Change Management

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

Why organisations work with René Carayol His SPIKE framework (Strengths Positively Identified Kick-Start Excellence) gives leadership teams a diagnostic for identifying the two or three individual strengths that drive high performance, rather than a generic conversation about development areas. It changes how teams are built, not just how leaders think. His case for inclusive leadership is grounded in firsthand board experience, including appointment as a Non-Executive Director of the Inland Revenue in 2001, at a time when no diversity representation existed at that level in UK public institutions. The argument carries a credibility that cannot be borrowed from research alone. Coaching and advisory engagements with senior leaders across business and government: clients and counterparts include Ralph Hamers (former CEO, ING and UBS), Sir Richard Branson, and Sir Tony Blair His “Everybody In, Nobody Out” framing positions inclusion as a performance architecture rather than an HR compliance function, directly relevant to organisations where DEI has stalled because it has not been connected to business outcomes. His executive and governance track from Marks & Spencer, PepsiCo, and IPC Media to Inland Revenue board and Computacenter plc, means his observations on leadership culture are drawn from the inside of institutions, not from coaching their periphery. His academic teaching (Cass Business School, MSc in Management) and media fluency (BBC, Channel 4, Sky News) mean he can move between rigorous argument and compelling narrative in a single session. His events consistently produce behavioural commitments rather than inspiration that dissipates. Biography highlights Decade-long career at Marks & Spencer (Senior IT Manager); IT Systems Director, PepsiCo; CIO then Managing Director of IPC Electric, IPC Magazines, driving Europe’s largest MBO at £860m, culminating in the sale to AOL Time Warner Non-Executive Director, Inland Revenue (appointed 2001); current Independent Non-Executive Director, Computacenter plc (FTSE-listed), sitting on Audit, Nomination and Remuneration Committees Executive Vice President for ESG, Medallia; member of the Global Executive Leadership Team Visiting Professor, Cass Business School; lectured on MSc in Management programme MBE (2004), services to the business community; undergraduate degree, London School of Economics; Honorary Doctorate, University of Roehampton Author, SPIKE: What Are You Great At?; co-author, Corporate Voodoo (third edition) and My Voodoo Broadcaster and commentator: BBC Two, Channel 4, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 5 Live, Sky News; former Sunday Telegraph Business Reporter columnist Biography Most leadership cultures are built around a small number of star performers at the top. SPIKE, René Carayol’s published strengths framework, challenges that model directly. The argument comes from someone who has led, governed, and coached at the highest levels of British and international business. Carayol spent a decade at Marks & Spencer in senior IT roles, then moved to PepsiCo as IT Systems Director before joining IPC Magazines as CIO. He rose to Managing Director of IPC Electric, the internet business at the centre of Europe’s largest MBO, a £860 million transaction that ended with the sale to AOL Time Warner. He went on to serve as Non-Executive Director of the Inland Revenue through its merger into HMRC, and currently sits on the board of FTSE-listed Computacenter plc. SPIKE (Strengths Positively Identified Kick-Start Excellence) is the framework that emerged from this experience. Its core argument: every person carries at least one genuine strength, and organisations that build around those strengths consistently outperform those that manage around weaknesses. For Carayol, this is inseparable from the business case for inclusive leadership. His mantra, “Everybody In, Nobody Out,” frames inclusion as a performance imperative, a position he holds with authority as one of the first Black men to serve at board level in a major UK institution. As Visiting Professor at Cass Business School and a regular voice on BBC Radio 4, Sky News, and Channel 4, his thinking reaches well beyond the conference circuit. His books, SPIKE: What Are You Great At? and the co-authored Corporate Voodoo, now in its third edition, extend his frameworks to leadership teams at scale. He was awarded an MBE in 2004 for services to the business community. Key speaking topics Strengths-based leadership Inclusive leadership and culture Leadership and business transformation Collaborative leadership Corporate culture and performance Executive coaching and personal effectiveness Diversity, equity and inclusion Ideal for Senior leadership teams and C-suite executives in FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 organisations navigating culture change or post-merger integration CHROs and Chief People Officers building inclusive, high-performance leadership cultures Board directors and non-executive directors focused on governance, leadership accountability, and succession Transformation leads and executive development programmes where the shift from management to leadership is the central challenge Audience outcomes A working understanding of the SPIKE framework and how to apply it to individual development, team design, and succession planning A reframed case for inclusive leadership as a performance architecture, not a compliance exercise – with the language to make that argument inside their own organisations Practical distinctions between management and leadership behaviours, grounded in frontline C-suite and board experience Insight drawn from Carayol’s direct coaching relationships with named CEOs and institution heads; World Bank, Barclays, ING, Generali, rather than theoretical constructs Clarity on how culture and leadership interact in practice, and what leaders can do immediately to change the pattern

