Business Strategy & Growth

Why organisations work with Chris Brogan A defined framework for online influence, not just opinions about it. Trust Agents named what separates real customer traction from noise, and the CREATE equation in The Impact Equation turned the same idea into a model a marketing team can actually apply to a campaign. Three decades of working through every online wave in real time. He was blogging before the term existed, co-founded the PodCamp unconference series in 2006, and signed up as the 10,212th user on Twitter. His read on what AI will do to marketing is calibrated by having been early on the last four platform shifts. Credibility with the brands others want to sell into. Disney, Google, General Motors, Microsoft, Coke, PepsiCo, Cisco, Humana, and Sony USA have all retained him as a consultant or keynote speaker. He has sat inside the marketing functions of the companies most audiences are trying to reach. A thousand keynotes’ worth of calibration. Audiences have ranged from the Coldwell Banker GenBLUE conference to the royalty of the United Arab Emirates. Forbes named him one of its Must Follow Marketing Minds; Success magazine commissioned him to interview Richard Branson for its cover story. Biography highlights New York Times bestselling co-author of Trust Agents with Julien Smith (John Wiley & Sons, 2009; 10th Anniversary Edition 2019), also a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Author or co-author of nine business books, including The Impact Equation (Portfolio, 2012) and The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth (Wiley, 2014). Named by Forbes as one of its Must Follow Marketing Minds of 2014; chrisbrogan.com listed by Forbes among the 100 best websites for entrepreneurs. Co-founder of the PodCamp new-media unconference series (launched 2006 with Christopher S. Penn). Former monthly columnist at Entrepreneur magazine; featured in The Boston Globe, Forbes, Success, and USA Today; appeared on the Dr. Phil Show. Over a thousand keynote speeches delivered to clients including Disney, Google, General Motors, Microsoft, Coke, PepsiCo, Cisco, Humana, and Sony USA. Biography The cost of reaching customers online has fallen dramatically. The cost of earning their belief has climbed. Trust Agents, the 2009 New York Times bestseller Chris Brogan co-authored with Julien Smith, was among the first mainstream business books to name this problem. Its argument was that influence online accrues the way reputation does anywhere else, through consistent and useful contact with a defined community. The book’s “trust agent” framework set a vocabulary for a commercial category. With AI now flooding every inbox and feed with plausible noise, the framework has aged unusually well. The follow-up, The Impact Equation, made the same argument operational. Impact equals Contrast multiplied by the sum of Reach, Exposure, Articulation, Trust, and Echo. The formula tells a marketing team which of five dials to turn when campaigns underperform. Brogan’s work has been tested inside some of the companies with the most to lose on this question: Disney, Google, Microsoft, General Motors, Coke, Cisco, Humana, Sony USA. His authority on this stretches back further than most in the category. He was blogging before the term existed, co-founded the PodCamp unconference series in 2006 with Christopher S. Penn, and was signed up as the 10,212th user of Twitter. Forbes has listed him among its Must Follow Marketing Minds and named chrisbrogan.com one of the 100 best websites for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur magazine ran his monthly column for years; Success commissioned him to interview Richard Branson for its cover. The point Brogan keeps returning to in keynotes and advisory work is commercial. Every competitor runs broadly the same automation stack and the same CRM vendors. The organisations that win real customer loyalty are the ones willing to do slower, more specific work for a defined audience. A thousand keynotes across audiences from the Coldwell Banker GenBLUE conference to the royalty of the United Arab Emirates is the track record that stands behind the argument. Key speaking topics Trust and influence in digital markets Customer relationships in the age of AI marketing Content strategy and online community building The CREATE framework for campaign impact Human-centred approaches to digital transformation Executive leadership in a distracted marketplace Ideal for CMOs and marketing leaders rebuilding channel strategy as paid reach plateaus and AI transforms audience behaviour Sales and customer experience leaders responsible for converting digital attention into durable revenue Communications and corporate affairs teams rethinking how their organisation earns trust at scale Founders and senior operators in content-heavy businesses where audience, community, and media are the core assets Audience outcomes A usable way of diagnosing where marketing effort is being wasted, drawn from the CREATE equation A sharper read on where AI and automation extend customer relationships and where they erode them Shared vocabulary for internal debates about attention, trust, and audience value Specific examples from Fortune 500 marketing functions that clarify what “doing business the human way” looks like in practice

Why organisations work with Chris Barton He built a product under conditions that proved his point: no smartphones, no app stores, no viable algorithm, and a consensus view from MIT and Stanford that the problem was unsolvable. Shazam survived six years of near-bankruptcy before the App Store arrived. That timeline is the argument, not a metaphor for it. His two named frameworks – «Start from Zero» and «Creative Persistence» – give innovation leads something to work with after the event: a method for stripping assumptions back to first principles, and a model for distinguishing productive persistence from sunk-cost thinking. His role building Android’s carrier distribution infrastructure at Google, and leading mobile carrier partnerships at Dropbox, means his perspective on how transformative products actually reach scale is drawn from the operational history of three category-defining companies. He holds 12 patents across Shazam, Google, and Dropbox – including one employed in the Google Search algorithm – and testified as a key DOJ witness in the Google antitrust trial on the mobile default deals he personally negotiated. That depth of institutional involvement in the mobile computing era is not a speaker credential; it is a primary source. Guard Inc., his current startup applying AI to drowning detection in swimming pools, is a live demonstration that his frameworks are not retrospective lessons from one successful exit – he is still using them on a problem that experts regard as unsolved. Biography highlights Co-founder and first CEO of Shazam; the company was acquired by Apple in 2018 for a reported $400 million and has been downloaded more than 2 billion times First business development employee at Google focused on mobile partnerships; led the carrier agreements with Verizon and AT&T that established Android’s distribution infrastructure One of the first 100 employees at Dropbox, heading mobile carrier partnerships Holds 12 patents across Shazam, Google, and Dropbox, including one employed in the Google Search algorithm BA Economics and MBA, UC Berkeley; Master in Finance, University of Cambridge; early career at L.E.K. Consulting Key witness for the U.S. Department of Justice in the United States v. Google LLC antitrust trial (2023), testifying on mobile search default agreements he personally negotiated Founder and CEO of Guard Inc., an AI startup building drowning detection technology for swimming pools Biography Most organisations treat innovation as a culture question. Chris Barton treats it as a methods problem. As co-founder and first CEO of Shazam – the music recognition app Apple acquired in 2018 for a reported $400 million – he built a category that did not exist, under conditions that should have made it impossible. When Barton conceived the idea in 1999, there were no smartphones, no app stores, and no algorithm capable of identifying music from ambient audio. Professors at MIT and Stanford told