Business Strategy & Growth

Why organisations work with Archie Norman He ran the Asda turnaround from 1991 and sold the business to Walmart in 1999 at eight times the starting share price, a reference point that still defines UK retail recovery. He has chaired three FTSE-scale boards in very different states of repair: Asda, ITV and Marks & Spencer. Few speakers can discuss board, CEO and shareholder dynamics from all three seats. He sits at the intersection of commercial leadership and public policy, having served as Conservative MP for Tunbridge Wells, Chief Executive of the Conservative Party, and Lead Non-Executive at BEIS. He co-founded Policy Exchange in 2001, a think tank that shaped UK economic and public service reform, which gives his commentary on business and government real weight. The Institute for Turnaround awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010 for practitioner work on corporate recovery, not for commentary on it. Biography highlights Chairman of Marks & Spencer since September 2017. Chairman of ITV plc from 2010 to 2016. Chief Executive then Chairman of Asda from 1991 to 1999, sold to Walmart in July 1999. Co-founder of the Policy Exchange think tank with Francis Maude in 2001. Lead Non-Executive Board Member at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, 2016 to 2020. Conservative MP for Tunbridge Wells 1997-2005; Chief Executive of the Conservative Party 1998-1999. Institute for Turnaround Lifetime Achievement Award, 2010. Biography Asda was close to collapse when Archie Norman arrived as Chief Executive in 1991. Over the following eight years, he and Allan Leighton rebuilt the operating model, the culture and the commercial pitch. The business was sold to Walmart in 1999 at eight times the starting share price, and the story is still used as a practitioner case at Harvard Business School. What distinguishes his perspective is the seat he has held since. Chairman of ITV from 2010 to 2016 through a hard pivot in the broadcast market. Chairman of Marks & Spencer since 2017, running a multi-year reset of stores, supply chain and digital. Three listed boards, three different forms of inertia, one consistent operating philosophy about how change actually happens inside a large company. The public policy side matters commercially. He was Conservative MP for Tunbridge Wells, Chief Executive of the Conservative Party under William Hague, and Lead Non-Executive at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy from 2016 to 2020. He co-founded the Policy Exchange think tank with Francis Maude in 2001. That background shapes how he reads the interaction between regulators, ministers and boards, which is useful for any chair or CEO managing that perimeter. Youngest partner ever at McKinsey at 28, group finance director at Kingfisher at 32, and recipient of the Institute for Turnaround’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. The point of the sequence is not the speed of it. It is that by the time he arrives in a boardroom to discuss a stalled transformation, he has seen the same patterns from the inside at every scale a UK board is likely to be operating at. Key speaking topics Corporate turnaround and organisational recovery Board and chair leadership Retail strategy and transformation Culture change inside listed companies Business and government Executive leadership under pressure Ideal for Chairs, CEOs and senior independent directors navigating a turnaround or strategic reset. Retail and consumer sector leadership teams. Boards and executive committees managing cultural resistance to change. Senior leaders in regulated industries where government relations shape commercial outcomes. Audience outcomes A concrete view of what the first 100 days of a serious turnaround actually look like at board and operating level. A sharper read on where cultural inertia sits inside a listed business and how to move it. A practitioner perspective on how chair, CEO and shareholder dynamics succeed or fail in a crisis. A clearer picture of how the business-government perimeter is managed in practice, from both sides.

Why organisations work with Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez His “Project Economy” argument, developed across seven books, two Harvard Business Review cover articles, and the 2026 book Powered by Projects (HBR Press), gives boards and CEOs an evidence-based framework for why transformation fails and what structural changes are required to fix it. He provides the most specific publicly available diagnosis of executive project failure: leaders sponsor too many initiatives, misunderstand their own sponsorship role, and treat execution as a delegated technical function rather than a strategic leadership responsibility. His current C-suite work focuses on execution speed and the integration of AI into prioritisation, sponsorship, and decision-making, addressing the practical mechanics of moving transformation programmes faster rather than only managing them better. His 2026 “Project-Driven Organization” model offers transformation leaders a concrete operating architecture beyond agile and beyond PMO reform for building organisations capable of delivering sustained change. A 25-year corporate career at PwC, BNP Paribas Fortis, Fortis Bank, and GlaxoSmithKline Vaccines, including leading the post-merger integration of ABN AMRO, one of the largest acquisitions in financial services history, means his frameworks are stress-tested against the mechanics of real, large-scale transformation. Twice recognised in the Thinkers50 ranking (2023, 2025) and the most published project management author in Harvard Business Review, his arguments carry institutional credibility in conversations at board and C-suite level. Biography highlights Creator of the “Project Economy” concept; author of the featured Harvard Business Review articles “The Project Economy Has Arrived” (Nov/Dec 2021) and “The Project-Driven Organization” (Jan/Feb 2026) Author of Powered by Projects: Leading Your Organization in the Transformation Age (HBR Press, 2026) and the Harvard Business Review Project Management Handbook (HBR Press, 2021) Twice included in the Thinkers50 ranking of the world’s most influential management thinkers (2023, 2025); recipient of the Thinkers50 “Ideas into Practice” award; most published project management author in Harvard Business Review Fellow and former global Chairman, Project Management Institute (2016); currently Vice President, Association for Project Management (APM) Senior corporate career at PricewaterhouseCoopers (global lead, project and change management), BNP Paribas Fortis, Fortis Bank, and GlaxoSmithKline Vaccines Visiting professor at Duke CE, IE Business School, Solvay, Vlerick, École des Ponts, and Skolkovo; MBA, London Business School Founder of Projects & Company; co-founder of the Strategy Implementation Institute; creator of the Brightline Initiative; member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches Biography Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez built the first phase of his career inside the machinery of large-scale transformation. At PricewaterhouseCoopers, he became global lead for project and change management. At Fortis Bank, he led the post-merger integration of ABN AMRO (at the time, the largest acquisition in financial services history). At GlaxoSmithKline Vaccines, he served as Director of the Program Management Office. Those twenty-five years gave him a precise understanding of where transformation programmes break down, and why. The conclusion he drew is counterintuitive: the problem is not project management. The problem is leadership. His “Project Economy” argument, first published in Harvard Business Review in 2021, extended in his January 2026 book Powered by Projects (HBR Press) and a companion HBR article the same month, holds that projects are now the primary mechanism through which organisations create value. Most