Corporate Culture

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

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

Key speaking topics Leadership under pressure Resilience and adversity Teamwork in high-risk environments Decision-making in crisis Accountability and responsibility Performance in extreme situations Lessons from military operations Ideal for Senior leadership teams Organisations operating in high-risk or high-stakes environments Corporate conferences and leadership events Executive education programmes Audience outcomes Clear insight into leadership behaviours under extreme pressure Practical lessons on resilience and personal responsibility Greater understanding of teamwork in critical situations Perspective on decision-making in uncertain and high-risk contexts Why organisations work with John Peters First-hand experience of leadership and survival in a high-risk military environment. Credible insights drawn from real-world operational and crisis situations. Proven ability to translate military experience into commercially relevant leadership lessons. Recognised author and documentary subject with established public profile. Biography John Peters brings first-hand experience of leadership, decision-making and resilience from one of the most demanding environments imaginable. As a former Royal Air Force Tornado GR1 pilot, he operated in high-risk military contexts where clarity, accountability and teamwork were critical. During the Gulf War, his aircraft was shot down over Iraq and he was captured and held as a prisoner of war for around seven weeks. The experience, widely reported at the time, placed him under intense physical and psychological pressure and has since become the foundation for his insights into performance under extreme conditions. Following his release, he continued his career in the RAF before moving into leadership-focused consulting and speaking. He is co-author of Tornado Down, a No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller, and Team Tornado, both of which explore operational leadership, teamwork and life beyond frontline service. His story was also the subject of the BAFTA-nominated television documentary Cutting Edge: Tornado Down. In addition to his operational and publishing credentials, he has been recognised with an Honorary Doctorate of Education from the University of Bedfordshire. Through his work with organisations and executive audiences, he translates military experience into clear, commercially relevant lessons on responsibility, resilience and leadership when the stakes are high.

Why organisations work with Jean-Francois Manzoni Named a pattern managers now use to describe their own mistakes. The “set-up-to-fail syndrome”, introduced in his 1998 Harvard Business Review article and the 2002 Harvard Business School Press book with Jean-Louis Barsoux, is one of the few leadership concepts that has entered standard corporate vocabulary and is still taught on MBA and executive programmes worldwide. Works on the problem leadership development rarely solves. His current research focuses on the “knowing-doing gap”, the reason senior leaders leave off-sites full of energy and revert to old habits within weeks. Seven years running IMD gives him operational credibility that most academic speakers lack. As President from 2017 to 2024, he led the school through COVID and a revenue collapse from 130 million to 90 million Swiss francs in a single year. Governance expertise is practice, not theory. He served as Independent Director of Keppel Ltd from 2018 to 2024 and chaired its Nominations Committee during the period in which the company transformed from an industrial conglomerate to a global asset manager and won Best Managed Board at the 2023 Singapore Corporate Awards. Stays in live conversation with sitting CEOs. Through IMD’s CEO Dialogue series, he interviews the leaders of ABB, ASML, Vodafone, Hindustan Unilever, Mars, HEINEKEN, Tata Steel, Temasek and Keppel, keeping his material current against the challenges they are actually facing. Biography highlights Professor of Leadership, Organizational Development and Corporate Governance at IMD (Lausanne), where he served as President and Nestlé Chaired Professor from 2017 to 2024 Co-author with Jean-Louis Barsoux of The Set-Up-to-Fail Syndrome: How Good Managers Cause Great People to Fail (Harvard Business School Press), winner of two Book of the Year awards Author of the Harvard Business Review article that introduced the “set-up-to-fail syndrome” concept (March/April 1998); contributor to HBR and the Financial Times Author of 30+ business case studies; four received Case of the Year awards from the European Foundation for Management Development or the European Case Centre Recipient of the Research Award on Leadership and Corporate Governance from the Association of Executive Search Consultants; invited speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos (2014, 2016) Independent Director and Chair of the Nominations Committee at Keppel Ltd (2018-2024); Fellow and Senior Accredited Board Director of the Singapore Institute of Directors; Doctorate from Harvard Business School Biography When a capable employee starts under-performing, the instinctive explanation is that something has changed in them. A 1998 Harvard Business Review article argued the opposite: most of the time, the boss’s tightened monitoring and visible loss of confidence caused the decline. The authors called