Business Strategy & Growth

Why organisations work with Magnus Lindkvist He built the academic discipline he speaks from. In 2008 he created the world’s first accredited course in trendspotting and future thinking at the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship, which gives the work an unusually serious intellectual base for the futurist category. His books are a connected argument, not a back catalogue. Everything We Know Is Wrong, The Attack of the Unexpected, and When the Future Begins together form a thesis on why most forecasting fails and how leaders can think about long horizons more honestly. He treats unexpected events as a strategic category, not a footnote. Boards used to thinking in trends get a sharper framework for the shocks that trends cannot predict. He has spent three decades inside the meeting rooms of Fortune 500 boards, ministries, and global institutions, which means the material is calibrated for senior audiences rather than conference floors. The delivery is a deliberate performance. He calls it intellectual acupuncture, and senior buyers consistently book him for sessions where the brief is to change how a leadership team thinks, not to brief them on a topic. Biography highlights Founder of Pattern Recognition, a Stockholm-based trendspotting consultancy established in 2005. Created the world’s first academically accredited course in trendspotting and future thinking at the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship in 2008. Author of Everything We Know Is Wrong! The Trendspotter’s Handbook, The Attack of the Unexpected, and When the Future Begins: A Guide to Long-Term Thinking, published by LID Publishing. Author of Minifesto (2016), Creative Friction (2021, with Jan Gradvall), and The Reset Book: How to Bounce Back from a Crisis (2023). MSc in Business and Economics, Stockholm School of Economics; degree in film production, UCLA. Over 1,000 keynotes delivered to corporate, institutional, and government audiences across roughly three decades. Biography Most forecasting fails for the same reason. It extrapolates the present and underweights everything that arrives from outside the model. Magnus Lindkvist has spent three decades building a more honest discipline around that problem, and a body of work that takes long-term thinking seriously as a leadership skill. The intellectual base is unusual for the futurist category. In 2008 he created the world’s first accredited course in trendspotting and future thinking, at the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship, after founding his consultancy Pattern Recognition in 2005. The trio of books that anchors his speaking work, Everything We Know Is Wrong, The Attack of the Unexpected, and When the Future Begins, runs as a connected argument: trends matter, the events that break them matter more, and organisations need a different mental architecture for the long horizon. His later books extend the same instinct in new directions. Minifesto argues for the strategic power of small ideas inside organisations dominated by grand narratives. Creative Friction, written with Swedish music journalist Jan Gradvall, draws on popular culture to examine what actually produces creative work. The Reset Book, published in 2023, addresses how individuals and organisations recover from crisis with more rigour than the resilience genre usually allows. The delivery is the second reason senior buyers commission him. He treats a keynote as a performance designed to shift a room’s assumptions, which is why boards, ministries, and global firms tend to use him at moments when the leadership team needs to think differently, not simply hear an update on the future. Key speaking topics Long-term thinking and strategic foresight Trendspotting and turning points in industries The strategic role of unexpected events Creativity and the conditions for original work Reset and recovery after crisis Innovation under uncertainty The future of technology and society Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting multi-year strategy under high uncertainty CSOs, heads of strategy, and corporate development leaders responsible for long-range planning Innovation, R&D, and foresight leads inside large incumbents Leadership offsites where the brief is to change how the team thinks, not to deliver an update Audience outcomes A sharper sense of where current forecasting habits are likely to mislead a leadership team A practical vocabulary for distinguishing trends, turning points, and genuinely unexpected events A more honest framework for long-term thinking, drawn from his book When the Future Begins A renewed view of creativity and small ideas as strategic assets, not cultural ornaments Renewed appetite inside the room for thinking about the next decade, not the next quarter

