Change Management

Why organisations work with David Smith His 7 Principles framework is grounded in a specific, documented corporate turnaround – Asda’s recovery from near-bankruptcy to the UK’s No.1 Sunday Times Best Place to Work – giving boards a case study with traceable outcomes rather than a theoretical model. His book “Culture Trumps Strategy” gives leadership teams a direct, contestable argument: that most organisations are investing disproportionately in strategy and structure while the cultural conditions that determine execution go unmanaged. His book “Bad Bosses,” drawn from interviews with more than 200 CEOs and senior executives, documents the specific leadership behaviours that most consistently destroy engagement – giving HR directors and transformation leads a diagnostic, not a philosophy. He spent a decade on the Executive Board of a 170,000-person, £15bn-turnover business, which means his credibility holds in a boardroom conversation, not just an HR function. As a Companion of the CIPD – the body’s highest membership grade – and former Chairman of the Board of the Institute for Employment Studies, he can position people practice as a serious performance variable rather than a support function. Biography highlights People and IT Director at Asda (2000-2009); Executive Board member for 10 years, responsible for a workforce of 170,000 across a £15bn-turnover business Asda named No.1 Best Place to Work in The Sunday Times Best Companies survey during his tenure; Asda’s People Team also won the Personnel Today Rebus HR Award for Best HR Strategy in Line with Business Author of four books: “Asda Magic: The 7 Principles of Building a High-Performance Culture” (2012), “Culture Trumps Strategy” (2016), “Performance Management for the 21st Century” (2018), and “Bad Bosses” (2019) Companion of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development – the highest membership grade in the UK’s principal HR professional body Former Chairman of the Board, Institute for Employment Studies; former Commissioner, Equal Opportunities Commission; former Vice President of the CIPD for Organisation and Development Recipient of the Sam Walton Award for driving Excellence in People Policies MBA, Henley Management College; BA Business, Sheffield Hallam University Biography Most large organisations treat culture as a byproduct of leadership behaviour – something that forms over time, rather than something that is actively built. David Smith’s 15 years at Asda, where the people-led turnaround from near-bankruptcy to the UK’s No.1 Best Place to Work took roughly a decade and a half, produced a different conclusion: that culture is an engineered system, and that the principles governing it are specific and reproducible. His first book, “Asda Magic: The 7 Principles of Building a High-Performance Culture” (2012), translated that experience into a practical framework. Its argument – that employee engagement is the product of specific managed behaviours, not general sentiment – gave HR directors and CEOs a diagnostic tool rather than an aspiration. “Culture Trumps Strategy” (2016) extended the thesis: that organisations consistently over-invest in strategy and structure while underinvesting in the cultural conditions that determine whether strategy executes. Two further books addressed adjacent dysfunction. “Performance Management for the 21st Century” (2018) made the case against annual review-based systems, arguing that only regular performance coaching – not periodic appraisal – actually changes behaviour at scale. “Bad Bosses” (2019) drew on interviews with more than 200 CEOs and executives to document the leadership pitfalls that consistently destroy engagement from inside an organisation. A Companion of the CIPD and former Chairman of the Board of the Institute for Employment Studies, Smith bridges executive credibility and evidence-based people practice. His audiences include CHROs, chief executives, and transformation programme leads asking why significant investment in organisational change is not translating into measurable performance. Key speaking topics High-performance culture and employee engagement Performance management and performance coaching Culture transformation and change leadership Leadership in tough times The relationship between culture and commercial performance Communication as an organisational performance lever Managing and retaining talent in a high-performance environment Ideal for CHROs and HR directors leading culture or engagement programmes CEOs and executive teams mid-transformation seeking a cultural diagnostic Board-level and C-suite leadership development programmes Senior leaders in large, complex, or multi-site organisations Audience outcomes A specific, practical framework for diagnosing the cultural gap between stated values and daily managed reality A clearer understanding of why performance management systems fail – and what a coaching-based alternative requires Named leadership behaviours that most predictably drive disengagement – and the organisational cost of tolerating them A case study with traceable outcomes that makes the business case for culture investment to a commercially focused audience Practical language for communicating culture and engagement priorities to boards and executive teams

Why organisations work with Brandon Williams He brings a Human Factors academic record alongside the cockpit story. Fifteen years teaching the discipline at university level means his frameworks are the ones aviation safety regulators use, translated for boards and operating teams. His Just Culture model gives leaders a usable answer to the question of how to hold people accountable without destroying the candour that surfaces problems early. Most safety and conduct programmes fail on exactly this trade-off. His structured debrief practice converts incidents and near misses into organisational learning at a pace most corporate retros cannot match. It is the operating ritual fighter squadrons use to improve every cycle. His audience is the leadership team that has run out of patience with motivational speakers and wants the actual mechanism: clear intent, situational awareness, mutual support, decision-making under uncertainty. He has tested these frameworks with operating leadership at Deloitte, Northwell Health, Baptist Health, Global Atlantic Financial and Hertz, not only on conference stages. Biography highlights US Air Force Academy graduate and decorated Lieutenant Colonel, United States Air Force. F-15E fighter pilot with hundreds of combat hours over Iraq and Afghanistan. Captain at a major US commercial airline and serving US Air Force Safety Officer. Adjunct professor of Human Factors at university level for approximately 15 years. CEO and Founder of Lead-Tac, a leadership development firm. Client engagements include Deloitte, Hertz, Northwell Health, Baptist Health, Global Atlantic Financial, National Association of Federally-Insured Credit Unions. Biography Aviation worked out how to make high-stakes teams perform reliably under conditions of uncertainty long before the corporate world had a vocabulary for it. The cockpit runs on Human Factors, Just Culture, structured debrief and disciplined situational awareness. Brandon Williams spent two decades inside that system as an F-15E fighter pilot, decorated Lieutenant Colonel and US Air Force Safety Officer, then another fifteen years teaching the underlying discipline as a university adjunct. The work he does with senior leadership teams is the translation layer. Lead-Tac, the firm he founded, takes the operating mechanics of the cockpit, clear intent, mutual support, debrief, accountability without blame, and rebuilds them for boards, operating teams and frontline leaders carrying the weight of a complex business. His Just Culture framework addresses