Business Strategy & Growth

Why organisations work with Stephen M. R. Covey He treats trust as a measurable economic input, not a cultural sentiment. The Speed of Trust sets out a framework, the 4 cores and 13 behaviors, that converts trust into quantifiable effects on speed and cost. His operating record gives the argument weight. As President and CEO of Covey Leadership Center, he grew the firm into the largest leadership development company in the world before its integration with Franklin Quest, with publisher sources citing a sixty-seven-fold increase in shareholder value during his tenure. Trust & Inspire gives senior leaders explicit operating content for the shift away from command and control, a transition that has been described in management literature for decades but rarely defined in practical terms. He writes from inside the discipline, not outside it. He leads FranklinCovey’s Global Speed of Trust Practice and has worked with organisations across business, government, military, education, healthcare, and NGOs in more than fifty countries. His authority on the subject is independently recognised. Trust Across America/Trust Around the World awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award for “Top Thought Leaders in Trust”. Biography highlights Author of The Speed of Trust, New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller, translated into 22 languages, over 2 million copies sold (Simon & Schuster). Author of Trust & Inspire, Wall Street Journal bestseller, named #1 Leadership Book of 2022 by the Outstanding Work of Literature Awards. Former President and CEO of Covey Leadership Center, which under his leadership became the largest leadership development firm in the world. Co-founder and current leader of FranklinCovey’s Global Speed of Trust Practice; co-founder of CoveyLink Worldwide. Harvard MBA. Has taught trust and leadership in over fifty countries to business, government, military, education, healthcare, and NGO audiences. Lifetime Achievement Award for “Top Thought Leaders in Trust” from Trust Across America/Trust Around the World. Biography Trust is usually treated as the residue of culture, something an organisation either has or does not have. The Speed of Trust argues the opposite: trust is an economic variable, with direct and measurable effects on the speed at which work moves and the cost at which it gets done. The book has sold more than two million copies and been translated into 22 languages, and it remains the reference work in the field. The author is Stephen M. R. Covey. Before he wrote it, he ran the company that taught his father’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to the world. As President and CEO of Covey Leadership Center, he led the strategy that turned the firm into the largest leadership development company in the world; publisher records cite a sixty-seven-fold increase in shareholder value during his tenure. The credibility of his trust thesis sits on that operating record. His second book, Trust & Inspire, takes the argument into leadership style. The case is direct: command and control was an industrial-age design, and most organisations still use it without naming it. Trust and Inspire describes the alternative in operating terms, not in slogans. The book was a Wall Street Journal bestseller and was named #1 Leadership Book of 2022 by the Outstanding Work of Literature Awards. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, leads FranklinCovey’s Global Speed of Trust Practice, and has taught the work in more than fifty countries across business, government, military, education, healthcare, and NGO settings. Trust Across America/Trust Around the World awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award for “Top Thought Leaders in Trust”, recognition from the body that has tracked the discipline for the longest. Key speaking topics Organisational trust Trust as a driver of speed and cost Trust-based leadership The 4 cores and 13 behaviors of high-trust leaders The shift from command and control to trust and inspire Leadership credibility High-trust culture and organisational performance Ideal for CEOs, executive teams, and boards setting the leadership tone for the organisation CHROs and chief people officers redesigning leadership development and culture programmes Transformation, M&A, and post-restructure leaders rebuilding credibility with employees and stakeholders Senior leadership conferences, partner meetings, and government leadership audiences Audience outcomes A working definition of trust as an economic variable, with named effects on the speed and cost of execution The 4 cores and 13 behaviors framework for diagnosing where trust is being earned, eroded, or paid for A clear distinction between command and control leadership and trust and inspire leadership, with operating content for the shift Specific moves for extending, restoring, and embedding trust at the team, organisation, and stakeholder levels A language senior leaders can use with their teams to make trust an explicit competency in hiring, promotion, and performance

Why organisations work with Stephane Garelli He created the IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook in 1989, the reference benchmark used by governments and multinationals for more than three decades. When he interprets a country’s position, he is the source, not a commentator on the source. His 2025 book World Competitiveness: Rewriting the Rules of Global Prosperity (Wiley) is the first sustained reframing of his own thesis for the post-globalisation era, which gives boards a coherent argument for capital allocation under fragmentation rather than a list of risks. Thirteen years running the World Economic Forum and the Davos Annual Meetings, plus twelve years advising the European management of Hewlett-Packard, mean his counsel is informed by how senior executives and heads of state actually decide, not how they describe themselves on stage. His positions at IMD and the University of Lausanne, alongside long board service at Sandoz Financial and Banking Holding and Le Temps, place him at the intersection of academic originality and Swiss-grade institutional discipline, an unusual combination among economic speakers. Biography highlights Founder of the IMD World Competitiveness Center and creator of the IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook, the leading annual ranking of national competitiveness since 1989. Professor Emeritus of World Competitiveness at IMD Business School and Professor Emeritus at the University of Lausanne. Former Managing Director of the World Economic Forum and the Davos Annual Meetings for 13 years. Author of Top Class Competitors (Wiley) and World Competitiveness: Rewriting the Rules of Global Prosperity (Wiley, 2025). Former Chairman of FF Sandoz Financial and Banking Holding and long-tenured Chairman of Le Temps, the leading French-language Swiss newspaper. Member of the International Olympic Committee Commission on Sustainability and Legacy, chaired by Prince Albert of Monaco. Biography Most economic commentary on the new global order describes the symptoms. Garelli wrote the underlying framework. In 1989, he founded the IMD World Competitiveness Center and created the World Competitiveness Yearbook, the first systematic annual ranking of how nations build and sustain prosperity. The Yearbook now benchmarks more than sixty economies across hundreds of indicators and remains the reference governments and multinationals reach for when they want to know where a country actually stands. His 2025 book, World Competitiveness: Rewriting the Rules of Global Prosperity, published by Wiley, extends that work into the period after the “golden era of globalization”, the four decades from China’s 1978 opening to the COVID