Change Management

Why organisations work with Rachel Treece A coach-led leadership thesis grounded in published work, not platform rhetoric: her book “The Henka Effect” sets out how coaching changes the operating behaviour of senior leaders, with named case studies from financial services. Operating credibility inside financial services. The Henka Institute reports work with a majority of the largest fund managers and investment banks, and her podcast “Flex and the City” speaks directly to FS leadership audiences. ICF-accredited coaching credentials (PCC, CPCC) and a psychology background, which means the content is built on practice-tested method, not opinion. A multinational and multilingual delivery range across 35 countries, useful for boards and leadership populations that span Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific. A direct, no-platitudes register on inclusion and culture that buyers can put in front of mixed senior audiences without it landing as DEI theatre. Biography highlights CEO of The Henka Institute and fts global, a leadership development firm operating in 35 countries. Author of “The Henka Effect: How Coaching is Transforming Leadership and Organisations” (2022). Host of the podcast “Flex and the City – Great leadership in financial services”. ICF-credentialled executive coach (PCC, CPCC) and Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Speaker at the ALFI Leadership Seminar, the leading industry forum for the Luxembourg fund and asset management sector. Co-founder of Dress for Success Luxembourg. Biography Most senior leaders know that pushing harder no longer produces the result it used to. Workforces are exhausted by repeated change, sceptical of slogans, and quick to disengage from leaders who default to control. The harder question is what leaders should do instead, and how to develop that behaviour at scale. Rachel Treece’s answer is coaching. Not coaching as a development perk, but coaching as the operating mode of senior leadership itself. Her book “The Henka Effect” sets out the argument with case material drawn from her work inside financial services, where she has spent much of her career advising FTSE and Fortune 100 leadership teams. That work runs through The Henka Institute, the Luxembourg-based firm she leads. The institute operates across 35 countries and reports clients including a majority of the largest fund asset managers and investment banks. Her credentials sit alongside the practice: PCC and CPCC coaching certifications, a psychology background, and Fellowship of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. For organisations going through restructure, integration, or cultural reset, the value of her work is specific. She gives senior leaders a usable behavioural toolkit that replaces directive instinct with curiosity, ownership, and accountability, rather than asking them to soften their style and hope. Key speaking topics Coaching as a leadership operating model Leadership in financial services Inclusive and values-based leadership Change and transformation in regulated industries Communication and executive presence Organisational culture and trust Sustainable performance and leader energy Ideal for CEOs, CHROs, and heads of leadership development inside banks, asset managers, and other regulated financial institutions. Boards and executive committees navigating restructuring, M&A integration, or cultural reset. Senior leadership populations being asked to lead through change without burning out their teams or themselves. Audience outcomes A clear distinction between coaching as a development activity and coaching as a senior leadership behaviour, with the second framed as the lever for sustainable performance. Specific behavioural moves senior leaders can use to replace directive defaults in real conversations with their teams. A working model for building trust and ownership inside teams that have been through repeated change. An honest read on what inclusive leadership looks like in practice in commercial organisations, beyond statement-making.

Why organisations work with Ömer Atiker Three decades of running digital agencies, not advising on them. He has founded, scaled, and sold internet ventures since 1996, which gives his keynote content the texture of an operator rather than a commentator. Author of four German-language reference books on digital transformation, including titles with Wiley and Campus, used inside companies as practical handbooks rather than thought-leadership accessories. Works in German, English, and Dutch at conference register, which makes him a credible booking for DACH-headquartered firms with international leadership audiences. Client list spans regulated industrials (BASF, Bayer, Merck, Fresenius), platform technology (Amazon, Google, Adobe), and consumer-facing operators (Singapore Airlines, Mitsubishi), so the examples on stage match the room. Sits at the intersection of digital marketing, AI deployment, and change leadership, which is the precise zone where most enterprise transformation programmes get stuck. Biography highlights Industrial engineer from the University of Karlsruhe (now KIT), with a master’s thesis on human-machine interaction. Founded ArtWork, one of the first internet agencies in the Netherlands, in 1996. Founder and CEO of Click Effect, a Freiburg-based digital marketing and transformation consultancy, since 2006. Author of four books on digital transformation, published by Wiley, Campus, and GABAL between 2017 and 2020. Worked alongside Frithjof Bergmann, the originator of the New Work concept, during a sabbatical period. Keynote clients include BASF, Bayer, Merck, Fresenius, Amazon, Google, Adobe, Singapore Airlines, Mitsubishi, and John Deere. Biography Digital transformation has never been short of strategy. The bottleneck sits further down the operating stack, in the daily handover between leadership intent, technology choices, and the people who have to do the work differently on Monday. Atiker has spent thirty years inside that handover. He studied industrial engineering at the University of Karlsruhe and wrote his master’s thesis on human-machine interaction. In 1996 he founded ArtWork, one of the first internet agencies in the Netherlands, and sold it after the dotcom cycle. In 2006 he founded Click Effect in Freiburg, the digital marketing and transformation consultancy he still runs. Between agencies he took a sabbatical and worked with Frithjof Bergmann, the philosopher who originated the New Work concept. That period sits behind the leadership and culture material in his keynotes, which treats digital change as a problem of human adoption first and technology second. His four books, published by Wiley, Campus, and GABAL between 2017 and 2020, function as practical playbooks for German-speaking enterprises rather than airport thought-leadership. The client list reads as a cross-section of the European industrial and platform economy: BASF, Bayer, Merck, Fresenius, Singapore Airlines, Amazon, Google, Adobe, John