it the set-up-to-fail syndrome, and the term entered management vocabulary. Jean-Francois Manzoni co-wrote that article with Jean-Louis Barsoux, and the 2002 Harvard Business School Press book that followed won two Book of the Year awards. The book belongs to a larger body of work on why organisations struggle to change and why leaders struggle to behave differently once pressure returns. Manzoni is Professor of Leadership, Organizational Development and Corporate Governance at IMD. He has written more than thirty business cases, four of which received Case of the Year awards from the European Foundation for Management Development or the European Case Centre. Separate research on interpersonal dynamics in diverse boardrooms won the Research Award on Leadership and Corporate Governance from the Association of Executive Search Consultants. The research focus in recent years has narrowed to what he calls the “knowing-doing gap”. Senior leaders increasingly know what good leadership looks like. Most internalise it poorly. Development programmes generate intention; the habits they target return within weeks. Manzoni’s work examines why this happens and what designs, including technology-mediated interventions, actually change behaviour for longer. Academic insight of this kind rarely comes with operating experience. Manzoni’s does. He served as IMD President and Nestlé Chaired Professor from 2017 to 2024. During COVID, he restructured the school’s executive education model and held the institution together through a revenue collapse from 130 million to 90 million Swiss francs. Board-level practice ran in parallel. He was the Independent Director of Keppel Ltd from 2018 to 2024 and chaired its Nominations Committee. Over that period, Keppel transformed from an industrial conglomerate to a global asset manager and took Best Managed Board at the 2023 Singapore Corporate Awards. Key speaking topics Leadership development and sustained behaviour change The knowing-doing gap in executive practice Organisational change and high-performance work environments Corporate governance and boardroom interpersonal dynamics The set-up-to-fail syndrome and boss-subordinate relationships Executive development and leadership programme design Change management at individual and organisational levels Ideal for CEOs, presidents and C-suite leaders are responsible for shaping senior leadership behaviour and organisational culture Board chairs, nominations committees and directors examining the interpersonal dynamics that determine oversight quality CHROs and heads of leadership development are reassessing whether their programmes actually produce sustained behaviour change Executive committees preparing for or inside significant organisational change Audience outcomes A sharper vocabulary for the performance dynamics they are already creating without noticing, including the specific behaviours that cause capable people to disengage A realistic view of why leadership development programmes fail to produce sustained behaviour change and what design choices make new habits stick Evidence from boardrooms where diversity has increased but interpersonal maturity has not, and a clearer sense of how to close that gap A usable sense of the distance between what senior leaders say they value and what their behaviour signals once pressure returns

Why organisations work with Javier Bajer He treats culture as a system of habits, not a communications exercise, and builds timelines measured in months rather than multi-year programmes. His training sits in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, which lets him speak to behaviour change with evidence, not slogans. He has run this work inside large, complex institutions on both sides of the corporate and public divide: HSBC, Shell, Google, Buckingham Palace, and the City of Buenos Aires. As Editor-in-Chief of Strategic HR Review, he works at the interface between HR practice and academic research, which gives senior people leaders a counterpart who is credible in both rooms. He founded The Talent Foundation and has spent two decades translating values statements into observable behaviour, so the client conversation starts at execution rather than diagnosis. Biography highlights Founding CEO of The Talent Foundation Editor-in-Chief of Strategic HR Review, Emerald Publishing PhD in Behavioural Change and MSc in Neurosciences; cognitive psychologist by training Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts Professor of culture change at Universidad de San Andres and Visiting Fellow of the Business School at the University of Surrey Advisory work with HSBC, Shell, Google, Accenture, Hewlett-Packard, Buckingham Palace and the City of Buenos Aires Biography Most culture work fails in the same place. A values statement gets written, a town hall gets held, and the behaviour people see around them in meetings, decisions and email threads does not move. Javier Bajer has spent two decades working on that specific gap, and his argument is that culture is not a message problem. It is a habit problem. The foundation is technical. He trained as a cognitive psychologist, holds an MSc in Neurosciences and a doctorate in behavioural change, and uses that grounding to treat culture as a system of learned behaviours that can be redesigned on a defined timeline. He founded The Talent Foundation to apply that thinking at organisational scale, and he edits Strategic HR Review at Emerald, which