Change Management

Why organisations work with Michelle Rozen She brings peer-reviewed research on why goals fail, published in the Journal of Social Sciences, into a room of operators wrestling with stalled transformation. Her national study of 5,000 US professionals on AI adoption reframes the resistance problem from a technology question to a psychology question, which is where most enterprise AI programmes are actually losing ground. Branded, teachable frameworks (The 6% Club, the 0-10 Rule, The Change Doctor’s Playbook for Adapting to AI) give a leadership team shared language to use after the keynote, not a one-time message. A repeat client list across Fortune 100 and 500 organisations, including Pfizer, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson and Merrill Lynch, signals she translates the research into something senior leadership groups will sit with for ninety minutes and then apply on Monday. Biography highlights PhD and Master’s in psychology; founder of the Dr. Rozen Institute. Author of The 6% Club (Wiley, 2024), a USA Today bestseller. Author of 2 Second Decisions and The Change Doctor’s Playbook for Adapting to AI. Research on goal execution published in the Journal of Social Sciences. Huffington Post contributor; quoted across NBC, ABC, FOX News and CNN. Repeat speaker for Pfizer, Coca-Cola, Cisco, Johnson & Johnson, Merrill Lynch, IKEA and Illumina. Biography Most change programmes do not fail at the strategy layer. They fail at the point where a senior team has decided what should happen and a wider workforce, already worn down by previous change, has to make it real. Rozen’s work sits squarely on that point of failure. She is a behavioural scientist trained at masters and doctoral level in psychology, and her published research in the Journal of Social Sciences was the empirical basis for what became her best-known framework, The 6% Club. The headline finding from that research is uncomfortable for any leadership team running a transformation: of people who publicly commit to a change, only six percent sustain it past a month. The 6% Club, published by Wiley in 2024, took that finding into the boardroom. It became a USA Today bestseller and the spine of how she now works with Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 clients including Pfizer, Coca-Cola, Cisco, Johnson and Johnson, and Merrill Lynch. Her newer work follows the same logic into the AI conversation. A national study of five thousand US professionals, summarised in The Change Doctor’s Playbook for Adapting to AI, treats the AI adoption problem as psychological rather than technical. The point a senior buyer cares about is that this reframes where the bottleneck sits: not in the technology stack, but in the human response to it. What distinguishes her from the broader change-keynote field is the apparatus around the talk. Named frameworks, peer-reviewed research, a publishing record at a major business press, an institute under her name, and a Huffington Post column give a leadership team something to reach for after the room empties. The 6% problem is the one she has built her career on naming. Her contribution is giving senior leaders a defensible, research-grounded way to do something about it. Key speaking topics Behavioural science of organisational change The psychology of AI adoption and resistance Decision-making under pressure Goal execution and follow-through inside large organisations Leadership through restructure and uncertainty Motivation and influence at the team level Ideal for CHROs, transformation leads and change directors running multi-year restructures with stalled adoption. CIOs, CDOs and AI programme owners trying to move enterprise AI from pilot to operational use. Senior leadership offsites where the agenda is execution, not strategy. Sales and commercial leadership groups working on influence, decision-making and habit change in client-facing teams. Audience outcomes A research-backed account of why most change initiatives stall after the launch moment, and what a leader can do about it. Named frameworks (The 6% Club, the 0-10 Rule) the audience can use in their own teams without further translation. A specific reading of where AI adoption is actually breaking inside their organisation, drawn from her 5,000-professional study. Sharper language for talking to a tired workforce about another wave of change without losing credibility.

Why organisations work with James Clear He brings the operating manual behind one of the most-sold business books of the last decade, with 25 million copies in circulation and a shared vocabulary already present inside most client organisations. His Four Laws of Behavior Change (make it obvious, attractive, easy, satisfying) give teams a concrete framework they can apply to execution, sales behaviour, safety, and performance the week after the keynote. He draws on behavioural science, not motivation theatre, which lands with technical and commercial audiences who have seen too many inspirational speakers. His corporate track record includes named engagements with Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, JP Morgan Chase, and Procter & Gamble, so the work has been stress-tested inside complex organisations, not only on conference stages. His weekly 3-2-1 newsletter reaches over 3 million readers, which means audiences tend to arrive already familiar with his ideas and leave with a direct channel to keep applying them. Biography highlights Author of Atomic Habits, #1 New York Times bestseller, 25 million+ copies sold, translated into more than 60 languages. Atomic Habits has spent over 260 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Writer of the 3-2-1 Thursday newsletter, delivered weekly to over 3 million subscribers. Keynote client list includes Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, AT&T, JP Morgan Chase, Procter & Gamble, and Disney. His frameworks have been adopted inside teams across the NFL, NBA, and MLB. BA in biomechanics, Denison University (2008); inducted into the College Sports Communicators Academic All-America Hall of Fame, 2024. Biography Most strategy fails in the gap between decision and behaviour. Leaders leave the offsite aligned, the deck is immaculate, and six months later the teams are doing what they always did. Atomic Habits sold 25 million copies in part because it addressed that gap with a specific, usable mechanism, not another call to motivation. The mechanism is the Four Laws of Behavior Change: make the desired behaviour obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying, and invert each law to break the behaviours you want to lose. It is a simple vocabulary that scales, which is why it now shows up in internal decks at Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, JP Morgan Chase, and Procter & Gamble, and in locker rooms across the NFL, NBA, and MLB. The same language runs through teams that sit three organisational layers apart. Before the book, Clear spent six years writing at JamesClear.com, testing ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience against his own practice as an entrepreneur, writer, and competitive athlete. The 3-2-1 Thursday newsletter that grew out of that work now reaches more than 3 million readers each week. It is one of the largest paid-media-free newsletters in the world, and it keeps the ideas current, not frozen in 2018 when the book launched. For a senior buyer, the value is specific. Clear does not sell a mindset shift. He sells a framework for closing the execution gap that is portable across functions, clearly authored, and already circulating inside the company before he walks on stage. The audience leaves with something they can use on Monday morning and a shared language the leadership team can hold them to on Friday. Key speaking topics Habit formation and behaviour change Continuous improvement and the compounding of small gains Decision-making under uncertainty Behavioural design in teams and organisations Execution and performance systems Identity-based behaviour and culture Ideal for CHROs and heads of L&D building behaviour change into leadership and performance programmes. CEOs and executive teams running a transformation that requires sustained behaviour change below the leadership layer. Sales and commercial leaders looking to embed consistent customer-facing behaviours across distributed teams. Conference audiences of senior managers responsible for turning strategy into daily operational practice. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for diagnosing why a desired behaviour is not happening, using the Four Laws as a diagnostic grid. A specific method for designing environments and cues so that high-value behaviours become the default, not the exception. A concrete view of how small, consistent improvements compound into outsized organisational results over a one-to-three-year horizon. A framework linking identity and behaviour that senior leaders can use when the challenge is cultural, not procedural. A shared reference point, drawn from a widely read book, that leaders can hold teams to after the event.

