech firm and then as a partner in a tech startup, before founding Beyond Talents in Copenhagen. From that base, he advises senior leaders at HubSpot, Dynatrace, SimCorp, Vivino, Maersk, LEGO Group, Lundbeck, Novo Nordisk and Orsted on recruitment, retention, inclusion and the everyday psychological safety that lets teams actually use the talent they hire. The current output runs across formats. He co-hosts “The Recruitment Equation” with Pil Byriel, where guests include Lundbeck’s Head of Global Talent Acquisition, Cassie Wu and Fairec’s Morten Gerner on AI and bias; he co-authored a Danish book on motivation; he writes regularly for HR audiences. The through-line is consistent. Recruitment, inclusion and engagement are operational disciplines, and senior leaders should hold them to operational standards. Key speaking topics Talent acquisition and inclusive recruitment Employee engagement and retention Psychological safety in teams Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging Performance psychology in business Mindset during organisational transformation HR leadership capability Ideal for CHROs, talent acquisition leaders and heads of people are rebuilding hiring under pressure. Executive teams whose strategy depends on attracting and keeping scarce specialist talent. HR and recruitment functions reworking inclusion programmes for substance over signalling. Leadership audiences in scale-up tech and large enterprises managing distributed, multigenerational teams. Audience outcomes A sharper diagnosis of where their current hiring process is filtering out the talent they say they want. Concrete moves to widen the funnel and reduce bias without weakening the hiring bar. A working definition of psychological safety that distinguishes it from comfort, agreement or low standards. A view of engagement and retention as a continuous design problem owned by leaders, not a survey owned by HR. Language for talking to executives about inclusion in commercial terms when the political conversation has stalled.

Why organisations work with Nicola Green She brings firsthand observation of how power, identity and leadership operate at the highest level, drawn from sustained artistic access to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, Pope Francis, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu and Jonathan Sacks. Her work is held in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress and the Obama Presidential Center, which gives any inclusion conversation she leads an authority that consultancy-led sessions cannot match. She treats allyship as a discipline with daily behaviours, not as a values statement, which lands with senior leaders who are tired of slogans and want something they can act on. She founded the Khadija Saye Arts Programme and co-founded the Diaspora Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, so the institution-building she talks about is institution-building she has actually done. Biography highlights Co-founder and director, Diaspora Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale (2017), with David A. Bailey, David Lammy and Peter Clayton. In Seven Days…, her artistic record of the 2008 Obama campaign, is held by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the Obama Presidential Center and the UK Government Art Collection. Encounters, a fifty-portrait series with Pope Francis, the Dalai Lama, Justin Welby, Jonathan Sacks, Ali Gomaa and Desmond Tutu, exhibited at St Martin-in-the-Fields; book published by Brepols. Founder, Khadija Saye Arts Programme at IntoUniversity, addressing underrepresentation of Black and minority ethnic communities in the creative industries. Principal Artist on The World Reimagined, a UK-wide public art project on racial justice and the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. Co-founder and Chair, Sophia Point Rainforest Research Centre, Guyana. Biography Allyship has become one of the most used and least understood words in the workplace. Many leaders have signed up to it in principle while still being unsure what it asks of them in practice. Green’s work begins in that gap. Drawing on a decade of direct access to the figures who define modern leadership and faith, she treats allyship as something senior leaders do, not something they declare. Her portrait series In Seven Days… documented Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign from the Democratic Convention through to the inauguration. Sets are held by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress and the Obama Presidential Center. A second body of work, Encounters, sat her across the table from Pope Francis, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Justin Welby and Jonathan Sacks. The accompanying book, Encounters: The Art of Interfaith Dialogue, was published by Brepols. Beyond the studio, Green has built institutions for the conversation she leads on stage. She co-founded the Diaspora Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, featuring twenty-two artists from culturally diverse backgrounds, and founded the Khadija Saye Arts Programme at IntoUniversity in memory of her mentee, the artist Khadija Saye, who died in the Grenfell Tower fire. As Principal Artist on The World Reimagined, she created public work confronting the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade across the UK. For senior teams, the value is that Green has spent twenty years studying how leaders actually behave around questions of identity, power and faith. She does not arrive with a framework borrowed from elsewhere. She arrives with primary observation, recorded in works that now sit inside the national collections of two countries. Key speaking topics Allyship as leadership practice Identity, race and power in organisations Inclusive leadership Visual storytelling and narrative change Diversity in the creative industries Representation and institution-building Interfaith dialogue and leadership Ideal for Chief executives, CHROs and DEI leads rebuilding inclusion strategy after the post-2020 backlash. Boards and executive committees setting tone on identity, representation and culture. Senior leadership conferences in financial services, professional services, media and the public sector. Cultural institutions, universities and faith-based organisations working on representation and access. Audience outcomes A clearer working definition of allyship, expressed as behaviours leaders can hold each other to. A direct view of how high-stakes leaders, political and religious, handle identity and power in practice. A sharper sense of how visual culture and representation shape what an organisation looks like from the outside. Practical reference points for inclusion work that has stalled or lost credibility internally.