Deere, Mitsubishi. He works in German, English, and Dutch, which makes him a natural fit for DACH-headquartered companies running international leadership programmes around AI and digital execution. Key speaking topics Digital transformation execution AI in the enterprise Digital and remote leadership Customer centricity and digital marketing Corporate culture and digital adoption Innovation under operating constraints Personal development in the digital age Ideal for DACH-headquartered enterprises running multi-year digital and AI transformation programmes CDOs, CMOs, and transformation leads responsible for moving from pilot to operational deployment Industrial and life-sciences boards translating digital strategy into customer-facing change Senior leadership offsites where the audience needs an operator’s view, not a consultant’s frame Audience outcomes A practitioner’s reading of where their own transformation programme is most likely to stall Concrete examples of digital and AI deployment from regulated industrials and platform companies A clearer separation between technology decisions and the leadership behaviour those decisions require Language and reference points senior leaders can use with their own organisations after the session

Why organisations work with Eddie Obeng He has spent thirty years on a single, consequential argument: that the management playbook built for a slower world now actively harms organisations trying to move at current speed. Boards get a framework, not a pep talk. His project typology (Painting by Numbers, Quest, Film, Foggy Project) gives leadership teams a language for matching management style to the kind of uncertainty a project actually contains, instead of defaulting to one method for every initiative. He built and runs QUBE, one of the earliest avatar-based virtual campuses, used to teach and coach distributed executive teams. He is speaking about distributed leadership from inside a working example, not from theory. The 2011 Sir Monty Finniston Award from the Association for Project Management recognises a lifetime contribution to how organisations deliver complex work, which is the substance underneath his keynotes. He is genuinely provocative in a room. The Financial Times called him “an agent provocateur” for a reason; he is comfortable telling a senior audience that what they are doing will not work. Biography highlights Founder and Executive Director of Pentacle (The Virtual Business School), established 1994. Professor at Henley Business School’s School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation; previously Executive Director at Ashridge Business School. 2011 Sir Monty Finniston Award for lifetime achievement, Association for Project Management. Author of All Change! The Project Leader’s Secret Handbook (Financial Times Pearson), Perfect Projects, Making Re-Engineering Happen and New Rules for the New World. TED Global 2012 speaker, “Smart failure for a fast-changing world”. Creator of QUBE, a virtual learning and collaboration environment covered by The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. Biography The gap between how quickly the world changes and how quickly organisations learn has been widening for three decades. Eddie Obeng has built a career arguing that this gap, more than any single technology or disruption, is the defining problem of modern management. He calls the condition the “New World After Midnight”. Pentacle, the business school he founded in 1994, was an early attempt to answer the problem practically. Its teaching is built around immediate application rather than case-study reflection, and it runs on QUBE, an avatar-based virtual campus Pentacle developed in 2010 that The Wall Street Journal described in its coverage of virtual workplaces and The Economist flagged as a future digital place to work. Running it means he has been leading distributed teams for longer than most of the organisations he advises. The intellectual spine of his work sits in project management, where he is credited with the four-type model (Painting by Numbers, Quest, Film, Foggy Project) that reframes delivery around how much is known at the start rather than how big the budget is. The Association for Project Management gave him its Sir Monty Finniston Award for lifetime achievement in 2011. His books, beginning with All Change! The Project Leader’s Secret Handbook in 1995, translate that model for practising leaders. He also holds a chair at Henley Business School’s School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and has sat on the UK Design Council board. In front of an audience he is sharp and direct; the Financial Times has used the words “leading revolutionary” and “agent provocateur”, which is closer to the experience of being in the room than the usual speaker billing. Key speaking topics Leading organisations in a fast-changing environment Project leadership and delivery under uncertainty Distributed and virtual team leadership Innovation and smart failure Organisational change and transformation The future of work and digital collaboration Ideal for Boards and executive committees confronting a change agenda that their current operating model cannot support Transformation, strategy and innovation leaders responsible for delivery across distributed teams Project and programme leadership communities inside large, complex organisations Partner meetings and leadership offsites where the brief is to unsettle assumptions, not confirm them Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for the types of change a leadership team is actually managing, rather than treating every initiative as the same problem A sharper view of why current planning and governance rituals slow organisations down in fast-moving conditions Permission and structure for “smart failure” as a deliberate mechanism for learning, not a slogan A working sense of what leading a distributed team looks like when it is built from scratch, not retrofitted onto office norms A harder question to take back into the next executive meeting

