Corporate Culture

Why organisations work with Niven Postma She gives executive teams a vocabulary and method for organisational politics that most leadership programmes refuse to address directly, anchored in her Harvard Business Review article and her best-selling book on the subject. She has run the function from the inside: Head of Leadership and Culture at Standard Bank Group, Head of the South African Reserve Bank Academy, CEO of the Businesswomen’s Association of South Africa. Her work travels across financial services, retail, media, transport and manufacturing, so the politics framework is tested against very different operating environments rather than one sector’s habits. She holds a recognised platform in African leadership development as Programme Director of the Archbishop Tutu Leadership Fellowship, run by the African Leadership Institute in partnership with Oxford University. She codified her approach into a LinkedIn Learning course aimed at senior leaders, which means the content is structured for executive use, not anecdote-driven keynote material. Biography highlights Author, If You Don’t Do Politics, Politics Will Do You (2020). Harvard Business Review contributor; “You Can’t Sit Out Office Politics” (2021), selected for HBR Press collection Bosses, Coworkers and Building Great Relationships (2024). LinkedIn Learning instructor, Navigating Organizational Politics as a Senior Leader. Former CEO, Businesswomen’s Association of South Africa; former Head, South African Reserve Bank Academy; former Head of Leadership and Culture, Standard Bank Group. 2007 Archbishop Tutu Leadership Fellow; Programme Director of the Tutu Fellowship Programme from 2025 (African Leadership Institute, with Oxford University). Lecturer at Henley Business School and managing director of Niven Postma Inc. Biography Office politics are usually treated as something serious leaders should rise above. Niven Postma’s argument, set out in her Harvard Business Review article and her 2020 book If You Don’t Do Politics, Politics Will Do You, is the opposite. At senior levels, politics is the work. Influence capital and relationship currency decide which strategies get resourced, which leaders get promoted, and which decisions actually stick. Her credibility on the subject comes from having held the seat. She was Head of Leadership and Culture for Standard Bank Group, the largest bank by assets in Africa, after running the South African Reserve Bank Academy and serving as the founding CEO of the Businesswomen’s Association of South Africa. From those roles, she saw which executives understood how organisations really work and which ones did not, and built her practice around closing that gap. Today she advises executive teams across financial services, retail, media, transport and manufacturing through her firm Niven Postma Inc., lectures at Henley Business School, and teaches Navigating Organizational Politics as a Senior Leader on LinkedIn Learning. Her HBR piece “You Can’t Sit Out Office Politics” was selected for the HBR Press collection Bosses, Coworkers and Building Great Relationships in 2024. In 2025 she became Programme Director of the Archbishop Tutu Leadership Fellowship, the African Leadership Institute’s flagship programme run with Oxford University, having been a Fellow herself in 2007. That role situates her work in a wider conversation about how African senior leaders develop the practical political judgement complex organisations require. Key speaking topics Organisational politics for senior leaders Leadership and culture in complex organisations Executive presence and influence Women’s leadership and systemic gender equity Leading through disruption and change Culture transformation in financial services and large enterprises Ideal for C-suite and executive committees in banking, insurance and large regulated enterprises CHROs, chief people officers and heads of leadership development are designing senior-leader curricula High-potential leadership cohorts and women’s executive networks Boards and management teams operating across multiple geographies or post-merger contexts Audience outcomes A direct, non-euphemistic vocabulary for the political dynamics that shape decisions in their organisation A practical reading of where their own influence capital sits and which relationships are under-invested A framework for engaging in politics ethically without retreating into “I just focus on the work” Sharper judgement about how strategy, culture and politics interact at the top of complex organisations Specific moves senior leaders can use the next week, drawn from her HBR work and the LinkedIn Learning course

Why organisations work with Lisa Bodell She attacks the root cause most innovation programmes ignore. Her thesis is that complexity, not a lack of ideas, is what stops large companies from changing. She brings a tested operational toolkit, including the “Kill a Stupid Rule” exercise and the Why Simple Wins toolkit, that teams can run inside the business the week after the keynote. Her client list runs through hard-to-move organisations such as Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, Bloomberg, Google, SAP and Citigroup, where the simplification argument has to survive contact with regulated, matrixed environments. Her two Routledge books, Kill the Company (Axiom Best Business Book Award, 2014) and Why Simple Wins, give leadership teams a shared language and a structured method that outlasts the session. She is a working operator, not only a writer. She has run FutureThink for more than two decades and writes monthly for Forbes, so the material is being pressure-tested in the field continuously. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of FutureThink, an innovation and simplification training firm working with global enterprise clients since 2003. Author of Why Simple Wins (Routledge) and Kill the Company (Routledge / Bibliomotion), the latter an Axiom Best Business Book Award winner. Monthly contributor to Forbes; quoted or published in Fast Company, WIRED, The New York Times, Inc., Bloomberg Businessweek, Harvard Business Review, FOX News and CNN. TEDxNormal speaker, “How Simplification is the Key to Change”. Named to the Forbes “50 Leading Female Futurists” list in 2020. Has taught innovation at American University and Fordham University, and worked with clients including Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, Bloomberg, Google, SAP and Citigroup. Biography Most innovation problems inside large companies are not idea problems. The pipeline is full. The strategy decks exist. What is missing is room to act on any of it, because calendars, approval chains and legacy rules have absorbed the working week. This is the territory Lisa Bodell has built a career on. She is the founder and CEO of FutureThink, which she launched in 2003 to do something narrower and more useful than most innovation consulting. Rather than add another