the most common failure mode in corporate accountability. Punish the error and the next one stays hidden. Excuse the error and standards collapse. He shows leaders the structured middle path that aviation has used to drive incident rates down for forty years, and how to install the equivalent in a commercial operating environment. His client list, Deloitte, Northwell Health, Baptist Health, Global Atlantic Financial, Hertz, the National Association of Federally-Insured Credit Unions, runs through sectors where decision quality under pressure is the constraint on performance. That is the room he is built for. Key speaking topics Leadership under uncertainty and complexity Human Factors in high-performing teams Just Culture and psychological safety Decision-making under pressure Structured debrief and operating-rhythm learning High-reliability organisations Situational awareness for senior teams Safety leadership and accountability Ideal for C-suite and operating leadership in regulated, high-consequence sectors (healthcare, financial services, energy, industrial). Chief Safety Officers, Heads of Operational Risk and quality leadership building a Just Culture programme. Sales and commercial leadership teams operating under volatile market conditions. Boards seeking a working model for accountability that protects candour. Audience outcomes A working definition of Just Culture and a clear test for whether their organisation has one. The Human Factors lens on why competent teams still make predictable errors under load. A structured debrief method usable inside their own operating rhythm from the following Monday. Language for situational awareness, mutual support and clear intent that gives senior teams a shared vocabulary under pressure. A direct read on the difference between aviation-grade reliability practice and the safety theatre most corporate programmes default to.

Why organisations work with Robin Horsfall Inside account of Operation Nimrod, the 1980 Iranian Embassy hostage rescue, from a member of the assault team. Few speakers can describe high-stakes coordinated action with this level of first-hand authority. Permission to talk about fear at senior level. Horsfall’s book Fighting Scared is built around the argument that competence and fear coexist, which lands differently in a room of executives than standard resilience material. A career arc that puts setback at the centre rather than the margin. Boy soldier, SAS operator, bodyguard, karate school founder, broken neck, cancer survivor, mature undergraduate at Surrey. Useful for audiences in restructure, post-shock recovery or repeated reinvention. Live military analysis credibility. His ongoing commentary on the Russia-Ukraine war has built a substantial public following and is grounded in operational experience, not punditry. A direct, unsentimental voice. He is not a corporate keynote in uniform. He pushes back, takes questions hard, and gives a room something to argue about on the way home. Biography highlights Joined the British Army at 15; full member of the Parachute Regiment from 1974, with three operational tours of Northern Ireland. Badged to B Squadron, 22 SAS in May 1979; part of the assault team on the Iranian Embassy in London on 5 May 1980 that rescued 19 hostages. Author of Fighting Scared: My Life in the SAS (Cassell Military, 2002) and the trilogy The Words of the Wise Old Paratrooper. Author of Slava Ukraini. Who Dares Shares! (2023), an observational diary of the first 18 months of the Russia-Ukraine war. Featured in the BAFTA-winning documentary SAS Embassy Siege. BA (Hons) English Literature and Creative Writing, University of Surrey, 2:1, as a mature undergraduate. 6th Dan Shukokai karate; founder of London Shukokai Karate (1994) and London Karate Limited (1999). Biography The Iranian Embassy in Princes Gate was held for six days in 1980 before the SAS went in. Robin Horsfall was 23, badged to B Squadron the year before, and part of the assault team that ended the siege in roughly seventeen minutes and freed 19 hostages. That single operation is one of the most studied hostage rescues in modern policing and special forces history, and it gives his work with leadership audiences an evidence base most speakers in the resilience category do not have. Before Princes Gate he had already done three tours of Northern Ireland with the Parachute Regiment, having joined the army at 15. After it he served further tours, qualified as an emergency medical technician and as a sniper, and left the regular army in 1984. The next decade put him through territory most corporate audiences only hear about: close protection work in the Middle East, contract soldiering, building and running a medical reception centre in Guyana, founding a karate school in London that he ran for almost two decades. His book Fighting Scared (Cassell Military, 2002) is the spine of the keynote. The thesis is not that elite soldiers are unafraid. It is that fear, properly handled, is part of the discipline. He brings the same argument to senior teams facing restructure, public scrutiny, or decisions they cannot delay. Audiences hear how operators are actually trained to absorb shock, recover and act, and what that means for the way executives prepare themselves and the people around them. The later chapters of his story are also part of why he resonates with serious leadership audiences. He broke his neck in 2012, took a 2:1 in English Literature at Surrey as a mature undergraduate, survived bladder cancer in 2018, and built a large public following through his daily analysis of the Russia-Ukraine war. The career is unusual. The throughline, composure under pressure and a refusal to let setback define the next decision, is what executive audiences end up taking with them. Key speaking topics Decision-making under pressure Composure and self-leadership in crisis Resilience after physical and personal setback Lessons from elite military teams for high-performance cultures Fear, courage and the realities of operational performance Recovery, reinvention and lifelong learning Russia-Ukraine war and the lived experience of conflict Ideal for Senior leadership offsites focused on composure, crisis decision-making and team performance Executive development programmes for newly senior leaders being tested under live pressure Sales, operations and frontline leadership conferences where performance under stress is the theme Veterans, public service and security sector audiences engaging with leadership and recovery Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for fear, preparation and recovery that senior leaders can use with their own teams A clearer view of how elite teams actually train for the first minutes of a crisis, and what transfers into corporate decision-making A reset on what resilience means when separated from wellness industry framing Specific reference points from Operation Nimrod and post-military reinvention that audiences can carry into their own context