him the pattern recognition problem could not be solved. Shazam launched commercially in 2002 and survived six years of near-bankruptcy before the App Store created its distribution opportunity. It reached 300 million monthly active users before Apple acquired it. The timeline matters: this is not a story about a fast breakthrough. It is a story about sustained method under prolonged failure. His track record inside the companies that built mobile computing adds a different layer of authority. At Google he was the first business development employee focused on mobile, leading the carrier agreements with Verizon and AT&T that established Android’s distribution infrastructure. At Dropbox he was one of the first 100 employees, heading mobile carrier partnerships. He holds 12 patents across all three companies, including one used in the Google Search algorithm, and in 2023 testified as a key DOJ witness in the United States v. Google LLC antitrust trial – speaking to the mobile default deals he personally negotiated. His frameworks – «Start from Zero» and «Creative Persistence» – extract a repeatable method from that experience: how to strip assumptions back to first principles, and how to sustain focus on core insight when resistance is at its strongest. He applies both now as founder and CEO of Guard Inc., an AI startup building drowning detection technology for swimming pools – a problem, again, that multiple experts have called unsolvable. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and startup creation Innovation under expert and institutional resistance Consumer AI and the origins of mobile technology Friction elimination and product simplicity Creative Persistence as an organisational method Technology and business model disruption Assumption-stripping and first-principles thinking Ideal for Senior leadership and innovation teams at large organisations launching new products or business units against internal or expert resistance Chief Digital Officers, CTOs, and heads of innovation building internal capability for breakthrough thinking Entrepreneurial organisations and scale-up leadership navigating prolonged uncertainty Conference audiences of founders, technology executives, and business leaders in high-disruption sectors Audience outcomes A working understanding of the «Start from Zero» and «Creative Persistence» frameworks, and how to apply them when pursuing ideas facing expert or institutional opposition A concrete model for distinguishing productive persistence from sunk-cost thinking – drawn from six years of near-bankruptcy at Shazam before the product reached scale Specific techniques for identifying and eliminating friction – the unnecessary effort that prevents otherwise viable ideas from reaching users A revised understanding of how transformative consumer products (Shazam, Android, Dropbox) were built from first principles, not from incremental improvement Greater organisational confidence in pursuing ideas that current consensus dismisses

Why organisations work with Chris Anderson He wrote the book that gave retail, media and platform strategists a working vocabulary for digital assortment. The Long Tail is still the reference point senior teams reach for when they debate hits versus niches. Three separate books, three separate business-model arguments. Few speakers have published a sustained thesis on assortment, pricing and manufacturing in sequence, each rooted in named cases and data. He ran Wired through its most commercially important decade, winning the National Magazine Award for General Excellence three times. That is an operator’s view of how digital economics hit an established media business, not a consultant’s. He built a drone company out of an open-source community and took it to meaningful commercial scale. Leaders get a first-hand account of how distributed, software-led manufacturing actually works, not a slide about it. His framing has been adopted by boards and strategy teams well beyond technology, from publishing and retail to industrial products, because the underlying economics travel. Biography highlights Editor-in-chief of Wired from 2001 to 2012; the magazine won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2005, 2007 and 2009. Author of The Long Tail (2006), Free (2009) and Makers: The New Industrial Revolution (2012); The Long Tail won the 2007 Gerald Loeb Award for Business Book. Named on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2007. Co-founder and former CEO of 3D Robotics; founder of the DIY Drones community and founding chairman of the Linux Foundation’s Dronecode Project. Seven years at The Economist covering business and technology from London, Hong Kong and New York; earlier editorial roles at Nature and Science. Physics at George Washington University, graduate study in quantum mechanics and science journalism at UC Berkeley, with research time at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Biography The Long Tail began as a Wired article in 2004 and, by 2006, had become the language strategy teams used to argue about assortment. Anderson’s point was simple and consequential. When shelf space is effectively free, the economics of selling a little of a lot start to rival the economics of selling a lot of a little. Retail, media and platform businesses have been adjusting to that argument ever since. Free and Makers extended the same pattern into pricing and production. Free looked at what happens to revenue models when the marginal cost of a digital copy is close to zero. Makers argued that cheap fabrication, open-source design and online distribution would move parts of manufacturing into the hands of smaller, faster firms. Both books sit on the reading lists of serious commercial strategists for the same reason. They name the mechanism, not just the trend. Anderson is not only a writer about these shifts. He ran Wired for eleven years, the period when the magazine won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence three times, while its print model had to adapt to the internet it was covering. He then co-founded 3D Robotics, built out of the DIY Drones open-source community he started in 2007, and chaired the Linux Foundation’s Dronecode Project. That sequence, from The Economist and Wired to an open-source manufacturing business, is why his view of digital economics is operator-grade. For commercial leaders, the value is a single coherent argument applied to three of the levers they still own: what they sell, how they price it, and where it gets made. Time magazine listed him among its 100 most influential people in 2007; The Long Tail won the Gerald Loeb Award the same year. The recognition matters less than the fact that his frameworks are still the ones boards use to test their strategy in digital markets. Key speaking topics The Long Tail and digital assortment strategy Pricing and revenue models in zero-marginal-cost markets Distributed manufacturing and the Makers economy Open-source communities as commercial engines Drones, autonomous systems and the commercial robotics market Media and content business models in digital markets Technology-led entrepreneurship Ideal for Boards, CEOs and chief strategy officers testing assortment, pricing and production choices against digital economics. Chief commercial, marketing and digital officers in retail, media, publishing and platform businesses. Heads of innovation, product and manufacturing in industrial firms exploring distributed production and open-source hardware. Corporate venture, R&D and transformation leaders assessing drones, autonomous systems and community-driven technology markets. Audience outcomes A sharper read on where long-tail economics do and do not apply in a given business, and what that means for range and merchandising decisions. A working framework for pricing when the marginal cost of the digital component is near zero. A clearer picture of how open-source communities, cheap fabrication and distributed production change the shape of a manufacturing strategy. Named cases from retail, media and hardware that leaders can bring directly into their own board and strategy conversations. A realistic operator’s view of how incumbent businesses adjust when digital distribution reorganises their market.