Why organisations work with Nicole Bearne A continuous twenty-five-year vantage point inside one Formula One team, from founding member of British American Racing in 1998 to Head of Internal Communications at Mercedes-AMG Petronas through its run of consecutive Constructors’ Championships. Few practitioners in this field have anywhere near that depth of single-environment experience. Reported directly to Team Principal Ross Brawn between 2007 and 2013, including the 2009 Brawn GP season that delivered both world titles in the team’s first and only year of existence and is the subject of the 2023 Disney+ documentary Brawn: The Impossible Formula 1 Story. Built and led the Internal Communications function at Mercedes-AMG Petronas from scratch within a 1,300-person engineering organisation operating across multiple UK sites and racing every fortnight. MSc in Organisational Behaviour from Birkbeck, University of London, and a CIPR Diploma in Internal Communications. Few practitioners with comparable F1 operational experience hold formal qualifications in organisational psychology. Independent Non-Executive Director at Motorsport UK and Chair of its Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Committee, adding a board-level governance perspective to the operational track record. Biography highlights Head of Internal Communications, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, for approximately a decade through a sustained period of world championship success. Executive Assistant to Team Principal Ross Brawn (2007 to 2013), covering Honda Racing F1, the 2009 Brawn GP championship year, and the Mercedes acquisition. Founding member of British American Racing Formula One Team in 1998. Independent Non-Executive Director at Motorsport UK and Chair of its Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Committee. MSc in Organisational Behaviour, Birkbeck, University of London; CIPR Diploma in Internal Communications; Member of CIPR (MCIPR); Accredited PR Practitioner. Founder and Director of The Comms Exchange Ltd; featured in the 2023 Disney+ documentary Brawn: The Impossible Formula 1 Story. Biography Inside Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, internal communications is treated as a performance variable. The function exists to make sure that 1,300 people across multiple sites act on the same strategy at the same time, every race weekend. That is the environment Nicole Bearne worked inside for 25 years. She was a founding member of British American Racing in 1998 and stayed through the team’s transitions to Honda Racing F1, Brawn GP and Mercedes-AMG Petronas. Between 2007 and 2013 she was Executive Assistant to Team Principal Ross Brawn. That tenure included the 2009 season when Brawn GP took both world titles in its first and only year of existence. She then built the Internal Communications function at Mercedes-AMG Petronas from scratch and led it for the next decade. She operated at board level through a period in which the team won eight consecutive Constructors’ Championships. Her academic grounding sits alongside that operational experience: an MSc in Organisational Behaviour from Birkbeck and the CIPR Diploma in Internal Communications. Today she runs The Comms Exchange, advising organisations on internal communications and engagement in complex environments. She also serves as Independent Non-Executive Director at Motorsport UK and chairs its Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Committee. The Brawn GP season she lived through is the subject of the 2023 Disney+ documentary Brawn: The Impossible Formula 1 Story. Key speaking topics Internal communications in high-performance organisations Employee engagement and employee experience Leadership communication at scale Culture inside elite sport Diversity, equity and inclusion governance Lessons from Formula One for complex organisations Ideal for Internal communications, corporate affairs and employee experience leaders Chief People Officers, HR directors and heads of culture Senior leadership teams in large or multi-site organisations operating under sustained competitive pressure Boards and committees responsible for inclusion, engagement and organisational culture Audience outcomes A view of internal communications as an operating discipline, drawn from a decade running the function at Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team. How a 1,300-person F1 team translates strategy into execution under non-negotiable race deadlines. What four ownership transitions of one F1 team reveal about leading communications through structural change. The link between employee experience and on-track performance, with named examples from Brawn GP and Mercedes’ championship years.