Why organisations work with Axel Alletru He offers a rare verifiable proof point for resilience: the first paraplegic driver to win a category at the Dakar Rally, beating able-bodied competitors in the SSV T3S class in 2020. His career crosses three elite disciplines (motocross, para swimming, rally-raid), which lets him speak credibly about rebuilding capability from zero rather than delivering a single-sport anecdote. He works regularly with CAC40 companies, SMEs and business clubs, having delivered more than 400 keynotes since 2017, so his corporate register is already tuned for leadership and all-hands audiences. His two published books, “28 Principes pour rebondir” and “Et toujours rebondir” (Albin Michel), give organisations a structured vocabulary for recovery that extends beyond the keynote itself. Bilingual delivery in French and English makes him directly usable for multi-country leadership events across European and global teams. Biography highlights First disabled driver to win a category at the Dakar Rally: SSV T3S class, January 2020, competing against able-bodied teams. Former MX2 World Championship motocross rider, rated one of France’s strongest prospects in the discipline before his 2010 crash. Three-time European BMX champion and junior world runner-up earlier in his career. 12-time French Handisport swimming champion and European Masters Games gold medallist in 50m and 100m freestyle. Author of “28 Principes pour rebondir” (2018) and “Et toujours rebondir” (Albin Michel, 2024). Subject of the Canal+ documentary “Holeshot, un virage pour la vie”. Biography The 2010 MX2 World Championship season ended for one French rider with a crash that took away the use of his legs at age 20. A full motocross career, built from European BMX titles and a junior world runner-up result, stopped in a single weekend. The question was no longer how to win. It was whether competitive sport was finished. Ten years later, Axel Alletru crossed a Dakar Rally finish line in Saudi Arabia first in the SSV T3S category and seventh in the overall SSV class, making him the first disabled driver to win a Dakar category against able-bodied competitors. Between those two points sat a 12-time French Handisport swimming title, a European Masters Games gold in freestyle, and years of rebuilding physical capacity that doctors had not expected to return. That arc is what corporate audiences actually buy. It gives him a specific answer to the question leadership teams keep landing on: how do people and organisations recover usable performance after a hard stop, not just morale. He has turned the answer into two published works, “28 Principes pour rebondir” and “Et toujours rebondir” with Albin Michel, and into a speaking practice that covers more than 400 engagements since 2017 for CAC40 groups, mid-market firms and business clubs. He delivers in French and English, and his preferred frame is practical rather than inspirational. Teams leave with a working model for how reinvention happens under constraint, anchored in a career that has had to produce results in three elite disciplines rather than one. Key speaking topics Resilience after serious setback High performance under constraint Mental strength and recovery Team and collective performance Sport lessons applied to business leadership Reinvention and career rebuilds Disability and performance Ideal for Executive leadership teams facing restructuring, failed launches or strategic reset All-company events where leaders want a credible frame for resilience rather than generic motivation Sales, operations and transformation groups under sustained performance pressure HR, talent and employee engagement leads programming flagship annual events Audience outcomes A concrete language for recovery that leaders can carry back into their own teams A working model for how people rebuild capability after a hard stop, drawn from three elite disciplines Renewed belief that ambitious targets remain reachable after disruption, supported by specific evidence rather than slogans Stronger read on the role collective structure plays in individual comebacks, relevant to team design and leadership

Why organisations work with Jeff DeGraff He brings a tested intellectual frame, the Competing Values Framework, that gives executives a shared language for the trade-offs they already feel but cannot resolve. His Innovatrium has built innovation programmes inside more than half the Fortune 500, including Google, Apple, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, NASA and Microsoft, so the methods are stress-tested in real operating conditions. The work crosses sectors that rarely share a stage: commercial, military (US Air Force, NATO, Singapore Armed Forces), academic and mission-driven, which sharpens his diagnosis of what is structural and what is industry-specific. He treats innovation as a system of competing roles (Artist, Engineer, Athlete, Sage), so leaders leave with a way to staff and sequence change, not a motivational pep talk. The Ross School base and the Certified Professional Innovator programme give buyers a credible academic anchor when they need to sell the engagement internally. Biography highlights Clinical Professor of Management and Organizations, University of Michigan Ross School of Business, since 1990. Co-creator of the Competing Values Framework, with Robert Quinn, Kim Cameron and John Rohrbaugh. Founder of the Innovatrium Institute for Innovation, working with Fortune 500 firms, NASA and allied military commands. Author of The Art of Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2025), The Creative Mindset, The Innovation Code, Leading Innovation and Competing Values Leadership. Host of the PBS programme Innovation You and contributor to Michigan Public’s The Next Idea. Former Vice President of Communications and New Ventures at Domino’s Pizza during the period the company scaled from a regional chain to a global brand. Biography Innovation inside large organisations rarely fails for lack of ideas. It fails because the same organisation rewards efficiency, control and reliability while asking a small group to break those very rules. That tension is the subject Jeff DeGraff has spent his career mapping, first as a co-creator of the Competing Values Framework alongside Robert Quinn, Kim Cameron and John Rohrbaugh, and then as the architect of a more applied body of work on innovation as a system. The academic anchor is the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, where he has been Clinical Professor of Management and Organizations since 1990. The