Change Management

Why organisations work with Peter Baines His authority on crisis leadership is operational, not theoretical. He led international forensic teams in Thailand after the Boxing Day tsunami and held senior roles in the response to the Bali bombings, the 2010 Jeddah floods and the 2011 Japan tsunami. He is one of the very few speakers who can talk credibly about leading in chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear risk, having led an Interpol counter terrorism project on CBRN threats in Lyon. He brings a 20-year, AUD 40 million case study in purpose at scale through Hands Across the Water, which lets him talk about values, culture and CSR with real numbers behind him rather than slogans. He has published with Wiley twice on the substance of his work, Doing Good By Doing Good (2014) and Leadership Matters (2023), giving organisations a coherent body of thinking to engage with beyond the keynote. He carries an Order of Australia Medal and a royal Thai honour, which gives the talk a level of public standing that lands credibly with boards, philanthropic committees and senior leadership audiences. Biography highlights 22-year career as a forensic investigator with NSW Police, including leadership roles in the response to the 2002 Bali bombings and the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Thailand Seconded to Interpol in Lyon to lead an international counter terrorism project on chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats Founder of Hands Across the Water, an Australian charity that has raised more than AUD 40 million for children in Thailand since 2005 Awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in 2014 for international humanitarian work, and the Most Admirable Order of the Direkgunabhorn by the King of Thailand in 2016 Author of four books, including Doing Good By Doing Good (Wiley, 2014), Leadership Matters (Wiley, 2023), and Together We Can: 33 Marathons in 26 Days (2025) In December 2024, ran 1,400 km across Thailand in 26 days, the equivalent of 33 marathons, in support of Hands Across the Water Biography The bodies were still being recovered in Thai temples when the question of leadership stopped being abstract. In the weeks after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the Australian and international forensic teams operating out of Phuket and Khao Lak had to identify thousands of victims with limited infrastructure, exhausted personnel and grieving families waiting for answers. The leader running multiple rotations of that operation was a NSW Police forensic investigator on secondment. That investigator was Peter Baines. By the time he resigned from the force in 2009, he had also worked through the Bali bombings, been seconded to Interpol in Lyon to run an international counter terrorism project on chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats, and worked with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in Southeast Asia. The Saudi government later engaged him to review the response to the Jeddah floods. He was deployed again after the 2011 Japan tsunami. The leadership argument he draws from that work is simple but unfashionable: authority comes from how you behave when nobody is keeping score, and culture is what survives a bad day. He set out to test it in practice. In 2005, he founded Hands Across the Water, an Australian charity that has now raised more than AUD 40 million for children in Thailand and supported 46 of them through university degrees. He has written it up in two Wiley books, Doing Good By Doing Good (2014) and Leadership Matters (2023), and most recently in Together We Can (2025), the account of his 1,400 km, 26-day run across Thailand at age 57. The Order of Australia Medal and the King of Thailand’s Most Admirable Order of the Direkgunabhorn followed, but the real proof point is that the operation he started in a tent of orphaned children in 2005 is still functioning, and growing, twenty years later. Key speaking topics Leadership in crisis and disaster response Decision-making under uncertainty and operational pressure Purpose-driven leadership and culture Corporate social responsibility and shared value Resilience and recovery after shock Building and sustaining high performing teams Storytelling and humanitarian impact Ideal for Boards and executive committees rebuilding leadership credibility after a crisis, restructuring, or reputational shock CHROs, CSOs and culture leads designing values-based leadership programmes with substance behind them CSR, sustainability and foundation leads who need a credible voice on shared value and authentic purpose Senior leadership offsites and partner conferences in professional services, financial services and complex operating environments Audience outcomes A clearer view of what authority actually looks like when titles, scripts and procedures stop helping Specific reference points for decision-making under fatigue, ambiguity and public scrutiny A practical model for connecting organisational purpose to measurable community outcomes, not slogans Renewed appetite to hold leadership teams to a higher standard of behaviour in ordinary, not just exceptional, conditions A repertoire of concrete stories, tested in disaster response and humanitarian work, that senior leaders can carry into their own teams

Why organisations work with Jeff Havens A defined thesis on generational workplaces, set out in his Pearson FT Press book “Us vs. Them,” that there are not four or five generations at work and that most generational training reinforces the problem it claims to solve. A keynote portfolio that covers four distinct organisational tensions, change (“Conquering Tomorrow”), leadership (“Unleash Your Inner Tyrant”), innovation (“Uncrapify Your Future”) and generations (“Us vs. Them”), each anchored in a published book or a defined argument. Built and runs Levity University, a microlearning platform of more than 400 courses serving over half a million learners a year, so the keynote sits on top of an operating training business, not just a speaking practice. A working comedian’s structure applied to a serious management argument, which is why CNBC and Fox Business book him as a recurring guest and why named clients including Ford, General Electric, JP Morgan, McDonald’s and Berkshire Hathaway use him at conferences where attention fatigue is the main risk. Biography highlights Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Vanderbilt University. Author of “Us vs. Them” (Pearson FT Press), “Unleash Your Inner Tyrant!” and “Uncrapify Your Life!” Founder of The Jeff Havens Company and Levity University, with 400+ microlearning courses and 500,000+ annual learners. Recurring guest on Fox Business (including The Willis Report) and CNBC. Published in The Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, Fast Company and BusinessWeek. Delivered over 1,000 keynotes to organisations including General Electric, Ford, US Bank, McDonald’s, JP Morgan, Honeywell, Berkshire Hathaway and Caesars. Biography Generational training is one of the most-bought and least-effective categories of corporate learning. Most of it asks employees to memorise the supposed traits of Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z, then sends them back to the same teams with the same friction. The conflict is real. The frame is wrong. That is the argument behind “Us vs. Them,” published by Pearson FT Press, in which Jeff Havens makes the case that there are not four or five distinct generations in the workplace, and that the visible conflict is better explained by age and life stage than by birth cohort. The book sits alongside “Unleash Your Inner Tyrant!” on leadership behaviour and “Uncrapify Your Life!” on innovation, three published positions on three of the most-requested categories in corporate keynotes. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Vanderbilt and a former high school English teacher, Havens works at the intersection of stand-up comedy and management argument. The result is a presentation craft that holds a senior audience for a full hour. CNBC and Fox Business book him as a recurring guest for the same reason. His client list, General Electric, Ford, US Bank, McDonald’s, JP Morgan, Honeywell, Berkshire Hathaway, Caesars, is a list of organisations that buy attention as a scarce resource at their conferences. Beyond the keynote, he runs Levity University, a microlearning platform with over 400 courses and more than 500,000 annual learners. That operating business gives the speaking work a depth that pure-platform speakers rarely match: he is a practitioner who tests his content against a paying audience every week. Key speaking topics Generational dynamics in the workplace Leadership behaviour and management failure modes Innovation as an everyday discipline Change management and resistance Customer experience Corporate culture and communication Ideal for HR and L&D leaders running generational, culture or engagement programmes at scale Senior leadership conferences where attention fatigue across a long agenda is the main risk to the message CEO and divisional offsites looking to anchor a change, innovation or culture theme with a memorable plenary Industry association conferences (SHRM, ATD, MPI and equivalents) where mixed-seniority audiences need a single keynote that lands across the room Audience outcomes A working argument for why standard four-generations training does not reduce workplace friction, and what to do instead A clear language for naming leadership behaviours that quietly damage teams, drawn from “Unleash Your Inner Tyrant” A practical view of innovation as a habit available to every employee, not a function reserved for an R&D group A more confident stance for managers asked to lead change against fatigue and resistance A shared reference point, and shared humour, that a leadership team can take back into the room the next morning

Why organisations work with Mark DeVolder A practising change consultant with a named methodology, Empowered Change, used inside organisations from NASA to Coca-Cola, not a motivational speaker who borrows the language of change. Author of Perpetual Pivot, a book-length argument that continuous adaptation is now the default operating condition, with a defined construct leaders can apply to repeated reinvention. Holds a research doctorate on unity, diversity and synergy from Fuller, which gives the work an evidence base most change keynotes lack. Has worked with leadership teams in regulated, high-stakes environments such as Pfizer, Qatar Petroleum, Siemens and the US Air Force, where the cost of badly handled change is operational, not theoretical. Brings a Target Zero safety-culture frame for clients in industrial and engineering sectors where change failure shows up as incidents, not engagement scores. Biography highlights Doctorate, Fuller, with dissertation on unity, diversity and synergy. Founder of the Empowered Change methodology, used in client engagements across five continents. Author of Perpetual Pivot: How the Best Leaders Adapt to Exponential Change and Get Engaged! on employee engagement. Has spoken in over 25 countries to clients including NASA, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Siemens, PepsiCo, Pfizer, Royal Bank of Canada, Verizon, Medtronic, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Qatar Petroleum and the US Air Force. Signature talks on change, resilience, employee engagement and Target Zero safety culture. Biography Change has become the operating condition of large organisations, not the event between strategies. The leaders who hold their teams through repeated restructure, integration and digital reset are not the ones with the most polished communications plan. They are the ones who understand how people move through transition and can hold the line on engagement when the next wave arrives. This is the territory Mark DeVolder has worked in for two decades. His Empowered Change methodology and the wider argument set out in Perpetual Pivot: How the Best Leaders Adapt to Exponential Change treat continuous adaptation as the default state of senior leadership. The work is built on a doctorate from Fuller on unity, diversity and synergy, which gives the practice a research base rather than a personality base. Client engagements have included leadership teams at NASA, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Siemens, PepsiCo, Pfizer, Royal Bank of Canada, Verizon, Medtronic, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Qatar Petroleum, alongside the US Air Force. The work spans corporate integration, regulated industry, industrial safety and public-sector transformation, which means the methodology has been tested against very different definitions of what a failed change actually costs. For industrial and engineering clients, DeVolder also runs a Target Zero programme that frames change leadership as a safety-culture problem. In those settings the test of good change leadership is not employee survey scores; it is whether the operating environment becomes safer or more dangerous through the transition. That is a sharper test than most change keynotes are built to pass. Key speaking topics Change management and organisational transition Leadership through continuous restructure Resilience and decision-making under pressure Employee engagement during transformation Safety culture and high-performance operating environments Adapting to exponential change Ideal for Boards and executive teams entering or recovering from major restructure, M&A integration or digital reset. CHROs and transformation leads accountable for retaining trust and discretionary effort through repeated change. Operating leaders in regulated, industrial or safety-critical sectors where change failure shows up as incidents, not survey scores. Senior leadership development programmes building change-leadership capability across cohorts. Audience outcomes A clearer view of why repeated change erodes capability and what to protect first. A practical model, the Empowered Change journey-map, for diagnosing where a workforce sits in a transition. Specific behaviours senior leaders can adopt during continuous restructure to hold trust and engagement. Language to talk to a workforce about change without slipping into corporate abstraction. For industrial clients, a route to connect change leadership directly to safety performance.

