Corporate Culture

Why organisations work with Adam Kingl A decade-plus of original research into how Generation Y expects to work and be led, conducted while at London Business School and Duke Corporate Education, now applied to advising boards on talent and culture strategy. Author of two books from mainstream business publishers (Next Generation Leadership with HarperCollins, Sparking Success with Kogan Page), the second shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2024 in the Smart Thinking category. Primary research inside the creative industries (Carnegie Hall, Disney Imagineering, Broadway theatre, the writers’ room of Friends) translated into leadership practice for companies including Pixar, Panasonic, Bosch and Netflix. Very few leadership speakers work from that source base. Adjunct teaching at UCL School of Management, Hult Ashridge, Imperial College Business School and the Møller Institute at Churchill College, Cambridge. These appointments come through competitive academic review and carry live executive programme responsibility. A decade as Executive Director of Thought Leadership at London Business School and Regional Managing Director (Europe) at Duke Corporate Education. He has designed and run executive development at scale, which shapes how he reads a boardroom. Biography highlights Author of Next Generation Leadership (HarperCollins, 2020) and Sparking Success (Kogan Page, 2023), the second shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2024 in the Smart Thinking category Former Executive Director of Thought Leadership and Learning Solutions at London Business School (nearly a decade in post) Former Regional Managing Director (Europe) at Duke Corporate Education, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University Adjunct Faculty at UCL School of Management, Hult Ashridge International Business School and Imperial College Business School Associate of the Møller Institute at Churchill College, University of Cambridge Contributor and interviewee for the Financial Times, Forbes, Fortune, The Guardian, Fast Company and The Sunday Times Biography 80% of CEOs name innovation and creativity among their top three priorities. In the same surveyed organisations, 94% of employees rate their company as poor at both. That gap, between what executives say matters and what their organisations actually produce, is the starting point for most of Adam Kingl’s work. Kingl spent nearly a decade as Executive Director of Thought Leadership at London Business School, then led Duke Corporate Education’s European business as Regional Managing Director. He now teaches at UCL School of Management, Hult Ashridge, Imperial College Business School and the Møller Institute at Churchill College, Cambridge. His material is built and tested inside those programmes before it reaches any commercial audience. Next Generation Leadership (HarperCollins, 2020) grew out of a decade of original research into how Generation Y expects to work and be led. It treats generational change as a management design problem. Kingl’s argument is that the old playbook, built on hierarchy and productivity, produces the disengagement and attrition the same playbook is then used to diagnose. Sparking Success (Kogan Page, 2023), shortlisted for the Business Book Awards in the Smart Thinking category, goes inside the arts. Carnegie Hall, Disney Imagineering, Broadway theatre and the writers’ room of Friends are interviewed on how they produce creative output under commercial pressure. Those habits are then mapped into corporate practice at Pixar, Bosch, Panasonic and Netflix. His advisory work spans the BBC, BP, Disney, HSBC, LVMH, Shell and the European Central Bank. Key speaking topics Generational paradigms in leadership Creativity and creative mindset in business Culture and talent strategy Future of work Leadership and management innovation Executive education and capability building Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers reshaping leadership development for a multigenerational workforce CEOs and executive committees where stated innovation and engagement ambitions are outrunning the culture and talent practices meant to deliver them Boards and executive education programmes investing in next-generation leadership capability Learning and development leaders designing curricula for leadership at mid-career and senior level Audience outcomes A sharper diagnostic for why stated priorities on innovation and engagement keep failing to show up in organisational behaviour A set of creative practices borrowed from arts organisations (including how Pixar, Disney Imagineering and the Friends writers’ room actually work) and a route to adopting them in a corporate setting A clearer read on what younger talent actually expects from work, and which of those expectations are non-negotiable for retention A vocabulary for talking about generational differences in the workplace that avoids the usual folklore about “millennials” and “Gen Z”

Why organisations work with Keith Wyche He has actually run the P&L. Former President of Cub Foods and ACME Markets, former President of U.S. Operations at Pitney Bowes, and a retired Walmart Vice President. His advice on change comes from someone who has signed off on it. He sits on a NYSE board today. As an Independent Director at The Brink’s Company since 2022, he speaks to senior leaders with the perspective of someone in their own governance seat, not above it. His inclusion work is anchored to commercial outcomes. Diversity Is Not Enough sets out a recruitment, development, and promotion roadmap built around what large employers can actually operate, which is why boards and CHROs commission him in a contested DEI climate. He is one of a small group of senior Black executives who has reached the most senior operating ranks of corporate America, recognised twice over by Black Enterprise and Savoy. That lived authority changes how an inclusion conversation lands in a room of senior leaders. Biography highlights Retired Vice President, Community Engagement and Support, Walmart Inc. Former President, Cub Foods (SuperValu); former President, ACME Markets Former President, U.S. Operations, Pitney Bowes Management Services Independent Director, The Brink’s Company (NYSE: BCO) Author of Diversity Is Not Enough, Good Is Not Enough (2009 NAACP Image Award nominee), Corner Office Rules, and Swag Is Not Enough Named to the Top 100 African American Executives list by Black Enterprise and Savoy magazine Biography Cub Foods was a $3 billion grocery business with more than 8,000 employees when Keith Wyche took it through a turnaround that produced double-digit sales growth in his first year as President. That kind of operating record, repeated across ACME Markets, Pitney Bowes, and a long Walmart career that ended as Vice President of Community Engagement and Support, is the foundation everything else rests