Business Strategy & Growth

Why organisations work with Jo Fairley She built the first Fairtrade-marked product in the UK, in 1994, when ethical sourcing was a fringe argument rather than a procurement requirement. Few founders can speak to that arc with first-hand authority. She has run the full lifecycle most founders never see: kitchen-table launch, category creation, sale to a FTSE confectioner, and a continued ambassadorial role inside the acquirer. That makes her credible on what survives an acquisition and what does not. Beyond Green & Black’s she has built and exited multiple businesses, including Judges Bakery, The Wellington Centre wellbeing facility, and The Perfume Society. The portfolio breadth gives her a useful pattern view across categories. She holds an Honorary Doctorate from Kingston University and the Shackleton Medal from the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for leadership and citizenship. Recognition from a serious geographical body, not a marketing prize. Biography highlights Co-founder of Green & Black’s organic chocolate, 1991, with Craig Sams. Created Maya Gold, the first product to carry the UK Fairtrade Mark, in March 1994. Sold Green & Black’s to Cadbury in 2005; retained the role of Chocolate Ambassador. UK’s youngest-ever magazine editor at 23, editing Look Now and then Honey. Founder of Judges Bakery, The Wellington Centre, and The Perfume Society. Honorary Doctorate in Business Studies, Kingston University; Shackleton Medal, Royal Scottish Geographical Society. Co-author of the Beauty Bible series and The Perfume Bible; long-running contributor to The Times, YOU Magazine and the Telegraph. Biography The first product in the UK ever to carry the Fairtrade Mark was a chocolate bar called Maya Gold. It launched in 1994, three years after Jo Fairley and Craig Sams started Green & Black’s at their kitchen table. At that point, ethical sourcing was a niche conviction. Today it is a procurement standard in most large grocers. Fairley sat at the start of that shift and helped force it. Green & Black’s grew into a category-defining brand and was acquired by Cadbury in 2005. Fairley stayed on as Chocolate Ambassador, which gave her an unusual vantage point: a founder watching her values-led business absorbed into a confectionery giant, and learning in real time which parts of the brand promise survived contact with corporate scale. Few founders speak with that experience attached. Her career started in publishing, where she became the UK’s youngest-ever magazine editor at 23, editing Look Now and then Honey. The journalist’s instinct is still visible in the work: a focus on what consumers actually want to be told, and a refusal to let mission language do the work that products and pricing have to do. Subsequent ventures, including Judges Bakery, The Wellington Centre wellbeing facility in Hastings, and The Perfume Society, all follow the same pattern of category authorship rather than category entry. Recognition has come from serious bodies, not marketing prizes. An Honorary Doctorate in Business Studies from Kingston University. The Shackleton Medal from the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for leadership and citizenship. WorldAware and Soil Association awards across her businesses. The track record is not one of a single early hit; it is a thirty-year argument that values-led brands can be built, scaled, and sold without losing their reason to exist. Key speaking topics Ethical brand building Entrepreneurship and category creation Sustainability and Fairtrade in consumer business Founder experience through acquisition and post-acquisition life Women in entrepreneurship Brand consumer insight Portfolio entrepreneurship Ideal for CEOs and founders of consumer businesses navigating purpose, pricing and scale. Marketing and brand directors building ethical or values-led product lines. Sustainability and procurement leads working on Fairtrade, organic and ethical sourcing. Women’s leadership networks and entrepreneurship audiences. Audience outcomes A practical view of how a values-led brand survives an acquisition by a multinational. A first-hand account of how the UK’s first Fairtrade product reached supermarket shelves and what it took to keep it there. A clearer read on the difference between purpose as marketing language and purpose as supply chain decision. Specific lessons on category creation and the founder mindset across multiple businesses.