Why organisations work with Willie Kirk He has done the work that most leadership speakers describe. Four head-coach appointments across the women’s professional game, each with a different brief: build, promote, contend, restructure. He speaks from inside the professionalisation of women’s football, one of the fastest organisational transitions in modern sport. The lessons on growth without losing coherence are first-hand, not theoretical. He won a domestic cup in his first full season at Hibernian and was named Scottish Women’s Football Manager of the Year in 2013, which is a useful early signal that the results travel with him. He took Everton Women to a 2020 FA Cup Final from a position outside the elite tier, the kind of overperformance that buyers want to understand mechanically, not anecdotally. Biography highlights UEFA Pro Licence coach with over 15 years in senior management Former head coach of Hibernian, Bristol City, Everton and Leicester City Women Scottish Cup winner and Scottish Women’s Premier League Cup winner with Hibernian Scottish Women’s Football Manager of the Year, 2013 FA Women’s Super League Manager of the Month, November 2019 (Everton) 2020 FA Cup finalist as Everton head coach Current head coach, Djurgardens IF Women, Swedish Damallsvenskan Biography Bristol City Women had just been relegated from the Women’s Super League when Willie Kirk took the job in 2015. A year later they were promoted back. That sequence, inheriting a side at its lowest point and returning it to the top flight, is the pattern that has defined the rest of his career. He is a turnaround manager who arrives where the standards have slipped and the dressing room has stopped believing in itself. He had done it earlier at Hibernian Women, where his first season produced a Scottish Cup and where he was later named Scottish Women’s Football Manager of the Year. He did it again at Everton, reaching the 2020 FA Cup Final with a club that had been a long way off that conversation, and picking up a WSL Manager of the Month award in the process. The work is repeatable because the method is repeatable. What organisations get from him is the operating detail of that method. How to read a room of senior performers who have stopped trusting each other. How to set standards that hold under pressure rather than collapse on the first hard week. How to grow a function quickly without losing the discipline that made it work in the first place, which is the live problem facing any business scaling a high-performing team. His career has run alongside the most rapid professionalisation any sport has seen in a generation. Women’s football has gone from semi-professional to broadcast asset inside his coaching lifetime. He speaks from inside that change, with the credibility of someone who has had to manage talent, expectations and infrastructure all at once. Key speaking topics Turnaround leadership in underperforming teams Building team culture under scrutiny High performance and accountability Talent development in fast-growing organisations Resilience and composure for senior leaders Standards-setting and behaviour in elite environments Ideal for CEOs and executive teams inheriting underperforming functions HR and talent leaders responsible for performance culture Sales leadership and commercial teams under quota pressure Leadership development programmes for mid-to-senior managers Audience outcomes A clear picture of what high-performance culture actually requires in practice, not in slogan The specific behaviours a leader uses to reset standards without losing the team A working sense of how elite coaches manage performance, recovery and pressure across a season Permission to lead with clarity in environments where ambiguity has become the default

Why organisations work with Darren Woodson A rare second-act credibility: 12 NFL seasons, 14 years on ESPN, and an operating role at a global commercial real estate firm. Leaders hear from someone who has rebuilt his expertise twice over. A specific framework for culture, not generic motivation. The “Creating Cultures of Excellence” model names four conditions a team must meet to perform at the top: hard change, honest confrontation, healthy competition and heartfelt character. First-hand authority on what high-performance environments actually feel like, drawn from a locker room that won three Super Bowls in four seasons and from twelve years inside one of the most scrutinised franchises in American sport. A practitioner’s view of reinvention. As co-founder and chairman of CounterFind, Woodson has built a venture-backed technology company from scratch, which gives him real material on entrepreneurship, founder transition and operating discipline beyond the locker room. Biography highlights Three-time Super Bowl champion (XXVII, XXVIII, XXX) with the Dallas Cowboys. Five-time Pro Bowl selection and the Cowboys’ all-time leading tackler with 1,350 career tackles. Inducted into the Dallas Cowboys Ring of Honor (2015), the Arizona Sports Hall of Fame and the Texas Sports Hall of Fame. NFL analyst at ESPN for 14 years following retirement from playing. Managing Principal at Cresa, the world’s largest occupier-only commercial real estate advisory firm. Co-founder and chairman of CounterFind, a Dallas-based technology company that uses image recognition to remove counterfeit merchandise listings from Amazon, Facebook and Instagram. Biography A team that has won three championships in four seasons is not held together by talent alone. It is held together by the willingness to have difficult conversations every day. That is the environment Darren Woodson grew up inside as a strong safety for the Dallas Cowboys, and it is the lens he brings to the leadership teams he now advises. Over twelve NFL seasons, Woodson became the Cowboys’ all-time leading tackler with 1,350 career tackles, earned five Pro Bowl selections and won Super Bowls XXVII, XXVIII and XXX. He was inducted into the Dallas Cowboys Ring of Honor in 2015 alongside the franchise’s most enduring figures. The second act has been deliberate. Fourteen years as an ESPN analyst gave Woodson a public communicator’s discipline. He then moved into commercial