Change Management

Why organisations work with Sara Ross A named, proprietary framework. LeadFULL gives leadership teams a shared operating language for shifting out of effort management and into capacity management, grounded in her own multi-year workplace vitality research. A book with a thesis, not a brand. Dear Work, Something Has to Change sets out a specific argument about why current wellbeing interventions fail and what replaces them, which gives leaders something to act on after the keynote. Independent recognition from named bodies. Global Gurus ranked her among its Top 10 Keynote Speakers for 2026, Real Leaders named her a Top Impact Speaker, and SUCCESS Magazine made her a 2023 Woman of Influence, the kind of third-party validation buyers use to defend a shortlist. A working track record in high-pressure organisations. Microsoft, Cisco, PepsiCo, Wells Fargo, FedEx, and the U.S. Navy have used her work in environments where fatigue carries a direct operational cost. Biography highlights Founder and Chief Vitality Officer, BrainAMPED, a leadership research firm. Author of the bestselling Dear Work, Something Has to Change, built on a three-year Workplace Vitality Study of over 10,000 people. Global Gurus Top 10 Keynote Speakers (2026), Real Leaders Top Impact Speaker, and LinkedIn Top Voice in Leadership and Emotional Intelligence. 2023 Woman of Influence, SUCCESS Magazine. Featured in Fast Company, Forbes, The Globe and Mail, and Psychology Today, with more than 500 engagements delivered. Former executive with nearly two decades in leadership research and development; client work spans Microsoft, Cisco, PepsiCo, Wells Fargo, FedEx, Deloitte, the U.S. Navy, and Stanford Health Care. Biography Wellbeing has been a corporate priority for a decade, and most senior teams are no closer to fixing the underlying problem. Capable people are still leaving, performance is still uneven, and the cost of fatigue is now showing up in decisions, not just disengagement scores. Sara Ross’s work begins with that observation. She is the founder of BrainAMPED, a leadership research firm, and author of Dear Work, Something Has to Change, which draws on her own multi-year study of workplace vitality. The book makes a specific argument: leaders have been taught to manage effort, when what now matters is managing state. Capacity, not endurance, becomes the operating variable. Out of that research she built LeadFULL, a framework she uses with senior teams to translate the argument into practical leadership behaviour. It sits at the intersection of emotional intelligence, behavioural science, and organisational culture, areas she has worked in for close to two decades, most recently as a global head of leadership innovation before founding BrainAMPED. The work has earned external recognition: a Top 10 Global Gurus keynote ranking for 2026, a Top Impact Speaker listing from Real Leaders, and a 2023 Woman of Influence award from SUCCESS Magazine. Her writing appears in Fast Company, Forbes, and Psychology Today. Across more than 500 engagements, her clients include Microsoft, Cisco, PepsiCo, Wells Fargo, and the U.S. Navy, where fatigue carries a direct operational cost. Key speaking topics Workplace vitality and sustainable high performance Leadership in the age of burnout and fatigue Change leadership and future-ready resilience Human-centred leadership in the age of AI Emotional intelligence at senior levels The future of work and hybrid-era engagement Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers redesigning engagement and wellbeing strategy beyond the wellness-vendor cycle. CEOs and senior leadership teams carrying the cost of leadership fatigue and sustained operational pressure. Transformation and change leaders whose workforces are fatigued by repeated restructuring and AI-driven change. Heads of leadership development running flagship programmes for senior and high-potential leaders. Audience outcomes A clear, named distinction between managing effort and managing state, and why the second is the strategic variable. Specific leadership behaviours that reduce fatigue without lowering performance expectations. A practical reading of why current wellbeing initiatives stall, and what shifts the curve. Language senior teams can use with each other to talk about capacity, recovery, and sustained output without it sounding soft.

