Change Management

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

Why organisations work with Colleen Francis She reframes where growth actually comes from. Her Right on the Money thesis argues that the installed base, not the prospecting funnel, is the primary engine of bold growth, and gives revenue leaders a playbook for acting on it. She closes the gap between sales strategy and sales behaviour. Her work with Chevron, Merck, Royal Bank, John Deere and Dow is focused on what frontline sellers and managers actually do differently on Monday morning. She brings a full-cycle pipeline discipline rather than a single tactic. Nonstop Sales Boom is built around ending the boom-and-bust cycle through continuous engagement, qualification shared with the buyer, and disciplined prioritisation. She carries the credentials that senior audiences expect without leaning on them. Induction into the Professional Speakers Hall of Fame and the Canadian Speaking Hall of Fame is the signal; the room is there for the argument. Biography highlights Founder and President, Engage Selling Solutions. Author of Right on the Money: New Principles for Bold Growth (Morgan James, 2022), Nonstop Sales Boom, and Honesty Sells. Inductee, Professional Speakers Hall of Fame. Inductee, Canadian Speaking Hall of Fame, and past President of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers. Named a LinkedIn Top Voice for Sales. Keynote speaker at Dreamforce and MDRT Experience, with client work across Chevron, John Deere, Merck, Abbott, Experian, Royal Bank, Dow, Adobe and Salesforce. Biography Most B2B organisations still build their growth model around new-logo acquisition. The numbers tell a different story. The accounts already inside the house are usually under-penetrated, under-priced, and handed off to service teams the moment the contract signs. Colleen Francis has spent more than twenty years arguing that this is where bold growth is actually hiding, and building the systems that let revenue leaders reach it. That argument is the spine of Right on the Money, published by Morgan James in 2022, and the thread that runs through Engage Selling Solutions, the firm she founded and leads. Her earlier book, Nonstop Sales Boom, sets out the other half of the discipline: ending the boom-and-bust quarter by treating pipeline generation, deal progression, customer retention and account expansion as one connected system, not four competing ones. The work is built on client evidence, not theory. Engage Selling has run programmes with Chevron, John Deere, Merck, Abbott, Experian, Royal Bank, Dow, Adobe and Salesforce, among others. Francis speaks on the main stages these clients attend, including Dreamforce and MDRT Experience, and has been named a LinkedIn Top Voice for Sales. The credentials are there – induction into the Professional Speakers Hall of Fame and the Canadian Speaking Hall of Fame, past President of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers – but the reason senior revenue leaders book her is simpler. She tells a sales organisation what to stop doing, with specifics, and then what to do instead. Key speaking topics Sales strategy and commercial growth Account expansion and customer retention Pipeline discipline and revenue predictability Sales leadership and frontline management Buyer behaviour and modern B2B selling Sales transformation in mature businesses Ideal for Chief Revenue Officers, Chief Sales Officers and VPs of Sales running large distributed sales organisations. Senior sales leadership audiences inside B2B businesses where retention and expansion matter more than new-logo volume. Partner, channel and enterprise account leaders responsible for growing inside existing customers. Sales kickoffs and annual conferences looking for a commercial keynote with a practical, named methodology. Audience outcomes A clear commercial case for treating the installed customer base as the primary growth engine, with the metrics to defend it. Named behaviours that separate consistent sales teams from boom-and-bust ones, at both rep and manager level. A sharper view of where pipeline is leaking – qualification, handoff, account planning – and which of those to fix first. Language senior sales leaders can take straight into their next QBR on retention, expansion and forecast discipline.