Why organisations work with Luke Johnson He has built, bought and sold more well-known British consumer brands than almost any other operator of his generation, including PizzaExpress, Strada, The Ivy, Giraffe, Patisserie Valerie and Gail’s, which gives any commercial audience an unusually direct reference point. He runs his own private equity firm, Risk Capital Partners, and continues to chair operating businesses, so the perspective is current investor and chairman, not retired founder. He has written a weekly national-press column on entrepreneurship for more than twenty years across the Financial Times, The Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph, which means audiences get arguments that have been tested in print, not improvised on stage. He is willing to talk publicly about the collapse of Patisserie Valerie, the fraud that triggered it, and what a chairman missed, which is rare candour from a figure still active in private equity. His chairmanship of Channel 4, the Royal Society of Arts and the Institute of Cancer Research gives him a board-level vocabulary that translates well for non-executives, charity trustees and public sector audiences. Biography highlights Chairman of PizzaExpress from 1993 to 1999, growing the chain from 12 to over 150 restaurants and the share price from 40p to over 900p. Founder and chairman of Risk Capital Partners, a London private equity firm operating since 2001. Chairman of Channel 4 Television Corporation, 2004 to 2010. Founder of Signature Restaurants (The Ivy, Le Caprice, J. Sheekey, Belgo) and the Strada chain; investor in Giraffe, Gail’s, Brighton Pier Group and Patisserie Holdings. Author of “Start It Up: Why Running Your Own Business Is Easier Than You Think” (Penguin, 2011) and weekly columnist for the Financial Times (2007 to 2015) and The Sunday Times (2015 to 2021). Co-founder and chairman of the Centre for Entrepreneurs; former chairman of the Royal Society of Arts, StartUp Britain and the Institute of Cancer Research; honorary degrees from Heriot-Watt, Bath, UWE and the University of West London. Biography PizzaExpress had twelve restaurants and a 40p share price when Luke Johnson and Hugh Osmond took control in 1993. By the time Johnson left as chairman in 1999, the chain had passed 150 sites and the share price had cleared 900p. That single deal still anchors his commercial reputation, but it sits inside a longer pattern. He founded Signature Restaurants, which owned The Ivy, J. Sheekey, Le Caprice and Belgo. He built Strada from scratch to thirty sites. Risk Capital Partners, the private equity firm he has run since 2001, has backed Giraffe, Gail’s, Brighton Pier Group, Patisserie Holdings and a long list of mid-market operators. The picture is not uniformly positive, and that is part of why senior audiences listen. Patisserie Holdings, where he was chairman and largest shareholder, collapsed in October 2018 after the discovery of significant accounting fraud. He has written and spoken about the experience in detail, including what a non-executive chair can and cannot see from the board. Alongside the deals, Johnson has built an unusually durable second career as a writer. He wrote weekly for the Sunday Telegraph from 1998, for the Financial Times from 2007, and for The Sunday Times until 2021. The work covers founders, capital, markets, management and failure, and it is consistently specific. His 2011 book “Start It Up”, published by Penguin, sets out the operator’s view of starting and running a small business without the usual founder mythology. Public roles round out the picture. He chaired Channel 4 Television for six years, the Royal Society of Arts for three, the Institute of Cancer Research for eight, and co-founded the Centre for Entrepreneurs to make the case for British founders in public policy. Four British universities, Heriot-Watt, Bath, the University of the West of England and the University of West London, have awarded him honorary degrees on the strength of that combined record. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and the realities of starting a business Private equity and growth-stage investment Consumer, hospitality and retail strategy Scale-up leadership and board governance Lessons from corporate failure and fraud The economics of small and medium-sized business Chairmanship of listed and charitable organisations Ideal for Founders, CEOs and senior teams in consumer, hospitality, retail and service businesses Private equity, venture and growth-stage investor audiences Boards and non-executive directors of listed and private companies Industry conferences and member organisations focused on entrepreneurship and SME growth Audience outcomes A franker view of why scale-ups stall than most growth literature offers, drawn from named deals on both sides of the outcome. A working understanding of how private equity actually evaluates and backs consumer businesses, from a practitioner who still writes the cheques. A clearer sense of what a board chair owes a company under stress, informed by the Patisserie Valerie collapse and other live cases. Concrete prompts for founders on capital, hiring, controls and exit, anchored in three decades of operator experience.