on. He now sits as an Independent Director on the board of The Brink’s Company (NYSE: BCO), appointed in 2022. The board seat matters because it changes the room he is speaking into. He is not advising senior leaders from a step removed. He is in the same governance conversations they are. His four books, including the NAACP Image Award nominated Good Is Not Enough and the more recent Diversity Is Not Enough, treat inclusion as an operating problem rather than a values statement. The argument is that recruitment, development, and promotion of Black leaders in America requires the same systems thinking large companies apply to any other business priority. It is a position that holds up in front of a CHRO with revenue targets attached to it. Black Enterprise and Savoy have both named him among the Top 100 African American executives in the United States. That recognition signals what makes him useful in front of a senior audience right now. He carries the personal authority of someone who has done the work at the highest operating levels, and he brings it into rooms where the inclusion conversation has otherwise gone stale. Key speaking topics Leadership through transformation and restructure Inclusive leadership and DEI as an operating discipline Talent development and executive pipelines Personal branding and career progression for senior leaders Corporate culture and change management Board-level perspectives on organisational performance Ideal for CHROs and senior HR leaders rebuilding inclusion strategy with commercial credibility Boards and C-suite teams setting direction on culture, talent, and transformation Employee resource groups and senior leadership networks for under-represented talent Annual leadership conferences for retail, consumer, and services organisations Audience outcomes A direct view of what change leadership actually looks like inside a multi-billion dollar P&L A grounded position on inclusion that holds up commercially with senior peers and external scrutiny Specific career and visibility moves for high-potential leaders ready for executive roles Board-level perspective on how culture, talent, and performance connect at the top of an organisation

Why organisations work with Melissa Majors She gives managers a behavioural model, not a values statement. The seven habits in her book are written for the team-lead who has fifteen minutes between meetings, not for the chief diversity officer. She speaks from operator credibility, having rebuilt the education function at Ellucian for more than half a million clients and partners and run global education at Meeting Professionals International. She makes inclusion commercially legible. The argument she lands with senior buyers is innovation, retention and team output, which keeps the conversation alive when political appetite for DEI has cooled. She brings packaged IP, in’klooded for strategic planning and Community Keynotes for surfacing ideas, that clients can put to work after the keynote rather than translating principles into practice on their own. Biography highlights Author, The 7 Simple Habits of Inclusive Leaders; also author of Help Them Thrive: Leadership Coaching for Humans Leading Humans. Former Director, Global Education Services, Ellucian; former Director of Global Education, Meeting Professionals International. Career across Nationwide Insurance, Wells Fargo and HD Vest Financial Services before moving into education and consulting. Founder of Melissa Majors Consulting; creator of the in’klooded inclusive strategic planning methodology and Community Keynotes. Advanced study in strategy and innovation at Harvard University; guest lecturer in leadership and inclusion at San Diego State University. Featured contributor and subject in Forbes, Smart Meetings, PCMA Convene and The Meeting Professional. Biography Most inclusion programmes were built for a different political climate. They assumed senior sponsorship would hold, that the language would be uncontested, and that managers would translate principles into practice. None of that is reliable now. The work that survives is the work that turns inclusion into something a busy manager can do, repeatedly, without thinking of it as a programme at all. That is the territory Melissa Majors has spent more than two decades inside. She ran global education at Meeting Professionals International and rebuilt the education services function at Ellucian, where she was responsible for more than 500,000 clients and partners. Before that, her career sat inside Nationwide Insurance, Wells Fargo and HD Vest Financial Services. The pattern is consistent: large, regulated, performance-measured organisations where culture work has to justify itself in operating terms. Her book The 7 Simple Habits of Inclusive Leaders is the spine of her speaking work. It reframes inclusion as a set of repeatable behaviours, including how decisions get made, how empathy is applied tactically, and how dissent is invited rather than tolerated. The companion methodologies, in’klooded for strategic planning and Community Keynotes for idea generation, give clients something to use after the room clears. She has been featured in Forbes, Smart Meetings, PCMA Convene and The Meeting Professional, and lectures on leadership and inclusion at San Diego State University. The work she is booked for is straightforward: take inclusion off the values poster and put it back into the operating practice of managing a team. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership as everyday management practice Behavioural habits of high-performing inclusive teams Women’s leadership and progression Manager effectiveness and team performance Psychological safety and team trust Talent retention through inclusion Tactical empathy in leadership Ideal for CHROs, heads of DEI and heads of L&D rebuilding inclusion programmes for a more contested environment People-leader populations: front-line managers, mid-level leaders and newly promoted team leads Women’s leadership networks and ERGs inside large organisations Member associations and professional bodies addressing the meetings, events and education sectors Audience outcomes A behavioural model managers can apply in the next team meeting, not after the next training cycle Language for inclusion that holds up commercially when sponsorship has cooled A clearer read on where current inclusion efforts are stalling and which habits would shift them Practical mechanisms for surfacing dissent and quieter voices inside decision-making

