Change Management

Why organisations work with Mark Pollock He hands leaders a decision framework (“facts, acceptance, hope”) they can actually use mid-crisis, tested under conditions where poor judgement carries permanent consequences. His collaboration work is credible because he has done it at scale, catalysing over $100 million of multi-party scientific collaboration with organisations including UCLA, Ekso Bionics and Onward Medical, the company now producing a clinical breakthrough in spinal cord injury treatment. Where most speakers on resilience rely on metaphor, his frameworks have been tested in polar expeditions and in the slow work of brokering scientific collaboration across institutions. His 2018 TED talk with Simone George has over 1.5 million views and has been translated into 12 languages, which means most senior audiences arrive with a shared reference point the keynote can build on. The senior endorsements are unusually specific: Satya Nadella has written publicly about him, and Bank of Ireland’s Group CEO positioned his contribution to the CEO Council as a leadership lesson drawn from hard practice. Biography highlights First blind person to race to the South Pole, completing the 43-day Amundsen Omega 3 South Pole Race alongside Simon O’Donnell and Inge Solheim in January 2009. First person with chronic complete paralysis to voluntarily take steps in a robotic exoskeleton, working with UCLA’s Prof. Reggie Edgerton on spinal cord stimulation research published by the IEEE. TED2018 speaker with Simone George, “A Love Letter to Realism in a Time of Grief”; over 1.5 million views in its first six months; translated into 12 languages. Author of Making It Happen; subject of the documentaries Blind Man Walking and Unbreakable: The Mark Pollock Story. Chairman of Collaborative Cures and founder of the Run in the Dark global running series, which drew over 250,000 participants across all seven continents between 2011 and 2024. World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and former member of the Global Futures Council on Human Enhancement; honorary doctorates from Queen’s University Belfast and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland; currently pursuing a Professional Doctorate in Elite Performance (Sport) at Dublin City University. Biography Most frameworks for resilience were developed in environments where the stakes are low and the challenges are chosen. That is not where leaders need them. Mark Pollock’s 2018 TED talk with Simone George, “A Love Letter to Realism in a Time of Grief,” addresses the other category: the imposed challenge, where optimism alone becomes a liability and a team still has to make sound decisions. The talk has more than 1.5 million views and has been translated into 12 languages. The credibility comes from two tested sources. In January 2009, Pollock became the first blind person to race to the South Pole, a 43-day expedition across Antarctica in temperatures down to minus 50. In 2010 he fell from an upstairs window, broke his back, and has lived with paralysis since. The decade that followed took a distinctive shape. Pollock catalysed multi-party scientific collaboration worth over $100 million, connecting scientists, investors, technologists and regulators working on spinal cord injury. He became the first person with chronic complete paralysis to voluntarily take steps in a robotic exoskeleton, working with UCLA’s Prof. Reggie Edgerton. The company commercialising that research, Onward Medical, has since delivered the field’s most significant clinical breakthrough. Organisations like Microsoft, Google, GSK, EY and Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One keep booking him. Senior audiences leave with two concrete frameworks: “competitor, realist, collaborator” for maintaining team conviction, and “facts, acceptance, hope” for sound judgement under pressure. Bank of Ireland’s Group CEO framed Pollock’s CEO Council session as a leadership lesson. Satya Nadella has written publicly about him. Key speaking topics Resilience under imposed pressure Decision-making in crisis Elite performance and mindset Cross-institutional collaboration Leadership in uncertainty Human and machine collaboration Adversity and opportunity Ideal for CEO and executive teams during major operational or strategic disruption Chief People Officers and transformation leads rebuilding team confidence during prolonged change programmes Leadership conferences and global off-sites that need a credible account of decision-making in crisis Sales and commercial leadership teams under sustained targets and multi-market complexity Audience outcomes A decision framework (“facts, acceptance, hope”) audiences can apply in real operational crises, with worked examples from extreme environments and from scientific collaboration. A mental model (“competitor, realist, collaborator”) for deciding how a team positions itself when the challenge is imposed. Concrete examples of how high-performance teams hold together across disciplines and geographies, drawn from Pollock’s multi-million-dollar scientific partnerships. A sharper account of what resilience actually requires when the situation is imposed.