Why organisations work with Isabel Aguilera Navarro She has run the Iberian or Southern European business of three of the most scrutinised multinationals in the world (Dell, Google, GE) and can speak from the CEO chair, not the consultant’s deck. She sits on the boards of five listed and regulated companies spanning cement, real estate, biotech, digital advertising and water, giving her a cross-sector read on how governance and transformation actually play out at board level. She chairs the Audit and Control Committee of Lar Espana, a role that forces her to translate strategic ambition into numbers, risk and control, which is exactly the language CFOs and chairs want to hear from a speaker. She has held an Executive in Residence position at Esade Business School in Strategy and General Management for over two decades, so the frameworks she uses are taught as well as lived. She wrote a full book on intelligent digital transformation, Lo que estaba por llegar ya esta aqui, giving audiences a defined thesis rather than a collection of anecdotes. Biography highlights President, General Electric Spain and Portugal (2008 to 2009). General Manager, Google Spain and Portugal (2006 to 2008), leading the set-up of Google Iberia. CEO, Dell Computer for Spain, Italy and Portugal (1997 to 2002). Operations Director, NH Hotel Group (2002 to 2005). Independent director of Cemex, Lar Espana, Oryzon Genomics, Canal de Isabel II and Making Science; chair of the Audit and Control Committee at Lar Espana. Executive in Residence, Department of Strategy and General Management, Esade Business School; former President of the Social Council of the University of Seville. Author of Lo que estaba por llegar ya esta aqui: Secretos de la transformacion digital inteligente (LID Editorial, 2016). Biography Most transformation programmes fail in the gap between the boardroom and the country P&L. Isabel Aguilera Navarro has spent her career working in that gap. She stood up Google’s operation in Spain and Portugal, then moved across to run General Electric in the same region, having earlier led Dell’s Iberian and Italian business through the years in which Dell took the top of the PC market in Europe. That sequence, Dell then NH Hoteles then Google then GE, is unusual. It put her inside a Silicon Valley growth company, a Spanish hospitality group, a consumer technology brand at its commercial peak and an American industrial conglomerate, each at the moment the business model was being rewritten. The operating lessons translate directly into how she now advises boards. Today she sits as an independent director of Cemex, Lar Espana, Oryzon Genomics, Canal de Isabel II and Making Science, chairing the Audit and Control Committee at Lar Espana. The mix is deliberate: heavy industry, commercial real estate, biotech, a regulated water utility and a digital advertising firm. Few speakers can move between those governance contexts with credibility, and fewer still have done so while also holding an Executive in Residence role at Esade Business School. Her book Lo que estaba por llegar ya esta aqui argues that the digital transformation leaders were preparing for has already arrived, and the remaining work is organisational rather than technological. Financial Times and Fortune have both included her in their European and global rankings of senior women in business, and the Wall Street Journal named her among the 30 Most Influential Business Women in Europe in 2001 for her work at Dell. Key speaking topics Corporate governance and board strategy Digital transformation in established businesses Leadership across industries and operating models Strategy and competitive positioning Innovation inside large organisations Technology company operating culture Ideal for Boards and nominating committees preparing for a strategy refresh or a digital transformation programme. CEOs and executive committees of large, multi-country businesses navigating technology and operating-model change. Audit and risk committees looking to translate strategic ambition into governance, numbers and control. Leadership programmes for senior women in business and cross-sector executive development audiences. Audience outcomes A board-level view of where digital transformation programmes tend to break inside real P&Ls, drawn from three country-CEO seats. A clearer sense of how governance structures can either accelerate or stall strategic change, from someone who chairs an audit and control committee. Specific contrasts between how Silicon Valley, American industrials and European operators approach the same strategic problem. Frameworks from Esade’s Strategy and General Management faculty, tested against sitting boards in cement, real estate, biotech and water. Reference points from her book on intelligent digital transformation that audiences can take back into their own planning cycles.

Why organisations work with Holly Tucker She built a marketplace that gave more than 5,000 independent businesses a commercial route they could not otherwise access, and can speak directly to what scaled that community and what broke it. Her second act, Holly and Co, is a certified B Corp built around purpose-led small business advice, giving her a live view of what founders are wrestling with now, not a decade ago. As host of Conversations of Inspiration, she has interviewed several hundred founders in long form, which makes her one of the few speakers in the UK with a continuously refreshed sense of what early-stage builders are learning. Her MBE and appointment as a UK Prime Minister’s Business Ambassador give her credibility on the policy side of small business, not only the operator side. She translates founder thinking into language corporate audiences can use: retail teams, marketing teams and transformation teams leave with a sharper sense of what independent brands do that scale players do not. Biography highlights Co-founder of notonthehighstreet.com (2006), the UK marketplace for independent makers. Founder of Holly and Co (2017), a certified B Corporation supporting small businesses. MBE, 2013, for services to small businesses. UK Prime Minister’s Business Ambassador for creative small businesses, 2015. Author of Do What You Love, Love What You Do (Virgin Books, 2021), a Sunday Times bestseller; earlier titles with Simon and Schuster. Presenter of ITV’s Be Your Own Boss and host of the Conversations of Inspiration podcast. Biography Notonthehighstreet.com began as a frustration with nowhere to sell handmade Christmas wreaths. Holly Tucker and Sophie Cornish turned that frustration into the UK’s defining marketplace for independent brands, and over thirteen years it gave more than five thousand small businesses a route to customers they would not otherwise have reached. That is the operator credential Tucker brings into a room. Holly and Co, founded in 2017 and a certified B Corporation since 2022, is where the second chapter sits. It is a platform, a shop and an advice engine for independent founders, and it is the evidence base for most of what Tucker says publicly about small business. The weekly Conversations of Inspiration podcast now runs into the hundreds of episodes, which gives her a continuously updated read on what founders are actually doing, not what commentators think they are doing. Her public role has extended beyond business. An MBE in 2013 for services to small businesses, and appointment as a UK Prime Minister’s Business Ambassador in 2015, placed her inside the conversation about how policy shapes independent enterprise. Three books, including Sunday Times bestseller Do What You Love, Love What You Do, turned that experience into written form for founders at earlier stages. Where Tucker is most useful to a corporate audience is on the question larger companies rarely answer well: what exactly do independent brands do that scale players find hard to replicate, and how should a big business think about that when it partners with them, buys from them, or tries to build its own version. She speaks to that from both sides of the relationship. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and the founder mindset Building and scaling marketplaces Independent retail and the creative economy Purpose-led business and B Corp practice Small business advocacy and policy Female founders and enterprise Brand, storytelling and community for consumer businesses Ideal for Retail, consumer and marketplace leadership teams thinking about independent brand partnerships. Marketing and brand leaders who want a grounded view of what small and founder-led brands do that larger ones cannot. Conferences and internal events focused on entrepreneurship, purpose-led growth or the creative economy. Female founder communities and enterprise networks within larger organisations. Audience outcomes A clearer picture of what independent founders actually do differently, drawn from a marketplace of more than five thousand small businesses. A practical read on what purpose-led and B Corp businesses look like in operation, not in theory. Fresh founder stories from a podcast library that now spans several hundred interviews. Language for corporate teams to use when they talk about supporting, partnering with or learning from small businesses. A sharper sense of how policy, platform and community interact in the creative economy.

