Change Management

Why organisations work with Lyndon Evans He ran one of the most complex engineering programmes in human history. The LHC took fourteen years, twenty member states and roughly nine billion Swiss francs to build, and it produced the 2012 Higgs boson discovery. The lessons translate. He has lived through the kind of public setback most leaders only theorise about. The 2008 quench accident delayed the LHC’s first physics run by more than a year; how he managed the recovery is the case study, not a slide. He is recognised by the engineering profession, not only the physics community. The IEEE Simon Ramo Medal was awarded for systems engineering leadership, which makes him unusually credible with senior technical and operations audiences. He carries the institutional credentials buyers test against: CBE, Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the American Physical Society, Breakthrough Prize laureate. The credentials are useful because the underlying work is real. Biography highlights Project leader of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, 1994 to 2008 Director of the Linear Collider Collaboration from 2012, coordinating ILC and CLIC programmes 2012 Special Fundamental Physics Prize (Breakthrough Prize) for leadership of the LHC CBE, 2001 New Year Honours Fellow of the Royal Society (2010), Fellow of the American Physical Society (1991), Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales IEEE Simon Ramo Medal (2014) for systems engineering leadership of the LHC Biography The Large Hadron Collider was approved in 1994 and produced its first proton collisions in 2010. The fourteen-year gap is the story. Twenty member states, several thousand physicists and engineers, more than a hundred countries contributing components, and a budget of roughly nine billion Swiss francs had to be held together through funding rounds, design changes and a 2008 magnet quench that delayed the first physics run by more than a year. Lyndon Evans was the project leader who held it. That kind of work earns a different category of recognition. The 2012 Special Fundamental Physics Prize cited his leadership role in the discovery of the Higgs boson. The IEEE Simon Ramo Medal, awarded two years later, cited his systems engineering leadership specifically. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was appointed CBE in 2001. Since 2012 Evans has directed the Linear Collider Collaboration, the international body coordinating the next generation of particle colliders. The programmes he is now shaping, the International Linear Collider and the Compact Linear Collider, operate on similar timescales and similar coalitions to the LHC. The institutional questions are the same: how to keep a long-horizon scientific commitment alive through political cycles shorter than its delivery window. For corporate audiences the material is not particle physics. It is the management of complexity at a scale most organisations will not encounter, presented by someone who did the job rather than studied it. A Welsh chemist who switched to physics because he found it easier, Evans speaks plainly about coalitions, recovery from public failure, and the discipline of running programmes whose value will not be visible for a generation. Key speaking topics Leadership of large complex programmes Project recovery after public failure International scientific collaboration Engineering at the edge of feasibility Long-horizon delivery under political cycles Science, discovery and public trust Ideal for Boards and executive teams sponsoring multi-year capital or infrastructure programmes Chief operating officers and programme directors running cross-border delivery at scale Engineering and technology leadership audiences in regulated or research-intensive sectors Conferences on innovation, science and the long view of strategic investment Audience outcomes A working sense of what it takes to hold a long-horizon programme together when funding, politics and engineering all move on shorter cycles A specific account of how the LHC team handled the 2008 quench and what credibility recovery actually involved Language for talking about systems engineering and coalition management that translates from physics to business A grounded view of how scientific discovery is produced, useful for leaders sponsoring R&D, deep tech or moonshot programmes

Why organisations work with Luis Maria Huete He brings a named, structured methodology, Clienting, that gives a management team a shared language for customer segmentation, business model alignment, and service mix economics. It is the rare customer-strategy framework with both an academic anchor and four decades of board-room application. He has facilitated senior offsites in more than 800 companies across 70 countries, including Banco Santander, BBVA, Telefonica, Coca-Cola, Repsol, and ISS. The work is execution-focused: redesigning structure, coordination mechanisms, and the operating model behind a strategy. His doctoral work on commercial banking service strategy was named best dissertation of 1988 by the Decision Sciences Institute. The same analytical discipline shows up in the way he treats customer profitability as an operating problem, not a marketing one. He has taught inside Harvard Business School’s Achieving Breakthrough Service and Advanced Management programmes, alongside his chair at IESE. The combined platform gives senior audiences confidence that the frameworks have been pressure-tested in serious academic and corporate settings. He works fluently in English and Spanish, with board-level experience across Europe, Latin America, and Asia. For multinational teams that need a single voice on customer strategy across regions, that range is genuinely scarce. Biography highlights Professor of Operations, Information and Technology at IESE Business School, on faculty since 1982. DBA, Boston University. Fulbright Scholar. Doctoral thesis on commercial banking service strategy awarded best dissertation of 1988 by the Decision Sciences Institute. Author of thirteen management books, including Clienting, Service Management, Leading for the Common Good (2015), 50 Leaders Who Made History (2017), and Leadership and Governance (2025). Faculty contributor to Harvard Business School’s Achieving Breakthrough Service and Advanced Management executive programmes. Regular contributor to Harvard Deusto Business Review and Expansion. Chairs the Advisory Board of Makro and the Instituto de Capital Humano. Board member of Altia, the Instituto Gobernanza y Sociedad, and the International Academy of Management. Biography Customer profitability is an operating problem before it is a marketing one. Most companies cannot say, with any precision, which of their customers earn the margin that funds the rest of the business, or how the service model would need to change if they could. That is the question Huete has spent four decades putting in front of senior teams. His framework, Clienting, gives a management committee a structured way to work that question. It moves through segmentation, business model alignment, service mix, implementation, and performance measurement, treating customer strategy as a coordinated set of operating decisions rather than a brand exercise. The methodology is documented across thirteen books and tested inside the executive programmes of IESE Business School and Harvard Business School, where Huete has taught Achieving Breakthrough Service and Advanced Management. The academic anchor is serious. His doctoral thesis on commercial banking service strategy was named best dissertation of 1988 by the Decision Sciences Institute, and he holds a chair at IESE he has occupied since 1982. Alongside that, he has facilitated senior offsites in more than 800 companies across 70 countries, including Banco Santander, BBVA, Telefonica, Coca-Cola, Repsol, and ISS. He chairs the Advisory Board of Makro and the Instituto de Capital Humano, and writes regularly for Harvard Deusto Business Review and Expansion. What a senior team gets is a working vocabulary for customer strategy and a facilitator who has watched several hundred management committees try to install it. The conversation he runs is rarely about ideas. It is about what to stop doing, which customers to organise around, and how to align the operating model to the answer. Key speaking topics Clienting and customer strategy Service management and service economics Strategy execution and operating model design Corporate culture and senior-team alignment Leadership and governance Family business transitions Customer loyalty and profitability Ideal for CEOs, CCOs and CMOs reviewing customer segmentation and the underlying service economics. Boards and ExCos running a strategy refresh or post-merger operating model redesign. Senior leadership offsites that need a structured outside facilitator on customer strategy and execution. Family business owners and boards navigating governance and succession alongside commercial repositioning. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for Clienting, segmentation, service mix, and the link from customer loyalty to operating margin. A sharper read on which customer segments the organisation is actually built to serve profitably, and which it is not. A structured view of the gap between stated strategy and operating execution, and where coordination mechanisms break down. Specific examples drawn from senior offsites with European and Latin American multinationals on how the management committee owns customer strategy. A reference set of books and frameworks the team can use after the session to continue the work internally.

