Business Strategy & Growth speakers

Why organisations work with Jochen Zeitz He originated the Environmental Profit & Loss Account at PUMA – the first methodology to assign monetary values to environmental impact across a full corporate supply chain. The UK government cited it in its 2011 Natural Environment White Paper as a best-practice case in sustainable business. He has led turnarounds at three global brands – PUMA, Kering, and Harley-Davidson – as the accountable executive. The sustainability work he is known for was built under genuine commercial pressure, not alongside it. His commercial record – approximately $4 billion in annual PUMA revenue, around 4,000% share price growth, and three Financial Times Strategist of the Year honours – separates his sustainability argument from advocacy. Boards engage with this material as strategy. His 4Cs framework – conservation, community, culture, commerce – is a tested model for aligning environmental accountability with long-term commercial viability, embedded in a live enterprise across 50,000 acres of wildlife habitat in Kenya. As co-founder of The B Team with Sir Richard Branson – a coalition of 24 global business leaders including Paul Polman and Mo Ibrahim – he has been central to building the most credible executive-led case for redefining the corporate bottom line. Biography highlights Chairman and CEO of PUMA for 18 years (1993-2011); the youngest CEO in German history to head a publicly listed company, appointed at age 30 Led PUMA from near-bankruptcy to approximately $4 billion in annual revenue, with share price growth of approximately 4,000% Conceived and launched the Environmental Profit & Loss Account at PUMA (2011) – the first monetary valuation of environmental impact across a corporate supply chain; cited as a best-practice case in the UK government’s Natural Environment White Paper Chairman of Kering’s Sustainable Development Committee and CSO of Kering’s Sport & Lifestyle division; President, CEO and Chairman of Harley-Davidson (2020-2025) Financial Times Strategist of the Year three times; Germany’s Federal Cross of Merit (2004); ZSL Conservation Fellow; Honorary Warden of Kenya Co-author of The Breakthrough Challenge (with John Elkington, 2014) and The Manager and the Monk (2012, published in 15 languages); co-founder of The B Team with Sir Richard Branson and of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa Biography Until 2011, no major corporation had put a monetary value on what it cost the natural world. PUMA changed that. Jochen Zeitz conceived the Environmental Profit & Loss Account – the first framework to assign monetary values to environmental impact across a full corporate supply chain. It quantified PUMA’s 2010 footprint at €145 million and established a commercial language for environmental accountability that organisations across multiple sectors have since adapted. The EP&L came out of 18 years as PUMA’s CEO – a tenure that began when Zeitz was 30 and the company was near bankruptcy. He became the youngest CEO in German history to head a public company. Under his leadership, PUMA grew annual revenue to approximately $4 billion and share price by around 4,000%. That commercial track record is what makes the sustainability framework credible: it was built not alongside a turnaround, but as part of one. At Kering, Zeitz chaired the Sustainable Development Committee and served as CSO of the Sport & Lifestyle division, embedding the same approach across a portfolio of global luxury brands. He became President, CEO and Chairman of Harley-Davidson in 2020, leading the Rewire and Hardwire strategic resets that refocused the company on its most profitable segments and strongest brand identity. He retired from Harley-Davidson in October 2025. Beyond his executive roles, Zeitz co-founded The B Team with Sir Richard Branson, convening global business leaders to advance a redefined model of corporate accountability. He co-authored The Breakthrough Challenge (with John Elkington, 2014) and The Manager and the Monk (2012, published in 15 languages). The Financial Times has named him Strategist of the Year three times. His 4Cs framework – linking conservation, community, culture and commerce – underpins the Zeitz Foundation’s work across 50,000 acres of wildlife habitat in Kenya. Key speaking topics Environmental Profit and Loss accounting Corporate turnaround and brand transformation ESG integration into commercial strategy Responsible capitalism and redefined value creation Conservation-commerce models and the 4Cs framework Purpose-driven corporate governance Ideal for Boards and executive leadership teams navigating ESG integration into commercial strategy Chief Sustainability Officers and ESG leads building environmental measurement frameworks Corporate strategy and transformation teams leading large-scale brand or business model renewal Investor forums and governance audiences focused on long-term value creation and accountability Audience outcomes A clearer understanding of how environmental impact can be quantified in commercial terms, using the EP&L as a working reference Practical perspective on the conditions under which sustainability can be embedded into core strategy rather than treated as a reporting obligation A framework for aligning conservation, community, culture and commerce as mutually reinforcing business priorities Insight into leading corporate turnarounds that require simultaneous commercial discipline and long-term accountability Grounded context for what responsible capitalism means at board level, drawn from governance experience across three major global brands

Why organisations work with John Hall He has built two commercial businesses around the problem he speaks on: Influence & Co., which scaled content as a managed marketing function for senior executives, and Calendar, which monetises the attention his first company taught leaders to capture. Top of Mind (McGraw-Hill) gives sales and marketing teams a named operating model for staying memorable to specific decision-makers, not a generic content playbook. Weekly Forbes and Inc. columns, plus contributions to Harvard Business Review, Fortune and Fast Company, mean his frameworks are tested in public against a senior business readership every week. Influence & Co. was ranked No. 72 on Forbes’ Most Promising Companies in America and won EY Entrepreneur of the Year for Best Emerging Company, so the underlying methodology has commercial proof, not only platform reach. He translates content marketing out of the marketing department and into a CEO and revenue conversation, which is where buying decisions about brand authority actually sit. Biography highlights Co-founder of Calendar, a scheduling platform used by millions of professionals. Co-founder and former CEO of Influence & Co., the content marketing firm ranked No. 72 on Forbes’ Most Promising