framework, FutureThink helps leadership teams remove. Remove low-value meetings, remove obsolete rules, remove the tasks that consume capacity without producing decisions. The argument is that simplification is the precondition for innovation, not a side benefit. That argument runs through her two books with Routledge, Kill the Company and Why Simple Wins. Kill the Company, which won the 2014 Axiom Best Business Book Award, is built around a simple inversion: instead of asking how to grow, ask how a competitor would put you out of business, and act on the answer. Why Simple Wins extends the method into a practical toolkit for stripping out the work that does not matter, with exercises like “Kill a Stupid Rule” that have been used inside companies including Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, Bloomberg and Google. Bodell writes monthly for Forbes and has been featured in Fast Company, WIRED, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review and Bloomberg Businessweek. Forbes named her to its 2020 list of 50 Leading Female Futurists. The reason senior teams keep booking her is narrower than that profile suggests. She gives leaders a defensible reason, and a method, for taking things off the plate. Key speaking topics Organisational simplification Innovation and disruption Killing complexity in large organisations Future of work and ways of working Change and culture transformation Provocative questioning as a leadership tool Creating capacity for higher-value work Ideal for CEOs and executive teams trying to free up capacity inside complex, matrixed organisations. Chief Strategy, Transformation and Innovation Officers running enterprise-wide change programmes. Operations and HR leaders auditing meetings, rules and processes that no longer earn their place. Leadership offsites and innovation summits where the brief is to provoke, not to inform. Audience outcomes A direct case for treating complexity, not idea generation, as the binding constraint on innovation. A set of named exercises, including “Kill a Stupid Rule” and the Why Simple Wins toolkit, that teams can run on Monday morning. A sharper question set for leadership meetings, modelled on the Kill the Company method. A shared language for distinguishing low-value busywork from work that produces decisions and outcomes. Permission, from a credible outside voice, to remove rather than add.

Why organisations work with Isabel Behncke Her evidence base is unusually direct. More than 3,000 kilometres tracking wild bonobos in Congo gave her the first comprehensive field study of adult play in our closest living relatives, which anchors every claim she makes about creativity and social bonding in observed behaviour rather than metaphor. She translates evolutionary biology into practical arguments about culture. Her framing of play as a core adult competence, not a perk, gives leaders a defensible language for investing in creativity, psychological safety and informal connection inside performance-driven cultures. She moves between serious scientific and serious commercial settings. TED main stage twice, WIRED, Google Zeitgeist, SXSW, the House of Lords, the United Nations General Assembly and the G20, which means she is used to calibrating the same argument for scientists, policymakers and executives. She holds institutional credibility across three continents. Oxford DPhil, Gruter Institute fellowship, PERC board seat and a research post at Universidad del Desarrollo’s Social Complexity Research Center, plus advisory work on Chile’s long-term science and innovation strategy. She sits outside the behavioural economics cohort. Her discipline is field ethology, which gives her arguments about trust, risk and collaboration a biological depth that lands differently with leaders who have already heard the standard behavioural science keynote. Biography highlights DPhil in Evolutionary Anthropology from the University of Oxford, with the first comprehensive scientific study of adult play behaviour in wild bonobos at the Wamba research site in Congo. MPhil in Human Evolution from the University of Cambridge; BSc in Zoology and MSc in Wildlife Conservation from University College London. TED Fellow and TED Resident; two main-stage TED talks including «Evolution’s gift of play, from bonobo apes to humans» and «Does nature have a sense of humor?». Researcher at the Social Complexity Research Center (CICS), Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago; Fellow of the Gruter Institute for research on human behavior and institutions; board member at PERC. Advisory roles in Chile’s long-term strategy for science, technology, innovation and knowledge, with affiliations including the Centro de Estudios Publicos. Platform work includes WIRED, Google Zeitgeist, SXSW, the United Nations General Assembly, the House of Lords and the G20, alongside features in BBC and National Geographic documentaries and The Tim Ferriss Show. Biography Most organisations talk about creativity and collaboration as if they were cultural aspirations. Field ethology treats them as biological functions. Isabel Behncke built her career studying how social mammals, and specifically wild bonobos in the Congo, generate trust, creativity and resilience through play, risk-taking and informal bonding. Her DPhil at Oxford produced the first comprehensive scientific study of adult play behaviour in wild bonobos, based on more than 3,000 kilometres of field observation at the Wamba research site. That field base shapes how she works with organisations. Her argument is that adult play is not a soft concept but an adaptive mechanism that underpins learning, social bonding and innovation in every species that depends on flexible behaviour, humans included. Leaders hear a case for culture that is rooted in evolutionary evidence rather than slogans, delivered by someone who has watched these behaviours in the wild. Her institutional footprint runs across science, policy and public platforms. She is a researcher at the Social Complexity Research Center at Universidad del Desarrollo in Santiago, a Fellow of the Gruter Institute, a board member at PERC and an adviser on Chile’s long-term science and innovation strategy. She is a TED Fellow and TED Resident, has spoken twice from the main TED stage, and has appeared at WIRED, Google Zeitgeist, SXSW, the House of Lords, the United Nations General Assembly and the G20. For senior leaders grappling with how to build adaptive, creative teams under pressure, she offers a rare combination: the rigour of a field scientist, the clarity of a seasoned public communicator, and a set of questions most boards have never asked about why their best work tends to happen in their least controlled rooms. Key speaking topics Play as a driver of adult creativity and adaptation Trust, risk-taking and social bonding inside teams Evolutionary perspectives on organisational culture Human behaviour, complexity and change Creativity and the science of collaboration Rituals and informal structure in working life Ideal for CEOs, Chief People Officers and culture leads rethinking collaboration, creativity or psychological safety Leadership and talent development programmes that want a serious scientific frame rather than another behavioural economics keynote Innovation, R&D and design leaders examining how team environments shape creative output Organisations rebuilding rituals and informal structure after hybrid and remote disruption Audience outcomes A clear evolutionary case for why adult play, humour and informal bonding shape performance, not just morale Language for talking about trust, risk and creativity that rests on observed behaviour in social mammals A sharper read on which cultural habits accelerate adaptation and which quietly suppress it Fresh questions to ask about how teams learn, collaborate and recover under sustained pressure