Why organisations work with Carlos Munoz Two airline company builds from scratch, not one. Vueling taken to IPO in 2006, then Volotea launched in 2011 on a deliberately different commercial model. Few entrepreneurship speakers can point to repeat, verifiable company-building at that scale. Operator credibility on a contrarian model that worked. Volotea targets secondary and medium-sized European cities that the major low-cost carriers avoid, and has scaled to c.2,000 employees and EUR 800 million plus in revenue on that thesis. First-hand perspective on founder-board disagreements about strategy. His 2007 Vueling exit came over a merger he opposed, and he went on to build a second business. Useful material for leadership audiences thinking about conviction, governance and when to walk. Fluent in the strategic language of serious buyers. ICADE undergraduate, Harvard MBA, ex-McKinsey; the commercial arguments land with finance, strategy and board audiences without needing translation. Biography highlights Founder of Vueling Airlines; CEO 2002-2007; took the company public on the Spanish stock market in 2006. Co-founder and CEO of Volotea since 2011, the airline connecting secondary and medium-sized European cities. Volotea has carried more than 55 million passengers since operations began in 2012. Former McKinsey and Company management consultant, San Francisco office, 1998-2000. MBA, Harvard Business School; undergraduate degree in Business Administration, ICADE (Universidad Pontificia Comillas), Madrid. Subject of a Harvard Business School teaching case on Vueling Airlines. Biography Most low-cost carriers in Europe compete for the same hub airports and the same passenger flows. Volotea does not. The airline, co-founded by Carlos Munoz in 2011, was built around the cities the majors had written off: medium-sized and secondary European airports, point to point, bypassing the main hubs. The bet worked. Volotea operates from around 20 bases across France, Italy and Spain, employs roughly 2,000 people, and reported revenue in the EUR 800 million plus range in 2024. More than 55 million passengers have flown the airline since it began operations in 2012. It is his second airline, not his first. Munoz founded Vueling in 2002, served as CEO through its IPO in 2006, and left in 2007 after opposing a merger with Clickair that the shareholders backed. Vueling is today part of IAG and one of the largest low-cost carriers in Europe. The career arc gives him a rare vantage point: two distinct commercial models, one exit driven by strategic disagreement, and a second company built on a thesis the first did not address. The earlier credentials explain how the commercial arguments are structured. A business degree from ICADE in Madrid, a Harvard MBA, and two years at McKinsey in San Francisco analysing low-cost carrier economics; Vueling and Volotea are applied versions of that analysis. The Vueling build has since become a Harvard Business School teaching case. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and founding companies at scale Business model innovation in commoditised industries Challenger strategy against entrenched incumbents Growth strategy in the airline and travel sector Customer experience as a commercial lever Founder conviction, governance and strategic disagreement Ideal for CEOs and founders of challenger businesses competing against scaled incumbents Strategy and commercial leaders rethinking where the company plays Boards and executive teams of travel, transport and consumer services companies Leadership and management development programmes focused on entrepreneurial decision-making Audience outcomes A clearer view of where incumbents are structurally unable to defend, and what that implies for positioning. A worked example of a contrarian commercial model, from thesis through to operational scale. Honest framing of the founder-board tension points that decide whether a strategy actually gets executed. Practical reference points from two separate company builds, not one, for leaders weighing a second act.