shock. The argument is that the world will remain global but no longer united, and that competitiveness now has to be rebuilt around bloc-level alignment, industrial policy, and resilience rather than open markets. For boards setting capital allocation under sanctions, tariffs, and supply chain rewiring, this is operating guidance, not theory. The institutional spine behind the work is unusual. Thirteen years as Managing Director of the World Economic Forum and the Davos Annual Meetings, twelve years as permanent senior adviser to the European management of Hewlett-Packard, and chairmanship of FF Sandoz Financial and Banking Holding and of Le Temps, the leading French-language Swiss newspaper. He has sat on the IOC Commission on Sustainability and Legacy chaired by Prince Albert of Monaco. He has held faculty positions at IMD and the University of Lausanne, where he is Professor Emeritus at both. The credentials matter because the analysis is informed by how senior leaders actually decide, not how they describe their decisions in retrospect. The earlier Wiley book, Top Class Competitors, defined competitiveness as the ability to manage a set of disparate competencies, including education, security, brand, and individual reinvention, to achieve prosperity. The 2025 work argues that the components have changed but the discipline has not. Key speaking topics World competitiveness in a fragmented global economy The end of the golden era of globalisation National strategy under bloc-level alignment Enterprise competitiveness and value chain reconfiguration Capital allocation and country selection under fragmentation The competitiveness implications of industrial policy Ideal for Boards and executive committees rewriting global strategy under sanctions, tariffs, and bloc-level alignment. CFOs, CSOs, and corporate development leaders making country-level capital allocation decisions. Government, sovereign, and policy audiences benchmarking national competitiveness against credible peers. Senior leadership offsites where the agenda turns on what comes after the open-markets era. Audience outcomes A working frame for what competitiveness now means when blocs, not markets, set the rules. Sharper questions for the board on country exposure, supply chain dependence, and capital allocation under fragmentation. A clearer read on how industrial policy, sanctions, and multi-alignment strategies are reshaping where prosperity now accrues. The vocabulary and evidence base of the IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook applied directly to the audience’s strategic situation.

Why organisations work with Scott Sonenshein A peer-reviewed thesis with commercial bite: Stretch synthesises a decade of his published research at Rice and Michigan into a working model for resourcefulness, not a recycled productivity argument. Credibility with finance and operations buyers: a Wall Street Journal bestseller and Washington Post pick of the 10 leadership books of 2017, anchored in studies of how constrained firms outperform better-funded rivals. A second franchise on workplace clutter and focus: co-author with Marie Kondo of the New York Times bestseller Joy at Work, giving him reach into culture, productivity and wellbeing briefs as well as strategy. Academic standing that holds up under scrutiny: former Associate Editor of the Academy of Management Journal, with publications in Administrative Science Quarterly and Organization Science, and seven Rice Faculty Research Excellence Awards. A speaker who translates research without diluting it: keynotes at Google and Fortune 500 audiences across technology, energy, healthcare, retail, banking and manufacturing. Biography highlights Henry Gardiner Symonds, Professor of Management at Rice Business, Rice University. Author of Stretch (HarperCollins, 2017), a Wall Street Journal bestseller and Washington Post 2017 leadership book of the year selection. Co-author with Marie Kondo of Joy at Work (Little, Brown Spark, 2020), a New York Times bestseller. Ph.D. from the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan; M.Phil from the University of Cambridge. Former Associate Editor, Academy of Management Journal; published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Review and Organization Science. Bylines in the New York Times, Time, Fast Company and Harvard Business Review; speaker at Talks at Google. Biography The instinct in most boardrooms under pressure is to ask for more. More budget, more headcount, more technology, more data. Sonenshein’s research at Rice University, drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork, argues that the firms that outperform their rivals tend to do the opposite. They redeploy what they already own. That argument is the spine of Stretch, his Wall Street Journal bestseller, named by the Washington Post as one of the ten leadership books to read in 2017. The book separates two organisational mindsets. Chasers measure themselves by what they lack. Stretchers find unconventional uses for resources, people and capabilities already inside the business. The distinction shows up in margins, in innovation rates, and in how teams behave when the next round of funding does not arrive. The academic credentials behind the argument are unusually strong for a trade book author. Sonenshein holds the Henry Gardiner Symonds Professorship at Rice Business, a Ph.D. from the Ross School of Business at Michigan, and an M.Phil from Cambridge. He has served as Associate Editor of the Academy of Management Journal and published in Administrative Science Quarterly and Organization Science. Rice has awarded him its Faculty Research Excellence Award seven times. His second book, Joy at Work, co-written with Marie Kondo and published by Little, Brown Spark in 2020, became a New York Times bestseller and extended his reach into the operating reality of how people focus, prioritise and clear cognitive load at work. That combined ground, the strategy of resourcefulness above and the discipline of focus below, is what makes him useful to executive audiences who cannot solve a growth problem by writing a bigger cheque. Key speaking topics Resourcefulness as a strategic capability Innovation under constraint Organisational change and sensemaking Productivity and focus at work Decluttering professional life and decision load Creativity and growth without additional budget Ideal for Senior leadership teams under cost pressure who still own a growth mandate CHROs and culture leads rebuilding focus, prioritisation and engagement Innovation, transformation and operations leaders running pilots without expansion capital Conferences in technology, energy, healthcare, retail, banking and manufacturing where the audience is operators, not strategists in the abstract Audience outcomes A working language to separate “chasing” from “stretching” inside their own decisions Concrete examples of how constrained firms outperform better-resourced rivals A method for auditing the underused resources, people and capabilities already on the books Practical tools from Joy at Work for cutting cognitive clutter at the team level Research-backed counterarguments to the default that growth requires more inputs