Why organisations work with Debra Corey She built the Engagement Bridge, a ten-element model set out in Build It (Wiley, 2018) and road-tested across Reward Gateway’s client base. It gives HR and executive teams a shared diagnostic for where engagement is actually breaking. Her Bad Bosses Ruin Lives work names ten specific manager archetypes and the behaviours that produce them. It gives senior leaders a way to talk about poor management without it becoming personal. She has sat in the seat, twenty-plus years of senior HR roles at Gap Inc., Honeywell, Quintiles, Merlin Entertainments, and Reward Gateway. The case studies she uses are operational, not theoretical. HR Magazine ranked her on its Most Influential Thinkers list in 2021, and Inspiring Workplaces has named her on its Top 101 Global Employee Engagement Influencers list for multiple years running. She writes and speaks as a practitioner. Her six books give leadership teams a common vocabulary for engagement, recognition, values, and HR communication that outlasts the keynote. Biography highlights Author or co-author of six books on engagement, recognition, values, leadership, and HR communication, published with Wiley and Kogan Page among others. Creator of the Engagement Bridge model and the Great Boss Building Block framework. Former senior HR leader at Gap Inc., Honeywell, Quintiles, Merlin Entertainments, and Reward Gateway. Founder of DebCo HR Ltd (operating as Step It Up HR), established 2019. Ranked on HR Magazine’s HR Most Influential Thinkers list in 2021. Named Employee Benefits Professional of the Year by Employee Benefits Magazine. Biography Most organisations know their engagement scores are soft. Fewer can say where the break is, whether it sits in recognition, in values, in manager behaviour, or in how HR itself communicates. Debra Corey’s working career has been spent inside that diagnostic question. Twenty-plus years in senior HR at Gap Inc., Honeywell, Quintiles, Merlin Entertainments, and Reward Gateway gave her a view across retail, pharma, manufacturing, hospitality, and HR tech. In 2019 she left corporate life and founded DebCo HR, operating as Step It Up HR, to work on the same problem from the outside. The Engagement Bridge model, set out in Build It: The Rebel Playbook for World-Class Employee Engagement (Wiley, 2018, with Glenn Elliott), is the framework most associated with her. It breaks engagement into ten concrete elements, from purpose and reward through to manager behaviour, and gives HR and executive teams a shared way to identify which element is actually failing. Her later books push into specific pieces of that terrain: Appreciate It! on recognition, Bringing Your Values Out to Play on operationalising values, and Bad Bosses Ruin Lives (2023, with Ken Corey) on the ten archetypes of poor management. HR Magazine placed her on its Most Influential Thinkers list in 2021, and she has featured repeatedly on Inspiring Workplaces’ Top 101 Global Employee Engagement Influencers list. The through-line across the books, the consultancy, and the speaking is narrow and deliberate: make the gap between HR design and daily behaviour smaller. Key speaking topics Employee engagement and the Engagement Bridge model Employee recognition and appreciation Organisational values in practice Manager effectiveness and the Great Boss Building Block Workplace culture and employee experience HR communication and the IMPACT model Ideal for CHROs, Reward Directors, and People and Culture leads designing or resetting engagement and recognition programmes Executive teams where engagement or culture scores have stalled and the board wants a diagnostic, not a pep talk Organisations rolling out revised values or manager-capability frameworks and needing external credibility behind the launch HR conferences, leadership off-sites, and people-manager summits where the audience is operational, not theoretical Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for engagement rooted in the ten elements of the Engagement Bridge A working view of where recognition programmes typically fail and what a working one looks like A practical read on the ten bad-boss archetypes and the behaviours that produce each A method for moving organisational values from poster to operating practice Named examples from Gap, Honeywell, Merlin Entertainments, Reward Gateway, and the wider client base in her books

Why organisations work with Julia Hobsbawm She named the problem before most boards understood it. The Nowhere Office gave senior leaders a vocabulary and a framework for hybrid work at the moment they most needed one. Workplace social health is a category she effectively defined, and Bayes Business School made her its first Honorary Visiting Professor in the field. Her thinking is built from primary research and senior-leader interviews through Workathon, the invitation-only network she founded for decision-makers wrestling with workforce change. She translates a fast-moving debate into board-ready language. Her Bloomberg Work Shift column ran for two years through the period when work itself was being rewritten. She has a four-book arc, from Fully Connected to Working Assumptions, that gives buyers a coherent intellectual backbone, not a topic of the moment. Biography highlights OBE for Services to Business, 2015. Honorary Visiting Professor of Workplace Social Health, Bayes Business School (formerly Cass). Author of The Nowhere Office, The Simplicity Principle, Fully Connected and Working Assumptions. The Simplicity Principle won the American Book Fest Best Book Award 2020 and the NYC Big Book Award 2020; Fully Connected was shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year. Bloomberg contributing columnist; author of the Working Assumptions column for Bloomberg Work Shift, 2022 to 2024. Founder and CEO of Workathon, and founder of the World Work Organisation, launched in 2025. Biography The office stopped being a single place in 2020 and never went back. The Nowhere Office, the 2022 book that gave the