Why organisations work with Haiyan Wang A research-grounded view on the China and India axis from a co-founder of the China India Institute, built on three decades of work on global strategy with Anil K. Gupta. Authority drawn from a 200-corporation study underpinning The Quest for Global Dominance (2nd Edition) and the Axiom Award-winning Getting China and India Right. A serious counter-position to the standard “deglobalisation” narrative: the argument that trade is shifting toward data, IP and services rather than retreating, sharpened in her 2024 Thinkers50 Hall of Fame work. Translates emerging-market signals into board-level capital, supply chain and market-entry choices, not country-trend commentary. Recognised by named bodies that buyers trust: Thinkers50 Hall of Fame inductee (2024), Thinkers50-ranked thinker, Axiom Book Awards Silver Prize. Biography highlights Managing Partner and co-founder, China India Institute, Washington DC Adjunct Professor of Strategy, INSEAD 2024 Thinkers50 Hall of Fame inductee (with Anil K. Gupta) Co-author of The Quest for Global Dominance (2nd Edition), Getting China and India Right (Axiom Awards Silver Prize, 2009) and The Silk Road Rediscovered Regular columnist for Bloomberg Businessweek, blogger for Harvard Business Review, with bylined pieces in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Wired, China Daily, Times of India and South China Morning Post Holds graduate degrees from the University of International Business and Economics (China) and the University of Maryland at College Park Biography The cheap-globalisation era is over, but globalisation itself is not. That is the working thesis behind the China India Institute, the Washington DC research and advisory firm Haiyan Wang co-founded and runs as Managing Partner. Her argument, developed across three decades with Anil K. Gupta, is that the flow of physical goods is plateauing while the flow of data, intellectual property and services is accelerating. Boards that read the first signal without the second are making the wrong calls on capital allocation and footprint. The argument is anchored in a long-running research programme on global strategy, including a study of more than 200 corporations that underpins The Quest for Global Dominance (2nd Edition), co-authored with Gupta and Vijay Govindarajan. Getting China and India Right took the Axiom Book Awards Silver Prize for globalisation and international business in 2009. The Silk Road Rediscovered, written with Gupta and Girija Pande, examines how Indian and Chinese companies are using each other’s markets, a question most Western firms still treat as separate problems. Wang’s standing is recognised by the bodies senior buyers actually weigh. She and Gupta were inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2024, after appearing in the Thinkers50 ranking (most recently cited at #25 in 2021) and being shortlisted for Thinkers50 awards. She has held an Adjunct Professor of Strategy role at INSEAD and writes regularly for Bloomberg Businessweek and Harvard Business Review, with bylined commentary in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Times of India and the South China Morning Post. For a senior team trying to set a five-year stance on China, India and the next layer of emerging markets, the value is concrete: a credible read on which parts of globalisation are stalling, which are intensifying, and where that leaves a specific company’s growth and risk decisions. Key speaking topics Globalisation in a phase change China and India as strategic markets Emerging-market diverging futures Multinational strategy and global presence Global mindset for senior leadership Geopolitics and the rules-based economy Long-range scenario thinking on global trade Ideal for CEOs, CSOs and board directors setting multi-year China and India exposure Heads of strategy, corporate development and M&A in multinationals Risk committees and supply chain leaders reassessing globalisation assumptions Investor and asset-management forums on emerging markets and capital allocation Audience outcomes A clear read on which parts of globalisation are retreating and which are intensifying A defensible frame for board-level decisions on China, India and other emerging markets A working view of where data, IP and services flows are creating new commercial ground A sharper test for capital allocation and footprint choices under geopolitical pressure Reference points from the long China India Institute research programme that buyers can use in their own strategy reviews

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

