Business Strategy & Growth

Why organisations work with Ryan Serhant He built a brokerage that uses its own studio as the primary lead source, giving sales and marketing leaders a working reference for how content-to-commerce actually operates at scale. He has closed close to ten billion dollars in personal real estate sales while running the firm, including the most expensive home ever sold in Florida, so the methodology comes from a practitioner still in the deal flow. His three books, Sell It Like Serhant, Big Money Energy, and Brand It Like Serhant, sequence a coherent commercial argument from individual sales technique to personal brand as a business asset. He is one of the few operators booked at this level whose audience already knows the work through Netflix’s Owning Manhattan and Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing New York, which compresses the credibility step at large commercial events. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of SERHANT., a brokerage with an in-house film studio used as its lead-generation engine. Star and executive producer of Netflix’s Owning Manhattan; star of Bravo’s two-time Emmy-nominated Million Dollar Listing New York. Author of Sell It Like Serhant (2018), Big Money Energy (2021), and Brand It Like Serhant (2024). The Serhant Team ranked top sales team in New York by The Wall Street Journal for three consecutive years and Top 5 nationwide. Closed close to ten billion dollars in personal sales, including record-setting transactions in New York and Florida. Founder of SERHANT. Studios and the SELL IT digital education platform. Biography Most brokerages still treat marketing as a cost centre and the salesforce as the engine. SERHANT., the firm Ryan Serhant founded in September 2020, inverts that. The studio is the engine. The agents convert the demand it generates. Owning Manhattan, the Netflix series Serhant produces and stars in, is part of the same flywheel. That model is the reason commercial leaders book him. Serhant has closed close to ten billion dollars in personal real estate sales, including the most expensive home ever sold in Florida, while running the firm. The point on stage is not the listings. It is what an operating model looks like when content production, personal brand, and sales pipeline are run as a single discipline rather than three departments. His three books trace the same argument at different altitudes. Sell It Like Serhant (2018) is a salesperson’s playbook. Big Money Energy (2021) reframes ambition as a discipline that can be coached. Brand It Like Serhant (2024) treats personal and corporate brand as a measurable commercial asset that produces inbound demand. Together they are the spine of his keynote work and the SELL IT education platform that grew out of the first book. The Serhant Team was ranked the top sales team in New York by The Wall Street Journal for three consecutive years before he launched the brokerage. Million Dollar Listing New York, the two-time Emmy-nominated Bravo series, gave the broader audience the character. Owning Manhattan, now in its second Netflix season, gives them the company. Key speaking topics Content-to-commerce business models Sales methodology and pipeline Personal brand as a commercial asset Entrepreneurship and scale-up Customer acquisition and lead generation Founder mindset and commercial ambition Ideal for Chief revenue officers and heads of sales rebuilding pipeline economics around content Chief marketing officers integrating brand, social, and demand generation into one operating function Founders and CEOs of scale-up businesses building category presence Sales conferences, kickoffs, and partner events for high-ticket and brokerage businesses Audience outcomes A working picture of how an in-house content engine can function as the primary acquisition channel A clearer line between personal brand investment and measurable revenue A sales operating logic drawn from a practitioner who is still closing deals at the top of the market Language and frameworks senior leaders can take back to their commercial teams the next morning

Why organisations work with Chris Voss He brings a method built in the only setting where negotiation failure is counted in lives, then translated into vocabulary sales, procurement, and executive teams can apply on Monday. Tactical Empathy, mirroring, labeling, and calibrated questions are named, teachable moves, which means the approach survives the room and becomes company muscle memory rather than a memorable keynote. The Black Swan Group is a working consultancy, so the same principles that land on stage can be extended into deal-desk coaching, procurement clinics, and bespoke leadership training. His credibility reads instantly to a sceptical senior audience: 24 years in the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit, the US National Security Council Hostage Working Group, lead negotiator on the Jill Carroll and Steve Centanni cases. “Never Split the Difference” has made his vocabulary common currency across revenue, HR, and leadership functions, so a keynote plugs into language teams already recognise. Biography highlights Former FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator, 2003 to 2007, inside a 24-year FBI career across more than 150 international hostage cases. Founder and CEO of The Black Swan Group, a negotiation training and consulting firm serving corporate clients globally. Co-author of “Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It” with Tahl Raz, reported at more than 5 million copies sold. Adjunct professor at Harvard Law School and Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business; lecturer at the USC Marshall School of Business. Represented the FBI on the US National Security Council’s Hostage Working Group. Instructor of the MasterClass “Chris Voss Teaches the Art of Negotiation”; recipient of the Attorney General’s Award for Excellence in Law Enforcement. Biography Jill Carroll was held in Iraq. Steve Centanni was held in Gaza. Chris Voss was the lead FBI negotiator on both. That is the operational record that sits underneath his commercial work, and it is why his language about negotiation reads differently from most of what senior teams have heard before. For 24 years inside the FBI, including four as the Bureau’s lead international kidnapping negotiator, he worked cases where concession logic, position-trading, and splitting the difference were not available moves. The alternative he developed, and later named Tactical Empathy, is a discipline of understanding the counterpart’s emotional world accurately enough to influence the decision in front of them. Mirroring, labeling, and calibrated questions are the operating components. In 2008 he founded The Black Swan Group to teach that discipline to commercial teams, and in 2016 he codified it with Tahl Raz in “Never Split the Difference”. The book has moved more than 5 million copies and reshaped how sales, procurement, legal, and executive teams in large organisations talk about difficult conversations. He has carried the same material into classrooms at Harvard Law School, Georgetown McDonough, and USC Marshall. What buyers get when they book him is the original source of that vocabulary, with the cases that generated it. The US National Security Council’s Hostage Working Group asked him to represent the FBI on it. The Attorney General’s Award for Excellence in Law Enforcement went to him on the strength of the same work. A room of senior commercial leaders is a softer setting than the one that built his method, which is precisely why the method holds. Key speaking topics High-stakes negotiation Tactical empathy and influence Sales and commercial negotiation Procurement and deal-desk strategy Crisis communication Leadership under pressure Conflict resolution Ideal for Chief Revenue Officers, sales leadership, and enterprise account teams preparing for contested renewals and complex deals. Chief Procurement Officers and commercial directors leading supplier and cost negotiations with long-term partners. C-suite and board audiences managing stakeholder, activist, regulator, or crisis conversations where positions harden fast. Senior legal, HR, and people leaders handling disputes, restructurings, and executive-level conflict. Audience outcomes Specific language moves (mirroring, labeling, calibrated questions) the audience can test in their next live call. A reframe of empathy as a commercial tool, separated from concession and rapport. A shared vocabulary across revenue, procurement, and leadership functions for the deals and disputes that matter. Sharper preparation habits for high-stakes conversations, including how to identify the “Black Swans” that reset a negotiation. Confidence handling the counterpart who will not move, drawn from cases where not moving had life-or-death consequences.