Why organisations work with Baroness Ruth Hunt She ran the organisation that most large UK employers used as their inclusion benchmark, which means her advice to a C-suite team carries direct operational memory, not theory. She has spent the years since Stonewall inside the House of Lords as a Crossbench peer, watching how legislation, regulation and public mood shape the room a CEO walks into. Her consultancy Deeds and Words is built around collective leadership and humble inquiry as practical methods, giving executive teams a way to make inclusion an operating discipline rather than a statement. She edited The Book of Queer Prophets for William Collins, which gives her a public intellectual register useful when boards want a serious conversation, not a training module. She is comfortable on contested ground. Boards facing trans policy, religious freedom or campaign-group pressure get an adviser who has lived inside the argument from the inside of a national institution. Biography highlights Chief Executive, Stonewall, 2014 to 2019; led campaigns including Rainbow Laces with the Premier League and the No Bystanders schools programme. Crossbench peer, House of Lords, since October 2019, as Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green. Member, UK delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, focusing on democracy and youth participation. Co-founder and Director, Deeds and Words, advising C-suite teams on collective and inclusive leadership. Visiting Fellow, Jesus College, Cambridge, elected 2023. Editor, The Book of Queer Prophets: 24 Writers on Sexuality and Religion, William Collins, 2020. Named No. 1 on the Independent Pride Power List, 2019; speaker platforms include the Oxford Union, the NHS and Talks At Google. Biography Stonewall under Ruth Hunt’s leadership became the standard against which large UK employers measured their own inclusion work. The Workplace Equality Index moved inclusion from charity advocacy into employer practice, which is why her audience for serious leadership conversations is now the C-suite, not the diversity function. Since leaving Stonewall in 2019 she has taken a Crossbench seat in the House of Lords as Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green, the youngest Crossbench peer at the time of her appointment. She also sits on the UK delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. That work keeps her read on the operating environment current, particularly on the contested edges of equality policy. Through Deeds and Words, the consultancy she co-founded with Caroline Ellis, she works with senior teams on collective leadership and humble inquiry as practical methods. The argument is that inclusive leadership is a way of running an organisation, not an HR position, and that the leaders who treat it as the latter tend to lose ground when the politics gets harder. Her published work runs alongside the advisory practice. She edited The Book of Queer Prophets for William Collins in 2020, a collection of 24 essays on sexuality and religion that signalled an interest in difficult ground rather than safe ground. In 2023 she was elected a Visiting Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, where she has spoken on faith, identity and public leadership. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership in a contested political environment Collective leadership and humble inquiry as executive practice Building credible culture change in large organisations LGBTQ+ rights, politics and the new culture wars Allyship as a workplace discipline Faith, identity and public life Ideal for CEOs and executive committees who need to take a credible position on inclusion under public and political pressure Chief People Officers and Chief Diversity Officers moving from advocacy framing to operating discipline Board directors handling reputational risk on equality, faith or values-based policy Public sector and uniformed service leaders managing inclusion in hierarchical, mission-led organisations Audience outcomes A sharper read on why the inclusion consensus of the 2010s has fractured and what that means for leadership decisions A working definition of collective and inclusive leadership that a senior team can actually use the following week A clearer view of where allyship adds operating value and where it becomes performance A more confident position on how to hold contested ground without retreating into corporate neutrality

Why organisations work with Susan David She is the named originator of Emotional Agility, a peer-reviewed psychological framework that Harvard Business Review designated a Management Idea of the Year and Thinkers50 awarded its Breakthrough Idea Award. Her authority sits at Harvard Medical School and the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, which means leadership teams get clinical psychology, not motivational content dressed as science. She gives senior leaders a usable method for operating under pressure: working with hard emotions as signal rather than noise, and translating values into decisions when stakes are high. Her research base spans more than two decades of work on emotion, resilience and change, and her writing in HBR, the New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal puts her in front of the same readership a board does. She is South African, trained at Yale, and brings a register that travels across global executive audiences without the wellness-industry tone that often blunts this material. Biography highlights Faculty psychologist, Harvard Medical School. Cofounder and co-director, Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliate. CEO, Evidence Based Psychology. Author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Emotional Agility, translated into more than 30 languages. Winner of the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award; named to the Thinkers50 ranking of the world’s most influential management thinkers. TED Talk “The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage” delivered at TEDWomen 2017, with more than 11 million views on TED.com. Biography Most leadership advice asks senior people to stay positive under pressure. The clinical evidence says the opposite. Suppressing difficult emotion narrows judgement, erodes decision quality and corrodes trust over time. That gap, between the slogan and the science, is where Susan David built her work. She is a faculty psychologist at Harvard Medical School and cofounder of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliate. Her framework, Emotional Agility, was named a Management Idea of the Year by Harvard Business Review and won the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award. The book of the same title was a #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller and has been translated into more than 30 languages. The framework treats emotions as data on values, not as performance problems. It gives leaders a way to notice what they are feeling, label it accurately, separate the feeling from the impulse to act on it, and then make a values-based choice. It is a discipline, not a mood, and it scales from individual executive judgement to how cultures handle hard conversations, conflict and change. Her work has reached management readers through HBR, the New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, and a wider audience through her TEDWomen 2017 talk. The audiences that book her are usually executive teams under sustained pressure: leadership groups mid-restructure, partner cohorts in professional services, and senior teams trying to rebuild trust after shock. They leave with a method, not a mood-lift. Key speaking topics Emotional agility Self-leadership under pressure Resilience and change Decision-making under stress Values-based leadership Workplace mental health and wellbeing Culture and emotional honesty at work Ideal for CEOs, C-suite teams and boards leading through restructure, integration or sustained pressure. CHROs and senior people leaders rebuilding engagement and trust after change. Partner groups and senior cohorts in professional services, finance and law. Executive development and high-potential leadership programmes. Audience outcomes A working definition of emotional agility, with the four steps that turn it from idea into practice. A way to read difficult emotions as data on values rather than as problems to suppress. Language to lead hard conversations without retreating into positivity or performance. A method for staying decisive under pressure, including in moments of public scrutiny or internal conflict. A clearer link between personal values and the day-to-day choices a leadership role demands.