post-pandemic workplace its working name, set out the case that hybrid was not a phase to be managed but a structural shift to be designed for. Julia Hobsbawm wrote it from inside the conversation, drawing on a decade of research into how connectivity changes work. That research has a formal home. Bayes Business School made her its first Honorary Visiting Professor of Workplace Social Health in 2018, formalising a category she had been building since Fully Connected, the 2017 book shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year. The Simplicity Principle followed in 2020 and won the American Book Fest Best Book Award and the NYC Big Book Award, extending the argument into how leaders think and decide under cognitive load. Her platform now runs in two directions. Workathon, founded in 2024, is an invitation-only network of senior decision-makers feeding her primary research on workforce change, and produced its first annual study, The United State of Work, in 2025. The World Work Organisation, launched the same year, is an attempt to give the future-of-work conversation a global institutional anchor. She writes for buyers as well as boards. The Working Assumptions column ran in Bloomberg Work Shift from 2022 to 2024, and her latest book of the same name reads as a field report on what leaders thought they knew about work before Covid and generative AI, and what they know now. She was awarded the OBE for Services to Business in 2015. Key speaking topics The future of work and the Nowhere Office Hybrid and flexible working models Workplace social health and connectivity Simplicity and decision-making in complex organisations Generative AI and the human side of work Productivity, presence and the redesign of office life Ideal for CHROs and people directors redesigning hybrid policy and workplace strategy CEOs and executive teams navigating return-to-office and workforce expectations Boards and investors assessing workforce risk and organisational design Real estate, facilities and workplace experience leaders rethinking the role of the office Audience outcomes A clearer language for hybrid work, anchored in named frameworks rather than slogans. A sharper read on what employees now expect from work and how that reshapes retention. A practical lens on workplace social health as a measurable component of performance. An honest account of how generative AI is changing the texture of daily work, not just the tooling.

Why organisations work with Janey Lee Grace She brings a national-broadcast voice to a workplace wellbeing topic most internal teams avoid raising: how alcohol shows up in meetings, client entertainment, conferences and team rituals. Her coaching method is built around grey area drinkers, the majority of working adults who are not clinically dependent but whose drinking quietly affects sleep, mood, decision-making and presenteeism. The Sober Club gives her a live evidence base of what actually shifts behaviour at scale, drawn from a community of members and an accredited coach training programme, not theory alone. She is credible to a senior audience: 25+ years on BBC Radio 2’s Steve Wright in the Afternoon, a TEDx talk on sobriety, and the Amazon No. 1 bestseller Imperfectly Natural Woman. She speaks about alcohol culture without moralising, which is the practical reason internal sponsors trust her in front of mixed audiences. Biography highlights Co-presenter for more than two decades on BBC Radio 2’s Steve Wright in the Afternoon Founder of The Sober Club, an online community and coaching business focused on alcohol-free living Host of the Alcohol Free Life podcast, 450+ episodes, ranked by the publisher in the top 5% globally TEDx speaker, Sobriety Rocks: Who Knew!, TEDxNorwichED, 2019 Author of Happy Healthy Sober, the Amazon No. 1 bestseller Imperfectly Natural Woman, and the memoir From Wham to Woo Founder of the Janey Loves Platinum Awards, an annual awards programme for the natural and wellbeing sector, in its tenth year Biography Most workplaces are quietly built around alcohol. It anchors networking events, end-of-quarter celebrations, client dinners and the social glue between teams. Wellbeing programmes rarely touch it, because the topic feels personal and the social cost of raising it feels too high. That gap is the territory Janey Lee Grace works in. Her route into the subject is unusually credible. She spent more than two decades as a co-presenter on BBC Radio 2’s Steve Wright in the Afternoon, one of the most listened-to shows in the UK, and built a parallel career as an author of bestselling books on natural health, including the Amazon No. 1 Imperfectly Natural Woman. In January 2018 she stopped drinking. The Sober Club, the coaching practice, the Alcohol Free Life podcast and the TEDx talk Sobriety Rocks: Who Knew! followed. What she offers organisations is not a personal story dressed up as a talk. It is a practical argument grounded in the concept of grey area drinking, the working population who are not dependent but whose drinking shapes how they sleep, recover, present and decide. She is a qualified Grey Area Drinking Coach, an NLP Practitioner and an EFT practitioner, and she trains other coaches through an accredited programme. The Sober Club gives her a continuous read on what shifts behaviour for working adults outside a clinical setting. The point for a senior audience is not abstinence. It is to make alcohol a legible part of a wellbeing strategy: visible in policy, visible in event design, visible in how leaders model the social contract of work. That is a conversation most organisations have not had, and she is one of the few public figures equipped to start it without the room going defensive. Key speaking topics Workplace alcohol culture and wellbeing strategy Grey area drinking and performance at work Sobriety, sober-curious living and behaviour change Mental health and the social contract of work Natural health and holistic wellbeing Personal reinvention and second-act careers Ideal for HR, wellbeing and culture leads designing post-pandemic wellbeing programmes DEI and employee resource group sponsors looking at inclusion of non-drinkers and recovering drinkers Internal communications and events teams rethinking the role of alcohol at company events Professional services and finance leaders where client entertainment culture is a live issue Audience outcomes A language for discussing alcohol at work that does not moralise or alienate drinkers The grey area drinking framework as a way to think about wellbeing risk in the working population Specific prompts for redesigning company events, client entertainment and team rituals A clearer view of how alcohol intersects with sleep, mood, presenteeism and decision quality Permission, for leaders who want it, to model a different default