Why organisations work with Andreas Kuffner He has lived the precise problem most leadership teams describe in abstract terms: eight people, one boat, no room for individual heroics, sixteen years of preparation collapsing or holding in a six-minute window. That is the case he draws on, not a metaphor for it. He pairs that experience with a formal systemic coaching practice (ECA-certified) and a master’s in business engineering, so the language he uses with executives is operational, not inspirational. He works inside corporate change programmes at Allianz, Bayer, Daimler, Deutsche Bank, Lufthansa, Nestle and PwC, advising on team coherence and resilience rather than delivering one-off motivational sets. His framing of resilience is specific: coherence between meaning, self-efficacy and belonging, sustained when results stop confirming the strategy. That is a working model leaders can act on, not a slogan. Biography highlights Olympic gold medallist, men’s eight, London 2012, ending a 24-year German drought in the event Olympic silver medallist, men’s eight, Rio 2016 World champion, men’s eight, Bled 2011; European champion 2014 Recipient of the Silbernes Lorbeerblatt, Germany’s highest sporting honour, awarded twice Certified systemic personal and business coach (European Coaching Association) Master’s degree in business engineering, completed while competing at elite level Advises corporate clients including Allianz, Bayer, Daimler, Deutsche Bank, Lufthansa, Nestle and PwC Biography The German eight had not won Olympic gold for 24 years before the crew Kuffner rowed in took the title in London in 2012. Four years later, the same boat took silver in Rio. The interesting fact is not the medal count. It is what an eight-person crew has to do, technically and psychologically, to put six minutes of synchronised output on the water when one micro-deviation ends the race. That problem is closer to what senior leadership teams face than the usual sports-keynote framing suggests. Coherence under pressure is a measurable thing, not a mood. It can be designed, rehearsed and rebuilt when it breaks. Kuffner spent 16 years inside that discipline at the highest level, and he now works with corporate teams on the same mechanics. His credentials outside the boat matter for that reason. A master’s degree in business engineering, completed alongside Olympic training. Certification as a systemic personal and business coach through the European Coaching Association. Active consulting work with Allianz, Bayer, Daimler, Deutsche Bank, Lufthansa, Nestle and PwC on team development, change and resilience. The vocabulary is operational, and the engagements run beyond the stage. What he offers a leadership team is a working language for performance that does not collapse the first time results turn against the strategy. Resilience as a structural property of how a team is held together, not a personal virtue. That is the conversation a boardroom needs when the next quarter looks harder than the last. Key speaking topics Resilience and team coherence under sustained pressure High-performance team development Leadership through change and setback Composure and decision-making in elite environments Building trust and collective discipline in senior teams Corporate culture and value creation Ideal for Executive committees and senior leadership teams navigating restructure or sustained performance pressure CHROs and people leaders rebuilding team trust after acquisition, reorganisation or repeated change cycles Boards and operating committees seeking a working model of team coherence rather than a motivational input Audience outcomes A specific working model of team coherence drawn from elite rowing and applied to corporate operating teams A clearer view of resilience as a structural condition of the team, not a personality trait of its members Concrete language for how meaning, self-efficacy and belonging hold performance together when results turn A frame for distinguishing motivation from discipline in how leaders respond to setbacks

Why organisations work with Sebastian Wachter He arrives in a wheelchair with a Master’s in business mathematics, a career as a stock analyst, and a Bundesliga rugby record. The audience cannot file his argument under inspirational story and move on. His thesis, set out in Change Mindset (BoD, 2020) and excerpted in WirtschaftsWoche, treats change resistance as a managerial problem with named mechanisms, not a motivational gap. He won the European Speaker Award 2019 in front of a jury drawn from Daimler, Lufthansa and Siemens, which is the buyer profile that commissions him. He works fluently in German and English, which matters for DACH-region corporates running cross-border transformation programmes. Biography highlights Master of Science in Business Mathematics, with an exchange semester at the University of Texas at Austin. Former stock analyst in a private bank before founding Barrierefrei im Kopf UG. Bundesliga wheelchair rugby player with German national team experience. Author of Change Mindset: Veranderungsprozesse ins Rollen bringen! (BoD, 2020), with a chapter excerpt carried by WirtschaftsWoche’s Management-Blog. Winner of the European Speaker Award 2019. Television and radio appearances on ARD, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Radio Gong and SWR’s Nachtcafe. Biography Most change programmes do not fail at the design stage. They fail at the moment when the people inside the organisation decide, often quietly, that the new direction is something happening to them rather than something they own. This is the gap Sebastian Wachter writes about and the gap his keynotes are designed to close. His own credibility on the subject is mathematical before it is motivational. He holds a Master of Science in Business Mathematics, spent an exchange semester at the University of Texas at Austin, and worked as a stock analyst in a private bank. The accident that left him with roughly 95% muscle paralysis came at 24, after the analytical training, not before it. He treats change as a managerial problem with mechanisms, not a feel-good lesson drawn from biography. That argument is set out in Change Mindset: Veranderungsprozesse ins Rollen bringen!, published in 2020 and excerpted in WirtschaftsWoche’s Management-Blog. The book reframes change resistance as a question of accountability, role clarity and the willingness of senior managers to keep asking for help once the plan is signed off. The European Speaker Award 2019, judged by representatives from Daimler, Lufthansa and Siemens, recognised the same content in keynote form. He works in German and English, founded the Wurzburg-based firm Barrierefrei im Kopf UG, and continues to play Bundesliga wheelchair rugby. The work he is booked for sits at the point where a transformation programme has stalled and the executive team needs the workforce to re-engage on its own terms. Key speaking topics Change mindset and stalled transformation programmes Growth mindset and managerial resilience Diversity and inclusion in the workforce Team accountability and role clarity Resilience after personal and organisational setback Communication and collaboration across functions Ideal for Executive teams and transformation leads running multi-year change programmes that have lost momentum DACH-region corporates with mixed German- and English-speaking audiences HR directors and culture leads addressing inclusion and engagement together Leadership offsites where the brief is to reset accountability across senior managers Audience outcomes A working definition of why change programmes stall at the point of behavioural commitment, not strategic design. A vocabulary for separating constraint from excuse inside a leadership team. A concrete account of how role clarity, accountability and asking for help operate together in change execution. A different reference point for what resilience looks like in practice, drawn from a verifiable biographical record rather than abstraction.