Why organisations work with Lars Sudmann He brings Fortune 500 operating weight to leadership work. A former P&G CFO and Business Unit Strategy Leader speaks to executive committees in their own language. His self-leadership framework, drawn from his TEDx talk that has crossed 1.9 million views, gives senior leaders a usable model for the personal habits that determine whether strategy actually lands. The Spaghetti Principle, the thesis of his book on innovation, gives organisations a structured way to run more experiments without losing strategic discipline. He is a 6-time Belgian and 2-time European Champion of Public Speaking. Executive presence and communication craft are not a sideline; they are a discipline he can teach. As Council Director at The Conference Board, he convenes CFOs and strategy leaders across Europe and the Gulf, so the room he walks into is one he already understands. Biography highlights Former CFO Belgium and Business Unit Strategy Leader at Procter & Gamble. Principal of Sudmann & Company, advising Fortune 500 leadership teams on strategy execution and change. Council Director at The Conference Board (Strategy & Transformation, Finance Transformation, Gulf councils). Lecturer on leadership and innovation at RWTH Aachen, Braunschweig University, and Lüneburg University. Author of “Innovation that Sticks: Reach Success as a Leader in your Field with the Spaghetti Principle”. Multiple TEDx talks on self-leadership and innovation, with combined viewership in the millions. 6-time Belgian and 2-time European Champion of Public Speaking. Featured in BBC, Fast Company, Inc., The Washington Post, and Manager Magazin. Biography Most leadership content treats execution as a structural problem. Sudmann treats it as a personal one. His TEDx talk on self-leadership, now past 1.9 million views, argues that the daily behaviour of senior leaders is what determines whether strategy moves through the organisation or stalls in the slide deck. The argument carries weight because of the chair he sat in. Sudmann was CFO Belgium at Procter & Gamble and led business unit strategy inside the same group. He has run the numbers, owned the plan, and watched what actually happens when a leadership team is asked to change while still hitting the quarter. That experience now shapes Sudmann & Company, his consulting and training practice, and his role as Council Director at The Conference Board, where he convenes strategy and finance leaders across Europe and the Gulf. He lectures on innovation and leadership at RWTH Aachen, Braunschweig, and Lüneburg, and his book “Innovation that Sticks” sets out the Spaghetti Principle: a disciplined way to run small experiments and keep only what holds. The communication craft is its own credential. Six Belgian and two European public speaking titles mean a Sudmann keynote is not a polished version of corporate decks. It is built to land, with senior audiences, on the first hearing. Key speaking topics Self-leadership and executive habits Strategy execution under pressure Change leadership in complex organisations Innovation discipline and the Spaghetti Principle High-performance leadership teams Executive communication and presentation craft Ideal for Executive committees and senior leadership teams entering a major strategic shift. CFOs, strategy leaders, and transformation leads accountable for execution. Boards and leadership development programmes seeking a credible voice on self-leadership and high-performance behaviour. Conferences with audiences of senior corporate leaders across finance, strategy, and operations. Audience outcomes A working model of self-leadership that senior leaders can apply on Monday morning. A sharper read on why their current strategy is or is not moving through the organisation. The Spaghetti Principle as a method for running more disciplined innovation experiments. Concrete language and structure for executive communication, drawn from competitive speaking craft. A vocabulary for leadership behaviour their team can adopt collectively, not just individually.

