Business Strategy & Growth speakers

Why organisations work with Neri Karra Sillaman Her eight-principle longevity framework in Pioneers (Wiley, 2025) is built on original academic research rather than case-study observation – it provides strategic leaders with a testable, applicable structure for long-term competitive positioning, not an anecdote collection. Pioneers was named Thinkers50 Best New Management Book of 2025 and a Financial Times Readers’ Choice – the two most credible independent signals in management thinking, giving buyers a defensible basis for the engagement beyond the speaker bureau description. She runs a manufacturing business with 25 years of partnerships with leading Italian fashion labels, recognised as both a B Corp and a Positive Luxury venture. The argument she makes about sustainable, values-driven longevity is one she has applied and revised under commercial pressure. Her Cambridge doctoral research used her own family business as a primary case study – an insider position on immigrant entrepreneurship that no other management scholar in this space holds, and which is the source of her most counterintuitive findings: that constraint, outsider perspective, and community cohesion function as durable competitive advantages. Her academic research has been published in the Journal of Business Venturing, Strategic Organization, and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, while her practitioner work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and the Financial Times – giving her credibility across board, executive, and academic settings. Biography highlights Professor of Practice and Entrepreneurship Expert at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford PhD from the University of Cambridge; doctoral research on born-global firms and immigrant entrepreneurship Author of Pioneers: 8 Principles of Business Longevity from Immigrant Entrepreneurs (Wiley, 2025) – Thinkers50 Best New Management Book of 2025, Financial Times Readers’ Choice, and Next Big Idea Club Must Read Named to the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2024 and recipient of the Thinkers50 Radar Award 2025 Co-founder of Neri Karra, a luxury leather goods brand with 25+ years of manufacturing partnerships with leading Italian fashion labels, recognised as a B Corp and Positive Luxury venture Founder of Moda Métiers, a fashion and luxury business consultancy Academic research published in Journal of Business Venturing, Strategic Organization, and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice Contributed articles to Harvard Business Review and Fast Company; covered by the Financial Times, BBC, CNBC, Newsweek, Monocle, Bloomberg, and Vogue Business Biography The question of why some companies survive for decades while others peak and fade is one of the most commercially consequential questions in strategy – and one of the least rigorously studied. Neri Karra Sillaman spent two decades approaching it through an unusual lens: the immigrant entrepreneurs behind brands including Chobani, WhatsApp, Duolingo, and PayPal, who built iconic and enduring businesses while starting with limited capital, no institutional networks, and no margin for failure. That research, rooted in her Cambridge doctoral work and developed across her faculty career at Oxford’s Saïd Business School, produced Pioneers (Wiley, 2025) – an eight-principle framework for business longevity drawn from the structural choices that explain immigrant entrepreneurial success. The book was named Thinkers50 Best New Management Book of 2025 and a Financial Times Readers’ Choice. She holds roles as both Professor of Practice in Strategy and Entrepreneurship Expert at Oxford, and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2024. The practitioner dimension matters here. She is co-founder of Neri Karra, a luxury leather goods business with 25+ years of manufacturing partnerships with leading Italian fashion labels, recognised as a B Corp and a Positive Luxury venture. The principles she applies in the boardroom and lecture hall – around purpose, constraint, community, and sustainable growth – are ones she has had to test, revise, and defend commercially over the same period she was researching them. Her writing appears in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Newsweek. Her academic research has been published in the Journal of Business Venturing, Strategic Organization, and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. She has contributed commentary to the Financial Times, BBC, CNBC, Monocle, Bloomberg, and Vogue Business, and has delivered TEDx talks on creativity, resilience, and entrepreneurship. Born in Bulgaria, she fled as a child refugee to Turkey before making her way through the University of Miami and Cambridge to the research that has defined her career – and which gives her a lived understanding of the very principles she argues make businesses last. Key speaking topics Business longevity and long-term competitive strategy Immigrant entrepreneurship and outsider advantage Sustainable growth and purpose-driven enterprise Fashion and luxury entrepreneurship Iconic brand building and brand durability Creativity and innovation in organisations Resilience as a strategic asset Ideal for CEOs, founders, and boards engaged in long-term strategy and business durability reviews Chief Strategy Officers and senior commercial teams seeking research-grounded frameworks for sustainable growth Fashion, luxury, and consumer goods executives navigating brand longevity, sustainability pressures, and global expansion Executive education and MBA audiences at business schools Audience outcomes A concrete eight-principle framework for what drives business longevity, applicable across sectors not limited to fashion or luxury A reframed understanding of constraint, outsider perspective, and community as structural competitive advantages rather than liabilities Specific strategic principles drawn from the companies behind Chobani, WhatsApp, Duolingo, and PayPal – examined analytically, not biographically Clearer language for board and leadership conversations about the gap between short-term performance and lasting competitive advantage A research-grounded basis for evaluating whether current strategic decisions are building for durability or optimising for the next cycle

Why organisations work with Nicholas Jeffery Four ISP CEO and COO seats across Hostmark, Worldport, PSINet Europe and Uniserve Communications, giving him a working view of what actually happens inside a telecoms or managed service business when the model shifts. A second career on the investor side as Head of Investment Planning and Strategy for the TMT Group at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, where capital allocation decisions in technology and media were made across EMEA. Direct operating experience of digital transformation as a SaaS COO at VIMtrek and Vizerra, in Building Information Management and 3D virtualisation, and as the executive behind Digital Realty’s EMEA sales and marketing strategy. Co-creator of Buzzmetrics, the social media intelligence business acquired by Reed, with a forty-year line of sight across branding from 1980s corporate identity work to the current AI reset. A geopolitical voice on Central Europe through his “Danube Dispatches” column at WBN News, which gives boards with Hungary, EU or CEE exposure a senior commercial reader of the political terrain. Biography highlights CEO of Uniserve Communications Corporation from March 2017; led the