Why organisations work with Benedikt Böhm A working CEO, not a retired one. He runs an international outdoor brand and continues to ski 8,000-metre peaks, so the leadership material is current and tested, not memoir. A documented record in the most unforgiving operating environment in sport. Speed ascents of Muztagata, Gasherbrum II and Manaslu without oxygen are public, verifiable proof points for the arguments he makes about preparation, role clarity and team recovery. A peer-reviewed intellectual platform. His Routledge book with ESSEC professor Stefan Gröschl frames the work as leadership scholarship, which gives the content credibility with HR, executive development and L&D buyers who screen out motivational content. A live test case for sustainability as commercial strategy. The DYNAFIT lifetime guarantee and the Helping Band WWF partnership are operating decisions, not communications. Survivor and rescuer in the 2012 Manaslu avalanche. The account of decision-making in and after that event is one of the few first-hand executive narratives of catastrophic shock and sustained recovery. Biography highlights International Managing Director of DYNAFIT, the ski-touring brand he led from insolvency in 2003 to global category leadership. Co-author with Professor Stefan Gröschl of ESSEC Business School of “From the Death Zone to the Boardroom” (Routledge, 2019). Speed records on Muztagata (7,546m, 2005) and Gasherbrum II (8,035m, 2006) with Sebastian Haag; speed ascent and ski descent of Manaslu (8,163m, 2012) without supplemental oxygen. WWF Foundation ambassador for the Himalaya region and snow leopards. Founder of Helping Band, a wristband initiative committing approximately 60,000 euros per year to WWF. Former member of the German national ski mountaineering team. Biography DYNAFIT was effectively insolvent when Benedikt Böhm joined its marketing team in 2003. Two decades later the brand is the international category leader in ski touring, with a lifetime product guarantee and an institutional partnership with WWF that he built personally. The arc is unusual because it has been run in parallel with an active expedition career at 8,000 metres. That second career is the source of his leadership material. Speed ascents of Muztagata, Gasherbrum II and Manaslu without supplemental oxygen require a precision of role allocation, recovery management and judgement under hypoxia that ordinary corporate planning does not test for. Böhm has spent twenty years moving between the two settings, and the comparison is what makes the work substantive. His 2019 book with ESSEC professor Stefan Gröschl, “From the Death Zone to the Boardroom,” published by Routledge, is the formal statement of that work. The book sits deliberately outside the usual business-and-management canon, drawing on research into fear, pain, suffering and failure to argue that conventional models of executive resilience are too clean to describe how senior leaders actually behave under sustained pressure. The 2012 Manaslu avalanche, which killed eleven climbers and which Böhm and his climbing partner survived and helped rescue from, anchors much of the recovery and decision-making content. It is the rare case where the speaker has lived the catastrophic-shock material he discusses, and continued, after a deliberate pause, to operate at the same altitude and at the head of the same company. Key speaking topics Leadership and decision-making under extreme uncertainty Resilience and recovery after operational shock Team performance in high-stakes environments Risk management and the discipline of preparation Sustainability as commercial strategy Change leadership and organisational reinvention Personal performance and self-leadership at executive level Ideal for Executive committees and boards rebuilding after restructure, crisis or sustained pressure CHROs and heads of executive development designing leadership programmes with substance under the keynote CEOs and senior commercial leaders wrestling with sustainability as an operating decision rather than a communications line Senior teams preparing for major change, market entry or expedition-style strategic bets Audience outcomes A language for separating preparation, role discipline and recovery as three distinct leadership capabilities rather than one blurred idea of “resilience” A clearer view of how senior teams should behave in the first hours and days after a serious operational shock A working example of a CEO who has run sustainability as a product decision, not as a marketing position A grounded counterweight to motivational adventure content, with named expeditions, named outcomes and a named peer-reviewed text behind the argument

Why organisations work with Andrew Bryant He authored the McGraw-Hill book that defined self-leadership for a generation of corporate practitioners, and his research has been cited in more than 150 academic papers and dissertations. His 2026 Wiley book Potential-ize introduces the IGNITE Framework, a six-element model for leaders who need to combine human judgement with AI capability rather than be displaced by it. He has coached senior leaders inside Singapore Airlines, Microsoft, SAP, Deutsche Bank, and Nokia, so the work is tested against real operating pressure, not a coaching practice that lives only in workshops. He carries the Certified Speaking Professional designation from the Professional Speakers Association of Australia and has chaired the speaker associations of both Singapore and Spain, which means executional reliability on stage is a known quantity. The President of Singapore has formally recognised his work twice, in 2018 and 2020, for self-leadership programmes that produced measurable outcomes with disadvantaged teenagers and women leaders. Biography highlights Founder of Self Leadership International, established 1999, with clients in over 40 countries. Co-author of Self-Leadership (McGraw-Hill, 2012) with Dr. Ana Lucia Kazan, a defining text in the field. Author of The New Leadership Playbook (2022) and Potential-ize: How Leaders Unlock Human Potential in the Age of AI (Wiley, 2026). Certified Speaking Professional, Professional Speakers Association of Australia, 2009. Past President of Asia Professional Speakers Singapore (2015 to 2016) and Professional Speakers Association Spain (2021 to 2023). Acknowledged twice by the President of Singapore, in 2018 and 2020, for community leadership programmes. Biography Self-leadership is the practice of intentionally influencing your own thinking, feeling and actions toward