Why organisations work with Ramon Vullings A named, written methodology for cross-industry innovation, set out in Not Invented Here (BIS Publishers, with Marc Heleven), that gives innovation teams a shared language and a repeatable process rather than a one-off creativity session. The ideaDJ framework: a specific operating model for combining and adapting external ideas across silos, used in executive programmes at Antwerp Management School, Fontys and IE Business School. A working bridge between corporate and academic practice. Former PwC Consulting and IBM operations leader, now executive professor at three European business schools, with material that holds up in front of senior practitioners. Chair of the European Association for Creativity and Innovation, with access to a peer network of innovation specialists across Europe and a long view on what is actually working in the field. A clear position on failure tolerance, framed through “nearlings” rather than abstract permission to experiment, that gives leadership teams something concrete to take into governance and incentive design. Biography highlights Author of four management books, including Not Invented Here: Cross-Industry Innovation (BIS Publishers, with Marc Heleven) and Creativity in Business. Executive Professor at Fontys University of Applied Sciences, Antwerp Management School, and IE Executive Education at IE Business School in Madrid. Chairman of the European Association for Creativity and Innovation (EACI). Advisor to the Global Innovation Institute (GInI). Former Global CRM Operations Manager at PwC Consulting and EMEA CRM Learning and Knowledge Lead at IBM Business Consulting Services. Founder of innovation consultancy Twinkeling and co-founder of innovation network 21 Lobsterstreet. Biography Most original ideas are not original. The strongest commercial innovations of the last twenty years are recombinations of methods, business models and design patterns lifted from one industry and reapplied in another. Ramon Vullings built a career arguing this point and turning it into a method that innovation teams can actually run. The argument is set out in Not Invented Here: Cross-Industry Innovation, co-authored with Marc Heleven and published by BIS Publishers. The book gives leaders a structured way to find working answers in adjacent sectors and translate them into their own context, and it has been translated into five languages and sold over 60,000 copies. Three further books, including Creativity in Business and Great Leaders Mix and Match, extend the same logic into idea generation, leadership behaviour and complex problem-solving. The credibility behind the method is operational, not only academic. Before founding his consultancy Twinkeling, Vullings ran global CRM operations at PwC Consulting and led EMEA CRM learning and knowledge at IBM Business Consulting Services after the IBM acquisition. That background shows up in the work: the focus is on processes leaders can sponsor, governance models that tolerate productive failure, and innovation as a managed discipline rather than a creativity workshop. He now teaches the method as Executive Professor at Fontys, Antwerp Management School and IE Business School, chairs the European Association for Creativity and Innovation, and advises the Global Innovation Institute. For senior teams trying to break a sector-bound innovation pattern, his contribution is a vocabulary, a framework, and a network that have all been pressure-tested on practitioners. Key speaking topics Cross-industry innovation The ideaDJ framework and remix strategy Innovation methodology and idea management Cross-silo leadership Creativity in business Risk tolerance and productive failure Ecosystems and innovation partnerships Ideal for Chief innovation officers, CSOs and corporate strategy leads running innovation portfolios that have plateaued. R&D and product leadership teams in mature industries seeking analogies from outside their sector. Executive education cohorts and leadership programmes in regulated or engineering-heavy industries. Heads of transformation looking to embed innovation as a managed discipline rather than an event series. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for cross-industry innovation, including ideaDJ, copy-adapt-paste, and “nearlings”. Examples of analogies transferred between sectors that audiences can map onto their own portfolio. A clearer test for which external ideas are worth importing and which break on contact with the operating model. Concrete governance and incentive moves to raise tolerance for productive failure without losing discipline. A method audiences can run inside their teams without external facilitation.

