Change Management

Why organisations work with Will Greenwood His book World Class is built on interviews with more than 100 elite performers across sport and business, including Sir Clive Woodward, Rio Ferdinand, and Dame Carolyn McCall, giving his framework (celebrating difference, forging togetherness, accelerating growth) a research depth that distinguishes it from speaker anecdote. He was joint-top try scorer in the 2003 World Cup and central to the squad’s performance, not an observer of a winning culture but a direct participant in building one, which gives his account of accountability and standards an authority that is hard to replicate. His role as Chief Customer Officer at Afiniti means his thinking extends into live commercial application; AI-driven customer experience strategy, giving him credibility with boards and executive teams beyond sport. His named concept TCUP (Think Correctly Under Pressure) gives leaders a transferable mental model for individual and collective performance under stress: a specific takeaway rather than an inspirational experience. An Economics degree from Durham, a career as a City trader before turning professional, and more than 15 years as a Sky Sports analyst add analytical credibility that supports board-level conversations on performance, leadership, and organisational change. Biography highlights 55 England caps, 31 international tries: England’s third-highest international try scorer; joint-top scorer at the 2003 Rugby World Cup Three British & Irish Lions tours: South Africa (1997), Australia (2001), New Zealand (2005) Co-author of World Class: How to Lead, Learn and Grow like a Champion (Penguin/Ebury Edge, 2021), with Ben Fennell, former CEO of Bartle Bogle Hegarty; built from interviews with 100+ elite performers across sport and business Long-standing rugby analyst and presenter, Sky Sports; weekly rugby columnist, The Daily Telegraph Chief Customer Officer (UK), Afiniti: an AI company focused on customer experience optimisation, since 2020; earlier career as a financial trader at Midland Global Markets (HSBC) MBE; Doctor of Civil Law honoris causa, Durham University; BA in Economics, Durham University Biography England’s 2003 Rugby World Cup squad produced one of the most studied high-performance environments in sport. Will Greenwood was not a bystander: he was joint-top try scorer at the tournament, central to the team’s culture and to the trust structures that drove its performance. That first-hand experience of what a winning team actually looks and feels like from the inside is the foundation of everything he brings to organisations. Greenwood developed that thinking further in World Class: How to Lead, Learn and Grow like a Champion, co-authored with Ben Fennell, former CEO of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, and published by Penguin in 2021. The book is built on interviews with more than 100 elite performers, from Sir Clive Woodward and Rio Ferdinand to Dame Carolyn McCall, and identifies three organising principles: celebrating difference, forging togetherness, and accelerating growth. It is a framework, not a memoir. His credibility in the room is reinforced by a career that has never stayed still. He read Economics at Durham, traded at Midland Global Markets in the City before turning professional, and has held a C-suite role at AI company Afiniti since 2020. More than 15 years as a Sky Sports analyst, and a long-running column in The Daily Telegraph, have built a discipline of translating elite performance into clear, repeatable language. His concept TCUP (Think Correctly Under Pressure) sits at the centre of his speaking framework: the idea that in the critical moments, individual responsibility and mental clarity are the things that separate teams who deliver from teams who don’t. It is the kind of practical, named concept that organisations can take back into the room and use. Key speaking topics High-performance team leadership Standards and accountability culture Trust and cohesion under pressure Peak performance and mental discipline Learning, growth and continuous improvement Change management and mindset shift Leadership lessons from elite sport environments Ideal for Senior leadership and executive teams building or re-setting high-performance culture Chief People Officers and HR Directors leading culture transformation programmes Sales and commercial leadership audiences where team dynamics directly affect performance Boards and C-suite audiences on sustained organisational performance and resilience under pressure Audience outcomes A named, research-based framework (celebrating difference, forging togetherness, accelerating growth) drawn from 100+ interviews with elite performers across sport and business Practical understanding of the specific behaviours, standards and trust structures that distinguish high-performing teams from merely capable ones The TCUP model (Think Correctly Under Pressure), a transferable tool for individual and collective performance in high-stakes situations A reframed perspective on how organisations respond to setback, injury to performance, and the change of pace that comes with transition – grounded in lived experience, not theory Language and reference points that leadership teams can take back into internal conversations on culture, accountability and performance

Why organisations work with Tim Collins He has commanded under live fire. The lessons on composure, communication, and accountability are drawn from running the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment Battle Group in Iraq, not a leadership model. His eve-of-battle speech is one of the most studied pieces of leadership communication of the last twenty years, hung in the Oval Office and quoted in business schools. Few speakers can talk about leadership communication from that position. Eight years as an officer in 22 SAS, including as Operations Officer, gives him a vocabulary on small-team performance, selection, and trust that very few corporate speakers can match credibly. He builds the talk around the audience’s actual leadership tension. The military stories are evidence, not the point. Biography highlights Commanded the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment Battle Group during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Eight years as an officer in 22 SAS, including service as Operations Officer. Appointed OBE in 2003 for service in Iraq. Author of Rules of Engagement: A Life in Conflict (Headline, 2006). Co-founder and Chairman of New Century Consulting, an intelligence-led security services firm working with government clients since 2006. Regular media commentator and columnist on defence and security, with bylines in the Telegraph and other UK national press. Biography The eve-of-battle address to the Royal Irish Regiment Battle Group, delivered in Kuwait on 19 March 2003, was extemporised and recorded in shorthand by a single journalist. President George W. Bush later had a copy hung in the Oval Office. It is now a fixture on leadership reading lists, taught for what it does in five minutes: set the moral frame, give the team something to hold onto, and accept the weight of command without flinching. The speech is not why senior leaders book Collins, but it explains what they get. He commanded a battalion in combat, with all that implies for accountability, communication, and the long shadow that command throws over a career. He came back to allegations of war crimes, cleared his name, and was promoted to colonel. That sequence, command, scrutiny, recovery, is the substance of what he teaches. Before Iraq, Collins served eight years in 22 SAS, including as Operations Officer, and led troops through Northern Ireland, the Falklands, and Cyprus. The earlier work shapes how he talks about selection, small-team trust, and what actually holds a unit together when the plan fails. His memoir Rules of Engagement (Headline, 2006) is the long-form version. Since retiring from the army in 2004 he has built New Century Consulting, an intelligence-led security firm working largely with government, and become a regular commentator on defence and security in the UK national press. The corporate keynote work draws on all of it: the command experience, the public scrutiny, the second career building a business with a payroll and contracts. Key speaking topics Command leadership under pressure Leadership communication in high-stakes moments Small-team performance and trust Decision-making with incomplete information Accountability and the weight of command Resilience after public scrutiny Lessons from operational command for civilian leaders Ideal for CEOs, executive committees, and divisional MDs preparing teams for high-stakes operational moments Leadership development programmes for newly senior leaders taking on command-level accountability Sales and operations conferences where the central leadership question is composure under pressure Board offsites focused on crisis readiness, succession, or the human side of restructure Audience outcomes A clearer picture of what leadership communication actually does in the moment that counts. Practical handles on composure, accountability, and team trust, drawn from command experience rather than theory. A more honest reading of what holds a team together when the plan changes. A reference point, the eve-of-battle speech, that audiences carry back into their own leadership conversations.

