Change Management

Why organisations work with Chris Roebuck He designed and ran the leadership programme for UBS’s top 500 that is now taught at Harvard Business School as UBS: Towards the Integrated Firm. Few speakers can point to a live HBS case as evidence that their approach works at scale. He coined the corporate application of entrepreneurial leadership and has spent twenty years refining it in banks, government, healthcare, and the military. The Wikipedia entry on entrepreneurial leadership cites his definition. He operates as a practitioner first and a speaker second: former British Army officer, Head of Management Development at HSBC Investment Bank, Global Head of Leadership at UBS, Head of Culture Change at London Underground. The credibility in a boardroom is built in. HR Magazine named him one of HR’s Most Influential Thinkers ten times between 2009 and 2021, and inducted him into the HR Hall of Fame in 2025. That is the longest sustained recognition of any thinker on the list. Biography highlights Global Head of Leadership and Talent, UBS (2004 onward), leading the development programme for the bank’s top 500 leaders that became Harvard Business School case UBS: Towards the Integrated Firm Honorary Visiting Professor of Transformational Leadership, Cass Business School (2009–2021, the institution later rebranded Bayes) Inducted into the HR Hall of Fame by HR Magazine, July 2025; named one of HR’s Most Influential Thinkers ten times between 2009 and 2021, a record on the list Author of five leadership books, including Lead to Succeed (2014) and Strategic Leadership Development, co-authored with Professor Colin Carnall Expert panel member for the UK Government’s Engaging for Success review (2009), and author of The King’s Fund report on NHS leadership (2011) Contributor to Newsweek; quoted on leadership and organisational performance in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review China; 350+ television interviews across BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, Sky, and Al Jazeera Biography UBS between 2002 and 2006 is a useful place to start. A newly integrated global bank, 70,000 staff, a top team of 500 whose behaviour had to shift if the merger was going to hold. Chris Roebuck was the person, as Global Head of Leadership and Talent, who designed and ran the programme that got that behavioural shift. The work is now a Harvard Business School case study, UBS: Towards the Integrated Firm, and it is where the concept of entrepreneurial leadership, taking the behaviours of successful entrepreneurs and transplanting them into a large corporate, was first systematically applied in the corporate world. That practitioner record sits behind everything he now says from a stage. Before UBS, he was Head of Management Development at HSBC Investment Bank and ran culture change at London Underground during the partial privatisation. After UBS, he was commissioned by The King’s Fund to report to the UK Government on leadership in the NHS, and sat on the expert panel behind Engaging for Success, the UK Government’s review of employee engagement. He was Honorary Visiting Professor of Transformational Leadership at Cass Business School, now Bayes, from 2009 to 2021. The argument Roebuck brings to senior audiences is a hard one, because it refuses the usual levers. He tells leaders that the performance they are looking for is not hiding in a new strategy, a new tech stack, or a restructure. It is hiding in the way their top 200 people behave on a Tuesday morning. His Accelerate Your Success approach is built to make that behavioural gap visible, then close it, with the bottom line as the test. HR Magazine has named him one of its Most Influential Thinkers ten times; in July 2025 it inducted him into the HR Hall of Fame. The rare thing he does is connect that leadership argument to hard numbers. He is a trained economist, not a behavioural coach; he served as an officer in the British Army before moving into business; he has run programmes inside a global bank, the UK Civil Service, and a 1.4-million-person healthcare system. When he says ten percent of organisational performance is sitting unused, the claim is backed by work done at UBS, in the NHS, and at KPMG rather than by a slide deck. Key speaking topics Leadership during integration, transformation, and culture change Entrepreneurial leadership in large organisations Senior team behaviour and executive performance Talent identification and leadership pipelines Employee engagement as an organisational lever Leadership in conditions of uncertainty Human leadership in the AI era Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and C-suite teams running integrations, post-merger transformations, or major operating model change CHROs and Chief People Officers building a leadership and talent strategy that senior business leaders will take seriously Board and executive committee offsites where the subject is how top leadership needs to behave differently for the organisation to perform Public sector and military audiences looking at leadership reform in large, complex institutions Audience outcomes A clear view of where performance is being lost inside their own organisation, and which leadership behaviours are causing it The specific mechanics of how entrepreneurial leadership was built at UBS, and which elements transfer to their own sector A short set of actions senior leaders can take in the weeks after the session, tied to business outcomes rather than general development A more useful language for talking about leadership with their board, their HR function, and their top 100

Why organisations work with Jacques Villeneuve He is one of only two drivers in history, alongside Mario Andretti, to have won the Formula One World Championship, the CART IndyCar title, and the Indianapolis 500, which gives him a claim to performance at the highest level that almost no other speaker can match. His rookie Formula One records from 1996 (pole on debut in Australia, four wins, 11 podiums, 78 points) still stand, offering leadership audiences a concrete example of arriving inside an elite team and performing from day one. He brings an insider’s reading of how Formula One organisations align hundreds of engineers, mechanics, and commercial staff around a weekend deadline, useful for leaders managing complex global operations. A decade of analyst work for Sky Sport Italia and broader F1 broadcasting means he is fluent on camera and comfortable translating elite sport into plain language for corporate audiences. He speaks from direct experience of reinvention across disciplines, from CART to F1 to sportscars at Le Mans to NASCAR at Daytona, which grounds conversations about adapting when the rules of your industry change. Biography highlights 1997 Formula One World Drivers’ Champion with Williams, Canada’s first F1 world champion. 1995 Indianapolis 500 winner and 1995 CART IndyCar Series champion with Team Green. 