Why organisations work with Risha Grant A direct, behaviour-first approach to inclusion that holds up when the political climate around DEI is hostile, because the work targets individual bias and culture, not slogans or programmes. The BiaSphere framework, drawn from her book Be Better Than Your BS, gives leaders and employees a shared vocabulary for the belief systems that shape how they hire, promote, sell, and lead. More than twenty five years operating her own diversity consulting firm, which means the perspective in the room is that of a practitioner who has rebuilt cultures, not a commentator describing them. Credibility with both senior executives and broad employee audiences, evidenced by engagements at Google, Samsung, Procter and Gamble, the US Air Force, and Harvard University. A commercial frame on inclusion, connecting culture work to talent retention and to the customer markets organisations are otherwise leaving on the table. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Risha Grant LLC, founded in 1998 as the first diversity communications firm in Oklahoma. Author of Be Better Than Your BS: How Radical Acceptance Empowers Authenticity and Creates a Workplace Culture of Inclusion (Hay House, 2023), and of That’s BS! How Bias Synapse Disrupts Inclusive Cultures. Creator of DiversityConneX.com, a recruitment platform connecting diverse professionals to corporate roles, internships, and board seats. Named one of the Top 10 Most Powerful Women Leaders in HR (PeopleHum), NBA OKC Thunder Changemaker, and one of Real Leaders’ 40 Top Women Keynote Speakers. Featured in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, Bloomberg, Glamour UK, and Black Enterprise. Client engagements include Google, Levi Strauss, Samsung Electronics, Procter and Gamble, Intuit, Nestle Purina, the US Air Force, and Harvard University. Biography Most inclusion work fails for the same reason. It tries to change behaviour without ever touching the belief systems underneath it. Grant’s career has been a sustained argument that bias lives in personal stories before it lives in policies, and that organisations cannot get culture right until people are willing to examine the BS they bring to work. She built Risha Grant LLC in 1998, the first diversity communications firm in Oklahoma, and has run it ever since. That longevity matters. It means her view of what works in inclusion has been tested across more than two decades of changing political conditions, from the early diversity training era to the post 2020 acceleration and the current backlash. The framework she now teaches, the BiaSphere, came out of that long arc of practical work, not academic theory. Her 2023 book Be Better Than Your BS, published by Hay House and a Wall Street Journal bestseller per her publisher, set out the BiaSphere thesis in full: the subconscious beliefs that drive judgement of self and others, and the inner work required to dismantle them before any culture programme can stick. The book has anchored a speaking practice that reaches Google, Samsung, Procter and Gamble, the US Air Force, and Harvard University, and a media presence across Forbes, Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times, and Bloomberg. What separates her in the current climate is the refusal to soften the work or dress it in safer language. The premise is that inclusion is a behavioural and commercial capability, that organisations leave talent and customer revenue on the table when they get it wrong, and that the route to getting it right runs through individual honesty before it runs through policy. That is a harder message to sell now than it was five years ago, which is precisely why the organisations still serious about culture keep buying it. Key speaking topics Inclusive culture and belonging Unconscious bias and the BiaSphere Radical acceptance and authenticity at work Inclusive leadership behaviour Talent attraction and retention through inclusion Diverse customer markets and commercial inclusion Psychological safety in mixed teams Ideal for CHROs, chief diversity officers, and heads of talent rebuilding inclusion strategy after recent rollbacks Executive teams and boards under pressure to articulate a defensible position on culture and inclusion Senior leadership offsites where the brief is honest conversation about bias, not a training exercise All-employee and ERG audiences where credibility with both sceptics and advocates matters Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary, drawn from the BiaSphere framework, for the personal belief systems that drive bias at work A clearer view of where unconscious bias is costing the organisation in hiring, promotion, retention, and customer reach Permission and a method to have direct conversations about inclusion without defaulting to compliance language A behavioural starting point for leaders who want to model inclusive practice rather than delegate it to a function A reframing of inclusion as a commercial capability tied to talent and market access, not a values statement

Why organisations work with Brant Menswar A defined methodology, Black Sheep Values, that gives leaders a shared language for the five values their organisation will not trade away under pressure. Behavioural-science grounding through an eCornell Psychology of Leadership certification, applied to the everyday mechanics of trust, vulnerability and team performance. Author of two trade-published books on the same thesis: Black Sheep (Page Two, 2020) and Designing Momentum (Wiley, 2025), giving the work a documented intellectual spine rather than a slide deck. A 20-year career as a recording artist before the speaking work, which means a keynote that lands as a live performance, not a talk read off a screen. Track record inside large, brand-sensitive organisations including Netflix, Verizon, Microsoft, ESPN and Hilton, where the culture stakes are high and the audience is sceptical of motivational content. Biography highlights Author, Black Sheep: Unleash the Extraordinary, Awe-Inspiring, Undiscovered You (Page Two, 2020). Author, Designing Momentum: A Big Goal Blueprint for Transforming Everyday Moments into Massive Success (Wiley, 2025). Certified in Psychology of Leadership, eCornell, Cornell University. Founder and CEO of Black Sheep Foundry; previously founder of Rock Star Impact and partner at Banding People Together. Host of Just a Moment, a podcast distributed by SURROUND Podcast Network. Keynote work delivered for organisations including Netflix, Verizon, Microsoft, ESPN, Hilton, Anthem, Sony Pictures and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Biography Most companies can recite their stated values. Far fewer can name the values their teams actually use when a project slips, a leader leaves or a quarter goes sideways. That gap is the working territory of Brant Menswar’s keynote practice and the through-line of his two books. The methodology has a name and a structure. Black Sheep Values are the five non-negotiable values that, in Menswar’s framing, sit underneath every meaningful decision a person or a team makes. The argument is that culture only holds when those values are explicit, shared, and used as a decision filter, rather than printed on a wall poster. Black Sheep (Page Two, 2020) introduced