listed share price from CND$0.04 to CND$0.67 within nine months of joining. European MD/COO and CEO of internet service providers including Hostmark, Worldport, PSINet Europe and Uniserve. Head of Investment Planning and Strategy, TMT Group, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). COO of VIMtrek and Vizerra, SaaS firms in architectural 3D virtualisation and Building Information Management software. Co-creator of Buzzmetrics, the social media measurement business acquired by Reed. Founding and Managing Partner of Impresario Partners International; Chairman of Ventree Innovations Inc.; author of the Danube Dispatches column at WBN News. Biography PSINet Europe was in administration when its European operations had to be rebuilt as a managed services business. Nicholas Jeffery was one of the executives who ran that kind of work across four internet service providers, including Hostmark, Worldport and, later, Uniserve Communications, where as CEO from March 2017 the listed share price moved from CND$0.04 to CND$0.67 within nine months. The unusual part of his career is that the operating CEO work sits alongside an investor seat. As Head of Investment Planning and Strategy for the TMT Group at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, he was inside the capital allocation conversations on telecoms, media and technology investments across EMEA. Boards rarely meet a single adviser who has been both buyer and operator on the same kinds of assets. The second strand of his work is brand and customer. He co-created Buzzmetrics, the social media intelligence business later acquired by Reed, ran sales and marketing strategy for Digital Realty across EMEA, and has now turned his forty-year branding line into a commentary on how AI is reshaping the discipline. The talk “Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks: A 40-Year Branding Veteran Embraces AI,” delivered at WINK 2025, sits in this strand. He works between Vancouver, Budapest, London and Kampala as Founding and Managing Partner of Impresario Partners International and Chairman of Ventree Innovations Inc. From Budapest he writes the Danube Dispatches column at WBN News, a serious commercial reader’s account of Hungarian politics and Central European risk in the run-up to the 2026 Hungarian election. He was nominated for the Global Business and Authors’ Award UK 2024. Key speaking topics Digital transformation in telecoms, media and technology businesses Branding strategy under AI Scaling, restructuring and turning around technology companies Investment strategy in TMT Building Information Management and SaaS commercialisation Central European political and commercial risk Ideal for TMT, telecoms and media company boards and executive teams running through transformation or restructuring Private equity, venture and infrastructure investors with TMT or CEE exposure CMOs and brand leaders rethinking marketing operations under generative AI Boards with Hungary, EU accession state or wider Central European commercial exposure Audience outcomes A working operator’s account of what changes inside a telecoms or SaaS business when a transformation plan meets the P&L An investor-side perspective on how TMT capital allocation decisions get made and where they fail A practical view on how the branding discipline is being reorganised by AI, drawn from four decades inside the function A senior commercial reading of Central European political risk for boards exposed to Hungary and the wider region

Why organisations work with Nicholas Webb He has filed and won more than 40 US patents in healthcare, consumer, and industrial technologies. The advice on innovation comes from someone who has run the full cycle from invention to commercial product, not from a researcher reporting on it. The Innovation Mandate and What Customers Crave are used inside operating companies as design references for innovation programmes and customer experience strategy, not as airport reading. Global Gurus has named him a Top 30 customer service authority for multiple consecutive years, a credential held alongside a working consulting practice with boards of multibillion-dollar companies through LeaderLogic. His healthcare work is unusually concrete for a speaker in this space: a documentary, The Healthcare Cure, that won the Sedona International Film Festival’s Audience Choice Award, plus recent AI patent filings in patient monitoring. He builds keynotes around a specific commercial problem the buyer names, rather than a fixed deck. Useful when a board wants a session calibrated to an actual strategic decision, not a generic future-of overview. Biography highlights More than 40 US patents granted, spanning healthcare devices, consumer products, and industrial technologies, including one of the world’s smallest medical implants for ocular surface disease. Author of What Customers Crave, The Innovation Mandate, What Customers Hate, Happy Work, Lucid Leadership, and The Healthcare Mandate. CEO of LeaderLogic LLC, advising boards of multibillion-dollar companies on innovation and customer strategy. Named to Global Gurus’ Top 30 Customer Service authorities list for multiple consecutive years. Director of The Healthcare Cure, a documentary on US healthcare reform that won the Audience Choice Award at the Sedona International Film Festival in 2021. Former Chief Innovation Officer and adjunct professor at a leading US medical school, awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters for contributions to healthcare. Biography A patent is a useful filter. It is one of the few credentials in this field that requires a working invention, a defensible claim, and the discipline to take an idea through to a commercial product. Nicholas Webb has more than 40 of them, across healthcare devices, consumer goods, and industrial technologies, including one of the world’s smallest medical implants for ocular surface disease and an early wearable. That track record sits behind everything he says about innovation. He runs LeaderLogic LLC, a consulting practice that works with boards of multibillion-dollar companies on innovation strategy and customer experience. His books, including The Innovation Mandate, What Customers Crave, What Customers Hate, and Lucid Leadership, function as design references for those engagements rather than standalone trade titles. Global Gurus has placed him among the world’s top 30 customer service authorities for multiple consecutive years. The healthcare work runs in parallel and gives the rest of his thinking a useful test bed. He directed The Healthcare Cure, a documentary on the structural failures of US healthcare that won the Audience Choice Award at the Sedona International Film Festival in 2021, and continues to file AI patents in patient monitoring and mood-state analysis. Healthcare is where his views on innovation, customer experience, and AI are stress-tested in a high-stakes operating environment. For SA clients the practical value is this: a speaker who can sit with a board, take in a specific commercial question, and respond with a session built around the inventor’s logic of constraints, hypotheses, prototypes, and evidence. The output is not inspiration. It is a clearer view of where innovation pays and where customer experience is quietly costing the business growth. Key speaking topics Innovation as a managed commercial discipline Customer experience and the growth agenda AI in operating strategy Healthcare transformation and patient experience Leadership clarity under hyper-complexity Workforce engagement and talent retention Board-level innovation governance Ideal for Boards and executive committees reviewing innovation strategy or customer experience performance CEOs, CCOs, and CMOs accountable for growth in mature or commoditised categories Healthcare executives and provider networks navigating clinical, workforce, and AI transformation simultaneously Chief Innovation Officers and strategy leads building an internal innovation operating model Audience outcomes A clearer view of where current innovation activity is producing returns and where it is absorbing resource without compounding effect A practical model for customer experience design grounded in identifying what specific customer types love and hate, rather than aggregate satisfaction scores A board-level reading of AI as an operating discipline, with examples from healthcare and consumer technology A working definition of leadership clarity that holds up under complexity, drawn from Lucid Leadership Language and structure to take innovation conversations out of culture talk and into commercial governance