Why organisations work with Mark Gallagher Fifteen years on the management boards of Jordan Grand Prix and Red Bull Racing, plus leadership of Cosworth’s F1 engine business. He has actually run the functions he describes. Author of The Business of Winning (Kogan Page) and co-author of The Future Business Formula with Sullivan & Stanley’s Adrian Stalham. His frameworks exist in print, with a track record in front of senior audiences since 1998. Direct experience on FIA technical working groups covering safety and sustainability, including the development of F1’s 2014 hybrid power unit. When he talks about decarbonisation or safety culture, he is describing rules he helped write. Close working relationships with current F1 drivers and teams through Performance Insights and Status Grand Prix, the A1 Grand Prix World Cup-winning outfit he co-owns. The paddock material he draws on is current. Biography highlights Former management board member of Jordan Grand Prix (1998 onwards) and senior figure in the commercial build-out of what became Red Bull Racing Former head of Cosworth’s Formula 1 engine business, which supplied roughly one-third of the grid under his leadership Founder and Managing Director of Performance Insights, his F1 consulting firm, and co-founder of Status Grand Prix, winner of the 2009 A1 Grand Prix World Cup of Motorsport Author of The Business of Winning (Kogan Page, 2014; 2nd edition 2021) and co-author of The Future Business Formula (Rethink Press, 2023) Member of FIA technical working groups on safety and sustainability, including the development of F1’s 2014 hybrid power-unit regulations Media contributor to BBC, Sky Sports, ESPN, CNN, Channel 4 News and Al Jazeera; columnist for GP Racing Magazine; lecturer at Cranfield University Biography Formula 1 is one of the few industries where an operational failure on Sunday becomes a balance-sheet issue by Monday. Regulations shift every season. Deadlines cannot be moved. Mistakes are broadcast to hundreds of millions, and the competitive gap between first and last is measured in hundredths of a second. That is the environment Mark Gallagher spent forty years inside. He sat on the management board of Jordan Grand Prix through its most competitive era, helped build the commercial arm of what became Red Bull Racing, and later ran Cosworth’s F1 engine business as it supplied around a third of the grid. His consultancy, Performance Insights, works with F1 teams and commercial partners today. His books give the method a shape outside the paddock. The Business of Winning, published by Kogan Page, sets out his lessons on leadership, safety, performance management and communication. The Future Business Formula, co-written with Adrian Stalham of the change consultancy Sullivan & Stanley, translates F1’s operating principles into twelve design rules for organisations built to change at speed. Mika Häkkinen wrote the foreword. He has also served on FIA technical working groups on safety and sustainability, including the shift to hybrid power units in 2014, and lectures at Cranfield University. For a senior audience, the value is specific: a practitioner who has run the commercial, engineering and regulatory sides of one of the world’s most publicly scrutinised high-performance businesses, and can describe what each of those jobs actually demanded. Key speaking topics High-performance team culture in elite sport Leadership under non-negotiable deadlines Data, telemetry and decision-making at the operational edge Safety, risk management and regulatory change Sustainability and the energy transition in global sport Technology partnerships and digital transformation Change management in regulated industries Ideal for Senior leadership teams, boards and C-suite audiences responsible for high-stakes operational performance Engineering, manufacturing and technology organisations facing regulatory change or digital transformation Commercial, sponsorship and partnership teams working across technology-heavy sectors Safety, risk and sustainability leaders looking for a real-world reference point on culture and governance Audience outcomes A working sense of how F1 teams hit immovable deadlines without compromising safety or commercial discipline Specific examples of how telemetry, simulation and real-time analytics translate into faster decisions at the operational edge A credible reference point for treating safety culture as a performance lever inside the business Examples and language from elite motorsport that senior leaders can carry into their own strategy and change conversations