Why organisations work with Bernie Collins She ran race strategy at Aston Martin F1, a role that required committing several hundred engineers to a single decision in under thirty seconds, with the result televised live. Very few speakers have carried that kind of accountability. Her book with Maurice Hamilton, How to Win a Grand Prix, translates the mechanics of F1 decision making into a framework leaders can apply to their own operating rhythm. She brings a working broadcaster’s clarity. As Sky Sports F1’s strategy analyst, she explains complex trade-offs to a lay audience every race weekend, which transfers directly to boardroom and all-hands contexts. Her perspective on diversity in engineering is grounded in her own path through a male-dominated paddock, not in consultancy talking points. She is Irish, plain-spoken, and unafraid to be specific about what went wrong on a given decision. That honesty is rare in sports-adjacent keynotes. Biography highlights Former Head of Race Strategy, Aston Martin F1, 2020 to 2022. Performance and strategy engineer at Force India, Racing Point, and Aston Martin from 2015, working with Sergio Perez and Nico Hulkenberg. Began her F1 career at McLaren in 2009 as a graduate trainee, becoming performance engineer to Jenson Button. Formula 1 strategy analyst for Sky Sports F1 and F1TV. Author of How to Win a Grand Prix: From Pit Lane to Podium with Maurice Hamilton, Quercus, 2024. Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe, Manufacturing and Industry, 2016. Honorary degree from Queen’s University Belfast, 2023. Biography An F1 race strategist has around thirty seconds to recommend a tyre change that commits the team for the rest of the Grand Prix. Bernie Collins spent more than a decade in that seat, ending as Head of Race Strategy at Aston Martin F1, where she called the race at Sergio Perez’s maiden victory at the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix. Her route there ran through McLaren, where she arrived as a graduate from Queen’s University Belfast in 2009 and eventually worked trackside with Jenson Button, and then Force India, where she moved into strategy alongside Nico Hulkenberg and Perez. The team rebranded twice while she stayed in the same chair, which gave her an unusual view of how a technical organisation holds its culture together through ownership changes. What makes Collins useful to senior audiences is the structure of the F1 strategy job itself. A pit-wall call blends incomplete telemetry, weather models, competitor behaviour, and driver feedback into a single recommendation, made under time pressure, with the outcome visible on live television within minutes. In How to Win a Grand Prix, her 2024 book with journalist Maurice Hamilton, she sets out how that decision is actually made, and what organisations elsewhere tend to get wrong about it. She now works as Sky Sports F1’s strategy analyst, explaining those decisions in real time to a mass audience. The broadcaster’s discipline, saying what matters in plain language without hedging, carries into her speaking. Queen’s University Belfast awarded her an honorary degree in 2023. Key speaking topics Decision making under time pressure High-performance team culture Strategy in complex, data-rich environments Leadership in distributed technical organisations Women in engineering and motorsport Risk and safety in regulated, high-stakes settings Ideal for Executive leadership teams in fast-moving competitive markets Engineering, technology, and operations organisations Strategy, risk, and transformation functions Conferences on performance, decision making, and team culture Audience outcomes A clearer model of how high-performing teams decide when evidence is incomplete A frank look at what accountability actually feels like when your call is public Specific examples of how F1 teams align hundreds of people on a single decision in seconds A useful perspective on women in technical roles from someone who sat at the top of one

Why organisations work with Peter Crolla He has helped build two Formula 1 teams from scratch. He joined Haas in 2015 as the team’s 14th employee and joined Cadillac in 2025 to prepare its 2026 debut. Few F1 practitioners have stood up a competitive operation from zero more than once. His content is grounded in operational mechanics. Audiences leave with how the pit wall actually works, how a 1.8-second pit stop with 22 staff and 36 tasks is choreographed, and how compliance with FIA scrutineering is built into every weekend. Formula 1 sits where exacting regulation meets competitive margins of milliseconds. Leaders in pharmaceuticals, financial services, aviation, and energy find the comparison directly applicable to their own environments. He can explain how F1 reduced driver fatalities from over 40 between 1950 and 1994 to one in the three decades since. The shift came from a system in which safety stopped being a source of competitive advantage and was shared across rival teams. Two decades across British Touring Cars, F3, McLaren, Haas, and Cadillac give him grounded comparative views on which high-performance practices transfer between organisations and which collapse outside their original context. Biography highlights Race Team Manager at the Cadillac F1 Team, preparing the operation for its 2026 Formula 1 debut. Team Manager at Haas F1 Team for eight seasons, joining as the 14th employee in 2015 ahead of the team’s 2016 debut. Previously Team Leader at McLaren Racing, working alongside World