Business Strategy & Growth speakers
Strategists, economists and entrepreneurs who help organisations identify opportunity and execute with conviction
Speakers Associates represents 320 speakers on Business Strategy & Growth, including Kemal Apaydin, Arnt Eriksen, Michael Lyon, Peter Fisk, Neri Karra Sillaman, Mark Ritson, Olivier Sibony, Itai Green, Tom Goodwin and Rita McGrath.
Customers do not behave the way product, marketing and strategy decks assume they will. They misread information, default to inertia, and disengage at exactly the moments organisations most need them to act. Closing that gap between what behaviour the business model requires and what cognition actually delivers is the work.
Running an institution through a structural reinvention rarely fails because the strategy is wrong. It fails because the operating model, the people, and the brand cannot move in step. Senior leaders need a credible account of what it actually takes to hold a large business together while changing what it does.
Most established brands lose share not because a competitor invented something new, but because the incumbent had no plan for the attack when it came. Marketing teams are trained to launch and build; very few are trained to defend a position, protect a price corridor or hold a category against a credible challenger. The cost of that gap shows up in lost margin years before it shows up in lost revenue.
Most enterprises have run AI pilots. Far fewer have moved AI into the operating fabric of how decisions are made, deals get done, and software gets bought. The gap is not technology. It is a leadership problem about which workflows to redesign, which vendors actually deliver, and how to read the buyer signals coming back through the data.
Most organisations have a sustainability strategy. Far fewer have made sustainability the structural logic of their business model. The pressure from investors, regulators, and employees is real, but it is producing reporting, not reinvention. The gap between stated commitment and genuine commercial transformation is where ambition runs out.
Most large organisations cannot reach the under-30 buyer with the brand machinery they already own. Internal marketing teams are structured for paid media, not for creators, and senior leaders rarely have a credible read on how Gen Z actually decides what to buy, work for, or trust. The result is real revenue exposure dressed up as a content problem.
Most consumer brands describe sustainability as a value. Few have rebuilt their supply chain to pay for it. The harder question for any operator is whether ethical sourcing can survive contact with unit economics, scale, and a competitive high street.
Most leadership teams consume far more futures content than they can act on. The problem is not a shortage of prediction. It is the absence of a structured method for connecting macro change to the specific decisions an organisation is already under pressure to make. Without that connection, strategic planning is reactive, investment decisions trail the market, and the wrong questions dominate the board’s time.
Most companies bolt new technology onto old structures. They digitise the existing business instead of asking what that business would look like if they built it today. The hard part is telling which technologies are noise and which change the basis of competition, then acting before the answer is obvious to everyone.
Most negotiation training teaches tactics, then leaves people to apply them in conditions where their own anxiety overrides the playbook. Senior commercial teams know the patterns: rushed concessions, defensive pricing, value left on the table at the close. The gap is not knowledge. It is what happens to skilled people when the stakes get real.