applied side is the Innovatrium, the institute he founded to put the theory into contact with operating reality. Through Innovatrium and direct consulting, his methods have been used inside more than half the Fortune 500, including Google, Apple, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, Microsoft and NASA, and inside the US Air Force, NATO and the Singapore Armed Forces. His three most recent books, The Innovation Code (2017), The Creative Mindset (2020) and The Art of Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2025), form a single argument. Innovation is not a personality trait, it is a discipline of holding competing values long enough to produce something new. The Innovation Code translates that into roles and team design. The Creative Mindset breaks creative work into six trainable skills. The Art of Change reframes paradox itself as the engine of transformation. The career arc explains the bias toward application. He earned his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985 and went directly into industry as Vice President of Communications and New Ventures at Domino’s Pizza, where the nickname “Dean of Innovation” stuck. The work since has kept the same shape: a serious framework, tested against organisations that cannot afford abstractions. Key speaking topics Innovation strategy and operating models Competing Values Framework in practice Creative leadership and team design Organisational change and transformation Culture and capability for sustained innovation Cross-sector innovation: commercial, public, military Paradox and decision-making under competing priorities Ideal for CEOs and executive teams under pressure to deliver core performance and a credible innovation agenda at the same time Chief Innovation Officers, CSOs and heads of strategy designing or rebuilding innovation operating models CHROs and learning leaders building creative capability across senior cohorts Public-sector, defence and mission-driven leadership groups that need a private-sector grade innovation method Audience outcomes A shared language for the competing demands inside the business and a way to talk about them without picking sides A working model for staffing innovation teams across distinct creative roles rather than relying on a few “creative” individuals A practical sequence for turning paradoxes (efficiency versus experimentation, control versus autonomy) into design decisions Confidence that innovation can be built as a repeatable system, not a personality-driven exception Examples drawn from companies, NASA and military commands that translate cleanly back to the audience’s own context

Why organisations work with Tahl Raz The frameworks Raz presents aren’t drawn from his interpretation of others’ research. Rather, he co-constructed them, working directly with the FBI hostage negotiator, the CEO performance researchers, and the business practitioners behind three of the most widely read business books of the past two decades. The CEO Next Door, which Raz co-authored based on analysis of more than 17,000 CEO and C-suite assessments, gives boards and senior leadership teams a data-validated model for identifying and developing executive talent, not one built on anecdote or convention. Never Split the Difference has sold more than five million copies and been translated into over 40 languages, which reflects genuine market validation of the negotiation system Raz helped shape. It is now embedded in corporate training programmes globally. Never Eat Alone is used as a textbook in MBA programmes worldwide, making Raz a source-level contributor to how the next generation of executives is taught to build professional relationships and organisational influence. His background as an award-winning business journalist gives him an ability to take complex behavioural research and make it immediately actionable in a room – a skill that is structurally different from the researchers and practitioners who generated the underlying work. Biography highlights Co-author of Never Split the Difference with former FBI lead hostage negotiator Chris Voss, New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, 5 million+ copies sold, translated into 40+ languages Co-author of Never Eat Alone with Keith Ferrazzi, New York Times bestseller, adopted as an MBA textbook in business schools worldwide Co-author of The CEO Next Door with Elena Botelho and Kim Powell, New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller; CMI Management Book of the Year 2019; based on analysis of more than 17,000 CEO and C-suite assessments; research published as an HBR cover story Award-winning journalist published in Inc., GQ, Harvard Business Review, and the Jerusalem Post Former CEO of MyGreenLight (online education), Chief Content Officer, and founder and editor-in-chief of Jewcy Media Degree in Philosophy, Vassar College Biography The prevailing models for negotiation and leadership development share a common flaw: they were built on theory, intuition, and case studies drawn from a narrow slice of experience. What changes the conversation is evidence. Evidence from 20 years of hostage negotiation under life-or-death conditions, from a decade of performance data on 17,000 executives, from the social science of how professional relationships actually generate career capital. Tahl Raz has spent his career working at the intersection of that evidence and the people who need to act on it. Raz co-authored Never Split the Difference with Chris Voss, former lead international kidnapping negotiator for the FBI, translating a field-tested system developed in extreme-pressure environments into a framework that business leaders and sales teams now use worldwide. The book has sold more than five million copies and been translated into over 40 languages – a scale of adoption that reflects the practical utility of what the negotiation system actually delivers, not just the appeal of the source material. His work on The CEO Next Door, developed with researchers Elena Botelho and Kim Powell, draws on analysis of more than 17,000 CEO and C-suite assessments to identify the four behaviours that statistically separate executives who reach and sustain top performance from those who plateau. The research – published as a cover article in the May-June 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review – overturns widely held assumptions about pedigree, charisma, and the shape of a successful executive career. The book won CMI Management Book of the Year 2019. Before these collaborations, Raz co-authored Never Eat Alone with Keith