Why organisations work with Stuart Rose He has run a defensive takeover at the highest level in British retail. M&S beat Sir Philip Green’s bid in 2004 with Rose as chief executive, three weeks into the job. He turned Arcadia around and sold it for over £800m, then took on the M&S turnaround the same decade. Two CEO-led recoveries in adjacent businesses, a year apart. He authored the 2015 Better Leadership for Tomorrow review for the Department of Health, the standing reference document on why NHS hospital leadership underperforms and what to do about it. Plan A at M&S was the first time a FTSE retailer treated sustainability as a board strategy with capital attached, not a CSR report. Rose committed £200m and signed his top suppliers in private before launch. Sits in the House of Lords as Baron Rose of Monewden and chaired Ocado Group from 2013 to 2021. Buyers get a perspective shaped by both governance and operating accountability. Biography highlights Former Chief Executive (2004 to 2008) and Executive Chairman (2008 to 2011) of Marks & Spencer. Former Chairman of Ocado Group (2013 to 2021) and Chairman of Asda (2021 to 2024), with day-to-day executive leadership at Asda from September 2024. Former Chief Executive of Arcadia Group, Argos, Booker plc and Burton Group. Author of the 2015 NHS leadership review commissioned by the Secretary of State for Health, Better Leadership for Tomorrow. Knighted in the 2008 New Year Honours for services to retail and corporate social responsibility. Conservative life peer: Baron Rose of Monewden, created 2014. Biography Marks & Spencer was three weeks into a hostile bid from Sir Philip Green when Stuart Rose was appointed chief executive in May 2004. The defence held. What followed was a six-year programme that restored profit, rebuilt the supply base, and put sustainability at the centre of the operating plan rather than the CSR report. Plan A launched in 2007 with 100 commitments across climate, waste, raw materials, fair partnership and health. The framing was deliberately blunt: there is no Plan B. £200m of capital was committed up front, and the largest M&S suppliers were briefed privately before launch so the public commitment was already operationally backed. The retail track record runs deeper than M&S. As chief executive of Arcadia from 2000, he led the turnaround that culminated in the £800m sale of the group in 2002. Earlier, he ran Argos, Booker plc, where he engineered the merger with Iceland to form the Big Food Group and the Burton Group. The 2015 NHS leadership review for the Department of Health applied the same operating discipline to a non-commercial setting, with 19 recommendations on talent, accountability and visible frontline leadership. He chaired Ocado Group from 2013 to 2021 and took the chair at Asda in November 2021, stepping into executive responsibilities in September 2024 to stabilise the business. He sits in the House of Lords as Baron Rose of Monewden. Key speaking topics Turnaround leadership in large consumer businesses Defended takeover bids and board response Sustainability as an operating strategy Public sector reform and NHS leadership Corporate governance and the chair role UK retail and the future of the high street Ideal for Boards and chairs of large consumer or retail businesses are going through performance recovery Public sector leadership audiences responsible for hospital, trust or system reform CEO and CFO offsites where the agenda is restoring investor and workforce confidence Sustainability and ESG forums where the audience is past narrative and into capital allocation Audience outcomes A working account of how a defended takeover changes board behaviour and the CEO calendar in the first 90 days. The decisions behind Plan A, including how Rose secured supplier alignment before public launch. A clear view of why NHS leadership underperforms and which of the 2015 review recommendations still apply. The chair’s perspective on when to intervene executively and when to hold back, drawn from the Ocado and Asda chairmanships.