Why organisations work with Luis Maria Huete He brings a named, structured methodology, Clienting, that gives a management team a shared language for customer segmentation, business model alignment, and service mix economics. It is the rare customer-strategy framework with both an academic anchor and four decades of board-room application. He has facilitated senior offsites in more than 800 companies across 70 countries, including Banco Santander, BBVA, Telefonica, Coca-Cola, Repsol, and ISS. The work is execution-focused: redesigning structure, coordination mechanisms, and the operating model behind a strategy. His doctoral work on commercial banking service strategy was named best dissertation of 1988 by the Decision Sciences Institute. The same analytical discipline shows up in the way he treats customer profitability as an operating problem, not a marketing one. He has taught inside Harvard Business School’s Achieving Breakthrough Service and Advanced Management programmes, alongside his chair at IESE. The combined platform gives senior audiences confidence that the frameworks have been pressure-tested in serious academic and corporate settings. He works fluently in English and Spanish, with board-level experience across Europe, Latin America, and Asia. For multinational teams that need a single voice on customer strategy across regions, that range is genuinely scarce. Biography highlights Professor of Operations, Information and Technology at IESE Business School, on faculty since 1982. DBA, Boston University. Fulbright Scholar. Doctoral thesis on commercial banking service strategy awarded best dissertation of 1988 by the Decision Sciences Institute. Author of thirteen management books, including Clienting, Service Management, Leading for the Common Good (2015), 50 Leaders Who Made History (2017), and Leadership and Governance (2025). Faculty contributor to Harvard Business School’s Achieving Breakthrough Service and Advanced Management executive programmes. Regular contributor to Harvard Deusto Business Review and Expansion. Chairs the Advisory Board of Makro and the Instituto de Capital Humano. Board member of Altia, the Instituto Gobernanza y Sociedad, and the International Academy of Management. Biography Customer profitability is an operating problem before it is a marketing one. Most companies cannot say, with any precision, which of their customers earn the margin that funds the rest of the business, or how the service model would need to change if they could. That is the question Huete has spent four decades putting in front of senior teams. His framework, Clienting, gives a management committee a structured way to work that question. It moves through segmentation, business model alignment, service mix, implementation, and performance measurement, treating customer strategy as a coordinated set of operating decisions rather than a brand exercise. The methodology is documented across thirteen books and tested inside the executive programmes of IESE Business School and Harvard Business School, where Huete has taught Achieving Breakthrough Service and Advanced Management. The academic anchor is serious. His doctoral thesis on commercial banking service strategy was named best dissertation of 1988 by the Decision Sciences Institute, and he holds a chair at IESE he has occupied since 1982. Alongside that, he has facilitated senior offsites in more than 800 companies across 70 countries, including Banco Santander, BBVA, Telefonica, Coca-Cola, Repsol, and ISS. He chairs the Advisory Board of Makro and the Instituto de Capital Humano, and writes regularly for Harvard Deusto Business Review and Expansion. What a senior team gets is a working vocabulary for customer strategy and a facilitator who has watched several hundred management committees try to install it. The conversation he runs is rarely about ideas. It is about what to stop doing, which customers to organise around, and how to align the operating model to the answer. Key speaking topics Clienting and customer strategy Service management and service economics Strategy execution and operating model design Corporate culture and senior-team alignment Leadership and governance Family business transitions Customer loyalty and profitability Ideal for CEOs, CCOs and CMOs reviewing customer segmentation and the underlying service economics. Boards and ExCos running a strategy refresh or post-merger operating model redesign. Senior leadership offsites that need a structured outside facilitator on customer strategy and execution. Family business owners and boards navigating governance and succession alongside commercial repositioning. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for Clienting, segmentation, service mix, and the link from customer loyalty to operating margin. A sharper read on which customer segments the organisation is actually built to serve profitably, and which it is not. A structured view of the gap between stated strategy and operating execution, and where coordination mechanisms break down. Specific examples drawn from senior offsites with European and Latin American multinationals on how the management committee owns customer strategy. A reference set of books and frameworks the team can use after the session to continue the work internally.