senior leaders, however, still manage them as a secondary, delegated activity. The result is a structural misalignment: transformation investment is spread too thin, executive ownership is ambiguous, and programmes stall not from lack of capability but from the absence of a structure built to execute at speed and scale. The “Project-Driven Organization” framework he introduced in 2026 addresses this directly. It is not an argument for better project managers; it is a blueprint for how boards, CEOs, and transformation leads must redesign authority, resource allocation, and culture to make strategic execution a repeatable organisational capability. This is taught at Duke CE, IE Business School, Solvay, Vlerick, École des Ponts, and Skolkovo, and underpins advisory work with organisations including Nestlé, L’Oréal, Google, ING, and Moodys. Twice included in the Thinkers50 ranking (2023 and 2025) and recipient of the Thinkers50 “Ideas into Practice” award, he is a Fellow and former global Chairman of the Project Management Institute and currently Vice President of the Association for Project Management. He is a member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and the most published project management author in Harvard Business Review. Key speaking topics The Project Economy The Project-Driven Organization Transformation at scale and speed Strategy execution and organisational transformation Executive sponsorship and leadership accountability Portfolio prioritisation and strategic focus AI in accelerating execution Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and boards overseeing large-scale transformation programmes Chief Transformation Officers and strategy implementation leads PMO directors seeking executive-level alignment and mandate Executive education cohorts at business schools focused on strategy execution and organisational change Audience outcomes A reframed understanding of why transformation programmes fail – and the specific leadership behaviours that drive or undermine them Practical criteria for prioritising strategic initiatives when resources are constrained and demand is unlimited A working model of the Project-Driven Organization: what it looks like, how it differs from agile, and how to begin the transition Clarity on what active executive project sponsorship means in practice – and how it differs from oversight Familiarity with the Project Economy argument as a framework for making the case internally for structural change in how transformation is governed

Why organisations work with Anthony Hilton Five decades inside the City press, from trainee on The Guardian in 1968 to City Editor of The Times and the Evening Standard, give audiences a working memory of how UK financial crises, regulatory shifts and market cycles actually play out. A named position of record. As Senior Commentator for The Independent and The Standard his arguments on markets, pensions and the economy are already in public circulation, so organisations get a writer whose views are testable. Specific authority on pensions and long-term savings, an area he has covered as a weekly columnist for more than 30 years and on which he has been singled out by UK pensions industry awards. A track record of calling the 2008 crash, recognised by the University of Aberdeen with an honorary degree in 2010 for articles from 2005 to 2007 warning that the financial system was heading for trouble. Deep fluency in corporate and financial communication, drawn from his book How to Communicate Financial Information to Employees and a career running the editorial operation at the Evening Standard as Managing Director. Biography highlights Senior Commentator for The Independent and The London Standard, writing on markets, pensions, investor relations and the economy. Former City Editor of The Times (1981 to 1983) and City Editor of the Evening Standard (1984 to 1989), then Managing Director of the Evening Standard from 1989. Author of City Within a State: A Portrait of Britain’s Financial World, a study of how the City of London really works. Wincott Prize for Business Journalism; Business Journalist of the Year and Outstanding Achievement in Financial Journalism at the 2014 ABI Financial Media Awards; Association of British Insurers Commentator of the Year (twice); Decade of Excellence Award, World Press Awards, 2007. Honorary degree from the University of Aberdeen, 2010, for services to journalism, including articles from 2005 to 2007 predicting the financial crash; MA in Economics, University of Aberdeen. Joint founder and past non-executive chairman of Newsdesk Media Group; Visiting Professor in Economics at London Metropolitan University, 2010 to 2012; former Editor of Accountancy Age. Biography The 1970s sterling story, the 1980s Big Bang, the dotcom crash, the 2008 banking collapse and the pensions and inflation shocks since: the same journalist has covered them in real time for a general reader, inside the British national press. That continuity is unusual, and it is the reason senior audiences listen when Anthony Hilton explains what is happening in the City. He joined Fleet Street in 1968 as a trainee on The Guardian, moved to New York in 1978 as Business Correspondent for the Sunday Times, and returned in 1981 to become City Editor of The Times. From 1984 he was City Editor of the Evening Standard, then its Managing Director from 1989, before returning to writing. He is now Senior Commentator for The Independent and The London Standard. The published argument is the other half of the case. City Within a State set out how the City of London actually works as a system of firms, regulators and capital flows. How to Communicate Financial Information to Employees codified what he has observed boards and finance chiefs get wrong when talking about money to their own people. His weekly columns on pensions, investor relations and the economic outlook have run for more than 30 years. The recognition is from bodies that matter in the field. The Wincott Prize for Business Journalism, Business Journalist of the Year and Outstanding Achievement in Financial Journalism at the 2014 ABI Financial Media Awards, and Commentator of the Year from the Association of British Insurers, twice. The University of Aberdeen awarded him an honorary degree in 2010 in recognition of columns from 2005 to 2007 that warned the financial system was heading for serious trouble. Key speaking topics UK economic outlook and policy City of London, markets and investor relations Pensions, long-term savings and retirement policy Corporate governance and financial communication Financial journalism and the media view of business Economic history and lessons from past UK financial crises Ideal for Boards and CEOs in financial services, asset management, insurance and pensions needing an informed macro and markets read CFOs, heads of investor relations and corporate communications teams preparing for scrutiny from the City press Pensions trustees, scheme sponsors and providers running strategy or member communication programmes Conferences and industry dinners needing a senior City commentator as host, moderator or after-dinner speaker Audience outcomes A clearer read on how UK economic policy, Bank of England decisions and market conditions intersect with their own sector A working columnist’s view on how the City press is interpreting their industry and their company Named historical reference points for making sense of current market and pensions stress A sharper frame on pensions and long-term savings policy for employers and trustees An argument on where the UK economy is heading and what that implies for strategy and communication