Why organisations work with Meridith Elliott Powell A researched 9-Step Formula for Thriving in Uncertainty, drawn from a study of nine companies that have survived since the late 1700s through wars, depressions, and pandemics. The framework gives sales and leadership teams a repeatable playbook rather than a motivational prompt. Twenty-five years of operating experience across banking, healthcare, and finance, including C-suite roles. The advice lands with sales leaders because it was built inside the function, not observed from outside it. Inducted into the National Speakers Association Speaker Hall of Fame (CPAE) in 2022, an award restricted to a small number of speakers globally. A credential that buyers recognise as a quality bar. A body of work that connects three commercial problems most organisations treat separately: sales performance, leadership development, and succession planning. Useful when a sponsor wants a single voice across a sales kickoff, a leadership offsite, and a board session. Biography highlights Inducted into the National Speakers Association Speaker Hall of Fame (CPAE Council of Peers Award for Excellence), 2022 Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), held by fewer than twelve percent of professional speakers globally Author of Thrive: Strategies to Turn Uncertainty to Competitive Advantage, Gold Award winner, Nonfiction Authors Association Author of Who Comes Next? Leadership Succession Planning Made Easy and co-author of The Best Sales Book Ever with Connie Podesta Member of the Forbes Coaching Council LinkedIn Learning instructor, including “Personalizing Your Customer’s Buying Experience” Biography Most sales playbooks assume the operating environment is broadly stable. Powell’s research started from the opposite premise. She studied nine companies founded in the late 1700s and early 1800s that have survived wars, depressions, financial crises, and pandemics, and reverse-engineered what those companies did consistently that newer competitors did not. The output is her 9-Step Formula for Thriving in Uncertainty, set out in Thrive: Strategies to Turn Uncertainty to Competitive Advantage, which won a Gold Award from the Nonfiction Authors Association. That research sits on top of twenty-five years of operating experience in banking, healthcare, and finance, including C-suite roles. The framework was built for sales leaders and general managers who own a number, not for a leadership-development audience. The practical claim is straightforward. Uncertainty is not a phase to wait out; it is the structural condition under which growth has to happen, and organisations that accept that can take share from competitors who are still waiting. Powell’s wider body of work extends the thesis into adjacent commercial problems. Who Comes Next? Leadership Succession Planning Made Easy addresses the pipeline problem most sales and leadership teams under-invest in until it becomes urgent. The Best Sales Book Ever, co-authored with Connie Podesta, sets out the seller behaviours that survive volatile markets. Her LinkedIn Learning courses, including “Personalizing Your Customer’s Buying Experience”, carry the same operational register into shorter-format material. The recognition is consistent with the work. Powell holds the Certified Speaking Professional designation, sits on the Forbes Coaching Council, and was inducted into the National Speakers Association Speaker Hall of Fame in 2022, a credential held by a small number of speakers globally and one buyers use as a quality filter when commissioning sales and leadership keynotes. Key speaking topics Sales strategy in uncertain markets Business growth and competitive advantage Leadership succession and pipeline development Sales team performance and culture Resilience and mental toughness in commercial roles Customer experience and buyer behaviour Ideal for Chief revenue officers, sales directors, and commercial leadership teams running national or global sales kickoffs CEOs and executive teams setting growth strategy under volatile demand conditions HR and talent leaders responsible for leadership succession in commercial functions Industry associations in banking, financial services, healthcare, and distribution sectors Audience outcomes A named nine-step framework for turning uncertainty into a source of competitive advantage, tied to real company evidence Specific commercial behaviours sales teams can adopt when the macro environment is working against them A succession-planning lens leaders can apply to the next eighteen months, not the next five years Sharper language for talking to customers when buying decisions are slower and more conservative

Why organisations work with Tim Munden His “inner and outer game” framework gives leadership teams a practical diagnostic for the gap between leadership intent and leadership behaviour, and a structured path to close it He built and ran global leadership development for Unilever’s 135,000-person workforce, including pipeline programmes for the most senior roles in the organisation; he knows what works at enterprise scale, not just in the classroom Unilever’s “Discover Your Purpose” programme, which he designed and led, reached 56,000 employees and was validated through randomised controlled trials, a level of rigour that most leadership interventions never reach He co-founded the Global Business Collaboration for Better Workplace Mental Health, giving him a credible and practical perspective on the link between psychological safety, energy, and sustained organisational performance His Senior Associate role at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership connects his leadership frameworks to the strategic context that boards increasingly expect their senior teams to navigate: purpose, resilience, and transformation for the longer term Biography highlights Former Chief Learning Officer and Head of Wellbeing at Unilever, responsible for leadership development and learning across a 135,000-person global workforce Former HR Vice President for Unilever UK & Ireland, a €2.5bn business unit Senior Associate, Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), University of Cambridge Partner at inchigo, a leadership and culture consultancy Co-founded the Global Business Collaboration for Better Workplace Mental Health; represented Unilever on the UK Thriving at Work Leadership Council Developed Unilever’s “Discover Your Purpose” programme, reaching 56,000 employees with outcomes validated through randomised controlled trials Joined Unilever as a graduate trainee in 1993; career spans roles across the Netherlands, Belgium, the US, and the UK Holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from the University of Manchester and Manchester School of Management Biography Leadership development in large organisations has a persistent failure