Ferrazzi, a study of professional networking and relationship capital that remains in use as an MBA textbook in business programmes globally. His journalism has appeared in Inc., GQ, Harvard Business Review, and the Jerusalem Post. That background – knowing how to extract what is genuinely new in a body of research and make it land for a senior audience – is what distinguishes his platform: he is not interpreting these frameworks from the outside, he helped build them. Key speaking topics Negotiation strategy and behavioural influence Executive leadership behaviours and CEO performance Professional relationship capital and network strategy Storytelling and leadership communication Organisational decision-making under pressure Career development and leadership advancement The future of work and professional influence Ideal for C-suite and senior executive audiences in leadership development or strategic offsites CHROs and talent leaders building executive assessment or succession frameworks Sales leadership and commercial teams focused on high-stakes negotiation Boards and governance teams examining executive performance and leadership pipeline Audience outcomes A working understanding of the negotiation tactics developed in FBI hostage situations and how they apply in commercial and leadership contexts Clarity on the four behaviours; decisiveness, engaging for impact, relentless reliability, bold adaptation which CEO performance data identifies as the genuine predictors of executive success A reframed view of professional networking as a deliberate, structured strategic practice rather than a social variable Practical approaches for improving persuasion, communication, and influence in high-pressure conversations Sharper criteria for evaluating leadership potential – their own or others’ – against evidence rather than convention

Why organisations work with Larry Jacobson A source experience that is independently documented and book-published. The six-year voyage, the 40 countries, the tsunami in Thailand, the pirate threat in the Gulf of Aden are not rhetorical devices, they are a verifiable record audiences can read after the keynote. Direct translation between an extreme personal undertaking and the corporate context he left to begin it. Jacobson ran a company before he sailed, and speaks to commercial audiences with the cadence of someone who has carried a P&L. A specific argument that fear is a workable variable, not a problem to be removed. Audiences leave with a clearer sense of how to act while still afraid, rather than waiting for the fear to subside. A track record with mainstream corporate and financial-services audiences, including Northwestern Mutual, Investment & Wealth Institute, and Retirement Coaches Association, alongside two TEDx platforms. Biography highlights Six-year circumnavigation by sailboat, 40,000+ nautical miles, 40 countries visited. Author of The Boy Behind the Gate, an Amazon best-seller and award-winning memoir of the voyage. Two-time TEDx speaker: TEDx Golden Gate (“Passion Trumps Fear”) and TEDx Youth (“Passion, Priorities, and Perseverance”). Additional books include What’s Your Encore? A Step-by-Step Guide to Retiring with Purpose and Fulfillment, Beyond the Meeting Room: A Practical Guide to Mastering Communication in a Remote World, and Navigating Entrepreneurship: 11 Proven Keys to Success, with companion video programmes (Sail Into Retirement, Navigating Entrepreneurship) hosted at Buoy Training. Certified World Class Speaking Coach, the credential awarded through the 12-week certification programme run by 1999 World Champion of Public Speaking Craig Valentine. Keynote and coaching clients include Northwestern Mutual, Investment & Wealth Institute, Retirement Coaches Association, InVision, The Henderson Group, Hill Physicians, CASE District VII. Biography Most leadership content is written for the crisis. The harder problem is the long stretch in between, when conditions stay difficult, fear becomes ambient, and the easy decision is to retreat or wait. Jacobson’s material is built for that stretch. He spent six years sailing around the world after running World Class Incentives, a corporate incentive and meeting planning business. The voyage covered 40,000 nautical miles and 40 countries, and included the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and a transit through the Gulf of Aden during a live piracy threat. The book that followed, The Boy Behind the Gate, became an Amazon best-seller and the spine of his speaking practice. The argument he builds from that experience is practical. Fear is a workable variable in any sustained undertaking, not an obstacle to be removed before starting. Audiences hear how to make decisions while afraid, how to sustain conviction over months rather than minutes, and how to finish a long commitment that no one else can see the end of. He has spoken twice on the TEDx platform and works regularly with corporate, financial-services, and association audiences, including Northwestern Mutual, Investment & Wealth Institute, and the Retirement Coaches Association. His retirement work extends beyond the keynote into What’s Your Encore?, a step-by-step retirement guide, and Sail Into Retirement, the structured video programme advisers use with clients. His other books include Beyond the Meeting Room on remote-world communication and Navigating Entrepreneurship. He is a Certified World Class Speaking Coach, a credential earned through the programme run by 1999 World Champion of Public Speaking Craig Valentine. Key speaking topics Resilience and decision-making under sustained pressure Fear management in leadership Perseverance through long commitments Personal reinvention and career transition Goal-setting and execution Retirement and second-career planning Communication and presentation skills for senior audiences Ideal for Sales kick-offs and annual corporate off-sites where the brief is morale and conviction, not analytical content Financial-services and wealth-management association audiences working on client retirement and life-stage conversations Leadership teams entering a long restructuring or turnaround, where the work will outlast the initial mandate Audience outcomes A direct, named framework for acting while afraid, rather than waiting for confidence to arrive first. A clearer view of what sustains conviction over months of difficult conditions, drawn from a six-year first-person example. Permission to take a personally difficult decision they have been deferring, supported by a specific story rather than abstract encouragement.