real estate, where he is now Managing Principal at Cresa, the only global advisory firm representing occupiers rather than landlords. In parallel, he co-founded CounterFind, a venture-backed technology company that has removed counterfeit listings worth millions from Amazon, Facebook and Instagram. His keynote work is organised around a framework he calls Creating Cultures of Excellence, built on four conditions: hard change, honest confrontation, healthy competition and heartfelt character. The argument is that average cultures avoid all four. Winning ones, in sport and in business, build the muscle to live inside them. Woodson has tested the proposition at the top of professional sport and in the rebuilding of a commercial career, and he speaks to it as a practitioner. Key speaking topics Building cultures of excellence Leadership and team performance under pressure Change management and organisational transformation Resilience and reinvention Allyship and crucial conversations Entrepreneurship and second-career leadership Ideal for C-suite leadership teams are setting cultural standards for their next operating cycle Sales kickoffs and commercial leadership offsites CHROs and people leaders running culture transformation programmes Board and partner meetings at professional services firms Audience outcomes A clear four-part test for whether their team is genuinely competing or quietly settling Practical language for having the honest conversations leaders most often avoid A perspective on reinvention drawn from someone who has rebuilt his career twice Conviction that culture is built through specific behaviours, not slogans

Why organisations work with Cy Wakeman She quantifies the cost of workplace drama in hours and dollars, giving HR and operations leaders a financial case for cultural change that executive committees actually fund. Her Reality-Based Leadership method directly contradicts the dominant engagement-survey playbook, which makes her useful to organisations whose engagement scores rise while performance does not. Four books, including the New York Times bestseller The Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace, give her a coherent body of work that scales beyond the keynote into manager training, coaching, and certification. She has been ranked the world’s #1 leadership guru on the Global Gurus list for three consecutive years and is a 2024 inductee into the National Speakers Association Hall of Fame, placing her in the top tier of professional platform speakers globally. Her client roster spans Google, Meta, Pfizer, NASA, Bank of America, NBCUniversal, and major US health systems, which gives her language credibility across both highly regulated and high-growth environments. Biography highlights Founder of Reality-Based Leadership, an executive coaching and culture consultancy operating since 2001. Author of Reality-Based Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2010), New York Times bestseller The Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace (2013), No Ego (2017), and Life’s Messy, Live Happy (2022). Ranked #1 on the Global Gurus Top 30 Leadership Professionals list in 2021, 2022, and 2023. Certified Speaking Professional and 2024 inductee into the National Speakers Association Hall of Fame via the Council of Peers Award of Excellence. Regular contributor to Forbes, Success, Huffington Post, and Thrive Global; featured in The New York Times, Business Insider, and SHRM. Clients include Google, Meta, Pfizer, NASA, NBCUniversal, Bank of America, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford Health Care. Biography Most organisations treat engagement as the answer to cultural underperformance. Wakeman’s research argues the opposite. Engagement without accountability produces entitlement, and the cost shows up as emotional waste: gossip, venting, resistance, and rehearsed grievance that her work estimates at roughly two and a half hours per employee per day. That framing is the spine of Reality-Based Leadership, the consultancy she founded in 2001 and the title of her 2010 Jossey-Bass book. The follow-up, The Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace, reached the New York Times bestseller list in 2013. No Ego in 2017 sharpened the argument: leaders should stop arguing with reality on behalf of their teams and start coaching people to work within it. Her client roster covers the full span where this argument lands hardest. Google, Meta, and NBCUniversal on the high-growth side. Pfizer, NASA, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford Health Care on the regulated and mission-driven side. The work tends to follow a familiar pattern: senior teams that have invested heavily in culture programmes, with strong engagement scores and stubbornly weak performance, retention, or change-readiness. Recognition has tracked the substance. The Global Gurus list ranked her #1 leadership professional in 2021, 2022, and 2023. In 2024 the National Speakers Association inducted her into its Hall of Fame through the Council of Peers Award of Excellence, a designation held by fewer than 300 speakers worldwide. Key speaking topics Reality-Based Leadership Workplace drama and emotional waste Accountability cultures Employee engagement that produces results Change readiness No-ego leadership Ideal for CHROs and heads of culture working on the gap between engagement scores and performance. Senior operating leaders dealing with change fatigue and low accountability in their teams. Healthcare, financial services, and regulated-sector executives managing retention and frontline morale at scale. Manager populations being trained out of conflict-avoidance and into direct, accountable conversations. Audience outcomes A concrete language for naming and pricing the cost of workplace drama in their own teams. Practical tools to redirect employee energy from grievance into contribution. A working distinction between engagement and accountability, and why most cultural investment confuses the two. A coaching approach for managers facing resistance to change without escalating conflict. Permission to stop arguing with reality on behalf of their teams and start leading inside it.