Why organisations work with Lars Sudmann He brings Fortune 500 operating weight to leadership work. A former P&G CFO and Business Unit Strategy Leader speaks to executive committees in their own language. His self-leadership framework, drawn from his TEDx talk that has crossed 1.9 million views, gives senior leaders a usable model for the personal habits that determine whether strategy actually lands. The Spaghetti Principle, the thesis of his book on innovation, gives organisations a structured way to run more experiments without losing strategic discipline. He is a 6-time Belgian and 2-time European Champion of Public Speaking. Executive presence and communication craft are not a sideline; they are a discipline he can teach. As Council Director at The Conference Board, he convenes CFOs and strategy leaders across Europe and the Gulf, so the room he walks into is one he already understands. Biography highlights Former CFO Belgium and Business Unit Strategy Leader at Procter & Gamble. Principal of Sudmann & Company, advising Fortune 500 leadership teams on strategy execution and change. Council Director at The Conference Board (Strategy & Transformation, Finance Transformation, Gulf councils). Lecturer on leadership and innovation at RWTH Aachen, Braunschweig University, and Lüneburg University. Author of “Innovation that Sticks: Reach Success as a Leader in your Field with the Spaghetti Principle”. Multiple TEDx talks on self-leadership and innovation, with combined viewership in the millions. 6-time Belgian and 2-time European Champion of Public Speaking. Featured in BBC, Fast Company, Inc., The Washington Post, and Manager Magazin. Biography Most leadership content treats execution as a structural problem. Sudmann treats it as a personal one. His TEDx talk on self-leadership, now past 1.9 million views, argues that the daily behaviour of senior leaders is what determines whether strategy moves through the organisation or stalls in the slide deck. The argument carries weight because of the chair he sat in. Sudmann was CFO Belgium at Procter & Gamble and led business unit strategy inside the same group. He has run the numbers, owned the plan, and watched what actually happens when a leadership team is asked to change while still hitting the quarter. That experience now shapes Sudmann & Company, his consulting and training practice, and his role as Council Director at The Conference Board, where he convenes strategy and finance leaders across Europe and the Gulf. He lectures on innovation and leadership at RWTH Aachen, Braunschweig, and Lüneburg, and his book “Innovation that Sticks” sets out the Spaghetti Principle: a disciplined way to run small experiments and keep only what holds. The communication craft is its own credential. Six Belgian and two European public speaking titles mean a Sudmann keynote is not a polished version of corporate decks. It is built to land, with senior audiences, on the first hearing. Key speaking topics Self-leadership and executive habits Strategy execution under pressure Change leadership in complex organisations Innovation discipline and the Spaghetti Principle High-performance leadership teams Executive communication and presentation craft Ideal for Executive committees and senior leadership teams entering a major strategic shift. CFOs, strategy leaders, and transformation leads accountable for execution. Boards and leadership development programmes seeking a credible voice on self-leadership and high-performance behaviour. Conferences with audiences of senior corporate leaders across finance, strategy, and operations. Audience outcomes A working model of self-leadership that senior leaders can apply on Monday morning. A sharper read on why their current strategy is or is not moving through the organisation. The Spaghetti Principle as a method for running more disciplined innovation experiments. Concrete language and structure for executive communication, drawn from competitive speaking craft. A vocabulary for leadership behaviour their team can adopt collectively, not just individually.

Why organisations work with Klisman Murati The Global Power Index, a proprietary quantitative model assessing 194 countries across multiple dimensions of national power and built on more than 30 years of longitudinal data. Clients drawing on it include NATO, the European Commission, Shell, JP Morgan, and HSBC. A documented forecasting record. The GPI signalled Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Germany’s 2024 recession before consensus, and surfaced the structural drivers of the US-Israel-Iran conflict for shipping and energy leadership ahead of the market. A direct challenge to the categories institutions still allocate against. He shows asset managers and corporate boards why “emerging markets” no longer maps to where capability is actually accumulating, and gives them a more accurate way to read country trajectories. A multidisciplinary lens that single-discipline analysts cannot replicate. His training spans anthropology, political economy, energy policy, security studies, and financial crime, which is what allows him to read AI, protectionism, capital flows, and demographic change as one connected system. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Pareto Economics, the London-based strategic intelligence firm behind the Global Power Index Creator of the Global Power Index, a proprietary quantitative framework covering 194 countries and three decades of longitudinal data Visiting Professor at the Helsinki Geoeconomics Institute Forecasts arriving ahead of consensus include Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Germany’s 2024 recession Clients include NATO, the European Commission, Shell, JP Morgan, HSBC, Vanguard, Telia, and Stena Bulk Quoted and broadcast across BBC, Al Jazeera, CGTN, the Financial Times, and Investment Week; author of more than 250 published articles Biography Pareto Economics called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Germany’s 2024 recession ahead of consensus. Behind those calls sits the Global Power Index, a proprietary quantitative model of 194 countries built on more than 30 years of longitudinal data. Klisman Murati founded Pareto Economics in 2017 to address a specific gap in country-risk analysis. Conventional models rank economies by income thresholds and credit ratings. The GPI instead maps which economies are actually accumulating capability across consumer markets, military balance, technological leadership, commodities exposure, geostrategic position, and financial strength. That work has placed him in the room with the people allocating capital under geopolitical exposure. Clients include NATO, the European Commission, Shell, JP Morgan, HSBC, Vanguard, Stena Bulk, and Telia. He has helped asset managers reposition ahead of the Russia-Ukraine shock and advised shipping and energy leadership on the structural drivers of the US-Israel-Iran conflict. Murati’s training spans social anthropology, security studies, energy policy, and financial crime. As Visiting Professor at the Helsinki Geoeconomics Institute, he sits at the intersection of frontier academic research and live institutional practice. His commentary appears across BBC, Al Jazeera, CGTN, the Financial Times, and Investment Week, and he has published more than 250 articles. Key speaking topics Geoeconomic strategy and country risk The Global Power Index and quantitative country forecasting Geopolitical risk and capital allocation Fragmentation of the global trade and investment order AI, protectionism, and the redistribution of global power Long-horizon strategic foresight Emerging market reassessment Ideal for Boards, investment committees, and CIOs setting country and exposure strategy in a fracturing global order Asset managers and family offices repositioning capital ahead of geopolitical shocks Corporate strategy leadership in energy, shipping, financial services, and technology with material cross-border exposure Policymakers and government officials shaping long-horizon economic and security strategy Audience outcomes A clearer view of which forces will actually shape the next five to ten years, separated from headline noise A working framework for pricing geopolitical risk into specific capital allocation, market entry, and exposure decisions Specific signals to track in their own industry, sector, or geography, drawn directly from the GPI’s underlying data Replacement of outdated categories like “emerging markets” with a sharper, data-driven read of country capability

Why organisations work with Kjell A. Nordstrom The «Karaoke Capitalism» framework names a specific competitive failure – the institutional imitation produced by benchmarking and best practice – that most strategy teams recognise but lack precise language to challenge or dismantle. His «multi-urban corporation» thesis, developed in Urban Express, gives multinationals a practical alternative to national market segmentation: a model for deciding where to compete based on urban density, talent pools, and city-level economic power rather than country borders. His argument that urbanisation and the feminisation of skilled workforces are structural economic forces – not social policy questions – translates demographic change into a direct input for strategic planning and talent decisions. Three decades of advisory work with large multinationals and the UK government, grounded in academic research into the internationalisation of firms, means his structural arguments have been pressure-tested against real strategic decisions at board level. Funky Business, translated into 33 languages and ranked among the greatest business books ever published, demonstrates that his frameworks have been tested and adopted in every major market – giving leadership teams confidence the thinking travels beyond any single regional or cultural context. Biography highlights PhD in International Business, Stockholm School of Economics (1991); former Assistant Professor at the Institute of International Business (IIB), same institution Co-author of Funky Business: Talent Makes Capital Dance, translated into 33 languages and ranked 16th greatest business book of all time; co-author of Karaoke Capitalism and Funky Business Forever with Jonas Ridderstrale Co-author of Urban Express and Momentum with Per Schlingmann; sole author of The Monkey and the Money: A History of Capitalism (Bokförlaget Stolpe, 2023) Ranked #9 in the Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers (2005); featured in multiple subsequent editions of the ranking Advisory and consulting work with large multinational corporations and the UK government Media appearances across CNN, CNBC, Fortune, Fast Company, Time Magazine, and the Financial Times; keynote presentations delivered in over 100 countries Biography The rules of competitive strategy seemed settled for most of the twentieth century. Identify a national market. Deploy capital and scale. Benchmark against rivals. Kjell A. Nordstrom, a Swedish economist with a PhD from the Stockholm School of Economics, has spent three decades building the case that those rules are losing their purchase – and that the structural forces displacing them are more powerful than most boards have yet absorbed. His 2000 book Funky Business, co-authored with Jonas Ridderstrale, argued that talent, not capital, had become the decisive competitive input. The book became an international bestseller in 33 languages and was ranked among the 16 greatest business books ever published. The follow-up, Karaoke Capitalism (2003), named a specific organisational failure: benchmarking and best practice had trained entire industries to imitate rather than differentiate, producing what the authors called a karaoke economy of second-rate cover versions. Both books remain in active circulation in serious management conversations. His subsequent work extended the analytical frame outward. Urban