Companies in America. Author of Top of Mind, published by McGraw-Hill in 2017. Weekly columnist for Forbes and Inc. Contributor to Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company, Entrepreneur and Mashable. EY Entrepreneur of the Year (Best Emerging Company) and Business Journals’ Top 100 Visionaries. Described by Inc. as “one of the most powerful people in media you’ve never met” and by Forbes as a “must-see keynote speaker”. Biography Most companies treat brand visibility as a marketing line item. Buyers experience it as the shortlist they already had in their heads before procurement opened a process. Closing that gap, between how visibility is funded internally and how it is consumed externally, is the commercial problem John Hall has worked on for more than a decade. Top of Mind, his McGraw-Hill book, sets out the operating logic. Trust is built by useful content delivered consistently to the specific people whose decisions matter, and it compounds. The book is not a content marketing manual. It is a framework for executive and corporate visibility, built from running Influence & Co., the agency that productised the discipline for senior leaders and was ranked No. 72 on Forbes’ Most Promising Companies in America. Hall scaled that thesis into a second business, Calendar, which sits on the other side of the equation. Once a leader has captured attention, time becomes the constraint. Together the two companies bracket the commercial problem his keynotes address: how to be the name buyers reach for, and how to manage the demand that creates. His weekly columns for Forbes and Inc., and contributions to Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company, Entrepreneur and Mashable, keep the argument public and tested. EY named him Entrepreneur of the Year for Best Emerging Company. The Business Journals listed him among its Top 100 Visionaries. Key speaking topics Building executive and corporate visibility Content as a trust-building system Sales influence and decision-maker engagement Top-of-mind brand strategy Time management and executive productivity Talent attraction through company culture and content Ideal for CMOs, CROs and heads of brand reassessing how content drives pipeline CEOs and founders building personal and corporate authority in a contested market Sales leadership teams measuring trust as a leading indicator of revenue Marketing and communications functions inside professional services, B2B technology and financial services Audience outcomes A working definition of top-of-mind status and the specific behaviours that produce it inside their organisation Named criteria for deciding which content earns attention from senior buyers and which dilutes it A clearer line between brand spend and revenue contribution, framed for finance and board conversations Tactics for converting executive expertise into published authority without consuming executive time

Why organisations work with John Mackey He took one Austin store to 540 locations and $22B in annual sales over four decades, so his account of stakeholder strategy is operating evidence, not theory. He co-authored the book, Conscious Capitalism (HBR Press, 2013), that gave the stakeholder argument its working vocabulary inside boardrooms and business schools. Few founders have lived the full arc he describes: IPO, activist investor pressure, a $13.7B sale to Amazon, and a second venture built on the same philosophy. His Love.Life venture applies the same conscious-business model to preventative healthcare, giving audiences a current case in a different sector. He speaks to capitalism’s critics from inside the system, useful for boards under pressure on purpose, ESG credibility and the social licence to operate. Biography highlights Co-founded Whole Foods Market in 1978; served as CEO until September 2022, growing the business to 540 stores in the US, UK and Canada and over $22B in annual sales. Co-author of Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013), New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. Author of Conscious Leadership: Elevating Humanity Through Business (2020) and the memoir The Whole Story: Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism (2024). Co-founder and CEO of Love.Life, an integrated preventative healthcare and wellness venture, with its flagship centre in El Segundo, California. Inducted into the World Retail Congress Hall of Fame (2022); recognised by Fortune as one of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders” and Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year US Overall Winner. Board roles include Conscious Capitalism Inc., The Motley Fool, Cato Institute, Institute for Cultural Evolution and Students for Liberty. Biography Whole Foods Market began in 1978 as a single store on a side street in Austin, Texas. Forty-four years later, when John Mackey stepped down as CEO, it had 540 stores, 105,000 team members and $22 billion in annual sales. That trajectory is the spine of his authority on stakeholder capitalism. The argument he co-built around it became Conscious Capitalism (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013), a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller co-authored with Raj Sisodia. The book set out four operating tenets, higher purpose, stakeholder integration, conscious leadership, conscious culture, that boards and business schools now use as a working vocabulary for purpose-led business. Mackey has also lived the harder parts of the case. He took Whole Foods through an IPO, public clashes with critics on both left and right, sustained activist investor pressure from Jana Partners, and the $13.7 billion sale to Amazon in 2017. His 2024 memoir The Whole Story sets out what those moments cost and what they confirmed. He now runs Love.Life, a preventative healthcare and wellness company he co-founded with former Whole Foods executives, applying the same conscious-business model to a sector he argues is structurally set up to manage disease rather than prevent it. The work positions him as a serious voice on stakeholder strategy, board-level purpose, and the next test of conscious capitalism in healthcare. Key speaking topics Conscious Capitalism and stakeholder strategy Founder-led growth and scaling a category-defining business Purpose, culture and the operating model behind them Leadership through activist pressure, acquisition and succession Preventative healthcare and the future of wellness Higher-purpose leadership at board level Entrepreneurship and long-horizon company building Ideal for Boards and CEOs reframing purpose as an operating model rather than a communications layer Founders and senior leaders scaling mission-led businesses through institutional capital and public-market pressure Retail, consumer, grocery and health sector leadership teams Conferences on capitalism, ESG credibility and the social licence to operate Audience outcomes A working account of how stakeholder strategy held together through four decades of growth, IPO, activism and acquisition The four-tenet architecture of Conscious Capitalism applied to current board and executive decisions A founder’s view of when to fight activist investors and when to sell A live case on building a second purpose-led business, this time in healthcare Sharper language for explaining purpose to investors, employees and customers without losing credibility on either side