Why organisations work with Tony Perzow Twenty years on the operator side of the table, buying and selling closeouts to Walmart, Amazon, and Costco, before becoming a trainer. The frame is procurement and sales floor, not classroom. Former negotiation trainer at the Karrass Organization and former VP of negotiation training at Strategic Pricing Associates, giving him a structured pedagogical lineage in the most established commercial negotiation methodologies. His “Heart of the Deal” system is built around what happens to skilled negotiators when pressure rewires their judgement, not around tactic lists. Sessions are simulation-led. Teams negotiate, then get critiqued on the specific unconscious moves that cost margin, rather than walking out with a slide deck. Trained more than 20,000 commercial professionals, with a client roster spanning Apple, Red Bull, Rolls Royce, Pfizer, Panasonic, and Daimler Trucks. Biography highlights Former negotiation trainer at the Karrass Organization and former Vice President of negotiation training at Strategic Pricing Associates. Trained more than 20,000 sales, procurement, and commercial leadership professionals. Past corporate audiences include Apple, Red Bull, Rolls Royce, Pfizer, Panasonic, Daimler Trucks, and Starz Network. Built a procurement and sales operator background negotiating closeouts with Walmart, Amazon, and Costco. Creator of the “Heart of the Deal” methodology, structured around decision-making under pressure rather than tactic playbooks. Working on a book titled “You Suck at Negotiating, But You Don’t Have to with a Mindful Negotiation Practice.” Biography Negotiation training has a credibility problem. Most of it is built on tactic lists that hold up in role play and fall apart the moment a real buyer pushes back. Tony Perzow’s work starts where that gap opens: the behavioural moment where a skilled negotiator, under pressure, makes a decision they would not have made on paper. That framing comes from a career on the operator side of the table. Before training, Perzow spent close to two decades as a procurement specialist and sales lead, buying and selling closeouts with Walmart, Amazon, and Costco. The pedagogy came later, first as a trainer at the Karrass Organization, then as Vice President of negotiation training at Strategic Pricing Associates, two of the longest-running commercial negotiation institutions in the United States. His methodology, “Heart of the Deal,” is structured around pressure-triggered decisions rather than tactical repertoire. The training uses simulations followed by critique of the specific unconscious choices that leave margin on the table. The audience is sales, procurement, and commercial leadership; the deliverable is behaviour change in the room where contracts close, not a framework to read on a flight home. More than 20,000 commercial professionals have been through his programmes, with corporate audiences including Apple, Red Bull, Rolls Royce, Pfizer, Panasonic, and Daimler Trucks. His forthcoming book, “You Suck at Negotiating, But You Don’t Have to with a Mindful Negotiation Practice,” extends the same argument: that the failure mode in negotiation is rarely ignorance and almost always the negotiator’s own state under pressure. Key speaking topics High-stakes negotiation Sales negotiation and deal-making Procurement and price negotiation Behavioural decision-making under pressure Commercial leadership and revenue strategy Persuasive communication in client relationships Ideal for Chief revenue officers, sales leaders, and commercial directors briefing teams ahead of major deal cycles Heads of procurement and supply chain managing high-value supplier contracts Account management and key account teams in industries with concentrated buyers Sales kick-offs, commercial leadership offsites, and procurement summits Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the behavioural moves that compress margin in live negotiations The ability to diagnose, in their own deals, where pressure is driving suboptimal concessions A planning discipline that shifts power before the negotiation begins, not during it Techniques for managing hardball tactics without escalating or capitulating A framework for value creation in deals that would otherwise be priced as zero-sum

Why organisations work with Brett StClair He has run the inside of both sides of the problem: a Google regional product portfolio and the digital stack of a 40,000-person bank across 32 markets. That is rare credibility on the operating reality of AI inside a regulated enterprise. He frames AI adoption as a leadership and workforce problem first, technology problem second, which is what most boards actually need before they spend the next budget cycle on tooling. Through Teraflow.ai he works with enterprise clients on the implementation, not only the strategy. The keynote content is grounded in current delivery, not retrospective case studies. The “Rebel Technologist” thesis gives senior leaders a usable language for identifying and protecting the internal disruptors who actually move transformation programmes. Biography highlights Co-Founder and Chief Connector, Teraflow.ai, an enterprise AI and cloud consultancy. Former Head of Digital Products, Barclays Africa, leading digital modernisation across 32 countries. Former Google executive across mobile, YouTube, AdMob and Cloud for the Africa region. Host of the “Rebel Technologist” podcast on AI adoption and digital leadership. Computer Science, University of Cape Town. MBA, University of South Africa. Featured in BBC, Financial Times, Forbes and regional business press including ITWeb and Business Day. Biography Most enterprise AI conversations stall at the same point. Leaders agree the technology is significant. They cannot agree what to do with it on Monday. The gap between a board’s appetite for AI and an operating model that can actually absorb it is now the central problem in digital transformation, and it is exactly where Brett StClair works. StClair spent his Google years inside the product engine for Africa, with responsibilities across mobile, AdMob, YouTube and Cloud. He left to take on a different kind of problem: rebuilding Barclays Africa as a digital bank, leading product across 32 countries and an organisation of around 40,000 people. That experience, working at the seam between a hyperscaler and a regulated bank, sits behind his current work. As Co-Founder and Chief Connector of Teraflow.ai, he leads enterprise engagements on AI and cloud adoption with banks, healthcare organisations and large corporates. His “Rebel Technologist” thesis, carried through his podcast and keynotes, names a recurring pattern inside large firms: the internal disruptors who actually move transformation forward, and the leadership choices that determine whether they survive long enough to ship. His keynote from Google to global banking has been delivered to audiences including Mastercard, Vodafone, Standard Bank, Nedbank, FNB, Deloitte and Accenture, and his work has been referenced in BBC, Financial Times and Forbes coverage of AI and digital change. Key speaking topics Enterprise AI adoption Generative AI in regulated industries Digital transformation at scale DevOps and agile inside large organisations Cloud strategy for enterprises Innovation culture and internal disruptors Leadership in technology change programmes Ideal for CIOs, CDOs and CTOs setting AI and cloud strategy Transformation, innovation and digital leads moving from pilot to production Boards and executive committees in banking, healthcare and large corporates Heads of operations and HR designing workforce capability around AI Audience outcomes A clearer view of where AI investment converts into operating advantage and where it does not. A working language for governance, risk and capability around generative AI in regulated environments. Practical lessons from inside Google and Barclays Africa on what makes large-scale digital change actually land. A sharper sense of how to identify and protect the internal disruptors who carry transformation programmes through their hardest stages.