mode: it develops individuals in isolation from the organisational culture that will either enable or undermine everything they have learned. Tim Munden spent the better part of three decades inside one of the world’s most complex multinationals working on both sides of that problem simultaneously. As Chief Learning Officer and Head of Wellbeing at Unilever, Munden was accountable for leadership capability across a 135,000-person workforce. His approach centred on what he describes as the “inner and outer game” of leadership. The inner game is the psychological clarity, purpose, and resilience that allows a leader to act under pressure; the outer game is the cultural architecture and organisational design that gives people the conditions to perform. Neither works without the other. That dual framework now shapes how he advises executive teams and consults with organisations across financial services, technology, pharmaceuticals, and consumer goods. The practical rigour behind his work is verifiable. The “Discover Your Purpose” programme Munden designed at Unilever was completed by 56,000 employees, with outcomes tested through randomised controlled trials. Those outcomes included improved psychological safety, work fulfilment, and discretionary effort. He also co-founded the Global Business Collaboration for Better Workplace Mental Health and represented Unilever on the UK Thriving at Work Leadership Council, establishing workplace wellbeing not as a wellbeing initiative but as a leadership strategy with measurable business consequences. Since leaving Unilever, Munden has continued this work as a Partner at inchigo, a leadership and culture consultancy, and as a Senior Associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, where the link between leadership capability and long-term organisational resilience is a central research concern. He brings to boards and senior leadership teams a rare combination: he has operated at CLO level inside a global organisation and has built the frameworks to explain and replicate what makes leadership development work in practice. Key speaking topics Leadership capability for disruption and transformation Leadership agility, resilience and adaptability through change The inner and outer game of leadership Human skills for leadership in the age of AI Purpose-driven culture and organisations Workplace wellbeing as a performance strategy Leadership development at enterprise scale Psychological safety and organisational agility Ideal for CHROs, Chief People Officers, and senior HR leadership teams designing enterprise leadership strategy CEOs and executive committees navigating significant transformation or cultural change Learning and development leaders building or evaluating large-scale leadership programmes Boards and remuneration committees examining the link between leadership culture and long-term organisational resilience Audience outcomes A clear model, the inner and outer game, for diagnosing where leadership capability is breaking down and what to do about it Practical understanding of how purpose can be embedded in organisational culture at scale, with evidence from a large, tested programme A more precise vocabulary for the link between psychological safety, wellbeing, and sustained performance, moving the conversation beyond wellbeing as an HR initiative Insight into what enterprise-scale leadership development actually requires, drawn from direct experience at one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies Clearer thinking on the leadership capabilities most needed to maintain performance in periods of sustained uncertainty

Why organisations work with Jochen Zeitz He originated the Environmental Profit & Loss Account at PUMA – the first methodology to assign monetary values to environmental impact across a full corporate supply chain. The UK government cited it in its 2011 Natural Environment White Paper as a best-practice case in sustainable business. He has led turnarounds at three global brands – PUMA, Kering, and Harley-Davidson – as the accountable executive. The sustainability work he is known for was built under genuine commercial pressure, not alongside it. His commercial record – approximately $4 billion in annual PUMA revenue, around 4,000% share price growth, and three Financial Times Strategist of the Year honours – separates his sustainability argument from advocacy. Boards engage with this material as strategy. His 4Cs framework – conservation, community, culture, commerce – is a tested model for aligning environmental accountability with long-term commercial viability, embedded in a live enterprise across 50,000 acres of wildlife habitat in Kenya. As co-founder of The B Team with Sir Richard Branson – a coalition of 24 global business leaders including Paul Polman and Mo Ibrahim – he has been central to building the most credible executive-led case for redefining the corporate bottom line. Biography highlights Chairman and CEO of PUMA for 18 years (1993-2011); the youngest CEO in German history to head a publicly listed company, appointed at age 30 Led PUMA from near-bankruptcy to approximately $4 billion in annual revenue, with share price growth of approximately 4,000% Conceived and launched the Environmental Profit & Loss Account at PUMA (2011) – the first monetary valuation of environmental impact across a corporate supply chain; cited as a best-practice case in the UK government’s Natural Environment White Paper Chairman of Kering’s Sustainable Development Committee and CSO of Kering’s Sport & Lifestyle division; President, CEO and Chairman of Harley-Davidson (2020-2025) Financial Times Strategist of the Year three times; Germany’s Federal Cross of Merit (2004); ZSL Conservation Fellow; Honorary Warden of Kenya Co-author of The Breakthrough Challenge (with John Elkington, 2014) and The Manager and the Monk (2012, published in 15 languages); co-founder of The B Team with Sir Richard Branson and of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa Biography Until 2011, no major corporation had put a monetary value on what it cost the natural world. PUMA changed that. Jochen Zeitz conceived the Environmental Profit & Loss Account – the first framework to assign monetary values to environmental impact across a full corporate supply chain. It quantified PUMA’s 2010 footprint at €145 million and established a commercial language for environmental accountability that organisations across multiple sectors have since adapted. The EP&L came out of 18 years as PUMA’s CEO – a tenure that began when Zeitz was 30 and the company was near bankruptcy. He became the youngest CEO in German history to head a public company. Under his leadership, PUMA grew annual revenue to approximately $4 billion and share price by around 4,000%. That commercial track record is what makes the sustainability framework credible: it was built not alongside a turnaround, but as part of one. At Kering, Zeitz chaired the Sustainable Development Committee and served as CSO of the Sport & Lifestyle division, embedding the same approach across a portfolio of global luxury brands. He became President, CEO and Chairman of Harley-Davidson in 2020, leading the Rewire and Hardwire strategic resets that refocused the company on its most profitable segments and strongest brand identity. He retired from Harley-Davidson in October 2025. Beyond his executive roles, Zeitz co-founded The B Team with Sir Richard Branson, convening global business leaders to advance a redefined model of corporate accountability. He co-authored The Breakthrough Challenge (with John Elkington, 2014) and The Manager and the Monk (2012, published in 15 languages). The Financial Times has named him Strategist of the Year three times. His 4Cs framework – linking conservation, community, culture and commerce – underpins the Zeitz Foundation’s work across 50,000 acres of wildlife habitat in Kenya. Key speaking topics Environmental Profit and Loss accounting Corporate turnaround and brand transformation ESG integration into commercial strategy Responsible capitalism and redefined value creation Conservation-commerce models and the 4Cs framework Purpose-driven corporate governance Ideal for Boards and executive leadership teams navigating ESG integration into commercial strategy Chief Sustainability Officers and ESG leads building environmental measurement frameworks Corporate strategy and transformation teams leading large-scale brand or business model renewal Investor forums and governance audiences focused on long-term value creation and accountability Audience outcomes A clearer understanding of how environmental impact can be quantified in commercial terms, using the EP&L as a working reference Practical perspective on the conditions under which sustainability can be embedded into core strategy rather than treated as a reporting obligation A framework for aligning conservation, community, culture and commerce as mutually reinforcing business priorities Insight into leading corporate turnarounds that require simultaneous commercial discipline and long-term accountability Grounded context for what responsible capitalism means at board level, drawn from governance experience across three major global brands

Why organisations work with Jamie Clarke He has an unusually specific evidence base for leadership under pressure: two Mount Everest summits, the Seven Summits, a 1,126 km camel crossing of the Empty Quarter, and two failed Everest attempts that shape how he talks about recovery. He is a named performance coach to the 2018 Stanley Cup winning Washington Capitals and Hockey Canada’s 2018 PyeongChang team, so his material translates into elite team environments, not just general audiences. His academic base at the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business Centre for Advanced Leadership gives the work a teaching structure, not only a story arc. He pairs expedition narrative with operator experience, having built and run LiveOutThere.com through growth, a Profit Hot 50 ranking in 2013 and eventual closure, so the failure material is first-hand. His delivery is built for senior audiences that have heard every motivational speaker before; the work is about decisions under uncertainty, not summit photography. Biography highlights Summited Mount Everest on 23 May 1997 and again on 17 May 2010, after two earlier unsuccessful attempts. Completed the Seven Summits between 1993 and 2008. Crossed the Empty Quarter of Arabia by camel in 1999, a 1,126 km, 40-day expedition with brother Leigh Clarke and Bruce Kirkby. Associate adjunct professor and fellow at the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business, Centre for Advanced Leadership. Performance coach for the 2018 Stanley Cup winning Washington Capitals and Hockey Canada in PyeongChang 2018. Author of Everest to Arabia (2001) and co-author of The Power of Passion with Alan Hobson, later republished as Above All Else: The Everest Dream. Founder of LiveOutThere.com, ranked No. 39 on Profit Magazine’s 2013 Hot 50. Biography The second Everest attempt came apart at 8,300 metres in 1994. The team Clarke was part of had the summit in reach and turned back. He went home, rebuilt the expedition, and made the top in 1997, then returned and did it again in 2010. Two failed attempts sit on the same CV as two successful ones, and that is the part of the story he now teaches from. The work is about what teams do in the hours after the plan stops working. Clarke has built a leadership practice on specific expedition evidence rather than metaphor: the 1997 and 2010 Everest summits, the 1,126 km Empty Quarter crossing by camel in 1999, the Seven Summits completed across fifteen years, and the 2019 Mongolian motorbike traverse with his son Khobe. Each expedition produced a different failure mode, which is the material he uses with senior teams. His academic base is the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business, where he is an associate adjunct professor and fellow in the Centre for Advanced Leadership. His coaching work has been with elite performance environments under real stakes, including the Washington Capitals through their 2018 Stanley Cup run and Hockey Canada at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics. Barry Trotz’s on-record comment after the Capitals won reads as a working review, not a blurb. Clarke also operated as a founder. LiveOutThere.com grew into a Profit Hot 50 retailer in 2013 and closed in 2017. He has run the inside of a business that did well and then did not, which is why the failure and recovery material in his talks sounds like first-hand accounting rather than adventure content. Key speaking topics Leadership under uncertainty Team performance in high-stakes environments Recovery after setback and failure Resilience and decision-making under stress Expedition leadership as organisational case study Culture and morale in long-cycle projects Coaching elite teams through pressure Ideal for CEOs and executive teams going into contested strategic bets Leadership development and executive education cohorts Sales and performance leaders preparing teams for long, high-pressure cycles Boards and senior groups that have already heard the standard motivational set Audience outcomes A sharper sense of how high-performing teams behave in the hours after a plan breaks. Specific expedition decisions, named and dated, that map onto organisational choices under pressure. A working language for separating recoverable setbacks from terminal ones. A clearer view of the leader’s job when morale, information and authority are all moving at once. Practical reference points drawn from elite hockey and Olympic environments, not generic motivation.