Champions Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso. Oversaw Haas’s maiden Formula 1 pole position at the 2022 Brazilian Grand Prix. Helped Haas secure FIA Three-Star Environmental Accreditation ahead of the 2023 season. Awarded the Teamwork Award at the 2013 MIA Business Excellence Awards during his time at Team Dynamics in the British Touring Car Championship. Biography In Formula 1, a pit stop now takes 1.8 seconds. Twenty-two people complete thirty-six tasks while the car is stationary. One missed cue and a podium becomes a points-paying afternoon. That kind of choreography is what Peter Crolla has spent his career producing. He joined the Haas F1 Team in 2015 as its fourteenth employee, before the team had been on a grid, and stayed for eight seasons as Team Manager. In 2025 he left to take the same role at the Cadillac F1 Team, where he is preparing the operation for its 2026 debut. Doing this work twice in a decade puts him in a small group of practitioners who have stood up a competitive Formula 1 team from a standing start. F1 teams of 1800 staff coordinate around twenty-four non-negotiable race weekend deadlines a year, under one of the most exacting regulatory regimes in commercial sport. Crolla speaks about how that machine actually runs. He explains the daily tension between psychological safety and personal accountability, and how F1 turned over forty driver fatalities between 1950 and 1994 into one in the three decades since. The change came from stopping competitive teams from hoarding what they learned about safety. Key speaking topics High-performance team operations Leadership in regulated, high-pressure environments Operational excellence under non-negotiable deadlines Safety culture and risk transformation Building organisations from a standing start Continuous improvement and marginal gains Sustainability in elite motorsport Ideal for COOs and operations directors in regulated sectors such as financial services, pharmaceuticals, aviation, and energy, where compliance and competitive performance have to be solved together. Founders, transformation leads, and executive teams building or rebuilding an organisation from a standing start. Senior risk and safety leaders looking at how F1’s cultural transformation was actually achieved over three decades. HR and people leaders focused on psychological safety and accountability in technical or engineering-led organisations. Audience outcomes The choreography of a 1.8-second pit stop across 22 staff, including where it most often breaks down. The specific practices that keep psychological safety and personal accountability in balance inside an F1 operation. How F1’s safety record went from over forty driver fatalities in its first four decades to one in its last three, including the specific decision to stop competing on safety. A clear separation between high-performance practices that transfer between industries and those that depend on the specifics of F1.

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 Emma Hayes She has built two elite teams from different starting points: a Chelsea side she took from mid-table to seven Women’s Super League titles, and a US national team she led to Olympic gold within ten matches of taking charge. Her leadership thesis is published and tested. A Completely Different Game sets out a working method built around team, staff and standards, not personality. She speaks from a current operational seat, not a retired one. Buyers get a working head coach describing live decisions under pressure, not retrospective career narrative. Named The Best FIFA Women’s Coach (2021) and winner of the inaugural Johan Cruyff Trophy (2024); the formal recognition tracks the operational record. She is fluent in the language of senior business audiences from regular broadcast and conference work, including Sky and BBC punditry and the Leaders in Sport platform. Biography highlights Head Coach, United States Women’s National Team, 2024 to present. Manager, Chelsea FC Women, 2012 to 2024; seven WSL titles, five FA Cups, five domestic doubles. Olympic gold medal with the USWNT, Paris 2024. The Best FIFA Women’s Coach, 2021; inaugural Johan Cruyff Trophy, 2024. OBE (2022) and MBE (2016) for services to football. Author, A Completely Different Game: My Leadership Playbook (2024), expanded from the Audible Original Kill the Unicorn. Biography Chelsea FC Women were a mid-table side in 2012. By the time Emma Hayes left in 2024, they had won seven Women’s Super League titles, including five in a row, alongside five FA Cups and multiple League Cups. The rebuild was not the result of a single tactical idea. It was the product of how she organised the staff around her, the standards she held, and the way she handled players, ownership and scrutiny over twelve seasons. The work translated directly. Appointed Head Coach of the United States Women’s National Team in 2024, she led the side to Olympic gold in Paris in her tenth match in charge, winning every knockout game 1-0. The body of evidence sits across two contexts, club and country, with very different constraints. The leadership method travelled. Her book, A Completely Different Game: My Leadership Playbook, sets out the underlying argument. Published in 2024 as the print expansion of the Audible Original Kill the Unicorn, written with Michael Calvin, it dismantles the idea of the lone great leader. Sustained performance, she argues, is built by the staff around the leader and the culture the leader is willing to enforce. The book