Why organisations work with John Ridding He ran the playbook the rest of the news industry copied. The FT moved to a paywall in 2002, a metered model in 2007, and trial-led subscriptions in 2015, reaching one million subscribers in 2019 and 2.9 million paying users by 2023. He brings the inside view of a cross-border acquisition that worked. The 2015 sale of the FT from Pearson to Nikkei is one of the cleanest examples of a Japanese parent acquiring a Western media asset without breaking it. He has signed the first UK national publisher licensing deal with OpenAI, which gives him a current operator perspective on how content businesses negotiate with foundation model companies, not a commentator’s view. He spent 35 years inside one institution and ran it for almost 20. That tenure is unusual at his level and gives him a coherent argument about long-horizon transformation rather than a sequence of quarterly bets. Biography highlights Chief Executive Officer of the FT Group, May 2006 to June 2025. Special Executive Director of Nikkei, parent company of the Financial Times since 2015. Honorary Chairman of the Financial Times following his transition from CEO. Previously Publisher of FT Asia and Chairman of Pearson Asia, 2003 to 2006. Foreign correspondent for the FT in Seoul, Paris and Hong Kong, with reporting from China, Japan, India and Indonesia. First-class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Oxford University. Biography The reader-revenue model now treated as orthodoxy across global news media did not exist as a serious commercial strategy when the Financial Times began charging for online journalism in 2002. The decision was contested inside the building and dismissed outside it. Two decades later, it is the model the New York Times, the Washington Post and most of the European broadsheets have adopted in some form. John Ridding ran that experiment to scale. As CEO of the FT Group from 2006 to 2025, he took the paper from print-led economics to a paying audience of 2.9 million and revenues of GBP 500m, with more than two-thirds of revenue from digital subscriptions. The headline numbers matter, but the operating choices behind them are what executives in other sectors find useful: how to price confidently when the market expects free, how to redesign the product around habit rather than transactions, how to build a direct data relationship with a reader. He also managed two structural events most CEOs never face. The 2015 sale of the FT from Pearson to Nikkei moved a British editorial institution into Japanese ownership without disturbing the journalism. In April 2024 the FT became the first UK national publisher to license its content to OpenAI, an early test of how content owners negotiate with foundation model companies on terms rather than waiting to be scraped. Before running the business he reported from it. Postings in Seoul, Paris and Hong Kong covered the Asian financial crisis, the rise of China as a commercial power, and the early years of the Eurozone. That reporter background is the throughline. He talks about the digital subscription business the way a foreign correspondent talks about a country, in specifics, not abstractions. Key speaking topics Subscription and reader-revenue business models Digital transformation of legacy businesses AI and the future of content, media and intellectual property Cross-border M&A and post-acquisition integration Global business through the lens of news and capital flows Leadership of long-horizon transformation The economics of trust in a fragmented information market Ideal for CEOs and CFOs of subscription, media, publishing and content businesses Boards of legacy companies designing direct customer-revenue strategies Chief Strategy and Chief Commercial Officers wrestling with pricing in commoditising markets Senior teams negotiating content, IP or data licensing terms with AI platforms Audience outcomes A clear account of how a legacy business shifted from advertising to direct customer revenue, with the sequencing decisions that made it work A framework for thinking about pricing, product and data as one operating system rather than three departments An informed read on what content owners are actually negotiating with foundation model companies, beyond the headlines A view on cross-border integration that treats culture and editorial autonomy as commercial assets, not soft factors

Why organisations work with Jonas Kjellberg He has lived the full venture cycle at the level most leadership teams only theorise about: founding member of Skype’s leadership group, head of Internet Investments at Kinnevik backing Zalando and HelloFresh, then founder again at NORNORM. The Gear Up framework, developed with Stanford’s Tom Kosnik and Lena Ramfelt and published by Wiley, gives executives a structured way to diagnose where a business model will break before they commit capital. He brings the operator’s view on how Skype actually generated revenue and scaled commercially, not the founding myth. That distinction is what makes his sessions useful for boards thinking about commercial models, not just product. His current work at NORNORM puts him inside a circular, subscription-based business model with IKEA as a co-founder investor, which gives him a current case study on how subscription and sustainability economics interact. Biography highlights Co-creator and former member of the leadership team at Skype, with operating responsibility on the commercial side. Co-author of Gear Up (Wiley/Capstone, 2014) and Business Creation, with Stanford’s Lena Ramfelt and Tom Kosnik. Lecturer on entrepreneurship and sales culture at Stanford University and the Stockholm School of Economics. Former Head of Internet Investments at Kinnevik, leading roughly EUR 700m of investment into Zalando, Rocket Internet, Avito, Lamoda, Jabong, and HelloFresh. Founder and Chairman of NORNORM, a circular, subscription-based office furniture company co-founded with Inter IKEA, which raised EUR 110m in scale-up funding led by Verdane. Founder of Player:IO and former senior advisor at BCG Digital Ventures. Biography Skype was a small Stockholm team trying to work out whether voice-over-IP could ever be a real business. Jonas Kjellberg sat inside that team as part of the founding leadership group, focused on the commercial engine that turned a free product into