Why organisations work with Ann Daniels She holds a Guinness World Record that has not been repeated: first women’s team, with Caroline Hamilton, to ski to both the North and South Poles, a credential that sits behind every claim she makes about decision-making under pressure. She led ice operations for all three Catlin Arctic Survey expeditions with Pen Hadow, a rare example of an explorer whose field leadership has been trusted by peer-reviewed science programmes working with NASA and the European Space Agency. Her career arc, from NatWest assistant bank manager and mother of triplets to polar team leader, gives her credibility with audiences who are sceptical of exploration narratives delivered by lifelong adventurers. She speaks with operational specificity: route-finding on moving ice, calling a team member off the ice with frostbite, swimming open leads in survival suits. Senior audiences recognise these as decisions, not anecdotes. She is listed by The Daily Telegraph among the Top 20 Great British Adventurers of all time, which shortens the credibility conversation with boards and external audiences. Biography highlights Guinness World Record holder: first women’s team, with Caroline Hamilton, to ski to both the North and South Poles (1 June 2002). Head of ice operations and navigator for all three Catlin Arctic Survey expeditions (2009, 2010, 2011), led by Pen Hadow. Arctic scientific collaborations with NASA, the European Space Agency, NOAA and the University of Washington. Honorary DUniv, Staffordshire University (2007). Castaway on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs (January 2007). Named in The Daily Telegraph’s Top 20 Great British Adventurers of all time. Biography Route-finding on the Arctic Ocean is decision-making in its purest form. The ice moves under you, the weather closes without warning, and the team’s survival depends on whether the person in front is reading the ground correctly. Ann Daniels has done that job for more than two decades, including three consecutive Catlin Arctic Survey expeditions with Pen Hadow, where she was head of ice operations for scientists working with NASA and the European Space Agency. She came to it from an unlikely starting point. Daniels was an assistant bank manager at NatWest and a mother of triplets when she was selected, from more than two hundred applicants, for the 1997 McVities Penguin Polar Relay. She had no prior outdoor experience. Five years later, on 1 June 2002, she and Caroline Hamilton became the first women to reach both the North and South Poles as part of all-women teams, a Guinness record that has not been repeated. The Catlin work reframed her practice. Between 2009 and 2011 she led teams of scientists across hundreds of miles of drifting sea ice to manually measure its thickness, feeding data into the climate record. Later expeditions extended that into collaborations with the European Space Agency, NOAA and the University of Washington. She is the rare field leader whose decisions have been trusted inside a peer-reviewed research programme. What she offers senior audiences is the texture of that work. She can describe calling a team-mate off the ice with frostbite, swimming an open lead in a survival suit, and choosing a route across fracturing ice when the satellite image is already twelve hours old. The Daily Telegraph has named her among the Top 20 Great British Adventurers of all time; Staffordshire University awarded her an honorary DUniv in 2007. Key speaking topics Decision-making under uncertainty Team leadership in extreme environments Resilience and recovery after setback Women in leadership and exploration Climate change and the Arctic Career reinvention Ideal for Executive teams running strategic change programmes where the plan will keep adjusting Operational and transformation leaders responsible for decisions on partial information Leadership development cohorts and senior high-potential groups Conferences focused on resilience, climate, or women in leadership Audience outcomes A clearer language for making decisions when the data is incomplete and the cost of waiting is rising Specific, transferable lessons on holding a team together when conditions deteriorate A harder test for what resilience actually looks like in practice, drawn from named events on the ice Renewed confidence that significant career reinvention is possible without a conventional starting point

Why organisations work with Jeremy Schwartz He has sat in the chief executive seat at The Body Shop and as interim joint CEO at Pandora, so the advice on transformation comes from someone who has signed off the trade-offs, not described them. He led the launch of “Enrich Not Exploit” at The Body Shop, a sustainability commitment with hard 2020 targets across ingredients, packaging, suppliers and stores, and oversaw the business through the 1bn euro sale to Natura. He proposed the consumer concept behind Coca-Cola Zero during his time as Marketing and Innovation Director for Coca-Cola Europe, giving him credibility on commercial brand creation as well as ethical repositioning. His current mandates as Practice Chairman at Kantar and advisor to McKinsey’s Business Transformation Practice keep him close to live programmes inside large consumer and retail organisations. Few speakers can argue the commercial case for sustainability from inside the P&L of a global beauty business and the boardroom of a listed jewellery company. Biography highlights CEO of The Body Shop, 2013-2017; led the “Enrich Not Exploit” sustainability strategy and the 1bn euro divestment from L’Oreal to Natura. Chief Operating Officer and interim joint CEO of Pandora A/S. Managing Director, L’Oreal UK; Marketing and Innovation Director, Coca-Cola Europe; Brand Director, Sainsbury’s; CMO, News International. Practice Chairman, Kantar Sustainable Transformation Practice; Senior Advisor, McKinsey Business Transformation Practice. Founder and host of the “Saving Tomorrow’s Planet” podcast. Founding trustee, Against Malaria Foundation. Biography The hardest job in a consumer business right now is holding two clocks at once. The quarterly clock that the market reads, and the multi-year clock that sustainability commitments, digital re-platforming and supply chain redesign actually run on. Schwartz has run a business under both. As CEO of The Body Shop from 2013 to 2017, he led the launch of “Enrich Not Exploit”, a sustainability commitment with measurable 2020 targets on ingredients, packaging, fair trade sourcing and habitat protection. Over the same period he steered the business back to growth and through the 1bn euro sale from L’Oreal to Natura. Before that he was Managing Director of L’Oreal UK, Marketing and Innovation Director for Coca-Cola in Europe (where he proposed the consumer concept behind Coca-Cola Zero), Brand Director at Sainsbury’s, and CMO at News International. He later served as Chief Operating Officer and interim joint CEO of Pandora. His advisory work now sits inside the practices that buy-side leaders actually use. He is Practice Chairman of Kantar’s