Why organisations work with Brian McBride He has actually done the job a board is usually asking about: scaled Amazon UK as CEO, then chaired ASOS and Trainline through listed-company growth. His view on digital disruption is operator-grade, not commentator-grade, grounded in P&L decisions inside a pure-play digital business. He has governed at national scale as President of the CBI and as Lead Non-Executive on the UK Ministry of Defence Board, which gives him a rare read on the business-state interface. He speaks the language of chairs, non-executives, and regulators fluently, because those are the roles he still holds. He is credible with both traditional boards and digital-native leadership teams, and comfortable translating between them. Biography highlights CEO of Amazon.co.uk, 2006-2011 Chairman of ASOS plc, 2012-2018 Current Chair of Trainline plc President of the Confederation of British Industry, 2022-2024 Lead Non-Executive Director, UK Ministry of Defence Board, 2020-2025 Independent non-Executive, KPMG UK Public Interest Committee Honorary Doctorate, University of Glasgow; Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Biography Amazon UK was still a challenger in the British market when Brian McBride took over as CEO in 2006. By the time he left in 2011, it had become the default reference point for what digital retail looked like in the UK, and the benchmark every high-street incumbent was measured against. That experience sits underneath almost everything he has done since. After Amazon he moved into chairing listed digital businesses. He chaired ASOS plc from 2012 to 2018 through its expansion as a global online fashion retailer, and he currently chairs Trainline plc, the UK-listed online rail and coach platform. Chairing digital-first companies at public-market scale is a narrow skill, and his track record in it is unusually deep. His governance reach runs well beyond any single company. He served as President of the CBI from 2022 to 2024, a period that included the most serious institutional crisis in the organisation’s recent history, and as Lead Non-Executive Director on the UK Ministry of Defence Board from 2020 to 2025. He is now an Independent non-Executive on KPMG UK’s Public Interest Committee and a senior adviser at Scottish Equity Partners. Earlier in his career he ran Dell’s UK and Northern Europe business and was Managing Director of T-Mobile UK, where he led the UK launch of 3G. Glasgow University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2024 for services to business and philanthropy, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh elected him a Fellow in 2025. Key speaking topics Digital business leadership at scale E-commerce strategy and platform competition Board governance in listed digital companies Transformation inside traditional businesses Public and private sector leadership The UK business and policy environment Ideal for Chairs, CEOs and board directors of listed companies facing digital-era competition Executive teams inside traditional businesses running a transformation programme Senior leaders in public sector and government-adjacent institutions working with private sector partners CBI-level industry bodies, banks, professional services firms and large retailers Audience outcomes A working view of how a pure-play digital business actually makes decisions, from someone who ran one A sharper sense of what effective board governance looks like when the business model is still changing A clearer read on where leadership styles break down in the shift from traditional to digital-native operating models A grounded perspective on the UK business environment from a former CBI President Practical reference points from Amazon, ASOS and Trainline rather than abstract case studies

Why organisations work with Bill Taylor His central argument – that the most dangerous thing in a successful organisation is its own track record – gives leadership teams a precise, uncomfortable diagnosis, not a generic call to “innovate more.” Simply Brilliant provides a detailed, case-study-backed framework for achieving breakthrough performance in traditional and unglamorous fields, making it directly applicable to organisations outside tech and consumer markets. His research spans companies most strategy consultants never study – regional banks, industrial manufacturers, office cleaning businesses – which means his examples land with audiences tired of hearing about Apple and Amazon. His Mavericks at Work thesis – that the most successful competitors don’t try to out-execute rivals but redefine the terms of competition altogether – gives strategy teams a concrete alternative to benchmarking their way to mediocrity. As a former HBR editor and founding editor of a magazine that sold for $340 million, he brings practitioner credibility to arguments about how organisations actually change, not just how they should. Biography highlights Co-founder and founding editor, Fast Company, with Alan Webber; magazine sold for $340 million within six years of founding Former editor, Harvard Business Review Author of three books published by Portfolio/Penguin: Simply Brilliant (2016), Practically Radical, and Mavericks at Work Mavericks at Work: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek bestseller; named “Business Book of the Year” by both The Economist and the Financial Times Simply Brilliant named “Best Strategy and Leadership Book of 2016” by 800CEORead Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review; former “Under New Management” columnist, New York Times Sunday Business; former columnist, The Guardian Graduate of Princeton University (BA) and MIT Sloan School of Management (MBA) Named “Champion of Workplace Learning and Performance” by the American Society for Training and Development, alongside past recipients Jack Welch and Fred Smith Biography Fast Company was built on a single provocation: that the rules of business competition were being rewritten, and most organisations were too comfortable to notice. Bill Taylor co-founded the magazine from borrowed office space in Harvard Square, and within six years it had sold for $340 million – at the time, the second-highest price ever paid for a single magazine in the United States. The argument that drove it has shaped his work ever since. Taylor’s three books – Mavericks at Work, Practically Radical, and Simply Brilliant – are each structured around the same core tension: why do organisations with genuine competitive advantages so often fail to sustain them? His answer, developed most fully in Simply Brilliant, is that expertise becomes a trap. The knowledge that produced past performance quietly closes off the thinking that would produce future performance. It is not disruption from outside that limits most organisations – it is the weight of their own accumulated success. What makes this argument useful in practice is where Taylor looks for evidence. His case studies are not drawn from Silicon Valley or the usual gallery of tech unicorns. They come from regional banks, industrial suppliers, auto dealerships, and office cleaning companies – settings where leaders have no option to blame their industry for mediocrity. Simply Brilliant was named the best strategy and leadership book of 2016 by 800CEORead. Mavericks at Work was named “Business Book of the Year” by both The Economist and the Financial Times. Taylor writes regularly for Harvard Business Review and held an editorial role there before Fast Company. His work is consistently focused on a single, testable question: what does it actually take for leaders to let go of what made them successful, and build something better? Key speaking topics Organisational innovation beyond technology Breaking the experience trap in established industries Competitive strategy and differentiation Culture as competitive advantage Leadership imagination and renewal Change management in traditional organisations Talent, engagement, and high-performance culture Ideal for CEOs and senior leadership teams in established, non-tech industries facing competitive reinvention Strategy and transformation leads planning large-scale organisational change programmes Executive conferences where the audience has heard the Silicon Valley playbook and needs a different frame CHROs and culture leads connecting people strategy to competitive performance Audience outcomes A named framework for diagnosing why expertise becomes an obstacle to growth – and what to do about it Case studies from non-tech, traditional industries that reframe what competitive reinvention looks like in their own sector Practical questions for testing whether their organisation’s current strategy is genuinely distinctive or competitively invisible A clearer sense of where leadership imagination, rather than market conditions, is the binding constraint on performance Language for talking to boards and leadership teams about transformation that doesn’t rely on disruption clichés