Why organisations work with Anil Gupta His research on China and India spans thirty years and six books: not a regional specialist’s tour d’horizon, but a body of work that produced frameworks now used by boards and strategy teams at major multinationals The «global mindset» framework distinguishing local depth from global connect gives leadership teams a diagnostic tool for identifying where strategic blind spots sit, not just a description of why diversity matters One of only three professors in the world elected a lifetime fellow of all three premier academic bodies in his field: the Academy of Management, the Strategic Management Society, and the Academy of International Business Organisations that have engaged Gupta have included GE, Walmart, IBM, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, and SAP; his frameworks are tested against the operational complexity of companies with genuinely global footprints, not just emerging market theory He is a member of the Bretton Woods Committee, the body convened by the World Bank and IMF to advise on global economic challenges, giving him line-of-sight into macro-structural debates that rarely reach corporate strategy teams Biography highlights Michael D. Dingman Chair in Strategy and Entrepreneurship, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland 2024 inductee, Thinkers50 Hall of Fame; ranked continuously in Thinkers50 since 2013; 2023 C.K. Prahalad Award for Scholarly Impact on Practice, Strategic Management Society One of only three professors worldwide holding lifetime fellowship from all three major academic bodies in the field: Academy of Management, Strategic Management Society, and Academy of International Business Co-founder and chairman, China India Institute, Washington DC; visiting professor of strategy, INSEAD Author or co-author of six books (Wiley), including Getting China and India Right (Axiom Book Awards Silver Prize) and The Silk Road Rediscovered; contributor to Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Bloomberg BusinessWeek PhD, Harvard Business School; MBA, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad; B.Tech, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur Member, World Economic Forum Global Expert Network and Bretton Woods Committee; regular participant at WEF Davos Biography Anil Gupta holds the Michael D. Dingman Chair in Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. Here, he has spent three decades building one of the most specific bodies of research in global strategy: the competitive dynamics of China and India, and what their rise means for organisations competing across the global economy. His 2024 induction into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame recognised that work, explicitly citing his contribution to understanding globalisation trends over thirty years. Most strategy advice on emerging markets treats China and India as a category. Gupta’s argument, developed across six books and more than seventy academic papers, is that they represent four distinct strategic realities simultaneously: mega-markets, cost platforms, innovation bases, and springboards for fearsome new global competitors. Getting China and India Right, the clearest statement of that argument, received the Axiom Book Awards Silver Prize and was shortlisted for the Asia Society’s Bernard Schwartz Book Award. The Silk Road Rediscovered extended that work into the competitive dynamics between the two economies themselves. What separates Gupta’s perspective from macro-commentary is its institutional background. He is one of only three professors in the world elected a lifetime fellow of the Academy of Management, the Strategic Management Society, and the Academy of International Business simultaneously, a peer recognition that reflects the rigour of the underlying research, not its public profile. He was awarded the Strategic Management Society’s C.K. Prahalad Award for Scholarly Impact on Practice in 2023. He is also chairman of the China India Institute, a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Expert Network, and sits on the Bretton Woods Committee convened by the World Bank and IMF. His work and opinion have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and Bloomberg BusinessWeek. He holds a PhD from Harvard Business School, an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, and a B.Tech from IIT Kanpur. Key speaking topics Global strategy and international competitive advantage China and India as strategic priorities Emerging markets and diverging economic trajectories Global mindset and cross-border leadership capability Geopolitical shifts and corporate strategy Global megatrends and scenario planning Globalisation, deglobalisation, and supply chain restructuring Ideal for C-suite and board-level leadership teams with significant international exposure or expansion mandates Chief Strategy Officers and corporate strategy functions navigating market entry or competitive repositioning in Asia Investor and sovereign wealth audiences monitoring emerging market trajectories Executive education cohorts at graduate business schools focused on global strategy Audience outcomes A structured framework – the «global mindset» model – for diagnosing where an organisation’s international strategy assumptions are outdated or misaligned Clearer understanding of why China and India require distinct strategic logics, not a single emerging-markets approach Practical perspective on which emerging markets are better positioned for long-term growth and what that means for investment and competitive positioning Sharper criteria for evaluating when global expansion creates competitive advantage versus merely adding complexity An updated reading of the macro-structural forces – demographic, technological, environmental – reshaping international competition over the next decade

Why organisations work with Andrew Hessel He is one of a small group of people actually running a human-genome-scale project. Co-founding Genome Project-write with George Church and Jef Boeke gives him a direct line of sight into what will be technically and commercially real in the next ten years, not a commentator’s view. He has built companies in this space, not just written about it. Miikana Therapeutics, Pink Army Cooperative and Humane Genomics each tested a different commercial model for synthetic biology, which is what boards want when they are sizing their own exposure. His Autodesk work made the abstract concrete. The phiX174 genome his team synthesised sits in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection, which is a useful anchor for a room that has not yet understood that genomes can be printed. The Genesis Machine, co-authored with Amy Webb, gives leadership teams a shared reference point. It was named a New Yorker Best Book of 2022 and is already on the reading lists of strategy and R and D functions thinking through biotech platform bets. He speaks to risk as fluently as opportunity. Biosecurity, governance and dual-use are part of his core argument, which matters for regulated industries and for any board that has to sign off on a biology-forward strategy. Biography highlights Co-founder, Genome Project-write (GP-write), the international effort to engineer large genomes including the human genome, launched in 2016 with George Church, Jef Boeke and Nancy J. Kelley. Co-founder and President, Humane Genomics, a synthetic-virus cancer therapeutics company based in New York. Distinguished Researcher, Autodesk Bio/Nano Programmable Matter group, 2012 to 2018; led the synthesis of bacteriophage phiX174, a print of which entered the Museum of Modern Art’s collection. Founding faculty and former co-chair of Bioinformatics and Biotechnology, Singularity University. Co-author with Amy Webb of The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology (PublicAffairs, 2022), a New Yorker Best Book of 2022. AAAS-Lemelson Invention Ambassador, 2015; contributor to Scientific American. Biography Genome Project-write launched in 2016 with a plan to engineer genomes at the scale of the human genome. Hessel co-founded it with Harvard geneticist George Church, NYU’s Jef Boeke, and Nancy