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

Why organisations work with Debbie Wosskow Three exits as founding CEO across PR, the sharing economy, and the women’s network category, giving boards a rare interlocutor who has personally taken capital, scaled a team, and sold the business. Co-Chair of the UK government’s Invest in Women Taskforce, which closed over £255m of committed capital for female founders in November 2024, the largest pool of its kind globally. Author of the 2014 government review “Unlocking the Sharing Economy”, the regulatory frame that legitimised platforms including Airbnb and Zipcar in the UK market. Operates inside the institutions that allocate capital and reputation: Senior Advisor at McKinsey, Non-Executive Director of Channel 4, Mayor of London’s Business Advisory Board. Co-author with Anna Jones of “Believe. Build. Become” (Penguin, 2019), the playbook that emerged from the AllBright Academy and continues to anchor her keynote material on women in leadership. Biography highlights Founder and exited CEO of three businesses: Mantra (sold to Loewy Group), Love Home Swap (sold to Wyndham Destination Networks, $53m, 2017) and AllBright (co-founded with Anna Jones, exited 2022). Co-Chair, Invest in Women Taskforce, appointed by Chancellor Rachel Reeves. Non-Executive Director, Channel 4, since January 2024. Senior Advisor, McKinsey & Company. OBE for services to business; Freedom of the City of London. Author of “Believe. Build. Become” (Penguin, 2019) with Anna Jones, and the UK government’s “Unlocking the Sharing Economy” review. Biography The UK economy loses roughly £250bn a year because women start and scale businesses at a fraction of the rate of men. Debbie Wosskow has spent two decades building inside that gap, first as a founder and now as the operator who sits at the table where institutional capital is reassigned. The Invest in Women Taskforce she co-chairs closed over £255m of committed funding for female founders in November 2024, the largest dedicated pool of its kind anywhere. Her authority on the topic is not theoretical. Wosskow founded and sold Mantra in her twenties, built Love Home Swap into a subscription business that Wyndham Destination Networks bought for $53m in 2017, and co-founded AllBright with Anna Jones in 2016, exiting in 2022. Each business was venture-backed and each exit was completed under her as CEO. Government and regulators use her as a translator between policy and operating reality. She wrote the 2014 review “Unlocking the Sharing Economy” for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the document that shaped how the UK regulates platforms including Airbnb and Zipcar. She now sits as Non-Executive Director of Channel 4, Senior Advisor to McKinsey & Company, and Executive Chair of The Better Menopause, with a board seat on the Mayor of London’s Business Advisory Board. For senior audiences, the proposition is specific: an operator who has built and sold three companies, written the rules for one of the largest new market categories of the last decade, and now controls one of the most consequential pools of growth capital aimed at women in the UK. Her co-authored Penguin title “Believe. Build. Become” remains the public expression of that argument. Key speaking topics Female entrepreneurship and access to capital Scaling and exiting venture-backed businesses The sharing economy and platform regulation Women in leadership and the AllBright thesis Investing in women as economic strategy Building and selling businesses at pace Boardroom voice for entrepreneurs Ideal for Boards and ExCos commissioning a serious operator voice on female founders, capital allocation, and the economics of inclusion. CEOs, CFOs and investment committees rethinking how growth capital reaches female-led businesses. Financial services, professional services and corporate venture audiences seeking a credible UK policy and operator perspective. Female leadership networks and executive development programmes within FTSE-listed and global organisations. Audience outcomes A clearer operator account of what scaling and exiting a venture-backed business actually requires, drawn from three completed exits. A working understanding of the £255m Invest in Women Taskforce model and what it signals for corporate capital strategy. The argument and the evidence base behind investing in female founders as a growth lever, not a CSR line. Practical perspectives from “Believe. Build. Become” on building career and leadership capital as a woman in a senior commercial role. A direct read on how Westminster, the City and corporate boards are currently moving on female entrepreneurship.