1996 Formula One debut season with Williams: pole in his first race, four victories, 11 podiums, runner-up in the championship. Second overall at the 2008 24 Hours of Le Mans with the Peugeot 908 HDi FAP alongside Marc Gene and Nicolas Minassian. Competed in the 2022 Daytona 500 with Team Hezeberg, finishing 22nd. F1 analyst for Sky Sport Italia since 2013 and confirmed on the Sky Sports F1 broadcast team for 2026. Biography Very few drivers have ever held the three races that define the sport. Fewer still have held them the way Jacques Villeneuve did, inside three seasons, on two continents, before turning 27. The 1995 Indianapolis 500, the 1995 CART championship, and the 1997 Formula One World Championship sit together on a record that only Mario Andretti also owns. His arrival in Formula One in 1996 is the part that tends to interest leadership audiences. Williams put him in the car, he put it on pole in Melbourne, and he ended the year with four wins, 11 podiums, and a set of rookie records that have not been beaten since. The following season he won the title in a championship-deciding race at Jerez against Michael Schumacher. After Williams, Villeneuve spent five seasons helping build the British American Racing team from a start-up into a Formula One constructor, then went on to contest the 24 Hours of Le Mans for Peugeot, finishing second in 2008, and later qualified for the 2022 Daytona 500 at the age of 50. The common thread is a driver who kept stepping into unfamiliar machinery and making it work. He now speaks, writes, and broadcasts about the sport, including a long-running analyst role with Sky Sport Italia since 2013 and a confirmed seat on the Sky Sports F1 team for 2026. For corporate audiences, he is useful on the same question that sits behind every race weekend: how leaders and teams hold their standard when the conditions keep changing and the margin for error is measured in tenths. Key speaking topics High-performance culture in elite teams Decision-making under pressure Composure and focus in competitive environments Leadership inside Formula One organisations Safety, risk, and calculated aggression Reinvention across disciplines and formats Teamwork in deadline-driven operations Ideal for Executive leadership teams preparing for high-stakes decision cycles Sales kick-offs and commercial leadership conferences focused on competitive edge Client events hosted by brands with motorsport, engineering, or performance heritage Operations and engineering leadership audiences interested in elite-team execution Audience outcomes A first-person account of how world-class drivers and teams prepare for moments where hesitation is the failure mode. A view from inside Formula One on how large technical organisations align around a weekend deadline they cannot move. Language leaders can take back to their own teams about composure, standards, and the difference between aggression and recklessness. A sharper sense of what sustained high performance actually costs, across a career rather than a single season.

Why organisations work with Karun Chandhok He has lived inside two of the most exposed environments in elite sport: the cockpit of a backmarker F1 team trying to build a car around him, and a Sky Sports broadcast booth analysing the same paddock in real time. He sits on the Motorsport UK Board and the FIA Drivers’ Commission, so the governance, safety and DEI conversations he brings into the room are ones he is actively shaping, not commenting on from the outside. He translates how F1 teams turn millions of data points per race into decisive calls that engineers, strategists and a driver all act on within seconds, with examples a non-motorsport audience can follow. He is one of only two Indians ever to race in Formula One, which gives weight to his work on talent pipelines, representation and what it takes to break into a closed competitive system. He is a working broadcaster for a global audience, so the keynote is paced and structured for the room rather than delivered as a career retrospective. Biography highlights 11 Formula One Grand Prix starts for Hispania Racing in 2010 and Team Lotus in 2011. Sky Sports F1 analyst, co-commentator and pit-lane reporter, full-time since 2019. Board Director, Motorsport UK, and member of its Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee. Founding member of the FIA Drivers’ Commission since 2013, with further roles on the FIA Single Seater Commission and Driver Grading Committee. Williams Heritage driver since 2016, demonstrating the team’s championship-winning cars. Author of “Drive to Victory: Incredible True Stories from the Fastest Sport in the World”, Hachette Children’s, 2025. Biography A modern Formula One team is roughly a thousand engineers, strategists and operations staff who have to redesign their product every two weeks, inside a moving regulatory frame, while a driver they have never met executes the result on television. Karun Chandhok has been the driver in that picture, the analyst describing it for Sky Sports F1, and a director on the boards that write the rules around it. He raced 11 Grands Prix for Hispania Racing and Team Lotus, becoming the second Indian to compete in the championship. From there he moved into the FIA World Endurance Championship and five starts at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, then drove for Mahindra Racing in the inaugural Formula E season. The breadth matters: very few people have raced across the three categories actively reshaping motorsport’s relationship with technology, sustainability and global audiences. Since 2019 he has been part of the core Sky Sports F1 line-up as analyst, co-commentator and pit-lane reporter. The role is unusual because it sits between the engineers and the public; he has to read live telemetry, strategy calls and team radio quickly enough to explain them on air, and accurately enough that the paddock will keep talking to him next weekend. His governance work gives the keynote its third dimension. He has served on the FIA Drivers’ Commission since 2013 and joined the Motorsport UK board in 2021, where he sits on the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee. Those seats are why his material on talent pipelines, safety reform and competitive integrity carries authority that most sports speakers cannot match. Key speaking topics Decision-making in high-pressure performance environments Leadership and team coordination in elite motorsport Data, technology and human judgement in Formula One Safety, governance and regulatory change Diversity, inclusion and talent pipelines in closed competitive systems Continuous transformation under external pressure Global sport as a commercial and operational system Ideal for Executive teams and boards working through sustained operational or regulatory change. CHROs, DEI leads and talent functions building pipelines into historically closed industries. Engineering, technology and data leadership audiences interested in how F1 turns data into action. Sales conferences and client events where a credible, broadcast-quality headline speaker is needed. Audience outcomes A clearer view of how elite teams sustain judgement and coordination when conditions keep shifting. A working sense of how F1 organisations turn data and technology into faster human decisions. Specific examples of how regulation, safety and competitive performance trade against each other inside a sport. A more honest picture of what genuine inclusion looks like in a sector that historically locked talent out.