Why organisations work with Bill Fischer Primary-source access to Haier’s rendanheyi model, one of the most studied organisational experiments of the last two decades, with direct consulting engagement rather than secondary commentary. A working framework for turning a commodity business into a platform of autonomous micro-enterprises, grounded in Reinventing Giants and a decade of fieldwork inside Chinese and Western incumbents. Co-direction of IMD’s Driving Strategic Innovation programme with MIT Sloan gives him a live executive audience and a tested pedagogy, not only a book. A Thinkers50 Hall of Fame induction and a former CEIBS presidency signal range: he reads Chinese industrial strategy and Western corporate transformation from the inside of both. Two decades of work on creative teams, from Virtuoso Teams to The Idea Hunter, give him a practitioner language for how ideas actually get found and executed inside organisations. Biography highlights Professor Emeritus of Innovation Management at IMD, Lausanne. Inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, 2019. Former President of China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), Shanghai, 1997-1999; recipient of Shanghai’s Silver Magnolia award. Co-founder and co-director of IMD’s Driving Strategic Innovation programme with MIT Sloan. Author of Reinventing Giants (Wiley, 2013), The Idea Hunter (Wiley, 2011), and Virtuoso Teams (FT/Prentice Hall, 2005). Forbes columnist, “The Ideas Business”; management innovation consultant to Haier Group. Biography Haier was a near-bankrupt Qingdao refrigerator maker when Fischer first studied it. Three decades later it is the world’s largest home appliance group and the most watched organisational experiment in global management, run as a platform of thousands of autonomous micro-enterprises. Fischer’s book Reinventing Giants documented how that happened, and he has advised the company on its rendanheyi model since. That work sits inside a longer argument. Fischer’s research treats innovation as a social problem, not a creativity problem. Virtuoso Teams looked at how small groups of strong talents produce original work under pressure. The Idea Hunter showed that good ideas are mostly found, not invented, and that the hunt is a disciplined practice. Reinventing Giants pushed the question up one level, to the architecture of the firm itself. His institutional track record reinforces the range. He held an endowed chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for more than two decades, led CEIBS in Shanghai at the point when it became China’s first serious global business school, and has been on the IMD faculty in Lausanne since 1990. With MIT Sloan he co-directs Driving Strategic Innovation, one of the longer-running senior executive programmes on the subject. For buyers, that means a speaker who can move from the CEO question, how do we stop strangling new businesses inside the old one, to the concrete organisational moves that Haier and a small number of other firms have actually made. Key speaking topics Business model innovation in mature incumbents Haier and the rendanheyi platform model Organisational design for innovation Creative teams and talent Corporate transformation in China Leadership of innovation programmes Ecosystems and micro-enterprise structures Ideal for CEOs and boards of large incumbents under pressure to generate new businesses from the core. Chief Strategy, Chief Innovation and Chief Transformation officers redesigning operating models. Senior leadership teams at industrial and consumer-goods firms competing against Chinese platform companies. Executive development audiences on innovation, strategy, and organisational design. Audience outcomes A clear read of what Haier actually did, beyond the slogans, and what parts travel to other firms. Sharper vocabulary for diagnosing why new ideas die inside the existing structure. A working model of the firm as a platform of micro-enterprises, with the trade-offs named. A practitioner frame for finding, developing and scaling ideas through small strong teams. Perspective on Chinese management practice from someone who has taught and led inside it.

Why organisations work with Bill Emmott His 13 years editing The Economist – during which global circulation roughly doubled – produced a practitioner’s discipline in making geopolitical complexity legible to business audiences without simplifying it away. His 2024 IISS Adelphi book on Taiwan develops a specific deterrence framework for US-China conflict risk, giving boards a tested analytical vocabulary for the most consequential near-term geopolitical scenario they face. His argument in The Fate of the West (2017) – that the democratic world’s greatest threat is institutional self-erosion, not external aggression – anticipated a political dynamic that organisations are now managing in real time. Three decades of specialist focus on Japan, Asia, Italy, and European political economy means he does not speak generically about geopolitics; he speaks about specific countries, specific pressures, and specific trajectories. As Senior Adviser, Geopolitics at Montrose Associates, he works at the intersection of intelligence and executive decision-making – his analysis is applied, not academic. Biography highlights Editor-in-Chief, The Economist, 1993–2006; under his editorship global circulation approximately doubled to over one million Chairman of the Trustees, International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), 2010–2025 Author of 15 books on Japan, Asia, Italy, and the 20th century; latest published by IISS/Routledge (2024) Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence in business journalism, 2009 (UCLA Anderson School) Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, awarded by the Japanese government, 2016 Regular columnist: La Stampa, Nikkei Business, Mainichi Shimbun, Project Syndicate; contributor to the Financial Times First-class honours, Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Magdalen College, Oxford; Honorary Fellow, Magdalen College Ushioda Fellow, Tokyo College, University of Tokyo; visiting fellow at All Souls College and Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford Biography Geopolitics became a boardroom word long before most boards knew how to use it. Bill Emmott spent 13 years at the helm of The Economist – the period in which it doubled its global circulation – developing the discipline of making the world’s structural shifts legible to decision-makers under deadline. That combination of editorial rigour and strategic directness is what he now brings to executive and board audiences. His most recent book, Deterrence, Diplomacy and the Risk of Conflict over Taiwan (IISS/Routledge, 2024), builds a specific analytical framework for the US-China scenario that organisations cite most often as an unquantified risk. His earlier work, The Fate of the West (2017), argued that liberal democracies are more threatened by institutional decay from within than by external pressure – a thesis