is grounded in operational practice, not theory. Formal recognition has followed the record. She was named The Best FIFA Women’s Coach in 2021, won the inaugural Johan Cruyff Trophy for the best women’s coach in the world in 2024, and was appointed OBE in 2022 after an MBE in 2016. She continues to coach at the top of the international game, which is what gives her speaking work its weight: the material is live, not retrospective. Key speaking topics Building high-performance teams Leadership through sustained change Culture and standards in elite organisations Decision-making under pressure Women in leadership Coaching as a leadership discipline Ideal for CEOs, COOs and executive teams rebuilding performance after underperformance or restructure CHROs and chief people officers working on leadership development and high-performance culture Boards and senior leadership offsites focused on standards, accountability and team design Audience outcomes A working model for how senior leaders set and hold standards through cycles of pressure A clear view of how culture is built deliberately, not absorbed by accident Concrete examples of decisions made under scrutiny, with the trade-offs named A reframing of leadership away from individual heroics towards staff, team and system design

Why organisations work with Dion Dublin A first-hand account of returning to elite performance after a life-threatening broken neck in 1999, with the medical and professional detail that gives the story credibility beyond inspiration. Twenty years inside top-flight football dressing rooms at Manchester United, Coventry, Aston Villa and the England squad, used as material for senior-team conversations on cohesion and standards. A working portfolio career that few sports speakers can match: BBC daytime presenter on Homes Under the Hammer since 2015, regular pundit on Match of the Day and Final Score, and inventor of the Dube percussion instrument used by Stevie Wonder. Comfortable on stage as host, panel chair or interviewer, drawn from a decade of live broadcast work, which makes him useful for full event hosting rather than only keynote slots. Biography highlights Premier League Golden Boot, 1997-98 season, shared with Chris Sutton and Michael Owen on 18 league goals. Four senior England caps; clubs included Manchester United, Coventry City, Aston Villa, Norwich City, Leicester City and Celtic. Returned to top-flight football within months of a broken neck sustained playing for Aston Villa in December 1999; helped the club to the FA Cup final the following April. Presenter on BBC One’s Homes Under the Hammer since 2015; pundit for BBC Football Focus, Match of the Day and Final Score. Inventor of the Dube, a four-sided percussion instrument used by Stevie Wonder and the Official England Supporters Band. Board member of Cambridge United F.C. since July 2021. Biography A broken neck in December 1999 should have ended a football career. Dion Dublin ran headfirst into a Sheffield Wednesday defender playing for Aston Villa, fractured three vertebrae and underwent surgery in which part of his pelvis was used to replace a crushed bone in his neck. He was back in the Villa side within months and helped the club to the FA Cup final the following April. He still plays with a titanium plate in his neck. That recovery sits inside a career that began at Cambridge United, took in Manchester United, Coventry City, Aston Villa, Norwich City, Leicester City and Celtic, and produced the Premier League Golden Boot in 1997-98, shared with Chris Sutton and Michael Owen. Four England caps followed. The material he uses with senior teams is drawn directly from that period: how high-performing dressing rooms hold each other to a standard, how players manage themselves through long injuries, and what happens to identity when the playing career ends. The post-playing career is unusual. Since 2015 Dublin has been a regular presenter on BBC One’s Homes Under the Hammer and a pundit on BBC Football Focus, Match of the Day and Final Score. He invented the Dube, a four-sided wooden percussion instrument that has been bought by Stevie Wonder and the Official England Supporters Band. In July 2021 he joined the board of Cambridge United, the club where he started. He finished fourth on Celebrity MasterChef in 2021. For corporate audiences the practical value is twofold. He speaks credibly on resilience and team performance from inside the experience rather than as commentary on it. He also hosts well, with a decade of live broadcast practice behind him, which makes him a strong fit for award nights, conference plenaries and panel sessions where a recognisable presence carries the room. Key speaking topics Resilience after acute setback High-performance team dynamics Career reinvention Mental and physical recovery Leadership under pressure Event hosting and panel facilitation Ideal for Sales and commercial teams running annual kick-offs and awards nights Senior leadership offsites focused on team standards and recovery from disruption Conference organisers needing a recognisable broadcast presence for hosting or interview formats Audience outcomes A grounded account of what elite team standards actually look like day to day A concrete recovery story they can map onto their own organisational setbacks A view of career reinvention drawn from three working chapters: sport, broadcast and product invention A confident, recognisable presence on stage that lifts the room

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