Why organisations work with Charlotte Sweeney She has the rare credential of having written a UK government-commissioned policy review on women on boards, the 2014 Sweeney Review for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which directly shaped the Enhanced Code for executive search firms. Leaders FIRST gives her a named diagnostic framework, drawn from work with more than 3,000 senior leaders, that identifies the five reasons inclusion change actually stalls inside a business. That is unusual in a field dominated by training products without a thesis. Her co-authored book Inclusive Leadership, published by FT Publishing and shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year 2018, gives executive audiences a substantive reference rather than a slide deck. Twelve years of running Charlotte Sweeney Associates means she briefs at C-suite level on what has actually worked, and what has quietly failed, across financial services, FMCG, luxury, healthcare, and professional services. She is credible in the current climate where DEI is contested. She talks about inclusion as a leadership discipline, not a political position, which is what most boards now need. Biography highlights OBE, 2017 New Year Honours, for services to Women and Equalities. Author of the 2014 Independent Review of the Voluntary Code of Conduct for Executive Search Firms, commissioned by the UK Business Secretary. Co-author, Inclusive Leadership (FT Publishing, 2016), shortlisted for CMI Management Book of the Year 2018. Founder and CEO, Charlotte Sweeney Associates, established 2012. Chartered Management Consultant; 2025 MCA Inclusion Award winner; finalist, Times Management Consultant of the Year 2025. Named among HR’s Most Influential Thinkers; former member of the Forbes HR Council. Biography Most inclusion programmes fail at the same point. The strategy is signed off, the metrics get published, and within eighteen months the leadership team has rotated, the budget has been clipped, and the work has lost its centre of gravity. Sweeney has spent more than two decades watching this pattern, first inside global financial services, then through her own firm. She founded Charlotte Sweeney Associates in 2012 and has since advised C-suites and boards across financial services, FMCG, luxury, hospitality, healthcare, and manufacturing. The firm’s signature framework, Leaders FIRST, was built from input from more than 3,000 senior leaders and isolates the five barriers that actually stop inclusion work landing: fear, ignorance, relinquishing responsibility, systemic inertia, and time. Her credibility on policy is not theoretical. In 2014 she authored the independent review for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, commissioned by Business Secretary Vince Cable, into the executive search firms’ Voluntary Code of Conduct on women on boards. The review directly shaped the Enhanced Code that followed. She received an OBE in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to Women and Equalities. The book she co-authored with Fleur Bothwick, Inclusive Leadership, was published by FT Publishing and shortlisted for the Chartered Management Institute’s Management Book of the Year 2018. It is the reference she leaves with executive teams who want a serious working text rather than a training deck. In 2025, the Management Consultancies Association named her firm winner of its Inclusion Award, and the Times shortlisted her for Management Consultant of the Year. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership at board and C-suite level Diversity, equity and inclusion strategy Culture transformation Women on boards and senior pipeline Leaders FIRST: barriers to culture change Wellbeing in the workplace Inclusion in a contested political climate Ideal for CHROs, Chief People Officers and Chief Inclusion Officers redesigning DEI strategy after political and budget pressure Boards and executive committees holding the line on inclusion as a governance issue, not a campaign Executive search and talent functions reviewing pipeline practice for senior appointments CEOs leading culture transformation where prior inclusion programmes have lost momentum Audience outcomes A clear read on why most DEI programmes lose executive support, drawn from named patterns across sectors The Leaders FIRST diagnostic, which gives leaders a shared language for the five barriers to culture change A defensible position on inclusion that holds up under board scrutiny in the current political environment Practical reference points from a UK government policy review and a decade of C-suite advisory work A senior peer voice on what separates inclusion theatre from inclusion as an operating discipline

Why organisations work with Cathy O’Dowd Her central argument that internal team dynamics, not the external environment, are the primary source of failure in high-performing groups, is drawn from specific, documented expeditions and maps directly onto the decisions senior leadership teams are already wrestling with. The 1996 South African Everest expedition provides one of the most detailed public case studies of a high-performing team collapsing through ego and power-play, then recovering to reach the summit. That arc of breakdown, diagnosis and recommitment is the substance of the work. Her participation in the 2012 Mazeno Ridge expedition on Nanga Parbat (a first ascent of a 10-kilometre ridgeline that had defeated ten previous international expeditions) provides a tested model for executing ambitious objectives when the plan meets an unpredictable environment and must adapt in real time. She makes a specific, counterintuitive claim: that most failures in extreme environments are self-created. This challenges how many organisations locate and manage risk, and gives leaders a different set of questions to ask of their own teams. As a Fellow of the Professional Speaking Association of UK/Ireland and recipient of its highest honour, the Professional Speaking Award of Excellence, she brings the structural rigour of a career speaker to content that has been tested in front of senior corporate audiences across 46+ countries. Biography highlights First woman to summit Everest from both its south (1996) and north (1999) sides – an unmatched record in mountaineering history First South African to summit Everest; member of the First South African Everest Expedition (1996) Fourth woman to climb Lhotse, the world’s fourth-highest mountain (2000) Participant in the 2012 Mazeno Ridge expedition on Nanga Parbat – a first ascent of one