Why organisations work with Steve Faktor He works from a proprietary, named methodology, the 4C’s of Innovation™, developed inside Fortune 100 innovation programmes at American Express, Citi and MasterCard, not adapted from case studies of others’ work. His operating record is concrete. As head of the $50M Chairman’s Innovation Fund at American Express, he launched commercial products including Zync, LoyaltyEdge, and the Private Sales joint venture with Vente Privée. His 9 Corporate Personality Types™, the viral Forbes piece picked up by NPR, gives audiences a working tool for diagnosing why innovation initiatives die inside specific corporate cultures. He carries a 750,000-strong LinkedIn following from his status as one of the platform’s original 160 Influencers, alongside figures like Richard Branson. Buyers hiring him get a futurist whose calls are public and dated. The voice in Econovation, sharp and satirical, is the same voice on stage. Senior leaders get an honest read on innovation work without the consultant gloss. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of IdeaFaktory, the innovation incubator behind multiple $100M+ businesses for Fortune 100 brands, built on its proprietary 4C’s of Innovation™ process. Former Vice President of Growth and Innovation and Head of the $50M Chairman’s Innovation Fund at American Express, where he launched Zync, LoyaltyEdge and the Private Sales joint venture with Vente Privée. Former SVP of Innovation and Growth Ventures at Citigroup; senior strategy and innovation executive at MasterCard; former management consultant at Arthur Andersen. Author of Econovation: The Red, White, and Blue Pill for Arousing Innovation (Wiley, 2011). Forbes and Harvard Business Review contributor; one of LinkedIn’s original 160 Influencers, with a 750,000-strong executive following. Host of The Trendaddy show; media credits include The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Bloomberg Radio and MSNBC. Graduate of NYU Stern School of Business. Biography At American Express, the Chairman’s Innovation Fund came with a $50M budget and a brief to launch new businesses inside the company. Steve Faktor ran it. Out of that role came Zync, LoyaltyEdge and a Private Sales joint venture with Vente Privée. The same period produced the methodology he has since codified as the 4C’s of Innovation™: context, creativity, capabilities and culture. That methodology is the operating logic he now applies through IdeaFaktory, the innovation firm he founded after leaving AmEx. IdeaFaktory has helped Fortune 100 clients launch multiple $100M+ businesses by partnering with vetted startups and rebuilding their internal innovation programmes from the culture out. The ‘culture out’ part matters. His viral Forbes piece on the 9 Corporate Personality Types, picked up by NPR, came from watching innovation initiatives die at the hands of identifiable, predictable internal characters. Faktor’s second strand of work is futurist. Econovation (Wiley, 2011) argued that consumerism was ending and producerism was emerging, with economic value shifting to those who make rather than those who consume. As one of LinkedIn’s original 160 Influencers, with a 750,000-strong executive following and Forbes and Harvard Business Review columns, he has built more than a decade of dated, public predictions clients can audit. In a boardroom, both strands earn their seat. Senior teams get a working framework rooted in real product P&Ls, the AmEx ones with his name on them, not someone else’s case studies. They also get a voice that has been right enough, often enough, in public, that buyers can audit the work before they commission it. Key speaking topics Innovation strategy and methodology Corporate-startup partnerships and commercialisation Growth strategy in financial services and consumer goods Futurism and trend forecasting Innovation culture and corporate change Business model innovation Digital commerce, payments and loyalty Ideal for Chief Innovation Officers and Heads of Strategy in Fortune 500 firms whose innovation programmes have plateaued at pilot stage. Growth and commercial leadership teams in financial services, payments and consumer goods evaluating where to commit capital next. Boards and executive committees commissioning a candid, externally validated read on internal innovation capability. Founders and corporate venture teams looking for an operator’s view of how large enterprises actually make buying decisions. Audience outcomes A specific diagnostic for why their innovation programmes are stalling, anchored to the 4C’s of Innovation™. A working vocabulary for the cultural archetypes that block or enable change inside large organisations, drawn from the 9 Corporate Personality Types. A view of which trends in technology, economics and consumer behaviour are most likely to disrupt their P&L over the next five to ten years. A short list of the highest-leverage moves a senior team can make to convert innovation budget into commercial product launches.

Why organisations work with Steve Blank Co-creator of the Lean Startup methodology, the operating logic most corporate innovation programmes are now built on, taught by the person who designed it. His Lean LaunchPad curriculum became the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps, now the standard for commercialising research at the NSF, NIH and U.S. Department of Energy. Co-founder of Stanford’s Hacking for Defense programme and the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation, with direct experience deploying innovation methodology inside the U.S. defence and intelligence community. Twenty-one years inside eight Silicon Valley startups, with four IPOs including E.piphany. He built what he teaches before he taught it. Named one of 12 Masters of Innovation by Harvard Business Review and listed on the Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers. Biography highlights Adjunct Professor at Stanford University and Senior Fellow for Entrepreneurship at Columbia University. Author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany, The Startup Owner’s Manual, and Hacking for Defense: Innovation Doctrine. May 2013 Harvard Business Review cover story, “Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything,” defined the field. Co-founder of Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation; served on the Defense Business Board and the U.S. Navy’s Science and Technology Advisory Board. Lean LaunchPad class taught at 75+ universities globally; Hacking for Defense at 70+, with more than 70 dual-use startups and over $350 million in follow-on funding. Eight Silicon Valley startups across 21 years, four IPOs, including E.piphany, Zilog, MIPS and SuperMac. Biography Startups search for a business model. Large companies execute one. Conflating the two is what makes most corporate innovation programmes underperform: they apply planning, forecasting and accountability tools designed for known businesses to activities that are inherently exploratory. Steve Blank’s argument, developed across two foundational books and a 2013 Harvard Business Review cover story, is that innovation has to be run as a managed discipline with its own operating logic. The Lean Startup methodology he co-created treats new ventures as a search process, where customer development, hypothesis testing and minimum viable products replace the business plan as the primary instrument of decision-making. His credibility on this is built from doing the work, not just teaching it. He spent 21 years inside eight Silicon Valley startups, four of which went public, including E.piphany. He then took the same methodology into the U.S. federal system: his Lean LaunchPad curriculum was adopted by the National Science Foundation as I-Corps, now the standard for commercialising research at the NSF, NIH and Department of Energy. His Hacking for Defense programme, co-founded at Stanford with Joe Felter and Peter Newell, has produced more than 70 dual-use startups and over $350 million in funding. He teaches at Stanford, Columbia and Berkeley, advises the Department of Defense, and co-founded Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation. Harvard Business Review has named him one of 12 Masters of Innovation; Thinkers50 ranked him among the global top 50. The reason corporate audiences book him is straightforward: he is one of very few people who has built innovation processes that work inside the most rigid bureaucracies in existence, and he can show a senior team how to do the same. Key speaking topics Lean Startup methodology Corporate innovation at scale Customer development and business model search Entrepreneurship Disruption and incumbent response Innovation inside government and defence Ideal for Chief Innovation Officers and corporate venture leaders Boards and executive teams designing or resetting innovation programmes Government and defence leaders responsible for technology adoption and commercialisation Founders, scale-up CEOs and corporate accelerator leadership Audience outcomes A working distinction between executing a known business model and searching for a new one, with the implications for how each should be resourced, measured and led. The operating logic behind customer development, hypothesis testing and minimum viable products as decision-making instruments inside large organisations. Examples from the Lean LaunchPad, NSF I-Corps and Hacking for Defense programmes showing how the methodology has been deployed at federal scale. A diagnostic for why most corporate innovation programmes produce pilots and proofs-of-concept without commercial outcomes.