the framework. Designing Momentum (Wiley, 2025) applies it to how teams convert ordinary moments into compounding progress. The credentials behind the work are concrete. Menswar holds a Psychology of Leadership certification from eCornell at Cornell University, and built the consulting practice through Banding People Together and Rock Star Impact before founding Black Sheep Foundry in 2023. The client list, including Netflix, Verizon, Microsoft, ESPN, Hilton, Anthem, Sony Pictures and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, sits inside industries where culture programmes are routinely cynical, and where a generic motivational keynote does not survive the room. What separates the delivery from a standard culture talk is the craft of the room itself. Menswar spent twenty years as a recording artist before the keynote work, and the live performance discipline shows: pacing, music, structure, and a refusal to default to slide-driven exposition. The result is a session leadership teams can recall in detail months later, which is the only useful test of a culture keynote. Key speaking topics Values-based culture and the Black Sheep Values methodology Connection, trust and team vulnerability Employee engagement and retention through values alignment Leading change without losing the workforce Personal and team resilience under pressure Authenticity and identity in professional life Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers rebuilding culture after restructure, merger or rapid growth Sales, customer and client-facing leadership teams whose performance depends on trust All-employee or all-leader gatherings where the brief is engagement and connection, not strategy content Organisations using offsites to reset team norms after a period of fatigue or turnover Audience outcomes A method for naming the five non-negotiable values a team will not trade away A clearer read on why specific cultural commitments are failing in the organisation today Language and a shared frame leaders can use back at work, not just in the room A more honest conversation about trust, vulnerability and what teams owe each other

Why organisations work with Stephen Frost He has run inclusion at a scale almost no other practitioner can claim, leading diversity and inclusion across the 200,000-strong workforce of the London 2012 Olympics and afterwards heading the function at KPMG. He treats inclusion as a system to be engineered into hiring, promotion and decision-making, not a values campaign, an approach laid out in The Inclusion Imperative and Building an Inclusive Organization. His teaching positions at Harvard Business School, Sciences Po and Singapore Management University give boards confidence that the methodology stands up to academic scrutiny as well as commercial pressure. He brings a record of building inclusion infrastructure that outlives him, including Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index, now used by most leading UK employers. He is one of a small number of DEI voices able to hold the line on substance while a political backlash makes many DEI conversations harder to have at board level. Biography highlights Head of Diversity and Inclusion for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Former Head of Diversity and Inclusion at KPMG. Founder and CEO of Included, a global diversity and inclusion consultancy. Teaches Inclusive Leadership at Harvard Business School, Singapore Management University and Sciences Po. Author of The Inclusion Imperative, Inclusive Talent Management and Building an Inclusive Organization; editor of The Key to Inclusion. All published by Kogan Page. Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum (2011); recipient of the 2010 Peter Robertson Award for Equality and Diversity Champions. Biography The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games employed close to 200,000 people. Running diversity and inclusion across that operation was not a values exercise. It was a delivery problem under intense political and media scrutiny, and Stephen Frost was the person who owned it. The workforce that resulted was 46 per cent female, 40 per cent from minority ethnic backgrounds and 9 per cent with a disability, on numbers that few corporates have come close to since. After the Games, he was hired by KPMG as Head of Diversity and Inclusion, where he set the firm’s targets on gender, ethnicity, social mobility and sexual orientation. He went on to found Included, a global consultancy that now advises governments, multinationals, media organisations and universities. Earlier in his career he had built much of the modern UK D&I infrastructure at Stonewall, including the Workplace Equality Index now used as a benchmark across most leading employers. The argument in his four Kogan Page books is consistent. Inclusion is a decision-making system, not a culture campaign. The Inclusion Imperative draws on the Olympic work to set out how it can be embedded into procurement, recruitment, leadership and operations. Building an Inclusive Organization, co-authored with Raafi-Karim Alidina, extends the case into the cognitive and behavioural mechanics of how inclusion succeeds or fails inside a firm. That body of work is reinforced by teaching positions at Harvard Business School, Singapore Management University and Sciences Po, and by his selection as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. For boards under pressure on inclusion at the same time as they are under pressure on cost, regulation and political risk, the value of Frost’s perspective is that it treats inclusion as an operating capability that can be measured, defended and improved. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership Embedding inclusion into organisational strategy The business case for diversity and inclusion Inclusive talent management and hiring Culture change and behaviour design Cognitive load and decision-making in diverse teams Building an inclusive organisation at scale Ideal for CHROs and Chief Diversity Officers under pressure to show measurable outcomes from inclusion investment. Boards and executive committees navigating DEI in politically contested or regulatory-heavy environments. Talent, recruitment and leadership development leads redesigning processes around inclusion. Senior leadership teams in firms scaling internationally across multiple cultural and legal contexts. Audience outcomes A working definition of inclusion as a decision-making discipline, not a values statement. Specific levers leaders can pull inside recruitment, promotion and team design to improve inclusion outcomes. A clearer language for defending inclusion work to sceptical boards and shareholders. Examples drawn from enterprise-scale deployments at the London Olympics, KPMG and Included’s client base. A grounded view of where inclusion programmes commonly fail and how to design them to last.