a defined objective. That definition, written by Andrew Bryant and Dr. Ana Lucia Kazan in their 2012 McGraw-Hill book, is now cited in more than 150 academic papers. It is also the operating idea behind a coaching and keynote practice that has run for more than twenty-five years. The argument is simple. Leaders who cannot regulate their own attention, energy and reactions cannot reliably lead anyone else through change. Bryant founded Self Leadership International in 1999 and built the methodology out of work with named global organisations, including Singapore Airlines, Microsoft, SAP, Deutsche Bank and Nokia. The 2022 follow-up book, The New Leadership Playbook, translated the underlying research into twelve concrete leadership conversations that teams actually need to have. His 2026 Wiley book, Potential-ize: How Leaders Unlock Human Potential in the Age of AI, extends the work into the live boardroom question. The IGNITE Framework, six elements covering Inspire, Guide, Nurture, Integrate, Transform and Evaluate, is built for leaders who need to combine human judgement with AI capability without losing either. It is the same intellectual line, applied to the workforce conversation that buyers are having now. Bryant carries the Certified Speaking Professional designation from the Professional Speakers Association of Australia and has chaired the speaker associations of both Singapore and Spain. The President of Singapore acknowledged his community work formally in 2018 and again in 2020. The credentials are useful as proof of seriousness, but the more practical point for a buyer is that he is one of the very few speakers who can credibly claim to have shaped the leadership category he speaks on. Key speaking topics Self-leadership Leadership in the age of AI Executive presence and personal effectiveness Workplace mental health and resilience Psychological safety and high-performing teams Leading change and restructure Human potential and talent development Ideal for CEO, COO and senior leadership teams under pressure to deliver during restructure or AI adoption. CHROs and Heads of Leadership Development building self-leadership capability across mid and senior cohorts. Boards and executive committees commissioning offsites on resilience, composure and decision quality. Audience outcomes A working definition of self-leadership that leaders can apply to their own behaviour the next day, not just discuss in the abstract. The IGNITE Framework as a structured way to think about unlocking team potential alongside AI capability rather than against it. A direct view of how composure under pressure compounds into team performance and retention. Specific leadership conversations, drawn from the twelve plays in The New Leadership Playbook, that managers can run with their own teams. Named tools from Bryant’s Self-Leadership Resilience Stack, including the Evening Review and the View from Above, for regulating pressure before it compounds into burnout.

Why organisations work with Léa Steinacker Her “Code Capital” framework, developed through her University of St. Gallen doctorate and published by Nomos Verlag, gives executive teams a structured way to analyse what is embedded in AI systems from design through deployment, something most AI governance conversations currently lack. Her peer-reviewed research covers specific, contested AI applications, including cross-national surveys of facial recognition acceptance published in Government Information Quarterly and Public Understanding of Science, which gives her arguments empirical grounding rather than assertion. Her 2024 book co-authored with Prof. Dr. Miriam Meckel (Rowohlt Verlag) reached both the Spiegel and Manager Magazin bestseller rankings, evidence that her framing of AI’s organisational and societal consequences resonates with senior business audiences, not only specialist ones. As co-founder of ada Learning, which has equipped thousands of employees from DAX companies, SMEs, and governments with AI transformation skills, she has tested her frameworks inside major institutions at scale, not only described them from the outside. Board-level experience at Weleda AG and active leadership as CEO of GaiaLogic AG mean her perspective on AI governance comes from someone directly accountable for it, not only someone who analyses it. Biography highlights PhD from the University of St. Gallen; doctoral thesis “Code Capital” published as an academic monograph by Nomos Verlag (2022) Co-author with Prof. Dr. Miriam Meckel of “Alles überall auf einmal” (Rowohlt Verlag, 2024), ranked on both the Spiegel and Manager Magazin bestseller lists; published in English as “Everything Everywhere All At Once: How Artificial Intelligence Impacts Our World” and in Korean CEO of GaiaLogic AG; co-founder and former Executive Chairwoman of ada Learning GmbH, which has equipped thousands of employees from DAX companies, SMEs, and governments with AI transformation skills Member of the Board of Directors of Weleda AG; former member of the AI Advisory Board of Ringier AG Lecturer at the University of St. Gallen, teaching “Social and Economic Impacts of Artificial Intelligence” Peer-reviewed publications in Government Information Quarterly, Electronic Markets, Public Understanding of Science, and Data and Policy (Cambridge Core) Degrees from Princeton University (A.B.), Harvard Kennedy School of Government (MPP), and the University of St. Gallen (PhD) Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe; Medium Magazine Top 30 Under 30 Journalists; BCG Thought Leader; Atlantik-Brücke Young Leader; Munich Young Leader (Munich Security Conference and Körber Stiftung); Henry Richardson Labouisse Prize, Princeton University Biography Organisations moving quickly on AI adoption are finding that their governance structures are not keeping pace. Boards are increasingly accountable for what AI systems do to their decisions and their people, yet most lack the analytical frameworks to evaluate it. Léa Steinacker has spent a decade building exactly those frameworks. Her doctoral research at the University of St. Gallen produced Code Capital, a sociotechnical framework for analysing AI systems from design through deployment. Published by Nomos Verlag in 2022, it gives leaders a structured way to identify what AI systems actually contain, from design assumptions to deployment risks. Her peer-reviewed work, covering facial recognition adoption across four countries and published in journals including Government Information Quarterly and Public Understanding of Science, brings