Why organisations work with Tim Bradshaw His authority sits in operational tradecraft, not theory. As a Covert Human Intelligence Officer he recruited and ran foreign agents in environments where misjudging a person or a moment carried real consequences. That experience translates directly into how senior leaders read rooms, build trust quickly, and influence outcomes without formal authority. He treats resilience as a leadership system, not an individual virtue. His work focuses on how decision-making structures and cultural signals shape whether teams hold together under sustained pressure, which is the version boards actually need. He has tested his content with operationally serious clients across regulated and high-stakes sectors, including Jaguar Land Rover, Mercedes-Benz, Deloitte, Clyde & Co, Knight Frank, St James’s Place and Netflix. Through Sandstone Communications and the Sandstone Foundation he runs the same material at executive level and in schools, which keeps the language plain and the frameworks usable rather than abstract. Biography highlights Former British Army Intelligence Officer, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst graduate, served as a Covert Human Intelligence Officer. Founder and director of Sandstone Communications, an international leadership and trauma-informed training consultancy. Chief Executive of the Sandstone Foundation, delivering leadership and resilience programmes across corporate, public and education sectors. Author of Because I Can, a practical guide to personal effectiveness under pressure. Keynote client roster includes Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar Land Rover, Netflix, Deloitte, Knight Frank, Clyde & Co, St James’s Place, Fujifilm Europe, Hitachi Solutions, Taylor Wessing and Gateley. Personal endurance record includes Ironman, summit of Everest, summit of the Matterhorn, and seven triathlons in one weekend. Biography Most leadership programmes train people for clarity. The harder problem is the meeting where the information is incomplete, the timeline has collapsed, and the person in charge has to commit anyway. That is the territory Tim Bradshaw works in, and it is where his content earns its weight. His authority comes from operational practice rather than research. As a Covert Human Intelligence Officer in the British Army, a Royal Military Academy Sandhurst graduate, he recruited and handled foreign agents in environments where reading a person wrongly had immediate consequences. The discipline he brings into the room is not motivational. It is practical tradecraft: how to make decisions when the picture refuses to clarify, how to build trust at speed, how to influence outcomes when hierarchy gives you nothing to lean on. Through Sandstone Communications, the consultancy he founded, and the Sandstone Foundation, where he is chief executive, he applies that work to senior teams in regulated and operationally complex businesses. Clients include Jaguar Land Rover, Mercedes-Benz, Deloitte, Clyde & Co, Knight Frank, St James’s Place, Netflix, Fujifilm Europe and Taylor Wessing. His book Because I Can sets out the personal effectiveness framework that underpins the keynotes. What makes his work usable is the refusal to treat resilience as an individual quality. He argues that leadership behaviour, decision structures and cultural signals are what determine whether a team stays effective under sustained pressure. That reframes a topic boards often hear as a wellbeing conversation into a question about how the organisation is actually run. Key speaking topics Decision-making under pressure and uncertainty Influence and trust without formal authority Leadership in high-stakes operational environments Team resilience as a leadership system Crisis management and composure Leading change without creating fragility Ideal for CEOs and executive teams in regulated, safety-critical or operationally complex sectors Senior leadership offsites where decision-making and judgment under pressure are the headline themes Sales, advisory and client-facing teams that depend on rapid trust-building with senior counterparties Risk, security and crisis leadership functions, including CROs, CISOs and continuity leads Audience outcomes A working method for committing to a decision when the information is incomplete A specific way to build trust and influence at speed without relying on title or authority A view of resilience as something leaders engineer into teams, not something they ask of individuals Composure as a teachable behaviour, with the cues senior leaders can use to model it A clearer read on which organisational habits actively erode performance when pressure is sustained

Why organisations work with Claire Harper She has run senior marketing inside three of the UK’s most scrutinised retail brands, Ocado, Sainsbury’s, and Argos, during periods of leadership change and digital pivot. She has also done the founder’s job: built IndiaCoco from a dining-table operation to an award-winning multi-channel children’s brand, with the cash-flow scars to prove it. She translates board-level brand strategy into the operating decisions marketing teams actually face the next morning, on pricing, range, channel mix, and acquisition. Her current commercial leadership at London Pulse Netball gives her live material on building a consumer brand in women’s sport, a sector under significant commercial expansion. One credential that travels: first female board director at Mamas & Papas, brought in to scale the brand domestically and internationally. Biography highlights First Head of Customer Acquisition and PR at Ocado, later Head of Marketing during the company’s grocery delivery breakthrough. Head of Online Marketing at Sainsbury’s during Justin King’s turnaround programme. First female board director at Mamas & Papas, with international brand remit. Founder of IndiaCoco childrenswear; winner of Theo Paphitis Small