Why organisations work with Skip Bowman The Safe2Great model is the only publicly available integrated framework that treats psychological safety and growth mindset as a single system – giving organisations one coherent diagnostic language that connects leadership behaviour, team dynamics, and organisational culture without requiring them to hold multiple competing frameworks simultaneously. The Growth Mindset Leadership 360 converts leadership culture into quantified, benchmarked data – replacing the subjective impressions that dominate most culture assessments with comparative insight on where specific leaders are enabling or blocking growth, measured against a global dataset. His research found that more than 60% of leaders assess their own impact inaccurately relative to how their teams experience them – a specific, repeatable finding that reframes the conversation with senior leadership teams from aspiration to accountability. The Safe2Great model names and maps three distinct protective mindsets – controlling-competitive, complying-complacent, and critical-skeptical – that remain invisible in standard leadership frameworks, enabling organisations to identify the specific cultural blockers at play rather than working against a generic leadership gap. Both the book and the assessment tools are designed for practitioner deployment through a formal accreditation programme, meaning organisations can embed the methodology independently – Bowman’s work scales beyond the keynote. Biography highlights Author of Safe to Great: The New Psychology of Leadership (Figure 1 Publishing, 2023) Creator of the Safe2Great model and suite of four proprietary diagnostic tools including the Growth Mindset Leadership 360 – available in over ten languages Founder and CEO of Global Mindset, leadership and organisational development consultancy based in Denmark MA in Psychology and Languages (Copenhagen); MA in Organisational Psychology (Denmark); trained in cross-cultural management, group dynamics, and coaching Over 25 years of applied consulting with global organisations including Danfoss, Siemens, Nestlé, Ericsson, VELUX, and Merck Bilingual in English and Danish; consulting engagements across Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East Biography Skip Bowman starts from a finding that most leadership programmes prefer to avoid: the majority of leaders believe they behave very differently from how their teams actually experience them. His Safe2Great research, conducted across more than 500 leadership teams, found that over 60% of leaders inaccurately assessed their own impact. That data point is the foundation of everything he does. His 2023 book, Safe to Great: The New Psychology of Leadership (Figure 1 Publishing), sets out the argument in full. The central claim is that psychological safety is not a cultural aspiration that organisations approach through values statements and team workshops – it is a direct output of specific, identifiable leadership behaviours. The Safe2Great model maps those behaviours against three protective mindsets – controlling-competitive, complying-complacent, and critical-sceptical – and connects them to a suite of validated diagnostic tools that make the invisible visible. The Growth Mindset Leadership 360 is the operational core of this system. It benchmarks leaders against a global dataset, measuring the behaviours that enable or obstruct growth-oriented team dynamics. Combined with the Great Teams Assessment and Culture for Growth Survey, the result is an assessment architecture that links individual leadership behaviour to team experience to organisational culture in a single, connected methodology. The tools are available in over ten languages and come with a formal practitioner accreditation programme. Bowman grew up in Perth, Australia, and has spent the majority of the last 25 years in Europe – working in Switzerland, England, France, and Denmark and consulting across Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. He holds an MA in Psychology and Languages from Copenhagen and an MA in Organisational Psychology from Denmark, with additional training in cross-cultural management, group dynamics, and coaching. His consulting client history includes Danfoss, Siemens, Nestlé, Ericsson, VELUX, and Merck. Key speaking topics Psychological safety and leadership behaviour Growth mindset in leadership and organisational culture The Safe2Great model and leadership diagnostics Transforming organisational culture Leading change and transformation Cross-cultural and global leadership Leadership development and behavioural change Ideal for Senior leadership teams and executive committees navigating transformation or cultural change CHROs and people directors responsible for leadership development strategy and investment decisions L&D and organisational development leads in multinational or cross-border organisations Boards evaluating the relationship between leadership behaviour and organisational performance Audience outcomes A clear, working model for understanding how leadership behaviour directly creates or dismantles psychological safety in teams – beyond the concept, into measurable practice Ability to identify the three protective mindsets that most commonly obstruct cultural change, and to recognise them in their own leadership environment A shared organisational language connecting leadership assessment, team dynamics, and culture in a single coherent framework Practical understanding of what a diagnostic-led approach to leadership development looks like, and why design matters more than content in producing lasting behavioural change The research basis for understanding why leadership development programmes frequently fail to change the behaviours they are designed to change

Why organisations work with Simon Walker Operational leadership credibility, not metaphor. Walker took Toshiba Wave Warrior to second place in the BT Global Challenge as the fleet’s youngest skipper, then ran the company that organised the race. Boards hear leadership lessons drawn from a record, not an anecdote. Twenty years of practice inside corporate leadership development through his own firms, talentsmoothie and my360plus, including 360-degree feedback systems used inside live executive programmes. Academic anchoring at Henley Business School and Southampton Business School as a Visiting Executive Development Fellow, which gives the work a research spine that withstands scrutiny from heads of L&D and CHROs. A coherent point of view on generational dynamics, grounded in his co-authored “Generation Y: what they want from work” research, that helps leadership teams stop treating generational friction as an HR irritation and start treating it as a leadership question. Range across formats. Walker is commissioned for keynote, masterclass, mentoring and senior-team facilitation, which suits buyers who need the same voice across a multi-touch leadership programme rather than a one-off platform speech. Biography highlights Skipper of Toshiba Wave Warrior, BT Global Challenge 1996/97, second place, youngest skipper in the fleet. Former CEO of Challenge Business, organiser of the 