Why organisations work with Jane Garvey Thirteen years anchoring Woman’s Hour gives her a working command of the gender, workplace and culture agenda that few corporate chairs can match. She launched BBC Radio 5 Live on air in 1994 and has been live every week since, on Radio 4, Radio 5 Live and now Times Radio. The composure transfers directly to a corporate stage. Four Sony Gold Awards for the Radio 5 Live Drive programme, including the 2002 News Broadcaster Gold Medal, give her a verifiable editorial standing rather than a borrowed celebrity profile. The Off Air podcast with Fi Glover has passed 10 million listens, demonstrating a current, active audience and a register that lands with professional listeners, not only consumer ones. She runs a room. After-dinner, on-stage interviews, panel chairs and awards hosting are her core commercial product, not an extension of a keynote practice. Biography highlights First voice on air at the launch of BBC Radio 5 Live, 28 March 1994. Presented BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour for thirteen years, October 2007 to December 2020. Four Sony Gold Awards on the Radio 5 Live Drive show with Peter Allen, including the 2002 News Broadcaster Gold Medal. Co-host of the Times Radio afternoon show and the Off Air podcast, which has passed 10 million listens. Co-author with Fi Glover of Did I Say That Out Loud? Notes on the Chuff of Life, Trapeze, 2021. Honorary doctorate, University of Birmingham, 2019. Biography Radio 5 Live went on air at five in the morning on 28 March 1994. The first voice listeners heard was Jane Garvey’s. Three decades later she is still doing live broadcast every week, now on Times Radio, having moved through Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, the BBC’s Fortunately podcast and a string of news and documentary projects on the way. Live broadcasting at that level is, in practice, the same skill organisations now ask of senior chairs. You are listening to three things at once. You are deciding which line to follow. You are protecting the listener’s interest against the speaker’s habits. Garvey has been doing that without a script for thirty years, on subjects ranging from a chancellor’s spending review to a Supreme Court nomination to the gender pay gap inside the BBC itself. The editorial register comes from Woman’s Hour. Across thirteen years she interviewed politicians, executives, authors and ordinary contributors on the working lives of women, the policy that shapes them and the leaders who set the tone. That work earned a Sony News Broadcaster Gold Medal in 2002 for the Radio 5 Live Drive programme, three further Sony Golds with Peter Allen, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Birmingham in 2019. The current evidence sits in Off Air, the podcast she co-hosts with Fi Glover for The Times. It has passed 10 million listens. The pair were nominated for Best Speech Presenter at the 2024 ARIAS. For corporate buyers, that is the most useful proof point. The audience is live, the register is professional, and the craft has not slipped. Key speaking topics Panel chairing and on-stage interviewing Awards hosting and after-dinner presentation Women at work and the gender agenda Workplace culture and generational change Media, journalism and public conversation Leadership conversations on inclusion Ideal for CEOs, CHROs and communications leads who need a chair for a senior internal or client-facing event Conference and awards organisers booking a host who can hold a serious room Boards and leadership teams running gender, workplace or culture conversations that need a credible moderator Audience outcomes A live conversation that moves, with executives drawn out rather than allowed to drift A clearer view of the gender and workplace agenda from someone who has covered it as a working journalist for two decades An event that finishes on time, with the headline points captured A room that leaves with something specific to repeat, not a generic recap

Why organisations work with Gillian Tett Her track record on the 2008 crisis is specific and verifiable: she conducted ethnographic research into JPMorgan’s banking culture from 2005 to 2007, published FT warnings about derivative risk before the crash, and documented the analysis in Fool’s Gold – giving organisations a concrete, tested basis for trusting her read of current systemic risk. The Anthro-Vision framework translates anthropological field methods into a practical leadership tool: a way to surface the unstated assumptions, classification systems, and cultural dynamics that standard data analysis cannot reach. The Silo Effect provides boards with a specific diagnostic – that the most dangerous organisational failure modes are cultural, not structural – and a set of case-studied arguments for why addressing them requires a different kind of analysis than process redesign. As co-founder of FT Moral Money, she has tracked the ESG movement from its earliest institutional phase, giving her a longitudinal perspective on how sustainability commitments become financial and reputational risk that few analysts or advisers can match. Her simultaneous role as an active FT journalist and Provost of King’s College Cambridge produces a form of authority that is genuinely rare: live market intelligence, editorial independence, and academic standing, without advisory-firm positioning. Biography highlights 45th Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, since October 2023 FT editorial board member and weekly columnist; former US managing editor (2013-2019) and former Chair of the FT US Editorial Board Co-founder, FT Moral Money newsletter Author of four books: Fool’s Gold (New York Times bestseller), The Silo Effect, Anthro-Vision (Porchlight best business book award; Columbia Business School Eccles prize), and Saving the Sun PhD in Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge Awards: Wincott Prize for financial journalism (2007); British Press Awards – Business Journalist of the Year (2008), Journalist of the Year (2009), Columnist of the Year (2014); British Academy President’s Medal (2011); American Anthropological Association President’s Medal (2022); OBE for services to journalism (2024) Chair of the board of trustees, Knight-Bagehot Fellowship Program in Economics and Business Journalism, Columbia University Biography Gillian Tett has spent thirty years at the Financial Times covering global markets. What she found, consistently, is that what moves them is cultural as much as numerical. The forces shaping systemic risk – tribal behaviour, unspoken institutional assumptions, rigid classification systems – are largely invisible in standard economic analysis. Her most verifiable proof point came before the 2008 financial crisis. From 2005 to 2007, she studied JPMorgan’s banking culture ethnographically and published FT warnings about the systemic risks of credit derivatives – risks that most economists and regulators had not yet identified. Fool’s Gold – a New York Times bestseller – documented that analysis and became one of the definitive accounts