that has moved from provocative to plainly descriptive in the years since. Emmott’s specialist geography sets him apart from generalist geopolitics commentators. Three decades of work on Japan, Asia, and European political economy – including a Japanese government honour for contributions to UK-Japan relations – gives him granular fluency in precisely the regions where organisations most need specific, rather than broad-brush, risk analysis. Outside writing and speaking, he served as Chairman of IISS Trustees for 15 years, advised Swiss Re’s senior panel for 13 years, and currently acts as Senior Adviser, Geopolitics at Montrose Associates. The accumulated perspective is that of someone who has analysed geopolitical risk not only for public audiences, but for the institutions charged with managing it. Key speaking topics Great-power competition and the US-China relationship Indo-Pacific security and the Taiwan risk scenario The fragility of the liberal international order Geopolitical risk and corporate strategy Japan, Asia, and the shifting balance of economic power European political economy and the future of the EU Business decision-making under geopolitical uncertainty Ideal for Boards and C-suites assessing geopolitical exposure in investment, supply chain, or market strategy decisions Chief Strategy Officers and Chief Risk Officers navigating great-power competition Financial services and insurance sector leadership (experience advising Swiss Re; expertise in macro and political risk) Government affairs, policy, and public affairs leadership teams requiring analysis of Western institutional trends Audience outcomes A clearer analytical framework for distinguishing genuine geopolitical risk from background noise, applicable to specific business decisions A grounded understanding of the US-China-Taiwan scenario and the deterrence logic that shapes it – beyond media headlines A historically informed perspective on why Western institutional resilience matters to business, and where it is most under pressure Specific insight into Japan and Asia’s economic and political trajectories, relevant to market-entry, partnership, and investment decisions The vocabulary to communicate geopolitical risk credibly inside an organisation – to boards, investors, and regulators

Why organisations work with Bertrand Piccard The Solar Impulse Foundation’s portfolio of more than 1,000 independently certified, profitable environmental solutions gives organisations a verified, searchable evidence base – not an aspiration but a commercially assessed library of technologies available today, spanning energy, construction, mobility, agriculture, and industry. His “qualitative growth” framework – articulated in his book RÉALISTE – gives leaders a specific language for presenting sustainability to boards, investors, and governments as a source of economic development rather than a compliance cost. Few speakers can point to a named framework, a published thesis, and twenty years of testing it with heads of state and global executives. As a trained psychiatrist, Piccard applies behavioural insight to the structural reason sustainability arguments fail at decision-making level: not a lack of belief, but the absence of a financial narrative that aligns with existing incentive structures. His diagnosis is precise – and so is the alternative he offers. His advisory roles – Special Advisor to the European Commission and member of the European Investment Bank’s Climate and Environment Advisory Council – provide direct intelligence on the regulatory and financial frameworks that will shape corporate energy transition decisions this decade. The Solar Impulse round-the-world flight covered 43,000 km on commercially available solar technology alone. Organisations working through assumptions about what clean energy can realistically deliver hear this not as a metaphor but as an audit: the gap between what these technologies can do and what most boards believe they can do is not a future problem. Biography highlights Completed the first non-stop round-the-world balloon flight, Breitling Orbiter 3, with Brian Jones (1999) – the longest flight in aviation history by both distance and duration at that time Co-initiated and piloted Solar Impulse: the first solar-powered aircraft to circumnavigate the globe (2016, 43,000 km, zero fuel), with André Borschberg Founder and Chairman, Solar Impulse Foundation – has certified more than 1,000 clean and profitable environmental solutions via the Solar Impulse Efficient Solution Label UN Champions of the Earth Award (2012, UNEP); UN Goodwill Ambassador for the Environment; Special Advisor to the European Commission; member, European Investment Bank Climate and Environment Advisory Council Mungo Park Medal, Royal Scottish Geographical Society (2018); Harmon Trophy; FAI Gold Air Medal; holds 22 FAI world records in solar and electric aviation categories Author of RÉALISTE, The Greatest Adventure, and Changer d’Altitude; keynote speaker at the United Nations, World Economic Forum, TED, and major UN Climate Change Conferences Biography The argument Bertrand Piccard has advanced for two decades is specific: ecology and economy are not opposites. Clean technology is where the next generation of industrial value is being created. His Solar Impulse Foundation has certified more than 1,000 profitable environmental solutions – available today – to demonstrate that the energy transition is already a market, not a future aspiration. The Solar Impulse round-the-world flight – 43,000 km with zero fuel, completed with André Borschberg in 2016 – was designed to carry a message as much as a pilot. When Piccard landed in Abu Dhabi, the point was not the distance but the technology: every solar system and electric motor that had just circled the planet was commercially available. Most organisations had simply not been shown a coherent financial case for using it. That case is the work of the Solar Impulse Foundation, which Piccard founded and chairs. The Foundation’s Efficient Solution Label certifies technologies, products, and processes across energy, construction, mobility, agriculture, and industry – providing governments, corporations, and investors with a vetted evidence base for capital and policy decisions. His advisory roles extend this work directly into policy: he is Special Advisor to the European Commission and a member of the European Investment Bank’s Climate and Environment Advisory Council, positions that give him current intelligence on the regulatory environment shaping energy transition this decade. Trained as a psychiatrist, Piccard applies behavioural insight to the precise reason sustainability strategies fail at board level: the financial argument is missing. His book RÉALISTE sets out the case for his named framework – “qualitative growth” – as a practical alternative to both degrowth and unlimited consumption. The Climate Impulse project, a hydrogen-powered aircraft designed for a non-stop round-the-world flight, is his current proof-of-concept: another first, built to demonstrate what the next generation of clean technology can already do. Key speaking topics Clean technology and the commercial case for energy transition Qualitative growth: sustainability as an economic strategy The Solar Impulse Efficient Solution Label and cleantech certification Climate policy, regulation, and the role of business Mission-driven leadership and the explorer’s mindset The psychology of organisational change and resistance to transition Hydrogen and the future of sustainable aviation Ideal for Boards and C-suites working through the commercial and investment case for energy transition Chief Sustainability Officers and ESG leads under pressure to translate environmental commitments into language investors and boards will act on Government and policy audiences involved in clean energy planning, regulatory design, or climate target-setting Global executive leadership summits where the intersection of sustainability, growth strategy, and industrial policy is on the agenda Audience outcomes A reframed understanding of the sustainability-profitability relationship – with a specific named framework, “qualitative growth,” that can be used internally to move the conversation forward Awareness of a verified portfolio of more than 1,000 commercially available clean technologies, and how the Solar Impulse Efficient Solution Label works as a practical decision-making tool A clear diagnosis of why sustainability arguments typically fail at board and investment level – and what to substitute for the standard cost-and-compliance framing Insight into the European and global regulatory and financial architecture that will shape energy transition investment decisions over the next decade A more precise distinction between sustainability as an organisational cost and sustainability as a source of new industrial markets – presented with the proof points to make that argument to investors, regulators, and governments