Why organisations work with Nick Ayton More than four decades inside computer science and ten founded start-ups give him a working operator’s view of where deep tech actually breaks, not a consultant’s slide on where it might. He translates AI, quantum, and longevity science into capital allocation questions a CFO or investment committee can act on, which is rare among futurists who stop at the trend. His book The Slow Bleed sets out Cash Conversion Velocity, a diagnostic he uses to show CEOs why a profitable business is draining cash and what to fix first, in days rather than quarters. His Living to 150 book and ongoing work on AI-assisted healthcare give him a specific, defensible position on longevity, a topic most technology speakers cannot credibly hold. He chairs global summits where deep tech meets investor capital, including the Family Office Summit in Abu Dhabi, so the audience he speaks to most often is the one buyers are trying to reach. Biography highlights Author, The Slow Bleed: A CEO Field Guide to Cash Conversion Velocity (Redline Press, 2026), with a foreword by Ian Wright, founder of VirtualNonExecs. Author, Living to 150: A New Era in Personalised AI Healthcare (2024). Founder of Crix.io, a regulated crypto-exchange, and Chainstarter Ventures, advising family offices on deep tech investment. Named Blockchain Visionary of the Year by Cointelegraph (2018); founding writer of the “Sage of Shoreditch” column. Named Top Futurist Speaker at the Family Office Summit, Abu Dhabi (2023). Has delivered keynotes and faculty addresses at MIT, Harvard, LSE, and Berkeley, alongside more than 100 global summits, working between the UK and the UAE. Biography Most futurist commentary on AI, quantum, and longevity stops at the trend line. Ayton’s work starts where the boardroom question starts: what does this technology mean for the next ten-year capital decision? After more than four decades in computer science and ten founded companies, he speaks to investors and operators in their own language. His early move into blockchain produced Crix.io, one of the first regulated crypto-exchanges, and the Cointelegraph column that named him Blockchain Visionary of the Year in 2018. The work has since broadened into quantum computing, synthetic biology, and longevity science. His book Living to 150 argues for personalised AI healthcare as the next investable frontier, and he advises family offices on how to position capital around it. A second strand of his work asks why profitable businesses quietly fail. His 2026 book The Slow Bleed sets out Cash Conversion Velocity, a way to measure the real health of an operating model in days, and a structured programme to fix it in months rather than years. The same instinct runs through his keynotes on why digital transformation so often optimises dysfunction instead of removing it. What separates Ayton from the futurist field is the audience he was built for. Family offices, founders, and the investment committees behind frontier-tech bets do not want a vision deck. They want someone who has built companies in the category, taken the losses, and can name which signals matter and which numbers lie. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and the next decade of enterprise value Quantum computing and its commercial timeline Data sovereignty and the post-cloud era Biological computing and synthetic biology Longevity sciences and personalised AI healthcare Frontier technology investment for family offices Cash Conversion Velocity and operating-model diagnosis Why digital transformation fails Ideal for Boards and investment committees making long-horizon capital decisions on AI, quantum, or biotech Family offices and private capital allocators positioning around frontier technologies Founders and CTOs in deep tech who need a credible external voice on category direction CEOs, PE operating partners, and family office principals who suspect a profitable business is quietly losing cash Audience outcomes A clearer read on which deep tech signals carry commercial weight and which are noise A working vocabulary for AI, quantum, and longevity that holds up in front of technical and capital audiences Specific examples of where capital is already moving in frontier tech, drawn from family office and founder networks A way to tell whether a profitable business is actually healthy, using cash conversion rather than the backward-looking metrics on the board pack A sharper sense of which technology bets compound over a decade and which expire within two

Why organisations work with Nirmalya Kumar He has run group strategy inside one of the world’s largest conglomerates. As a member of the Tata Sons Group Executive Council from 2013 to 2016, he was responsible for group-level strategy and customer centricity across Tata’s operating companies. His Marketing as Strategy thesis, published by Harvard Business Press, is the reference text for CEOs and CMOs trying to elevate marketing from a campaign function to a profit-and-loss instrument. Brand Breakout, co-authored with Jan-Benedict Steenkamp, codifies eight specific routes by which emerging-market brands take share from Western incumbents, including the Asian tortoise route and B2B-to-B2C migration. It is one of the few books on the subject grounded in named cases rather than generic globalisation theory. Private Label Strategy gives executive teams a worked playbook for competing with retailer brands, an issue that returns to the boardroom every time a downturn compresses margins in consumer goods. Thinkers50 Hall of Fame induction in 2017, the AMA Mahajan Award in 2021, and roughly twenty thousand Google Scholar citations place his work in the upper tier of academic marketing thinkers actively booked by industry. Biography highlights Lee Kong Chian Professor of Marketing, Singapore Management University; Distinguished Fellow, INSEAD Emerging Markets Institute. Member, Group Executive Council of Tata Sons (2013 to 2016), reporting to Chairman Cyrus Mistry, with responsibility for group strategy. Former Professor of Marketing and Co-Director of the Aditya Birla India Centre at London Business School (2003 to 2013). Author of eight books, including Marketing as Strategy and Private Label Strategy, both Harvard Business Press; and Brand Breakout (Palgrave Macmillan). Inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame (2017); awarded the Thinkers50 Global Village Award (2011); awarded the AMA Mahajan Award