of how cultural insularity inside banking created the conditions for the crash. Her subsequent books formalised the method. The Silo Effect showed how cultural classification systems – not just structural inefficiencies – create the organisational blindness that precedes major strategic failures. Anthro-Vision – winner of the Porchlight best business book award and the Columbia Business School Eccles prize – translated this into a practical framework for applying anthropological field methods to business, markets, and geopolitical risk. Her current position is what makes her singular. As the 45th Provost of King’s College Cambridge and an active FT columnist, she reports on markets while leading one of the world’s most significant academic institutions. She co-founded FT Moral Money and holds the OBE for services to journalism. Key speaking topics Global economic risk and geopolitical uncertainty Financial markets and systemic risk Anthropological analysis in business and strategy Organisational silos and decision-making failure ESG and sustainable finance Political tribalism and social change Cultural dynamics of markets and institutions Ideal for Board directors and C-suite executives navigating economic and geopolitical uncertainty CFOs, CROs, and investment audiences requiring independent analysis of financial market dynamics CHROs and transformation leads addressing structural silos, organisational culture, and decision-making quality Policy, government, and public sector leaders facing complex political and economic risk Audience outcomes A framework for identifying the cultural assumptions and social dynamics that standard economic analysis tends to miss A clearer perspective on how organisational silos and cultural classification systems create the blindness that precedes strategic and financial failure Practical insight into how anthropological methods can be applied to risk assessment, market analysis, and organisational decision-making A grounded, independent reading of current global economic forces and geopolitical shifts, drawn from active FT journalism A reframing of ESG as a systemic risk discipline rather than a reputational management exercise

Why organisations work with Erica Dhawan She has a named thesis built for the AI moment. Use Your Brain, her forthcoming book, gives executive teams a method for the problem they now all face: moving fast with AI without sliding into cognitive autopilot. Her argument is that speed has become the commodity and judgment the real differentiator. She owns two further published frameworks, Connectional Intelligence and Digital Body Language, each with its own book, research base and Fortune 500 application record. Few speakers in this space operate from a body of work this specific. Thinkers50 recognition and a Wall Street Journal bestseller give her credibility with boards and executive committees that are sceptical of soft-skill keynotes. The work has been pressure-tested across unusually wide terrain: World Economic Forum, US Army, Coca-Cola, FedEx, Goldman Sachs, Walmart and Cisco. The frameworks travel across sector, hierarchy and culture. Biography highlights Author of the forthcoming Use Your Brain: How to Think Deeper in a World on Autopilot, on rebuilding judgment as AI accelerates everyday work. Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance. Co-author of Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence with Saj-nicole Joni. Named to Thinkers50; shortlisted for the Thinkers50 RADAR award for emerging management thinkers. Founder and CEO of Cotential, advising global organisations on 21st-century collaboration. TED speaker; talk on connection across distance has surpassed 2 million views. Contributor to Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal. Education: Wharton (BS), MIT Sloan (MBA), Harvard Kennedy School (MPA). Biography Most organisations are racing to adopt AI. Far fewer are asking what it is quietly doing to the way their people think. When a tool can draft, summarise and recommend in seconds, the path of least resistance is to accept the output and move on. The real risk of the AI era, Erica Dhawan argues, is that people stop thinking for themselves while the machine does it for them. Her forthcoming book, Use Your Brain, is built for that problem. It gives leaders and teams a practical method for staying in the driver’s seat: catching the moment a team slips into cognitive autopilot, interrogating what AI hands them, and protecting the judgment no model can supply. The message lands because it is practical rather than alarmist. Speed is now the commodity, and judgment is the edge. That argument sits on more than a decade of work on how people connect and perform. Her Wall Street Journal bestseller Digital Body Language decoded the cues that replace tone, posture and eye contact when teams work across distance, channel and generation. Her earlier book with Saj-nicole Joni, Get Big Things Done, introduced Connectional Intelligence, the practical capability to combine networks, knowledge and ambition into outsized results. Thinkers50 has recognised her on this body of work, and her writing appears regularly in Harvard Business Review and Fast Company. The work has been stress-tested in unusually varied rooms. She has briefed the World Economic Forum, the US Army, and global teams at Coca-Cola, FedEx, Goldman Sachs, Walmart and Cisco. Her TED Talk on connection across distance has been watched more than two million times, rare reach for a topic most speakers struggle to make concrete. Key speaking topics Use Your Brain: judgment and human thinking in the age of AI High-performing teams in the age of AI Connectional Intelligence and cross-silo collaboration Digital Body Language and hybrid communication Trust and engagement across distributed workforces Multigenerational and cross-cultural communication Connectional Intelligence for sales and client relationships (optional, reinstated) Ideal for CEOs and executive teams setting the tone for how AI is adopted across the organisation. CHROs and heads of culture building human capability alongside AI rollout. Learning and leadership development heads building judgment and collaboration at scale. Cross-functional and cross-geography teams that need to think and decide together, faster. Sales and client-facing leaders translating Connectional Intelligence into stronger customer relationships. (optional, reinstated) Audience outcomes A shared language for using AI as an amplifier of human judgment rather than a substitute for it. Practical tools for recognising cognitive autopilot and interrogating what AI hands you. The Four Laws of Digital Body Language for cutting ambiguity and building trust across distance, channel and generation. A clearer read on where speed without judgment is quietly costing the organisation in decision quality. A sharper understanding of how AI changes, but does not replace, the work of human connection.