Why organisations work with Niven Postma She gives executive teams a vocabulary and method for organisational politics that most leadership programmes refuse to address directly, anchored in her Harvard Business Review article and her best-selling book on the subject. She has run the function from the inside: Head of Leadership and Culture at Standard Bank Group, Head of the South African Reserve Bank Academy, CEO of the Businesswomen’s Association of South Africa. Her work travels across financial services, retail, media, transport and manufacturing, so the politics framework is tested against very different operating environments rather than one sector’s habits. She holds a recognised platform in African leadership development as Programme Director of the Archbishop Tutu Leadership Fellowship, run by the African Leadership Institute in partnership with Oxford University. She codified her approach into a LinkedIn Learning course aimed at senior leaders, which means the content is structured for executive use, not anecdote-driven keynote material. Biography highlights Author, If You Don’t Do Politics, Politics Will Do You (2020). Harvard Business Review contributor; “You Can’t Sit Out Office Politics” (2021), selected for HBR Press collection Bosses, Coworkers and Building Great Relationships (2024). LinkedIn Learning instructor, Navigating Organizational Politics as a Senior Leader. Former CEO, Businesswomen’s Association of South Africa; former Head, South African Reserve Bank Academy; former Head of Leadership and Culture, Standard Bank Group. 2007 Archbishop Tutu Leadership Fellow; Programme Director of the Tutu Fellowship Programme from 2025 (African Leadership Institute, with Oxford University). Lecturer at Henley Business School and managing director of Niven Postma Inc. Biography Office politics are usually treated as something serious leaders should rise above. Niven Postma’s argument, set out in her Harvard Business Review article and her 2020 book If You Don’t Do Politics, Politics Will Do You, is the opposite. At senior levels, politics is the work. Influence capital and relationship currency decide which strategies get resourced, which leaders get promoted, and which decisions actually stick. Her credibility on the subject comes from having held the seat. She was Head of Leadership and Culture for Standard Bank Group, the largest bank by assets in Africa, after running the South African Reserve Bank Academy and serving as the founding CEO of the Businesswomen’s Association of South Africa. From those roles, she saw which executives understood how organisations really work and which ones did not, and built her practice around closing that gap. Today she advises executive teams across financial services, retail, media, transport and manufacturing through her firm Niven Postma Inc., lectures at Henley Business School, and teaches Navigating Organizational Politics as a Senior Leader on LinkedIn Learning. Her HBR piece “You Can’t Sit Out Office Politics” was selected for the HBR Press collection Bosses, Coworkers and Building Great Relationships in 2024. In 2025 she became Programme Director of the Archbishop Tutu Leadership Fellowship, the African Leadership Institute’s flagship programme run with Oxford University, having been a Fellow herself in 2007. That role situates her work in a wider conversation about how African senior leaders develop the practical political judgement complex organisations require. Key speaking topics Organisational politics for senior leaders Leadership and culture in complex organisations Executive presence and influence Women’s leadership and systemic gender equity Leading through disruption and change Culture transformation in financial services and large enterprises Ideal for C-suite and executive committees in banking, insurance and large regulated enterprises CHROs, chief people officers and heads of leadership development are designing senior-leader curricula High-potential leadership cohorts and women’s executive networks Boards and management teams operating across multiple geographies or post-merger contexts Audience outcomes A direct, non-euphemistic vocabulary for the political dynamics that shape decisions in their organisation A practical reading of where their own influence capital sits and which relationships are under-invested A framework for engaging in politics ethically without retreating into “I just focus on the work” Sharper judgement about how strategy, culture and politics interact at the top of complex organisations Specific moves senior leaders can use the next week, drawn from her HBR work and the LinkedIn Learning course

Why organisations work with Lisa Bodell She attacks the root cause most innovation programmes ignore. Her thesis is that complexity, not a lack of ideas, is what stops large companies from changing. She brings a tested operational toolkit, including the “Kill a Stupid Rule” exercise and the Why Simple Wins toolkit, that teams can run inside the business the week after the keynote. Her client list runs through hard-to-move organisations such as Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, Bloomberg, Google, SAP and Citigroup, where the simplification argument has to survive contact with regulated, matrixed environments. Her two Routledge books, Kill the Company (Axiom Best Business Book Award, 2014) and Why Simple Wins, give leadership teams a shared language and a structured method that outlasts the session. She is a working operator, not only a writer. She has run FutureThink for more than two decades and writes monthly for Forbes, so the material is being pressure-tested in the field continuously. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of FutureThink, an innovation and simplification training firm working with global enterprise clients since 2003. Author of Why Simple Wins (Routledge) and Kill the Company (Routledge / Bibliomotion), the latter an Axiom Best Business Book Award winner. Monthly contributor to Forbes; quoted or published in Fast Company, WIRED, The New York Times, Inc., Bloomberg Businessweek, Harvard Business Review, FOX News and CNN. TEDxNormal speaker, “How Simplification is the Key to Change”. Named to the Forbes “50 Leading Female Futurists” list in 2020. Has taught innovation at American University and Fordham University, and worked with clients including Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, Bloomberg, Google, SAP and Citigroup. Biography Most innovation problems inside large companies are not idea problems. The pipeline is full. The strategy decks exist. What is missing is room to act on any of it, because calendars, approval chains and legacy rules have absorbed the working week. This is the territory Lisa Bodell has built a career on. She is the founder and CEO of FutureThink, which she launched in 2003 to do something narrower and more useful than most innovation consulting. Rather than add another framework, FutureThink helps leadership teams remove. Remove low-value meetings, remove obsolete rules, remove the tasks that consume capacity without producing decisions. The argument is that simplification is the precondition for innovation, not a side benefit. That argument runs through her two books with Routledge, Kill the Company and Why Simple Wins. Kill the Company, which won the 2014 Axiom Best Business Book Award, is built around a simple inversion: instead of asking how to grow, ask how a competitor would put you out of business, and act on the answer. Why Simple Wins extends the method into a practical toolkit for stripping out the work that does not matter, with exercises like “Kill a Stupid Rule” that have been used inside companies including Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, Bloomberg and Google. Bodell writes monthly for Forbes and has been featured in Fast Company, WIRED, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review and Bloomberg Businessweek. Forbes named her to its 2020 list of 50 Leading Female Futurists. The reason senior teams keep booking her is narrower than that profile suggests. She gives leaders a defensible reason, and a method, for taking things off the plate. Key speaking topics Organisational simplification Innovation and disruption Killing complexity in large organisations Future of work and ways of working Change and culture transformation Provocative questioning as a leadership tool Creating capacity for higher-value work Ideal for CEOs and executive teams trying to free up capacity inside complex, matrixed organisations. Chief Strategy, Transformation and Innovation Officers running enterprise-wide change programmes. Operations and HR leaders auditing meetings, rules and processes that no longer earn their place. Leadership offsites and innovation summits where the brief is to provoke, not to inform. Audience outcomes A direct case for treating complexity, not idea generation, as the binding constraint on innovation. A set of named exercises, including “Kill a Stupid Rule” and the Why Simple Wins toolkit, that teams can run on Monday morning. A sharper question set for leadership meetings, modelled on the Kill the Company method. A shared language for distinguishing low-value busywork from work that produces decisions and outcomes. Permission, from a credible outside voice, to remove rather than add.