Sustainable Transformation Practice and Senior Advisor to McKinsey’s Business Transformation Practice. That keeps the speaking material close to live transformation programmes rather than retrospective case studies. He hosts the “Saving Tomorrow’s Planet” podcast, interviewing leaders who are reducing emissions inside operating businesses, and is a founding trustee of the Against Malaria Foundation. The through-line across all of this is the same argument he makes to boards: sustainability and commercial growth are not parallel agendas to be balanced, they are the same agenda once the operating model is set up to carry both. Key speaking topics Consumer brand transformation Sustainability and commercial growth Retail leadership CEO and executive team performance Marketing and innovation in consumer businesses Purpose and culture in transformation Digital transformation in retail Ideal for CEOs and executive committees in consumer, retail and FMCG businesses balancing growth targets with sustainability commitments. CMOs and brand leaders rebuilding propositions around purpose without losing commercial discipline. Boards and chairs evaluating ESG and transformation programmes with real P&L implications. Senior leadership teams inside transformation, sustainability or digital programmes that need an outside CEO voice. Audience outcomes A working argument for why sustainability and commercial growth belong in the same operating plan, drawn from a CEO who has run it. Specific examples from The Body Shop, Pandora, L’Oreal and Coca-Cola of how brand, marketing and sustainability decisions look from inside the P&L. A clearer view of where consumer transformations stall and what senior leaders can do about it before they reach the operating teams. Practical reference points for boards on how to set sustainability targets that survive contact with quarterly performance.

Why organisations work with Andrew Bannon The Self-Developer philosophy is structurally unavailable elsewhere in English: Bannon holds sole authorisation from its creator, Jens Corssen, making this engagement genuinely exclusive rather than merely differentiated from comparable self-leadership speakers. He addresses the specific failure point that most leadership development misses – the gap between insight and habitual behaviour – using a named, four-tool framework that leaders can apply immediately and return to independently. His delivery in both English and German makes him one of very few speakers able to bring rigorous self-leadership content consistently to DACH and internationally operating European organisations without dilution across language boundaries. His position on the CAS Senior Management Programme at the University of St. Gallen signals that the methodology meets the expectations of senior executive audiences – not a motivation seminar, but a substantive leadership development intervention. Engagements leave teams with a shared internal language – the four Self-Developer tools – which makes individual behavioural development operational at team and leadership cohort level. Biography highlights Sole globally authorised trainer to teach Jens Corssen’s Self-Developer philosophy; holds personal certification from Corssen active since 2013 Lecturer on the CAS Senior Management Programme, University of St. Gallen (Institute of Business Administration, IFB-HSG) MSc in Coaching for Behavioural Change, Henley Business School / University of Reading BA in Economics, University of Surrey Corporate delivery for Siemens, Bosch, Hilti, Lufthansa, Roche, and Lilly Adapted and performed the English-language audiobook The Way of the Self-Developer (co-credited with Jens Corssen, ISBN 9783000435706) Delivers in English and German; Munich-based for over two decades Biography Leadership performance rarely breaks down because leaders lack knowledge. Under sustained pressure – restructuring, fast-paced change, complex stakeholder demands – it breaks down because default behaviour takes over. Reactive patterns replace intentional ones. Avoidance displaces accountability. The Self-Developer philosophy, developed by German psychologist Jens Corssen, was built to address exactly this: a structured four-tool framework for interrupting automatic behaviour and restoring conscious choice. Andrew Bannon is the only trainer globally authorised by Corssen to teach this methodology in English. Since 2013, he has delivered the Self-Developer philosophy to management teams and executive cohorts across Europe – at organisations including Siemens, Bosch, Hilti, Lufthansa, Roche, and Lilly – and as a module lecturer on the CAS Senior Management Programme at the University of St. Gallen. His academic grounding combines economics at the University of Surrey with an MSc in Coaching for Behavioural Change from Henley Business School. The four tools – Self-Awareness, Self-Responsibility, Self-Confidence, and Self-Conquest – give leaders a repeatable internal framework rather than a motivational prompt. Bannon’s specific contribution is making this framework operational for international audiences: he delivers in English and German, brings two decades of experience embedded in German-speaking corporate culture, and adapted the methodology for English-speaking audiences in the audiobook The Way of the Self-Developer, co-credited with Corssen. The methodology has been tested across both open executive education at the University of St. Gallen and deep corporate programmes with global organisations – evidence that it holds across seniority, sector, and language. For leadership cohorts navigating high-pressure periods of change, the Self-Developer tools give behavioural development real operational traction. Key speaking topics Self-leadership and behavioural change The Self-Developer philosophy and four-tool framework Personal accountability in leadership Mindset and inner dialogue under pressure Resilience and self-management Intercultural leadership in European and DACH contexts Growth mindset in organisations Ideal for Senior leaders and C-suite executives navigating organisational change or cultural transformation Leadership development programme participants at upper-management and executive level CHROs and L&D leads seeking behavioural change frameworks that operate across language and cultural contexts Executive education audiences in DACH-region and internationally operating European organisations Audience outcomes A shared language for self-leadership: the four Self-Developer tools (Self-Awareness, Self-Responsibility, Self-Confidence, Self-Conquest) Practical ability to distinguish between objective circumstance and subjective interpretation when under pressure Methods for interrupting reactive behavioural patterns and replacing them with conscious, intentional choice Clearer understanding of how avoidance and procrastination erode leadership confidence over time A repeatable inner framework that supports sustained performance during periods of change and uncertainty