keeps him close to both research and practice. The client record is unusually wide for the field. He has advised HSBC, Shell, Accenture, Hewlett-Packard and Google on the corporate side, Buckingham Palace in a royal institutional context, and the City of Buenos Aires at municipal scale. The through-line is not the sector; it is that each of these organisations had a gap between what leadership said and what staff did, and needed that gap closed in months rather than years. His academic affiliations reinforce the practitioner work. He is a Fellow of the RSA, professor of culture change at Universidad de San Andres, and Visiting Fellow of the Business School at the University of Surrey. On stage, the argument he brings to senior audiences is that good intentions are cheap, sustainable habits are rare, and the route from one to the other is a design problem leaders can actually solve. Key speaking topics Culture change and transformation Behavioural science in organisations Translating values into daily behaviour Leadership and cultural alignment Employee engagement beyond incentives Purpose and meaning at work Culture change in public institutions and cities Ideal for CHROs and senior HR leaders holding the mandate for culture and engagement CEOs and executive teams running a values refresh, post-merger integration or strategy reset Transformation and change leaders whose plans depend on observable behaviour shifts Public sector leaders working on institutional or city-level behaviour change Audience outcomes A working definition of culture as a system of habits rather than a communications output A sharper view of why values statements usually fail to change behaviour, and what replaces them Language for separating leadership intent from the daily signals that shape staff behaviour Reference points from corporate, royal and city government culture programmes that have moved in months A set of questions leaders can take into their next culture or engagement conversation

Why organisations work with Jamil Qureshi Six individuals to world number one, five Ryder Cup captains advised, 22 golfers ranked inside the world top 50. The track record in elite sport is operationally specific, not rhetorical. He has designed and embedded long-running change programmes at scale: Lloyds Banking Group’s ‘Journey to World Class’, the Post Office’s separation from Royal Mail, and Marks & Spencer. He has run transformation inside organisations, not only spoken about it. He translates the psychology of sustained pressure from environments where the cost of failure is public and immediate (Premier League, Ryder Cup) into boardrooms where it usually is not. One of a small number of external psychologists invited to study astronauts on the 2008 NASA Space Programme. The framework has been pressure-tested in domains most speakers can only describe. Biography highlights First-ever official psychologist appointed to the European Ryder Cup team by captain Ian Woosnam in 2006; has since worked with five Ryder Cup captains. Has worked with 22 golfers ranked inside the world top 50, with Premier League players from Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea, with Formula 1 drivers David Coulthard and Eddie Irvine, and with members of the 2009 England Ashes-winning cricket team. Designed and delivered board-level leadership and change programmes for Coca-Cola, Hewlett Packard, Emirates Airlines, Cisco, GSK, and Lloyds Banking Group. Author of The Mind Coach, published by Penguin, on the psychological foundations of personal and professional performance. One of a small number of external psychologists invited to study astronauts on the 2008 NASA Space Programme. Listed by GQ Magazine among the most influential figures in British sport (2009); named in The Daily Mirror’s top 100 coaches in the world (2023). Biography At the 2006 Ryder Cup at the K Club, Europe beat the United States by a record-equalling margin. Captain Ian Woosnam had done something no Ryder Cup captain had done before: he appointed an official psychologist to the team. That psychologist was Jamil Qureshi. Sport had been treating mindset as decisive for years. Most boards still treat it as a soft skill, even as senior leaders increasingly face the conditions of elite athletes: sustained scrutiny and very narrow margins for error. Qureshi has spent two decades closing that gap. He has helped six individuals reach world number one in their sport, advised five Ryder Cup captains, and worked with 22 golfers ranked inside the world top 50. Premier League players at Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea sit on the same client list as Coca-Cola, Hewlett Packard, Emirates Airlines, Cisco, GSK and Lloyds Banking Group. In business, the work goes well beyond keynotes. Qureshi designed and embedded leadership and change programmes for Lloyds Banking Group’s ‘Journey to World Class’, the Post Office’s cultural separation from Royal Mail, and Marks & Spencer. Through Covid he ran extensive work with global leadership teams at SAS, GSK, Janssen, NHS England and Protiviti as they reset around remote and hybrid leadership. His book, The Mind Coach, published by Penguin, sets out the psychological foundations he applies in both worlds. Skill gets people to the top. What keeps them there, and what determines whether the team around them performs when it matters, is something organisations rarely build deliberately. That is what Qureshi is asked in to do. Key