for Lifetime Contributions to Marketing Strategy (2021). Board service across ACC, Bata India, Tata Chemicals, UltraTech Cement, and Zensar. Biography Marketing inside large organisations has been losing strategic ground for two decades, and the cost is now visible at the top line. CEOs see commoditisation, retailer power, and emerging-market competitors moving faster than their own brand portfolios. Kumar’s central argument, set out in Marketing as Strategy (Harvard Business Press, 2004), is that the answer is not better campaigns but a redefined role for marketing as the architect of customer-driven growth across the organisation. His subsequent work develops that argument against specific commercial pressures. Private Label Strategy, co-authored with Jan-Benedict Steenkamp at Harvard Business Press, addressed the structural rise of retailer brands. Brand Breakout, published as Western incumbents woke up to Tata, Lenovo, Haier, and Mahindra, mapped eight named routes by which emerging-market brands cross into global markets. Clash, on Amazon versus Walmart, examined the platform-versus-retail confrontation now defining consumer business. The work is reinforced by an operating record. From 2013 to 2016 Kumar sat on the Tata Sons Group Executive Council under Cyrus Mistry, leading group strategy across one of the most diversified industrial portfolios in the world. He has held faculty positions at London Business School, IMD, and Kellogg, and currently holds the Lee Kong Chian Chair at Singapore Management University. The recognition follows from the substance: Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2017, the Global Village Award in 2011, the AMA Mahajan Award for Lifetime Contributions to Marketing Strategy in 2021, and a citation record above twenty thousand on Google Scholar. For boards weighing how to make marketing pay back its budget, his work is the operating manual. Key speaking topics Marketing as strategy Private label and retailer power Brand-building from emerging markets Competing with low-cost rivals Customer centricity in conglomerates Strategy and innovation in India Platform versus retail competition Ideal for CMOs and brand leaders seeking to position marketing as a P&L discipline CEOs and boards of consumer goods, retail, and industrial groups facing margin compression from private label or emerging-market entrants Executive teams in Indian and Asian conglomerates planning international brand strategy Strategy and corporate development leaders working on portfolio decisions and customer-centric reorganisation Audience outcomes A working definition of what marketing must control inside the organisation to drive profitable growth, beyond the campaign function A framework of named routes by which emerging-market brands take share from incumbents, with worked cases A practical view of when to fight, partner with, or build a private label, drawn from the Harvard Business Press study A Tata-scale account of how group strategy and customer focus get implemented across diversified portfolios A sharper read on the Amazon-versus-Walmart structural shift and what it means for consumer companies

Why organisations work with Oliver Hart Hart’s theory of incomplete contracts and the Grossman-Hart-Moore property rights theory underpin most modern thinking on corporate governance and the boundaries of the firm. Boards working through M&A, integration, outsourcing, or governance redesign get a framework grounded in four decades of foundational research. The Hart-Zingales shareholder welfare framework gives boards a substantive third position between Friedman-style shareholder primacy and stakeholder capitalism rhetoric. It is published in peer-reviewed journals and directly applicable to live ESG and shareholder voting decisions. Hart has served as a government expert witness in major US legal cases, including Black & Decker v. USA and Wells Fargo v. USA. The framework has been tested under adversarial legal scrutiny, with high-stakes commercial outcomes turning on the economic argument. Hart’s body of work has shaped four decades of research on ownership and incentive design. The 2016 Nobel Prize and 2023 Knight Bachelor are the formal recognition of a framework that now underpins how regulators and corporate boards approach governance questions. Biography highlights Co-recipient of the 2016 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, awarded with Bengt Holmström for contributions to contract theory. Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard, the institution’s highest faculty rank. Author of Firms, Contracts, and Financial Structure (Oxford University Press), the standard reference text on the economic theory of the firm. Knight Bachelor in the 2023 King’s Birthday Honours for services to economic theory. Past president of the American Law and Economics Association and past vice president of the American Economic Association. Fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Biography What is a firm, and where should its boundaries lie? The question sits underneath most of the contested decisions facing modern boards, from M&A integration to ESG governance. The framework that lets boards answer it rigorously was largely built by Sir Oliver Hart. Hart’s contributions to contract theory, recognised with the 2016 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, centre on a foundational insight. Real contracts are incomplete: they cannot specify every contingency, and whoever holds the right to decide on the unspecified elements holds the real power. The Grossman-Hart-Moore property rights theory built on this to formalise when activities should sit inside firms and when they should sit in markets. More recently, his work with Luigi Zingales of Chicago Booth has redrawn the corporate purpose debate. The Hart-Zingales shareholder welfare framework reframes corporate objectives around the actual preferences of investors, including their non-financial concerns, and proposes shareholder voting as the mechanism for expressing them. The framework speaks directly to live disputes about ESG votes and shareholder activism on social issues. At Harvard since 1993, Hart holds the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professorship and chaired the Economics department from 2000 to 2003. Past president of the American Law and Economics Association and fellow of the British Academy, he was made a Knight Bachelor in 2023 for services to economic theory. The 1986 paper with Sandy Grossman, “The Costs and Benefits of Ownership,” remains the standard reference for how firm boundaries are analysed in modern economics. Key speaking topics Contract theory and incomplete contracts The theory of the firm Corporate governance and ownership Shareholder welfare and corporate purpose ESG governance and shareholder activism Incentive design Ideal for Boards of directors and chairs General counsel, CFOs, and corporate governance leaders Investors and asset managers grappling with ESG mandates Policymakers, regulators, and antitrust authorities Audience outcomes A working theory of where firm boundaries should lie and why, applicable to live decisions on M&A and outsourcing. A defensible position on corporate purpose that goes beyond Friedman versus stakeholder capitalism slogans. The economic logic underneath shareholder activism and ESG governance, including when shareholder voting matters and when it doesn’t. The intellectual vocabulary for thinking about ownership and incentive design with the seriousness these topics require.