Why organisations work with Konstantinos Karypidis He holds a room the way a stage performer does, then converts that attention into mindset work, drawing on years performing in theatres and on national television before moving into corporate training. His method is built on clinical ground, not platform clichés: as a licensed psychotherapist he targets the beliefs that keep behaviour stuck, which is where most change initiatives quietly fail. Every workshop is built from scratch against the client’s specific problem rather than delivered from a fixed deck, so the content matches the actual tension in the organisation. He has run sessions for the people-facing functions of demanding multinationals, including Sanofi, Roche, KPMG, L’Oréal and AstraZeneca, across sales, HR and customer-service briefs. Biography highlights Licensed psychotherapist, business consultant and executive coach to senior leaders internationally. Began his career as a performance artist, writing and directing his own shows for theatres and national television. Has delivered keynotes and bespoke workshops for Sanofi, Roche, Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, Philips, AstraZeneca, L’Oréal, DHL, AXA and JTI. TEDx speaker. Listed in the Thinkers360 Top 50 Global Thinkers & Influencers in Change Management, 2022. Hosts a podcast and a YouTube channel devoted to books worth reading. Biography Most behaviour-change efforts inside organisations stall in the same place. The strategy is sound and the training is delivered, but the people expected to change carry the same assumptions out of the room that they brought into it. Konstantinos Karypidis works on that gap. He came to corporate work by an unusual route. Before the boardroom he was a performer, writing and directing his own shows for theatres and national television. That background gives him a working performer’s command of attention, which he treats as the precondition for any real change rather than the point of it. The substance underneath the stagecraft is clinical. As a licensed psychotherapist, he focuses on the beliefs and mental patterns that govern how people act, the layer most training programmes skip. His sessions are built individually for each client, shaped around the specific friction a team is facing in sales, HR or customer service. That approach has been tested across demanding environments, from Sanofi and Roche to KPMG, L’Oréal and AstraZeneca. He was listed among the Thinkers360 Top 50 Global Thinkers and Influencers in Change Management in 2022, and speaks regularly on the same TEDx and conference platforms where he first built his reputation for getting an audience to question how they think. Key speaking topics Mindset change and behavioural adoption Peak performance and productivity Employee motivation and engagement Non-verbal communication and influence Sales and customer service Embracing organisational change Ideal for Heads of HR and L&D commissioning a keynote that needs to land emotionally and stick afterwards Sales and customer-service leaders running kick-offs or summits where energy and engagement matter Conference organisers who need an opening or closing speaker who can hold a large room After-dinner audiences at corporate events Audience outcomes A clearer view of the mental patterns that hold back individual performance, and practical techniques to interrupt them Specific tools for reading and using non-verbal communication Renewed motivation tied to concrete take-away methods rather than a temporary lift A shared, energised reference point that teams can carry back into day-to-day work

Why organisations work with Kevin Gaskell He has led verifiable turnarounds at three named global brands – Porsche GB from near-bankruptcy to the UK’s most profitable car company, BMW GB to four years of record growth and 500% profitability improvement, and Lamborghini GB – which means his frameworks are grounded in a documented, repeated track record, not a single case. His book Catching Giants (Business Book Awards 2023 finalist) makes a specific, testable argument: that resource-constrained teams with clarity of goal and high belief can consistently outperform better-resourced opponents. Organisations working through transformation can put that directly to use. His portfolio of 15+ businesses across technology, data, and manufacturing – including taking Fairline Boats from ten years of losses to profit within 14 months – shows the same turnaround approach applied across sectors, which makes it credible to audiences outside automotive. The world-record Atlantic and Pacific rowing expeditions are not decorative biography. They are tested case material on exactly the leadership dynamics he teaches: small teams, constrained resources, extreme conditions, and the challenge of sustaining belief and performance when the goal feels unreachable. He has delivered keynotes and masterclasses in over 50 countries for clients including Google, Oracle, JP Morgan, P&G, and Airbus – a range that tests his frameworks against diverse industries, organisation sizes, and cultures. Biography highlights MD of Porsche GB: took the business from near-bankruptcy and bottom of UK customer satisfaction rankings to most profitable car company in the UK within five years MD of BMW GB: four years of record growth, 70% sales increase, 500% improvement in profitability MD of Lamborghini GB; CEO of Fairline Boats, leading the business from ten years of losses to profit within 14 months Founder, chairman, and investor across 15+ businesses in technology, data, manufacturing, and professional services; portfolio has created over £3 billion in shareholder value Author of Catching Giants (Right Book Press, 2022), shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2023 Guinness World Record holder as part of the Ocean 5 team, fastest five-person Atlantic row (2020); world record Pacific row (2025); expeditions to both the North and South Poles Keynote and masterclass clients include Google, Oracle, JP Morgan, P&G, Airbus, and Accenture; delivered in over 50 countries Recognised as one of the UK’s Top 40 Managers under 40 Biography Turning round a failing business is one of the most demanding tests of leadership because it requires people to change their behaviour before there is any evidence the change will work. Kevin Gaskell has done that three times – at Porsche GB, BMW GB, and Lamborghini GB – and the mechanism in each case was the same: rebuilding team belief in a new direction ahead of any visible result. Appointed MD of Porsche GB at 32, he inherited a company close to bankruptcy and ranked at the bottom of UK customer satisfaction tables. Within five years it was the most profitable car company in the UK. At BMW GB, he led four years of record growth, including a 500% improvement in profitability. At Lamborghini GB, the same approach – refocusing the team on a clear goal, rebuilding culture from the inside – produced comparable results. Across these three brands, the pattern was never primarily about strategy. It was about belief. That same discipline has been applied outside automotive. At Fairline Boats, a business carrying ten years of losses was returned to profit within 14 months. Across a wider portfolio of technology, data, and manufacturing businesses, his teams have created more than £3 billion in shareholder value. His book Catching Giants, shortlisted for the Business Book Awards in 2023, formalises the core argument: that teams with limited resources and a clear goal, led well, can outperform better-equipped competition