speaking topics Performance psychology in business High-performing teams Leadership under sustained pressure Mindset and behavioural change Cultural change and transformation Translating elite sport into business performance Hybrid and remote leadership Ideal for Boards and CEO leadership teams setting expectations for performance under sustained pressure Sales and commercial leadership teams where individual mindset shapes pipeline outcomes HR and L&D directors building leadership programmes that need psychological substance, not theory Senior leadership conferences where elite-sport credibility opens the room Audience outcomes Specific behaviours for performing under sustained pressure, drawn from how elite athletes actually train A sharper view of where individual mindset constrains team output, and what to do about it Language for leaders to talk about psychology without it sounding soft A more honest read on the gap between intent and execution in their own teams

Key speaking topics Real-world cyber risk Social engineering Malware and cyber threats Security awareness for non-specialists Technology risk and society Cybercrime trends Ideal for Boards and senior leadership teams Cybersecurity and IT leaders Risk and compliance professionals Corporate conferences focused on technology and security Audience outcomes Clear understanding of contemporary cyber threats Insight into how social engineering attacks operate Practical awareness of real-world malware risks Greater confidence in discussing cyber risk at leadership level Why organisations work with James Lyne Combines frontline cybersecurity experience with senior strategic leadership at SANS Institute Translates complex cyber threats into clear, accessible insights for non-technical audiences Brings media and TED experience to high-profile corporate events Connects technical risk with organisational and leadership decision-making Biography James Lyne operates at the intersection of frontline cybersecurity and strategic leadership. As Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer in the Office of the CEO at SANS Institute and a SANS Certified Instructor, he brings deep technical insight together with an understanding of how cyber risk affects organisations at board and executive level. His career includes senior security research leadership at Sophos, where he worked on emerging threats, malware, and real-world attack techniques. This foundation underpins his ability to translate complex cyber issues into clear, practical implications for decision-makers. James is also the founder of Helical Levity, a security research firm focused on developing cybersecurity education tools. His work centres on making cyber risk understandable and actionable for non-specialist audiences without oversimplifying the underlying threats. A TED speaker on everyday cybercrime and the societal impact of technology, he has also appeared in international media, including NBC Nightly News and HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. For organisations navigating digital transformation, regulatory pressure, and escalating threat landscapes, James Lyne provides informed, strategic perspective grounded in real-world security experience.

Why organisations work with Imran Rehman He runs a working team-measurement platform, Kokoro, so his sessions draw on live data from teams rather than abstract models. His thesis reframes the problem: fix the environment, not the individual. That shift gives HR and transformation leaders a more tractable lever than personality interventions. He combines executive coaching practice with product building, which gives senior teams a rare mix of one-to-one diagnostic instinct and systems thinking in the same room. He works fluently in English and German and operates across European corporate and multinational contexts, which suits international leadership audiences. His book “Sum of Many” gives the work a named, published argument leaders can reference after the session. Biography highlights Co-founder of Kokoro (Kokoro GmbH, Vienna), a real-time team and leadership analytics platform founded in 2018. Author of “Sum of Many,” featured on the Chapters Of My Life podcast (Life Book 45). Certified business and executive coach, European Business School (EBS). Bilingual working languages: English and German; based in Vienna, Austria. Signature talks include “The Science of Great Teams,” “The Myths of Measuring Humans,” and “Preventing Team Burnout: 6 Evidence-Based Actions for Success.” Professional coaching practice spanning multiple sectors and geographies, with a focus on senior leadership teams and organisational development. Biography Most teams are not underperforming because the people in them are weak. They are underperforming because the environment around them quietly punishes candour, overload is treated as a personal resilience problem, and the signals that matter are read too late. This is the terrain Imran Rehman works in. He is co-founder of Kokoro, a Vienna-based platform that measures psychological safety, belonging, and the conditions of healthy high performance in real time. Kokoro was founded in 2018, and the product sits behind his speaking: the data he references is the data his clients are generating, not borrowed survey research. His book “Sum of Many” argues the same point in long form. Stop trying to fix individuals. Build environments where ordinary people can do unusually good work together. It