of the last major unclimbed lines on an 8,000-metre peak; the summit pair were awarded the 2013 Piolet d’Or Author of Just for the Love of It; co-author of Everest: Free to Decide Fellow of the Professional Speaking Association of UK/Ireland; recipient of the Professional Speaking Award of Excellence, the PSA’s highest honour Master’s degree in Journalism, Rhodes University; former university lecturer Professional speaker for 27+ years; presented to organisations in 46+ countries on six continents Biography Most teams of ambitious, capable people contain the seeds of their own failure. Not because the external environment defeats them, but because the competition between high-performers: the very drive that brought them to the room, erodes the collaboration they need to succeed. Cathy O’Dowd watched this happen in real time, at altitude, with lives in the balance. O’Dowd became the first woman to summit Everest from both its south and north sides, completing the south-side ascent in 1996 and returning for the north in 1999. What formed her thinking was not the summits but the crisis that preceded the first: the in-fighting, power-plays, and near-disintegration of a team that had every credential to succeed. Her analysis of that expedition: what broke, what was rebuilt, and how the team reached the top despite itself, is the foundation of her corporate work. Her second major case study is the 2012 Mazeno Ridge on Nanga Parbat, a 10-kilometre Himalayan ridgeline that had repelled ten previous international expeditions. The six-person team committed to a first ascent with no existing blueprint and had to adapt in real time as the plan met a complex, unforgiving environment. Two teammates completed the ascent and were awarded the 2013 Piolet d’Or, mountaineering’s most prestigious prize. O’Dowd uses this expedition as a model for executing ambitious objectives when certainty is unavailable and the original plan cannot hold. A Fellow of the Professional Speaking Association of UK/Ireland and recipient of its Professional Speaking Award of Excellence, she has presented in 46+ countries over 27 years. She holds a Master’s degree in Journalism from Rhodes University, where she also lectured. Her presentations are built not on inspiration but on diagnosis: specific, transferable analysis of why high-performing groups succeed and fail under pressure. Key speaking topics Decision-making under extreme pressure High-performance team dynamics Leadership in high-stakes environments Executing ambitious plans under uncertainty Resilience, failure, and recovery Risk, responsibility, and the limits of control Adapting strategy when execution meets reality Ideal for C-suite and senior leadership teams navigating high-stakes decisions under uncertainty Organisations running ambitious transformation, innovation, or change programmes Leadership conferences centred on team performance and organisational resilience Boards and executive committees examining risk, accountability, and decision-making frameworks Audience outcomes A specific diagnostic framework for understanding why high-performing teams fail from within, not from outside Practical analysis of how ego, competition, and communication breakdown manifest under pressure, and how to interrupt those patterns A case-study model for adapting ambitious plans when execution meets an unpredictable environment A reframed understanding of organisational risk: internal dynamics as a primary variable, not just external conditions Greater clarity on what leadership under genuine uncertainty looks and feels like, drawn from real decisions with irreversible consequences

Why organisations work with Amy Cappellanti-Wolf She has held the CHRO seat at Dayforce, Cohesity, Symantec and Silver Spring Networks, including taking Silver Spring Networks public on the NYSE in 2013. Her HR career runs from Frito-Lay and The Walt Disney Company through Sun Microsystems and Cisco, so she can speak credibly to consumer, entertainment and enterprise tech leadership teams in their own language. At Dayforce she runs people strategy at an HR technology vendor and acts as “Customer Zero” for the company’s AI-powered HR releases, which gives her an unusually concrete view of where AI lands in real HR operations. She works at board and committee level on talent and rewards, currently as Compensation Committee Chair at Softchoice and as a director or advisor at D-Wave Quantum, Betterworks and Wellist. Recognised externally on people and tech leadership: National Diversity Council Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology, Silicon Valley Business Journal Women of Influence, and the Forbes Human Resources Council. Biography highlights EVP and Chief People Officer, Dayforce, since April 2024. Former CHRO at Cohesity, Symantec and Silver Spring Networks; led people strategy through Silver Spring Networks’ 2013 IPO. Earlier senior HR roles at Cisco Systems (2001 to 2009), Sun Microsystems, The Walt Disney Company and Frito-Lay (PepsiCo). Compensation Committee Chair at Softchoice (TSX: SFTC); board and advisory roles at D-Wave Quantum, Betterworks and Wellist. Forbes Human Resources Council member since 2018; National Diversity Council Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology. Inducted into the Roll of Distinguished Alumni, WVU’s John Chambers College of Business and Economics, in 2019. Biography Few CHROs have stood in the room for a Cisco-era leadership build, a Disney creative organisation, a Symantec security business and a Silver Spring Networks IPO. Amy Cappellanti-Wolf has. That cross-section is what gives her practical authority on what culture and talent actually take when a company changes shape. Her current seat sharpens the point. As EVP and Chief People Officer at Dayforce, she runs people strategy inside an HR technology vendor and uses Dayforce’s own platform as “Customer Zero” for AI-powered HR releases. That gives her a working view of where AI lands in payroll, performance and workforce planning, not as a forecast but as a live deployment. Boards use her where rewards, governance and people risk meet. She chairs the Compensation Committee at Softchoice, sits on the board at D-Wave Quantum, and advises Betterworks and Wellist. Her recognition track record, Forbes HR Council, the National Diversity Council Top 50 in Technology, Silicon Valley Business Journal Women of Influence, sits alongside the operating record, not in place of it. For senior buyers, the practical value is specific. She can talk credibly to a CHRO planning an IPO, a CEO