consistently. The expedition record – both poles, world-record Atlantic and Pacific rows – provides a parallel body of case material on the same dynamics. Small teams, constrained resources, extreme conditions, and the central leadership question: how do you sustain the belief and cohesion needed to reach an objective that looks, for most of the journey, unreachable. Key speaking topics Business turnaround and performance recovery High-performance team leadership Organisational culture as a performance lever Leading through disruption and uncertainty Brand building and repositioning Resilience and performance under pressure Entrepreneurship and business building Ideal for CEOs, MDs, and executive teams in businesses facing stalled performance, competitive disruption, or active turnaround Senior leadership teams initiating or sustaining large-scale transformation programmes Board-level and C-suite audiences exploring the human and cultural dynamics of sustained organisational performance Commercial and operations leaders responsible for driving step-change performance in established organisations Audience outcomes A specific framework for diagnosing why performance has stalled and what leadership change is needed to address it Practical tools for building team belief and shared purpose around an ambitious goal Case-based understanding of how cultural change typically precedes financial performance recovery in turnaround situations A working model for connecting leadership behaviour to commercial outcomes, drawn from multiple named business examples Perspective on sustaining high performance and decision quality under conditions of extreme pressure and limited resource

Why organisations work with Justin King A first-hand, decade-long account of running a FTSE 100 retailer through competitive attack, recession and the shift to online, with named results: 36 consecutive quarters of like-for-like growth, tripled underlying profit, and an 85 per cent total shareholder return by the time he stepped down. The “Making Sainsbury’s Great Again” playbook talked through by the CEO who wrote it, with concrete decisions on price, fresh food, colleague engagement and the Paralympic sponsorship that reset the brand. An active cross-portfolio operating perspective from the Chair seats at Allwyn Entertainment, Dexters and Itsu Grocery, plus the recent OVO Energy chairmanship through the sector’s difficult patch, so the material is current rather than retrospective. A credible record on purpose-led commercial leadership, evidenced through Sainsbury’s Comic Relief partnership of £1 for every £10 donated, the first dedicated Paralympic sponsorship of London 2012, and Made by Sport, the charity he founded in 2019 that raised over £6m for community organisations before transferring to Sported. A leadership framework, the ten Cs, that has been pressure-tested against a real CEO seat rather than developed in a classroom, and is delivered with the candour of someone who has had to defend results to a board. Biography highlights CEO of J Sainsbury plc, 2004 to 2014, ten years that took the business from third place and falling sales to 36 consecutive quarters of like-for-like growth and an 85 per cent total shareholder return. Chair of Allwyn Entertainment and Dexters; Non-Executive Chair of Itsu Grocery; recent Chair of OVO Energy. Non-Executive Director of Marks and Spencer plc, January 2019 to September 2025; member of the PwC Public Interest Body, 2015 to 2022. Vice Chairman and Senior Adviser at Terra Firma Capital Partners, 2015 to 2021; interim Chairman of the Manor Racing F1 team during its 2014-2015 restructuring. Member of the London Organising Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games and its audit committee, with Sainsbury’s the first dedicated Paralympic sponsor of London 2012. Founder of Made by Sport, 2019 to 2023, raising over £6m for community sport organisations. CBE for services to the retail industry, 2011 Birthday Honours; Honorary DBA, University of Bath, 2009; Most Admired Business Leader, Management Today; Britain’s Most Impressive Businessman, IPSOS-MORI Captains of Industry Report. Biography Sainsbury’s was the third-place supermarket with falling sales when Justin King took the CEO seat in March 2004. The City viewed the appointment as the company’s last chance to remain independent. Within six months he had launched “Making Sainsbury’s Great Again”, a recovery plan built on fresh food, colleague engagement and a re-priced shelf. The plan’s headline target, a £2.5 billion sales uplift, was hit three months early. Over his ten years as CEO, the business delivered 36 consecutive quarters of like-for-like growth, tripled underlying profit from £252m to £756m, and returned 85 per cent to shareholders. The brand was rebuilt around the first dedicated Paralympic sponsorship of London 2012, and the long-standing Comic Relief partnership of £1 for every £10 donated. Sainsbury’s regained second place in UK grocery and he stepped down in 2014 with the longest unbroken growth run of any major UK supermarket CEO of the era. He arrived at Sainsbury’s with three decades in consumer businesses behind him, including senior roles at M&S Food, Asda and Häagen-Dazs UK. After leaving the CEO seat he held the Vice Chairman and Senior Adviser role at Terra Firma Capital Partners from 2015 to 2021, sat on the PwC Public Interest Body from 2015 to 2022, and served as a Non-Executive Director of Marks and Spencer from January 2019 until September 2025. He chaired the Manor Racing F1 team through its 2014-2015 restructuring. He is Chair of Allwyn Entertainment, Chair of Dexters, and Non-Executive Chair of Itsu Grocery, with adviser seats at Snappy Shopper and Rezolve. He chaired OVO Energy through the post-energy-crisis period to August 2025. The purpose thread runs through the record: he founded Made by Sport in 2019, which raised over £6m for community sport organisations before the campaign was handed to Sported in 2023. He was appointed CBE in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to retail, named Most Admired Business Leader by Management Today, and topped the IPSOS-MORI Captains of Industry Report. The University of Bath conferred an Honorary DBA in 2009, and he served on the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Group from 2010 to 2012. Key speaking topics Retail leadership and the long-cycle turnaround Consumer behaviour and brand reinvention Customer and colleague-led growth Purpose-led commercial leadership and responsible business Boardroom decision-making under competitive pressure Sponsorship and purpose, drawn from London 2012 Cross-portfolio non-executive leadership Ideal for FTSE and large-cap consumer business leadership teams managing a multi-year turnaround Retail, hospitality and consumer goods boards weighing strategy against operational execution Chief executives, COOs and store or operations directors in customer-facing sectors Boards and leadership teams looking to embed purpose into commercial performance rather than treat it as a side function Audience outcomes A working view of how a CEO sequences price, range, colleagues and brand through a decade-long recovery rather than a single reset. Specific lessons from London 2012, the Comic Relief partnership and Made by Sport on how purpose can shift commercial performance. A frank account of what holds boards together when results are slow, competitors aggressive and shareholders impatient. A leadership lens, the ten Cs, applied to the audience’s own operating questions during Q&A.