Why organisations work with Colleen Francis She reframes where growth actually comes from. Her Right on the Money thesis argues that the installed base, not the prospecting funnel, is the primary engine of bold growth, and gives revenue leaders a playbook for acting on it. She closes the gap between sales strategy and sales behaviour. Her work with Chevron, Merck, Royal Bank, John Deere and Dow is focused on what frontline sellers and managers actually do differently on Monday morning. She brings a full-cycle pipeline discipline rather than a single tactic. Nonstop Sales Boom is built around ending the boom-and-bust cycle through continuous engagement, qualification shared with the buyer, and disciplined prioritisation. She carries the credentials that senior audiences expect without leaning on them. Induction into the Professional Speakers Hall of Fame and the Canadian Speaking Hall of Fame is the signal; the room is there for the argument. Biography highlights Founder and President, Engage Selling Solutions. Author of Right on the Money: New Principles for Bold Growth (Morgan James, 2022), Nonstop Sales Boom, and Honesty Sells. Inductee, Professional Speakers Hall of Fame. Inductee, Canadian Speaking Hall of Fame, and past President of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers. Named a LinkedIn Top Voice for Sales. Keynote speaker at Dreamforce and MDRT Experience, with client work across Chevron, John Deere, Merck, Abbott, Experian, Royal Bank, Dow, Adobe and Salesforce. Biography Most B2B organisations still build their growth model around new-logo acquisition. The numbers tell a different story. The accounts already inside the house are usually under-penetrated, under-priced, and handed off to service teams the moment the contract signs. Colleen Francis has spent more than twenty years arguing that this is where bold growth is actually hiding, and building the systems that let revenue leaders reach it. That argument is the spine of Right on the Money, published by Morgan James in 2022, and the thread that runs through Engage Selling Solutions, the firm she founded and leads. Her earlier book, Nonstop Sales Boom, sets out the other half of the discipline: ending the boom-and-bust quarter by treating pipeline generation, deal progression, customer retention and account expansion as one connected system, not four competing ones. The work is built on client evidence, not theory. Engage Selling has run programmes with Chevron, John Deere, Merck, Abbott, Experian, Royal Bank, Dow, Adobe and Salesforce, among others. Francis speaks on the main stages these clients attend, including Dreamforce and MDRT Experience, and has been named a LinkedIn Top Voice for Sales. The credentials are there – induction into the Professional Speakers Hall of Fame and the Canadian Speaking Hall of Fame, past President of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers – but the reason senior revenue leaders book her is simpler. She tells a sales organisation what to stop doing, with specifics, and then what to do instead. Key speaking topics Sales strategy and commercial growth Account expansion and customer retention Pipeline discipline and revenue predictability Sales leadership and frontline management Buyer behaviour and modern B2B selling Sales transformation in mature businesses Ideal for Chief Revenue Officers, Chief Sales Officers and VPs of Sales running large distributed sales organisations. Senior sales leadership audiences inside B2B businesses where retention and expansion matter more than new-logo volume. Partner, channel and enterprise account leaders responsible for growing inside existing customers. Sales kickoffs and annual conferences looking for a commercial keynote with a practical, named methodology. Audience outcomes A clear commercial case for treating the installed customer base as the primary growth engine, with the metrics to defend it. Named behaviours that separate consistent sales teams from boom-and-bust ones, at both rep and manager level. A sharper view of where pipeline is leaking – qualification, handoff, account planning – and which of those to fix first. Language senior sales leaders can take straight into their next QBR on retention, expansion and forecast discipline.

Why organisations work with Charlene Li Her central argument inverts the standard AI conversation: organisations do not need a separate AI strategy – they need AI deployed in service of the strategy already in place. That reframe moves boards from analysis paralysis to sequenced action, in a space where most external voices add complexity rather than remove it. The Disruption Mindset reverses thirty years of received innovation wisdom: disruption does not create growth – growth creates disruption. That distinction changes how leadership teams set strategy and allocate resources, not merely how they talk about change. Winning with AI (2025, co-authored with Dr. Katia Walsh, Harvard Business School’s inaugural Chief Digital Officer) is grounded in two years of research and 50+ executive interviews, and includes the Six-Quarter Walk planning tool – a practical sequencing instrument designed to be used without external consultants. Her research spans the full arc of technological disruption – internet, social media, digital transformation, generative AI – giving her longitudinal credibility when leadership teams are being asked to make bets on technologies whose business implications are still contested. As the founder of Altimeter Group, a firm built explicitly to compete with Gartner, Forrester, and IDC before being acquired by Prophet, Li has operated as both a researcher and an entrepreneur navigating the disruption she now advises on – a position most AI strategy voices cannot occupy. Biography highlights New York Times bestselling author of six books, including The Disruption Mindset, Open Leadership, Groundswell, and Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success (2025, co-authored with Dr. Katia Walsh) Founder of Altimeter Group (2008), a research and strategy firm that competed directly with Gartner, Forrester, and IDC; acquired by Prophet in 2015 Former Chief Research Officer at PA Consulting; currently leads Quantum Networks Group Graduate of Harvard College (magna cum laude, A.B.) and Harvard Business School (MBA) Named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company; Top 50 Leadership Innovators by Inc.; LinkedIn Top 10 Voices on Company Culture (2022) Keynote