Why organisations work with Kevin O’Leary He has run the full founder cycle once, from boot-strapped start-up through hostile acquisitions to a multi-billion-dollar exit, and he speaks about growth from inside that experience rather than around it. His Shark Tank track record gives him one of the largest public corpora of investor-versus-founder negotiations on record, which translates directly into how he teaches deal discipline. O’Leary Ventures has invested across more than 30 private companies, so the commentary on emerging sectors is grounded in current capital allocation, not retrospective storytelling. The Cold Hard Truth book series with Penguin Random House Canada has built a financial literacy framework that travels well from boardroom audiences to all-employee events. His CNBC, Fox Business, and CNN presence means audiences arrive already familiar with the voice, which compresses the time it takes to land a serious argument. Biography highlights Founder of SoftKey Software Products, which acquired The Learning Company in 1995 and was sold to Mattel in 1999 for $4.2 billion. Investor on ABC’s Shark Tank since the 2009 launch, where he is known on screen as “Mr. Wonderful”. Chairman of O’Leary Ventures, the venture platform he founded in 2000, and of Beanstox, the automated investing service. Host of CNBC’s Money Court, the primetime business series adjudicating financial disputes. Author of the Cold Hard Truth series published by Penguin Random House Canada. MBA from the Ivey Business School at the University of Western Ontario; honours bachelor’s degree from the University of Waterloo. Biography The Learning Company was bankrupt-adjacent in the early 1990s when SoftKey, Kevin O’Leary’s small Toronto software business, bought it through a hostile bid and adopted its name. Four years later, Mattel paid $4.2 billion for the combined company. That transaction sits at the centre of his commercial credibility, both the win and the post-deal collapse that followed at Mattel, and it shapes how he talks about capital. Since 2009 he has sat on ABC’s Shark Tank as a working investor evaluating live pitches. The show has accumulated multiple Primetime Emmy wins for Outstanding Structured Reality Program. For audiences, the relevance is not the entertainment, it is the public archive: hundreds of negotiations on the record, with the founder’s pitch, the investor’s questions, and the post-deal outcome all visible. Few business voices carry that volume of documented decision-making. Off camera he runs O’Leary Ventures, the platform he founded in 2000, and chairs Beanstox. He hosts CNBC’s Money Court and contributes regularly to CNBC, Fox Business, and CNN on markets and policy. The Cold Hard Truth book series with Penguin Random House Canada extends the same operating philosophy into personal finance, family business, and money behaviour. What organisations buy with him is the cold-eyed view of their own pitch. He treats a business the way a professional allocator does, judging it by cash, defensibility, and the quality of the operator, and he applies that lens with the bluntness that built the on-screen persona and the off-screen track record. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and founder discipline Investment decision-making and capital allocation Venture investing and start-up evaluation Personal finance and financial literacy Economic and market commentary Business media and brand building Ideal for CEOs and founders preparing for fundraising, M&A, or a strategic capital event Boards and senior investment teams looking at portfolio discipline and venture exposure Sales conferences and channel events where the audience is operating against revenue and unit-economics targets Banking, wealth management, and financial services audiences working with entrepreneur clients Audience outcomes A working sense of how a professional investor reads a pitch in the first three minutes. Sharper questions about cash conversion, defensibility, and operator quality inside their own portfolio or business unit. A direct, sometimes contrarian view of where capital is moving across sectors. Practical financial literacy points that hold up across a mixed audience of executives and front-line staff.