Why organisations work with Isabel Aguilera Navarro She has run the Iberian or Southern European business of three of the most scrutinised multinationals in the world (Dell, Google, GE) and can speak from the CEO chair, not the consultant’s deck. She sits on the boards of five listed and regulated companies spanning cement, real estate, biotech, digital advertising and water, giving her a cross-sector read on how governance and transformation actually play out at board level. She chairs the Audit and Control Committee of Lar Espana, a role that forces her to translate strategic ambition into numbers, risk and control, which is exactly the language CFOs and chairs want to hear from a speaker. She has held an Executive in Residence position at Esade Business School in Strategy and General Management for over two decades, so the frameworks she uses are taught as well as lived. She wrote a full book on intelligent digital transformation, Lo que estaba por llegar ya esta aqui, giving audiences a defined thesis rather than a collection of anecdotes. Biography highlights President, General Electric Spain and Portugal (2008 to 2009). General Manager, Google Spain and Portugal (2006 to 2008), leading the set-up of Google Iberia. CEO, Dell Computer for Spain, Italy and Portugal (1997 to 2002). Operations Director, NH Hotel Group (2002 to 2005). Independent director of Cemex, Lar Espana, Oryzon Genomics, Canal de Isabel II and Making Science; chair of the Audit and Control Committee at Lar Espana. Executive in Residence, Department of Strategy and General Management, Esade Business School; former President of the Social Council of the University of Seville. Author of Lo que estaba por llegar ya esta aqui: Secretos de la transformacion digital inteligente (LID Editorial, 2016). Biography Most transformation programmes fail in the gap between the boardroom and the country P&L. Isabel Aguilera Navarro has spent her career working in that gap. She stood up Google’s operation in Spain and Portugal, then moved across to run General Electric in the same region, having earlier led Dell’s Iberian and Italian business through the years in which Dell took the top of the PC market in Europe. That sequence, Dell then NH Hoteles then Google then GE, is unusual. It put her inside a Silicon Valley growth company, a Spanish hospitality group, a consumer technology brand at its commercial peak and an American industrial conglomerate, each at the moment the business model was being rewritten. The operating lessons translate directly into how she now advises boards. Today she sits as an independent director of Cemex, Lar Espana, Oryzon Genomics, Canal de Isabel II and Making Science, chairing the Audit and Control Committee at Lar Espana. The mix is deliberate: heavy industry, commercial real estate, biotech, a regulated water utility and a digital advertising firm. Few speakers can move between those governance contexts with credibility, and fewer still have done so while also holding an Executive in Residence role at Esade Business School. Her book Lo que estaba por llegar ya esta aqui argues that the digital transformation leaders were preparing for has already arrived, and the remaining work is organisational rather than technological. Financial Times and Fortune have both included her in their European and global rankings of senior women in business, and the Wall Street Journal named her among the 30 Most Influential Business Women in Europe in 2001 for her work at Dell. Key speaking topics Corporate governance and board strategy Digital transformation in established businesses Leadership across industries and operating models Strategy and competitive positioning Innovation inside large organisations Technology company operating culture Ideal for Boards and nominating committees preparing for a strategy refresh or a digital transformation programme. CEOs and executive committees of large, multi-country businesses navigating technology and operating-model change. Audit and risk committees looking to translate strategic ambition into governance, numbers and control. Leadership programmes for senior women in business and cross-sector executive development audiences. Audience outcomes A board-level view of where digital transformation programmes tend to break inside real P&Ls, drawn from three country-CEO seats. A clearer sense of how governance structures can either accelerate or stall strategic change, from someone who chairs an audit and control committee. Specific contrasts between how Silicon Valley, American industrials and European operators approach the same strategic problem. Frameworks from Esade’s Strategy and General Management faculty, tested against sitting boards in cement, real estate, biotech and water. Reference points from her book on intelligent digital transformation that audiences can take back into their own planning cycles.