Why organisations work with Jonas Ridderstrale He gives leadership teams a serious framework for the talent-versus-capital question, drawn from “Funky Business,” a title ranked No. 16 in Bloomsbury’s survey of the best business books and translated into more than 30 languages. He is one of a small group of European thinkers who have held a Thinkers50 European Top 5 position across multiple cycles, which gives senior buyers confidence that the underlying ideas have stood up to peer scrutiny. His argument cuts directly at strategic mimicry: why most differentiation programmes fail because organisations copy each other faster than they can build genuine identity, and what to do about it. He brings the academic spine of a Stockholm School of Economics PhD together with sustained advisory work at Ashridge and IE Business School, so the ideas land with both rigour and commercial framing. He is co-owner and chairman of Mgruppen, a Swedish management training company, which keeps his material connected to live executive development practice rather than archived theory. Biography highlights PhD in International Business and MBA, Stockholm School of Economics. Visiting professor at Ashridge Business School (UK) and IE Business School (Spain). Co-author of “Funky Business” (2000), “Karaoke Capitalism” (2004) and “Funky Business Forever” (2007) with Kjell A. Nordstrom. Co-author of “Re-energizing the Corporation” with Mark Wilcox and “Fast/Forward” with Julian Birkinshaw of London Business School. Ranked No. 23 globally and Top 5 in Europe on the 2009 Thinkers50 list, with continued European Top 5 placement in 2011. Italian Nobels Colloquia award for “Leadership in Business and Economic Thinking” (2007). Biography Capital is no longer the binding constraint on most large companies. Talent is, ideas are, and identity is. That shift, set out in “Funky Business” with Kjell A. Nordstrom in 2000, became one of the most widely translated business arguments of the last quarter century, sold over 300,000 copies in the original edition and reached more than 30 languages. The work behind the argument is academic. Ridderstrale completed his MBA and PhD in International Business at Stockholm School of Economics, with a doctoral thesis on global innovation in multinational corporations. He spent his early career at the Centre for Advanced Studies of Leadership there before moving into visiting professor roles at Ashridge in the UK and IE Business School in Spain. The follow-on books extended the thesis rather than restating it. “Karaoke Capitalism” tackled strategic mimicry in copycat markets. “Funky Business Forever” pressed on the human stakes. “Re-energizing the Corporation,” with Mark Wilcox, addressed the question of how leaders convert a different idea into actual organisational change. “Fast/Forward,” with Julian Birkinshaw of London Business School, sharpened the link to execution. The Thinkers50 ranking placed him at No. 23 globally in 2009 and inside the European Top 5 across multiple cycles, alongside the Italian Nobels Colloquia award in 2007. Today he chairs Mgruppen, a Swedish management training company, which keeps the material grounded in the executive development brief rather than the lecture circuit. Key speaking topics Strategy under commoditisation Talent and human capital advantage Innovation and corporate identity Leadership of organisational change Competitive differentiation in copycat markets Building corporate “tribes” and culture The future firm Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting strategy in markets where products and processes have converged. CHROs and Chief Talent Officers reframing the link between people strategy and competitive advantage. Innovation and strategy leads tasked with moving the business off cost-led competition. Leadership development programmes for senior managers in transformation-heavy industries. Audience outcomes A sharper read on why most differentiation efforts default to imitation, and how to break that pattern. Language for the talent-versus-capital question that lands with both finance and HR audiences. A practical view of how identity, culture and “tribe” become commercial assets, not soft factors. Concrete prompts for senior teams on what their organisation looks like when capital advantages run out.

Why organisations work with John Weeks He treats culture as a leadership problem, not an HR programme. The work focuses on what executives say and do in the room, not on values posters or engagement scores. His ethnographic training gives him a method most leadership speakers do not have. He reads organisations the way an anthropologist reads a community, then translates what he sees into specific behavioural choices senior leaders can make. He co-directs IMD’s High Performance Leadership programme, the institution’s flagship six-day senior leadership course, which means his material is tested every year against the questions actual CEOs and senior executives bring to Lausanne. His book Unpopular Culture, a study of why a British bank could not change despite years of trying, gives him a sharp argument about why most culture-change efforts fail and what a serious one looks like. He is fluent in the executive’s other reality, the board. Service on the LEO Pharma board means he speaks from inside the governance and accountability structures his audiences operate within. Biography highlights Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IMD Business School since 2007. Co-director of IMD’s High Performance Leadership programme, the school’s flagship senior leadership course. Author of Unpopular Culture: The Ritual of Complaint in a British Bank, University of Chicago Press, reviewed in the Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, BBC Radio 4, and the American Journal of Sociology. Contributor to Harvard Business Review, with articles including “Designing the Hybrid Office” and “Who Moved My Cubes?”, and to the Academy of Management Review and Organization Studies. Eleven years on the faculty of INSEAD before IMD, with three nominations for “Best Teacher”. Former member of the Board of Directors of LEO Pharma. PhD in Management, MIT Sloan; MPhil in Management, Oxford; BA in Computer Science, UC Berkeley. Biography Culture, on the working definition Weeks uses with senior leaders, is what people say and do when they think their bosses are not looking. That sentence does most of the work. It moves the conversation away from values statements and engagement scores and onto the behaviours senior executives actually model, often without noticing. His route into the question is unusual. A computer science degree from Berkeley, an MPhil at Oxford, a PhD at MIT Sloan, and then training as an organizational ethnographer, the discipline of watching what people in a workplace really do rather than what they say they do. That method is the spine of Unpopular Culture, his University of Chicago Press book about a British bank where everyone complained about the culture, no one liked the way things were done, and yet nothing fundamentally changed. The Financial Times, The Economist, BBC Radio 4, and the American Journal of Sociology all engaged with it; the argument has shaped how he reads every organisation since. At IMD, where he has been Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior since 2007, he co-directs the High Performance Leadership programme, the school’s