is a direct challenge to a lot of standard leadership development, and it gives his keynotes a single, testable claim rather than a list of tips. He is a certified executive coach through the European Business School and works fluently in English and German across European and multinational organisations. The coaching practice and the product are not separate lives. One informs the other, which is why his sessions land with HR directors and operating leaders who have already sat through the generic version of this topic. Key speaking topics Psychological safety in teams Belonging and team dynamics Data-informed team performance Healthy high performance and burnout prevention Leadership development and coaching Organisational development and culture Ideal for CHROs, CPOs, and heads of organisational development responsible for team effectiveness at scale Senior leadership teams preparing for a step-change in performance expectations Transformation and change leaders who need measurable people indicators alongside operational ones International and German-speaking leadership audiences in multinational corporate settings Audience outcomes A working definition of psychological safety that is specific enough to act on, not just reference A shift in framing from individual performance fixes to environmental design A view of what can and cannot be usefully measured in team behaviour, and why most surveys fail Evidence-based moves for preventing team burnout before it shows up in attrition figures A shared language for senior teams to diagnose their own dynamics in the weeks after the session

Why organisations work with Howard Schultz He is one of the only major executives to have led a full crisis turnaround at the same global company twice. That longitudinal experience produces a very different quality of insight than a single transformation story. His 2011 number-one New York Times bestseller “Onward” presents a specific and testable argument: recovering a business means restoring what people came for, not restructuring around it. Within three years of his 2008 return to Starbucks, the stock had risen more than five times from its crisis low. His case for employee investment is built on commercial evidence, not values rhetoric. Starbucks under Schultz was among the first U.S. companies to extend healthcare to part-time workers and to offer equity participation to hourly employees. He presents attrition, service quality, and customer loyalty as the direct outputs. Named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year in 2011 and included in Time’s “Time 200” most influential people, he holds ethics recognition from Columbia Business School, Notre Dame’s Mendoza College, and UCLA Anderson – providing academic validation of a practical executive record. As co-founder of Maveron, a consumer-focused venture capital firm with $1.3 billion in assets under management, he brings pattern recognition on consumer brand durability well beyond the Starbucks story. Biography highlights Chairman and CEO of Starbucks across three leadership periods (1986-2000, 2008-2017, 2022-2023), growing the company from 11 stores to 28,000 locations across 77 countries Took Starbucks public in 1992; oversaw nearly $100 billion added to the company’s market capitalisation between 2008 and 2017 Author of four books including “Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul” (2011), a number-one New York Times bestseller Named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year in 2011; included in Time magazine’s “Time 200” most influential people Ethics and leadership awards from Columbia Business School (Botwinick Prize), Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business (Hesburgh Award), and UCLA Anderson (John Wooden Global Leadership Award) Co-founder of Maveron (1998), a consumer-focused venture capital firm with $1.3 billion in assets under management and early investments including eBay and Zulily Biography The most destructive leadership decisions at scale are rarely made during crises. They accumulate during the growth years, when speed and efficiency gradually crowd out the cultural foundations that made a business worth building. Howard Schultz experienced this from the inside, as the architect of Starbucks’ global expansion and the executive who had to reverse the damage when it became visible. His 2008 return as CEO is documented in “Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul,” a number-one New York Times bestseller. The argument at the centre of the book is precise: the path back to financial health ran directly through culture, not around it. Employee retraining, the restoration of the in-store experience, and a deliberate recalibration of what Starbucks stood for came before the financial metrics recovered. Within three years of his return, the stock had risen more than five times from its crisis low. His approach to employees follows the same logic. Starbucks under his leadership was among the first U.S. companies to extend healthcare benefits to part-time workers, and it offered equity participation to hourly employees through a programme called Bean Stock. Schultz presented these not as social obligations but as commercial decisions: loyalty, retention, and service quality are measurable outputs of how people are treated, not side effects of good intentions. Named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year in 2011 and included in Time magazine’s “Time 