Why organisations work with Samuel J Scott He argues the brand-versus-performance trade-off in CFO language, which is the conversation that actually decides marketing budgets in a downturn. He is a current Head of Marketing at a connected TV advertising platform, so the case studies are operating reality, not retrospective consulting. His Promotion Fix column in The Drum has run since 2017, giving senior marketers a reference point on advertising effectiveness most peers in the room already read. He holds a WARC Master of Advertising Effectiveness and Marketing Week Mini-MBAs, which is unusually formal training for a working marketer presenting to boards. He takes a public contrarian line on adtech and AI marketing hype, useful for leadership teams tired of vendor pitches dressed as keynotes. Biography highlights Head of Marketing, Adte, a connected TV advertising platform. Columnist of The Promotion Fix in The Drum since 2017; previously a contributing columnist for TechCrunch and Moz. Master of Advertising Effectiveness, WARC, UK. Mini-MBAs in Marketing and Brand Management, Marketing Week, London. 2019 juror, UK Advertising Association Young Lions, the UK Cannes Lions qualifier. Former Director of Marketing at Logz.io and Head of Marketing at Faddom in the Israeli B2B tech sector. Biography In a downturn, the marketing line is the easiest to cut and the most commonly mis-cut. Performance budgets get protected because they are measurable. Brand budgets get reduced because they are not. Within two years, the performance machine stops compounding because the brand has stopped feeding it. That is the argument Samuel J Scott has been making in The Drum’s Promotion Fix column since 2017, and in keynotes for marketing leadership teams across more than two dozen countries. He is one of the few speakers on this subject who is also a working operator, currently Head of Marketing at the connected TV advertising platform Adte, and previously a marketing director in the Israeli B2B technology sector at companies including Logz.io and Faddom. His credentials sit on the technical side of the discipline. A Master of Advertising Effectiveness from WARC, two Mini-MBAs in marketing and brand management from Marketing Week in London, and CIM certifications across marcom planning, copywriting and AI marketing tools. He served as a jury member for the UK Advertising Association’s 2019 Young Lions, the UK qualifier for Cannes. The editorial register is contrarian. Scott has built a reputation for arguing against marketing fashion, whether that is uncritical AI adoption, attribution theatre, or brand purpose campaigns that cannot survive a CFO’s scrutiny. Audiences leave with a sharper view of how to spend a marketing budget when growth gets harder, not a slide deck of trends. Key speaking topics Brand and performance advertising Marketing effectiveness and measurement Defending marketing budgets in downturns B2B marketing and brand-led growth AI in marketing communications Adtech and connected TV Marketing communications strategy Ideal for CMOs and marketing directors under pressure to justify brand spend to a CFO. B2B technology marketing leaders rebuilding a brand layer above lead-gen. Boards and executive teams reviewing marketing as a commercial function, not a cost line. Marketing communications and agency teams negotiating AI-era budget assumptions. Audience outcomes A working language for arguing brand investment in financial terms. A clearer split between what performance media can do and what only brand work delivers. A sceptic’s filter on AI marketing claims from agencies and adtech vendors. A defensible structure for marketing budgets through a downturn. Specific reference points from current B2B technology marketing practice.

Why organisations work with Rowan Gibson He is the author of a named ideation methodology, the 4 Lenses of Innovation, that gives an entire organisation a common language for spotting breakthrough opportunities rather than relying on isolated creative teams. His book Innovation to the Core, published by Harvard Business School Press with Peter Skarzynski, is one of the few practitioner texts focused specifically on building enterprise-wide innovation systems, not on innovation as a mindset. He has worked directly with senior teams at Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Bayer, Mars, Philips, P&G, Dell and Haier, giving him a working comparison set across most major industries. He was shortlisted for the 2015 Thinkers50 Innovation Award, alongside Vijay Govindarajan and Scott Anthony, marking peer recognition from the field’s primary ranking body. His current keynote work integrates AI tools directly into the innovation method, so audiences leave with a view of generative AI as a creative engine inside a structured process, not as a separate technology agenda. Biography highlights Author of Rethinking The Future (1996), Innovation to the Core (Harvard Business School Press, 2008) and The Four Lenses of Innovation (Wiley, 2015), translated into 25 languages. Originator of the 4 Lenses of Innovation methodology, taught and applied inside Fortune 500 innovation programmes. Cofounder of InnovationExcellence.com, a long-running practitioner portal in the innovation field. Shortlisted for the 2015 Thinkers50 Innovation Award. Founder and President of Imagination Bridge, a strategy innovation and digital transformation consultancy. Has advised and lectured at Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Bayer, Coca-Cola, Mars, Philips, P&G, Dell, Haier, Heineken, Siemens and Toyota, among others. Biography Most companies do not have an innovation problem. They have an innovation system problem. Ideas surface and stall, breakthrough projects depend on a particular leader, and the next pipeline always starts from scratch. Rowan Gibson built his career around fixing exactly that gap. Rethinking The Future, his 1996 anthology with contributions from Charles Handy, Michael Porter, C.K. Prahalad, Stephen Covey and Peter Senge, set the early frame. Innovation to the Core, written with Peter Skarzynski for Harvard Business School Press in 2008, took the next step and laid out how an enterprise builds a sustained innovation capability rather than running isolated programmes. The Four Lenses of Innovation, published by Wiley in 2015, distilled the underlying ideation method into something a working team can actually use: four perspectives, Challenging Orthodoxies, Harnessing Trends, Leveraging Resources and Understanding Needs, that produce new strategic options on demand. That method is now the spine of his keynote and consulting work as President of Imagination Bridge. He has run innovation engagements for Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Bayer, Mars, P&G, Coca-Cola, Philips, Dell and Haier, which is a working comparison set across consumer goods, technology, pharma and industrials. The 2015 Thinkers50 Innovation Award shortlist placed him alongside Vijay Govindarajan and Scott Anthony, the field’s most cited contributors. His current work folds generative AI into the same method, which is the most useful version of the AI-and-innovation conversation a senior team can have. The question is not whether AI changes innovation. It is whether the organisation has a disciplined process strong enough for AI to accelerate, instead of one that AI only makes faster at producing the wrong ideas. Key speaking topics Enterprise innovation capability The 4 Lenses of Innovation methodology AI in the innovation process Business model innovation Strategy under disruption Creative thinking for senior teams Digital transformation Ideal for Chief Strategy Officers, Chief Innovation Officers and CTOs running enterprise innovation programmes Executive committees are redesigning the innovation operating model around AI tools Heads of R&D, product and growth in consumer, industrial and technology businesses Boards are weighing how to make innovation a measurable capability rather than a sponsored activity Audience outcomes A working version of the 4 Lenses of Innovation method that teams can apply to a current strategic question A clearer view of where AI fits inside an innovation process, and where it does not Specific examples of how named global companies have built innovation capability at scale A vocabulary for distinguishing one-off creative wins from a repeatable enterprise capability Concrete prompts for the orthodoxies, trends, resources and unmet needs in the audience’s own market