Why organisations work with Kevin Brown He brings the operator’s view. Twenty years inside SERVPRO’s leadership team, helping build a franchise system into a billion-dollar category leader, gives him direct credibility with sales, service, and franchise audiences that academic culture speakers cannot match. The HERO Effect is a usable framework, not a slogan. It gives frontline teams and managers a shared language for personal accountability that survives the flight home from the conference. He sits comfortably in front of mixed audiences: sales kick-offs, franchisee conventions, dealer meetings, and customer-experience summits. The same material lands with technicians, agents, and senior leaders. Repeat-booking proof. His client list, which includes American Express, Delta Air Lines, PayPal, ExxonMobil, Chick-fil-A, and Ernst and Young, reflects organisations that buy speakers on outcomes, not on novelty. Recognition from buyer-facing bodies. Global Gurus Top 30 Motivational Speakers (2024), SpeakInc Top 10 Keynote Speakers (2021), and NorthStar Meetings Group Best Keynote Speakers (2019). Biography highlights Author of The Hero Effect: Being Your Best When It Matters the Most (2017) and Unleashing Your Hero (HarperCollins Leadership, 2021). Spent more than 20 years on the senior leadership team at SERVPRO, helping grow the franchise system into a billion-dollar category leader. Creator of the HERO Effect framework, used as the basis of his keynote programmes and books. Named to Global Gurus’ Top 30 Motivational Speakers list (2024). Selected to SpeakInc’s Top 10 Keynote Speakers (2021) and NorthStar Meetings Group’s Best Keynote Speakers (2019). Keynote client list includes American Express, Delta Air Lines, PayPal, ExxonMobil, Chick-fil-A, Verizon Connect, O’Reilly Automotive, Ernst and Young, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Merck. Biography Service-led businesses spend heavily on customer-experience programmes and still lose customers at the moment of contact. The reason is rarely strategy. It is the daily, individual choices of the people closest to the customer, and most cultures do not equip those people to choose well under pressure. That is the territory Kevin Brown has worked in for thirty years, first as an operator and now as a keynote speaker. Two decades of his corporate career were spent on the senior leadership team at SERVPRO, where the team built the franchise system into a billion-dollar category leader. He learned culture from the inside, in a network of independent operators where consistency had to be earned every day rather than mandated from headquarters. Out of that experience came the HERO Effect, the framework that anchors his keynotes and his two books, The Hero Effect (2017) and Unleashing Your Hero (HarperCollins Leadership, 2021). The argument is straightforward. Excellence is a personal practice before it is an organisational outcome, and leaders who treat culture as a behavioural discipline, not a values poster, get measurably different results from their frontline teams. His client list reflects who that argument lands with: American Express, Delta Air Lines, PayPal, ExxonMobil, Chick-fil-A, Verizon Connect, Ernst and Young, Booz Allen Hamilton. Global Gurus named him to its Top 30 Motivational Speakers list in 2024. The work is not theory borrowed for a stage. It is a set of operating principles taken back into the room they came from. Key speaking topics Service excellence and customer experience Culture and frontline accountability Leadership at every level Personal performance and ownership Sales-team motivation and consistency Franchise and dealer-network performance Ideal for CHROs, customer-experience leads, and operations leaders running cultural change inside service-led organisations. Sales kick-offs, dealer conferences, and franchisee conventions where the audience is mixed-seniority and outcome-focused. Front-line and customer-facing teams in retail, hospitality, financial services, and field service. Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for personal accountability that managers can keep using after the keynote. A clearer line between individual behaviour and customer-experience results, made concrete with examples from inside a billion-dollar franchise system. Renewed energy in mixed-audience settings such as sales kick-offs and dealer meetings, where engagement is the usual brief. Practical prompts for managers on how to coach service consistency rather than mandate it.

Why organisations work with Sarah Culberson A first-person story that does the work belonging-themed talks usually fail at: foster care, transracial adoption, and the discovery at 28 that her father was a Mende prince in Sierra Leone. Audiences disengage from abstract DEI framing; this is concrete. Co-author of A Princess Found (St. Martin’s Press, 2009), in development as a Disney live-action film with producer Stephanie Allain. The story has cultural reach beyond the corporate room. President and co-founder of Sierra Leone Rising, an operating nonprofit running water, sanitation, education and coding programmes in the Bumpe Chiefdom. Allyship is something she builds, not theorises. Recipient of the Impact Award at Bounce TV’s 30th Trumpet Awards (2022), with sustained media coverage on CNN, Good Morning America, BBC and The New York Times. Pairs the inspirational keynote with practical content on assumptions, uncomfortable conversations and inclusive team-building, drawn from over 15 years presenting in schools, universities and corporations. Biography highlights Co-author, A Princess Found: An American Family, an African Chiefdom, and the Daughter Who Connected Them All (St. Martin’s Press, 2009) President and co-founder, Sierra Leone Rising (founded 2006, formerly the Kposowa Foundation) Mahaloi (granddaughter of the Paramount Chief) of the Bumpe-Gao Chiefdom, Sierra Leone Disney development deal (2019) for a live-action film adaptation of her memoir, with Stephanie