speaker at the World Economic Forum, TED, and South by Southwest; regularly cited in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Reuters; has appeared on 60 Minutes and CNBC Biography The most common failure point in AI transformation is strategic misdiagnosis. Charlene Li’s research – two years of fieldwork and more than 50 executive interviews for Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success (2025) – found that organisations treating AI as a strategy in its own right fall behind those that deploy it in service of the strategy they already have. That distinction, between AI as initiative and AI as instrument, is what separates pilot programmes from scaled competitive advantage. The same counterintuitive rigour runs through her earlier body of work. The Disruption Mindset (2019) challenged a core assumption of competitive strategy: disruption does not create growth – growth creates disruption. Companies that make disruption the goal, rather than the outcome of aggressively pursued growth opportunities, build the wrong culture and the wrong metrics. That argument, backed by research, has changed how board-level strategy conversations are framed, not just concluded. Li’s analytical credibility was built at Altimeter Group, the research firm she founded in 2008 as a deliberate competitor to Gartner, Forrester, and IDC – and which was acquired by Prophet in 2015. She subsequently served as Chief Research Officer at PA Consulting before founding Quantum Networks Group. Across those institutions, she has worked with organisations including 14 of the Dow Jones Industrial 30. She holds a Harvard MBA and an undergraduate degree from Harvard College, earned magna cum laude. Named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company and one of Inc.’s Top 50 Leadership Innovators, Li has keynoted the World Economic Forum, TED, and South by Southwest, and is regularly cited by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. What distinguishes her from others working the same ground is the research arc: she has tracked and advised on each major wave of technological disruption – internet, social media, digital transformation, generative AI – from inside analytical and advisory institutions, not from the outside looking in. Key speaking topics AI strategy and competitive deployment Disruptive transformation and growth strategy Leadership in the digital age Future of work and AI’s workforce implications Organisational culture and the disruption mindset Strategic decision-making under technological uncertainty Business model disruption and innovation Ideal for C-suite and board members responsible for AI investment and transformation decisions Chief Digital Officers, Chief AI Officers, and technology transformation leads Strategy and innovation leaders at established organisations facing competitive disruption Senior HR and people leaders managing workforce implications of AI adoption Audience outcomes A clear framework for aligning AI with existing business strategy – rather than building a parallel AI initiative Understanding of why most AI pilot programmes stall and what organisationally moves them into scaled production The Disruption Mindset distinction: why pursuing disruption as a goal is a strategic error, and what to pursue instead Practical tools for sequencing AI investments against business priorities, including the Six-Quarter Walk planning framework A more confident leadership posture for communicating AI strategy internally – to boards, to workforces, and across the organisation

Why organisations work with Anne Lise Kjaer The Trend Management Toolkit is a published, step-by-step methodology – not a proprietary black box – giving leadership teams a repeatable, teachable system for reading and prioritising complex signals before they become obvious to competitors. The 4P framework (People, Planet, Purpose, Profit) gives boards a practical lens for evaluating long-range decisions against societal value as well as financial return – a model that predates mainstream ESG adoption and has been tested across sectors from automotive to humanitarian. Government advisory appointments – to the UK’s DEFRA and Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority IPE – mean her foresight work is calibrated against real policy and long-horizon planning environments, not only corporate strategy rooms. Kjaer Global has operated continuously since 1988; the methodology behind her speaking work has been applied and revised across multiple economic cycles, not developed for the conference circuit. Her design background gives trend analysis a granular, sensory dimension: she reads cultural and behavioural shifts in material culture and consumer behaviour before they appear in quantitative data. Biography highlights Founder of Kjaer Global, London-based trend management and futures consultancy, established 1988 Author of The Trend Management Toolkit: A Practical Guide to the Future (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) – a step-by-step methodology for strategic trend analysis and scenario planning Developer of the 4P framework (People, Planet, Purpose, Profit), applied with clients including BMW, McKinsey, IKEA, EY, UNICEF, Amazon, and Volvo Appointed adviser to the UK government’s DEFRA (2022); former member of Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority International Panel of Experts (2018–2022) Listed among Forbes’ 50 Leading Female Futurists (2020); featured in MIT Technology Review’s profile of professional forecasters Profiled by the Financial Times; regular media contributor across BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Fast Company, and The Times Copenhagen Goodwill Ambassador (honorary title, since 2004); BA in Design, TEKO Design and Business School Biography Most organisations treat trends as incoming intelligence to be monitored. Anne Lise Kjaer’s argument – developed over more than three decades running Kjaer Global – is that monitoring is not enough. Trends require a system for evaluation, prioritisation, and integration into decisions. Without that system, even well-informed leadership teams are reacting, not preparing. The Trend Management Toolkit, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014, is the codification of that system. It moves through the practical mechanics of trend mapping: how to distinguish structural drivers from surface noise, how to scenario-plan across people, planet, purpose, and