a company eBay was prepared to pay for. That experience, of seeing exactly which business model decisions made the venture scalable and which nearly broke it, became the raw material for everything that followed. After Skype, he moved to the investor side as Head of Internet Investments at Kinnevik, deploying around EUR 700m into Zalando, Rocket Internet, Avito, Lamoda, Jabong, and HelloFresh. That seat gave him a comparative view across consumer internet bets that most operators never get. He saw which models survived contact with real markets and which collapsed under their own assumptions. Out of that operating and investing work came Gear Up, written with Stanford’s Tom Kosnik and Lena Ramfelt and published by Wiley in 2014. The book sets out a nine-component framework for testing whether a business model is actually viable before scaling it. It is now used in entrepreneurship classrooms at Stanford and the Stockholm School of Economics, where Kjellberg lectures on venture creation and sales culture. He is now back inside an operating business as founder and chairman of NORNORM, a circular, subscription-based office furniture company built with Inter IKEA as a co-founding investor and now backed by Verdane in a EUR 110m round. For executive audiences, this matters because it gives him a live case study on subscription economics and circular business models, drawn from a company he is currently running. Key speaking topics Business model innovation and venture design Scaling consumer technology businesses Sales culture and commercial growth Circular and subscription business models Corporate venturing and intrapreneurship Entrepreneurial decision-making under uncertainty Ideal for Boards and executive teams evaluating new ventures, spin-offs, or commercial model changes Chief Strategy Officers and Heads of Innovation responsible for new business creation Corporate venturing units and incubators inside large companies Founders and senior operators inside scale-up companies preparing for the next stage of growth Audience outcomes A clear way to stress-test a business model against the nine components of the Gear Up framework before committing capital A first-hand account of the commercial decisions that made Skype a scalable business, useful as a reference case for current bets A working view of how subscription and circular models change unit economics, drawn from NORNORM A sharper sense of which venture decisions are reversible and which lock the business in Direct comparison points from a portfolio that includes Zalando, HelloFresh, and Rocket Internet

Why organisations work with Jonas Ridderstrale He gives leadership teams a serious framework for the talent-versus-capital question, drawn from “Funky Business,” a title ranked No. 16 in Bloomsbury’s survey of the best business books and translated into more than 30 languages. He is one of a small group of European thinkers who have held a Thinkers50 European Top 5 position across multiple cycles, which gives senior buyers confidence that the underlying ideas have stood up to peer scrutiny. His argument cuts directly at strategic mimicry: why most differentiation programmes fail because organisations copy each other faster than they can build genuine identity, and what to do about it. He brings the academic spine of a Stockholm School of Economics PhD together with sustained advisory work at Ashridge and IE Business School, so the ideas land with both rigour and commercial framing. He is co-owner and chairman of Mgruppen, a Swedish management training company, which keeps his material connected to live executive development practice rather than archived theory. Biography highlights PhD in International Business and MBA, Stockholm School of Economics. Visiting professor at Ashridge Business School (UK) and IE Business School (Spain). Co-author of “Funky Business” (2000), “Karaoke Capitalism” (2004) and “Funky Business Forever” (2007) with Kjell A. Nordstrom. Co-author of “Re-energizing the Corporation” with Mark Wilcox and “Fast/Forward” with Julian Birkinshaw of London Business School. Ranked No. 23 globally and Top 5 in Europe on the 2009 Thinkers50 list, with continued European Top 5 placement in 2011. Italian Nobels Colloquia award for “Leadership in Business and Economic Thinking” (2007). Biography Capital is no longer the binding constraint on most large companies. Talent is, ideas are, and identity is. That shift, set out in “Funky Business” with Kjell A. Nordstrom in 2000, became one of the most widely translated business arguments of the last quarter century, sold over 300,000 copies in the original edition and reached more than 30 languages. The work behind the argument is academic. Ridderstrale completed his MBA and PhD in International Business at Stockholm School of Economics, with a doctoral thesis on global innovation in multinational corporations. He spent his early career at the Centre for Advanced Studies of Leadership there before moving into visiting professor roles at Ashridge in the UK and IE Business School in Spain. The follow-on books extended the thesis rather than restating it. “Karaoke Capitalism” tackled strategic mimicry in copycat markets. “Funky Business Forever” pressed on the human stakes. “Re-energizing the Corporation,” with Mark Wilcox, addressed the question of how leaders convert a different idea into actual organisational change. “Fast/Forward,” with Julian Birkinshaw of London Business School, sharpened the link to execution. The Thinkers50 ranking placed him at No. 23 globally in 2009 and inside the European Top 5 across multiple cycles, alongside the Italian Nobels Colloquia award in 2007. Today he chairs Mgruppen, a Swedish management training company, which keeps the material grounded in the executive development brief rather than the lecture circuit. Key speaking topics Strategy under commoditisation Talent and human capital advantage Innovation and corporate identity Leadership of organisational change Competitive differentiation in copycat markets Building corporate “tribes” and culture The future firm Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting strategy in markets where products and processes have converged. CHROs and Chief Talent Officers reframing the link between people strategy and competitive advantage. Innovation and strategy leads tasked with moving the business off cost-led competition. Leadership development programmes for senior managers in transformation-heavy industries. Audience outcomes A sharper read on why most differentiation efforts default to imitation, and how to break that pattern. Language for the talent-versus-capital question that lands with both finance and HR audiences. A practical view of how identity, culture and “tribe” become commercial assets, not soft factors. Concrete prompts for senior teams on what their organisation looks like when capital advantages run out.