Why organisations work with Bernard Marr His frameworks for data strategy and AI adoption are grounded in peer-reviewed academic research from Cambridge and Cranfield – which means they hold up to internal scrutiny in ways that practitioner opinion rarely does. Business Trends in Practice, winner of the 2022 Business Book of the Year Award, gives executive audiences a shared, structured vocabulary for decisions that are otherwise made in fragmented, jargon-heavy conversations. His Forbes column reaches approximately one million readers a month – meaning his conceptual framing is often already in the room before he arrives, which accelerates rather than starts the conversation. He advises organisations across the full spectrum of sectors – from Google and Microsoft to the Bank of England, NATO and the NHS – which gives him a pattern-recognition advantage that single-sector specialists cannot replicate. Where most AI speakers address technology adoption as an IT problem, Marr consistently frames it as a governance and leadership problem – which is what boards and C-suites are actually wrestling with. Biography highlights Research Fellow, Cambridge Judge Business School; subsequently at Cranfield School of Management – before founding Bernard Marr & Co in 2006 Author of more than 20 books on AI, data strategy and digital transformation, published in over 20 languages Business Trends in Practice named Business Book of the Year 2022; additional awards include the CMI Management Book of the Year, Axiom Book Award and WHSmith Best Business Book Award Ranked by LinkedIn as one of the top 5 business influencers in the world Regular contributor to Forbes and the World Economic Forum; media presence includes BBC News, Sky News, the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and HBR Advisory clients include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, the Bank of England, NATO, the NHS, Shell and the United Nations Biography Bernard Marr spent his early career as a research fellow at Cambridge Judge Business School and then at Cranfield School of Management, where his published work – cited more than 5,400 times – focused on business performance, intellectual capital and strategic measurement. In 2006 he left academia to found Bernard Marr & Co, taking that analytical infrastructure into advisory work with some of the world’s most complex organisations. His books – more than twenty of them, translated into over twenty languages – are not airport business books. Data Strategy, AI Strategy, Generative AI in Practice and Future Skills each address a specific executive decision: how to treat data as a governed asset, how to build an AI adoption roadmap, how to prepare a workforce for automation. Business Trends in Practice won the 2022 Business Book of the Year Award. His writing for Forbes, published at a rate of around three articles per week, gives those frameworks sustained reach into executive audiences between engagements. What makes Marr useful to a board is not that he explains technology well – many speakers do that. It is that he consistently reframes technology questions as governance questions: who owns the data strategy, how do we assess AI risk, what does leadership fluency in this area actually require? These are the questions that stall transformation programmes, and they sit above the pay grade of a CTO. His advisory work spans Google, Microsoft, Amazon, the Bank of England, NATO, the NHS, Shell and the United Nations – a range that gives him cross-sector pattern recognition that sector-specific specialists cannot replicate. The organisations that benefit most from his work are those where the executive team is technically literate enough to know they don’t know enough, and needs a structured way to close that gap. Key speaking topics AI strategy and adoption for executive leadership Data strategy and data governance Generative AI and its organisational implications Digital transformation and business performance Future of work and future skills Emerging technology trends and business impact Strategic performance management Ideal for C-suite and board-level audiences navigating AI and data investment decisions Chief Digital Officers, Chief Data Officers and technology transformation leads Senior leadership teams ahead of major digital transformation programmes Corporate and enterprise conference audiences requiring clarity on technology without technical fluency as a prerequisite Audience outcomes A working framework for evaluating AI and data investments – not just a description of what they are Clearer language for discussing technology strategy at board level, with less dependence on specialist intermediaries Understanding of which emerging technology trends carry genuine near-term organisational implications versus which are still speculative A more structured approach to data governance and the conditions under which data generates strategic advantage Insight into the skills and capabilities organisations will need to build – and which to acquire versus develop internally

Why organisations work with Arturo Bris He is the custodian of the IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook – benchmarking 69 economies on 341 criteria annually – which means he brings a proprietary, data-based view of global competitive dynamics that no consultant or generalist economist can replicate. The Right Place (Routledge, 2021) makes a specific, evidence-based argument that national competitiveness explains more of corporate performance than internal strategy or leadership quality – a direct challenge to how most boards set their investment and expansion priorities. His research on 3,692 CEOs across 22 countries and three decades found that conventional analyses significantly overestimate the impact of individual leaders on firm performance – giving boards a more rigorous basis for leadership decisions and executive remuneration. His 2025 book SuperEurope provides a contrarian, data-backed case for Europe as a model of institutional resilience – directly actionable for multinationals reassessing their operating geography in light of US political fragmentation and US-China rivalry. As director of IMD’s Boards and Risks executive programme, he brings a structured, board-tested approach to systemic risk – spanning geopolitical exposure, social evolution, and technological disruption – rather than single-issue commentary. Biography highlights Douglas Geertz IMEDE 1988 Professor in Geopolitics and Business, and Professor of Finance, IMD Lausanne Director of the IMD World Competitiveness Center since 2014; annual rankings cover 69 economies on 341 criteria, including digital competitiveness, talent, and smart cities Former Robert B & Candice J. Haas Associate Professor of Corporate Finance, Yale School of Management Author of The Right Place (Routledge, 2021), SuperEurope (2025), Flex or Fail (2019), and Blockchange! (2018), among other books Academic research published in the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies; contributor