2000/01 and 2004/05 Global Challenge round-the-world yacht races. Co-founder of talentsmoothie, a leadership and people development consultancy. Co-founder of my360plus, an online 360-degree feedback and executive coaching platform. Visiting Executive Development Fellow, Henley Business School and Southampton Business School. Co-author, “Generation Y: what they want from work.” Featured in Fast Company’s “Who’s Fast 2001” leadership profile. Biography Most leadership lessons come from books. A smaller number come from a documented record under conditions that punish poor judgement. The 1996/97 BT Global Challenge sent fourteen identical yachts the wrong way around the world against the prevailing winds, and a 28-year-old skipper named Simon Walker brought Toshiba Wave Warrior home in second place, the youngest in the fleet. Fast Company later profiled him under the line, “I can only compete through my crew.” That insight, that a leader competes through other people, has shaped the rest of his career. After the race he ran Challenge Business, organising the 2000/01 and 2004/05 Global Challenges, then turned full-time to corporate leadership development. He co-founded talentsmoothie, a research-based consultancy, and my360plus, an online 360-degree feedback and coaching platform now used inside executive programmes. His academic anchoring sits at Henley Business School and Southampton Business School, where he is a Visiting Executive Development Fellow. The work covers leadership behaviour under pressure, the practical mechanics of executive development, and the generational shifts reshaping how teams form and commit, ground he covered first in the co-authored report “Generation Y: what they want from work.” What buyers tend to remember after a session is the specificity. The detail of how a crew breaks down on the seventh gale of a Southern Ocean leg maps closely onto how a leadership team breaks down in the third quarter of a difficult restructure. The diagnostic is the same. Walker’s value to a senior audience is that he has run both kinds of crew and can talk about each in the language of the other. Key speaking topics Leadership under sustained pressure Executive development and 360-degree feedback Future of work and the changing employment contract Generational diversity in senior teams Team dynamics and crew leadership Technology and the behavioural shift inside organisations Talent attraction and retention Ideal for CEOs, CHROs and heads of leadership development designing senior leadership programmes Boards and executive teams entering or recovering from a sustained period of change Talent and L&D leaders rethinking executive development for a multigenerational workforce Senior leadership offsites where the brief is composure, judgement and crew dynamics rather than a single topic Audience outcomes A clearer read on how leadership behaviour shifts when pressure becomes sustained rather than episodic A sharper diagnostic for where a senior team is likely to break down before it does A practical view of how 360-degree feedback and structured executive development translate into changed behaviour A more grounded conversation about generational expectations inside the leadership pipeline Reference points and language that senior leaders can use back at work, drawn from a documented offshore command record rather than abstraction

Why organisations work with Scott Steinberg A method for foresight that produces decisions, not predictions. The POP FUTURE workshop format converts trend analysis into specific moves on product, talent, and customer strategy. A working library of 30 published books across futurism, innovation, change, and digital transformation, which means buyers can match a programme to a specific board agenda rather than a generic keynote. Direct advisory exposure to Fortune 500 operators and US defence leadership, including IBM, PwC, Intel, Microsoft, and the US Department of Defense, with the language and pace that environment demands. A trends franchise visible through CNBC, BBC, NPR, and Forbes, which gives senior audiences confidence that the speaker on stage is the same voice they have heard analysing the market elsewhere. Biography highlights CEO of FutureProof Strategies and of BIZDEV, the International Association for Business Development and Strategic Partnerships. Author of Make Change Work for You (Perigee/Penguin) and Think Like a Futurist, part of a published catalogue of more than 30 books. Named Master of Innovation by Fortune magazine. Contributor and on-air expert for CNBC, BBC, CNN, NPR, ABC, CBS, and Fox Business; columnist for Forbes and Reader’s Digest. Advisory and consulting work with IBM, PwC, Intel, Sony, Microsoft, MTV, ESPN, American Express, and the US Department of Defense. Creator of the POP FUTURE methodology and the What’s the Future of…? and The Future is Yours applied foresight tools. Biography Most foresight work stops at the trend chart. Boards see the slide on AI, demographics, or customer behaviour, agree it matters, then return to the operating decisions in front of them. Scott Steinberg’s work is built around closing that gap. His POP FUTURE methodology and the What’s the Future of…? workshop tools are designed to take a leadership team from “this trend is real” to “this is what we do on Monday”. That bias toward decision shows up across his published catalogue. Make Change Work for You, published by Perigee, frames future-proofing as a set of practical disciplines for individuals and teams. Think Like a Futurist extends the same logic to enterprise planning. Across more than 30 books, the through-line is the same: foresight as an operating capability, not a corporate trend report. The credentials behind that argument are unusually broad. He runs FutureProof Strategies and BIZDEV, advises IBM, PwC, Intel, Microsoft, and the US Department of Defense, and was named Master of Innovation by Fortune. CNBC, BBC, NPR, and Forbes use him as a recurring voice on technology, work, and consumer behaviour, which means his audiences arrive already familiar with how he reasons. For senior buyers, the practical value is range. Boards working on AI adoption, generational change, customer experience, or change fatigue can put him in front of any of those audiences and get the same disciplined translation from trend to decision. That is what makes him useful when the brief is wide, the audience is mixed, and the agenda is more than a single topic. Key speaking topics Strategic foresight and future-proofing Artificial intelligence and the future of business Change leadership and innovation Digital transformation Customer experience and consumer trends Generational shift and future of work Organisational culture and resilience Ideal for Board and executive committee strategy offsites setting a multi-year agenda Transformation, innovation, and digital leaders running enterprise-wide change programmes CMOs and customer experience leaders planning around generational and behavioural shift Industry events where a mixed senior audience needs a single integrating view of technology, work, and customer trends Audience outcomes A working definition of what futurism is and is not, and how to use it inside an existing planning cycle A short list of the trends most likely to reshape the audience’s industry over the next planning horizon A method for translating trend analysis into specific decisions on product, customer, and workforce Language and frames that make foresight defensible to a sceptical board or investment committee