Why organisations work with Jonathan Reynolds His research framework on omnichannel retail – built over four decades at Oxford through direct partnerships with Tesco, the British Retail Consortium, Eurocommerce, and retail associations in eight countries, gives leadership teams a structural diagnosis of competitive change, rather than a trend description. Navigating the New Retail Landscape (Oxford University Press, 3rd edition 2025) draws on over 40 international case studies to make a specific argument: the retailers that win redesign the enterprise, not just the channel mix. Audiences leave with a reference framework, not just a perspective. Reynolds leads OXIRM, the UK’s only dedicated university research institute for retail management, giving him an institutional vantage point that neither management consultants nor industry analysts can replicate. His research consistently interrogates the “death of the high street” narrative and offers a more rigorous counter-argument: physical retail is not dying, but its strategic logic has changed fundamentally. That distinction matters to boards making long-term investment decisions. As a regular contributor to the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, and Wall Street Journal, he translates peer-reviewed research into language that executive teams and boards can act on directly. Biography highlights Associate Professor in Retail Marketing and Deputy Dean (External Relations), Saïd Business School, University of Oxford Founding member and Academic Director, Oxford Institute of Retail Management (OXIRM), since 1999 Co-author, Navigating the New Retail Landscape: A Guide for Business Leaders (Oxford University Press; 3rd edition, 2025) Deputy Director, ESRC Smart Data Research geographic data service (GeoDS) – joint initiative of Oxford, Liverpool, Edinburgh and UCL Vice-Principal and Governing Body Fellow, Green Templeton College, Oxford Keynote speaker, World Retail Congress Regular media contributor: BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal Visiting Professor, Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, Dartmouth College Biography In 1985, a research commission from Tesco brought Jonathan Reynolds to Oxford to examine how new technology would reshape retail operations. Four decades later, Reynolds is Associate Professor in Retail Marketing and Deputy Dean at Saïd Business School. The structural question that commission raised of how a retail enterprise stays competitive when its environment is being redrawn, has never been more pressing. Reynolds is the founding Academic Director of the Oxford Institute of Retail Management, a role he has held since 1999. OXIRM is the UK’s only dedicated university research centre for retail management. Reynolds uses it to run sustained research partnerships with practitioners and policymakers including the British Retail Consortium, Eurocommerce, and retail associations in Estonia, Finland, Greece, Malaysia, New Zealand and the UK, giving his analysis a data foundation that industry commentary rarely achieves. His central argument, developed across three editions of Navigating the New Retail Landscape (OUP, 3rd edition 2025), is that the retailers who survive the current period of disruption are not those who add channels most quickly. Drawing on over 40 international case studies, Reynolds and co-author Alan Treadgold show that success requires redesigning the enterprise: its capabilities, its leadership model, and its understanding of what physical stores are strategically for. The book is now a standard reference for senior retail executives and strategy teams internationally. Reynolds is a keynote speaker at the World Retail Congress and a regular analytical voice for the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal. His research sits inside peer-reviewed journals and inside boardroom conversations simultaneously: a combination that is less common than it should be, and that gives his arguments their particular authority. Key speaking topics Omnichannel and e-commerce strategy Retail business model innovation Technology adoption and digital transformation in retail The strategic role of physical stores Retail entrepreneurship and innovation Retail productivity and workforce capability Retail development, planning and location strategy Consumer data and retail intelligence Ideal for Chief Executive Officers and strategy directors of retail and consumer-facing enterprises Chief Commercial Officers and Chief Marketing Officers navigating channel complexity Real estate and property investors with significant retail exposure Policy teams and government bodies working on town centres, high streets, and retail planning Audience outcomes A clearer framework for distinguishing between channel complexity and genuine competitive strategy An evidence-based analysis of where physical retail creates value and where it no longer does, drawn from 40+ international case studies A more precise understanding of the organisational capabilities and leadership behaviours that separate retail winners from those adding digital layers without structural change Exposure to current Oxford research on consumer data, retail geography, and market evolution that does not typically reach practitioner audiences Language and reference points for board-level conversations about long-term retail investment and transformation

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 Julie Holmes She gives leaders a way past the trap most AI programmes fall into. Second Story Strategy™, her framework, treats AI as a starting line for distinct new value, not a finish line for cost savings. She has built and sold technology, not just studied it. Two innovation companies and products in over 60 countries give her keynotes the texture of an operator, and she still builds AI applications for herself and clients today. Her material works at two stages: helping teams who are still becoming AI-capable, and pushing teams who have already proven AI makes them faster toward the harder question of what they will do with it that no one else can. PSA-UKI Hall of Fame status puts her among 33 speakers recognised for sustained craft on stage, which matters when the brief is a high-stakes leadership audience with mixed AI fluency in the room. She lectures on innovation and AI at Yale, Birkbeck, and the American University of Beirut, keeping the material tested against faculty and students as well as paying clients. Biography highlights Hall of Fame Speaker, PSA-UKI, one of 33 to hold the honour Originator of Second Story Strategy™ and the Second Story Blueprint