flagship six-day course for senior leaders. Eleven years at INSEAD preceded that, including three nominations for the institution’s Best Teacher award. His Harvard Business Review work on hybrid offices and on the design of physical workspace sits alongside more academic publications in the Academy of Management Review and Organization Studies. Service on the LEO Pharma board gives him the other half of the executive’s view, the side that sees governance, accountability, and the consequences of culture rather than only its rhetoric. The result is a speaker who can sit with a CEO at the level of behaviour and at the level of the board agenda, and connect the two. Key speaking topics Organisational culture and leadership behaviour Self-management for senior leaders Culture change in established organisations High performance leadership Hybrid work and the design of organisational space Ethnographic reading of organisations Ideal for CEOs, executive committees, and senior leadership teams setting or resetting culture CHROs and chief people officers running senior leadership development Boards examining culture, governance, and the gap between stated and lived values Leadership academies and flagship internal programmes for high-potential executives Audience outcomes A direct, working definition of culture that leaders can use the next morning A clear view of how their own daily behaviour creates or undermines the culture they say they want A frame for diagnosing why previous culture-change efforts have stalled A sharper sense of what self-management looks like for people running organisations Specific behavioural choices, drawn from research and from senior executive practice, that move culture more reliably than declarative interventions

Why organisations work with John Peters A first-hand account of decision-making, fear and recovery under conditions most executives will never experience, used as a working reference for leadership behaviour rather than as a war story. Twenty years of post-RAF consultancy through Monkey Business and UPH Ltd, with engagements at board and senior-team level on leadership, strategy and cultural change. Authority on human factors and safety culture, built on MoD programme leadership that won the Flight International Aerospace Industry Award for Training and Safety. Academic standing that supports the commercial work: former Chair of the Association of MBAs, Visiting Professor at Kingston Business School, Honorary Doctorate of Education from the University of Bedfordshire. Co-author of Tornado Down, a Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller, and Team Tornado, with a BAFTA-nominated documentary in the same body of work. Biography highlights Former Royal Air Force Squadron Leader and Tornado GR1 pilot, shot down on the opening day of the 1991 Gulf War and held as a prisoner of war for seven weeks. Co-author of Tornado Down (Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller) and Team Tornado, with John Nichol. Subject of Cutting Edge: Tornado Down, BAFTA-nominated and Independent Documentary of the Year. Founder and owner of Monkey Business, a leadership and strategy consultancy working with senior teams since 2009; founder of UPH Ltd in 2000. Former Chair of the Association of MBAs; Visiting Professor at Kingston Business School; Associate Professor at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow. Honorary Doctorate of Education, University of Bedfordshire (2022). Biography A Tornado GR1 was shot down over Iraq on the opening day of Operation Desert Storm in January 1991. The two crew members, John Peters and his navigator John Nichol, were captured, interrogated and held for seven weeks. The bruised image of Peters on Iraqi state television became one of the defining pictures of the war. That experience is the entry point, not the conclusion. Peters returned to RAF service, then led Ministry of Defence work on aviation safety and human error, including a Human Factors Cultural Change Programme recognised by the Flight International Aerospace Industry Award for Training and Safety. The interest is consistent: how groups of capable people make sound decisions when stakes rise and information thins. Since leaving the RAF in 2000, Peters has worked with senior business teams on the same question, first through UPH Ltd and from 2009 through his consultancy Monkey Business. The frame is practical. Leadership behaviour, team trust and clarity of intent are treated as performance variables, observed and adjusted, not virtues to be admired. The academic work runs alongside the commercial. Peters chaired the Association of MBAs, holds a Visiting Professorship at Kingston Business School and an Associate Professorship at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow, and received an Honorary Doctorate of Education from the University of Bedfordshire in 2022. Tornado Down, written with Nichol, remains a Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller and the basis of a BAFTA-nominated documentary. Key speaking topics Leadership under sustained pressure Resilience and recovery after acute setbacks High-performing teams in high-stakes environments Decision-making with incomplete information Human factors and safety culture Cultural change in complex organisations Accountability and personal responsibility Ideal for Boards and executive committees taking on a major change, integration or operational risk CEOs and senior leadership teams stress-testing how they make decisions under load Heads of safety, operations and risk in regulated or safety-critical industries Leadership development and executive education programmes building resilience capability Audience outcomes A working language for what leadership actually looks like when conditions deteriorate A clearer view of how teams hold or lose their composure when judgement is under strain Specific reference points for handling fear, ambiguity and reputational exposure inside a senior team A first-hand case in human factors and safety culture that is hard to obtain from any other source Renewed conviction about the cost of avoiding hard conversations before they become forced

Why organisations work with John Mattone His Intelligent Leadership framework draws a structural distinction between the “Inner Core” of character, values and emotional maturity and the “Outer Core” of skills and competencies. Most leadership development programmes work only on the outer layer. Mattone’s argument is that this is why they underdeliver. The Mattone Leadership Enneagram Inventory, in use since 1996 and administered to more than 10,000 leaders worldwide, quantifies the internal drivers of leadership behaviour. It gives organisations a measurable starting point for executive development rather than a qualitative one. John Mattone Global is recognised among the world’s top ten executive coaching and leadership development firms by Worldwide Research Reports, STATS N DATA, and Infinity Business Insights. Its ICF-accredited Intelligent Leadership certification has produced more than 800 certified coaches across 55+ countries, so the methodology can be deployed at scale rather than through a single practitioner. Named #1 Executive Coach in the World by Global Gurus six times between 2019 and 2026, and inducted into the Corps d’Elite (Hall of Fame) in 2025 for lifetime achievement. Both are credentialled external rankings, not self-conferred