Why organisations work with Jeff DeGraff He brings a tested intellectual frame, the Competing Values Framework, that gives executives a shared language for the trade-offs they already feel but cannot resolve. His Innovatrium has built innovation programmes inside more than half the Fortune 500, including Google, Apple, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, NASA and Microsoft, so the methods are stress-tested in real operating conditions. The work crosses sectors that rarely share a stage: commercial, military (US Air Force, NATO, Singapore Armed Forces), academic and mission-driven, which sharpens his diagnosis of what is structural and what is industry-specific. He treats innovation as a system of competing roles (Artist, Engineer, Athlete, Sage), so leaders leave with a way to staff and sequence change, not a motivational pep talk. The Ross School base and the Certified Professional Innovator programme give buyers a credible academic anchor when they need to sell the engagement internally. Biography highlights Clinical Professor of Management and Organizations, University of Michigan Ross School of Business, since 1990. Co-creator of the Competing Values Framework, with Robert Quinn, Kim Cameron and John Rohrbaugh. Founder of the Innovatrium Institute for Innovation, working with Fortune 500 firms, NASA and allied military commands. Author of The Art of Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2025), The Creative Mindset, The Innovation Code, Leading Innovation and Competing Values Leadership. Host of the PBS programme Innovation You and contributor to Michigan Public’s The Next Idea. Former Vice President of Communications and New Ventures at Domino’s Pizza during the period the company scaled from a regional chain to a global brand. Biography Innovation inside large organisations rarely fails for lack of ideas. It fails because the same organisation rewards efficiency, control and reliability while asking a small group to break those very rules. That tension is the subject Jeff DeGraff has spent his career mapping, first as a co-creator of the Competing Values Framework alongside Robert Quinn, Kim Cameron and John Rohrbaugh, and then as the architect of a more applied body of work on innovation as a system. The academic anchor is the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, where he has been Clinical Professor of Management and Organizations since 1990. The applied side is the Innovatrium, the institute he founded to put the theory into contact with operating reality. Through Innovatrium and direct consulting, his methods have been used inside more than half the Fortune 500, including Google, Apple, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, Microsoft and NASA, and inside the US Air Force, NATO and the Singapore Armed Forces. His three most recent books, The Innovation Code (2017), The Creative Mindset (2020) and The Art of Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2025), form a single argument. Innovation is not a personality trait, it is a discipline of holding competing values long enough to produce something new. The Innovation Code translates that into roles and team design. The Creative Mindset breaks creative work into six trainable skills. The Art of Change reframes paradox itself as the engine of transformation. The career arc explains the bias toward application. He earned his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985 and went directly into industry as Vice President of Communications and New Ventures at Domino’s Pizza, where the nickname “Dean of Innovation” stuck. The work since has kept the same shape: a serious framework, tested against organisations that cannot afford abstractions. Key speaking topics Innovation strategy and operating models Competing Values Framework in practice Creative leadership and team design Organisational change and transformation Culture and capability for sustained innovation Cross-sector innovation: commercial, public, military Paradox and decision-making under competing priorities Ideal for CEOs and executive teams under pressure to deliver core performance and a credible innovation agenda at the same time Chief Innovation Officers, CSOs and heads of strategy designing or rebuilding innovation operating models CHROs and learning leaders building creative capability across senior cohorts Public-sector, defence and mission-driven leadership groups that need a private-sector grade innovation method Audience outcomes A shared language for the competing demands inside the business and a way to talk about them without picking sides A working model for staffing innovation teams across distinct creative roles rather than relying on a few “creative” individuals A practical sequence for turning paradoxes (efficiency versus experimentation, control versus autonomy) into design decisions Confidence that innovation can be built as a repeatable system, not a personality-driven exception Examples drawn from companies, NASA and military commands that translate cleanly back to the audience’s own context

Why organisations work with Chris Kelly He built the privacy, safety and public policy functions at Facebook from employee 25 onward, across the period the platform moved from college network to global infrastructure. He has negotiated directly with Attorneys General in all 50 US states on child safety and platform accountability, which is a register of regulator engagement almost no other operator can match. He combines Harvard Law training with live commercial stakes: Netscape in the Microsoft antitrust case, Diamond Multimedia in the first MP3 player litigation, then the defining privacy debates of the social web. He has translated operating experience into public policy, co-authoring California Proposition 35 on human trafficking, which passed with around 81 percent support. He sits on the investor side of technology and sport, as Sacramento Kings co-owner and former board chair at Fandor and MoviePass, so boards get a peer voice rather than an outside adviser. Biography highlights Chief Privacy Officer, first General Counsel and Head of Global Public Policy at Facebook, 2005 to 2009. Employee 25 at Facebook, introduced to the company by Sean Parker. Harvard Law School JD; prior degrees from Georgetown and Yale. Represented Netscape in the Microsoft antitrust case and Diamond Multimedia in the landmark MP3 player suit while in private practice at Wilson Sonsini and Baker and McKenzie. Co-author of California Proposition 35 on human trafficking, approved by roughly 81 percent of voters in 2012. Co-owner of the Sacramento Kings since 2013; former board chair of Fandor and MoviePass. Biography Facebook was a college network with a few million users when Chris Kelly became employee 25 in September 2005. By the time he left in 2009, the platform had hundreds of millions of users and was the subject of sustained scrutiny from regulators, attorneys general and the press. Kelly was the person inside the company holding the pen on how it answered them. As Chief Privacy Officer, first General Counsel and Head of Global Public Policy, he built the functions that most technology companies only assemble after a crisis. That included real-identity and safety policies, enforcement staffing, and a direct working relationship with Attorneys General in all 50 US states on child protection. The model he shaped is now standard practice across the industry. His path into that seat matters. A Harvard Law JD with earlier degrees from Georgetown and Yale, he came out of Wilson Sonsini and Baker and McKenzie, where he represented Netscape against Microsoft and Diamond Multimedia in the suit that opened the MP3 era. Each fight turned on how new technology collides with existing law, which is the exact question boards now face on AI, data and platform liability. He has since extended that work beyond Facebook. He co-authored California Proposition 35, a human trafficking measure that passed with roughly 81 percent of the vote, ran in the 2010 Democratic primary for California Attorney General, and moved into investing as a co-owner of the Sacramento Kings and former board chair at Fandor and MoviePass. The through line is practical: how technology organisations and the public institutions around them build rules that hold when growth and scrutiny arrive together. Key speaking topics Data privacy and platform governance Technology regulation and policy Online safety and child protection Scaling a hyperscale technology business Legal and regulatory risk for digital platforms Silicon Valley operating lessons Public policy and technology investment Ideal for Boards and general counsel at technology, platform and data-intensive businesses preparing for regulatory scrutiny. CEOs and founders scaling products into markets with live privacy, safety or content-liability exposure. Chief Privacy Officers, CISOs and policy heads designing governance across multiple jurisdictions. Investors and non-executive directors evaluating technology holdings where policy risk affects valuation. Audience outcomes A clearer read on how regulators and attorneys general are thinking about platform accountability, from someone who has sat across the table from them. Operating detail on how Facebook built privacy, safety and policy functions during hypergrowth, and what held up against scrutiny. A framework for deciding which governance decisions belong in product, which in legal, and which in public policy. Insight into how technology companies and public institutions negotiate the rules around new categories, drawing on the Microsoft antitrust and MP3 cases as well as the social-media era. A candid view of the trade-offs between scale, user trust and regulatory exposure.