profit dimensions, and how to apply foresight to brand, innovation, and leadership decisions. The 4P framework at its core is not a values statement – it is a decision architecture, and it predates the mainstream ESG vocabulary by several years. The client range is deliberate evidence. BMW, McKinsey, EY, IKEA, and UNICEF are not natural strategic neighbours, but each has used Kjaer’s methodology for different planning challenges. Her formal advisory roles extend the same logic into government: as an appointed adviser to the UK’s DEFRA and a member of Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority’s International Panel of Experts – advising on urban planning to 2060 – her foresight work has been tested against policy timelines, not only commercial ones. The Financial Times described her perspective as one that creates social prototypes based on nascent trends. Forbes included her among its 50 Leading Female Futurists; MIT Technology Review featured her in its 2020 profile of professional forecasters. She has contributed commentary across BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Fast Company, and The Times, and holds the honorary title of Copenhagen Goodwill Ambassador. Key speaking topics Strategic foresight and trend management methodology The 4P framework: People, Planet, Purpose, Profit Sustainable and responsible innovation Long-range consumer and societal trends Scenario planning for leadership and strategy Glocalisation and regional economic ecosystems Futures thinking for business model development Ideal for Executive and leadership teams building or pressure-testing long-range strategy Chief Strategy Officers and innovation leads with responsibility for horizon-scanning and scenario planning Boards integrating ESG and societal value into long-term business decision-making Strategy, futures, and sustainability conferences requiring rigorous methodology rather than trend commentary Audience outcomes Practical understanding of the Trend Management Toolkit methodology and how to apply it to their organisation’s planning cycles A working model for distinguishing high-signal trends from background noise in a saturated information environment Familiarity with the 4P framework as an operational decision lens – not an abstract value statement – applicable to board-level strategic choices Concrete examples of how organisations across sectors have translated structured foresight into competitive advantage Greater confidence in making long-term strategic commitments under conditions of genuine uncertainty

Why organisations work with Ann Handley She built two of the businesses that defined modern digital marketing, ClickZ and MarketingProfs, so her advice on content operations comes from running them, not theorising about them. Everybody Writes, now in a second edition, gives commercial teams a single shared standard for how the company writes to customers, prospects and employees. She has spent 15+ years shaping the agenda at the MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum, which gives her a working view of what is actually moving the pipeline for B2B marketers right now. Her Total Annarchy newsletter, read fortnightly by more than 51,000 marketers, is itself the case study: subscriber-driven, voice-first, low-volume, high-trust. IBM named her among the seven people shaping modern marketing; that recognition reflects influence on how the discipline is practised, not just commented on. Biography highlights Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs (600,000+ subscribers; annual B2B Marketing Forum). Co-founder of ClickZ, an early authority in digital marketing news and commentary. Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Everybody Writes; co-author of Content Rules; works translated into 19 languages. Named by IBM as one of “the 7 people shaping modern marketing,”; cited by Forbes as a top thought leader. Writes Total Annarchy, a fortnightly newsletter with 51,000+ subscribers. Contributing writer to Entrepreneur, Inc., Mashable, Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal. Biography Most marketing functions have a content problem they have decided to call a strategy problem. They publish more, segment harder, automate further, and the writing still sounds like everyone else’s. Ann Handley’s working argument is that the words are the product, and that an organisation’s marketing is only as serious as the sentences it is willing to put its name to. She has tested that argument inside the businesses she helped build. As co-founder of ClickZ and Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs, she has spent two decades running marketing operations rather than narrating them, and the MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum has become one of the few places where senior B2B marketers go to compare notes on what is actually working. Her book Everybody Writes, a Wall Street Journal bestseller now in a second edition, gives commercial teams a shared operating standard for marketing writing. Content Rules, her earlier title with C.C. Chapman, did the same job for the wider content stack. Both have been translated into 19 languages and are used inside marketing organisations as training material, not coffee-table reading. What sets her work apart at the keynote level is the refusal to treat content as a category. IBM placed her among the seven people shaping modern marketing because she keeps pulling marketing back to the part of the job that is hardest to fake: writing something a customer would actually want to read. Key speaking topics Content marketing strategy Marketing writing as a commercial discipline B2B marketing and demand generation Brand voice and editorial standards Email and newsletter strategy Customer experience through content Storytelling for business Ideal for CMOs and heads of marketing are rebuilding content operations for measurable commercial outcomes Heads of brand, communications and content responsible for editorial standards across teams B2B marketing leaders working on demand generation and customer engagement Founders and commercial leaders whose growth depends on the company sounding like itself Audience outcomes A clearer working definition of what good marketing writing looks like inside their own organisation Specific tests for whether a piece of content earns the attention it asks for A view on how to run content as an operating function, not a campaign output Concrete examples of B2B and B2C brands using writing and editorial voice to win commercially A more honest read on what their current marketing sounds like to a customer