Why organisations work with Herminia Ibarra She supplies the missing operating manual for executive transitions. Her research names the specific trap, clinging to a proven identity, that causes capable leaders to stall in bigger roles. She owns a published, citable framework. “Outsight”, the principle that leaders think their way into new behaviours by acting first, gives a leadership team a shared vocabulary it can actually use on a Monday morning. Her HBR article “The Authenticity Paradox” reframed a live boardroom debate. It is one of the few pieces of leadership writing that gives senior teams permission to experiment with styles that do not yet feel like “them”. She sits at the top of the field by external measure, not self-description. Fellow of the British Academy, multi-cycle Thinkers50 listee, 2013 Thinkers50 Leadership Award, Charles Handy Chair at LBS. She speaks to succession, sponsorship, and women’s advancement with the same empirical grounding, which matters for organisations running serious talent and inclusion agendas rather than performative ones. Biography highlights Charles Handy Professor of Organisational Behaviour, London Business School; prior faculty posts at INSEAD and Harvard Business School. Fellow of the British Academy (elected 2019). Multi-cycle Thinkers50 ranked thinker; winner of the Thinkers50 Leadership Award, 2013. Author of Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader (Harvard Business Review Press) and Working Identity (Harvard Business Press), translated into 16 languages. Judge, Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award; member, World Economic Forum Expert Network; Governor of London Business School. Ph.D. in Organisational Behaviour, Yale University (National Science Fellow). Biography Capable executives often stall in their first genuinely senior role. The research by Herminia Ibarra explains why: they try to think their way into the new job from the inside, when the only reliable route is the opposite. Act first, reflect later, and let the new behaviours gradually reshape how you see yourself. That argument, captured in her book Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader and in the “outsight” principle, is what most distinguishes her work. Her HBR article “The Authenticity Paradox” extended the case into one of the thorniest topics in executive development, how leaders can experiment with unfamiliar styles without feeling like frauds. Working Identity, her earlier book, has been translated into 16 languages and sits on the Thinkers50 Management Classics list. Ibarra holds the Charles Handy Chair at London Business School, with prior tenured posts at INSEAD and Harvard Business School. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, a multi-cycle Thinkers50 honoree, winner of the 2013 Thinkers50 Leadership Award, and a Governor of LBS. She also judges the Financial Times Business Book of the Year and sits in the World Economic Forum Expert Network. For a leadership team wrestling with succession, executive transitions, or the gap between the leader a company has and the leader it now needs, few academics anywhere offer a more precise diagnosis or a more usable set of moves. Key speaking topics Executive transitions and stepping up to bigger roles Leadership identity and the authenticity paradox Career reinvention and the “outsight” principle Leadership in the age of AI Sponsorship, succession, and women’s advancement Authentic leadership development Organisational reinvention under change Ideal for CHROs and chief talent officers redesigning executive development and succession pipelines CEOs and boards planning leadership transitions at the top team Senior leaders stepping into enterprise-wide or first-time general management roles Inclusion, sponsorship, and high-potential programmes for underrepresented senior talent Audience outcomes A clear diagnosis of why smart executives stall in bigger roles and what to do about it Language and examples for leading through a change in identity, not just a change in strategy A usable principle, “outsight”, that senior leaders can apply to their own weekly calendar A sharper view of authenticity that replaces “be yourself” with a more workable standard for growth Practical cues for building sponsorship and succession conversations that actually move careers

Why organisations work with Dr Gaia Grant A working University of Sydney Business School researcher whose doctoral thesis on sustainable innovation drew on 70+ global leader interviews and 4,000+ survey responses, so the frameworks she presents are tested data, not opinion. Two Wiley-published books, “The Innovation Race” and “Who Killed Creativity?”, that give buyers a defined intellectual position they can preview before booking. Proprietary diagnostics, the Innovative Change Leader Profile (iCLi) and the Polar Positioning tool, that let an executive team locate where their own innovation culture is breaking down rather than receive a generic talk. Two decades of advisory work with Google, JP Morgan, Visa, Salesforce, Boeing, Deloitte Digital and KPMG, which means the examples in the room land at the level senior teams operate at. A specific argument on ambidextrous leadership, the discipline of running today’s business and tomorrow’s at the same time, which is the actual problem most innovation programmes fail on. Biography highlights Researcher and lecturer in innovation, University of Sydney Business School, Discipline of Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Co-author of “The Innovation Race” (Wiley, 2016) and the international bestseller “Who Killed Creativity?” (Wiley). Executive Director of Tirian, an international consultancy with client work across more than 30 countries. Creator of the Innovative Change Leader Profile (iCLi) and the Polar Positioning (PoP) tool, used inside corporate innovation and leadership programmes. Featured in Harvard Business Review, BBC, ABC TV, Reuters, Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal. Speaker and facilitator for Salesforce, Gartner Symposium, the World Presidents Organization, Google, JP Morgan, Boeing, KPMG and Deloitte Digital. Biography Innovation budgets keep rising while breakthrough output keeps falling. The gap is not a creativity problem; it is a culture and leadership problem, and that is the territory Dr Gaia Grant has spent her career mapping. Her doctoral research at the University of Sydney Business School, drawing on more than 70 interviews with global innovation leaders and over 4,000 survey responses, set out to identify what actually makes innovation sustainable inside large organisations. The work produced a set of diagnostics, the Innovative Change Leader Profile (iCLi) and the Polar Positioning tool, that locate where a leadership team is collapsing into one mode (efficiency, control, short-term certainty) at the expense of the other (exploration, risk, long-horizon bets). That argument runs through her two Wiley books. “Who Killed Creativity?”, co-authored with Andrew Grant, became an international bestseller by treating the loss of creative capacity as an organisational and cultural diagnosis rather than a personal failing. “The Innovation Race” extends the analysis to whole companies and economies, framing the central problem as ambidextrous leadership: the practical discipline of running the existing business and the next one at the same time. As Executive Director of Tirian, she works with Google, JP Morgan, Visa, Salesforce, Boeing, Deloitte Digital and KPMG, which gives her the rarer asset in this field: live evidence of where the published frameworks hold up under operating pressure and where they have to be retuned. Her commentary and research have appeared in Harvard Business Review, BBC, Reuters, Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal. Key speaking topics Innovation leadership and culture Ambidextrous leadership and the explore/exploit tension Sustainable innovation and purpose-driven growth Creative thinking inside large organisations Change leadership and cultural transformation Responsible decision-making about new technologies, including AI Future-proofing leadership for digital transformation Ideal for CEOs, CSOs and innovation leads commissioning enterprise innovation programmes that need to move past pilot stage. CHROs and chief learning officers building leadership development around adaptive and ambidextrous capability. Boards and executive teams confronting the trade-off between core-business performance and long-horizon investment. Transformation and culture leads inside professional services, financial services and technology firms. Audience outcomes A clear diagnosis of where their own organisation’s innovation culture is breaking down, framed against the iCLi and Polar Positioning models. A working vocabulary for the explore/exploit trade-off that leadership teams can apply to specific portfolio decisions. Evidence-based examples from Google, JP Morgan, Salesforce, Boeing and similar firms on what works and what fails. A defensible position on responsible adoption of new technologies, including AI, inside an existing operating culture. Confidence to challenge the assumption that “more creativity training” will fix what is fundamentally a leadership and structural problem.