Why organisations work with Mark Adams He has run the operating side of digital change at scale, leading innovation inside VICE Media as it grew from print magazine into a multi-billion-dollar global youth media group. That is a sharply different vantage point from consultants who advise on transformation without running it. His earliest clients were Hollywood A-listers and global public figures, then global consumer brands. The result is a working understanding of how audiences, talent, and brand authority interact in algorithmic markets, which most digital strategists do not have. As Chairman of the AI Leadership Council, he spends his time fielding live questions from the public and senior leaders on how to use AI responsibly and commercially. The result is content built around the questions executives are actually asking, not the ones a slide deck assumes. He converts AI hype into specific operating choices: which capabilities to build internally, which to buy, which to ignore, and how to set the cultural conditions for adoption. Useful for boards and executive teams that feel busy on AI but not yet decisive. Biography highlights Senior Vice President and Head of Innovation, VICE Media, following the 2015 acquisition of his consumer-brand digital transformation business. Founder of the first digital transformation consultancy for celebrities and public figures, acquired by William Morris Endeavor. First Chief Digital Officer in the entertainment industry, appointed at WME. Chairman of the AI Leadership Council, convening senior AI practitioners to answer public and executive questions on AI. Named to the Sunday Times Top People in Britain, The Drum Digerati List, Debrett’s Top 10 Digital List, and the Silicon 60 Global Tech Entrepreneurs list. Profiled by The Guardian as a “Star of Tech City”. TEDx speaker with a TED talk reaching millions of views; forthcoming book Enter the Cult of Extreme Innovation, Penguin, 2026. Biography The first wave of AI in the enterprise was about pilots. The second is about whether large organisations can absorb the technology into the way they actually work. That gap, between AI capability and AI as operating reality, is the territory Mark Adams now spends most of his time inside. His route to that work is unusual. In 2003 he built the first digital transformation consultancy aimed at celebrities and public figures, advising A-list talent on how to operate in an internet-shaped media economy. The business was acquired by William Morris Endeavor, where he was installed as the entertainment industry’s first Chief Digital Officer. He then built a second business focused on consumer brand digital transformation, which VICE Media acquired in 2015. As Senior Vice President and Head of Innovation, he helped run the company through its expansion from a print title into a global youth media group. Today he chairs the AI Leadership Council, a panel of senior digital and AI practitioners who field questions from the public and from executives trying to make sense of the technology. The model is deliberate. Most AI commentary is one-directional. The Council works the other way, starting with the question the leader is asking and building the answer from operating practice. His forthcoming book with Penguin, Enter the Cult of Extreme Innovation, sits in the same territory: AI treated as a creative and commercial discipline rather than a topic. He has been named to the Sunday Times Top People in Britain, the Silicon 60 Global Tech Entrepreneurs list, The Drum Digerati and Debrett’s Top 10 Digital lists, and profiled by The Guardian as a “Star of Tech City”. The recognition matters less than the through-line: he has spent his career inside the institutions that have had to absorb digital change first, from celebrity talent to youth media, and is now working the same problem in AI. Key speaking topics AI adoption inside large organisations Digital transformation as operating change Brand building in algorithmic and AI-shaped markets Innovation as a managed practice Engaging younger audiences and youth-culture brands The cultural conditions for digital and AI change Ideal for Boards and executive committees moving from AI pilots to operating deployment Chief Marketing Officers and brand leaders rethinking brand in an AI and algorithm-led environment Chief Innovation, Digital and Transformation Officers responsible for execution, not just strategy Consumer-facing businesses trying to reach and retain younger audiences Audience outcomes A sharper read on which AI capabilities to build internally and which to buy or ignore Working language for translating AI between technical teams and senior decision-makers A practical sense of the cultural and operating conditions that determine whether AI investment pays back Specific reference points from inside VICE Media and from advising A-list talent on digital and AI shifts A frame for thinking about brand and audience in an algorithmically mediated market

Why organisations work with Felix Oberholzer-Gee His Value Stick reduces competitive strategy to two quantifiable variables – customer willingness-to-pay and employee willingness-to-sell – giving leadership teams a data-driven basis for ranking strategic priorities rather than accumulating them. His central argument – that consistent outperformers do fewer things, not more things – gives boards and strategy teams a principled case for simplification that does not read as retreat or reduced ambition. The framework is designed to be cascaded across an organisation, not held at the strategy function level; it has been used in HBS executive programmes including the Harvard General Management Program and validated by senior practitioners including the CEOs of Michelin and Google X. His research base spans top-tier peer-reviewed economics journals (American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy) and two decades of HBS executive teaching, so the framework holds under board-level scrutiny and works in a workshop setting. As co-host of After Hours on the TED Audio Collective with Youngme Moon and Mihir Desai, he brings the same analytical rigour to live, public business questions – signalling a communicator as well as a researcher. Biography highlights Andreas Andresen Professor of Business Administration, Strategy Unit, Harvard Business School – member of faculty since 2003 Author: Better, Simpler Strategy: A Value-Based Guide to Exceptional Performance (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021) Creator of the Value Stick framework, taught in HBS MBA and executive programmes including the Harvard General Management Program Faculty Chair: Driving Digital Strategy; Senior Executive Leadership Program for China; Managing Turbulence – Harvard Business School HBS Class of 2006 Faculty Teaching Award (best teacher in core curriculum); 2002 Helen Kardon Moss Anvil Award, Wharton School Research published in