Why organisations work with Scott Sonenshein A peer-reviewed thesis with commercial bite: Stretch synthesises a decade of his published research at Rice and Michigan into a working model for resourcefulness, not a recycled productivity argument. Credibility with finance and operations buyers: a Wall Street Journal bestseller and Washington Post pick of the 10 leadership books of 2017, anchored in studies of how constrained firms outperform better-funded rivals. A second franchise on workplace clutter and focus: co-author with Marie Kondo of the New York Times bestseller Joy at Work, giving him reach into culture, productivity and wellbeing briefs as well as strategy. Academic standing that holds up under scrutiny: former Associate Editor of the Academy of Management Journal, with publications in Administrative Science Quarterly and Organization Science, and seven Rice Faculty Research Excellence Awards. A speaker who translates research without diluting it: keynotes at Google and Fortune 500 audiences across technology, energy, healthcare, retail, banking and manufacturing. Biography highlights Henry Gardiner Symonds, Professor of Management at Rice Business, Rice University. Author of Stretch (HarperCollins, 2017), a Wall Street Journal bestseller and Washington Post 2017 leadership book of the year selection. Co-author with Marie Kondo of Joy at Work (Little, Brown Spark, 2020), a New York Times bestseller. Ph.D. from the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan; M.Phil from the University of Cambridge. Former Associate Editor, Academy of Management Journal; published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Review and Organization Science. Bylines in the New York Times, Time, Fast Company and Harvard Business Review; speaker at Talks at Google. Biography The instinct in most boardrooms under pressure is to ask for more. More budget, more headcount, more technology, more data. Sonenshein’s research at Rice University, drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork, argues that the firms that outperform their rivals tend to do the opposite. They redeploy what they already own. That argument is the spine of Stretch, his Wall Street Journal bestseller, named by the Washington Post as one of the ten leadership books to read in 2017. The book separates two organisational mindsets. Chasers measure themselves by what they lack. Stretchers find unconventional uses for resources, people and capabilities already inside the business. The distinction shows up in margins, in innovation rates, and in how teams behave when the next round of funding does not arrive. The academic credentials behind the argument are unusually strong for a trade book author. Sonenshein holds the Henry Gardiner Symonds Professorship at Rice Business, a Ph.D. from the Ross School of Business at Michigan, and an M.Phil from Cambridge. He has served as Associate Editor of the Academy of Management Journal and published in Administrative Science Quarterly and Organization Science. Rice has awarded him its Faculty Research Excellence Award seven times. His second book, Joy at Work, co-written with Marie Kondo and published by Little, Brown Spark in 2020, became a New York Times bestseller and extended his reach into the operating reality of how people focus, prioritise and clear cognitive load at work. That combined ground, the strategy of resourcefulness above and the discipline of focus below, is what makes him useful to executive audiences who cannot solve a growth problem by writing a bigger cheque. Key speaking topics Resourcefulness as a strategic capability Innovation under constraint Organisational change and sensemaking Productivity and focus at work Decluttering professional life and decision load Creativity and growth without additional budget Ideal for Senior leadership teams under cost pressure who still own a growth mandate CHROs and culture leads rebuilding focus, prioritisation and engagement Innovation, transformation and operations leaders running pilots without expansion capital Conferences in technology, energy, healthcare, retail, banking and manufacturing where the audience is operators, not strategists in the abstract Audience outcomes A working language to separate “chasing” from “stretching” inside their own decisions Concrete examples of how constrained firms outperform better-resourced rivals A method for auditing the underused resources, people and capabilities already on the books Practical tools from Joy at Work for cutting cognitive clutter at the team level Research-backed counterarguments to the default that growth requires more inputs

Why organisations work with Ronan Harrington He has built and tested the Resilient Performance Method directly with Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG, so the model arrives in the room already pressure-tested by the firms that advise on the same problems. His foresight background at the UK Foreign Office gives leaders a credible reading of why the operating environment has changed, before he gets to what to do about it personally and as a team. He is a guest teacher on the KPMG C-Suite Leadership Programme, which makes him a familiar choice for executive development teams looking for a speaker who works alongside their existing leadership curriculum. His chronic illness and political burnout story is verifiable and used as evidence, not as theatre, which lets the resilience argument land with senior audiences who are usually allergic to motivational content. Buyers report a practical takeaway: leaders leave with a small set of decisions about how they spend energy, attention and team time, rather than a generic call to look after themselves. Biography highlights Former Futurist to the UK Foreign Office, authoring a long-range outlook on the world of 2030 and advising senior officials on geopolitical risk. Creator of the Resilient Performance Method, developed with Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG. Guest teacher on the KPMG C-Suite Leadership Programme and at Oxford University. Founder of Alter Ego, a global network of progressive leaders. Former strategic lead at RethinkX, leading narrative work on the “Rethinking Humanity” report. LinkedIn Top Voice on Public Speaking and Top 5 Best Storyteller at the 2023 Speaker Awards. Biography Most resilience content sounds the same once a senior audience has heard it twice. Harrington is interesting because his track record is in foresight, not in sport psychology, and the model he teaches was built with the firms that advise the same boards he now speaks to. He worked as a Futurist at the UK Foreign Office, advising on geopolitical risk and authoring a long-range outlook on the world of 2030. The brief gave him a structural view of why the operating environment has shifted from