Why organisations work with Jennifer Jordan Her seven tensions framework, built from surveys of more than 1,000 senior executives and published in Harvard Business Review with Michael Wade, gives leadership teams a shared language for the contradictions that actually slow them down. She directs IMD’s Leading Digital Execution and Leadership Essentials programmes, so the work she brings to a boardroom is the same work she runs with executive cohorts every month. Her doctoral training at Yale in social psychology means the advice on power, influence, and ethical lapse rests on peer-reviewed research, not anecdote. She translates academic findings into operational decisions: when to slow a leader down, when to add a shadow board, when a decision should be made by data and when by judgment. Recognised by Poets&Quants on its 2019 Best 40 Under 40 list and the Thinkers50 Radar in the same year, she sits in the small group of leadership researchers whose work senior executives are actively asking for. Biography highlights Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior, IMD Business School, Lausanne. Director of IMD’s Leading Digital Execution and Leadership Essentials programmes. PhD in Psychology, Yale University; postdoctoral fellow at Kellogg School of Management and Tuck School of Business. Co-author with Michael Wade of “Every Leader Needs to Navigate These 7 Tensions,” Harvard Business Review, 2020. Named by Poets&Quants to its 2019 Best 40 Under 40 business school professors list and nominated to the Thinkers50 Radar in the same year. Research published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Psychological Science, Journal of Management, and Business Ethics Quarterly. Biography Most leadership advice still asks executives to pick a side. Be visionary or be operational. Trust the data or trust your gut. Hold authority or share it. The senior leaders Jennifer Jordan studies do not have that luxury, and her research is built around the cost of pretending they do. Jordan is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IMD in Lausanne, where she directs the Leading Digital Execution and Leadership Essentials programmes. Her 2020 Harvard Business Review piece with Michael Wade, drawn from surveys of more than 1,000 senior leaders, set out seven tensions that define the modern executive role, from expert to learner, from controller to architect, from constant to adaptor. The framework is now used inside leadership development at major firms. Trained as a social psychologist at Yale, she works on the harder edge of the leadership question: power, influence, and the conditions under which capable people make ethical mistakes. That research is published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Psychological Science, and the Journal of Management, and it underpins her work on leadership transitions, family business succession, and women on boards. Her recognition is concrete. Poets&Quants placed her on its 2019 Best 40 Under 40 list of business school professors, citing close to 1,500 academic citations of her work. Thinkers50 named her to its Radar list of management thinkers to watch in the same year. With Mahwesh Khan, she has argued in HBR for shadow boards as a structural answer to generational distance at the top of organisations, a recommendation that several large European firms have since adopted. Key speaking topics Leadership in the digital age Power, influence, and ethics Leadership transitions and succession Decision-making under contradiction Women on boards and inclusive leadership Family business leadership Shadow boards and intergenerational governance Ideal for CEOs and executive committees are navigating contradictory strategic demands. CHROs and heads of leadership development are designing senior leader programmes. Board chairs and nominating committees are working on succession and governance. Family business principals and next-generation leaders are preparing to take over. Audience outcomes A direct read on the seven tensions that define senior leadership today, with practical tests for which behaviour each situation calls for. A clearer view of how power changes a leader’s judgement, and the routines that keep that change in check. Sharper questions for succession and leadership transitions, including how shadow boards and reverse mentoring change board-level perspective. A research-grounded account of why digital execution stalls at the top of organisations, and what senior leaders can do about it.

Why organisations work with George Kohlrieser He turns a literal high-stakes discipline into a leadership method. The negotiation techniques he teaches carry a documented 95% resolution rate in real hostage situations, and he shows leaders how the same bonding and dialogue skills resolve conflict in a boardroom. He gives leaders the “secure base” model: a tested account, grounded in attachment theory and neuroscience, of how a leader can provide both safety and challenge so that teams take risks instead of protecting themselves. He teaches the specific act most leaders avoid: naming a difficult issue out loud. His “put the fish on the table” approach gives executives a repeatable way to surface conflict before it rots a team from the inside. His authority is built on two decades of senior-executive teaching at IMD, where he created and still directs its flagship High Performance Leadership programme, not on a single book or talk. He works on the leader’s internal state first. His doctoral research on physiological recovery after high-stress events underpins practical methods for staying composed when a situation is escalating. Biography highlights Distinguished Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behaviour at IMD, Lausanne, and creator and director of its High Performance Leadership and Advanced High Performance Leadership programmes. Author of the international bestseller Hostage at the Table, winner of Best Business Book in France and Best Management Book in Germany, with a revised second edition published in 2025. Co-author of Care to Dare: Unleashing Astonishing Potential Through Secure Base Leadership, part of the Warren Bennis leadership series and named among Soundview’s best business books of 2013. Organizational and clinical psychologist with a doctorate from Ohio State University; veteran police psychologist and hostage negotiator taken hostage four times in the course of his work. Has trained the FBI, the Los Angeles Police and Sheriff’s Departments, and police academies in France, the Netherlands and Germany in crisis negotiation. Has worked with leaders in over 100 countries for clients including Cisco, Coca-Cola, IBM, Roche, Santander, Toyota and UBS; featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the Financial Times and Forbes. Biography Most leadership advice about conflict tells people to manage it. Kohlrieser’s career began somewhere far less comfortable: as a police psychologist and hostage negotiator who was himself taken hostage four times, once in a hospital emergency room and three times in homes during domestic violence calls. He came out of each by building a bond with the person holding him. That experience became the