American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Financial Economics, and Journal of Law and Economics Co-host of After Hours, TED Audio Collective, alongside HBS professors Youngme Moon and Mihir Desai Former faculty member, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; former Managing Director, Symo Electronics (Switzerland) Biography Felix Oberholzer-Gee has spent more than two decades at Harvard Business School making a counterintuitive argument: the organisations that consistently outperform their rivals are doing fewer things than their competitors, not more. His work is less a critique of strategic planning than a dismantling of the assumption that better strategy means broader strategy. The tool at the centre of his approach is the Value Stick, a framework he developed through research and refined through HBS executive programmes. It measures competitive performance through two variables: customer willingness-to-pay at one end, and employee and supplier willingness-to-sell at the other. The gap between them is the value a firm creates. Any initiative that does not widen that gap, his research shows, is a drain on competitive advantage rather than a contribution to it. That argument is the basis of Better, Simpler Strategy (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021), endorsed in practice by the CEOs of Michelin and Google X. The framework is data-driven and designed to work at every level of an organisation – from board-level portfolio decisions to operational choices about talent and supplier relationships. Oberholzer-Gee holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Zurich and has served in senior leadership roles at HBS, including chair of the MBA programme and Senior Associate Dean for the school’s global research centers. His research has been published in the American Economic Review and the Journal of Political Economy, and covered by the Financial Times, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. As co-host of After Hours on the TED Audio Collective, he applies the same analytical approach to business and culture questions with a wide public audience – extending the reach of his strategic thinking well beyond the executive classroom. Key speaking topics Value-based competitive strategy The Value Stick framework and willingness-to-pay analysis Strategic focus and initiative prioritisation Digital transformation and value creation Non-market strategy and competitive positioning Business performance in digital and disrupted markets Global competition and the Chinese economy Ideal for Chief Strategy Officers and corporate strategy teams choosing between competing strategic priorities Boards and senior leadership teams evaluating competitive positioning Executive education cohorts focused on general management and commercial strategy Leadership teams in digitally disrupted sectors reassessing the value they create for customers and talent Audience outcomes A single, quantifiable framework for assessing whether a strategic initiative creates or destroys competitive value Clarity on how to reduce strategic complexity without reducing strategic ambition A practical method for mapping competitive advantage through willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-sell Sharper criteria for deciding which initiatives to pursue and which to cut A common language for strategy discussions that can be applied consistently across business units and leadership levels

Why organisations work with Talya Miron-Shatz Trained directly under Daniel Kahneman at Princeton, with a research output of more than 60 peer-reviewed papers anchoring every commercial recommendation in published evidence. Translates behavioural science into specific design decisions on consent forms, patient journeys, adherence programmes and customer communications, not abstract nudges. Operating credibility with global pharma and consumer brands including Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Novartis, BMS, AbbVie, Boehringer Ingelheim and Samsung, where she has worked on advisory boards, customer outreach and behaviour-change programmes. Author of Your Life Depends on It (Basic Books, 2021), a book-length argument for why even motivated customers fail to act on the information they are given, and what producers of products and information can do about it. Biography highlights Full Professor, Ono Academic College, Faculty of Business Administration. Visiting Researcher, Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, University of Cambridge. Postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University with Daniel Kahneman; former adjunct lecturer in consumer behaviour at the Wharton School. Author of Your Life Depends on It (Basic Books, 2021); over 60 peer-reviewed publications on decision-making and behaviour change. CEO of CureMyWay, advising pharmaceutical companies, insurers and digital health firms on patient and customer behaviour. Senior Fellow, Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, New York. Biography Most customer decisions are not made the way product strategy assumes. People skim consent forms, default to inaction, misread probabilities and disengage at the precise points a business model depends on them showing up. Closing that gap is the practical job of behavioural science in commercial settings, and it is the question Talya Miron-Shatz has spent two decades answering. Her research training came from inside the field that defined the question. After a PhD in psychology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, she spent four years at Princeton as a postdoctoral fellow under Daniel Kahneman, then taught consumer behaviour at the Wharton School. She is now a full professor at Ono Academic College and a visiting researcher at the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge, with more than 60 peer-reviewed publications on decision-making, risk communication and patient comprehension. The applied work matters as much as the academic record. As CEO of CureMyWay she has advised Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Novartis, BMS, AbbVie, Boehringer Ingelheim and Samsung on how to design products, communications and customer pathways that line up with how people actually process information. Her 2021 book Your Life Depends on It (Basic Books) sets out the underlying argument: even highly motivated customers fail to act when the choice architecture is wrong, and the responsibility sits with the organisation that designed it. What this gives a leadership team is a behavioural lens with operating teeth. Pricing, product, marketing and customer experience decisions get tested against published evidence on attention, comprehension and choice, and the recommendations come back as specific design changes a team can ship. Key speaking topics Behavioural economics in commercial decision-making Choice architecture and customer experience Risk communication and information design Patient and consumer behaviour in healthcare Decision-making under uncertainty Behaviour change and adherence Wellbeing and the science of life satisfaction Ideal for Pharmaceutical, medtech and health insurance leadership teams designing patient and physician journeys CMOs, CX leaders and product heads in regulated consumer markets Strategy and innovation teams using behavioural insight to shape pricing, communication and service design Boards and executive committees commissioning customer behaviour-change programmes Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for diagnosing where customer decisions break down and why Specific design moves to apply to communications, consent flows, choice menus and adherence programmes A clear separation between behavioural insight that holds up in published research and the looser claims of the broader nudge industry Evidence-based ways to align product, marketing and operations around real customer cognition rather than assumed rationality