Why organisations work with Rory Sutherland His Alchemy argument, that businesses leave their most valuable opportunities untapped by optimising for logic rather than psychology, is built on 30 years of commercial practice at Ogilvy, not academic research. He founded and runs a dedicated behavioural science practice inside one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, where small contextual changes have produced large, documented commercial results, including tripling a call centre’s conversion rate through script changes alone. His concept of “psycho-logic” gives commercial teams a named, usable framework for the decisions that resist rational modelling: pricing, positioning, and customer experience chief among them. His two TED talks have passed seven million combined views, meaning his arguments are already part of the strategic vocabulary of many senior audiences, any conversation with him starts further ahead. He founded Nudgestock, the annual festival of behavioural sciences – making him an institutional builder in the field, not simply a commentator on it. Biography highlights Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK; co-founder and leader of Ogilvy’s Behavioural Science Practice, established 2012 Author of Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense (Penguin, 2019); co-author of Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? (2021) Two TED Talks – “Life Lessons from an Ad Man” and “Sweat the Small Stuff” – with over 7 million combined views Former President of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising; former Chair of Judges, Direct Jury, Cannes Lions Fortnightly “The Wiki Man” columnist, The Spectator; founder of Nudgestock, the annual behavioural sciences festival Studied Classics at Christ’s College, Cambridge; joined Ogilvy as a graduate trainee in 1988 Biography In 2012, Rory Sutherland did something unusual for an advertising agency: he built a team of psychology graduates inside Ogilvy and pointed them at commercial problems. The premise was direct. Most organisations optimise for the logical version of what customers want, not the psychological reality of how they decide. Three decades of commercial practice have made that premise difficult to argue with. His 2019 book Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense sets out the argument in full. Human decision-making, Sutherland contends, follows a “psycho-logic”, a coherent but non-rational set of rules governing what people buy, how much they’ll pay, and how satisfied they feel. Richard Thaler and Robert Cialdini both appear in its pages; Nassim Nicholas Taleb described it as “a breakthrough book.” The Behavioural Science Practice he founded at Ogilvy tests these ideas commercially. Small contextual adjustments – changes to a call centre script, a reframing of a product’s positioning, a tweak to the sequence of a customer journey – have produced measurable results. It is the kind of evidence that makes his argument practical rather than purely theoretical. He served as President of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising and as Chair of the Judges for Cannes Lions’ Direct Jury. His two TED talks have passed seven million combined views. He writes a fortnightly column in The Spectator and founded Nudgestock, the annual festival of behavioural sciences. Key speaking topics Behavioural economics and commercial strategy Consumer psychology and decision-making Perception, value, and pricing psychology The limits of data-driven marketing Creativity and non-rational problem-solving Behavioural design and customer experience Nudge theory in organisational contexts Ideal for Chief Marketing Officers and marketing leadership teams rethinking growth strategy Commercial strategy and innovation leaders exploring alternatives to pure data-led optimisation Senior executives and boards examining how psychological insight can improve pricing, product design, and customer experience Conference audiences in financial services, retail, consumer goods, and technology where customer behaviour directly drives commercial performance Audience outcomes A named framework, “psycho-logic”, for identifying where logical optimisation is producing diminishing returns in marketing and commercial strategy Specific, documented examples of small behavioural interventions that produced large commercial results A clearer understanding of why the most effective growth moves often look counterintuitive, and how to make the internal case for them Practical grounding in behavioural economics principles applicable to pricing, customer experience, and product design A more honest audit of where data-driven approaches reach their limits and what to reach for instead

Why organisations work with Rohit Talwar His “Very Human Future” argument that the central strategic task is keeping human outcomes at the centre of AI and technology adoption, not merely managing adoption itself gives leadership teams a framing that is both commercially grounded and defensible at board level. He edits and contributes to multi-author research books that aggregate the work of 60+ futurists and practitioners across a single question; this publishing model means his content draws on current collective intelligence rather than a single perspective frozen at a point in time. As Co-Chair of the UK Node of The Millennium Project, he sits inside a global futures research network. His material reflects active scenario-building methodology, not retrospective trend commentary. He builds entire talks around sector-specific strategic implications: financial services, aviation, local economies, rather than delivering a generic future-of-technology keynote with surface-level industry references. Ranked among the Global Gurus Top 30 Futurist Professionals for 2025, he is a verifiably credentialled figure in an industry where credibility is difficult to assess. Biography highlights CEO and founder of Fast Future, a foresight research, publishing, and advisory firm Editor or lead contributor to more than eight books including A Very Human Future, Beyond Genuine Stupidity: Ensuring AI Serves Humanity, and The Future of Business Co-Chair of the UK Node of The Millennium Project, a global futures research organisation Ranked in the Global Gurus Top 30 Futurist Professionals for 2025; previously profiled by The Independent as a top 10 global futurist MBA from London Business School; BA in Electronics and Computer Science from the University of Keele; early career at British Telecom on AI research and at Andersen Consulting Delivered more than 1,500 keynotes and workshops across 70+ countries on six continents; regular contributor to international news networks on technology and innovation Biography Fast Future is not a typical consultancy. Rohit Talwar built it as a research and publishing operation, an ongoing mechanism for aggregating the work of futurists, practitioners, and emerging thinkers into books and advisory frameworks. That structural choice shapes the quality of what he brings to a leadership conversation. His central argument, developed across titles including A Very Human Future and Beyond Genuine Stupidity: Ensuring AI Serves Humanity, is specific: the question organisations are not asking clearly enough is not whether to adopt AI, but what kind of organisation they want to be when the adoption is complete. Strategy that treats AI as a technical problem consistently misses the governance, cultural, and human-capital decisions that determine whether the investment pays off. Talwar holds an MBA from London Business School and began his career in AI research at British Telecom before moving into management consulting. His foresight work is grounded in structured methodology: he serves as Co-Chair of the UK Node of The Millennium Project, a global futures research body, and brings scenario-building rigour to topics that, in other hands, often remain speculative. The Global Gurus research organisation ranked him among the Top 30 Futurist Professionals for 2025. The effect on senior audiences evidenced consistently across client feedback is a specific one: not inspiration, but productive disruption of existing strategic assumptions. His talks are built to destabilise complacent planning rather than to validate it. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and exponential technologies Strategic foresight and scenario planning Human-centred responses to digital transformation Business model innovation in the face of disruption Global megatrends and drivers of change The future of financial services and fintech Long-range futures and organisational resilience Ideal for Executive leadership teams and boards stress-testing long-range strategy Chief Strategy Officers and Chief Innovation Officers building foresight capability Financial services leadership navigating AI and platform disruption Conference and association audiences in technology, aviation, professional services, and public sector Audience outcomes A structured vocabulary for discussing AI strategy that goes beyond adoption and automation Practical scenario-thinking tools that can be applied directly in strategy workshops Clearer understanding of which emerging technologies require immediate strategic response versus longer-horizon monitoring A sharper framing of the organisational and human-capital implications of accelerating technological change Reduced gap between awareness of disruption and the leadership confidence to act on it

Why organisations work with Roger Myerson He is one of three living architects of mechanism design, the field that won the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and now underpins serious thinking on auction design, procurement, regulation and incentive contracts. His revelation principle and revenue-equivalence results are not abstractions for a senior team setting bid rules, supplier contracts or commission structures. They tell you when an incentive system can be made truth-telling at all, and when no rule will work without changing the information environment. He occupies the David L. Pearson Distinguished Service Professorship in Global Conflict Studies at Chicago, which means his second body of work, on political leadership, federalism and post-conflict state-building, is directly relevant to boards exposed to weak-institution markets. His textbook Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict has trained a generation of economists, regulators and strategists, which makes him unusually effective with audiences who already speak some of the language and want the original source rather than a popularisation. Past president of both the Econometric Society and the Game Theory Society, member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations: a level of peer recognition that travels into board rooms and policy settings without further explanation. Biography highlights Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, 2007, shared with Leonid Hurwicz and Eric Maskin for the foundations of mechanism design theory. David L. Pearson Distinguished Service Professor of Global Conflict Studies, University of Chicago, with appointments in the Harris School of Public Policy and the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics. PhD in applied mathematics, Harvard University, supervised by Kenneth Arrow; twenty-five years on the faculty at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management before moving to Chicago in 2001. Author of Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict (Harvard University Press) and Probability Models for Economic Decisions (now in a second edition with MIT Press). Past President of the Econometric Society (2009) and the Game Theory Society (2012 to 2014); Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize, 2009. Member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the Council on Foreign Relations. Biography Most rules inside an organisation are written as if everyone has the same information and roughly aligned interests. Procurement contracts, sales commissions, internal capital allocation, joint-venture terms: the rule is set, and then people behave as the rule incentivises them to behave, which is rarely what the designer intended. Mechanism design is the formal answer to that problem, and Roger Myerson is one of the three economists who built it. The 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences recognised that body of work, shared with Leonid Hurwicz and Eric Maskin. Within it, two of Myerson’s results carry the most operational weight. The revelation principle tells designers when a system can in principle be made truth-telling. The revenue-equivalence theorem, derived in his auction work, tells sellers when superficially different bidding rules produce the same outcome and when they do not. Senior teams designing auctions, bid processes or contracts use these ideas whether they cite him or not. His training is Harvard, applied mathematics, supervised by Kenneth Arrow. The career sat at Northwestern’s Kellogg School for twenty-five years before he moved to the University of Chicago in 2001, where he now holds the David L. Pearson Distinguished Service Professorship in Global Conflict Studies, with joint appointments in the Harris School of Public Policy and the Griffin Department of Economics. Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict, published by Harvard University Press in 1991, remains a standard graduate text. The Pearson chair signals the second arc of his work. Over the past fifteen years he has applied the same incentive-and-information lens to political institutions: how leaders build reputations, how federal structures change the supply of credible politicians, how post-conflict states succeed or fail at building durable government. For boards with serious exposure to weak-institution markets, that is a different and rarer kind of advisor than a geopolitical commentator. Key speaking topics Mechanism design and incentive systems under asymmetric information Auction design and competitive bidding Game theory for strategy and negotiation Contract and procurement design Political economy of leadership and state-building Federalism and the design of democratic institutions Ideal for Boards and executive teams designing auctions, bid processes, procurement frameworks or major partnership contracts. CSOs, CFOs and corporate development leaders working on incentive structures, internal capital allocation or commission and bonus design. Regulators, central bank teams and policy bodies working on market design, spectrum or asset auctions, and institutional reform. Leadership teams of multinationals with substantive exposure to weak-institution or post-conflict markets. Audience outcomes A working understanding of mechanism design as a tool for setting rules when the other side knows more than you do. The ability to recognise when an auction, bid or contract structure is fighting against the information environment rather than working with it. A clearer view of where incentive design can solve a coordination problem and where the underlying information asymmetry has to be changed first. A grounded perspective on how political incentives shape the operating environment in fragile or institutionally weak markets. Direct exposure to one of the three living architects of the field, with the precision that brings to questions teams are usually forced to answer with intuition.