cyclical pressure to permanent volatility, which is the frame he now brings to executive audiences. The Resilient Performance Method was developed with Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG, and Harrington is a guest teacher on the KPMG C-Suite Leadership Programme. The method covers how senior leaders allocate energy, attention and team capacity through restructure, AI rollouts and prolonged uncertainty. It is taught as practice, not as inspiration. The personal story is load-bearing rather than decorative. After a period operating at national political level he was diagnosed with a lifetime chronic pain condition, and seven years of managing that condition is what gives his content on energy, recovery and pace its specificity. Clients including L’Oreal, Siemens Energy, Sky, Aviva, IHG, TUI, Sage, Kimberly-Clark, A&O Shearman, DLA Piper, the UK Treasury and Oxford University use him as the speaker who makes the resilience conversation operational at executive level. Key speaking topics Resilient high performance under sustained pressure Leadership through restructuring and prolonged uncertainty Burnout prevention in senior teams Human-first leadership in the AI transition Psychological safety and candour at executive level Energy and attention management for leaders Mental health and recovery for senior professionals Ideal for C-suite and senior leadership offsites where the agenda is performance, not wellbeing as a side topic. Partner and director audiences in professional services facing prolonged client and restructuring pressure. Heads of executive development and leadership programmes building resilience modules into senior curricula. Transformation and change leads running multi-year AI or restructuring programmes that are fatiguing leadership populations. Audience outcomes A working definition of resilient performance that goes beyond personal wellbeing into team-level decisions. A specific read on which signals of burnout to act on early in a senior population. Practical decisions about how leaders allocate energy, attention and team time during sustained pressure. A reframe of human capability under AI-driven change, focused on judgement, candour and recovery rather than tooling. A vocabulary leadership teams can carry into their own meetings about pace, candour and what they will stop doing.

Why organisations work with Robin Sieger Natural Born Winners has sold internationally in dozens of countries and around twenty languages and remains in print twenty-five years after first publication, giving senior audiences a recognised body of work rather than a one-off keynote. His material on success as a learnable design, drawn in part from his own cancer recovery in his late twenties, lands with leadership audiences who are tired of generic resilience talks and want something with a real story behind it. Decades of repeat work with Microsoft, IBM, HSBC, Coca-Cola, Ford, Vodafone and Unilever means he understands a corporate room and pitches to the actual pressures of senior commercial life, not a public-speaking circuit version of them. Fellowship of the Professional Speaking Association in the UK and a main-platform slot at the National Speakers Association Convention in the United States place him among a small group of speakers recognised by their own profession on both sides of the Atlantic. Biography highlights Author of Natural Born Winners (Random House), an international bestseller in dozens of countries, with a 25th Anniversary edition published in 2024. Author of further books on mindset and performance, including You Can Change Your Life Any Time You Want, 42 Days to Wealth Health and Happiness, Silent Mind Golf, Silent Mind Putting and Golf Under Pressure. Natural Born Winners adapted into a No. 1-rated television series for Scottish Television. Fellow of the Professional Speaking Association, one of the first three UK speakers to be awarded the fellowship. 2006: first European speaker invited to present on the main platform of the National Speakers Association Convention in the United States. Long-standing speaker for Microsoft, IBM, Coca-Cola, Nokia, HSBC, Virgin, Ford, Merrill Lynch, BBC, Vodafone, Unilever, General Motors and McDonald’s. Biography A cancer diagnosis at twenty-nine forced a question most leadership writers approach from the outside. The experience pushed Robin Sieger out of a career in television comedy and into a long inquiry into why some people recover their footing under extreme pressure and others do not. The book that followed, Natural Born Winners, was published by Random House in 1999 and has stayed in print and in translation for a quarter of a century. He built Sieger International around that thesis, working with senior teams at Microsoft, IBM, Coca-Cola, HSBC, Ford, Vodafone and Unilever on the psychology of performance and self-leadership. The framing is practical rather than therapeutic: how leaders think under load, what they do with setback, and how they hold composure when the conditions are not favourable. Alongside the corporate work, Sieger has written further books on mindset and on the mental side of golf with Tony Jacklin and David Leadbetter, and was made a Fellow of the Professional Speaking Association as one of the first three UK recipients. In 2006, he became the first European speaker invited to the main platform of the National Speakers Association Convention in the United States. What boards and senior teams take from him is a credible voice on resilience that is not a wellbeing talk. The case is that performance under pressure is a learnable discipline, evidenced by his own recovery and a long client list of organisations who have brought him back to repeat the conversation with new cohorts of leaders. Key speaking topics Psychology of peak performance Resilience and recovery under pressure Self-leadership and personal effectiveness Mindset and behaviour change Motivation in periods of change and uncertainty Creating a success culture inside teams Mental performance in sport and business Ideal for Senior leadership offsites where the agenda is composure, decision-making and personal performance under sustained pressure. Sales and commercial conferences looking to lift performance without resorting to generic motivational content. Programmes for high-potential leaders moving into roles where the variable is no longer skill but how they handle setback. After-dinner and main-stage slots at corporate annual conferences where the audience expects a recognised author with a serious back catalogue. Audience outcomes A clearer account of why some people and teams recover faster from setback than others, grounded in lived experience rather than slogans. Language and frames from Natural Born Winners that senior leaders can use with their own teams the following week. A more honest reading of where motivation comes from in mature commercial organisations, beyond incentive design. A sharper sense of what self-leadership actually looks like in practice for people running pressured roles. A reset on how the audience thinks about their own response to pressure, not as a wellbeing issue but as a performance variable.