Why organisations work with Sung Won Sohn His forecasting record is one of the few in the economics profession that has been publicly audited. The Wall Street Journal has repeatedly ranked him the most accurate forecaster in the country, including first place in 2006 and a top-three ranking in 2012 as the only academic in the top ten. Analysis built from inside three institutions most economists only write about. Dr. Sohn served as a Senior Economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, as Chief Economist at Wells Fargo, and as President and CEO of Hanmi Financial Corporation in Los Angeles. A Pacific-rim lens that US-focused commentators rarely offer. Korean-born and long specialised in trans-Pacific trade, he reads US-China and US-Korea exposure the way someone who has tracked those flows for four decades does. Constant presence in live financial coverage. Reuters, CNN, CNBC, NBC, and Bloomberg cite him regularly on Fed decisions, inflation prints, and tariff announcements. Audiences hear what is shaping markets this week, in the language of the data that week. Biography highlights Professor of Finance and Economics, College of Business Administration, Loyola Marymount University Former Senior Economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers at The White House Former Executive Vice President and Chief Economist at Wells Fargo Bank; former President and CEO of Hanmi Financial Corporation in Los Angeles Named the most accurate economic forecaster in the United States by the Wall Street Journal in 2006, with top-five rankings from the same publication in 2010 and 2012 Named to Time Magazine’s Board of Economists; one of the five most accurate US forecasters by Bloomberg News; most accurate forecaster for the Western States by Blue Chip Publications Author of Global Financial Crisis and Exit Strategy and The New Economy; Chair of the Investment Committee at LACERS, overseeing a multi-billion-dollar public pension fund; Director, Western Alliance Bancorporation Biography In 2006, the Wall Street Journal named its most accurate economic forecaster in the United States. The winner was running what he himself described as a one-man operation against forecasting teams at Goldman Sachs, Citibank, and Bank of America. His name was Sung Won Sohn. The Journal has returned to him in the years since, at one point ranking him the only academic in the country’s top ten forecasters. The forecasting record is built from a career that has sat on three different sides of the economic question. Dr. Sohn served as a Senior Economist on President Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers, with a brief covering the Federal Reserve and financial markets. He then spent three decades inside Northwest National Bank as it became Wells Fargo, rising to Executive Vice President and Chief Economist. In 2005 he crossed the table entirely, becoming President and CEO of Hanmi Financial Corporation in Los Angeles. Today Dr. Sohn is Professor of Finance and Economics at Loyola Marymount University’s College of Business Administration and president of SS Economics, his own consulting firm. Reuters, CNN, CNBC, NBC, and Bloomberg cite him routinely on Fed decisions, jobs data, and tariffs. His books Global Financial Crisis and Exit Strategy and The New Economy address the questions that still sit on most board agendas. What sets the commentary apart from other US-based macro voices is a Pacific-rim lens. Korean-born and formerly chief executive of a Korean-American bank in Los Angeles, Dr. Sohn has tracked trans-Pacific trade flows for four decades. He reads US-China and US-Korea exposure the way someone who has lived on both ends of those flows reads them. He also sits on the Board of Directors at Western Alliance Bancorporation and chairs the Investment Committee at LACERS, the Los Angeles City Employees’ Retirement System. Key speaking topics US economic forecasting and the Federal Reserve Inflation, interest rates, and monetary policy International trade, tariffs, and non-tariff barriers The Pacific-rim economy and US-China relations AI and the future of business and productivity Digital currencies and the future of payments Competitive strategy in a volatile economy Ideal for CFOs, treasurers, and finance leadership teams needing a clear read on Federal Reserve policy and interest rate direction Board directors and investment committees making decisions sensitive to inflation, tariffs, and global trade flows CEOs and strategy leaders in manufacturing, retail, banking, and logistics with material exposure to US-China and Pacific-rim trade Asset managers, pension trustees, and financial advisers who need a macro voice with a publicly verified forecasting record Audience outcomes A forecast of where US growth, inflation, and interest rates are likely to move over the next two to four quarters, and the indicators that matter most A reading of US-China and US-Korea trade dynamics that goes beyond the headlines, including the non-tariff barriers that often matter more than the tariffs themselves A sharper sense of how AI is actually reshaping pricing, productivity, and labour markets, grounded in specific company examples A way to pressure-test their own planning assumptions against someone who has sat inside both the Council of Economic Advisers and a major bank’s forecasting team