Why organisations work with Amy Webb Webb’s foresight methodology is not scenario-planning by another name – it applies quantitative modelling to emerging signals, giving boards an evidential basis for long-horizon technology decisions that is defensible rather than intuitive. Her annual Tech Trends Report tracks more than 700 emerging technology and science trends and is downloaded more than one million times a year; few advisory practices produce intelligence infrastructure at comparable scale or breadth. The Big Nine named and defined the “G-MAFIA” framework – the six American and three Chinese corporations Webb argues hold structural control over AI’s trajectory. Audiences gain a durable analytical vocabulary for a problem most organisations are still describing in generic terms. Her advisory relationships with the White House, European Union, United Nations, and World Economic Forum are ongoing, not project-based – her understanding of how governments are approaching AI governance and technology risk is primary source, not aggregated. Her latest concept, “living intelligence” – the convergence of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and advanced sensors into a single technology supercycle – gives senior leaders a framework for thinking beyond current AI strategy before the convergence forces reactive decisions. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Future Today Strategy Group; ranked #3 most influential management thinker globally by Thinkers50 (2025) Adjunct Professor of Strategic Foresight, NYU Stern School of Business; Visiting Fellow, Oxford University’s Saïd Business School; former Nieman Fellow, Harvard University Author of The Big Nine (2019) – longlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year, winner of the 2020 Gold Axiom Medal – and The Signals Are Talking (2016), winner of the Thinkers50 RADAR Award and 2017 Gold Axiom Medal The Genesis Machine (2022, co-authored with Andrew Hessel) named by The New Yorker as one of the year’s best nonfiction works; books translated into 23 languages Life member, Council on Foreign Relations; founding member, WEF Strategic Foresight Advisory Board; member, WEF Global Risks Board; AI Governance Alliance partner Contributor to Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review; TED Talk on algorithmic thinking viewed more than 8 million times, translated into 32 languages Biography The gap between sensing that a technology will reshape a sector and knowing when – and how – to act is where most long-range strategy breaks down. Amy Webb’s work is built around closing that gap. As founder and CEO of the Future Today Strategy Group, she pioneered a quantitative modelling approach to strategic foresight: one that applies the analytical rigour of economic forecasting to the identification of emerging technology signals, rather than relying on narrative scenarios or trend decks. Her books have given organisations specific frameworks for understanding the structural dynamics of technology change. The Big Nine named the six American and three Chinese corporations – the “G-MAFIA” and BAT – that Webb argues hold disproportionate control over AI’s development, and traced the geopolitical and commercial consequences of that concentration. The Genesis Machine, co-authored with biotechnologist Andrew Hessel, examined the organisational and governance implications of synthetic biology before the technology entered mainstream strategy conversations. Both were recognised externally: The Big Nine was longlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year; The Genesis Machine was named by The New Yorker as one of the year’s best nonfiction works. Her access to the rooms where technology governance is being decided is direct and ongoing. As an advisor to the White House, European Union, and United Nations, and as a founding member of the World Economic Forum’s Strategic Foresight Advisory Board, Webb’s work informs global technology policy – not as periodic input but as sustained engagement. Her annual Tech Trends Report, tracking more than 700 emerging technology and science developments, is downloaded more than one million times a year. Ranked third on Thinkers50’s 2025 list of the world’s most influential management thinkers, Webb teaches strategic foresight at NYU Stern’s MBA programme and holds a visiting fellowship at Oxford’s Saïd Business School. Her current framework, “living intelligence” – the convergence of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and advanced sensors – maps the technology supercycle she argues is already underway. For organisations whose long-range strategy begins and ends with AI, it is a substantive challenge to the scope of their thinking. Key speaking topics Quantitative strategic foresight Artificial intelligence and the global technology power landscape Living intelligence: AI, biotechnology, and advanced sensors Technology supercycles and long-horizon planning Geopolitics of emerging technology Futures methodology and organisational decision-making Synthetic biology and the next frontier of disruption Ideal for C-suite and boards developing long-range technology and competitive strategy Chief Strategy Officers and innovation leads rethinking their approach to uncertainty and futures planning Government, regulatory, and policy audiences responsible for technology governance Risk, investment, and scenario-planning teams assessing the strategic implications of AI and converging technologies Audience outcomes A clear analytical method for distinguishing which emerging technology signals warrant a strategic response – and which represent noise Understanding of the “living intelligence” framework and why the convergence of AI, biotechnology, and advanced sensors represents a broader challenge than current AI strategy typically accounts for A structural vocabulary for the global AI power landscape – particularly the dynamics between major US and Chinese technology actors – that simplifies a complex geopolitical issue for non-specialist leaders Familiarity with the Tech Trends methodology: how to scan, filter, and prioritise signals across a large and rapidly evolving technology landscape Practical frameworks for building a long-horizon foresight capability internally, rather than depending on periodic external consultancy