for building competitive advantage on top of AI Author of Little Big Bangs for Leaders and of the 101+ AI Tips, Tools and Prompts series for leaders and sales professionals Founder of two innovation companies with products distributed in over 60 countries Clients include Oracle, Expedia, American Express, JetBlue, Nestle, EY, VMware, US Bank, and LinkedIn Guest lecturer at Yale, Birkbeck (University of London), and the American University of Beirut Biography AI is raising the floor for everyone. The same models, agents, and automation reach every competitor in a category at roughly the same time. That makes it easy to be good, and good is no longer a position. It is the new baseline. Julie Holmes works on the question that follows: once everyone is faster, what will your organisation be that no one else can be? Her answer is Second Story Strategy™, a framework drawn from studying which companies actually pull ahead with AI and which simply run harder in place. The pattern she found was not about budget or engineering depth. The standouts treated AI as a foundation and built something distinct on top of it, working through four levels she maps as Build, Reimagine, Extend, and Lead, with the organisation’s own distinctiveness as the load-bearing element running through all of them. Her credibility comes from building, not commenting. Holmes founded two innovation companies and shipped products into more than 60 countries, and she still builds AI applications for herself and clients. That operator history shapes how she talks to senior audiences. The diagnosis is practical, the language is plain, and her work extends into resources leaders can use directly, including the regularly updated 101+ AI Tips, Tools and Prompts series. Holmes is a Hall of Fame Speaker with PSA-UKI, one of 33 to hold the honour, and a guest lecturer at Yale, Birkbeck, and the American University of Beirut. Brands including Oracle, Expedia, JetBlue, Nestle, EY, and LinkedIn have brought her in for the same reason: to move AI from a tool that makes them cheaper to a foundation that makes them distinct. Key speaking topics Second Story Strategy™ and competitive advantage through AI AI strategy and enterprise adoption AI-empowered teams and workflows Innovation as a leadership discipline Sales and customer experience under AI Future of work and AI capability building Ideal for C-suite leaders setting enterprise AI direction Heads of department helping their teams level up with AI Sales and customer-experience leaders integrating AI into commercial workflows Company-wide events where AI fluency varies widely across the room Audience outcomes The five behaviours that set AI-savvy teams apart, framed as a Second Story Strategy™ they can act on A clear way to decide where to build genuine distinction and where keeping pace is enough Concrete examples of how AI is reshaping leadership, sales, and customer experience, with specific tools named Language for leading non-technical teams into AI with confidence rather than anxiety A sharper sense of which AI use cases build advantage and which only add speed

Why organisations work with Justin King A first-hand, decade-long account of running a FTSE 100 retailer through competitive attack, recession and the shift to online, with named results: 36 consecutive quarters of like-for-like growth, tripled underlying profit, and an 85 per cent total shareholder return by the time he stepped down. The “Making Sainsbury’s Great Again” playbook talked through by the CEO who wrote it, with concrete decisions on price, fresh food, colleague engagement and the Paralympic sponsorship that reset the brand. An active cross-portfolio operating perspective from the Chair seats at Allwyn Entertainment, Dexters and Itsu Grocery, plus the recent OVO Energy chairmanship through the sector’s difficult patch, so the material is current rather than retrospective. A credible record on purpose-led commercial leadership, evidenced through Sainsbury’s Comic Relief partnership of £1 for every £10 donated, the first dedicated Paralympic sponsorship of London 2012, and Made by Sport, the charity he founded in 2019 that raised over £6m for community organisations before transferring to Sported. A leadership framework, the ten Cs, that has been pressure-tested against a real CEO seat rather than developed in a classroom, and is delivered with the candour of someone who has had to defend results to a board. Biography highlights CEO of J Sainsbury plc, 2004 to 2014, ten years that took the business from third place and falling sales to 36 consecutive quarters of like-for-like growth and an 85 per cent total shareholder return. Chair of Allwyn Entertainment and Dexters; Non-Executive Chair of Itsu Grocery; recent Chair of OVO Energy. Non-Executive Director of Marks and Spencer plc, January 2019 to September 2025; member of the PwC Public Interest Body, 2015 to 2022. Vice Chairman and Senior Adviser at Terra Firma Capital Partners, 2015 to 2021; interim Chairman of the Manor Racing F1 team during its 2014-2015 restructuring. Member of the London Organising Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games and its audit committee, with Sainsbury’s the first dedicated Paralympic sponsor of London 2012. Founder of Made by Sport, 2019 to 2023, raising over £6m for community sport organisations. CBE for services to the retail industry, 2011 Birthday Honours; Honorary DBA, University of Bath, 2009; Most Admired Business Leader, Management Today; Britain’s Most Impressive Businessman, IPSOS-MORI Captains of Industry Report. Biography Sainsbury’s was the third-place supermarket with falling sales when Justin King took the CEO seat in March 2004. The City viewed the appointment as the company’s last chance to remain independent. Within six months he had launched “Making Sainsbury’s Great Again”, a recovery plan built on fresh food, colleague engagement and a re-priced shelf. The plan’s headline target, a £2.5 billion sales uplift, was hit three months early. Over his ten years as CEO, the business delivered 36 consecutive quarters of like-for-like growth, tripled underlying profit from £252m to £756m, and returned 85 per cent to shareholders. The brand was rebuilt around the first dedicated Paralympic sponsorship of London 2012, and the long-standing Comic Relief partnership of £1 for every £10 donated. Sainsbury’s regained second place in UK grocery and he stepped down in 2014 with the longest unbroken growth run of any major UK supermarket CEO of the era. He arrived at Sainsbury’s with three decades in consumer businesses behind him, including senior roles at M&S Food, Asda