integrating an acquisition, an HR team rebuilding engagement after a restructure, or a board asking what AI in HR really changes. The answers come from having done it, not from observing it. Key speaking topics People strategy through IPO, M&A and divestiture AI in HR and the future of the people function High-performance culture in scaling tech companies Diversity, equity and inclusion as an operating discipline Leadership and talent for enterprise transformation The CHRO as a board-level voice on people risk Ideal for CHROs and senior HR leaders preparing for IPO, M&A or large-scale restructure CEOs and boards weighing the people implications of AI deployment in core operations Compensation and talent committees considering rewards, succession and culture risk Technology, consumer and entertainment leadership teams running concurrent transformations Audience outcomes A clear sense of how to sequence people priorities through IPO, integration and restructure A practical view of where AI changes HR operations now, drawn from a live enterprise deployment Sharper questions for boards and executive teams on culture, rewards and talent risk Concrete language for inclusion outcomes that survive a politically contested environment

Why organisations work with Dr Alison Edgar MBE The intrapreneurship methodology addresses a specific organisational failure: talent hired to think and then trained to execute. It gives teams ownership inside the existing structure without asking for a reorg. Operator before author. She built her career inside Yell during the Yellow Pages collapse, founded her own training business in 2011, and advises UK government on small business policy. The frameworks on stage were built for a business she was running at the time. The work sits in the mechanics of accountability. The Intrapreneur Mindset and her Big Balls® prioritisation framework give managers a shared language for ownership and follow-through that outlasts the keynote. Designed to land in mixed rooms. Leaders, managers, and front-line teams leave a session with the same vocabulary and the same expectations, which matters when a change programme needs to move through every layer of the business. The back-story does work that a CV can’t. Clydebank council flat, undiagnosed dyslexia, no school qualifications, MBE in 2020, honorary doctorate in education from Bournemouth University in 2024. Senior leaders and front-line staff end up listening to the same talk for different reasons. Biography highlights Founder and Managing Director of SMASH IT!® Training. Appointed MBE in 2020 for services to small business. Awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Education by Bournemouth University, 2024. Author of Secrets of Successful Sales (WHSmith Top Ten business book; named by The Independent in 2019 among the top business books written by a woman) and SMASH IT! The Art of Getting What YOU Want. Named one of the UK’s Top 10 Business Advisers by Enterprise Nation; TEDx speaker; business expert on The Apprentice: Unfinished Business; regular contributor to BBC Breakfast and BBC Radio. Clients include Sky, Discovery Channel, EasyJet, the NHS, the European Commission, Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, CBRE, Specsavers, Currys, St James’s Place, Porsche and Renault. Biography Most change programmes are written to land in the boardroom. The work of making them stick sits three layers below, in the everyday decisions that keep standards consistent when the strategy slides have been filed away. That gap is where Alison Edgar does her work. SMASH IT!® Training was founded after twenty-five years in corporate sales at BT and Yell. The Yell years were the formative ones. She watched Yellow Pages, once a fixture in almost every UK home, lose its market because the leadership chose not to react to Google. Before that came an earlier career managing hotels in Cape Town and Sydney. The training business grew into something broader than sales. At the centre of the work today is the Intrapreneur Mindset: Edgar’s term for what it looks like when employees think and decide like owners inside a large organisation. The Big Balls® framework sits alongside it, giving managers a prioritisation language for work that all feels equally urgent. Clients include Sky, Discovery Channel, EasyJet, the NHS, the European Commission and Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy. The credibility behind the frameworks is unusually well-documented. She was named one of the UK’s Top 10 Business Advisers by Enterprise Nation, appointed MBE in 2020 for services to small business, and awarded an honorary doctorate in education by Bournemouth University in 2024. Two books sit on the record: Secrets of Successful Sales, named by The Independent in 2019 among the top business books written by a woman, and SMASH IT! The Art of Getting What YOU Want. She is a regular BBC contributor, including as a business expert on The Apprentice: Unfinished Business, and is quoted across The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Sunday Times. The practical test of any speaker for a serious organisation is what survives the following Monday. Alison Edgar is booked repeatedly by Sky, the NHS and the European Commission because the language she gives a room keeps showing up in meetings weeks later. Key speaking topics Leadership accountability Leading change and change fatigue Intrapreneurship and ownership culture Standards and everyday execution Customer experience and service culture High-performance teams Sales leadership and commercial behaviour Ideal for Senior leaders accountable for consistent performance across transformation programmes. CHROs and CPOs building accountability and standards in hybrid or multi-site organisations. Commercial and sales leaders looking to raise conversion through team behaviour without expanding headcount. Organisations running large all-hands or leadership off-sites where the same message needs to reach the C-suite and the front line. Audience outcomes A working definition of accountability that lives in everyday behaviour and survives the next restructure. The Big Balls® prioritisation framework applied to real work, so teams stop treating every task as equally urgent. A shared language across leaders, managers and front-line staff for ownership and consistent standards. Intrapreneurship tools that let employees act like owners inside the existing structure. Language and tools for handling change fatigue, including what to do when a team has already checked out of the next transformation.