Allain as producer Impact Award, Bounce TV 30th Trumpet Awards (2022) BFA, West Virginia University; MFA, American Conservatory Theater, San Francisco Featured on CNN, Good Morning America, BBC, NPR, The New York Times, People and Newsweek Biography In 2004, an adopted theatre student in San Francisco hired a private investigator to trace her birth family. The trail led from West Virginia to a chiefdom in Sierra Leone still recovering from a brutal civil war. Sarah Culberson’s father was a Mende prince. Her grandfather had been Paramount Chief. The discovery rewrote her sense of identity and gave her a public platform she has been working with ever since. That platform produced a memoir, A Princess Found, co-written with Tracy Trivas and published by St. Martin’s Press in 2009. Disney signed a development deal in 2019 to adapt the book into a live-action film, with Stephanie Allain producing and Culberson serving as executive producer. The story has been covered on CNN, Good Morning America, BBC and The New York Times. The substantive work, though, sits inside Sierra Leone Rising, the nonprofit she co-founded in 2006. It runs sanitation, clean water, education and coding programmes in the Bumpe Chiefdom. The nonprofit is what gives her belonging keynote its weight. She is not asking organisations to consider allyship as a concept; she has spent two decades building it across two cultures. For corporate audiences she translates that experience into the practical content of belonging: how assumptions form, how uncomfortable conversations are conducted, how cross-cultural teams move past politeness into trust. In 2022 she received the Impact Award at Bounce TV’s 30th Trumpet Awards, recognition for a body of work that joins a personal story to operating institutions on two continents. Key speaking topics Belonging and allyship in the workplace Cross-cultural identity and biracial experience Inclusive team-building Diversity, equity and inclusion Personal transformation and purpose Humanitarian leadership and social impact Ideal for CHROs, heads of DEI and culture leads commissioning belonging or inclusion programmes Employee resource groups and women’s leadership networks Annual company conferences and kick-offs seeking an inspirational anchor with substantive content Education and nonprofit sector audiences working on equity and social impact Audience outcomes A vivid, memorable narrative that grounds inclusion conversations in lived experience rather than policy language A working vocabulary for assumptions, allyship and cross-cultural difference inside teams Concrete examples of how a Western-educated outsider built trust and impact in a post-conflict community in Sierra Leone Renewed commitment to belonging as a daily leadership practice, not a programme

Why organisations work with Scott Dikkers A published method for generating creative output at volume, codified in the “How to Write Funny” series and tested over three decades of running The Onion newsroom. The founder’s view of how a $16,000 college newspaper became a national satirical brand worth multiples of that, with a defined argument about mission, culture and creative discipline drawn from “Outrageous Marketing” and “The Onion Story.” Built and runs the “Writing with The Onion” programme at The Second City in Chicago, training comedy writers who have gone on to Emmy-winning television rooms, so the keynote sits on top of a working teaching practice. A practitioner’s perspective on creativity in the age of generative AI, framed around how human writers and editors keep brand voice intact when first drafts are cheap and originality is not. Biography highlights Founder of The Onion and TheOnion.com, the world’s first humour website. Longest-serving editor-in-chief of The Onion across two tenures (1988-1999 and 2005-2008) and former General Manager and VP of Creative Development. Number one New York Times bestselling author of “Our Dumb Century,” winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Author of more than 30 books, including the “How to Write Funny” series, “Outrageous Marketing” and “The Onion Story.” Creator of the “Writing with The Onion” programme at The Second City training centre in Chicago. Syndicated cartoonist of “Jim’s Journal,” distributed to college newspapers across the United States from 1987 to 1997. Biography A satirical college newspaper bought for $16,000 in 1989 became one of the most recognisable brands in American media. The route from there to a national audience, a Peabody-winning news network and a publishing list that has sold millions of copies was not luck. It was a writers’ room run with unusual discipline, and Scott Dikkers ran it for most of its formative years. As editor-in-chief of The Onion across two tenures, and later as General Manager and VP of Creative Development, Dikkers built the editorial process that produced the headlines most readers can still quote. He launched TheOnion.com in 1996, the first humour website on the internet, and went on to edit “Our Dumb Century,” a number one New York Times bestseller that won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and has sold more than half a million copies. The argument behind his commercial work is set out in “How to Write Funny,” “Outrageous Marketing” and “The Onion Story.” Comedy is not magic. It is a method, and brand voice is the operational output of that method. Dikkers codified the process at The Onion, then transferred it into the “Writing with The Onion” programme he created at The Second City training centre in Chicago, where his students have been hired into Emmy-winning television rooms. For corporate audiences, the relevance is direct. Generative AI has made first drafts trivial and originality scarce. Dikkers’ keynote takes the writers’ room discipline that built The Onion and applies it to creative output, brand voice and the question every marketing and product team is now asking: how do you keep what makes your work yours when the cost