Why organisations work with Oliver Peyton He pioneered the model of high-quality restaurant and café concessions inside cultural institutions, with sites at the National Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, Wallace Collection and Kew Gardens, and can describe the operating logic from the inside. He has presided over both the building and the public administration of Peyton & Byrne, and discusses commercial failure and reinvention as someone who has lived it. He has applied a single operating philosophy, hospitality as a service discipline, across nightclubs, restaurants, bakeries, drinks brands and the funeral sector with Exit Here. Fifteen years as a judge on the BBC’s Great British Menu has given him sustained scrutiny of how performance operations function under pressure, and a vocabulary that translates for audiences outside hospitality. He has consulted for Sodexo, British Airways, Virgin and Pernod Ricard, organisations large enough to expose any thin theory of consumer-facing operations. Biography highlights Founder of Peyton & Byrne, with restaurants and cafés inside the National Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, Wallace Collection, Kew Gardens, the British Library and the Wellcome Collection. Judge on BBC Two’s Great British Menu from 2006 to 2021. Honorary OBE for services to catering, presented in 2012. Founder of Exit Here, a contemporary funeral business in Chiswick and Crouch End, opened in 2019. Founder of Unknown Pleasures, a premium canned cocktail brand launched in 2021. Author of two cookbooks; columnist for GQ Magazine; consulting client list includes Sodexo, British Airways, Virgin and Pernod Ricard. Biography Hospitality is a public discipline. Every cover is a transaction watched in real time, and a single bad year can take a brand that took fifteen years to build. Few operators have spent longer testing what that requires than Oliver Peyton. He opened nightclubs in Brighton and London in the early 1980s. He moved into restaurants with the Atlantic Bar & Grill in 1994, then launched a string of London venues including Coast, Mash and Isola. In 2005, he founded Peyton & Byrne, which placed restaurant and café concessions inside major London cultural institutions, including the National Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Wallace Collection and Kew Gardens. The trajectory has not been linear. In October 2016, Peyton & Byrne entered administration after losing contracts, including Kew Gardens and the British Library. It was acquired by Sodexo, where Peyton stayed on as creative director. In 2019, he founded Exit Here, a contemporary funeral business in Chiswick, now also operating in Crouch End. It applies the hospitality model to a sector he describes as largely unchanged since the Victorian era. In 2021, he launched the premium canned cocktail brand Unknown Pleasures. Alongside the operating career, Peyton spent fifteen years as a judge on BBC Two’s Great British Menu, from 2006 to 2021. He has also presented and contributed to programmes on restaurant turnaround. He was awarded an honorary OBE for services to catering in 2012 and has consulted for Sodexo, British Airways, Virgin and Pernod Ricard. His career makes a practical point. Consumer-facing operations are a portable discipline. Operators who have lived through public failure and started again carry an authority that strategists rarely match. Key speaking topics Hospitality and consumer-facing operations Restaurant and catering entrepreneurship Brand building inside cultural and visitor attraction venues Commercial reinvention after public failure Operating discipline in service businesses Cross-sector application of hospitality models Ideal for Hospitality, retail and consumer-facing operators looking at growth or repositioning CEOs and founders of brands operating inside host environments such as museums, galleries, transport hubs and public venues Boards weighing turnaround, recovery or reinvention strategy after operational failure Senior leaders in catering, foodservice and customer-facing service industries Audience outcomes An operator’s account of how restaurants and consumer venues actually generate margin, and where it leaks Specific case material on building brands inside the National Gallery, Royal Academy, Kew Gardens and similar host venues A direct read on how Peyton & Byrne entered administration, what was lost, and what came next A view of how hospitality discipline transfers into adjacent sectors, drawn from the funeral business, Exit Here and drinks brand Unknown Pleasures

Why organisations work with Olivier Sibony He co-authored Noise with Daniel Kahneman and Cass Sunstein, which means a board hears the original behavioural science argument from one of the people who built it, not a secondhand interpretation. Twenty-five years at McKinsey, including running the Global Corporate Strategy Practice, gives him a working vocabulary for the actual decisions executive committees argue about: portfolio bets, M&A, market entry, capital allocation. His framework converts cognitive bias from an interesting concept into a procurement question: what does your decision architecture look like, and which specific traps does it fail to catch. He is one of a small group who can sit in a HEC Paris and Saïd Business School classroom and a CEO’s strategy offsite in the same week, and translate without losing either audience. Biography highlights Co-author of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment with Daniel Kahneman and Cass R. Sunstein, New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller Author of You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake!, winner of the 2019 Manpower Foundation Grand Prize for best management book Professor of Strategy at HEC Paris and Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company for 25 years, leading the firm’s Corporate Strategy Practice globally Co-author with Daniel