Why organisations work with Robert B Tucker He has spent four decades inside the innovation practice of large companies, with named research underpinning each book: 50+ innovator interviews behind Winning the Innovation Game, 23 vanguard companies behind Driving Growth Through Innovation. His Forbes column and his international bestseller Managing the Future give him an unusually wide read on what is actually shifting in markets, technology and customer behaviour, not what is trending in the innovation press. He brings named frameworks the room can use afterwards: the seven I-Skills, the D.I.T.O. method, the seven navigational mindsets. Each maps to a specific leadership decision. His client work spans Nokia, IBM, American Express, Nestle and the economic development ministries of Singapore, Dubai and Morocco, so he speaks to commercial and public-sector audiences with equal grounding. He treats innovation as a portfolio and capability question, not a creativity exhortation, which is what senior leaders need when the board is asking why pilots are not producing returns. Biography highlights President of The Innovation Resource, Santa Barbara; consultant and keynote speaker since 1986. Former adjunct professor, UCLA. Author of Managing the Future: 10 Driving Forces of Change (international bestseller, translated into 13 languages, endorsed by Andy Grove of Intel), Driving Growth Through Innovation, Innovation Is Everybody’s Business (John Wiley), Winning the Innovation Game, and Build a Better Future: 7 Mindsets for Navigating the Age of Acceleration. Forbes contributor on innovation trends; published in Strategy & Leadership, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Journal of Business Strategy, Harvard Management Update. Recipient of the BrandLaureate Brand Personality Award from the Asia Pacific Brands Foundation for contributions to innovation. Featured on PBS, Bloomberg and CNBC’s The Business of Innovation series. Biography Innovation as a corporate function is now mature; innovation as a corporate discipline often is not. Robert B Tucker has spent forty years documenting the difference. His first book, Winning the Innovation Game, was built on interviews with more than fifty leading innovators in 1986, before innovation had a department or a budget line. The argument then, and now, is that companies which produce repeatable growth treat innovation as an operating practice, not a posture. That argument runs through his later work. Driving Growth Through Innovation studied 23 vanguard companies and isolated the practices that separated them from peers who talked the same language but produced different results. Innovation Is Everybody’s Business, published by John Wiley, sets out the seven I-Skills he sees as the practical competence behind those practices. Managing the Future, an international bestseller endorsed by Intel’s Andy Grove and translated into thirteen languages, broadened the lens to the macro forces leadership teams have to read. His most recent book, Build a Better Future, addresses what he calls the Age of Acceleration: a period in which climatological, geopolitical, technological and social shifts compound faster than most planning cycles can absorb. The book introduces the D.I.T.O. framework and seven navigational mindsets aimed at senior leaders deciding where to place capital, talent and attention. Tucker is president of The Innovation Resource in Santa Barbara, a former UCLA adjunct professor, and a Forbes contributor on innovation trends. His client work, from IBM, Nokia, American Express and Nestle to the economic development ministries of Singapore, Dubai and Morocco, gives him a working brief on what innovation discipline looks like when the operating reality is complex and the upside is contested. Key speaking topics Innovation as a managed discipline Strategic foresight and the Age of Acceleration Driving growth through innovation portfolios Innovation skills for individual contributors and leaders The seven navigational mindsets for senior leaders Future trends and market disruption Building a culture that produces innovation outcomes Ideal for CEOs, CSOs and corporate strategy teams wrestling with where the next growth wave actually comes from Heads of innovation, R&D and transformation responsible for converting pilots into operating advantage Boards and senior leadership teams setting long-range direction under accelerating change Public-sector and economic development leaders shaping national or regional innovation agendas Audience outcomes A clearer view of which innovation practices separate vanguard companies from peers that talk the same language A named framework, the seven I-Skills, that maps innovation behaviour to individual and team capability The D.I.T.O. method and the seven navigational mindsets as a working reference for senior decisions under acceleration A read on the macro forces that change the assumptions underneath strategy, capital allocation and talent A more honest internal conversation about which innovation activity is producing returns and which is theatre