Why organisations work with Nigella Lawson Sustained public presence across three decades, from broadsheet journalism through ten million books sold to a current generation of streaming and broadcast audiences. Few hosts carry that breadth of recognition into a corporate room. Track record performing to large, paying audiences in a conversational format, including a sell-out at the Sydney Opera House in 2016. Translates directly to keynote stages, fireside formats and audience interviews. A working point of view on reinvention, women’s voice in competitive industries, and the place of joy and care in working life, drawn from her own career and public life rather than borrowed from a management framework. Brand value at the level of awards hosting, after-dinner sets and partnership activations, where the booking is partly about the room’s response to the name on the programme. Biography highlights Author of How to Eat (1998) and How to Be a Domestic Goddess (2000), the latter winning the British Book Award for Author of the Year. Over ten million books sold globally across titles including Nigella Bites, At My Table, Simply Nigella and Cook, Eat, Repeat. Television series for Channel 4 and the BBC including Nigella Bites, Nigella Feasts, Simply Nigella and Nigella’s Cook, Eat, Repeat. Deputy Literary Editor of The Sunday Times; originated the restaurant column in The Spectator; food columnist for British Vogue; contributor to the Guardian, Observer, Daily Telegraph, Gourmet and Bon Appetit. Fortnum and Mason TV Personality of the Year, 2016. Guild of Food Writers Award and World Food Media Gold Ladle for Nigella Bites. Studied Medieval and Modern Languages at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. Biography How to Eat sold three hundred thousand copies in 1998. Its successor, How to Be a Domestic Goddess, won the British Book Award for Author of the Year in 2001. Those two books did something the food category had not previously achieved at that scale in the UK, they spoke to a reader rather than instructing a cook, and they established Nigella Lawson as a writer first and a presenter second. The journalism came first. After Oxford she was Deputy Literary Editor of The Sunday Times, originated the restaurant column at The Spectator, and wrote the food column at British Vogue. The prose carried across into broadcast when Nigella Bites launched on Channel 4 in 1999. The series and its successors, Nigella Feasts, Simply Nigella, At My Table and Cook, Eat, Repeat, sold the books they accompanied and reset the tone of food television in English. The corporate proposition draws on the same instincts. Audiences come for warmth, command of an audience, and a presence that has been earned across thirty years of public work, including a sell-out at the Sydney Opera House in 2016 and frequent appearances at awards, festivals and live events. The themes she takes onto a stage, reinvention, the long arc of a working life, the right to claim pleasure and care as serious values, are spoken by someone who has lived them publicly rather than studied them. For organisations she works best as a host, conversation partner or after-dinner draw, where the room responds to a familiar voice on a programme that needs an anchor. Her cumulative sales of over ten million books and her continued reach across broadcast and streaming are the most concrete measure of why audiences turn up. Key speaking topics Reinvention and the long career Women’s voice in competitive industries Wellbeing, joy and care as working values Creativity and curiosity in commercial work Conference hosting and fireside conversation Awards hosting and after-dinner appearances Ideal for Corporate awards nights, gala dinners and partner conferences seeking a recognisable host Internal leadership and culture events on reinvention, voice or wellbeing Brand activations, customer events and retail partnerships in food, lifestyle and consumer categories Women’s networks and senior women’s leadership programmes Audience outcomes A high-recognition moment that lifts the energy and attendance of the wider programme A first-person account of building and rebuilding a public career across thirty years A direct, conversational take on wellbeing and self-compassion at work, framed by lived experience rather than wellness language A confident, professionally hosted conversation or interview segment