Why organisations work with Marc Descheemaecker He has done the thing that most change management speakers have only studied: turned around a nationally significant, politically exposed, heavily unionised institution, with verifiable numbers. That gives him a standing in board and C-suite conversations that credentialed academics cannot replicate. His SNCB experience surfaces a distinction most transformation programmes ignore: the difference between change in organisations that can move freely and change in organisations that cannot. Leaders in regulated industries, public bodies, and large state-influenced enterprises hear something they rarely get: a framework built for their actual constraints. Having chaired Brussels Airport during the 2016 terrorist attacks, he brings direct experience of leadership under acute operational crisis, not as a crisis consultant but as the person publicly accountable for the institution’s response and recovery. His simultaneous positions across a national railway, a national bus operator, Brussels Airport, the European Investment Bank, and the European Investment Fund gave him a view few practitioners hold: where European capital allocation meets national infrastructure governance, and where the two pull in opposite directions. Career that moved from McKinsey analysis through consumer goods and facilities services to four major European transport institutions gives him a genuine cross-sector perspective on operational transformation. He is not a transport specialist; he is a change practitioner who happened to work in transport. Biography highlights CEO, NMBS-SNCB (Belgian national railway), 2004–2013: grew passenger numbers by 60%, reduced workforce by approximately 20% Turned loss-making Belgian operations of Thalys and Eurostar into a profitable shareholding; oversaw the separation and partial sale of the SNCB freight division Chairman, Brussels Airport Company (BAC), 2013–2021 Chairman, De Lijn (Belgian national bus and tram operator), 2016–2022 Director, European Investment Bank (EIB), 2015–2022; Director, European Investment Fund (EIF), 2016–2022 Board member, Gimv NV (listed Belgian investment company) Postgraduate in European Economics, College of Europe, Bruges; Master in Business Economics (cum laude), UFSIA University Antwerp; career began at McKinsey Amsterdam Biography Belgium’s national railway was losing passengers and carrying a workforce structure it could no longer sustain when Marc Descheemaecker was appointed CEO in 2004. Over nine years, he reversed both. Ridership grew by 60%. The workforce reduced by almost 20%. Neither result was achieved by bypassing the constraints that define a state-owned enterprise. They were achieved by understanding them precisely, and leading within them. The SNCB work went beyond the headline numbers. The Belgian operations of Thalys and Eurostar were structurally loss-making; Descheemaecker restructured them into a profitable shareholding. The freight division, a separate challenge, was carved out as an independent entity and partly sold to a financial partner. These were not sequential projects. They ran concurrently, each requiring negotiation across government ministries, unions, and private capital. His subsequent board positions; Chairman of Brussels Airport Company, Chairman of De Lijn, Director at the European Investment Bank and the European Investment Fund extended that operational picture into institutional governance. Few practitioners have seen, from the inside, how capital decisions at European level translate into choices on the ground at a national transport authority. He has sat on both sides of the table. His academic formation; Master in Business Economics (cum laude) from UFSIA Antwerp, postgraduate in European Economics from the College of Europe in Bruges gave him the analytical base. The McKinsey apprenticeship sharpened it. The credential that resonates with senior audiences, however, is neither. It is a national railway, genuinely transformed. Key speaking topics Large-scale organisational transformation in politically constrained environments Change leadership in state-owned and regulated enterprises Workforce restructuring under political and union constraint Infrastructure governance and European investment strategy Operational crisis leadership Transport and mobility as a strategic policy challenge Board governance across public and private capital Ideal for CEOs and senior executives leading transformation in regulated industries, utilities, or public-sector adjacent organisations Boards and chairs of state-owned enterprises, infrastructure authorities, or large government-funded bodies CHROs and transformation leads navigating workforce restructuring in politically sensitive environments European policy, infrastructure, and public investment forums where governance and commercial strategy intersect Audience outcomes A clearer articulation of how change management in constrained organisations differs from private-sector transformation – and what that difference demands of leadership Concrete case material from the SNCB turnaround: what decisions were made, what levers were available, and what did not work A practical lens on managing multiple simultaneous stakeholder mandates (government, unions, commercial partners, and public) without losing operational momentum Insight into how European investment institutions think about national infrastructure; useful for leaders navigating public funding cycles and cross-border capital decisions Honest reflection on leading an institution through acute public crisis, and the communication and governance choices that followed