empirical grounding to arguments that too often stay at the level of principle. Her 2024 book with Prof. Dr. Miriam Meckel (Rowohlt Verlag) became an immediate Spiegel and Manager Magazin bestseller and was subsequently translated into English and Korean. It moved the question of what AI means for people, organisations, and societies from ethical debate into practical leadership conversation. She now carries that perspective directly into practice as CEO of GaiaLogic AG and as a lecturer at the University of St. Gallen. As a member of the Board of Directors of Weleda AG, her perspective on AI governance is shaped by institutional accountability, not only academic analysis. She co-founded ada Learning, which has equipped thousands of employees from DAX companies, governments, and civil society organisations with AI transformation skills. She holds degrees from Princeton University, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and the University of St. Gallen. Key speaking topics AI governance and responsible deployment The societal and organisational implications of AI Code Capital and sociotechnical analysis of AI systems AI regulation and the European policy framework Workforce transformation and AI readiness Human-AI collaboration and decision-making AI and the future of knowledge work Ideal for Boards and C-suite executives evaluating AI governance and accountability structures Chief Technology Officers, Chief Digital Officers, and transformation leads navigating AI adoption Policy, legal, and compliance teams working on AI regulation and enterprise risk Senior HR and people leaders managing workforce readiness and AI-driven organisational change Audience outcomes A framework, grounded in the Code Capital model, for evaluating what AI systems do to organisations beyond their stated technical capabilities Clearer understanding of where AI governance risk accumulates before it becomes visible at board level Practical grounding in European AI regulation and what it means for organisational decision-making and liability A more precise vocabulary for asking the right questions about AI in leadership and governance contexts Greater clarity on how to structure workforce readiness initiatives that treat AI transformation as an organisational challenge, not only a skills one

Why organisations work with Philip Keil He brings the operating discipline of Crew Resource Management, the framework airlines use to prevent crew failure under pressure, into language a leadership team can actually apply on Monday morning. He has been the captain in command during a genuine in-flight emergency with nearly 200 passengers on board, so his content on composure and decision-making is grounded in a specific event, not a hypothetical. His books You are the pilot! and The inner compass give him a published position on intuition and self-leadership, which extends a keynote into a longer programme for executive development. He delivers in English and German at a senior corporate level across more than 20 countries, which suits multinational audiences without an interpreter compromise. He is an active TV aviation expert in Germany, which means he is fluent at explaining technical environments to non-technical audiences without losing the senior register. Biography highlights Qualified as a Lufthansa-trained airline pilot at 22, one of the youngest in Germany. Over 9,000 hours of commercial flying across four continents. Author of You are the pilot! (2019) and The inner compass (2022). Listed in Europe’s TOP 100 Excellent Keynote Speakers since 2017. Two-time nominee for the Red Fox Award, Germany’s Keynote Speaker of the Year (2019, 2020). Recurring aviation expert across ZDF, RTL, Pro 7, Sat.1, WELT, and ntv. Biography The aviation industry has spent four decades engineering away a single problem: capable people, working together, still making fatal decisions. The framework that emerged is called Crew Resource Management, and it is the operating discipline behind the modern cockpit. It assumes that a senior captain can be wrong, that a junior co-pilot must be heard, and that error must surface before it compounds. Philip Keil works inside that framework professionally. He qualified as an airline pilot at 22 after training at Lufthansa in Bremen, and has since logged more than 9,000 flying hours over four continents. On 24 February 2009 he was the captain in command when a routine flight with around 200 passengers became an emergency landing, an event he has used as the empirical anchor for his work on composure and decision-making ever since. His books extend the cockpit material into something more useful for a senior leader. You are the pilot! (2019) is a study in self-leadership and confidence under load. The inner compass (2022) addresses the role of intuition in high-stakes decisions, the part of judgement that does not appear on a spreadsheet. Both have given him a published intellectual position rather than a single-incident speaker hook. That position has been recognised commercially. Keil has been listed in Europe’s TOP 100 Excellent Keynote Speakers since 2017, was nominated as Germany’s Keynote Speaker of the Year in 2019 and 2020, and is the recurring aviation voice across the major German broadcasters. He works in English and German, which is what a multinational leadership audience actually needs. Key speaking topics Decision-making under pressure Crew Resource Management for executive teams Error culture and accountability Self-leadership and composure Crisis communication and command Team coordination across hierarchy Ideal for Executive committees and boards facing high-consequence decisions under time pressure COOs, CHROs, and operational leaders rebuilding accountability and error reporting culture Leadership development programmes for newly appointed senior managers Safety-critical, regulated, or operationally complex industries (aviation, energy, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services) Audience outcomes A working vocabulary from Crew Resource Management that they can apply to their own leadership meetings A specific model for how to surface bad news up a hierarchy before it becomes a crisis A clearer view of what composure looks like as an operational skill, not a personality trait A repeatable approach to making the next decision when the information is incomplete