Why organisations work with Robert Herjavec Two major business exits anchor the credibility. BRAK Systems sold to AT&T Canada for $30.2 million in 2000, and Herjavec Group’s majority stake sold to Apax Partners in 2021. Senior teams hear from an operator who has built and exited at scale. Seventeen years as an original Shark on ABC’s Shark Tank, evaluating thousands of founder pitches in real time. Audiences get a working investor’s read on what closes a deal and what kills one. A sales-first view of business growth. You Don’t Have to Be a Shark, his Wall Street Journal bestseller, frames sales as the universal skill of business and gives non-sales people a usable discipline. Operator-level cybersecurity context from founding and running Herjavec Group, once one of Canada’s largest information security firms, before its 2022 merger into Cyderes. Useful when boards want the threat landscape explained without a vendor agenda. An immigrant-founder narrative with verifiable outcomes. Arrived in Halifax at age eight from communist Yugoslavia, then built and exited multiple technology businesses while helping launch one of the most successful business reality formats on network television. Biography highlights Founder of Herjavec Group (2003); served as CEO until stepping down in September 2024 following the company’s 2022 merger with Fishtech Group and rebrand to Cyderes Sold BRAK Systems to AT&T Canada for $30.2 million in 2000 Original cast member on ABC’s Shark Tank since the show’s 2009 debut; also a panelist on Canada’s Dragons’ Den and Shark Tank Australia Author of three business books: Driven (2010), The Will to Win (2013), and You Don’t Have to Be a Shark (St. Martin’s Press, 2016), a Wall Street Journal bestseller Recipient of the 2012 Ernst & Young Ontario Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Technology and the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal BA in English literature and political science, University of Toronto Biography Most leaders manage businesses someone else built. Robert Herjavec has founded and exited three. BRAK Systems, the cybersecurity firm he started in his basement, was sold to AT&T Canada for $30.2 million in 2000. Ramp Network, which he ran as VP of Sales, was acquired by Nokia for $225 million. In 2003 he founded Herjavec Group, which grew into one of Canada’s largest information security businesses. Apax Partners bought a majority stake in 2021. After a 2022 merger with Fishtech Group it became Cyderes, where Herjavec served as CEO until September 2024 and remains an investor and board member. He has been an original Shark on ABC’s Shark Tank since the show’s 2009 debut. Across seventeen seasons he has heard thousands of founder pitches and decided in real time which to back and which to walk away from. The result is an unusual stockpile of pattern recognition on what closes a deal and what kills one from the investor’s side of the table. His three books work the same vein. Driven (2010) and The Will to Win (2013) were simultaneous Globe and Mail bestsellers about how persistence and self-discipline build careers. You Don’t Have to Be a Shark (St. Martin’s Press, 2016) reached the Wall Street Journal bestseller list, arguing that sales is a teachable craft any senior leader can use. He won the 2012 Ernst & Young Ontario Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Technology and was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal by the Governor-General of Canada for outstanding service. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and the founder mindset Sales as a business discipline Building and scaling technology companies Resilience and persistence in business The cybersecurity threat landscape for enterprise leaders Growth strategy and going from zero to scale Pitch evaluation and the investor’s perspective Ideal for Sales kickoffs and revenue leadership offsites where credibility on selling as a teachable discipline is the priority Annual conferences and flagship events where a marquee, household-name keynote needs to anchor the agenda on entrepreneurship and growth Founder-led businesses and high-growth firms whose audiences want an operator with multiple verified exits behind him Cybersecurity, fintech, and enterprise technology audiences, where his industry pedigree adds weight to the broader entrepreneurship and growth conversation Audience outcomes A sharper read on what actually closes a sales conversation and what kills one before it starts The discipline of starting from zero, told by someone who arrived in Halifax with one suitcase and built three businesses worth nine-figure exits An investor’s lens on how to evaluate ideas and the founders behind them, built from seventeen years inside the Shark Tank panel A working argument that persistence and discipline outperform inherited advantage, with a verifiable career arc behind it: BRAK to AT&T, Ramp to Nokia, Herjavec Group to Apax A board-level perspective on cybersecurity risk informed by two decades inside one of Canada’s largest enterprise security operators

Why organisations work with Robert B Tucker He has spent four decades inside the innovation practice of large companies, with named research underpinning each book: 50+ innovator interviews behind Winning the Innovation Game, 23 vanguard companies behind Driving Growth Through Innovation. His Forbes column and his international bestseller Managing the Future give him an unusually wide read on what is actually shifting in markets, technology and customer behaviour, not what is trending in the innovation press. He brings named frameworks the room can use afterwards: the seven I-Skills, the D.I.T.O. method, the seven navigational mindsets. Each maps to a specific leadership decision. His client work spans Nokia, IBM, American Express, Nestle and the economic development ministries of Singapore, Dubai and Morocco, so he speaks to commercial and public-sector audiences with equal grounding. He treats innovation as a portfolio and capability question, not a creativity exhortation, which is what senior leaders need when the board is asking why pilots are not producing returns. Biography highlights President of The Innovation Resource, Santa Barbara; consultant and keynote speaker since 1986. Former adjunct professor, UCLA. Author of Managing the Future: 10 Driving Forces of Change (international bestseller, translated into 13 languages, endorsed by Andy Grove of Intel), Driving Growth Through Innovation, Innovation Is Everybody’s Business (John Wiley), Winning the Innovation Game, and Build a Better Future: 7 Mindsets for Navigating the Age of Acceleration. Forbes contributor on innovation trends; published in Strategy & Leadership, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Journal of Business Strategy, Harvard Management Update. Recipient of the BrandLaureate Brand Personality Award from the Asia Pacific Brands Foundation for contributions to