J. Kelley, after a period advocating that biology needed an equivalent to the software industry’s write phase, not just the read phase delivered by the original Human Genome Project. That framing runs through his career. As Distinguished Researcher at Autodesk from 2012 to 2018, he led the team that designed and printed the bacteriophage phiX174 genome in three weeks for roughly a thousand dollars, a demonstration that biology had become a design discipline. A copy of that print entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Before Autodesk he was founding faculty at Singularity University, where he built and co-chaired the Bioinformatics and Biotechnology track. He is also an operator. He co-founded Miikana Therapeutics in 2002, launched Pink Army Cooperative in 2009 as an open-source biotech experiment in personalised cancer therapy, and co-founded Humane Genomics in 2017 to develop synthetic oncolytic viruses, starting with a veterinary indication before moving to human oncology. Each company is a different bet on how synthetic biology gets to market. His 2022 book with futurist Amy Webb, The Genesis Machine, is the clearest articulation of his argument: synthetic biology is on the same kind of curve that digital computing was in the 1970s, with the same mix of platform opportunities and governance risks. The book was named a New Yorker Best Book of 2022 and is widely used by strategy teams trying to build a common vocabulary for biotech decisions. He was named an AAAS-Lemelson Invention Ambassador in 2015 and contributes to Scientific American. Key speaking topics Synthetic biology and the future of medicine Programmable genomes and the write phase of biotechnology Biosecurity and governance of engineering biology Personalised and precision cancer therapies Platform economics of bioengineering Convergence of AI, software and biology Ideal for Pharma, biotech and medtech boards sizing long-horizon platform bets CTOs, Chief Scientific Officers and heads of R and D in regulated industries Insurance, agriculture, food and materials leaders exposed to biological innovation Strategy and foresight teams building scenarios for the next decade of life sciences Audience outcomes A working model of synthetic biology as an industrial platform, not a research topic A clearer read on which biology-driven shifts are near-term commercial and which are still speculative Named examples of where programmable biology is already changing medicine, agriculture and materials A sharper view of the biosecurity and governance questions that sit alongside the commercial upside Language and reference points leadership teams can use to brief their own boards

Why organisations work with Anders Indset His Quantum Economy framework gives organisations a named argument for what comes after digitalization – not a call to “transform,” but a specific claim: that existing economic and organisational models require a philosophical upgrade, and that human potential, not technology alone, determines what follows. He coined the concept of the “Final Narcissistic Injury of Humankind” – the argument that AI’s deepest threat is not job displacement but the erosion of human agency and self-perception. This gives boards and executive teams a precise vocabulary for what is genuinely at stake in AI strategy. His “Anticipated Future” concept reframes strategic foresight as a leadership competency: the capacity to project forward from exponential data rather than extrapolate backwards from historical analysis. It is a directly applicable decision-making discipline, not a futurist premise. As an early investor in Terra Quantum AG and founder of the Njordis Group, his perspectives on deep tech are grounded in active investment decisions – meaning his claims about emerging technology have been stress-tested against real capital allocation. He has co-authored peer-reviewed philosophical and scientific papers with physicist Florian Neukart on the simulation hypothesis and the convergence of AI and human intelligence (AHI) – providing a rigour of argument that distinguishes him from commentators working purely at the level of narrative. Biography highlights Four Spiegel bestselling books – Wild Knowledge, The Quantum Economy, Das infizierte Denken, The Viking Code – translated into more than ten languages Named to Thinkers50 Radar 2018 among 30 Global Thinkers most likely to shape the future of organisational leadership; 2019 Breakthrough Idea Award finalist for The Quantum Economy Founder, Global Institute of Leadership and Technology (GILT), 2012; Founder and Chairman, Njordis Group (venture capital and advisory) Early investor and advisory board member, Terra Quantum AG; supervisory board member, German Tech Entrepreneurship Center (GTEC) Keynote speaker at the World Economic Forum, Global HR Summit, and Mobile World Congress; over 1,500 presentations across more than 60 countries Media coverage in Fast Company, Forbes, Fortune, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, NZZ, and Harvard Business Manager Dubbed “Rock’n’Roll Plato” by European media; guest lecturer at leading international business schools Biography Anders Indset’s central argument is simple and uncomfortable: in a world with near-unlimited access to information, knowledge is no longer the scarce resource for leaders – understanding is. His work begins where most AI and technology commentary stops, asking not what technology can do but what it means for human decision-making, economic design, and organisational purpose. His 2019 Spiegel bestseller The Quantum Economy introduced the concept of a post-digital economic framework – a named thesis, not a trend report – arguing that capitalism requires a philosophical upgrade to remain compatible with human values as algorithms become authorities. The book was a finalist for the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award and reached number one on the Manager Magazin business book chart. Subsequent books – including The Viking Code (2024) and The Singularity Paradox (2025, co-authored with physicist Florian Neukart) – have extended the framework into culture, values-driven leadership, and the emergence of what Indset and Neukart term Artificial Human Intelligence (AHI): the argument that a conscious, human-centred response to superintelligence is both possible and necessary. Indset is not a commentator at a distance from the technologies he describes. As an early investor in Terra Quantum AG and founder of the Njordis Group, he has made active capital commitments in quantum computing, AI, healthtech, and cybersecurity. This positions his philosophical arguments inside real decisions about where exponential technology is heading – not above them. He has spoken at the World Economic Forum, the Global HR Summit, and Mobile World Congress, and his work has appeared in Fast Company, Forbes, Fortune, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. For organisations navigating the question of what leadership actually means when AI can outperform human cognition on an expanding range of tasks, Indset offers something specific: a systematic philosophical framework, tested in print, in investment, and across executive audiences in more than 60 countries. Key speaking topics The Quantum Economy and post-digital capitalism Artificial intelligence and human agency Exponential technology and organisational strategy Anticipated Future as a leadership discipline Artificial Human Intelligence (AHI) and the technological singularity Values-driven performance culture Philosophical foundations of strategic decision-making Ideal for C-suite and board-level audiences wrestling with the strategic and existential implications of AI Technology, innovation, and strategy leadership conferences Executive development programmes exploring the relationship between philosophy, leadership, and emerging technology Policy and business forums on the future of economies and social structures in an AI-accelerated world Audience outcomes A named, book-backed conceptual vocabulary – Quantum Economy, Anticipated Future, Possibilism – for framing strategic thinking about technology beyond trend language A sharper distinction between information access and organisational wisdom, and why the gap between them is the real leadership challenge of the AI era Specific philosophical tools for exercising anticipatory leadership: projecting forward from exponential change rather than extrapolating from historical data A reframing of AI risk – moving beyond job displacement to the deeper question of human agency, purpose, and self-determination in technology-driven organisations A perspective on performance culture grounded in values and collective intelligence, drawing on the Viking Code framework