Why organisations work with Dr Helena Boschi She brings neuroscience into the room with the credibility of someone who has sat on the executive side of HR. Senior roles at Shire Pharmaceuticals and Serono SA mean she speaks to leadership problems from inside, not from a lab. Her book Why We Do What We Do (Wiley, 2020) gives leadership teams a shared vocabulary for why people behave as they do under pressure, which lasts beyond the event. She works at the intersection of chronic stress and cognitive performance, an area most leadership speakers skim and few treat as a board-level risk. She is a member of the British Psychological Society and has built Chequered Leopard Ltd since 2004 specifically to translate peer-reviewed research into operational practice, not keynote theatre. She is unusually sharp on the behavioural cost of hybrid working: trust erosion, risk attitudes, attention, empathy. Useful for any leadership team still making assumptions about what remote does to a workforce. Biography highlights Founder of Chequered Leopard Ltd (since 2004), a consultancy applying neuroscience to leadership, change and workplace behaviour. Author of Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Our Brain to Get the Best Out of Ourselves and Others (Wiley, 2020). Former Vice President of Talent Management at Shire Pharmaceuticals. Former Corporate Director and Head of Global Organisation Development at Serono SA (now part of Merck KGaA). Member of the British Psychological Society. Research interests include the impact of chronic, work-induced stress on cognitive ability in the workplace. Biography Most change programmes fail on the same fault line. Leaders model behaviour as a matter of willingness, when the brain is actually running on threat detection, bias and habit. Helena Boschi has built a twenty-year practice around closing that gap, translating applied neuroscience into the decisions senior teams actually have to make. Her consultancy, Chequered Leopard Ltd, was founded in 2004 after senior corporate roles inside Shire Pharmaceuticals, where she was Vice President of Talent Management, and Serono SA, where she led global organisation development. That sequence matters. She is not a researcher who later discovered business. She ran the people function at scale in listed multinationals and turned to neuroscience because the tools available to her were not explaining what she was seeing. Her book Why We Do What We Do, published by Wiley in 2020, sets out how the brain communicates, remembers, attends, leads and decides, and what organisations can do to stop working against it. The work that sits beneath it, including her interest in chronic work-induced stress and cognitive function, informs keynotes on change, cognitive bias, psychological safety, hybrid working and innovation. She is a member of the British Psychological Society. The argument she leaves in the room is specific. Most of what organisations call a culture problem is a biology problem being asked to behave. Once leaders see that, the interventions change. Key speaking topics Applied neuroscience at work The neuroscience of change Cognitive bias and decision-making Psychological safety and fear at work Trust, risk and hybrid working The neuroscience of innovation Chronic stress and cognitive performance Neuroplasticity and cognitive agility in an AI-driven world Ideal for CEOs, executive teams and boards working through sustained change or transformation programmes. CHROs, CPOs and senior HR, talent and organisation development leaders. Leadership development and learning teams designing programmes for senior cohorts. Cross-cultural and international leadership groups operating in hybrid conditions. Audience outcomes A clearer picture of why people resist, withdraw or underperform during change, grounded in how the brain responds to uncertainty. Named cognitive biases leaders can spot in their own decisions and in the decisions their teams make for them. A practical read on what hybrid working is doing to trust, empathy and risk appetite inside their organisation. Specific behavioural levers for psychological safety, rather than slogans. Language and evidence leaders can take back into their own teams without needing to cite academic research.

Why organisations work with John Ridding He ran the playbook the rest of the news industry copied. The FT moved to a paywall in 2002, a metered model in 2007, and trial-led subscriptions in 2015, reaching one million subscribers in 2019 and 2.9 million paying users by 2023. He brings the inside view of a cross-border acquisition that worked. The 2015 sale of the FT from Pearson to Nikkei is one of the cleanest examples of a Japanese parent acquiring a Western media asset without breaking it. He has signed the first UK national publisher licensing deal with OpenAI, which gives him a current operator perspective on how content businesses negotiate with foundation model companies, not a commentator’s view. He spent 35 years inside one institution and ran it for almost 20. That tenure is unusual at his level and gives him a coherent argument about long-horizon transformation rather than a sequence of quarterly bets. Biography highlights Chief Executive Officer of the FT Group, May 2006 to June 2025. Special Executive Director of Nikkei, parent company of the Financial Times since 2015. Honorary Chairman of the Financial Times following his transition from CEO. Previously Publisher of FT Asia and Chairman of Pearson Asia, 2003 to 2006. Foreign correspondent for the FT in Seoul, Paris and Hong Kong, with reporting from China, Japan, India and Indonesia. First-class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Oxford University. Biography The reader-revenue model now treated as orthodoxy across global news media did not exist as a serious commercial strategy when the Financial Times began charging for online journalism in 2002. The decision was contested inside the building and dismissed outside it. Two decades later, it is the model the New York Times, the Washington Post and most of the European broadsheets have adopted in some form. John Ridding ran that experiment to scale. As CEO of the FT Group from 2006 to 2025, he took the paper from print-led economics to a paying audience of 2.9 million and revenues of GBP 500m, with more than two-thirds of revenue from digital subscriptions. The headline numbers matter, but the operating choices behind them are what executives in other sectors find useful: how to price confidently when the market expects free, how to redesign the product around habit rather than transactions, how to build a direct data relationship with a reader. He also managed two structural events most CEOs never face. The 2015 sale of