200,” Schultz holds ethics recognition from Columbia Business School, Notre Dame’s Mendoza College, and UCLA Anderson. As co-founder of Maveron, a consumer-focused venture capital firm with $1.3 billion in assets under management, he has extended this analysis of brand durability well beyond the Starbucks story. His perspective reaches audiences navigating growth, crisis recovery, and the sustained tension between operational efficiency and cultural health. Key speaking topics Values-based leadership at scale Crisis leadership and organisational recovery Brand culture and long-term commercial performance Global consumer brand strategy Employee investment as competitive strategy Entrepreneurship and growth Corporate responsibility and business ethics Ideal for CEOs and executive leadership teams navigating rapid scaling decisions or organisational turnaround Chief People Officers and HR leadership examining employee value proposition at scale Brand, marketing, and commercial leadership in consumer-facing organisations Boards and senior leaders weighing cultural priorities against short-term commercial pressure Audience outcomes A tested framework for treating culture and commercial performance as mutually reinforcing, not competing priorities Concrete, sequenced lessons from a live turnaround at global scale – what decisions were made, in what order, and why A reframe of employee investment from a cost line to a commercial variable with traceable outcomes Perspective on how a brand’s identity is preserved or eroded through the decisions made at pace and scale Practical insight into leading across multiple organisational phases, including growth, institutional crisis, and recovery

Key speaking topics Business strategy and strategic renewal Core competencies and competitive advantage Management innovation Organisational transformation Corporate culture and organisational design Human-centric organisations and management models Leadership and organisational capability Innovation in large organisations Ideal for Senior executives and corporate leadership teams Strategy, transformation, and innovation leaders Boards and senior management in large global organisations Leadership and management conferences Audience outcomes Clearer understanding of strategy and competitive advantage in complex markets Practical perspectives on management innovation and organisational design Insights into building adaptable, human-centred organisations Frameworks for strengthening organisational capability and long-term performance Strategic thinking about leadership and innovation in large enterprises Why organisations work with Gary Hamel Combines academic research, consulting experience, and authorship in strategy and management innovation. Brings recognised frameworks such as core competence and human-centred management to leadership audiences. Extensive experience advising major international companies on strategy and organisational change. Provides senior audiences with strategic perspectives on how organisations can evolve their management models and capabilities. Biography Gary Hamel is widely recognised for shaping modern thinking on strategy, management innovation, and organisational capability. His work has influenced how large organisations compete, innovate, and redesign their management systems to remain effective in complex and fast-changing markets. As a long-standing member of the faculty at London Business School, where he serves as Visiting Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, Hamel has spent more than three decades researching and teaching the principles that underpin successful organisations. His work bridges academic insight and practical leadership challenges, making him a trusted voice for executives navigating strategic transformation. Hamel is best known for co-developing the concept of core competence with C.K. Prahalad, introduced in their influential Harvard Business Review article “The Core Competence of the Corporation.” The idea reshaped how companies think about competitive advantage by focusing on the distinctive capabilities that drive long-term success. His contributions to management thinking are further reflected in a series of widely read business books, including Competing for the Future, Leading the Revolution, The Future of Management, What Matters Now, and Humanocracy, co-authored with Michele Zanini. His writing for Harvard Business Review has also made him one of the publication’s most widely reprinted contributors. Beyond his academic and writing work, Hamel leads management innovation initiatives through the Management Lab and has been closely associated with the Management Innovation eXchange. These platforms focus on rethinking how organisations are structured and managed to unlock adaptability, creativity, and human potential at scale. Hamel’s ideas have been shaped by extensive work with major global organisations including Microsoft, IBM, Shell, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, 3M, Best Buy, Time Warner, and General Electric. His perspectives are grounded in real organisational challenges, from strategic renewal and innovation to leadership and organisational transformation. He is also recognised within the global management community, including being ranked in the Thinkers50 list of influential management thinkers. His work continues to inform leaders seeking new approaches to strategy, organisational design, and the future of management.