to the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Handelsblatt Ranked in the top 100 most-read finance academics in the world TEDx speaker; featured at the World Government Summit and the World Knowledge Forum, Seoul PhD in Management, INSEAD; holds a named chair in Geopolitics and Business Biography Most companies explain their performance by pointing inward – to their strategy, their people, their execution. Arturo Bris, Douglas Geertz IMEDE 1988 Professor in Geopolitics and Business at IMD and Director of the IMD World Competitiveness Center, has spent two decades building the empirical case that this view is incomplete. The environment a company operates in – regulatory quality, institutional trust, infrastructure – shapes outcomes in ways that internal decisions cannot fully override. The IMD World Competitiveness Center, which he has led since 2014, is the research institution behind this argument. It produces the most authoritative annual benchmarking of national competitiveness in the world – covering 69 economies across 341 criteria – and under his direction has expanded to include rankings on digital readiness, talent, and smart cities. His book The Right Place (Routledge, 2021) draws on 30 years of country-level data to explain why similar firms succeed in one country and fail in another, irrespective of their strategic choices. His most recent book, SuperEurope (2025), extends this argument into live geopolitical territory – making a data-driven case that Europe’s institutional model is more resilient than its detractors claim, and more relevant to corporate location strategy than most boards currently recognise. His published research in the Journal of Finance and Journal of Financial Economics spans financial regulation, short-selling markets, corporate governance, and the macroeconomic effects of the Euro. Before joining IMD, he was Associate Professor at the Yale School of Management, where he received the Best Teacher Award twice. He holds a PhD from INSEAD and advises boards and governments across Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America through the Center’s network and IMD’s Boards and Risks executive programme. Key speaking topics National competitiveness and its effects on corporate performance Geopolitics, economic fragmentation, and global trade Financial regulation and corporate governance The future of globalisation and protectionism Digital competitiveness and smart city development Scenario planning and strategic foresight for boards Labour markets, income inequality, and social mobility Ideal for Boards and C-suite executives making geographic expansion, market entry, or investment allocation decisions Government ministers, policy teams, and national development bodies managing economic competitiveness CFOs and strategy directors navigating geopolitical risk and regulatory change across multiple operating environments Investment committees and sovereign wealth funds benchmarking market and country conditions Audience outcomes A data-based framework for assessing how national competitiveness affects corporate strategy, location decisions, and investment risk A more calibrated view of how much macro-environment – versus internal leadership and strategy – drives firm performance, with implications for board priorities Practical insight into the current state of global economic fragmentation and how to model its effects on market access and supply chain resilience A structured approach to board-level systemic risk, integrating geopolitical, technological, and regulatory dimensions A clearer picture of where competitive advantage is shifting globally, grounded in the IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook data

Why organisations work with Arnaud Bonzom He co-authored the INSEAD and 500 Startups study of the Forbes Global 500, which mapped how 262 of the world’s largest public companies actually engage startups. Few corporate-innovation speakers can point to an original dataset of that scale. He has advised more than 200 corporations on corporate-startup engagement, including Accenture, Airbus, Allianz, AWS, BMW, Shell, Standard Chartered and Volkswagen, as well as the European Commission and several national governments. He can distinguish, on the record, between a startup competition, a corporate accelerator, a corporate venture capital arm and a direct M&A play, and tell a board which one fits the problem they are actually trying to solve. His vantage point is Southeast Asia, built over a decade on the ground in Singapore at 500 Startups and INSEAD, which matters for Western corporates trying to understand Asian market entry and innovation sourcing. Biography highlights Co-author with INSEAD Professor Serguei Netessine of “How do the World’s Biggest Companies Deal with the Startup Revolution?”, the INSEAD and 500 Startups study covering the Forbes Global 500. Former Venture Partner at 500 Startups, focused on Southeast Asian founders. Entrepreneur-in-Residence at INSEAD; previously Assistant Director of Corporate Partnership Development at INSEAD. Founder and Managing Director of Black Mangroves; co-founder of Map of the Money, a platform mapping active investors across Southeast Asia. Research and commentary cited by Forbes, Bloomberg TV, Les Echos, Bain, SAP, BNP Paribas and Orange, with coverage in 28 countries. Speaker at Slush, Web Summit, DLD, Tech in Asia, Rise and SuperReturn. Biography Most large companies now run some form of startup engagement programme. The INSEAD and 500 Startups study of the Forbes Global 500, co-authored by Arnaud Bonzom with Professor Serguei Netessine, found that 262 of those 500 companies were already working with startups. The harder question, which the study set out to answer, is which models actually produce returns. That question sits at the centre of his work. As Director of Corporate Innovation at 500 Startups and later as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at INSEAD, he spent years watching corporates set up accelerators, write cheques, sign partnerships and run competitions, often in parallel, often without a clear theory of what each one was meant to deliver. His argument to boards is that these are different instruments with different risk profiles, and treating them as interchangeable is how budgets get burned. He has put the argument to more than 200 corporations, including Accenture, Airbus, Allianz, AWS, BMW, Shell, Standard Chartered and Volkswagen, and to the European Commission and the governments of Estonia, Germany, Singapore and Taiwan. His work has been cited by Forbes, Bloomberg TV, Les Echos, Bain, SAP, BNP Paribas and Orange, with coverage across 28 countries. His current base is Singapore, where he founded Black Mangroves and co-founded Map of the Money, a data platform that maps active investors across Southeast Asia. That gives him a direct line into one of the more complex venture ecosystems in the world, which matters for any multinational trying to understand where Asian growth capital is actually moving. Key speaking topics Corporate-startup engagement models Corporate venture capital Startup ecosystems Southeast Asia innovation and venture capital Corporate innovation strategy Entrepreneurship and fundraising Ideal for CEOs, CSOs and heads of strategy reassessing corporate innovation and venture programmes Corporate venture capital leads, accelerator directors and M&A teams Boards and executive committees of multinationals expanding into or sourcing innovation from Southeast Asia Audience outcomes A clear read on which corporate-startup engagement model fits which strategic objective, with trade-offs named A grounded view of how the Forbes Global 500 are actually engaging startups, based on original research rather than anecdote A practical perspective on Southeast Asia’s venture and innovation landscape for corporates entering or scaling in the region Sharper questions to take back to internal innovation teams about what returns they are actually being asked to produce