Why organisations work with Diana Renner Her book Not Knowing (CMI Management Book of the Year, translated into 15+ languages) makes a specific, counterintuitive argument: that the pressure to project expertise and have answers actively impairs leadership in genuinely complex situations. This is a diagnosis most leadership development programmes avoid, and a conversation senior leadership teams rarely have with rigour. She works at the intersection of three distinct bodies of knowledge – adaptive leadership, adult development theory, and process oriented psychology – a combination that addresses not only what organisations need to do differently, but how leaders must develop as people. This is not available from single-discipline practitioners. Her guest faculty roles at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and the University of Texas LBJ School of Government confirm that her frameworks hold up in rigorous, peer-reviewed executive education settings alongside practitioner application. Through the Uncharted Leadership Institute and programme partnerships with Melbourne Business School, Monash Business School, the University of Adelaide, and the Australian Institute of Police Management, she has built and tested leadership development approaches across commercial, government, and community contexts at scale. Her personal biography – leaving Romania in 1987, professional reinvention across law, refugee advocacy, and leadership development – gives the Not Knowing framework lived authority that purely academic treatments of the same topic cannot match. Biography highlights Co-author of Not Knowing: The Art of Turning Uncertainty into Opportunity (LID Publishing) – CMI Management Book of the Year 2015; translated into 15+ languages Co-author of Not Doing: The Art of Effortless Action (LID Publishing, 2018) Director and co-founder, Uncharted Leadership Institute (est. 2016); creator, Not Knowing Lab Senior Lecturer, Monash University; adjunct lecturer, University of Adelaide; associate, Melbourne Business School Guest faculty, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government and University of Texas LBJ School of Government 2017 Monash University Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award (Global Challenges Honours Program teaching team) Biography Diana Renner’s book Not Knowing: The Art of Turning Uncertainty into Opportunity, co-written with Steven D’Souza, won the Chartered Management Institute’s Management Book of the Year in 2015. Its thesis is direct: the pressure to project expertise and certainty is often what makes complex adaptive challenges harder to navigate, not easier. Translated into more than fifteen languages, it has become a reference for leadership development practitioners and senior teams working with genuine strategic uncertainty. The book draws on a distinction most leadership frameworks collapse: technical problems can be solved with existing expertise, while adaptive challenges require new thinking and development. Renner’s work through the Uncharted Leadership Institute, which she co-founded in 2016, is built around helping senior leaders recognise which they are facing – and develop the capacity to engage productively with the latter. Her practice draws on three distinct disciplines: adaptive leadership, adult development theory, and process oriented psychology. Together, these address not only what organisations need to do differently, but how leaders need to develop as people to lead well in conditions of genuine uncertainty. Programme partnerships with Melbourne Business School, Monash Business School, the University of Adelaide, and the Australian Institute of Police Management have tested these frameworks across commercial, government, and community contexts. Renner holds a Senior Lectureship at Monash University and has served as guest faculty at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and the University of Texas LBJ School of Government. Her second book, Not Doing: The Art of Effortless Action (2018), extends the Not Knowing argument into the territory of executive effectiveness – examining how excessive busyness and compulsive doing undermine the quality of leadership in complex environments. Key speaking topics Adaptive leadership in uncertainty and complexity Not Knowing – leading beyond expertise Not Doing – effortless action and the limits of busyness Distinguishing adaptive from technical challenges Adult development theory and leadership growth Deliberately developmental organisational cultures Complexity theory and strategic resilience Ideal for CEOs and C-suite executives leading organisations through complex change or strategic inflection points CHROs and heads of leadership development designing senior leadership programmes Senior executives and leadership teams in government and public sector organisations Board-level strategy and scenario planning forums Audience outcomes A clear distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges, with practical language for applying it in real organisational conversations Greater self-awareness about how the pressure to have answers shapes individual leadership behaviour and team dynamics Practical frameworks from Not Knowing and Not Doing for leading through uncertainty without forcing premature resolution A more explicit understanding of how adult development theory applies to the daily practice of leadership Approaches to building team and organisational cultures that can hold complexity and sustain productive engagement over time

Why organisations work with Debra Searle The Choose Your Attitude Toolkit is a named, practical framework, not a motivational narrative. It gives teams repeatable tools for maintaining focus and performance when conditions are working against them. Debra’s 111 days alone at sea were unplanned and unsupported. She was not a trained athlete or military professional. That specificity matters: the resilience she describes is genuinely transferable to ordinary professionals facing ordinary pressure, not a feat designed to impress. She has founded five companies, including the diversity and inclusion consultancy MIX Diversity Developers, and has held board-level governance roles. She speaks to the organisational realities of change from direct commercial experience, not observation. The research basis she references, that 75% of top performer success is attributable to attitude rather than skillset, gives people leaders and HR teams a frame for workforce conversations that goes beyond inspiration. Her audience feedback is unusually concrete: perfect scores at IBM events (170 delegates, 5 out of 5), ranked best speaker at a major conference above heads of state and global business figures. Biography highlights Rowed 3,300 miles solo across the Atlantic Ocean over 111 days in 2001-2002, after her husband was rescued eight days into the crossing; she was a novice rower at the time Appointed MBE by Her Majesty The Queen in 2002; appointed Member of the Royal Victorian Order (MVO) in 2014 for services to The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Youngest ever Trustee of The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, serving a decade alongside HRH Prince Philip and HRH