and Häagen-Dazs UK. After leaving the CEO seat he held the Vice Chairman and Senior Adviser role at Terra Firma Capital Partners from 2015 to 2021, sat on the PwC Public Interest Body from 2015 to 2022, and served as a Non-Executive Director of Marks and Spencer from January 2019 until September 2025. He chaired the Manor Racing F1 team through its 2014-2015 restructuring. He is Chair of Allwyn Entertainment, Chair of Dexters, and Non-Executive Chair of Itsu Grocery, with adviser seats at Snappy Shopper and Rezolve. He chaired OVO Energy through the post-energy-crisis period to August 2025. The purpose thread runs through the record: he founded Made by Sport in 2019, which raised over £6m for community sport organisations before the campaign was handed to Sported in 2023. He was appointed CBE in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to retail, named Most Admired Business Leader by Management Today, and topped the IPSOS-MORI Captains of Industry Report. The University of Bath conferred an Honorary DBA in 2009, and he served on the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Group from 2010 to 2012. Key speaking topics Retail leadership and the long-cycle turnaround Consumer behaviour and brand reinvention Customer and colleague-led growth Purpose-led commercial leadership and responsible business Boardroom decision-making under competitive pressure Sponsorship and purpose, drawn from London 2012 Cross-portfolio non-executive leadership Ideal for FTSE and large-cap consumer business leadership teams managing a multi-year turnaround Retail, hospitality and consumer goods boards weighing strategy against operational execution Chief executives, COOs and store or operations directors in customer-facing sectors Boards and leadership teams looking to embed purpose into commercial performance rather than treat it as a side function Audience outcomes A working view of how a CEO sequences price, range, colleagues and brand through a decade-long recovery rather than a single reset. Specific lessons from London 2012, the Comic Relief partnership and Made by Sport on how purpose can shift commercial performance. A frank account of what holds boards together when results are slow, competitors aggressive and shareholders impatient. A leadership lens, the ten Cs, applied to the audience’s own operating questions during Q&A.

Why organisations work with K D Adamson She has named and framed the shift. Her concept of “nobleization” – the argument that the next phase of business is not globalisation but morally accountable, purpose-led value creation – gives leadership teams a precise, shareable thesis rather than a trend briefing. She challenges the techno-optimist default from a position of intellectual rigour. When AI, automation and digital transformation dominate the conversation, Adamson’s argument that tomorrow is a value problem, not a technology problem reframes the strategic question at board level. This is a harder case to make but her broadcast record on BBC World News, Bloomberg, CNN and the Financial Times confirms it holds up under interrogation. Her “Seismotectonic” model gives leaders a practical foresight tool, not just a perspective. The three-movement framework of what changes rapidly, what changes slowly, what appears not to change at all is actionable in strategic planning contexts and transfers directly from a keynote into workshop and executive briefing formats. Her client base spans sectors where the future-of-value argument has immediate strategic urgency including Google, Airbus, Mastercard, CHANEL, Allianz, and PwC, which gives her the commercial credibility to speak to mixed leadership audiences without being narrowed to a single industry vertical. Her ecocentrist positioning is analytically distinct. Placing ecological systems rather than human enterprise at the centre of value creation is not rhetorical positioning. It is the foundation of her ESG and circular economy arguments, and it produces conclusions that differ meaningfully from those of speakers whose sustainability work begins and ends with reporting frameworks. Biography highlights Founder and former CEO, Futurenautics Group; former Futurist, The Futures Agency Author of Shipping and the 800-lb Gorilla (2017), the foundational foresight text on digital transformation in the shipping and maritime industry Broadcast commentator for BBC World News, Bloomberg, CNN, Financial Times, Al Jazeera, Channel News Asia, and BBC R4 Today Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts; stated member of Chatham House, The Aristotelian Society, the Society of Antiquaries, CERN Open Quantum Institute, and the International Society for the Circular Economy Global client roster includes Google, Airbus, Mastercard, CHANEL, Allianz, PwC, Deloitte, Capgemini, Rolls-Royce, Vodafone, Oracle, and Pfizer Biography The thesis K D Adamson has built over two decades is a direct challenge to the most widely held corporate assumption about the future: that it is, above all, a technology problem. In a landscape where most foresight is organised around what AI, automation, or quantum computing will do to a given industry, Adamson argues that what actually determines where organisations end up is what they believe about value, about purpose, and about who business is ultimately for. Her concept of “nobleization” names this argument precisely. Where globalisation provided the operating logic of the late twentieth century, Adamson contends that the defining shift of the current era is from a global business to a noble one, where ESG, the circular economy, and purpose-led strategy are not peripheral compliance exercises but the competitive architecture of the world arriving. The implication for leadership is significant: the strategic planning tools built for the previous era are no longer sufficient guides. Adamson founded and led Futurenautics Group, where her work on the digital transformation of the shipping and maritime industry made her the sector’s authoritative futurist – a standing substantiated by Shipping and the 800-lb Gorilla (2017), which set the analytical agenda for how one of the world’s most conservative global industries understood its own disruption. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts and a regular broadcast commentator for BBC World News, Bloomberg, CNN, the Financial Times, and Al Jazeera, which means her frameworks are tested in real time against the hardest current questions, not only in controlled conference settings. Her “Seismotectonic” model of change, mapping three simultaneous rates of disruption: what changes rapidly, what changes slowly, and what appears not to change at all, gives senior teams a working tool for strategy under deep uncertainty. It is this combination of named intellectual frameworks, commercial range across clients including Google, Airbus, Mastercard, and CHANEL, and the ecocentrist perspective that places ecology rather than enterprise at the centre of value analysis, that separates Adamson from speakers covering adjacent territory. Key speaking topics Future of business value and sustainable transformation The limits of techno-optimism ESG as competitive strategy, not compliance Geopolitics and the end of globalisation AI: belief, systemic risk, and organisational response Leadership beyond control Strategic foresight and scenario planning Ideal for C-suite and board audiences navigating how to reframe business strategy as stakeholder expectations, geopolitical pressures, and ecological imperatives converge Chief Sustainability Officers and strategy leads responsible for translating ESG from reporting obligation into organisational design Global leadership conferences convening senior executives across multiple sectors and geographies, where a macro-systemic perspective is required rather than a sector-specific one Executive leadership teams of multinationals at significant inflection points – where the question is not only operational but concerns organisational identity and the long-term logic of value creation Audience outcomes A named conceptual framework, “nobleization”, for articulating why business strategy must move beyond profit primacy, framed as competitive logic rather than ideology Clarity on why the next wave of disruption is a value problem rather than a technology problem, and what that distinction means for strategic planning and capital allocation A working model for reading simultaneous, differently-paced change: the Seismotectonic framework, applicable in strategy sessions and scenario planning processes A more rigorous way to frame AI risk: focused on collective belief and systemic dependency rather than technical capability alone Greater confidence in articulating an alternative vision of organisational purpose to boards, investors, and internal leadership audiences

Why organisations work with Kaihan Krippendorff He runs Outthinker, a working peer network of chief strategy, innovation and growth officers from Fortune 500 companies. The research that feeds his keynotes is drawn from sitting CSOs, not desk study. His IDEAS process, Outthinker Playbook, and 9Ps business model framework give strategy teams a structured way to surface non-obvious options. These are taught inside Wharton Executive Education, NYU, and FIU. Proximity, co-authored with Robert Wolcott of Kellogg, is the most developed business-side thesis on what just-in-time production, AI, and on-demand services mean for where value is created. It earned Thinkers50 recognition and a Next Big Idea Club endorsement. He bridges strategy and internal entrepreneurship. Driving Innovation from Within (Columbia Business School Publishing) addresses the operational problem of getting new ideas through a corporate immune system, the issue most CSOs actually wrestle with. Biography highlights Founder of Outthinker, a peer network of chief strategy, innovation, growth and transformation officers from Fortune 500 and large private organisations. Former McKinsey consultant; senior fellow at Wharton; teaching roles at NYU School of Professional Studies and Florida International University. Author of six books including Outthink the Competition, Driving Innovation from Within, and Proximity (co-authored with Robert Wolcott, 2024). Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2019; shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Innovation Award (2019) and Strategy Award (2023). Host of three podcasts: Outthinkers, The Chief Strategy Officer Podcast, and Strategy at Scale Podcast. Contributor to Harvard Business Review and Fast Company. Biography Competitive advantage in most large companies is built on assumptions that quietly stop holding. The Outthinker network was set up to surface those assumptions early. It is a working group of chief strategy, innovation, growth and transformation officers from Fortune 500 and large private companies, convened by Kaihan Krippendorff to pressure-test where their industries are actually moving. Krippendorff trained at McKinsey before founding Outthinker. His doctorate is in economics and business; his engineering degree comes from the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering, with further study at Wharton, Columbia Business School, and London Business School. He is a senior fellow at Wharton Executive Education and teaches at NYU School of Professional Studies and Florida International University. His published work has the same emphasis. Outthink the Competition sets out the strategic patterns disruptors use that incumbents rarely consider. Driving Innovation from Within, published by Columbia Business School Publishing, addresses the harder operational problem of moving an idea through a corporate immune system. Proximity, co-authored with Robert Wolcott of Kellogg, argues that AI, on-demand production, and digital infrastructure are collapsing the distance between supply and demand, and that this shift, rather than any single technology, is what redraws competitive position. He hosts three podcasts aimed at the same audience: Outthinkers, The Chief Strategy Officer Podcast, and Strategy at Scale Podcast. Thinkers50 has ranked him on its Radar list and shortlisted him for both its Innovation and Strategy awards. Key speaking topics Strategy under accelerating disruption Business model innovation Corporate innovation and internal entrepreneurship AI and the proximity economy Outside-in strategic foresight Chief strategy officer practice Growth strategy for Fortune 500 organisations Ideal for CSOs, chief innovation officers, and chief growth officers running strategy refresh cycles Boards and executive teams reassessing competitive position in an industry under structural change Corporate transformation leads building internal innovation pipelines Audience outcomes A clearer view of which assumptions underpinning the current strategy have already expired A working vocabulary, drawn from the Outthinker Playbook and 9Ps, for generating non-obvious strategic options A framework for thinking about AI and on-demand technology as a shift in where value is created, not a productivity tool Sharper questions for the next strategy offsite, informed by what sitting CSOs in the Outthinker network are actually working on