titles, which gives procurement teams an independently verified benchmark when selecting executive development partners. His critique of the leadership development industry is pointed and specific: he argues that the sector systematically overinvests in outer competencies and underinvests in the inner character work that determines how leaders actually behave when stakes are high. That position gives boards and CHROs a framework for re-evaluating their existing development spend. Biography highlights Creator of the Intelligent Leadership framework and the Mattone Leadership Enneagram Inventory; the MLEI has been administered to more than 10,000 leaders globally since 1996 Named #1 Executive Coach in the World by Global Gurus six times between 2019 and 2026; inducted into the Corps d’Elite (Hall of Fame) in 2025 for lifetime achievement Author of 11 books, five of them bestsellers: Talent Leadership (AMACOM, 2012), Intelligent Leadership (AMACOM, 2013), Cultural Transformations (Wiley, 2016), The Intelligent Leader (Wiley, 2020), The Executive Coach’s Handbook (2022). Marshall Goldsmith wrote the forewords for Intelligent Leadership and The Intelligent Leader. The Intelligent Leader was named a Forbes #1 Holiday Book and a Soundview Best Book of 2020. Most recent contribution: Pinnacle of Influence (Global Gurus, 2024), a multi-author anthology with Marshall Goldsmith and other Global Gurus-ranked leaders Founder of John Mattone Global; the firm is recognised by Worldwide Research Reports, STATS N DATA, and Infinity Insights Research among the world’s top ten executive coaching and leadership development firms. Its ICF-accredited Intelligent Leadership certification programme has produced more than 800 coaches across 55+ countries Industrial/organisational psychologist by training (MS, University of Central Florida); coaching engagements with C-suite leaders across global organisations, including the publicly documented coaching of Steve Jobs Featured in Forbes, Chief Executive, HR Magazine, and Training magazine; the John Mattone Global leadership blog has been ranked #1 in its category by Feedspot from 2017 through 2025 Biography Leadership development has a measurement problem. Organisations can assess whether a leader has the right skills; they struggle to assess whether that leader has the inner constitution to deploy those skills when conditions deteriorate. John Mattone’s work is built around that gap. His Intelligent Leadership framework distinguishes the Inner Core, a leader’s character, values, emotional maturity and self-awareness, from the Outer Core of visible competencies and behaviours. His argument, made across 11 books and four decades of executive coaching practice, is that outer performance is only as reliable as the inner foundation beneath it. Competency training without inner-core development produces leaders who look good in stable conditions and struggle in everything else. The Mattone Leadership Enneagram Inventory, in use since 1996 and administered to more than 10,000 leaders globally, translates that argument into a quantified diagnostic; organisations get a baseline measure of leadership character, not just leadership style. The published work is more methodology than motivation. Intelligent Leadership (AMACOM, 2013) and The Intelligent Leader (Wiley, 2020), both with forewords by Marshall Goldsmith, set out the structural argument and the implementation path. Cultural Transformations (Wiley, 2016) extends it into how senior leadership character shapes organisational culture. Global Gurus has named Mattone the #1 Executive Coach in the World six times between 2019 and 2026, and inducted him into the Corps d’Elite in 2025 for lifetime achievement. Mattone is the founder of John Mattone Global, recognised by Worldwide Research Reports, STATS N DATA, and Infinity Insights Research as a top-ten executive coaching and leadership development firm. Its ICF-accredited Intelligent Leadership certification programme has produced more than 800 coaches across 55+ countries, so the IL methodology can be deployed at organisational scale rather than through a single practitioner. An industrial/organisational psychologist by training (University of Central Florida), Mattone has consulted with more than 250 organisations and directly coached over 200 senior executives, including the late Steve Jobs and former PepsiCo CEO Roger Enrico. For CHROs and boards reviewing leadership development strategy, Mattone offers a diagnosis of why current programmes underperform, a named alternative framework, the diagnostic instrumentation to apply it, and the certified coaching infrastructure to implement it at the individual executive level. Key speaking topics Intelligent Leadership and the Inner Core / Outer Core model Executive character and leadership sustainability Leadership development programme design Executive coaching methodology and practice Culture transformation and leadership alignment CEO and C-suite succession readiness The Mattone Leadership Enneagram Inventory (MLEI) and leadership diagnostics Internal coaching capability and certified networks Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers reviewing or redesigning executive development programmes Boards and nomination committees focused on CEO succession and senior leadership pipeline Transformation leads overseeing culture change initiatives where leadership behaviour is a critical variable Executive development teams in large organisations seeking a diagnostic-led rather than programme-led approach to leadership capability Audience outcomes A working understanding of the Inner Core / Outer Core distinction and why it reframes how organisations should design senior leadership development Familiarity with the MLEI as a diagnostic instrument and how it creates a measurable starting point for executive coaching engagements A framework for identifying which leaders in a pipeline carry the inner character foundations to perform under high-pressure conditions – and which do not Practical criteria for evaluating whether existing leadership development spend is addressing the right layer of leadership A replicable methodology, drawn from Mattone’s published books, that leadership teams can apply without ongoing dependency on external consultants

Why organisations work with Jim Lawless He has put his framework under the most public stress test available: 101 metres on one breath, and a televised race ride from a standing start, both inside the timelines he sets for his clients. His Ten Rules from Taming Tigers (Random House) are a written, named methodology that executive teams can adopt and audit, not a set of stories. He advises CEOs and executive teams at Microsoft, Diageo, Novartis, HSBC, Amazon and Accenture, alongside Olympic and Paralympic squads, which means the same operating model travels from corporate boards to elite sport. He sits at No. 1 outside the US and No. 6 globally on the Global Gurus motivational speaker list, a third-party ranking that filters for sustained client demand rather than a single viral moment. He spent a decade as a City of London commercial solicitor before this work, so the conversation with a board on accountability and disciplined decision-making is delivered in their language, not in performance metaphor. Biography highlights Author of Taming Tigers: Do Things You Never Thought You Could, Random House (Virgin