Why organisations work with Emma Willis Two decades of live presenting across every major UK broadcaster, plus Netflix, develops a capacity to read a room under pressure and adapt in real time that most available hosts simply do not have. That composure is the product. Her six-series run on Big Brother (2013-2018) required managing emotionally unpredictable situations live, on camera, with no preparation time. Her skill set (firm pacing, genuine empathy, zero visible panic) is directly transferable to panel discussions, live Q&As, or award presentations that do not go to plan. The W Channel’s “Delivering Babies,” for which she trained and qualified as a Maternity Care Assistant, won the Broadcast Digital Award for Best Popular Factual for three consecutive years. It is evidence that when she commits to a subject, the result is award-winning rather than merely competent. Her appointment to BBC Radio 2’s Saturday lunchtime slot from January 2026, taking over from Zoe Ball, reflects the institutional trust that comes with consistently delivering at the highest level of British broadcasting, a validation that is straightforward for senior buyers to cite. As a Prince’s Trust ambassador, she brings an existing, public relationship with purpose-driven work to occasions where charitable giving or social commitments are part of the event’s agenda. Biography highlights Broadcast presenter since 2002; major credits across the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, and Netflix Main host of Big Brother and Celebrity Big Brother, Channel 5 (2013-2018) Presenter of The Voice UK (2014-present), initially BBC One then ITV; also hosted The Voice Kids UK Co-host of Love Is Blind: UK alongside Matt Willis, Netflix (2024) BBC Radio 2 Saturday lunchtime presenter from January 2026 Broadcast Digital Award for Best Popular Factual, three consecutive years (Delivering Babies, W Channel) Prince’s Trust ambassador Former fashion model; campaigns for Gap, Chanel, and Samsung; editorial work for Marie Claire, Elle, and Vogue Biography Live occasions are unforgiving. A host who is technically capable but emotionally disconnected leaves the room cold; one who is warm but underprepared leaves it chaotic. Emma Willis has spent more than two decades navigating both risks: across reality television, talent competitions, factual documentary, entertainment, and radio, formats as different from each other as any two occasions a programme director might need to anchor. Her television career began at MTV in 2002 and expanded through Big Brother and Celebrity Big Brother (Channel 5, 2013-2018), The Voice UK (BBC One then ITV, 2014-present), The Circle (Channel 4), and Love Is Blind: UK (Netflix, 2024, with her husband Matt Willis). Each format demanded a different register: firm management of contestants under pressure, warmth with young singers, curiosity about social dynamics, empathy in emotionally complex moments. The consistency across all of them is not a personality trait, it is a professional discipline. In 2019, Willis trained and qualified as a Maternity Care Assistant for the W Channel’s “Delivering Babies” series, working real shifts in a real maternity ward, not observing as a celebrity. The series won the Broadcast Digital Award for Best Popular Factual for three consecutive years. The project illustrated something her broadcast career had long implied: a genuine capacity to be present on the subject’s terms, not her own. From January 2026, she presents BBC Radio 2’s Saturday lunchtime slot, one of the most scrutinised appointments in British broadcasting. She is a Prince’s Trust ambassador. Her early career as a fashion model, with campaigns for Gap, Chanel, and Samsung and editorial work for Marie Claire, Elle, and Vogue gives her a credible platform to speak on fashion, personal style, and media at occasions where those subjects are part of the agenda. Key speaking topics Live broadcast presenting and audience connection Fashion, personal style, and public image Resilience and personal reinvention Authenticity in public and professional life Charitable work and purpose-driven engagement Career development and life transitions Ideal for Awards ceremonies, gala dinners, and internal celebration events Brand launches and consumer-facing occasions Charity fundraisers and purpose-led events Fashion, lifestyle, and consumer industry conferences Audience outcomes An occasion that is paced, emotionally responsive, and memorable rather than merely completed A sense that the room was hosted for the people in it, not managed at them Consistent energy and composure across a full live programme, including unscripted moments Confidence in the platform from the moment the event begins Where relevant, personal insight on resilience, authenticity, and life in the public eye that participants can apply beyond the occasion itself