Why organisations work with Alex Osterwalder The Business Model Canvas is used by millions of practitioners across industries. When Osterwalder presents it, he brings the doctoral research that produced it – giving leadership teams not just a tool but the underlying architecture for why it works and how to apply it to their specific strategic situation. The Value Proposition Canvas addresses a precise and expensive commercial failure: the gap between what organisations build and what customers actually need. For B2B marketing and product teams, this is the difference between offerings that generate revenue and those that absorb it. Strategyzer’s live programmes span three distinct commercial challenges – business model strategy, value proposition design, and innovation governance – through a single interconnected system. Leadership, marketing, strategy, and product functions can work with the same shared language rather than operating on separate frameworks. The Invincible Company framework gives executive teams a structural answer to the portfolio question: how to manage existing revenue-generating business models while simultaneously building new growth engines, with separate governance and metrics for each. Consistent top-10 placement across five consecutive Thinkers50 global rankings (2015-2025), with two Thinkers50 Strategy Awards, provides independent verification of Osterwalder’s standing – outside bureau self-attribution. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Strategyzer; co-founded 2010 following the publication of Business Model Generation Co-creator, with Yves Pigneur and Alan Smith, of the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map Business Model Generation (2010): international bestseller, more than 5 million copies sold, translated into nearly 40 languages Consistently ranked in the Thinkers50 global top 10 across five biennial rankings (2015-2025); two-time Thinkers50 Strategy Award recipient Visiting Professor, IMD; co-directs the Driving Strategic Innovation programme with MIT Sloan Contributor to Harvard Business Review; PhD, HEC Lausanne – doctoral thesis on business model ontology; recipient of the EU’s inaugural Innovation Luminary Award (2013) Biography Alex Osterwalder’s doctoral thesis at HEC Lausanne, completed in 2004, proposed a formal architecture for how value is created, delivered, and captured in any business. That thesis became the Business Model Canvas. Co-developed with Yves Pigneur, it is now in use across millions of teams at organisations including Microsoft, Nestlé, Mastercard, and Merck. The Value Proposition Canvas extended that system into one of the most consistently expensive failures in commercial strategy: building products and propositions without a clear picture of what customers actually need. For B2B marketing and product leaders, this is an operational problem. Strategyzer’s programmes on value proposition design, sales and marketing alignment, and customer understanding apply the same structured, testable approach to go-to-market challenges that the Canvas brought to strategy. The Invincible Company, co-authored with Pigneur, Smith, and Frederic Etiemble, addressed the portfolio dimension. Large organisations fail not from lack of innovation intent but from having no structural mechanism to run exploration and exploitation in parallel. The book provides that mechanism: separate governance, separate metrics, and a distinct decision logic for the existing business and the growth bets being built alongside it. Osterwalder is founder and CEO of Strategyzer, a Visiting Professor at IMD, and a Thinkers50 top-10 thinker across five consecutive rankings from 2015 to 2025. Whether the challenge is growth strategy, value proposition design, or innovation governance, a leadership team, a marketing function, and an innovation unit in the same organisation can each engage with the same interconnected system. Key speaking topics Business model design and competitive strategy Value proposition design and customer fit Go-to-market strategy and offering management Sales, marketing, and product alignment Innovation portfolio management Customer discovery and assumption testing Competing on business model advantage Ideal for CEOs and executive leadership teams working on growth strategy and business model resilience Chief Marketing Officers and commercial leaders in B2B organisations designing and testing value propositions Chief Strategy Officers and heads of corporate development managing business model portfolios Innovation leaders and transformation directors responsible for testing and scaling new growth engines Audience outcomes A working understanding of the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Portfolio Map, and how to apply each to live strategic and commercial challenges A shared language across leadership, marketing, strategy, and product functions for discussing business model design and value proposition fit Practical methods for testing assumptions about customer needs and market demand before committing significant resource A structural framework for running exploration and exploitation in parallel, with the governance logic each requires Clearer diagnostic tools for identifying where value propositions are failing to match real customer needs, and what to do about it

Why organisations work with Alex Brummer Five decades of front-line financial reporting, from the 1976 sterling crisis to the 2008 banking collapse to the post-Brexit settlement, give audiences a working memory of how financial crises actually unfold. A named position of record. As City Editor of the Daily Mail he writes the paper’s daily view on business, markets and the economy, which means organisations get an author whose arguments are already in public circulation. Book-length theses backed by serious publishers. Bad Banks on financial system fragility and The Great British Reboot (Yale University Press, 2020) on UK economic strategy give audiences a coherent argument, not a survey. Specific expertise on pensions and long-term savings, the subject of The Great Pensions Robbery, which matters to any organisation running a material defined benefit liability or rethinking retirement provision. Award weight from credible bodies: Wincott Senior Financial Journalist of the Year, British Press Awards Financial Journalist of the Year, Overseas Press Club of New York for US coverage. Biography highlights City Editor of the Daily Mail since May 2000, writing the paper’s daily commentary on business, markets and the economy. 