Kahneman and Dan Lovallo of “Before You Make That Big Decision,” selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Making Smart Decisions Knight in the French Legion of Honour and recipient of the Vernimmen Teaching Award at HEC Paris Biography Most strategic mistakes do not come from missing information. They come from the way executives process the information they already have. Behavioural strategy is the discipline of catching those errors before they reach the board paper, and Olivier Sibony has spent two decades building the case for treating it as a serious management practice rather than a curiosity. His credentials sit on both sides of the divide that usually separates academics from operators. He spent 25 years at McKinsey & Company, eventually as Senior Partner running the firm’s Global Corporate Strategy Practice and a European leader of the Consumer sector. In 2015 he moved full time into teaching, joining HEC Paris as a Professor of Strategy and taking up an Associate Fellowship at Oxford’s Saïd Business School. The intellectual work shows up most clearly in the books. Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, co-authored with Daniel Kahneman and Cass R. Sunstein, became a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller and reframed an entire category of judgment error that bias literature had ignored. You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake! won the Manpower Foundation Grand Prize and turned the academic case into 40 specific techniques executives can use. Earlier, his Harvard Business Review article with Kahneman and Dan Lovallo, “Before You Make That Big Decision,” was selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Making Smart Decisions. What makes him useful in a room full of operators is the McKinsey vocabulary underneath the behavioural science. He talks about decision architecture the way other people talk about org design: as something you build deliberately, audit regularly, and rebuild when it stops catching the errors it was meant to catch. Key speaking topics Behavioural strategy and decision quality Cognitive bias in executive judgment Noise and inconsistency in organisational decisions Decision architecture in senior teams Strategic choice under uncertainty Algorithms, AI, and the limits of human intuition Diversity and personnel decision-making Ideal for CEOs, executive committees, and boards reviewing how major capital allocation and strategy decisions get made Chief Strategy Officers and corporate development teams running M&A, portfolio, and market-entry processes CHROs and senior HR leaders responsible for hiring, performance review, and promotion systems where noise quietly distorts outcomes Investment committees and risk leadership teams whose decisions repeat under uncertainty Audience outcomes A clearer view of where their own decision processes are most exposed to bias and noise A vocabulary to challenge confident recommendations without attacking the people making them Specific techniques for building dissent, structured disagreement, and pre-mortems into existing governance A framework for deciding when to trust judgment, when to trust data, and when to trust an algorithm A sharper sense of which decisions deserve the heaviest process and which do not

Why organisations work with Omar Johnson He has a documented commercial result at the scale most marketers will never reach: Beats by Dre from $20 million to $2 billion, acquired by Apple for $3 billion. He is operating, not reminiscing. As founder of Øpus Intelligence, he is currently applying generative AI to cultural relevance for clients including Nissan, the NBA 2K League, and NFL franchises. He built the campaigns marketing teams still study: the 2012 Beats Olympics athlete play that drove a 600% international sales lift, and the “Straight Outta Somewhere” meme generator that reached over a billion people on a near-zero media budget. He gives senior marketing leaders a working model for cultural relevance as a commercial discipline, with named brand cases from Nike, Apple, Coca-Cola, and Kraft, rather than agency-side theory. Biography highlights Former Chief Marketing Officer, Beats by Dre, and former Vice President of Marketing, Apple. Led Beats from $20 million to over $2 billion in revenue, culminating in the $3 billion acquisition by Apple in 2014. Founder of ØPUS United and founder of Øpus Intelligence, a generative AI platform for cultural relevance, with clients including Nissan, NBA 2K League, Tennessee Titans, and Minnesota Vikings. Author of “Dear White Corporate America,” following a full-page New York Times open letter on racial equity in June 2020. Named “Brand Genius” by Adweek and one of the “Most Innovative CMOs” by Business Insider. Earlier marketing leadership across Nike (including campaigns with LeBron James and Kobe Bryant), Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, and Campbell Soup. MBA from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. Biography Beats by Dre grew from $20 million to more than $2 billion in revenue in four years and was acquired by Apple for $3 billion in 2014. Omar Johnson was the third employee through the door and the Chief Marketing Officer who built the brand engine that made the trajectory possible. The case studies have lasted longer than the headphones themselves. At the 2012 Olympics, instead of paying for sponsor rights, Beats put national-flag headphones on athletes through a private lounge, lifting international sales by 600%. In 2015, the “Straight Outta Somewhere” meme generator reached over a billion people on a near-zero media budget. Both built category leadership through cultural participation, not paid reach. After Apple, Johnson founded ØPUS United, a brand management firm, and then Øpus Intelligence, a generative AI platform that productises cultural relevance for marketers. Live clients include Nissan, the NBA 2K League, and NFL franchises, with a 