Why organisations work with Daniel Murray A mathematician and MBA-trained strategist who treats empathy as an operating discipline, not a soft skill, and ties it directly to team output and strategic alignment. Author of The Empathy Gap (Wiley, 2025), which gives leaders a structured vocabulary and method rather than another plea for kindness at work. Eighteen years inside financial services and corporate strategy work with organisations including Commonwealth Bank, QBE, IAG, Westpac and BHP, so the examples land with executives who have budget to defend. Known for the “Pirates and Passengers” framework for reading team dynamics, which gives managers a practical lens for diagnosing disengagement before it shows up in attrition numbers. Equally credible on the harder end of the topic: ethics, AI adoption and the trust collapse leaders face when they roll out systems their workforce does not understand. Biography highlights Founder and Director of Empathic Consulting, an Australian leadership advisory practice focused on strategic empathy, culture and performance. Author of The Empathy Gap: The Bridge to Real Connection and Lasting Influence, Wiley, 2025. Author of Aligning Culture and Strategy: How clarity, empathy and leadership drive high performance. Executive MBA and BSc in Mathematics; former internal strategy and management consultant within financial services. Keynote and leadership development work with Commonwealth Bank, IAG, QBE, Westpac, BHP, Toyota, News Corp, Allianz, Perpetual, ASX, Tyro Payments, Swiss Re and Transport for NSW. Podcast guest on The Empathy Edge, Candour Communication Podcast, XY Adviser and Your Digital Reputation. Biography Most senior leaders already believe empathy matters. The gap is between that belief and the operating habits that would make it visible in a weekly business review. Daniel Murray works on that gap, and he has spent close to two decades inside corporate strategy functions learning where it actually opens up. Murray founded Empathic Consulting after years as an internal strategy and management consultant in Australian financial services. His training is mathematical and his default is systems thinking, which is why his framing of empathy reads less like a values statement and more like a capability an executive can design for, measure, and coach. That thinking became a book in 2025, when Wiley published The Empathy Gap: The Bridge to Real Connection and Lasting Influence. The argument is that empathy is a strategic skill with a structure to it: perception, interpretation, response. Leaders who treat it that way pull better decisions out of mixed teams, reduce the hidden cost of disengagement, and hold harder conversations earlier. An earlier book, Aligning Culture and Strategy, laid the groundwork by making the case that culture only works when leaders stop treating it as a separate workstream from the strategy they are asking people to deliver. The client list is telling. Commonwealth Bank, IAG, QBE, Westpac, BHP, Toyota, News Corp, Allianz and Transport for NSW are organisations where the cost of a distracted leadership team is counted in basis points and safety incidents. That is the room Murray is useful in, and it is why his work on AI ethics and the “Pirates and Passengers” dynamic inside teams reaches people who would normally switch off the moment the word empathy entered the agenda. Key speaking topics Strategic empathy as a leadership capability Culture and strategy alignment Ethics and trust in AI adoption Team dynamics and disengagement Leadership in post-pandemic workplaces Executive decision-making under complexity Ideal for CEOs, executive committees and boards wrestling with culture change alongside a live strategic agenda CHROs and heads of leadership development designing senior leader programmes in financial services, infrastructure and professional services Transformation and change leaders rolling out AI or operating model shifts that require workforce trust to succeed Senior leader offsites where the brief is honest conversation and behaviour change, not another motivational keynote Audience outcomes A working definition of empathy that leaders can defend in a commercial conversation, not just an HR one A shared diagnostic language for team dynamics, including the Pirates and Passengers lens for disengagement Clearer thinking on how to introduce AI and analytics without eroding team trust Specific habits senior leaders can apply the next week in one-to-ones, escalations and town halls

Why organisations work with Divyanshu Ganatra He brings clinical psychology training together with a record of firsts in adventure sport, so the conversation about resilience is grounded in evidence rather than in motivational narrative alone. He runs Adventures Beyond Barriers Foundation, a working inclusion organisation, which means his content on inclusive leadership comes from operating practice with cross-disability teams, not from a deck. He is recognised by the Vice President of India through the National Award for the Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, which gives senior buyers a defensible credential when positioning the session internally. He speaks credibly to CXO forums and Fortune 500 audiences on attitudinal barriers, the specific tension that stalls most inclusion programmes once policy and quotas have been set. His material translates between personal decision-making under pressure and organisational decision-making under restructure, which makes him a fit for leadership offsites that need both registers. Biography highlights Founder, Adventures Beyond Barriers Foundation (ABBF), 2014, an inclusive adventure-sports organisation working across cross-disabilities. India’s first blind solo paraglider pilot, 29 April 2014. First blind tandem cyclist to complete the Manali to Khardung La route, 2016, the world’s highest motorable road, now ABBF’s flagship M2K expedition. First blind Indian to summit Mount Kilimanjaro, 2018. Master’s in Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Pune, where he was the first blind student to graduate in the field; clinical psychologist by training. National Award for the Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, presented by the Vice President of India; named among the Ten Outstanding Young Indians by the Junior Chamber International. Biography Most inclusion programmes inside large organisations stall at the same point. Policy is in place, quotas are tracked, and senior leaders still cannot describe what changed in how the organisation actually works. The blockage is rarely structural. It is attitudinal, and it sits with the leadership group itself. That is the tension Divyanshu Ganatra was trained to read. He lost his sight to glaucoma at nineteen and went on to become the first blind student to complete a Master’s in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pune. He works as a clinical psychologist, and the discipline shapes how he frames inclusion to senior audiences: as a behavioural and decision-making problem, not a values statement. In 2014 he founded Adventures Beyond Barriers Foundation, an inclusive adventure-sports organisation that puts people with and without disabilities into the same physical task. The same year, he became India’s first blind solo paraglider pilot. In 2016 he led the first blind tandem cycling crossing from Manali to Khardung La, the world’s highest motorable road, which now anchors ABBF’s annual M2K expedition. In 2018 he became the first blind Indian to summit Mount Kilimanjaro. The Vice President of India presented him with the National Award for the Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, and the Junior Chamber International named him among the Ten Outstanding Young Indians. With CXO forums and Fortune 500 audiences he treats those firsts as case material, not biography, working back from each one to the decision sequence that made it possible for a leadership team to use. Key speaking topics Inclusion as a leadership capability Attitudinal barriers and behavioural change Decision-making after personal and organisational shock Resilience grounded in cognitive neuroscience Disability and workplace inclusion Innovation through cross-ability collaboration Ideal for CHROs and DEI leads designing inclusion strategy beyond compliance Executive committees and leadership offsites focused on resilience and composure under pressure CXO forums and Fortune 500 leadership audiences working on culture change Boards and senior teams setting the inclusion agenda for the next reporting cycle Audience outcomes A reframing of inclusion from policy mechanic to leadership behaviour, with named attitudinal barriers to look for in their own organisation. A working model for decision-making in the period that follows acute personal or organisational shock. A clearer view of what cross-ability collaboration produces operationally, drawn from ABBF’s M2K expedition and other inclusive programmes. A direct first-person account of building competence after sight loss, used as case material for senior leaders managing reinvention in their own teams.