Why organisations work with Jamie Siminoff He has the full founder arc on the record: invented a product category in a garage, pitched it on national television and walked out without a deal, rebuilt from near-bankruptcy, and sold to Amazon for about 1 billion dollars. He has run the acquired business inside Big Tech, giving buyers a rare view of what integration, reporting lines, and product autonomy look like after a landmark exit. He has repeated the cycle: founded Honest Day’s Work, sold it to Latch Inc., took the CEO seat at the acquirer, then returned to Amazon as a VP running Ring and adjacent smart home units. Most speakers have one exit story; he has a sequence. The Shark Tank rejection is specific and documented, which makes the resilience material credible rather than motivational. It is cited by the Sharks themselves as one of the biggest misses in the show’s history. He co-authored “Ding Dong: How Ring Went From Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door” with Andrew Postman, published in November 2025, which gives buyers a named, durable reference point for the material. Biography highlights Founder and original CEO of Ring, acquired by Amazon in 2018 for approximately 1 billion dollars. Pitched DoorBot on ABC’s Shark Tank in 2013 and left without a deal; returned to the show as a guest Shark in 2018. Earlier founder of PhoneTag, the first voicemail to text service, and Unsubscribe.com, both acquired. Founder of Honest Day’s Work, acquired by Latch Inc. in 2023; subsequently appointed CEO of Latch. Rejoined Amazon in 2025 as Vice President running Ring and related smart home businesses, leading a pivot to AI. Babson College, Class of 1999, and Honorary Doctor of Laws from Babson in 2021, where he delivered the undergraduate commencement address. Co-author with Andrew Postman of “Ding Dong: How Ring Went From Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door,” published November 2025. Biography Ring began as DoorBot, a Wi-Fi video doorbell built in a garage in 2011. By 2013 it was on Shark Tank, where every investor passed. The company was close to running out of money. Seven years later, Amazon bought it for roughly 1 billion dollars. That arc is the material Siminoff brings to the stage, and he brings it with the receipts. The more useful part of the story for serious operators is what happened between the rejection and the exit. Siminoff rebuilt the product and the brand, raised from Kleiner Perkins, Qualcomm Ventures, Goldman Sachs, DFJ Growth and Sir Richard Branson, and built Ring into a category defining consumer technology business. After the Amazon acquisition he stayed inside the company for five years, running Ring alongside Blink, Amazon Key and adjacent smart home lines. Most founder talks stop at the exit. His continues through integration. He has since extended the pattern. He founded Honest Day’s Work, sold it to Latch Inc. in 2023, stepped in as Latch’s CEO, and in 2025 rejoined Amazon as a Vice President running Ring and nearby smart home units, now pivoting the category toward AI. In November 2025 he published “Ding Dong” with Andrew Postman, the first full account of how Ring actually got built. A Babson graduate and Honorary Doctor of Laws from the same institution, he is one of a small group of founders who can speak to rejection, category creation, acquisition, and re-entry as connected stages of one working life. Key speaking topics Consumer technology product invention and category creation Scaling from prototype to acquisition Founder resilience through investor rejection Operating an acquired business inside Big Tech Smart home, connected devices, and AI in consumer hardware Brand building in hardware startups Hiring and team building in early stage companies Ideal for Founders, CEOs and product leaders in consumer technology and connected hardware Corporate innovation, strategy and M and A teams working on acquisition integration Investor audiences and startup ecosystems running portfolio or founder programmes Entrepreneurship centres and executive education audiences in business schools Audience outcomes A concrete, non-generic view of what it takes to get a hardware startup from prototype to billion-dollar exit. A working model for how to treat a high-profile rejection as distribution rather than a verdict. Specific insight into how an acquired category runs inside a company like Amazon, and what that means for teams going through similar integrations. A clear read on where consumer smart home and home security technology are heading as AI becomes the core layer of the product. Hiring and early team construction principles drawn from building Ring from a Craigslist hire list to a company sold for 1 billion dollars.

Why organisations work with Nathalie Nahai Her psychological model for how digital persuasion builds or erodes consumer trust is grounded in a decade of published research, not reactions to recent AI headlines, which gives marketing and strategy teams a diagnostic framework rather than a new concern to manage. Business Unusual directly addresses the commercial consequences of values misalignment, applying the frameworks of self-determination theory and eudaimonic consumerism to the question of why consumers switch, stay and trust: with practical implications for brand, marketing and leadership strategy. She co-created TheValuesMap.com with Dr Kiki Leutner of Goldsmiths University, a scientifically grounded instrument that organisations can use to measure and communicate the values they actually hold, converting a strategic abstraction into a usable tool that survives the board conversation. She translates the ethics of AI and persuasive technology into a commercially legible argument that boards can act on, rather than a compliance burden that legal teams manage. Webs of Influence, published by Pearson and translated into seven languages, is used by universities and Fortune 500 companies as a foundational text on digital consumer behaviour, meaning her frameworks are often already the shared language of the audiences she addresses. Biography highlights Author of Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion (Pearson), translated into seven languages and adopted by universities and Fortune 500 companies as a standard text on digital consumer behaviour Author of Business Unusual: Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience, with named contributors including Dan Pink, Cindy Gallop and Amy C. Edmondson Co-created TheValuesMap.com (2021) with Dr Kiki Leutner of Goldsmiths University, a scientific values-assessment instrument available to organisations Guest faculty at ELISAVA’s Masters programme in Human Interaction and AI, teaching “Transversal Vision of Artificial Intelligence” Member of the BIMA Human Insights Council, the representative body for digital and tech in the UK Covered in and contributed to the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, Forbes, The Guardian and The Telegraph; hosted the Guardian Changing Media Summit Biography Nathalie Nahai coined the term web psychology in 2011, defining it as the empirical study of how online environments influence human attitudes and behaviours. At the time, most organisations had powerful digital tools and no psychological framework for understanding what those tools were doing to the people using them. Her book Webs of Influence (Pearson), translated into seven languages, built that framework into a practical text adopted by universities and Fortune 500 companies as a standard reference on