Business Sunday and Jacqueline Gold WOW awards. Non-Executive Director at Blue Diamond Garden Centres; former Marketing Director at Frosts Garden Centres. Currently leading commercial and marketing for London Pulse Netball in the Netball Super League. Biography Ocado was a niche online grocer when Claire Harper joined at 26 as its first Head of Customer Acquisition and PR. By the time she had been promoted to Head of Marketing, the company was redrawing what UK households expected from a weekly shop. That early bet on customer behaviour, before the category had a name, set the pattern for the rest of her career. She moved into Sainsbury’s as Head of Online Marketing during Justin King’s “Make Sainsbury’s Great Again” turnaround, and into Argos during a hostile-takeover period that forced the brand to confront multi-channel reality. Both roles asked the same question: how do you keep a customer proposition coherent while the leadership and operating model are being rebuilt around it. At Mamas & Papas she became the first female board director, charged with scaling the brand internationally. She then founded IndiaCoco, a British childrenswear brand that grew from her dining room into a multi-channel business and picked up backing from Theo Paphitis and Jacqueline Gold. The founder years gave her the commercial discipline that corporate marketing budgets rarely teach. She now sits on the board at Blue Diamond Garden Centres and leads commercial and marketing for London Pulse Netball, one of the fastest-growing franchises in the Netball Super League. Audiences get a speaker who has run the brand from inside the boardroom and from inside a single-founder profit and loss, in retail categories where the customer is the only honest scoreboard. Key speaking topics Customer-led brand strategy in multi-channel retail Marketing leadership through restructure and ownership change Building consumer brands from founder stage to scale Commercial growth in women’s sport Non-executive contribution to consumer businesses Women’s leadership in retail and consumer industries Ideal for CMOs, brand directors, and customer experience leaders in consumer retail Boards and NEDs at consumer-facing businesses navigating ownership or strategic change Founders and scale-up leadership teams in DTC and consumer categories Sponsors, commercial partners, and leadership in women’s sport Audience outcomes A working view of how customer insight should sit at the centre of commercial decisions, not at the end of them Practical reference points from inside Ocado, Sainsbury’s, Argos, and Mamas & Papas during periods of strategic change A clearer sense of where founder discipline and corporate scale-marketing diverge, and what each can borrow from the other A current read on the commercial mechanics of women’s sport as a consumer category

Why organisations work with Lorraine Heggessey She has led turnarounds across three very different sectors: a flagship public broadcaster, a private-equity-backed independent producer, and a senior royal charity. Few speakers can compare an operating challenge across that range and be credible on each. She commissioned the decisions that defined a generation of British television, including the revival of Doctor Who and the launch of Strictly Come Dancing. Audiences trust her on risk because she has personally backed the calls that institutions hesitate to make. She built Boom Pictures from a private equity start into the UK’s seventh-largest independent producer in three years, then exited to ITV. She speaks on scale-up and exit with operator detail, not investor abstraction. As CEO of The Royal Foundation, she professionalised a venture philanthropy model addressing mental health and veteran support, working directly with the principals. She is one of a small number of speakers credible on both commercial leadership and complex stakeholder organisations. She is forthright on the practical content of leading women into senior roles, drawing on her own progression to one of British broadcasting’s most scrutinised jobs. The argument is operational, not motivational. Biography highlights First female Controller of BBC One, 2000 to 2005, commissioning Doctor Who (revival), Strictly Come Dancing, Spooks, and Waking the Dead. CEO of TalkbackThames, 2005 onwards, launching Britain’s Got Talent and growing profits by more than 50% in two years. Executive Chair of Boom Pictures, founded in 2012, grown into the UK’s seventh-largest independent producer and acquired by ITV in 2015. CEO of The Royal Foundation of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, 2017 to 2019. Chair of the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre (since 2022) and Chair of The Grierson Trust (2014 to 2025). Fellow of the Royal Television Society; Woman of the Year, Women in Film and Television UK Awards, 2005; Peabody Award winner. Biography BBC One was losing to ITV1 in audience share when a new Controller took over in November 2000. Five years later the channel had recommissioned Doctor Who after a sixteen-year absence, launched Strictly Come Dancing, and reclaimed the position of Britain’s most-watched channel. Lorraine Heggessey, the first woman to hold the role, made the commissioning calls that shifted the institutional culture around risk. She left the BBC in 2005 to run TalkbackThames, where Britain’s Got Talent and Take Me Out drove a profit increase of more than fifty per cent inside two years. In 2012 she raised private equity to start Boom Pictures, which within three years was the UK’s seventh-largest independent producer and was sold to ITV in 2015. Few UK operators have moved from running a public-service broadcaster to founding and exiting a commercial production business at that scale. In 2017 she became CEO of The Royal Foundation, the philanthropic vehicle of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, with a brief to professionalise its venture philanthropy