innovation. Featured on PBS, Bloomberg and CNBC’s The Business of Innovation series. Biography Innovation as a corporate function is now mature; innovation as a corporate discipline often is not. Robert B Tucker has spent forty years documenting the difference. His first book, Winning the Innovation Game, was built on interviews with more than fifty leading innovators in 1986, before innovation had a department or a budget line. The argument then, and now, is that companies which produce repeatable growth treat innovation as an operating practice, not a posture. That argument runs through his later work. Driving Growth Through Innovation studied 23 vanguard companies and isolated the practices that separated them from peers who talked the same language but produced different results. Innovation Is Everybody’s Business, published by John Wiley, sets out the seven I-Skills he sees as the practical competence behind those practices. Managing the Future, an international bestseller endorsed by Intel’s Andy Grove and translated into thirteen languages, broadened the lens to the macro forces leadership teams have to read. His most recent book, Build a Better Future, addresses what he calls the Age of Acceleration: a period in which climatological, geopolitical, technological and social shifts compound faster than most planning cycles can absorb. The book introduces the D.I.T.O. framework and seven navigational mindsets aimed at senior leaders deciding where to place capital, talent and attention. Tucker is president of The Innovation Resource in Santa Barbara, a former UCLA adjunct professor, and a Forbes contributor on innovation trends. His client work, from IBM, Nokia, American Express and Nestle to the economic development ministries of Singapore, Dubai and Morocco, gives him a working brief on what innovation discipline looks like when the operating reality is complex and the upside is contested. Key speaking topics Innovation as a managed discipline Strategic foresight and the Age of Acceleration Driving growth through innovation portfolios Innovation skills for individual contributors and leaders The seven navigational mindsets for senior leaders Future trends and market disruption Building a culture that produces innovation outcomes Ideal for CEOs, CSOs and corporate strategy teams wrestling with where the next growth wave actually comes from Heads of innovation, R&D and transformation responsible for converting pilots into operating advantage Boards and senior leadership teams setting long-range direction under accelerating change Public-sector and economic development leaders shaping national or regional innovation agendas Audience outcomes A clearer view of which innovation practices separate vanguard companies from peers that talk the same language A named framework, the seven I-Skills, that maps innovation behaviour to individual and team capability The D.I.T.O. method and the seven navigational mindsets as a working reference for senior decisions under acceleration A read on the macro forces that change the assumptions underneath strategy, capital allocation and talent A more honest internal conversation about which innovation activity is producing returns and which is theatre

Why organisations work with Rich Karlgaard Four decades of close-range observation of Silicon Valley business models, written from the editorial chair of Forbes, give him a fluent read on how technology cycles change the rules of competition. The Soft Edge sets out a specific argument that durable advantage comes from trust, intelligence, teams, taste and story, not from strategy and execution alone, and gives boards a vocabulary for the cultural side of growth. Late Bloomers challenges the early-achievement orthodoxy in corporate hiring and promotion, useful for leaders rethinking talent pipelines, succession and the cost of writing off mid-career performers. Team Genius, co-authored with Michael S. Malone, draws on research into team size, composition and dynamics, giving operating leaders a structured way to think about how high-performing groups are actually built. Karlgaard moderates and panels at scale at events such as the Milken Institute Global Conference and the ASU+GSV Summit, comfortable in front of CEO and investor audiences and able to push beyond a prepared script. Biography highlights Editor-at-large and futurist, Forbes Media; publisher of Forbes magazine, 1998 to 2018. Author of Late Bloomers (Currency, 2019), The Soft Edge (Jossey-Bass, 2014), Team Genius (HarperBusiness, 2015, with Michael S. Malone) and Life 2.0 (2004). Long-running Forbes columnist, “Innovation Rules” (formerly “Digital Rules”); regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal opinion pages and panellist on Forbes on FOX. Co-founder of the Churchill Club, Silicon Valley’s largest public business and technology forum, and of Upside magazine and Forbes ASAP. Northern California winner, Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year, 1997. Featured on NPR for Late Bloomers and a regular speaker at the Milken Institute Global Conference and the ASU+GSV Summit. Biography The companies that compound advantage over decades tend to look ordinary up close. They are not always the fastest or the most aggressive. What they share is a set of cultural conditions, trust, taste, intelligence about their own people, that competitors cannot easily copy. That is the argument running through Rich Karlgaard’s work at Forbes and in his books. Karlgaard has watched Silicon Valley from the editorial chair of a major business title for more than two decades. He was publisher of Forbes from 1998 to 2018 and is now editor-at-large and futurist for Forbes Media. He co-founded Upside magazine, Forbes ASAP, and the Churchill Club, the largest business and technology forum in Silicon Valley, work that earned him the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for Northern California in 1997. His books map a single problem from different angles. The Soft Edge (Jossey-Bass, 2014) argues that strategy and execution are necessary but not sufficient, and that durable competitive advantage now sits in five cultural variables led by trust. Team Genius, co-written with Michael S. Malone, applies that lens to team design, drawing on research into how size, composition and conflict actually drive performance. Late Bloomers (Currency, 2019) takes the argument into talent strategy, challenging the SAT-and-startup-founder logic that writes off the people who do their best work at forty, fifty or sixty. For a board or executive audience, Karlgaard’s value is in being a serious commercial voice for the unfashionable side of growth. He does not dispute the importance of speed or technology, he lives inside both, but he treats culture, trust and patient talent development as commercial inputs with measurable returns, not as soft virtues. That framing tends to land with senior leaders who have run the