Prince Edward Founder of five companies including MIX Diversity Developers, a diversity and inclusion consultancy BBC presenter across 40+ programmes including Grandstand and Extreme Lives Ranked in Global Gurus Top 30 Motivational Speakers list multiple years; consistently identified as the highest-ranking female speaker in the global ranking Over 1,300 keynote appearances across 40 countries; three books published including “Rowing It Alone” and “The Choose Your Attitude Journal” Biography Debra Searle spent 111 days alone in a 23-foot plywood boat rowing the Atlantic Ocean. She had not planned to do it solo. When her husband was rescued eight days in, she continued; a novice rower, no support vessel, in conditions most professional athletes would not accept. That experience became the foundation of a practical body of work on resilience and mindset that she has spent over two decades translating into organisational tools. The central argument of her work is precise: research suggests that roughly 75% of top-performer success traces to attitude rather than skill. Her Choose Your Attitude Toolkit distils the mental strategies she used at sea into a framework organisations can deploy with teams under pressure; not as inspiration, but as repeatable practice. The toolkit addresses what happens when conditions change faster than plans, when there is no clear end to the difficulty, and when leaders must model steadiness they do not fully feel. Searle’s commercial life runs alongside her expeditions rather than being separate from them. She founded five companies, including MIX Diversity Developers, a diversity and inclusion consultancy, and spent a decade as a Trustee of The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, the youngest person ever appointed to the board. That combination of extreme personal experience and working organisational life is what distinguishes her within the resilience and leadership space. Her work is recognised beyond the speaking circuit. The Queen recognised her twice; with an MBE in 2002 and an MVO in 2014. Global Gurus has ranked her among the world’s top motivational speakers multiple years. She has delivered over 1,300 keynote addresses across 40 countries, and her audience feedback, including perfect scores at IBM events, is among the most consistent in the field. Key speaking topics Resilience and performance under pressure Mindset and attitude as organisational tools Leading through change and adversity Women in leadership Motivation and peak performance Entrepreneurship and board-level leadership Ideal for CHROs and people leaders designing resilience or wellbeing programmes Leadership teams navigating significant organisational change or sustained uncertainty Women in leadership conferences and female talent development programmes All-staff or large-format events requiring a keynote that is both commercially credible and personally compelling Audience outcomes A named, structured framework (the Choose Your Attitude Toolkit) that individuals can apply to maintain performance when under pressure A clearer understanding of the psychological difference between coping and adapting, and practical tools to move from one to the other Language and strategies for managing mindset in the absence of certainty, relevant to leaders who must communicate confidence before they feel it Renewed motivation and a reframe of what is genuinely achievable, grounded in a specific and verifiable story rather than abstract optimism

Why organisations work with Deborah Rowland Her 2015/16 global research, conducted through Behavioural Event Interviews with senior leaders across industries, quantified that leader inner capacities account for over half the success or failure of large complex change – a finding that directly challenges how most organisations design transformation programmes. The Still Moving framework and Change Vitality model give organisations a specific diagnostic language for the leadership dimension of change: eight interconnected skills with a clear evidence base, not another generic competency framework. She spent the first half of her career inside the systems she now advises, as VP of Organisational and Management Development at PepsiCo, Change Lead at Royal Dutch Shell, and People Director at BBC Worldwide. She understands the constraints of the position, not just its theory. Four Wiley-published books, articles in the Harvard Business Review and LSE Business Review, and papers accepted at the Academy of Management give her frameworks independent credibility beyond the consulting relationship. Her most recent book, From Ought to Is (Wiley, 2025), applies the Still Moving thinking directly to polarisation and systemic inertia – relevant to organisations managing post-merger integration, contested cultural change, or restructuring in divided environments. Biography highlights Author of Still Moving: How to Lead Mindful Change (Wiley, 2017, bestseller) and From Ought to Is: Catalysing Change and Movement in a Polarised World (Wiley, 2025); co-author with Professor Malcolm Higgs of Sustaining Change: Leadership That Works (Wiley, 2008) Named on Thinkers50 Radar 2017; ranked 31st on HR Magazine Most Influential Thinkers list 2021 Contributor to Harvard Business Review and LSE Business Review; original research accepted at the 2016 Academy of Management and 2019 European Academy of Management Former VP of Organisational and Management Development at PepsiCo; Change Lead at Royal Dutch Shell; People Director at BBC Worldwide; earlier senior roles at Gucci Group Founder of Still Moving change consultancy; advisory clients include RWE, GlaxoSmithKline, Rolls-Royce, Diageo, Unilever and De Beers Faculty contributor at Henley, Imperial, Tuck and Bath business schools; Advisory Board member, International Institute for Leadership and Safety Culture Double First in Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge University Biography Most large-scale transformation programmes fall short not because the strategy is wrong, but because the leaders running them revert to familiar patterns when complexity peaks. Deborah Rowland has devoted three decades to studying that specific failure mode. Her research, conducted through Behavioural Event Interviews with senior leaders across industries and geographies, found that four inner capacities of the leader – staying present, responding intentionally, tuning into the system, and acknowledging the whole – explained over half the reason why big complex change either succeeds or fails. That research was not produced from the outside. Rowland spent the first half of her career as a practitioner, serving as VP of Organisational and Management Development at PepsiCo, Change Lead at Royal Dutch Shell, and People Director at BBC Worldwide, with earlier senior roles at Gucci Group. She has led major restructurings from within, and understands directly the conditions under which change leaders default to unhelpful patterns. That experience is embedded in every practical element of the Still Moving framework she subsequently developed. The intellectual architecture behind the framework spans four published Wiley books. Sustaining Change (2008, with Professor Malcolm Higgs) identified four external