Why organisations work with Belinda Parmar She created the Global Empathy Index, a quantitative framework published in the Harvard Business Review, that links corporate empathy directly to earnings, productivity, and retention. Most culture-change work lacks a measurement baseline; her work provides one. Her “Empathy-In-Residence” model, embedded at Barclays, Lloyds, and Centrica over extended engagements, means her frameworks have been tested at operational scale inside major institutions, not only delivered from a keynote stage. Work with AGL produced a 20.9% reduction in customer complaints and $1.7 million in cost savings, giving finance and operations leaders a commercial language for empathy that sits alongside a P&L, not just a people strategy. She has developed an AI-powered Empathy Index combining large language models with sentiment analysis, positioning organisations to measure their human culture in real time as AI transformation programmes change the surrounding landscape. As a Non-Executive Director at the UK Ministry of Defence, she brings board-level governance experience in a complex institutional environment, giving her work a credibility context that most leadership and culture speakers do not hold. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of The Empathy Business (formerly Lady Geek), a consultancy specialising in embedding empathy into organisational leadership, culture, and operations Creator of the Global Empathy Index, published in the Harvard Business Review: the first index to establish a quantitative correlation between corporate empathy and commercial performance Appointed OBE in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to Women in Technology World Economic Forum Young Global Leader; keynote speaker at Davos (2019) Empathy-In-Residence at Barclays, Lloyds, and Centrica; established the first Empathy Hub in Europe’s largest bank Non-Executive Director, UK Ministry of Defence (appointed 2023) Author of Little Miss Geek and The Empathy Era: Women, Business and the New Pathway to Profit Featured in the Financial Times (2025); has written for The Guardian and the World Economic Forum Biography Organisations have spent a decade investing in AI while underinvesting in the human layer that AI cannot replace. Belinda Parmar’s work starts from a specific and uncomfortable question: if empathy is genuinely valuable to business performance, why can almost no organisation measure it? The Global Empathy Index, published in the Harvard Business Review, was built to answer that question. It ranks companies by empathy and connects those rankings directly to earnings, productivity, and retention. What makes her approach distinct is its operational depth. Through Empathy-In-Residence engagements at Barclays, Lloyds, and Centrica, she has deployed hundreds of evidence-based behavioural nudges: targeted interventions designed to shift culture from the inside rather than impose it from above. Work with AGL produced a 20.9% reduction in customer complaints, establishing empathy-led transformation as a driver of cost reduction, not only a people programme. AI has sharpened the question she has always asked. As generative AI absorbs more cognitive tasks, organisations face a practical leadership problem: how to identify, build, and retain the distinctly human capabilities that remain. Parmar has developed an AI-powered version of the Empathy Index, combining large language models with sentiment analysis, giving organisations a live measure of empathy in their culture as the technology landscape shifts around them. As a Non-Executive Director at the UK Ministry of Defence, she brings governance experience at an institutional level that most culture and leadership specialists do not access. She was appointed OBE for services to Women in Technology and named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Her books – Little Miss Geek and The Empathy Era – sit alongside her HBR contributions as a published body of argument for the commercial case for empathy. Key speaking topics Human leadership in an AI world Empathy as a measurable leadership capability Behavioural science and organisational culture change Responsible AI and human-centred technology Customer experience transformation Inclusive cultures and belonging at scale Diversity and inclusion in technology Ideal for C-suite and senior leadership teams navigating AI transformation who need a human leadership framework alongside their technology strategy CHROs and People Directors seeking to connect culture change to measurable commercial outcomes Customer Experience and Operations leaders in consumer-facing industries where complaint reduction and loyalty are live performance metrics Board and governance audiences where responsible AI and organisational values are on the agenda Audience outcomes A practical understanding of the Global Empathy Index methodology and how empathy can be measured and tracked within their own organisation A working toolkit of “empathy nudges” – evidence-based behavioural interventions that can be deployed without a large-scale transformation programme A commercial language for empathy: specific case references linking culture change to cost reduction and measurable operational improvement Clarity on where AI enhances human connection rather than replaces it – and what that distinction requires of leaders A working definition of human leadership applicable to their own AI deployment context