Why organisations work with Magnus Lindkvist He built the academic discipline he speaks from. In 2008 he created the world’s first accredited course in trendspotting and future thinking at the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship, which gives the work an unusually serious intellectual base for the futurist category. His books are a connected argument, not a back catalogue. Everything We Know Is Wrong, The Attack of the Unexpected, and When the Future Begins set out why most forecasting fails, and his 2025 book with MIT research scientist Bryan Reimer, How to Make AI Useful, applies the same method to the one technology every forecast now has to reckon with. He treats unexpected events as a strategic category, not a footnote. Boards used to thinking in trends get a sharper framework for the shocks that trends cannot predict. He has spent three decades inside the meeting rooms of Fortune 500 boards, ministries, and global institutions, which means the material is calibrated for senior audiences rather than conference floors. The delivery is a deliberate performance. He calls it intellectual acupuncture, and senior buyers consistently book him for sessions where the brief is to change how a leadership team thinks, not to brief them on a topic. Biography highlights Co-author, with MIT research scientist Dr Bryan Reimer, of How to Make AI Useful: Moving Beyond the Hype to Real Progress in Business, Society and Life (LID Publishing, 2025). Creator, in 2008, of the world’s first academically accredited course in trendspotting and future thinking at the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship, and founder of the consultancy Pattern Recognition (2005). Author of further books on creativity and crisis recovery, including Minifesto, Creative Friction (with music journalist Jan Gradvall), The Reset Book, and The Dare to be Different Book. Has advised and presented to Fortune 500 boards, government ministries, and global institutions. MSc in Business and Economics, Stockholm School of Economics; degree in film production, UCLA. Over 1,000 keynotes delivered to corporate, institutional, and government audiences across roughly three decades. Biography Most forecasting fails for the same reason. It extrapolates the present and underweights everything that arrives from outside the model. Magnus Lindkvist has spent three decades building a more honest discipline around that problem, and a body of work that takes long-term thinking seriously as a leadership skill. The intellectual base is unusual for the futurist category. In 2008 he created the world’s first accredited course in trendspotting and future thinking, at the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship, after founding his consultancy Pattern Recognition in 2005. The trio of books that anchors his speaking work, Everything We Know Is Wrong, The Attack of the Unexpected, and When the Future Begins, runs as a connected argument: trends matter, the events that break them matter more, and organisations need a different mental architecture for the long horizon. The delivery is the second reason senior buyers commission him. He treats a keynote as a performance designed to shift a room’s assumptions, which is why boards, ministries, and global firms tend to use him when the leadership team needs to think differently, not simply hear an update. The same instinct runs through his shorter books: Minifesto makes the case for small ideas inside organisations dominated by grand narratives, and The Dare to be Different Book sets out what it takes to produce genuinely original work. His most recent book takes that discipline straight to the technology now reshaping every forecast. How to Make AI Useful, written with MIT research scientist Bryan Reimer and published in 2025, sets aside both the utopian and the apocalyptic framings of artificial intelligence and asks a narrower question: where AI is actually useful, and for whom. It is the foresight method applied to the defining uncertainty of the decade. Key speaking topics Long-term thinking and strategic foresight Trendspotting and turning points in industries The strategic role of unexpected events Making artificial intelligence useful in business Creativity and the conditions for original work Reset and recovery after crisis Innovation under uncertainty The future of technology and society Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting multi-year strategy under high uncertainty CSOs, heads of strategy, and corporate development leaders responsible for long-range planning Innovation, R&D, and foresight leads inside large incumbents Leadership offsites where the brief is to change how the team thinks, not to deliver an update Audience outcomes A sharper sense of where current forecasting habits are likely to mislead a leadership team A practical vocabulary for distinguishing trends, turning points, and genuinely unexpected events A more honest framework for long-term thinking, drawn from his book When the Future Begins A renewed view of creativity and small ideas as strategic assets, not cultural ornaments A clearer view of where AI is genuinely useful in their business and where current enthusiasm outruns the evidence, drawn from How to Make AI Useful

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