of imitation has collapsed. Key speaking topics Creativity as an operating discipline Brand voice and editorial culture Humour and storytelling in business communication Building a media brand from a standing start Creative leadership in the age of generative AI Media literacy and the reading of satire Mission-led culture in creative organisations Ideal for CMOs, brand and content leaders managing creative output at scale Innovation, R&D and product leadership teams working alongside generative AI tools Communications, internal comms and L&D leaders rebuilding storytelling capability Entrepreneurship programmes and founder audiences at universities and conferences Audience outcomes A working method for generating original creative material, drawn from the writers’ room that built The Onion A clearer language for what brand voice is and how it survives contact with AI-generated content A founder’s view of how a small editorial team scaled into a national media business without losing its identity A sharper test for distinguishing satire and credible information in a feed-driven media environment A reference set of named examples from three decades of Onion headlines that a team can take back into its own creative reviews

Why organisations work with Matt Eversmann He brings a first-person, documented account of small-unit leadership inside the Battle of Mogadishu, one of the most analysed combat actions of the modern era, and translates it directly into commercial decision-making. His Bronze Star with Valor and 20 years in elite Ranger and Infantry units give credibility on team performance under stress that consulting frameworks cannot replicate. As co-author with James Patterson of three New York Times bestselling oral histories of soldiers and police officers, he has spent a decade interviewing operators about how teams hold together, which sharpens his content well beyond a single war story. His teaching record at the U.S. Army War College and the Johns Hopkins ROTC program means he speaks to leaders in the language of training and followership, not just battlefield anecdotes. He is the rare keynote a senior team will quote back to each other a week later, because the material concerns specific, named decisions, not abstractions about resilience. Biography highlights Retired U.S. Army First Sergeant, 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment; 20 years of active service. Bronze Star Medal with Valor device for actions in the Battle of Mogadishu, October 3, 1993. Portrayed by Josh Hartnett in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001); the first source interviewed for Mark Bowden’s original book. Co-author with James Patterson of Walk in My Combat Boots, Walk the Blue Line and American Heroes, all New York Times bestsellers in the Heroes Among Us series. Former Operations Sergeant at the U.S. Army War College and former instructor in Johns Hopkins University’s ROTC program. Deployed to Iraq from 2007 to 2008 as an Infantry Company First Sergeant with the 10th Mountain Division during the Surge. Biography The Battle of Mogadishu on 3 October 1993 lasted roughly 18 hours. Inside it, a young staff sergeant from the 3rd Ranger Battalion was responsible for a chalk of soldiers fast-roping into a city that had already gone wrong. That sergeant was Matt Eversmann, and the decisions he made in those hours became one of the most studied case studies in modern small-unit command. The reason that experience matters in a boardroom is not symbolism. It is that the conditions Rangers train for, incomplete information, broken communications, no time to consult upward, are the same conditions senior teams now face during cyber incidents, supply shocks and reputational crises. Eversmann teaches what holds and what fails when a plan does not survive contact. His authority on the subject extends well beyond his own service. As co-author with James Patterson of Walk in My Combat Boots, Walk the Blue Line and American Heroes, he has spent years interviewing soldiers, police officers and first responders about the texture of decisions made under load. That body of work, three New York Times bestsellers, sits behind every keynote. Before founding Eversmann Advisory in 2018, he served as Operations Sergeant at the U.S. Army War College, taught leadership in the Johns Hopkins University ROTC program, and led an Infantry Company through the Iraq Surge. The result is a speaker who can move from a specific named moment in Mogadishu to a specific question a CEO is asking about command culture, without losing either audience. Key speaking topics Leadership under pressure and in crisis Team performance in high-stakes environments Decision-making with incomplete information Accountability and followership inside elite units Trust and culture in small teams Lessons from the Battle of Mogadishu and combat command Service, sacrifice and operator stories from Walk in My Combat Boots Ideal for CEO and C-suite offsites focused on resilience, command culture and crisis decision-making. Leadership development programmes for senior operators, plant managers, regional heads and first-line commanders of large field organisations. Conferences for sectors with a high-consequence operating tempo: financial services, energy, healthcare, defence, law enforcement, and aviation. Annual sales kick-offs and partner meetings looking for a serious anchor keynote rather than entertainment. Audience outcomes A vocabulary for naming what their teams actually do well and badly when conditions go non-linear. Specific lessons from a documented combat action that translate to crisis governance and post-incident review. A clearer view of what accountability looks like at the team-leader level, distinct from individual performance. Renewed seriousness about preparation, rehearsal and standards as cultural artefacts, not HR processes. Stories with named operators and named events that senior leaders can reference back inside their own organisations.