Her «neurosignature diversity» framework, developed in The Brain-Friendly Workplace, gives leadership teams a precise, science-based explanation for why talent attrition persists after conventional DEI investment – and a specific mechanism to address it. She names the «neurogap» – the structural drift toward dopamine- and testosterone-dominant personality profiles at the top of organisations – and provides a testable diagnostic for closing it, rather than a general aspiration toward inclusion. Her background spans neuroscience research at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and management consulting at McKinsey and Company – a combination that gives her credibility in two domains that most neuroleadership speakers claim from only one. Audiences leave with four mapped neurosignatures linked to specific workplace behaviours, stress responses, and collaboration styles – a concrete tool, not a mindset shift. Her frameworks are published and peer-accessible: a Harvard Business Review article and a Wall Street Journal bestselling book reduce the internal scepticism that evidence-oriented leadership teams typically bring to behavioural science. Biography highlights Neuroscientist trained at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research; alumna of McKinsey and Company Lead author of The Leading Brain: Neuroscience Hacks to Work Smarter, Better, Happier (Random House) – named a Best Management Book by strategy+business Author of The Brain-Friendly Workplace: Why Talented People Quit and How to Get Them to Stay – Wall Street Journal bestseller Harvard Business Review contributor; work featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Newsweek, and CNBC Member of the socio-political council of acatech, The German Academy for Technology, advising the German government on technology, digitalisation, and AI Advisory board member, NeuroColor; LinkedIn Top Voice Biography At the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Friederike Fabritius studied what actually happens inside the brain under pressure. At McKinsey and Company, she saw what organisations actually do – and how rarely those two things match. The gap between them is the problem her work is built to close. Her central argument, developed across two books and field-tested with organisations including EY, BCG, and Google, is specific: most leadership teams over-represent dopamine- and testosterone-dominant personality types, selecting for stress tolerance in ways that systematically exclude other cognitive profiles. She calls this the neurogap. It explains why talented people leave not because of poor managers but because of poorly calibrated environments – and why retention problems persist despite sustained DEI investment. In The Brain-Friendly Workplace – a Wall Street Journal bestseller – Fabritius maps four neurosignatures tied to distinct workplace behaviours, stress responses, and communication preferences. The framework gives HR and leadership teams a diagnostic built on brain chemistry rather than demographic proxies. Her Harvard Business Review article on neurosignature diversity brought the argument to a practitioner audience; her earlier book, The Leading Brain (named a Best Management Book by strategy+business), established the scientific credibility underpinning it. She serves on the socio-political council of acatech, The German Academy for Technology, which advises the German government on digitalisation and AI – a role that reflects the applied, policy-facing dimension of her science. For boards and senior teams wrestling with sustained performance, retention, and culture, she offers something distinctive: a testable causal model, not a call for behavioural change without a structural explanation. Key speaking topics Neurosignature diversity and talent retention Brain-based leadership and decision-making Peak performance and the neuroscience of flow Cognitive diversity and inclusion Neuroscience of change, uncertainty, and resilience Trust, collaboration, and the social brain Learning, neuroplasticity, and habit formation at work Ideal for CHROs and people leaders responsible for talent strategy and retention outcomes Senior leadership and executive teams seeking evidence-based frameworks for culture design Learning and development leaders building performance or cognitive diversity programmes Boards and transformation leads navigating hybrid work, workforce change, and sustained engagement Audience outcomes A named framework – neurosignature diversity – for diagnosing why current culture drives attrition, with specific, actionable steps to address the neurogap Practical understanding of how brain chemistry shapes performance, stress tolerance, collaboration style, and communication preference across a team Clearer grasp of how to design environments that support cognitive diversity beyond demographic targets Concrete approaches to managing hybrid and distributed teams in line with how different brain types actually work best under pressure Evidence-based perspective on why DEI initiatives stall at the neurological layer – and how to move past aspiration to structural change