approach to mental health, veterans, and conservation. She left in 2019, having institutionalised a model that the principals could continue to grow. Her current platforms are the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, which she chairs, and Channel 4’s Growth Fund, which she has advised for nearly a decade. She is a Fellow of the Royal Television Society and a regular BAFTA and RTS judge. Her authority on change and on senior leadership is grounded in repeated operating experience, not in a single signature thesis. Key speaking topics Leading organisational turnaround Risk-taking and commissioning under public scrutiny Scale-up leadership and exit Intrapreneurial culture inside large organisations Women in senior leadership Mental health at work Stakeholder-heavy non-profit leadership Ideal for CEO, CHRO, and board audiences working through structural change or repositioning. Senior leadership programmes inside large public-service or regulated organisations. Women’s leadership and high-potential talent forums seeking operational, not motivational, content. Founders and scale-up leadership teams preparing for institutional growth or exit. Audience outcomes A direct account of how a senior leader changes the risk appetite of a cautious institution. A working view of intrapreneurial culture from inside organisations that have to deliver under public scrutiny. An operator’s perspective on building and exiting a media business, including the decisions that determine value at sale. A grounded position on women’s progression to the most senior roles, based on lived experience rather than advocacy. A practical frame for addressing mental health at work, drawn from involvement in the Heads Together campaign.

Why organisations work with Richard Gerver He has a verifiable case study that most leadership speakers do not. Grange Primary School moved from near-failure to a nationally referenced model of learning under his leadership, recognised by the National Teaching Awards in 2005. His books are read by operating audiences, not just educators. Change: Learn to Love It, Learn to Lead It and Simple Thinking are published by Penguin and Wiley/Capstone, respectively, and held shelf positions in business charts. LinkedIn Learning commissioned him to build Smart Thinking and Developing Mental Toughness for a global business audience. The courses have reached learners at scale across multiple languages. He worked closely with Sir Ken Robinson on human potential and creativity, and is cited in Robinson’s The Element. That intellectual lineage gives his leadership works a depth most motivational speakers cannot claim. He has been named UK Business Speaker of the Year on more than one occasion, including a confirmed 2011 win cited in his University of Derby honorary doctorate commendation. Biography highlights Headteacher of Grange Primary School, Derbyshire, where he developed the «Grangeton» model and led a documented institutional turnaround. National Teaching Awards Head Teacher of the Year, 2005. Honorary Doctor of Education, University of Derby, 2016. Author of Creating Tomorrow’s Schools Today (Bloomsbury Education), Change: Learn to Love It, Learn to Lead It (Penguin) and Simple Thinking (Wiley/Capstone). LinkedIn Learning instructor: Smart Thinking and Developing Mental Toughness. Foreword by Sir Ken Robinson on his first book; later cited in Robinson’s The Element. Biography Grange Primary School was on the verge of failure when Richard Gerver took it over. Within two years, the school was being studied as a national model, with a curriculum built around a pupil-run virtual town called Grangeton. The work earned him the National Teaching Awards Head Teacher of the Year in 2005 and shaped the rest of his career. He has spent the two decades since translating that experience for business audiences. Change: Learn to Love It, Learn to Lead It, published by Penguin, argues that leaders fail at change because they manage it as a project rather than a behaviour. Simple Thinking, published by Wiley/Capstone, attacks the bureaucratic clutter that senior teams build around their own decisions. Both books found shelf space in mainstream business sections, not just education. His thinking sits in the lineage of Sir Ken Robinson, who wrote the foreword to his first book and cited him in The Element. He has worked with UNESCO, the British Council, Skanska and the Welsh Government, and was commissioned by LinkedIn Learning to build two courses, Smart Thinking and Developing Mental Toughness, that have reached a global business audience. The University of Derby awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Education in 2016, citing his ability to humanise complex organisational issues through a leadership philosophy built on communication, empowerment and impact. He has been named UK Business Speaker of the Year on more than one occasion. Key speaking topics Human leadership and behaviour change Organisational transformation Resilience and mental toughness Curiosity, creativity and innovation Future skills and human potential Change management Executive development Ideal for CEOs and executive teams are asking why a recent transformation programme has stalled CHROs and L&D directors rebuilding leadership development for a fatigued workforce Senior leaders preparing a workforce for restructure, integration, or operating-model change Boards looking for an outside voice on the human side of strategic execution Audience outcomes A sharper view of why most change programmes fail at the leader’s own behaviour, not at the strategy Specific tools for stripping complexity out of decisions and communication Confidence that resilience and mental toughness can be built deliberately, with examples from sport and education A reframing of curiosity as an organisational capability, not a personal trait Renewed clarity on what senior leaders should personally commit to during a period of change