26 years at The Guardian in senior roles including US Financial and Washington Correspondent, Financial Editor, Foreign Editor and Associate Editor. Author of seven books including The Great British Reboot (Yale University Press, 2020), Bad Banks (2014), Britain for Sale (2012) and The Great Pensions Robbery (2011). Wincott Prize for Senior Financial Journalist of the Year (2001); British Press Awards Financial Journalist of the Year (1999); Overseas Press Club of New York (1989). Honorary Doctor of the University, University of Bradford (2014). Columnist for New Statesman; contributor to The Spectator and Jewish Chronicle; chair of the Jewish News editorial board. Biography The 1976 sterling crisis, the 2008 banking collapse and the post-Brexit argument over UK industrial strategy have one thing in common. The same journalist covered them from inside a working newsroom, in real time, for a general reader. Since May 2000, that newsroom has been the Daily Mail, where Alex Brummer is City Editor. The role means writing the paper’s daily view on business, markets and the economy, turning movement in the FTSE, the Bank of England and global capital markets into a clear argument rather than a data dump. Before that he spent 26 years at The Guardian, including ten years as US Financial and Washington Correspondent covering three presidential elections, then Financial Editor, Foreign Editor and Associate Editor. The books map the territory he speaks from. Bad Banks (2014) traced the post-2008 banking system’s unresolved fragility. Britain for Sale (2012) set out the costs of foreign ownership of British industrial assets. The Great Pensions Robbery (2011) examined the unwinding of UK retirement provision. The Great British Reboot, published by Yale University Press in 2020, argues how the UK can rebuild economic strength through research, technology and industrial reform. The recognition is from bodies that matter in the field: the Wincott Prize for Senior Financial Journalist of the Year, the British Press Awards for Financial Journalist of the Year, and the Overseas Press Club of New York for best foreign correspondent in the United States. Bradford awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2014. Key speaking topics UK economic outlook and industrial policy Banking stability and systemic financial risk Pensions, savings and long-term capital Foreign ownership of UK assets and national economic security Global markets and macroeconomic trends Post-Brexit economic strategy Ideal for Boards and CEOs in financial services, asset management and banking needing an informed macro read alongside strategic decisions CFOs and treasury leaders exposed to rate, currency and pensions risk Policy forums, regulators and industry bodies across financial services, infrastructure and pensions Conferences needing a City Editor-grade host or moderator across business, economics and markets Audience outcomes A clearer read on how UK economic policy, banking regulation and market conditions intersect with their own sector Named historical reference points, from the 1976 sterling crisis to 2008 and beyond, for interpreting current financial stress A sharper frame on the pensions and long-term savings question facing UK employers A working journalist’s view on what is actually driving coverage and sentiment around their industry An argument, not a survey, on where the UK economy is heading and what that implies for strategy

Why organisations work with Albrecht Enders His Solvable framework – Frame, Explore, Decide – gives leadership teams a replicable method for complex decisions, not a diagnostic template. It addresses the two failure modes his research identifies most consistently: solving the wrong problem, and deciding without adequate stakeholder input. His academic work on discontinuous change, published in Administrative Science Quarterly and the Academy of Management Journal, explains why established firms with strong strategies still get disrupted – and what the firms that adapt successfully did differently. This gives his executive work a research foundation most strategy practitioners cannot draw on. His specific argument – that stakeholder engagement must be embedded throughout a decision process, not appended at the end – is a named, testable position that directly challenges how most senior teams structure their strategy work. He brings both sides of the strategy question: his IMD research and teaching work on how organisations should decide, and his consulting work with organisations including Siemens, Vodafone, Deutsche Bank, Novartis, and Thyssen Krupp on what that looks like under real operating conditions. Biography highlights Professor of Strategy and Innovation at IMD; former Dean of Programs and Innovation Co-author of Solvable: A Simple Solution to Complex Problems (Pearson, 2022), co-authored with Arnaud Chevallier; proposes the Frame, Explore, Decide methodology for complex problem-solving Research published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, and Research Policy Contributor to Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and the Financial Times EFMD Excellence in Practice Gold Award (2014); Academy of Management BPS Division Glueck Best Paper Award (2011 and 2013) Co-director of IMD’s Complex Problem Solving and Transition to Business Leadership programs Former consultant, Boston Consulting Group (Cologne); board member, Agathon AG Biography The decisions that define an organisation’s direction are rarely the ones with clean answers. They involve competing stakeholder priorities, incomplete information, and environments that may not resemble anything the leadership team has navigated before. Albrecht Enders, Professor of Strategy and Innovation at IMD, has spent two decades studying why these decisions go wrong – and building the tools to improve them. His core argument is structural. Most leadership teams separate the act of deciding from the act of engaging the people who will be affected. They analyse, choose, then communicate. Enders’ research shows this sequence is both intellectually and politically costly: involving key stakeholders throughout a decision process produces better choices and creates the sense of fair process that drives implementation. His book Solvable (Pearson, 2022), co-authored with Arnaud Chevallier, translates this into a three-step method – Frame, Explore, Decide – designed to stop executive teams from jumping to solutions before they have properly defined the problem. His academic research, published in Administrative Science Quarterly, the Academy of Management Journal, and Research Policy, focuses on the specific question of how established firms respond to technological discontinuities. This work explains not just that incumbents struggle with disruptive change, but why the structural and behavioural conditions inside large organisations make poor responses predictable – and what distinguishes the firms that adapt. It gives his practitioner work an empirical foundation that strategy consulting alone does not provide. At IMD, Enders co-directs the Complex Problem Solving program and the Transition to Business Leadership program, and served as Dean of Programs and Innovation until 2020. Before joining IMD, he spent three years at the Boston Consulting Group in Cologne, working on strategy development and reorganisation across financial services, energy, and industrial goods. He sits on the board of Swiss precision toolmaker Agathon and is a founding member of the E4S (Enterprise for Society) executive committee, the sustainability initiative launched jointly by IMD, the University of Lausanne, HEC Lausanne, and EPFL. Key speaking topics Strategic decision-making processes Managing discontinuous and technological change Complex problem-solving frameworks Top-team strategy development Incumbent response to disruption Corporate strategy in uncertain environments Stakeholder engagement in strategic decisions Ideal for C-suite and executive leadership teams reviewing or rebuilding their strategy processes Chief Strategy Officers and corporate strategy functions navigating market discontinuities Senior leaders in established industries facing disruption from new technologies or entrants Executive education and leadership development programmes at board and senior management level Audience outcomes A structured understanding of where strategic decision-making processes typically break down – and the specific interventions that address each failure point Familiarity with the Frame, Explore, Decide methodology from Solvable and how to apply it to live organisational problems Insight into the research evidence on why incumbents underperform in discontinuous environments, and which organisational conditions predict better responses A reframed view of stakeholder engagement – not as communication management, but as an integral part of building a better decision Practical tools for structuring strategy conversations with senior teams that produce both better choices and greater commitment to implementation