digital consumer behaviour. Her follow-up, Business Unusual: Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience, extended the argument into harder commercial territory – specifically, how organisations sustain consumer trust when digital markets, values and expectations all shift at once. The book drew contributions from Dan Pink, Cindy Gallop and Amy C. Edmondson, and applies self-determination theory and eudaimonic consumerism to the practical question of what makes brands resilient rather than brittle. In 2021 she co-created TheValuesMap.com with Dr Kiki Leutner of Goldsmiths University, a scientifically grounded instrument that organisations can use to measure and communicate their actual values. The ability to deploy psychology as a practical tool – not just a conceptual frame – distinguishes her approach from most advisory work in this space. Her analysis has been covered in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, Forbes, The Guardian and The Telegraph. She has lectured at Cambridge, UCL, Lund and Hult business schools and addressed major platforms including SXSW, the Web Summit and the Guardian Changing Media Summit. She serves as guest faculty at ELISAVA’s Masters programme in Human Interaction and AI and is a member of the BIMA Human Insights Council. Key speaking topics Consumer psychology and digital influence Ethics of AI and persuasive technology Values-led brand resilience Human behaviour and digital trust Eudaimonic consumerism and shifting consumer expectations Web psychology and online decision-making Behavioural science applied to marketing and product design Ideal for CMOs and marketing leadership teams navigating the ethics and commercial implications of AI-driven personalisation Boards and senior leadership teams seeking a psychological framework for brand resilience and consumer trust strategy Digital product and technology teams applying persuasive design with ethical accountability Transformation and strategy leads working to align organisational values with commercial outcomes Audience outcomes A working model for understanding how AI and persuasive technology affect consumer trust and decision-making, grounded in published research rather than trend observation Practical application of self-determination theory and eudaimonic consumerism frameworks to brand, marketing and customer experience strategy A diagnostic approach to identifying where persuasive technology is eroding rather than building customer relationships Clarity on the commercial case for values-led strategy, with evidence from consumer behaviour research A set of questions to carry back into product, marketing and leadership conversations about how technology is actually affecting the people it is designed to serve

Why organisations work with Timothy Armoo He has actually sold Gen Z attention to the buyers in the room. Fanbytes ran creator campaigns for Apple, McDonald’s, Nike, Samsung, Deliveroo and the UK Government before exiting to Brainlabs. Two exits before 28 give him an operator’s view of scale-up commercial discipline that most Gen Z marketing voices cannot match. His Penguin book What’s Stopping You? gives commercial audiences a structured language for the founder mindset he is asked to transfer into corporate teams. He sits inside Brainlabs as VP Influencer Marketing, which keeps his read on creator platforms, CPMs and Gen Z behaviour current rather than retrospective. He brings a credible answer to the multigenerational question: not a generational stereotype deck, but a working view of how Gen Z employees and customers behave once incentives are on the table. Biography highlights Co-founder and former CEO of Fanbytes; sold to Brainlabs in 2022 in an eight-figure deal. Sold his first business, EntrepreneurXpress, to Horizon Media at 17. Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe 2021, Media & Marketing. Named in the Evening Standard Progress 1000 list of London’s most influential figures in advertising and media. Author of What’s Stopping You? 11 Cheatcodes to Unlock the Life You Want, published by Penguin. Currently Vice President of Influencer Marketing at Brainlabs, the global digital agency that acquired Fanbytes. Biography The hardest commercial question facing many consumer brands is no longer awareness. It is whether the under-30 customer takes them seriously at all. Influencer budgets are climbing, internal teams are stretched between TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube, and most boards have no operator in the room who has actually run those campaigns at scale. Fanbytes was built to sit in that gap. Co-founded by Timothy Armoo in 2017 with Ambrose Cooke and Mitchell Fasanya, the agency ran creator campaigns for Apple, McDonald’s, Nike, Samsung, Deliveroo, Boohoo and the UK Government. In May 2022, Brainlabs acquired the business in an eight-figure deal. Armoo was 27. He stayed on as Vice President of Influencer Marketing at Brainlabs, which keeps his commercial view of Gen Z platforms current, not retrospective. The track record was not a single lucky exit. He sold his first company, EntrepreneurXpress, to Horizon Media at 17. Forbes named him to its 30 Under 30 Europe list for Media and Marketing in 2021. The Evening Standard Progress 1000 listed him among London’s most influential figures in advertising and media. His Penguin book What’s Stopping You? extends the same operator’s logic into a wider audience of commercial leaders and early-career professionals. For senior buyers, the value is specific. He is the rare voice on Gen Z marketing who can speak to a CMO with the discipline of a founder who had to make a P&L work, sell to a procurement team, and exit to a global agency. That is a different conversation from a panel on creator culture. Key speaking topics Gen Z consumer behaviour and brand decisions Influencer and creator-led marketing strategy Entrepreneurship and scale-up commercial discipline Building, scaling and exiting a venture-backed business The multigenerational customer and workforce Social platforms and the modern media landscape Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and consumer marketing leadership rethinking creator and Gen Z strategy Founders, scale-up CEOs and growth leaders preparing for raise, scale or exit Boards and exec teams of consumer-facing businesses with under-30 customer exposure Talent, employer brand and graduate recruitment leads who need a sharper read on Gen Z employees Audience outcomes A clearer commercial map of how Gen Z actually decides on brand, employer and product Specific operator lessons from building, scaling and selling a creator-economy agency A framework for evaluating influencer and creator spend as a measurable channel, not a content experiment A more honest read on the gap between how senior teams talk about Gen Z and how Gen Z behave Conviction to back internal entrepreneurial bets that conventional governance tends to slow