Express (2014), co-authored with Per Schlingmann, argued that multinationals are becoming multi-urban corporations. Cities, not nations, are the primary economic units of the coming decades, and an educated, urban, female workforce is the dominant skilled labour pool of the near future. Momentum (2023) examined how pandemic, geopolitical rupture, and climate pressure are accelerating this structural shift and what it demands from the next generation of leaders. Ranked #9 in the Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers (2005), and a regular presence in Fortune, the Financial Times, and on CNN, Nordstrom has advised large multinationals and the UK government on strategy and globalisation. His value in a boardroom conversation is specific: not scenario planning or trend forecasting, but structural argument about which forces are deterministic, and which are merely plausible. Key speaking topics Globalisation and competitive strategy Urbanisation and the rise of the multi-urban corporation The karaoke economy: imitation as competitive liability Talent as the primary driver of competitive advantage Demographic change as structural economic force The long-run trajectory of capitalism Crisis, geopolitical rupture, and strategic response Ideal for Executive and board-level strategy sessions at multinational organisations Government and public policy leaders navigating structural economic transformation Strategy, corporate development, and planning functions reviewing long-term competitive positioning International leadership forums and global business summits Audience outcomes A structural framework for identifying which macro forces are actually reshaping competition in their sector Language for naming and challenging institutional imitation within their own organisation A working understanding of the multi-urban corporation thesis and its implications for market entry and talent strategy Clearer thinking on how urbanisation and demographic change translate into actionable strategic planning inputs A longer-range perspective on the current moment in capitalism’s evolution and what it demands from senior leadership

Why organisations work with Kevin Roberts He led Saatchi and Saatchi globally for seventeen years, so brand and creative conversations land with the authority of someone who ran the network, not observed it. Lovemarks is one of the few brand frameworks from the 2000s still cited in marketing rooms; Advertising Age named it an Idea of the Decade in 2009. His operator track record covers Mary Quant, Gillette, Procter and Gamble, Pepsi-Cola and Lion Nathan, which gives commercial teams a counterpart who has run P&Ls, not only advised on them. 64 Shots gives leadership audiences a structured, opinionated playbook for operating in volatile markets, written from inside a creative business rather than a business school. Biography highlights CEO Worldwide of Saatchi and Saatchi from 1997 to 2014; Chairman until 2016. CEO of Pepsi-Cola Middle East at 32, then President and CEO of Pepsi-Cola Canada. Chief Operating Officer and Director at Lion Nathan, the Australasian brewer, from 1989 to 1996. Author of Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands, published in 18 languages, and 64 Shots: Leadership in a Crazy World. Honorary Professor of Creative Leadership at Lancaster University, with parallel honorary chairs at the University of Auckland Business School and the University of Victoria in Canada. Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to business and the community. Biography Lovemarks reframed a question marketers had been answering badly for years. Instead of measuring respect and recognition, Kevin Roberts argued that the brands that survive are the ones customers actively love, and that emotion, not rational benefit, is the real driver of long-term commercial value. The book travelled into 18 languages and became one of the few brand frameworks from the period still in active use. The argument carries weight because of where it came from. Roberts spent seventeen years as CEO Worldwide of Saatchi and Saatchi, after running Pepsi-Cola in the Middle East and Canada, and serving as Chief Operating Officer at Lion Nathan. He has sat on the operator side of brand decisions at scale, including categories where price is brutal and differentiation is mostly emotional. 64 Shots: Leadership in a Crazy World extended the work into leadership. The book is a set of sixty-four short, opinionated entries on running creative businesses in volatile conditions, drawn from his own career and the leaders he has worked with. It gives commercial audiences a way to talk about culture, decision-making and creative risk without the abstraction that usually surrounds those topics. Roberts now runs Red Rose Consulting and chairs My Food Bag and The Herdy Company. He holds honorary chairs in creative leadership and innovation at Lancaster University, the University of Auckland Business School and the University of Victoria in Canada, and is a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to business. Key speaking topics Brand strategy and emotional brand equity Creative leadership in commercial organisations Marketing transformation and customer loyalty High-performance culture Leadership in volatile markets Innovation inside legacy businesses Ideal for CMOs and brand leaders rebuilding loyalty in commoditised categories CEOs and boards of consumer-facing businesses where brand is the main commercial moat Marketing, creative and customer experience leadership teams Sales and growth conferences in retail, FMCG, media and advertising Audience outcomes A working definition of what separates a brand customers respect from one they actively love, and why the second is worth more Language for talking about emotion as a commercial asset rather than a soft variable A clearer view of how creative organisations make decisions under pressure, drawn from inside one of the world’s largest networks Practical positions on culture, risk and leadership taken from 64 Shots that audiences can argue with rather than nod at