Why organisations work with Adam Morgan Morgan coined the challenger brand concept in a named, commercially researched framework – the eight challenger credos in Eating the Big Fish – giving organisations a specific strategic vocabulary that has been in active use across global marketing for over two decades. His most recent research project, The Extraordinary Cost of Dull, quantifies in IPA-backed data what strategic sameness actually costs a business: dull communications require up to 2.6× the media spend of interesting ones to generate the same commercial result – a figure that reframes brand strategy as a finance conversation. Where most brand strategists stop at positioning, Morgan extends the argument to internal culture: The Pirate Inside addresses the behavioural and organisational conditions needed to sustain a challenger strategy over time. A Beautiful Constraint gives leadership teams a practical method for treating budgetary and structural limitations as strategic inputs rather than blockers – directly applicable to any growth brief operating under resource pressure. His work sits at the junction of brand strategy, marketing effectiveness, and organisational behaviour – a combination that is unusually rare in a single practitioner. Biography highlights Founder and Chair of eatbigfish, the international challenger brand consultancy Author of Eating the Big Fish (Wiley, 1999; 2nd ed. 2009) – international bestseller, translated into eight languages; coined the term “challenger brand” Author of The Pirate Inside (Wiley, 2004) and co-author of A Beautiful Constraint (2015, with Mark Barden) Former Joint European Planning Director, TBWA\Chiat\Day; TBWA clients included Apple, Absolut, and Sony PlayStation Co-creator of The Extraordinary Cost of Dull – multi-partner research with Peter Field, System1, the IPA, and Dr Karen Nelson-Field Speaker at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2023 and 2024 Host of the Let’s Make This More Interesting podcast (eatbigfish) Consultancy clients have included IKEA, Unilever, Lexus, and PepsiCo Biography Adam Morgan spent the formative years of his career at TBWA\Chiat\Day, the agency behind Apple’s relaunch, Absolut, and Sony PlayStation. When he left to found eatbigfish in 1997, his question was specific: how do brands with fewer resources than the market leader compete – and win? Eating the Big Fish, published in 1999, answered that question with a named framework: eight challenger credos drawn from research into forty brands that had grown rapidly against dominant incumbents. The book introduced the term “challenger brand” to a global marketing audience, became an international bestseller in eight languages, and established a body of research – The Challenger Project – that has continued to evolve through four further books and three decades of consultancy work. The most recent extension of that work is The Extraordinary Cost of Dull, a research collaboration with Peter Field, System1, the IPA, and Dr Karen Nelson-Field. Analysing IPA Effectiveness Databank data, the project quantifies what strategic sameness costs organisations at the P&L level: brands running dull communications need up to 2.6 times the media investment of those running interesting ones to achieve equivalent commercial returns. The finding moves brand strategy from a marketing conversation into a boardroom one. What makes Morgan’s perspective directly useful to senior leaders is the consistency of the underlying argument across all three registers – strategy (Eating the Big Fish), culture (The Pirate Inside), and resource constraint (A Beautiful Constraint). The thesis is the same in each case: ambition and specificity of point of view are not optional extras for challengers. They are the mechanism. Key speaking topics Challenger brand strategy Differentiation and market positioning Growth under resource constraint The commercial cost of strategic sameness Brand culture and internal challenger behaviour Marketing effectiveness and creative impact Constraint as competitive advantage Ideal for CMOs and marketing leadership teams responsible for brand growth and differentiation CEOs and strategy directors in organisations competing against dominant category incumbents CFOs and senior leadership teams seeking to connect brand investment to commercial return Brand and innovation teams operating under budget or resource pressure Audience outcomes A working definition of challenger strategy – and a clear way to assess whether it applies to their organisation’s current position Familiarity with the eight challenger credos as a practical diagnostic and planning tool A data-backed understanding of what strategic sameness costs in media spend terms, and how to use that argument internally A framework for identifying where organisational constraints can be reframed as strategic advantages rather than blockers Specific behavioural markers of a challenger culture – and how to diagnose whether their organisation has them

Why organisations work with Howard Yu The Future Readiness Indicator – a quantitative, publicly available benchmark developed by Yu’s Center at IMD – gives boards an industry-specific measure of strategic preparedness, replacing intuition with verifiable data and enabling direct comparison with the leading companies in their sector. His LEAP thesis makes a specific and testable claim: competitive longevity depends not on refining the current knowledge base but on deliberately crossing into adjacent disciplines before copycats commoditise what already exists. This is a named argument with an empirical track record, not a generic innovation position. His case material spans century-old incumbents (P&G, Novartis) and recent disruptors (BYD, WeChat) across industries – giving leadership teams cross-sector evidence for what strategic transformation actually looks like, rather than analogies drawn from a single sector. His doctoral research at Harvard Business School was supervised by Clayton Christensen and Joseph Bower – grounding his frameworks in a rigorous empirical tradition and a direct intellectual lineage from the two most cited strategy thinkers of their generation. He co-directs IMD’s Future-Ready Enterprise programme, run jointly with MIT, and has designed and delivered strategic transformation work for organisations including ABB, Novo Nordisk, Heineken, Bosch, and Maersk – his content is tested in demanding executive contexts, not developed for stage consumption alone. Biography highlights LEGO Professor of Management and Innovation, IMD Business School, Switzerland Director, IMD Center for Future Readiness – established with funding from the LEGO Brand Group Creator of the Future Readiness Indicator, a publicly available composite index benchmarking seven industries on long-term strategic preparedness Author of LEAP: How to Thrive in a World Where Everything Can Be Copied (2018) – Axiom Business Book Award winner; named to Inc.’s Best Strategy Books of 2018 Thinkers50 Strategy Award, 2023; included in the Thinkers50 global management thinkers ranking DBA, Harvard Business School, supervised by Clayton Christensen and Joseph Bower Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Forbes; frequent commentator on Bloomberg, BBC, and CNBC Named among the world’s top 40 business professors under 40 by Poets&Quants Biography Yu holds the LEGO Chair in Management