Why organisations work with Charlie Rocket A first-person reinvention story with hard credentials behind it: Grammy win as 2 Chainz’s manager at Street Execs, then a public health and athletic transformation rather than a curated brand exercise. The Nike «Dream Crazy» connection gives the keynote a culturally recognisable anchor. The Kaepernick spot won the 2019 Outstanding Commercial Emmy, and audiences place the story instantly. He moves a room emotionally without leaving it there. The Dream Machine Foundation gives the talk a working example of putting ambition into operational practice, not just rhetoric. He pairs naturally with leadership offsites, sales kick-offs, and culture moments where the brief is not analysis but a step-change in energy and self-belief at the top of the organisation. Biography highlights Founder of the Dream Machine Foundation, a non-profit funding individual dreams, small businesses and community recovery projects since 2018. Former CEO of Street Execs, the artist management company behind 2 Chainz, with a Grammy win to his name during that period. Featured in Nike’s «Dream Crazy» campaign with Colin Kaepernick, winner of the 2019 Creative Arts Emmy for Outstanding Commercial. Endurance athlete: marathon finisher and Ironman finisher following a documented health turnaround that included losing approximately 125 lbs. Profiled by CNN in its Turning Points series on his decision to leave the music business to focus on health. Speaks internationally on reinvention, mindset and culture for corporate audiences across sectors. Biography A music executive walks away from a multimillion-dollar artist management business at 31 because his body has stopped cooperating. That is the hinge moment in Charlie Rocket Jabaley’s story, and the reason it lands in corporate rooms. He had built Street Execs into the company behind 2 Chainz, taken home a Grammy, and was, by his own account, 300 lbs and out of road. What he did next is what makes the talk usable for organisations rather than just moving. He treated his own life as a turnaround project. He lost roughly 125 lbs, became a marathon and Ironman finisher, and ended up in Nike’s «Dream Crazy» advertisement with Colin Kaepernick, the spot that won the 2019 Creative Arts Emmy for Outstanding Commercial. CNN profiled the decision in its Turning Points series. The corporate keynote sits on top of that arc. The argument is straightforward: ambition is a renewable practice, and most senior teams have quietly let theirs decay under operational load. He extends the personal frame outward through the Dream Machine Foundation, which has been funding individual dreams and small business launches since 2018, as a working proof that the discipline scales beyond one person. The fit is specific. This is a speaker for moments when a leadership group, a sales force, or a culture programme needs a step-change in energy and self-belief, with credible substance behind the inspiration. It is not a research keynote. It is a reinvention keynote with the receipts. Key speaking topics Personal reinvention and mindset Resilience after health and career shock Culture shift and team ambition Purpose-driven leadership Storytelling and brand-led motivation Philanthropy and impact Ideal for Leadership offsites and CEO summits opening or closing on a culture moment Annual sales kick-offs and revenue team gatherings Employee experience and wellbeing programmes that need a credible voice on resilience Foundation, ESG and corporate responsibility events where the brief calls for substance behind the inspiration Audience outcomes A vivid case for treating personal ambition as a leadership discipline, not a private matter Specific behavioural anchors he has used in his own reinvention, transferable into team practice A reset on what individual leaders are willing to ask of themselves and their teams A working model, the Dream Machine Foundation, of how ambition becomes operational rather than aspirational

Why organisations work with Matt Mayberry He gives leaders a working blueprint for culture, not a values exercise. Culture Is the Way sets out a Five-Step Culture-Building Process that McKinsey named a 2024 top business book. He has been ranked in the world’s Top 30 leadership thought leaders by Global Gurus on the basis of a 25,000-respondent CEO and MBA survey, which means buyers can defend the booking internally on credentials alone. His client list, JP Morgan Chase, Allstate, the FBI, DuPont, Lowe’s and Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, signals that the material survives contact with regulated, high-pressure operating environments. The NFL backstory is not the act. He uses a career ended by injury in a Chicago Bears preseason opener as the opening case in a serious argument about reinvention and team behaviour, then moves to the management content quickly. He writes for the same audience that books him. Bylines in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune and Entrepreneur mean a CHRO can hand the keynote thesis to the executive team in printed form before he walks on stage. Biography highlights Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Culture Is the Way (Wiley, 2023), named a 2024 top business book by McKinsey & Company and featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s Next Big Idea Book Club. USA Today bestselling author of The Transformational Leader (Wiley, 2024). Ranked in the Top 30 global leadership thought leaders by Global Gurus. Former Chicago Bears linebacker, signed 2010; college career at Indiana University, recipient of the 2009 Howard Brown Award. Featured in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, Inc., Entrepreneur and Chief Executive; broadcast credits with NBC, ABC, Fox Business and ESPN. Client roster includes JP Morgan Chase, Allstate, the FBI, DuPont, Lowe’s, Optum, Fifth Third Bank, Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, Phillips 66 and Mack Trucks. Biography Most culture work fails for the same reason. It treats culture as the warm story an organisation tells itself, not the set of repeated behaviours that determine whether the strategy lands. Mayberry’s Culture Is the Way (Wiley, 2023) is built around that distinction, and it is why McKinsey selected it as a 2024 top business book and Malcolm Gladwell’s Next Big Idea Club picked it up. The argument has a structure. The Five-Step Culture-Building Process forces senior teams to define the behaviours they want to see, hold leaders accountable for them in public, and connect those behaviours to commercial outcomes. The Transformational Leader (Wiley, 2024), a USA Today bestseller, extends the work into how senior leaders model what they ask of others. Both books sit in front of an audience that includes JP Morgan Chase, the FBI, DuPont and Lowe’s. The credibility on stage comes partly from how the path began. Mayberry signed with the Chicago Bears in 2010 and lost the career to an ankle fracture in the preseason opener against the San Diego Chargers. He uses that moment briefly, as a way into the operating point about how teams rebuild after a setback, then moves to the management material. Global Gurus has placed him in the world’s Top 30 leadership thought leaders on the strength of that combined work. What organisations get is a senior practitioner who has translated the language of high-performing teams into something a CHRO, COO or transformation lead can put to work on Monday. The bylines in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune and Entrepreneur are the public evidence; the Five-Step Process is the working tool. Key speaking topics Workplace culture as an operating system Transformational leadership Employee engagement and team performance Change and disruption Peak performance and resilience Sales performance Leadership in the age of AI Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers leading culture and engagement programmes COOs and transformation leads accountable for cultural execution of a strategy Sales leadership conferences and revenue kickoffs Senior leadership teams running off-sites on team performance and behavioural alignment Audience outcomes A working definition of culture that connects daily behaviour to commercial outcome, drawn from the Five-Step Culture-Building Process A clearer view of what transformational leadership requires from senior leaders, beyond inspirational language Specific moves for rebuilding engagement when the workforce is fatigued by repeated change A vocabulary for how high-performing teams handle setback and recovery A short list of behaviours to take back to the executive team and operationalise