Why organisations work with Pierre-Yves Gerbeau A first-hand operating account of one of the most public corporate rescues in modern British memory, told by the executive who took the role on day one of the crisis. A career built inside live consumer assets at scale, from Disneyland Paris park operations through the X-Leisure portfolio he grew from roughly 70 million pounds to more than 1.3 billion pounds before the sale to Land Securities. Practical content for boards facing a hostile press cycle, a sceptical workforce and demanding political stakeholders at the same time, drawn from the Dome and the London Resort theme park CEO seat. A teaching practitioner, lecturing on the London Business School MBA programme and as Visiting Professor of Entrepreneurship and Corporate Rescue at Imperial College, so the operating stories carry an analytical frame. Biography highlights Chief Executive of the New Millennium Experience Company from February 2000, with the Millennium Dome reaching more than six million visitors during its year of operation. Vice-President of Park Operations and Attractions at Euro Disney, with operational ownership of ticketing, safety, maintenance and queue management. Co-founder and Chief Executive of X-Leisure, operator of the Xscape centres, sold to Land Securities after a decade of growth. Chief Executive of London Resort Company Holdings, June 2019 to December 2022, leading the Paramount IP licensing arrangement for the proposed Kent resort. President of the French Ice Hockey Federation, appointed October 2021 and re-elected in 2022. Visiting Professor of Entrepreneurship and Corporate Rescue at Imperial College, lecturer on the London Business School MBA programme, MBA from Sciences Po. Biography The Millennium Dome in January 2000 was the most publicly mocked asset in Britain. Tony Blair’s flagship project had opened to negative press, queues that did not move and visitor numbers well below plan. On 5 February that year Pierre-Yves Gerbeau, recommended by Disney CEO Michael Eisner, took over as Chief Executive of the New Millennium Experience Company. The Dome went on to attract more than six million visitors before its scheduled close. The Dome story is the headline, but the operating CV underneath it is what makes the perspective unusual on a stage. Gerbeau ran park operations at Disneyland Paris through its difficult early years, with direct responsibility for the unglamorous mechanics of a theme park: ticketing, safety, maintenance, queue flow. He then built X-Leisure, the platform behind the Xscape indoor ski and entertainment centres, growing it from roughly 70 million pounds of assets under management in 2003 to more than 1.3 billion pounds by 2007, and eventually selling to Land Securities. Subsequent roles have kept him close to the same set of problems. As CEO of London Resort Company Holdings from 2019 to 2022, he led negotiations for the Paramount IP deal that anchored the proposed Kent theme park before resigning in December 2022. In 2021 he was elected President of the French Ice Hockey Federation, a return to the sport in which he competed professionally before an ankle injury ended his playing career. The teaching work sits alongside the operating one. Gerbeau lectures on the London Business School MBA programme and is Visiting Professor of Entrepreneurship and Corporate Rescue at Imperial College, holding an MBA from Sciences Po. The argument he carries into a senior boardroom is built from the seat: turnaround is an operating discipline executed under public pressure, not a slide deck about resilience. Key speaking topics Corporate turnaround and rescue Transformational leadership under public scrutiny Change management in consumer-facing assets Entrepreneurial discipline at scale Customer experience in live-operations businesses Risk management and crisis response Stakeholder management with political and media exposure Ideal for Boards and executive committees inheriting a publicly criticised asset, brand or programme Operating leaders running large customer-facing platforms in leisure, retail, hospitality and travel CEOs and transformation directors managing a turnaround under regulatory or political stakeholder pressure Senior teams in scale-up businesses moving from founder energy to institutional operating discipline Audience outcomes A working model of how an incoming CEO sequences the first weeks of a public-asset turnaround A clear view of where operating discipline and brand recovery interact, drawn from the Dome and X-Leisure A sharper read on managing political, media and workforce stakeholders simultaneously Reusable lessons on building and selling a leisure property platform at scale Confidence to make unpopular operating calls when values and commercial reality both demand them

Why organisations work with Philip Gimmack Twenty-five years spanning enterprise change management at Oracle, KPMG, Cap Gemini and Accenture, followed by a dedicated EQ practice since 2012, means he speaks to senior audiences from inside their vocabulary rather than imposing a coaching register on them. His proprietary assessments, the A.R.T. and the 6 Pillars of Resilience Model, turn EQ from an abstract virtue into something a leadership team can score, compare and improve across engagements. He holds two of the most widely used professional credentials in the field: certified NLP Psychotherapist (1998) and licensed EQ-i 2.0 practitioner, which gives HR buyers confidence that the underlying method is not bespoke invention. He is as comfortable in a 30-minute keynote as in a multi-day programme, which suits organisations that want the keynote to seed a larger capability build rather than stand alone. His writing on HR Zone gives HR and L&D audiences prior exposure to his argument before they put him in front of their own leaders. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of EQworks, established 2012 Designer of The A.R.T. (Advanced Relationship Skills) assessment and the 6 Pillars of Resilience Model Certified NLP Psychotherapist (1998); licensed EQ-i 2.0 and A.R.T. practitioner Twenty-five years in change management and leadership coaching Earlier career in management consulting at Oracle, KPMG, Cap Gemini and Accenture Contributor to HR Zone Biography The reason most leadership development programmes fail to move the needle is not that the models are weak. It is that the participants cannot regulate their own emotions well enough to apply the models when it matters. Philip Gimmack built EQworks in 2012 to close that specific gap, and his twenty-five-year career has been a progression toward the argument that emotional intelligence is the operating layer underneath every other leadership skill. His route into the work was through enterprise change. Years as a management consultant at Oracle, KPMG, Cap Gemini and Accenture showed him that the repeatable failure point in transformation programmes was human rather than technical. The response was a deliberate shift into the behavioural disciplines: a certification as an NLP Psychotherapist in 1998, a professional coaching qualification, and licences to use the EQ-i 2.0 psychometric instrument. EQworks gave him a platform to turn that toolkit into something organisations could deploy. The A.R.T., his Advanced Relationship Skills assessment, diagnoses communication and relationship dynamics in a way that is specific enough to coach against. The 6 Pillars of Resilience Model does the same for how leaders and teams absorb pressure. Both sit underneath the programmes he now runs with UK corporate clients. Gimmack’s speaking style is built for the audiences he coaches: pragmatic, plain-spoken and framed in business rather than therapeutic terms. For HR directors, L&D leaders and executive teams looking for EQ content that will survive contact with a cynical senior audience, his proposition is a measurable method rather than a motivational message. Key speaking topics Emotional intelligence in leadership Resilience and the 6 Pillars model Behaviour change and communication skills Change management from the people side EQ and diversity and inclusion Employee engagement and retention Ideal for CHROs, HR directors and L&D leaders designing leadership development programmes with measurable behavioural outcomes Executive teams and senior leadership groups working on internal conflict, communication or change fatigue Corporate universities and in-house academies looking for EQ content that can scale across cohorts Industry conferences and HR forums requiring a practitioner voice on emotional intelligence Audience outcomes A working understanding of what emotional intelligence actually is, measured through established psychometrics rather than intuition An introduction to the A.R.T. framework for understanding relationship and communication dynamics in teams Practical techniques from the 6 Pillars of Resilience Model that leaders can apply to themselves and their direct reports A clearer view of how EQ underpins change management, diversity and retention outcomes

Why organisations work with Peter Sheahan A defined commercial framework. Matter and the Edge of Disruption give boards a concrete way to locate where their existing profits, reach, and reputation can be redeployed to create new markets, not just defend old ones. Operating credibility, not just theory. He has built three companies and runs Karrikins Group, advising leadership teams at Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Wells Fargo, Hyundai, Pfizer, and Cardinal Health on transformation execution. Authority recognised by his peers. The National Speakers Association ranked him among its 25 Most Influential Speakers and inducted him as the youngest member ever into its Hall of Fame. A clear thesis on commoditisation. He gives commercial and sales leadership a usable argument for moving organisations off price competition and onto value, trust, and indispensability. A senior-room voice on the human side of growth. His work on culture, attraction, and retention is grounded in the same commercial logic, treating people strategy as a driver of competitive position rather than an HR programme. Biography highlights Founder and Group CEO of Karrikins Group, a global growth and transformation consultancy. Author of seven books, including Matter, Flip, Generation Y, and Making it Happen; published by Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, and Amplify. Inducted into the National Speakers Association Hall of Fame as its youngest-ever member. Named one of the 25 Most Influential Speakers in the World by the National Speakers Association. 2,500+ keynote presentations delivered across more than 40 countries. Advisory and keynote client roster including Apple, Microsoft, IBM, AT&T, Wells Fargo, Hyundai, Pfizer, Cardinal Health, Chick-fil-A, and BP. Biography The companies that sustain growth do not protect what made them successful. They identify the place where their existing reach, reputation, and profits give them permission to build the next market, and they move before they have to. That place is what Peter Sheahan calls the Edge of Disruption. The thesis is laid out in Matter: Move Beyond the Competition, Create More Value, and Become the Obvious Choice, co-authored with Julie Williamson, PhD. The book studies more than thirty companies that achieved indispensability by leaning into disruption rather than defending against it. It is the intellectual spine of his consulting practice at Karrikins Group, where he advises Fortune 500 leadership teams on transformation, growth, and commercial repositioning. His earlier books cover the same terrain from different angles. Flip set out the case for counterintuitive thinking when markets refuse to behave predictably. Generation Y and Making it Happen addressed how the workforce side of a business has to evolve in step with its commercial ambitions. Across the work, the argument is consistent: growth comes from identifying where the most important problems are converging, then committing operational resources before the rest of the market sees them. The credibility behind the argument is operating, not academic. He