playbook of relentless execution and seen the limits. Key speaking topics Innovation and the future of business Culture as competitive advantage High-performing teams Talent, late bloomers and the corporate path Silicon Valley, technology cycles and disruption Leadership in the age of smart machines Ideal for CEO, board and senior leadership audiences setting innovation and growth strategy CHROs and talent leaders rethinking hiring, promotion and succession beyond early-career markers Investor and CFO audiences who want a fluent read on Silicon Valley business models from a long-standing editorial vantage Conference programmes that need a credible moderator or panellist for executive and investor sessions Audience outcomes A working argument for why durable advantage now sits in cultural and human variables, not just strategy and execution A sharper view of how high-performing teams are actually built, drawn from the research behind Team Genius A direct challenge to the early-achievement bias in corporate hiring, promotion and succession, with named examples A current read on which technology cycles and Silicon Valley operating models matter for the next planning horizon

Why organisations work with Reed Hastings The «Freedom and Responsibility» framework – documented in the Netflix Culture Deck and codified in No Rules Rules – gives organisations a named, sequenced model for replacing bureaucracy with accountability: not a philosophy, but a tested operating system built across a 200-person startup through to a 300-million-subscriber global company. Hastings applied the same cultural principles across four distinct business-model transitions at Netflix – DVD rental, streaming, original content production, and global expansion into 190 countries – providing evidence that the model holds across radically different operating contexts, not just favourable ones. His 2025 appointment to the board of Anthropic by its Long Term Benefit Trust positions him to speak directly to AI governance challenges at board level, based on direct engagement with one of the sector’s leading AI safety organisations – not commentary from the outside. He has publicly documented a major failure – the 2011 Qwikster decision, widely covered in the press – as a case study in what his own cultural model gets wrong under pressure, giving audiences honest access to failure alongside success. A $50 million commitment to Bowdoin College’s AI and Humanity research programme gives him a substantive, funded position on AI’s workforce and societal impact – relevant to CHROs, boards, and executive teams now building their own AI governance frameworks. Biography highlights Co-founder and executive chairman of Netflix; CEO from 1998 to 2023 – led the company through four business-model transformations, from DVD rental to global streaming platform and original content studio Co-authored No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention (2020) with INSEAD professor Erin Meyer – New York Times bestseller, shortlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award Two published TED talks: «How Netflix changed entertainment – and where it’s headed» (TED2018) and «3 secrets to Netflix’s success» (TED2020) Former board member of Microsoft (2007–2012) and Facebook/Meta (2011–2019); current board member of Bloomberg and Anthropic (appointed 2025) President of the California State Board of Education (2000–2004); current board member of KIPP, City Fund, and the Charter School Growth Fund BA in Mathematics, Bowdoin College; MSCS in Artificial Intelligence, Stanford University; Peace Corps mathematics teacher in Swaziland Biography Reed Hastings built the management case at Netflix – across 25 years and four business-model transitions – that organisations scale best when they remove controls, not add them. The result was the «Freedom and Responsibility» framework, first documented in an internal Culture Deck made public in 2009. Hastings and INSEAD professor Erin Meyer later codified it in No Rules Rules (2020), a New York Times bestseller shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year. The framework’s argument runs in sequence: high talent density creates the conditions for radical candor, which in turn enables leaders to eliminate policies, approval layers, and bureaucratic controls. This ordered logic is what separates the Netflix model from generic arguments for employee autonomy. It was not derived from a single favourable configuration – it was tested across DVD, streaming, original production, and international expansion simultaneously, and it broke and was rebuilt along the way. Hastings has spoken publicly about the Qwikster decision as a case in what the model costs when applied badly. Before Netflix, Hastings founded Pure Software in 1991, took it public in 1995, and sold it to Rational Software. That experience of scaling an engineer-led startup into a public corporation shaped his understanding of what happens to culture as organisations grow and complicate. It is the origin of the argument, not merely its backdrop. Hastings sits on the board of Anthropic, appointed in 2025 by its Long Term Benefit Trust to help guide AI development for long-term societal benefit. A $50 million gift to Bowdoin College to establish an AI and Humanity research programme adds institutional weight to that engagement. For boards and leadership teams now navigating AI governance, he brings a practitioner’s perspective – not an observer’s. Key speaking topics Organisational culture and management design The Freedom and Responsibility framework Talent density and high-performance teams Scaling technology-driven businesses AI governance and the societal impact of technology Corporate governance and board-level leadership Education reform and systemic institutional leadership Ideal for CEOs and executive leadership teams navigating growth, culture change, or organisational redesign CHROs and people leaders building high-performance cultures at scale Board directors and governance leads in technology, media, and high-growth organisations Senior leadership teams with active AI governance or AI adoption agendas Audience outcomes A concrete understanding of the «Freedom and Responsibility» framework – and the specific conditions (talent density, radical candor) required before eliminating controls, not after Clarity on how Netflix’s cultural principles functioned as a sequenced system across multiple business-model transitions, including where the model failed A working frame for evaluating which management policies and controls serve organisational performance and which impede it Board-level perspective on AI governance and the human-impact questions that senior leaders now need to address with institutional seriousness Practical reference points from a 25-year operating record – including documented failures – for leadership teams working through their own culture and performance challenges