Why organisations work with Kevin Gaskell He has led verifiable turnarounds at three named global brands – Porsche GB from near-bankruptcy to the UK’s most profitable car company, BMW GB to four years of record growth and 500% profitability improvement, and Lamborghini GB – which means his frameworks are grounded in a documented, repeated track record, not a single case. His book Catching Giants (Business Book Awards 2023 finalist) makes a specific, testable argument: that resource-constrained teams with clarity of goal and high belief can consistently outperform better-resourced opponents. Organisations working through transformation can put that directly to use. His portfolio of 15+ businesses across technology, data, and manufacturing – including taking Fairline Boats from ten years of losses to profit within 14 months – shows the same turnaround approach applied across sectors, which makes it credible to audiences outside automotive. The world-record Atlantic and Pacific rowing expeditions are not decorative biography. They are tested case material on exactly the leadership dynamics he teaches: small teams, constrained resources, extreme conditions, and the challenge of sustaining belief and performance when the goal feels unreachable. He has delivered keynotes and masterclasses in over 50 countries for clients including Google, Oracle, JP Morgan, P&G, and Airbus – a range that tests his frameworks against diverse industries, organisation sizes, and cultures. Biography highlights MD of Porsche GB: took the business from near-bankruptcy and bottom of UK customer satisfaction rankings to most profitable car company in the UK within five years MD of BMW GB: four years of record growth, 70% sales increase, 500% improvement in profitability MD of Lamborghini GB; CEO of Fairline Boats, leading the business from ten years of losses to profit within 14 months Founder, chairman, and investor across 15+ businesses in technology, data, manufacturing, and professional services; portfolio has created over £3 billion in shareholder value Author of Catching Giants (Right Book Press, 2022), shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2023 Guinness World Record holder as part of the Ocean 5 team, fastest five-person Atlantic row (2020); world record Pacific row (2025); expeditions to both the North and South Poles Keynote and masterclass clients include Google, Oracle, JP Morgan, P&G, Airbus, and Accenture; delivered in over 50 countries Recognised as one of the UK’s Top 40 Managers under 40 Biography Turning round a failing business is one of the most demanding tests of leadership because it requires people to change their behaviour before there is any evidence the change will work. Kevin Gaskell has done that three times – at Porsche GB, BMW GB, and Lamborghini GB – and the mechanism in each case was the same: rebuilding team belief in a new direction ahead of any visible result. Appointed MD of Porsche GB at 32, he inherited a company close to bankruptcy and ranked at the bottom of UK customer satisfaction tables. Within five years it was the most profitable car company in the UK. At BMW GB, he led four years of record growth, including a 500% improvement in profitability. At Lamborghini GB, the same approach – refocusing the team on a clear goal, rebuilding culture from the inside – produced comparable results. Across these three brands, the pattern was never primarily about strategy. It was about belief. That same discipline has been applied outside automotive. At Fairline Boats, a business carrying ten years of losses was returned to profit within 14 months. Across a wider portfolio of technology, data, and manufacturing businesses, his teams have created more than £3 billion in shareholder value. His book Catching Giants, shortlisted for the Business Book Awards in 2023, formalises the core argument: that teams with limited resources and a clear goal, led well, can outperform better-equipped competition consistently. The expedition record – both poles, world-record Atlantic and Pacific rows – provides a parallel body of case material on the same dynamics. Small teams, constrained resources, extreme conditions, and the central leadership question: how do you sustain the belief and cohesion needed to reach an objective that looks, for most of the journey, unreachable. Key speaking topics Business turnaround and performance recovery High-performance team leadership Organisational culture as a performance lever Leading through disruption and uncertainty Brand building and repositioning Resilience and performance under pressure Entrepreneurship and business building Ideal for CEOs, MDs, and executive teams in businesses facing stalled performance, competitive disruption, or active turnaround Senior leadership teams initiating or sustaining large-scale transformation programmes Board-level and C-suite audiences exploring the human and cultural dynamics of sustained organisational performance Commercial and operations leaders responsible for driving step-change performance in established organisations Audience outcomes A specific framework for diagnosing why performance has stalled and what leadership change is needed to address it Practical tools for building team belief and shared purpose around an ambitious goal Case-based understanding of how cultural change typically precedes financial performance recovery in turnaround situations A working model for connecting leadership behaviour to commercial outcomes, drawn from multiple named business examples Perspective on sustaining high performance and decision quality under conditions of extreme pressure and limited resource

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 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

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 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.