has built three companies, delivered more than 2,500 presentations across 40+ countries, and counts Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Wells Fargo, Pfizer, and Cardinal Health among the leadership teams he has worked with. The National Speakers Association named him among its 25 Most Influential Speakers in the World and inducted him as the youngest-ever member of its Hall of Fame. Key speaking topics Growth strategy under disruption Business model innovation and the Edge of Disruption Competitive advantage when products and services commoditise Culture as a commercial driver Workforce attraction and retention Trusted-adviser positioning and winning on value Ideal for CEOs, chief strategy officers, and chief growth officers planning the next horizon of competitive position Boards and executive teams confronting margin compression or post-acquisition integration Chief commercial officers, sales leadership, and revenue teams shifting from price to value CHROs and chief people officers tying talent strategy to commercial outcomes Audience outcomes A defined view of where the organisation’s Edge of Disruption sits, and what would need to be true to commit to it A working argument for moving customers, talent, and internal narrative away from price as the basis of choice Sharper language for the leadership team on what genuine differentiation looks like in their category Renewed conviction in the commercial logic of culture, talent, and organisational design decisions

Why organisations work with Peter Senge Built the framework that defined organisational learning. The Fifth Discipline has sold over two million copies; Harvard Business Review named it one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years, and the Financial Times listed it among the five most important management books ever published. Treats systems thinking as a leadership discipline. The Five Disciplines (personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking) give executives a working method for changing the structures that produce their hardest recurring problems. Three decades of applied work with Ford, Shell, BP, Unilever, Intel, and Saudi Aramco, alongside cross-sector initiatives on global food systems, climate, and education. Named “Strategist of the Century” by the Journal of Business Strategy, one of 24 figures judged to have had the greatest influence on 20th-century business strategy. The Fifth Discipline is now in its fourth decade of continuous use on MBA syllabuses and inside operating companies. Biography highlights Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Sustainability at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Founding Chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) and co-founder of the Academy for Systemic Change. Author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, with over two million copies sold worldwide. Co-author of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, The Dance of Change, Schools That Learn, Presence, and The Necessary Revolution. Named “Strategist of the Century” by the Journal of Business Strategy; ranked among the world’s top management thinkers by the Financial Times and BusinessWeek. Convened the Sustainable Food Lab, bringing major food companies and NGOs into shared work on sustainable agriculture. Biography The Fifth Discipline, published in 1990, gave senior executives a working vocabulary for something they kept hitting in practice but could not name: the structure of an organisation tends to produce the very problems its leaders are trying to solve. Thirty-six years later the book is still in print and still the reference text for the field. Peter Senge wrote it at MIT, where he is Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Sustainability at the Sloan School of Management. He is founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning and co-founder of the Academy for Systemic Change. The Fifth Discipline has sold more than two million copies. Harvard Business Review named it one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years; the Financial Times listed it among the five most important management books ever published. The book is organised around five disciplines: personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking. The core argument is that the only sustainable competitive advantage is an organisation’s ability to learn faster than its environment changes. Senge’s later work extended the method into education through Schools That Learn, into large-scale change through The Dance of Change, and into sustainability through The Necessary Revolution. His applied work has run through Ford, Shell, BP, Unilever, Intel, and Saudi Aramco, and across cross-sector initiatives including the Sustainable Food Lab, which brought major food companies and NGOs into shared work on sustainable agriculture, and the Compassionate Systems community in primary and secondary education. The Journal of Business Strategy named him a “Strategist of the Century,” one of 24 figures judged to have had the greatest influence on 20th-century business strategy. Key speaking topics Systems thinking Organisational learning Leadership in complex systems Sustaining change in large organisations Cross-sector collaboration Sustainability and systemic change Ideal for CEOs and senior executive teams running multi-year transformation programmes Heads of strategy and transformation leads diagnosing why change initiatives stall Chief sustainability officers and ESG leads working across sector and stakeholder boundaries Senior leaders in education, healthcare, and government addressing complex public-system challenges Audience outcomes A new vocabulary for talking about why their hardest organisational problems keep returning The Five Disciplines as a working method, applied through cases drawn from Ford, Shell, Unilever, and the Sustainable Food Lab Language to make the structural causes of organisational performance visible to senior teams A sharper read on what leadership in complex, multi-stakeholder environments demands