Books), international bestseller. First Briton to freedive below 100 metres, setting a national No Limits record of 101m in Sharm El Sheikh. CEO and founder of Symmetry International, the transformation practice he built from Optimise, founded in 2000. Ranked No. 1 motivational speaker outside the US and No. 6 globally on the Global Gurus list. Member of the Forbes Coaches Council. Former City of London commercial solicitor and international legal counsel to a global technology company. Biography Most strategy work fails on the human side of the line. The board signs off a plan, the operating model is redrawn, and somewhere between the steering committee and the front line the behaviour stops changing. Jim Lawless built a career on the interval between those two points. His methodology, the Ten Rules set out in Taming Tigers (Random House), came out of his first career as a commercial solicitor in the City of London and as international legal counsel inside a global technology business. He founded Optimise in 2000, now Symmetry International, to apply those rules to executive teams in real conditions. He then stress-tested the framework on himself. Inside twelve months of first sitting on a horse, he qualified and rode as a televised jockey. Inside eight months of starting to freedive, he became the first Briton to pass the 100 metre barrier, reaching 101m on a single breath in the No Limits discipline. Both attempts were undertaken while running the firm, on the explicit logic that a method sold to senior leaders should be survivable by the person selling it. That record has translated into a client list that runs from Microsoft, Diageo, Novartis, HSBC and Amazon through to Olympic and Paralympic teams, and a Global Gurus ranking of No. 1 outside the US. He sits on the Forbes Coaches Council and advises CEOs directly on clarity, accountability and disciplined decision-making in restructure and disruption. Key speaking topics Self-leadership and composure under pressure Strategy execution in complex organisations Leading through restructure and disruption High-performance team behaviour Decision-making under uncertainty Personal and organisational resilience Behaviour change as a leadership discipline Ideal for CEOs and executive committees holding a strategy through restructure or recovery Senior leadership populations being asked to change behaviour, not just process High-performance environments where standards have to be held under pressure, including elite sport HR and L&D leads building a resilience and self-leadership thread into executive development Audience outcomes A named set of behavioural rules executive teams can apply to their own decisions the following week A sharper read on where strategy execution is breaking down on the human side rather than the planning side A clearer language for talking about composure, fear and risk in senior conversations A worked example, drawn from his own record attempts, of what disciplined behaviour change looks like under time pressure

Why organisations work with Jim Harris Direct strategic counsel on enterprise AI deployment from a consultant who advises CEOs at IBM, SAP, Walmart, American Express and the UK Cabinet Office on the same decisions A peer-validated authority signal: named 2024 Speaker of the Year by TEC Canada, the Canadian arm of Vistage, an audience of operating chief executives who book speakers for utility, not entertainment An evidence base built across industries undergoing structural disruption, from autonomous vehicles and insurance to retail, financial services and energy, applied to the specific competitive context of the client A clear analytic frame separating product innovation (where most executive attention sits) from business model, process and customer experience innovation (where most of the value sits) Biography highlights #1 international bestseller Blindsided!, published in 80 countries and selected by Soundview Executive Summaries as a best business book of the year TEC Canada Speaker of the Year, February 2024, recognising AI keynotes to chief executives Closing keynote speaker, World Future Society conference Consulting and keynote client roster including Walmart, IBM, SAP, American Express, Barclays, Munich Re, Swiss Re, Zurich Insurance and the UK Cabinet Office Trained personally by former US Vice President Al Gore to deliver An Inconvenient Truth BA in English and Politics, Queen’s University; former representative of the Covey Leadership Center teaching The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People Biography Most enterprise AI investment has produced pilot projects, not operating advantage. The boards funding those pilots increasingly want to know which ones will move the P&L, which ones should be killed, and which competitor’s business model will collapse first as generative AI matures. That is the brief Jim Harris is working against when he sits with an executive team. His authority is built on the consulting side of his career, not the publishing side. Walmart, IBM, SAP, American Express, Barclays, GM, Canon, Munich Re, Swiss Re and the UK Cabinet Office have all retained him for strategic work on disruption and innovation. TEC Canada, part of the Vistage peer network of operating CEOs, named him Speaker of the Year in 2024 specifically for his AI keynotes. The award is meaningful because the audience is buying decision-grade content, not motivation. His core analytic argument is simple. Product innovation gets the budget and the headlines, but reimagining the business model, the process stack and the customer experience is where most of the value moves. Blindsided!, a #1 international bestseller distributed in 80 countries and summarised by Soundview to 80,000 executives, traced that pattern across industries. The current generative AI cycle is the most concentrated test of that argument so far. Harris was trained personally by Al Gore to deliver An Inconvenient Truth and has been the closing keynote speaker at the World Future Society conference. He read English and Politics at Queen’s University and spent the early 1990s representing the Covey Leadership Center, teaching The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People before the consulting practice took over. Key speaking topics Generative AI in the enterprise Disruptive innovation across industries Business model and process redesign Digital transformation strategy Leadership through technological disruption Strategic foresight and scenario planning Sustainability and the energy transition Ideal for CEO, COO and board audiences setting AI and digital strategy Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers and Chief Digital Officers responsible for enterprise AI rollout Strategy and transformation leaders working on business model redesign Executive offsites and senior leadership retreats where the brief is to set direction, not workshop tactics Audience outcomes A sharper view of where in the business AI investment is most likely to convert into margin and where it is being wasted Industry-specific examples of how disruption cascades from a single technology shift into adjacent sectors A working distinction between product, process, business-model and customer-experience innovation, applied to live competitive questions A defensible answer to the question a board will ask next: which of our current bets are pilots, and which are operating commitments