Why organisations work with Yves Morieux Smart Simplicity® is a proprietary BCG framework built on social science – game theory, organisational sociology, economics – not management intuition. Leaders take away a testable model, not a set of principles. His argument is counter-intuitive and specific: the problem is not complexity itself, but the organisational response to it. That reframe changes where leadership teams look for solutions. His two TED talks on the subject have exceeded 5 million views, which means senior audiences often arrive having already encountered the framework and wanting to operationalise it. Six Simple Rules, published by Harvard Business Review Press, gives organisations a durable reference point that outlasts a single event and shapes how teams implement change. His 2019 BCG Fellow research introduced “Relational Productivity”, extending the Smart Simplicity model into how digital ways of working reshape cooperation and output. Organisations dealing with hybrid work and digital transformation get a framework grounded in his earlier work but updated for current conditions. Biography highlights BCG Fellow since 2008; Managing Director and Senior Partner at Boston Consulting Group; Director of the BCG Institute for Organization Creator of Smart Simplicity®, BCG’s registered framework for managing organisational complexity and rebuilding cooperation Author of a second BCG Fellow research concept, Relational Productivity, developed in 2019 Co-author of Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014), with Peter Tollman Two TED talks on organisational complexity and workplace effectiveness, collectively exceeding 5 million views Published in Harvard Business Review, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Le Monde; author of more than 45 articles and book chapters Lecturer in the advanced sociology programme and professor in the master of public affairs programme at Sciences Po, Paris PhD in industrial marketing, University of Strathclyde; DEA in organisational sociology, Sciences Po Biography Organisations under pressure tend to reach for familiar tools: clearer accountability frameworks, more robust reporting, additional coordination structures. Yves Morieux has spent his career at BCG demonstrating that this instinct is the source of the problem, not the solution. The more complex the operating environment, the more those tools erode the cooperation that performance actually depends on. His framework, Smart Simplicity®, was developed through research at the BCG Institute for Organization where he has served as a BCG Fellow since 2008, and grounded in social science disciplines unusual in consulting: game theory, organisational sociology, economics. The six rules at its core are not management principles but structural interventions that change the conditions under which people decide whether to cooperate. His 2019 BCG Fellow work extended the model into Relational Productivity, examining how digital ways of working reshape those same dynamics. Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated, co-authored with Peter Tollman and published by Harvard Business Review Press, codified the framework for practitioner use. His two TED talks on the subject, delivered as part of a series curated with BCG, have collectively exceeded 5 million views, making Smart Simplicity one of the most widely seen management arguments of the past decade. Morieux also lectures in the advanced sociology programme and the master of public affairs at Sciences Po in Paris. His work has been covered and published in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Fast Company, and Le Monde, and spans more than 45 articles and book chapters. Key speaking topics Organisational complexity and its management Smart Simplicity® framework and the Six Simple Rules Cooperation as a performance driver Relational Productivity and digital ways of working Organisational design and behavioural architecture Leadership under complexity Productivity, engagement, and the failure of conventional management tools Ideal for C-suite and senior executive teams undertaking transformation or restructuring CHROs and people function leaders diagnosing engagement and performance gaps Strategy and organisational design leaders evaluating how structure is shaping behaviour Leadership teams navigating post-merger integration, scaling, or operating model change Audience outcomes A concrete diagnosis of how conventional management responses to complexity generate the performance and engagement problems they were designed to solve Understanding of the six Smart Simplicity® rules and how each changes the structural conditions for cooperation A framework to identify which processes, metrics, and accountabilities in their own organisation are creating complicatedness rather than managing complexity Exposure to the Relational Productivity concept and its implications for hybrid and digital-first operating environments Practical language to take back to leadership teams for evaluating organisational design decisions