the FT from Pearson to Nikkei moved a British editorial institution into Japanese ownership without disturbing the journalism. In April 2024 the FT became the first UK national publisher to license its content to OpenAI, an early test of how content owners negotiate with foundation model companies on terms rather than waiting to be scraped. Before running the business he reported from it. Postings in Seoul, Paris and Hong Kong covered the Asian financial crisis, the rise of China as a commercial power, and the early years of the Eurozone. That reporter background is the throughline. He talks about the digital subscription business the way a foreign correspondent talks about a country, in specifics, not abstractions. Key speaking topics Subscription and reader-revenue business models Digital transformation of legacy businesses AI and the future of content, media and intellectual property Cross-border M&A and post-acquisition integration Global business through the lens of news and capital flows Leadership of long-horizon transformation The economics of trust in a fragmented information market Ideal for CEOs and CFOs of subscription, media, publishing and content businesses Boards of legacy companies designing direct customer-revenue strategies Chief Strategy and Chief Commercial Officers wrestling with pricing in commoditising markets Senior teams negotiating content, IP or data licensing terms with AI platforms Audience outcomes A clear account of how a legacy business shifted from advertising to direct customer revenue, with the sequencing decisions that made it work A framework for thinking about pricing, product and data as one operating system rather than three departments An informed read on what content owners are actually negotiating with foundation model companies, beyond the headlines A view on cross-border integration that treats culture and editorial autonomy as commercial assets, not soft factors

Why organisations work with Martine Wright A first-hand account of recovery from catastrophic injury that gives leaders concrete language for talking about adversity, mental health, and return to work without slipping into platitudes. Paralympic-level perspective on marginal gains, team performance, and selection, drawn from competing for Great Britain in sitting volleyball at London 2012 rather than from a textbook. Credibility on inclusion and belonging that comes from being inside the disability sport system, not commenting on it. Useful for ERG launches, accessibility programmes, and culture work where lived authority matters. An MBE, the BBC Helen Rollason Award, and a Sports Book Award-winning memoir give buyers external validation that holds up in front of senior audiences. Consistent broadcast presence with the BBC and Channel 4, including Rio 2016 and Invictus Games, which translates into stage presence and timing that work in front of 10,000-seat audiences and intimate leadership rooms alike. Biography highlights Survivor of the 7 July 2005 London bombings; was the last person extracted alive from the Aldgate carriage and lost both legs above the knee. Member of Great Britain’s women’s sitting volleyball team at the London 2012 Paralympic Games and later team captain. Appointed MBE in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to sport. Recipient of the BBC Helen Rollason Award at the 2012 BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Author of Unbroken: My Story of Survival from 7/7 Bombings to Paralympic Success (Simon and Schuster, 2017), winner of Autobiography of the Year at the 2018 Sports Book Awards. Broadcaster for the BBC and Channel 4, including roving reporter at the Rio 2016 Paralympics and Invictus Games coverage. Biography The Aldgate bomb on 7 July 2005 killed seven people in a single Circle Line carriage. Martine Wright was the last person brought out alive. She lost roughly eighty percent of her blood, spent a week in a coma, and underwent ten months of surgery and double above-knee amputation. The detail that matters for a corporate audience is what came after: a deliberate decision, sustained over years, to treat recovery as work rather than a wait. That work led to elite sport. Wright took up sitting volleyball during rehabilitation, made the British squad, and was selected for the home Paralympic Games at London 2012, where Team GB fielded a women’s sitting volleyball side for the first time. She later captained the team and earned forty international caps. The 2012 BBC Helen Rollason Award and a 2016 MBE for services to sport followed. Her memoir Unbroken (Simon and Schuster, 2017) won Autobiography of the Year at the 2018 Sports Book Awards and remains the primary text behind her speaking. Alongside the book, she has built a steady broadcast career with the BBC and Channel 4, covering the Rio 2016 Paralympics and Invictus Games, which gives her a level of stage craft most lived-experience speakers do not have. What organisations actually book her for is the translation. Wright takes the language of marginal gains, team selection, mental health, and belonging out of the abstract and grounds it in specific decisions she made and watched others make. NatWest, the NHS, John Lewis, Deloitte, Salesforce, Pfizer, and Aon are among the named clients on her own record. The room leaves with usable vocabulary for the conversations leadership teams already know they need to have. Key speaking topics Resilience and recovery from adversity Mental health and return to work Inclusion, disability, and belonging in the workplace Marginal gains and high-performance teams Change and uncertainty Paralympic sport and elite competition Leadership through crisis Ideal for CHROs and people leaders rolling out wellbeing, mental health, or return-to-work programmes DEI leads and ERG sponsors building disability inclusion and belonging work Leadership teams briefing staff through restructures, crises, or major change programmes All-staff conferences and town halls where the brief calls for an authentic, high-impact keynote rather than a research talk Audience outcomes A vocabulary for talking about adversity, mental health, and recovery that does not feel scripted. Specific examples of how marginal gains and team selection work inside an elite sport environment, drawn from London 2012. A sharper sense of what disability inclusion looks like from inside the experience, useful for shaping ERG and accessibility work. A reset on what is actually possible after a catastrophic setback, anchored in a verifiable personal story rather than abstract motivation.