2025 partnership with Sundial Media (parent of ESSENCE, Refinery29, AFROPUNK) extending the model further into culture media. His earlier career across Nike, Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, and Campbell Soup gave him the inside view of large brand systems; his post-Apple work gives him the operator’s view of what is breaking in them now. Adweek named him a Brand Genius. Business Insider named him one of the Most Innovative CMOs. His 2020 New York Times open letter, “My Open Letter to White Corporate America,” became the book “Dear White Corporate America.” Key speaking topics Brand building and category leadership Marketing strategy and growth Cultural relevance as a commercial discipline Generative AI in marketing and brand management Customer experience and brand authenticity Storytelling and creative campaign design Ideal for CMOs, brand directors, and senior marketing leadership teams CEO and executive committee offsites where growth depends on brand strength Consumer, retail, sports, media, and entertainment audiences Innovation, creative, and customer experience functions exploring AI in marketing Audience outcomes A working definition of cultural relevance that can be applied to a brand plan, not a slogan Named campaign cases (Beats Olympics, Straight Outta Somewhere, Nike commercials with LeBron James and Kobe Bryant) used to illustrate how cultural participation beats paid reach A current view from inside a generative AI marketing platform on what the technology actually changes for brand teams A direct provocation to senior leaders on authenticity, representation, and the commercial cost of getting either wrong

Why organisations work with Omer Wilson He has run the brand function inside three of the most consequential data centre platforms of the last decade, including Digital Realty in EMEA and APAC, giving him a working model of how technical infrastructure businesses actually win category leadership. He has been voted Datacloud Marketer of the Year on two separate continents, in Monaco in 2015 and Singapore in 2018, which is a rare double inside the industry’s only credible peer-voted award. He builds brand strategy that translates between cultures, with operational experience in the UK, Singapore and now Portugal, and a Turkish-British background that informs his work on Asia and emerging-market positioning. He is currently leading marketing for a 1.2 GW, EUR 8.5 billion AI-era data campus in Sines, which means his commentary on the next decade of digital infrastructure marketing is grounded in a live programme, not retrospective analysis. Biography highlights Chief Marketing Officer, Start Campus, leading brand and go-to-market for the SINES DC campus in Portugal. Former Chief Marketing Officer at Qarbon Technologies and Pure Data Centres Group. Senior marketing leadership at Digital Realty across EMEA and APAC, joining the company in 2011 in London. Datacloud Data Centre Marketer of the Year 2015, Monaco. Datacloud Asia Marketer of the Year 2018, Singapore. Founder and Chief Strategist, Anatolia.Asia Consulting Group; trained on the IBM Global Graduate Scheme; former Head of Corporate Solutions Marketing for Jones Lang LaSalle EMEA. Biography The data centre industry built its commercial story on power, cooling and square metres. As AI workloads have changed what hyperscale customers actually need, the buying conversation has shifted to sustainability, sovereignty and brand trust. The companies winning that conversation are doing marketing work most of the sector still treats as overhead. Wilson has been one of the operators inside that shift. At Digital Realty he ran marketing across EMEA and later APAC after joining the firm in London in 2011, then took the CMO seat at Pure Data Centres Group and Qarbon Technologies. He is now Chief Marketing Officer at Start Campus, the operator behind the 1.2 GW SINES campus in Portugal, an EUR 8.5 billion programme positioned as one of Europe’s most sustainable AI data centres. His professional voice was shaped early by the IBM Global Graduate Scheme and then by running corporate solutions marketing at Jones Lang LaSalle across EMEA. That mix matters, because he treats brand as a commercial system: pricing, sales enablement and customer narrative working as one engine. He has been voted Datacloud Marketer of the Year twice, in Monaco in 2015 and Singapore in 2018, the industry’s clearest peer signal that the work travels. He also founded Anatolia.Asia Consulting Group, advising technology and infrastructure clients on positioning across Europe and Asia, and is a regular keynote speaker at Cloud Expo Asia, Data Centre World and DCD events. The through-line in his work is category creation: helping technical businesses build brand authority before commodity pressure forces a price conversation. Key speaking topics Brand strategy in technology and digital infrastructure Marketing leadership in data centres and hyperscale Category creation in B2B technology Cross-cultural positioning between Europe and Asia Sustainability and AI as commercial narratives Go-to-market for capital-intensive technology businesses Ideal for CMOs and senior marketing leaders inside technology, infrastructure and capital-intensive B2B businesses CEOs and founders of scale-up technology companies preparing a category narrative Sales and commercial leadership teams in data centres, cloud, energy and adjacent infrastructure sectors Industry conferences in digital infrastructure, AI, cloud and sustainability Audience outcomes A clearer model for how brand work compounds commercial value inside technical categories. Examples from inside the data centre industry of how marketing has shifted from spec-led to narrative-led selling. Practical perspectives on positioning sustainability and AI claims so they hold up with sophisticated buyers. A sharper view of how Asia, Europe and emerging markets behave differently as B2B technology audiences.