practices of effective change leadership. Still Moving (2017) showed that four inner capacities must precede those practices – and that this inner dimension accounted for over half the variance in change success. From Ought to Is (2025) extends the argument to address polarisation and systemic inertia as the specific obstacles leaders now face. Named on the Thinkers50 Radar in 2017 and a contributor to the Harvard Business Review and LSE Business Review, she has also taught at Henley, Imperial, Tuck and Bath. She holds a Double First in Archaeology and Anthropology from Cambridge University – a training in systemic observation that continues to shape how she reads organisations and the people leading them. Key speaking topics Large-scale organisational transformation The inner capacities of change leadership The Still Moving framework and Change Vitality model Systemic change approaches Leading through polarisation and organisational inertia Culture change and movement Executive leadership development in complex environments Ideal for Executive leadership teams and boards sponsoring or overseeing major transformation programmes CHROs and senior HR leadership communities Leaders at the top of organisations navigating post-merger integration, major restructuring, or contested cultural change Business school executive education participants on leadership and change programmes Audience outcomes A clear understanding of why leader inner state – not change methodology – is the primary driver of transformation success or failure Practical exposure to the Still Moving eight-skill framework and Change Vitality model as a leadership diagnostic tool Ability to identify specific leadership behaviours that correlate with success in large and complex change Approaches for leading systemic change without defaulting to controlling or directive patterns under pressure A more honest assessment of personal leadership habits that may be slowing organisational change

Why organisations work with Connie Dieken The Influence360° assessment is the only validated psychometric instrument built specifically to measure how individual leaders influence stakeholders. Organisations gain hard data on a capability they have previously only been able to assess anecdotally – or not at all. The Connect-Convey-Convince® methodology, developed through more than 15 years of research with over 20,000 participants, gives leadership teams a shared, actionable language for a problem most organisations misdiagnose as a personality issue rather than a learnable skill gap. Twenty years interviewing presidents and global CEOs for ABC and NBC gave Dieken direct observational data on how influence operates under pressure and at scale. That empirical foundation is not available from the executive coaching mainstream. Her training programmes are licensed in corporate universities worldwide and both her Wiley books reached No. 1 on Amazon and Audible – which means her frameworks carry weight in the room before she enters it. Membership of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches, a highly selective global practitioner community, places her within the most rigorously vetted executive coaching cohort in the world and signals peer-level recognition, not self-designation. Biography highlights Founder of Influence360°, a validated leadership influence assessment, and The Dieken Group, a C-suite executive advisory firm operating on five continents Author of two Wiley bestsellers: Talk Less, Say More (Connect-Convey-Convince® methodology) and Become the Real Deal (Three Layers of Presence and Return on Influence® framework) Five-time Emmy Award winner and inductee of the Radio/Television Broadcasters Hall of Fame, the National Speakers Association Speakers Hall of Fame, and the Million Dollar Consulting Hall of Fame Named Top 10 Executive Coach globally by the Global Gurus organisation; member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches (2019) Guest lecturer in executive education and MBA programmes at Case Western University, Indiana University, and Ohio State University Thought leadership featured in The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times Biography Most leaders believe they are more persuasive than others experience them. Connie Dieken, a broadcast journalist for ABC and NBC for two decades, built her career on closing that gap. Interviewing presidents and global CEOs, she identified the patterns that divided leaders who drove genuine action from those who merely spoke at people. That observation became a research project. Fifteen years of structured study involving more than 20,000 participants produced the Influence360° assessment, a validated instrument for measuring how leaders influence stakeholders. Two Wiley bestsellers followed: Talk Less, Say More, built on the Connect-Convey-Convince® methodology, and Become the Real Deal, which introduced the Three Layers of Presence and the Return on Influence® concept. The Dieken Group now advises C-suite executives at organisations including Coca-Cola, HP, Nestlé, BNP Paribas, and The Cleveland Clinic. Her influence training programmes are licensed in corporate universities on five continents. She is a guest lecturer in executive education at Case Western, Indiana, and Ohio State universities, and a member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches. Dieken has been inducted into the Radio/Television Broadcasters Hall of Fame, the National Speakers Association Speakers Hall of Fame, and the Million Dollar Consulting Hall of Fame. She has been named a Top 10 Executive Coach globally by the Global Gurus organisation and has delivered keynotes on four continents to audiences numbering in the thousands. Key speaking topics Leadership influence and stakeholder commitment Executive presence and authentic authority Influential communication under pressure Change leadership and stakeholder buy-in Human influence and decision-making in AI-shaped organisations Presentation strategy and persuasion Leadership assessment and behavioural diagnostics Ideal for Senior leadership teams navigating change, mergers, or strategic realignment where stakeholder buy-in is the critical variable CHROs and talent leaders designing executive development programmes where influence and presence are identified capability gaps Sales leadership and commercial functions where the ability to earn commitment is a direct performance driver Boards and executive committees seeking a research-grounded framework for developing leadership effectiveness at the top Audience outcomes A clear diagnostic of their personal influence pattern, including where they are most likely to lose stakeholder commitment and why A three-step methodology – Connect, Convey, Convince – they can apply immediately to high-stakes conversations, presentations, and change initiatives Understanding of the Three Layers of Presence and how inner, outer, and verbal presence affect their credibility with senior stakeholders Frameworks to distinguish between genuine influence and manipulation, and to lead without coercion or compliance-seeking Practical tools for navigating resistance from difficult stakeholders, including those who are dominant, anxious, or disengaged