Why organisations work with Emmanuel Gobillot His «Disciplined Collaboration» framework reframes organisational silos as a structural problem rather than a cultural failing, naming four specific fears that prevent collective work and providing a tested four-step method for removing them – replacing the generic language of culture programmes with operational tools senior teams can actually deploy. Alive Inside (Routledge, 2026) provides a named seven-principle model for the human leadership qualities – compassion, courage, intuition, presence, storytelling – that AI cannot replicate, giving executive teams a practical basis for deciding where to invest human leadership effort in an AI-enabled organisation. Follow the Leader identifies eight specific elements of charisma that followers respond to, starting from what followers need rather than what leaders should do – a structural inversion that produces more usable diagnostics than prescriptive leadership frameworks. His consulting record at Hay Group, leading both the Consumer Sector practice and the Leadership Services function, and subsequent client work with Google, Vodafone, AstraZeneca, Carlsberg, and the United Nations, gives his frameworks a testing ground that spans sectors, governance structures, and organisational scale. Ten books published with Kogan Page, Routledge, and De Gruyter over twenty years track how leadership must adapt through successive phases of technological change – mass collaboration, networked organisations, and now AI – giving organisations a framework that is cumulative rather than reactive to the latest disruption. Biography highlights Former Director at Hay Group, leading both the Consumer Sector Consulting practice and the Leadership Services function, advising Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 organisations Named corporate clients include Google, Vodafone, Carlsberg, Hilton, AstraZeneca, Zurich Financial Services, and the United Nations Author of ten published books, including Alive Inside (Routledge, 2026), an updated edition of The Connected Leader (De Gruyter, 2024), and earlier titles Leadershift, Disciplined Collaboration, and Follow the Leader (Kogan Page) Contributor to Chief Executive (chiefexecutive.net) on leadership and AI Educated at UWC Atlantic and the University of St Andrews; also holds a Diploma in Management Science from Nottingham Trent University Founder of Emmanuel Gobillot Limited; co-founder of Collaboration Partners consultancy Biography The gap between collaboration as a stated priority and collaboration as an operating reality is one of the most consistent problems in organisations. Most attempts to close it add process or culture without addressing the structural conditions that prevent people from working collectively in the first place. Emmanuel Gobillot has spent twenty years diagnosing that gap – and building the frameworks to close it. At Hay Group, he led the Consumer Sector Consulting practice and then the Leadership Services function, working directly with Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 organisations. Named clients – Google, Vodafone, Carlsberg, AstraZeneca, Zurich Financial Services, the United Nations – span sectors and governance structures. That breadth is the evidence base on which his frameworks are built. The best-known outputs of that work are The Connected Leader (updated edition, De Gruyter, 2024) and Disciplined Collaboration (Kogan Page). Both are built around a consistent argument: that leadership and collective performance require structural architecture, not cultural exhortation. Follow the Leader sharpens this through a specific focus on followership, identifying eight elements of charisma that followers respond to and asking what followers need rather than what leaders should do. Disciplined Collaboration names the four fears that make most collaboration programmes ineffective and provides a tested four-step method for removing them. His most recent book, Alive Inside (Routledge, 2026), extends this thinking into the AI era. Where most leadership responses to AI focus on skills and adaptation, Gobillot asks a more fundamental question: which human leadership qualities cannot be replicated by an algorithm, and how do leaders build authority around them? The answer – a seven-principle framework built on compassion, courage, intuition, presence, and storytelling – gives executive teams a practical model for investing human effort where it is most durable. Key speaking topics Disciplined collaboration and the architecture of collective performance Human leadership advantage in AI-enabled organisations Leadership and followership dynamics Connected leadership and trust-based influence Organisational culture and collective performance Leading through successive phases of technological disruption Ideal for Senior executive and C-suite teams addressing collaboration breakdown across divisions or functions CHROs and people leaders building leadership development programmes that account for AI-driven change Boards and transformation leads evaluating leadership models in AI-enabled environments Organisations where silos, cross-functional friction, or low collective performance are named strategic problems Audience outcomes A structural framework for diagnosing why collaboration initiatives fail and what architecture is missing A named set of human leadership qualities that AI cannot replicate, with a practical model for building authority around them Clarity on the distinction between the performance of teamwork and the structural conditions that produce genuine collective effort Tools drawn from the Disciplined Collaboration and Alive Inside frameworks that apply directly to existing leadership and culture programmes A reframe of the leader-follower relationship that shifts the design question from «what should leaders do?» to «what do followers actually need?»