Why organisations work with Ozwald Boateng He rebuilt Savile Row’s relevance to a younger global market without abandoning its craft. Few living designers have shifted a 200-year-old category that decisively. He was the first black designer to lead menswear at Givenchy under LVMH, a working case study in taking a personal aesthetic into a heritage luxury house. He co-founded the Made in Africa Foundation and helped launch the $2bn Africa50 infrastructure fund with the African Development Bank, giving him a track record few creative figures can match on capital and continental development. His commercial collaborations span Coutts, Johnnie Walker, Virgin and British Airways, alongside film work for Marvel’s Black Panther. The brand reach is unusually broad for a fashion founder. Biography highlights First English tailor to present a catwalk show at Paris Fashion Week (1994). Creative Director of Menswear at Givenchy, LVMH (2003 to 2007). OBE for services to the clothing industry (2006). Best Menswear Designer, Trophees de la Mode, Paris (1996); Best Menswear Designer, British Fashion Awards (2000). Subject of a V&A Fashion in Motion event (2005), one of a small group including Vivienne Westwood, Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen. Co-founder, Made in Africa Foundation; co-launched the $2bn Africa50 infrastructure fund with the African Development Bank. Biography Savile Row was a closed system when Boateng arrived. The category meant heritage, sober colour, and a customer his father’s age. He kept the cut and changed almost everything else. By 1994 he was the first English tailor to stage a catwalk show at Paris Fashion Week. By 1995 he had a boutique on Vigo Street, the south end of the Row, and a younger clientele was buying suits again. The category shift mattered commercially. In 2003, LVMH appointed him Creative Director of Menswear at Givenchy, a role he held until 2007. He was the first black designer to lead menswear at the house. The OBE followed in 2006 for services to the clothing industry. A new flagship at 30 Savile Row, co-designed with the architect David Adjaye, opened in 2008. The second act is less expected. Boateng co-founded the Made in Africa Foundation in 2011 to finance large-scale African infrastructure. With the African Development Bank he helped launch Africa50, a $2bn fund aimed at closing the continent’s infrastructure gap. He has worked with several African governments on industrial and development policy, and the work has been covered by CNN, Bloomberg and Pan African Visions. The collaborations sit alongside the official roles. Coutts, Johnnie Walker, Virgin Atlantic and British Airways have commissioned him; Ruth E. Carter put one of his teal mohair suits on screen in Black Panther. The throughline is consistent: a craft practice used as a lever on much bigger systems, from a London street to LVMH to continental capital allocation. Key speaking topics Luxury brand building and reinvention Creative entrepreneurship at scale Heritage brand leadership African economic development and investment Design, identity and cultural representation Diversity in luxury and creative industries Ideal for CEOs and CMOs of heritage brands considering category reinvention Boards and leadership teams of luxury, retail and consumer goods businesses Organisations with significant African market or investment exposure Senior creative and design leaders in fashion, hospitality and lifestyle Audience outcomes A working view of how one founder shifted a 200-year-old category and what that took commercially. A frank account of running a personal aesthetic inside a heritage LVMH house. A specific, named perspective on African infrastructure investment from someone who has helped raise it. A model for building cross-sector collaborations that compound a creative practice over decades.

Why organisations work with Paco Underhill He invented the methodology behind modern in-store consumer research. Envirosell’s video-tracking and observational fieldwork, built up over four decades, is the empirical foundation that most behavioural retail consulting now borrows from. His client base is the proof point. Envirosell has worked with more than a third of the Fortune 100 across 50-plus countries, on stores, banks, restaurants, malls, and digital interfaces. Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping is taught in MBA and design programmes globally and has been published in 27 languages, giving him a shared vocabulary with the buyers in the room. Malcolm Gladwell’s 1996 New Yorker profile “The Science of Shopping” turned Underhill’s work into one of the most reprinted pieces the magazine has ever run, anchoring his standing as the named figure in the field. He works in concrete categories, food and beverage, beauty, telecoms, fashion, supermarkets, malls, financial branches, not abstract retail strategy, which is what category leaders actually need. Biography highlights Founder and former CEO of Envirosell Inc., the behavioural research and consultancy firm he established in 1986 Author of four Simon & Schuster titles: Why We Buy, Call of the Mall, What Women Want, and How We Eat Why We Buy published in 27 languages and used in MBA and design school curricula worldwide Subject of Malcolm Gladwell’s 1996 New Yorker profile “The Science of Shopping” Vassar College graduate; also studied at Columbia University and Ewha University, Seoul; former adjunct instructor in the doctoral programme in Environmental Psychology at City University of New York Owner of Peckshee LLC; columnist for Design: Retail and The Robin Report Biography In 1986, almost no one was studying what customers actually did inside a store. Marketers had surveys, retailers had sales data, and architects had floor plans, but no one had a continuous record of human behaviour at the shelf. Envirosell, founded in New York that year, was built to fix that. Paco Underhill borrowed the basic premise of environmental psychology, that surroundings shape behaviour, and turned it into a fieldwork practice using video cameras, trained observers, and large-sample tracking inside live commercial space. The output, after four decades, is a body of work that consumer brands and retailers across more than 50 countries have used to redesign stores, formats, packaging, and service flow. Envirosell’s client list spans more than a third of the Fortune 100. The categories range from grocery and food service to beauty, fashion, financial branches, telecoms, and malls. Underhill’s books, published by Simon & Schuster, took that work into the public domain. Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping has appeared in 27 languages and is taught in MBA and design schools globally. Call of the Mall, What Women Want, and 2022’s How We Eat extended the method into specific commercial terrains. The work earned wider recognition through Malcolm Gladwell’s 1996 New Yorker profile, “The Science of Shopping,” one of the most reprinted articles in the magazine’s history. It introduced ideas that have since become standard vocabulary in retail design: the decompression zone at a store entrance, the butt-brush effect, the way physical adjacency shapes purchase decisions. Underhill’s role in this is specific. He is the figure most consistently named when the field is described. He stepped back as CEO of Envirosell in 2020 and now advises through Peckshee LLC. The intellectual position has not changed. Stores, malls, food retail, and the consumer-facing parts of banking and telecoms remain the terrain, and direct observation of behaviour remains the method. Key speaking topics The science of shopping and retail psychology Consumer behaviour in physical and digital commercial environments Food, beverage, and grocery retail transformation Female-friendly markets and the rise of women as commercial decision-makers The future of malls, high streets, and retail real estate Brand experience at the point of purchase Cross-market retail trends from 50-plus countries Ideal for Chief marketing officers, chief customer officers, and brand leaders inside consumer-facing businesses Retail and merchandising leadership inside grocery, food service, beauty, fashion, and electronics Real estate, mall, and property executives planning the next generation of commercial space Boards and leadership teams of consumer banks, telecoms, and service businesses with branch or storefront networks Audience outcomes A clearer read on how customers actually behave inside their own stores, sites, and branches Specific levers, layout, adjacency, signage, dwell time, that move conversion and basket size A grounded view of how food, beauty, fashion, and grocery retail are shifting across markets A practical sense of where female consumers are reshaping product, format, and service design An external reference point for internal debates on store closures, format changes, and digital integration