foundation of his work. At IMD in Lausanne, where he is Distinguished Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behaviour, he turned it into method. He created and still directs the school’s High Performance Leadership programme, an intensive course for senior executives, and built his teaching on a counterintuitive claim: hostage negotiators succeed roughly 95% of the time not by force but by forming a genuine connection with someone they have every reason to despise. The same capability, he argues, separates leaders who can challenge their teams from those who only pressure them. His books gave the method its structure. Hostage at the Table applies negotiation psychology to ordinary business conflict and won best-book awards in France and Germany. Care to Dare set out the “secure base” idea, drawn from attachment theory and neuroscience: a leader who provides both care and challenge frees people to take risks rather than protect themselves. The practical core is an act most executives dodge, what he calls putting the fish on the table, naming a difficult issue openly so it can be cleaned rather than left to rot. What gives the work its weight is the evidence behind the soft language. His doctoral research measured how law enforcement leaders physically recover after high-stress events, and that grounding in self-mastery runs through everything he teaches. He has trained the FBI and police academies across Europe, and advised leaders at Cisco, IBM, Roche and UBS in more than 100 countries, but the through-line is consistent: the hardest part of leadership is emotional, and it can be learned. Key speaking topics Conflict management and resolution Negotiation and influence under pressure Secure base leadership and trust High performance leadership and teams Self-mastery and composure in high-stress situations Leading through change and uncertainty Dialogue and high-impact communication Ideal for C-suite and senior executives responsible for leading teams through high-stakes or adversarial situations Leadership development and HPL-style executive programmes Boards and senior teams facing entrenched internal conflict or stalled negotiations CHROs and people leaders building trust and psychological safety as a performance lever Audience outcomes A working method for surfacing and resolving conflict instead of avoiding it Negotiation and bonding techniques drawn from real hostage situations, adapted for business relationships A clear model for becoming a “secure base” who combines care and challenge to lift team performance Practical ways to stay composed and make sound decisions when a situation is escalating A sharper read on how trust, emotion and dialogue drive results their teams will not deliver otherwise

Why organisations work with Whitney Johnson A field-tested model, the S Curve of Learning, that gives executives a shared language for placing every team member on a developmental trajectory rather than an annual performance grid. A track record of applying disruptive innovation theory to capital allocation, including co-founding the Disruptive Innovation Fund with Clayton Christensen and leading the seed investment in Coupang. A No. 8 Thinkers50 ranking in 2021 and consecutive listings since 2015, signalling sustained credibility with the same boards her audiences sit on. Direct relevance to succession planning, post-merger integration, and the talent risk inside transformation programmes, drawn from Fortune 500 advisory work with Kraft Heinz, Intermountain Health, Morgan Stanley, and Amazon. A Wall Street equity-analyst background that lets her speak to commercial leaders in their own language about return on people, not just culture. Biography highlights CEO and co-founder of Disruption Advisors, advising Fortune 500 companies, private equity portfolios, and scale-ups on leadership and team development. Co-founder with Clayton Christensen of the Disruptive Innovation Fund at Rose Park Advisors; led the seed round in Coupang. Ranked No. 8 on Thinkers50 in 2021, with continuous listings since 2015. Author of Smart Growth (Harvard Business Press, 2022), a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller and a Thinkers50 Best New Management Book. Author of Disrupt Yourself, Build an A-Team, and Dare, Dream, Do. LinkedIn Top Voice and host of the Disrupt Yourself podcast, with guests including Brene Brown, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and Stanley McChrystal. Biography Most companies treat leadership development as a calendar of programmes. The harder question is where each senior leader sits on a learning curve, and what the organisation does when too many of them are stalled at the top of the same one. That is the question Whitney Johnson built a career around. Before founding Disruption Advisors, Johnson spent eight consecutive years as an Institutional Investor-ranked equity analyst on Wall Street. She then partnered with Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen to co-found the Disruptive Innovation Fund at Rose Park Advisors, where she served as President from 2007 to 2012 and led the seed round in what is now Coupang. Her shift from capital allocation to people allocation is the through line of her work. The S Curve of Learning, adapted from Everett Rogers and applied through her January-February 2022 Harvard Business Review article and the book Smart Growth, gives executives a way to manage their organisations as a portfolio of learning curves. It reframes engagement, retention, and succession as the same problem looked at from three angles. That argument has earned her a No. 8 Thinkers50 ranking in 2021 and a consistent place on the list since 2015. Her client roster includes Kraft Heinz, Intermountain Health, Morgan Stanley, and Amazon, and her Disrupt Yourself podcast features sustained conversations with figures including Brene Brown, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and Stanley McChrystal. Key speaking topics Disruptive innovation applied to people and teams The S Curve of Learning as a development framework Succession planning and talent portfolio management Building and leading high-performing teams Personal disruption and reinvention for senior leaders Smart growth and organisational scaling Coaching cultures inside Fortune 500 companies Ideal for CEOs and executive committees rebuilding the bench beneath them CHROs and chief talent officers redesigning succession and development Private equity operating partners pressure-testing portfolio leadership Boards reviewing CEO succession and senior team capability Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for placing every senior leader on a learning curve, with implications for retention and succession A clearer view of when high performers are about to plateau and what to move them toward A practical link between team composition and commercial performance, drawn from her investment-fund experience Specific moves to disrupt their own roles before circumstances disrupt them Examples from named Fortune 500 engagements they can stress-test against their own organisation