and Innovation at IMD Business School and directs the Center for Future Readiness. His research addresses a recurring failure that most strategy teams prefer not to name: the slow commoditisation of the capabilities that once guaranteed advantage, and the organisational inertia that makes it so hard to act before the damage is visible. His book LEAP, winner of the Axiom Business Book Award and named by Inc. as one of the best strategy books of 2018, argues that competitive longevity requires deliberate moves across knowledge disciplines. Companies must leap from the domain that built today’s advantage to the one that will define tomorrow’s, before competitors close the gap. The case material runs from P&G’s sequential moves through manufacturing, consumer psychology, and biotechnology to pharmaceutical firms navigating organic chemistry, microbiology, and genomics over more than a century. That historical argument has a quantitative counterpart. The Future Readiness Indicator, developed by Yu’s Center, is a composite index benchmarking seven industries using publicly available data on R&D investment, revenue generation, and innovation behaviour. At IMD, he co-directs the Future-Ready Enterprise programme, run jointly with MIT, working directly with leadership teams from ABB, Novo Nordisk, Heineken, Bosch, and Maersk. His doctoral work at Harvard Business School was supervised by Clayton Christensen and Joseph Bower. In 2023, he received the Thinkers50 Strategy Award. He writes regularly for Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Forbes, and appears frequently on Bloomberg, the BBC, and CNBC. Key speaking topics Competitive advantage in commoditising markets Strategic leaps and knowledge discipline transitions Future readiness measurement and benchmarking Business model resilience and transformation Innovation strategy in incumbent organisations Long-term value creation under disruption Ideal for Board and C-suite teams confronting decisions about strategic transformation or competitive commoditisation Chief Strategy Officers and heads of corporate development Senior leadership teams at large incumbents in sectors facing digital or technological disruption Executive education cohorts focused on long-term strategy and innovation capability Audience outcomes A specific vocabulary for diagnosing where competitive advantage is in the process of commoditisation, before the position has fully eroded Practical application of the LEAP framework to identify which knowledge discipline transitions are most relevant to their industry and timeline Understanding of how the Future Readiness Indicator works and what the leading companies in their sector are doing differently on the dimensions it measures A shift from generic innovation language to a structured argument about which strategic bets are worth making and when Clarity on the distinction between strategic planning and forward-looking capability-building – and the leadership behaviours that drive the difference

Why organisations work with Simon Moore He runs a working behavioural science consultancy, IB (formerly Innovationbubble), with documented commercial case results including a 51% conversion uplift for a fashion brand and an 11% churn reduction in a banking client. He is a chartered psychologist with a PhD in psychobiological psychology, not a populariser of other people’s research, which is rare in the behavioural-economics speaker market. He won the Gold Retail Nudge Award in 2015 for retail behavioural work, a credential that maps directly to commercial decision-makers. His client list spans BBC, HSBC, Aviva, Virgin Atlantic, Pfizer, Sony, FedEx, Microsoft and the Financial Times, so the work has been pressure-tested in regulated, high-stakes commercial environments. He moves between consumer-facing strategy and internal employee behaviour, which lets the same engagement speak to a CMO and a CHRO without breaking apart. Biography highlights CEO and Partner of IB (Innovationbubble), an award-winning behavioural science consultancy applying psychology to commercial strategy. PhD in psychobiological psychology and Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society. Former Academic Leader in Psychology at London Metropolitan University. Co-author of the undergraduate textbook “Complete Psychology” (first edition 2008). Winner of the Gold Retail Nudge Award (2015) for behavioural work with retail clients. Has advised commercial clients including BBC, HSBC, Aviva, Virgin Atlantic, Pfizer, Sony, FedEx, Microsoft and the Financial Times, and is a regular UK media commentator on consumer psychology. Biography Most commercial strategies are built on what people say they will do. Surveys, focus groups, stated-preference research, customer panels. The data is clean, the models are tidy, and the behaviour at the till, the renewal point, or the checkout button still surprises everyone. That gap is where Dr Simon Moore works. Moore is a Chartered Psychologist with a PhD in psychobiological psychology and CEO of IB, the behavioural science consultancy he founded as Innovationbubble. The firm uses psychological methods, not opinion, to investigate why customers and employees actually behave as they do, then translates those findings into pricing decisions, brand communications, retention design and internal change programmes. Clients have included BBC, HSBC, Aviva, Virgin Atlantic, Pfizer, Sony, FedEx, Microsoft and the Financial Times. Before founding the consultancy, he was Academic Leader in Psychology at London Metropolitan University and is co-author of the textbook “Complete Psychology”, used on undergraduate degree programmes. The academic foundation matters because most of the behavioural-economics speaker market is built on a few thin layers of summary. Moore is one of a small group of practitioners who built the underlying science before commercialising it, and the difference shows up in the specificity of what he recommends. In 2015, Innovationbubble won the Gold Retail Nudge Award for retail behavioural work. The case studies that travel with him are unusually concrete for the field: a 51% conversion uplift through reworked product descriptions in fashion, an 11% churn reduction in a banking client. He is a regular UK media voice on consumer psychology and behavioural intervention, but the booking case is operational, not editorial: he is hired by commercial leaders who have run out of conventional explanations for the numbers in front of them. Key speaking topics Behavioural science in commercial strategy Consumer decision-making and the say-do gap Psychology of brand communication and storytelling Customer loyalty, trust and retention Pricing, value perception and choice architecture Psychology of organisational change and employee behaviour The psychology of AI and human response to automated systems Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and customer experience leads are facing flat returns on conventional campaigns and CX investments Commercial directors and pricing leads working on retention, subscription and value-perception problems CHROs and change leads running internal behaviour-change programmes alongside the consumer-side work Boards and executive teams in regulated sectors (financial services, healthcare, telecoms) where customer trust drives commercial outcomes Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the psychological drivers behind specific commercial problems they own Concrete examples of behavioural interventions that have moved retention, conversion and trust metrics in named sectors A clear distinction between what behavioural science can credibly do and the marketing claims made on its behalf Direct prompts for re-examining pricing, messaging or CX assumptions that test well in research but underperform in market A more accurate read on how customers and employees will respond to AI-driven products, services and internal tools