Why organisations work with Charlotte Sweeney She has the rare credential of having written a UK government-commissioned policy review on women on boards, the 2014 Sweeney Review for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which directly shaped the Enhanced Code for executive search firms. Leaders FIRST gives her a named diagnostic framework, drawn from work with more than 3,000 senior leaders, that identifies the five reasons inclusion change actually stalls inside a business. That is unusual in a field dominated by training products without a thesis. Her co-authored book Inclusive Leadership, published by FT Publishing and shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year 2018, gives executive audiences a substantive reference rather than a slide deck. Twelve years of running Charlotte Sweeney Associates means she briefs at C-suite level on what has actually worked, and what has quietly failed, across financial services, FMCG, luxury, healthcare, and professional services. She is credible in the current climate where DEI is contested. She talks about inclusion as a leadership discipline, not a political position, which is what most boards now need. Biography highlights OBE, 2017 New Year Honours, for services to Women and Equalities. Author of the 2014 Independent Review of the Voluntary Code of Conduct for Executive Search Firms, commissioned by the UK Business Secretary. Co-author, Inclusive Leadership (FT Publishing, 2016), shortlisted for CMI Management Book of the Year 2018. Founder and CEO, Charlotte Sweeney Associates, established 2012. Chartered Management Consultant; 2025 MCA Inclusion Award winner; finalist, Times Management Consultant of the Year 2025. Named among HR’s Most Influential Thinkers; former member of the Forbes HR Council. Biography Most inclusion programmes fail at the same point. The strategy is signed off, the metrics get published, and within eighteen months the leadership team has rotated, the budget has been clipped, and the work has lost its centre of gravity. Sweeney has spent more than two decades watching this pattern, first inside global financial services, then through her own firm. She founded Charlotte Sweeney Associates in 2012 and has since advised C-suites and boards across financial services, FMCG, luxury, hospitality, healthcare, and manufacturing. The firm’s signature framework, Leaders FIRST, was built from input from more than 3,000 senior leaders and isolates the five barriers that actually stop inclusion work landing: fear, ignorance, relinquishing responsibility, systemic inertia, and time. Her credibility on policy is not theoretical. In 2014 she authored the independent review for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, commissioned by Business Secretary Vince Cable, into the executive search firms’ Voluntary Code of Conduct on women on boards. The review directly shaped the Enhanced Code that followed. She received an OBE in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to Women and Equalities. The book she co-authored with Fleur Bothwick, Inclusive Leadership, was published by FT Publishing and shortlisted for the Chartered Management Institute’s Management Book of the Year 2018. It is the reference she leaves with executive teams who want a serious working text rather than a training deck. In 2025, the Management Consultancies Association named her firm winner of its Inclusion Award, and the Times shortlisted her for Management Consultant of the Year. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership at board and C-suite level Diversity, equity and inclusion strategy Culture transformation Women on boards and senior pipeline Leaders FIRST: barriers to culture change Wellbeing in the workplace Inclusion in a contested political climate Ideal for CHROs, Chief People Officers and Chief Inclusion Officers redesigning DEI strategy after political and budget pressure Boards and executive committees holding the line on inclusion as a governance issue, not a campaign Executive search and talent functions reviewing pipeline practice for senior appointments CEOs leading culture transformation where prior inclusion programmes have lost momentum Audience outcomes A clear read on why most DEI programmes lose executive support, drawn from named patterns across sectors The Leaders FIRST diagnostic, which gives leaders a shared language for the five barriers to culture change A defensible position on inclusion that holds up under board scrutiny in the current political environment Practical reference points from a UK government policy review and a decade of C-suite advisory work A senior peer voice on what separates inclusion theatre from inclusion as an operating discipline

Why organisations work with Carole Gaskell Her use of Motivational Mapping gives organisations something a standard engagement survey does not: a diagnostic map of where individual and team energy is being lost and why, before it becomes a performance or retention problem. As a Master Certified Practitioner in Neuro-agility, Insights Discovery and Motivational Maps, she brings three complementary frameworks to the same conversation, addressing how people think, what drives them, and how they communicate under pressure. Her book Full Potential Leadership sets out the case for coaching-led culture change: that leaders who cannot identify what motivates their people are operating with a structural blind spot, not a skills gap. Her executive background – Marketing and Acquisitions Director at a UK Plc, involved in both flotation and the sale of the business – gives her credibility in C-suite conversations about performance as a commercial issue rather than a wellbeing one. Five Outperformer of the Year speaker awards and consistent recognition for personal impact on CEO-level audiences reflect a track record of shifting thinking in rooms where change is genuinely hard. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Full Potential Group, one of the UK’s longest-established leadership and executive coaching firms, founded in the late 1990s Author of four books: Full Potential Leadership, Full Potential Coach, Transform Your Life, and Your Pocket Life Coach Master Certified Practitioner in Neuro-agility, Insights Discovery and Motivational Maps Five Outperformer of the Year speaker awards; voted speaker with the most personal impact on CEO and senior leadership audiences Keynote and facilitation work spanning Mercer, Tesco, PwC, NHS, Nationwide Building Society, Heinz, Lend Lease, JLL, Roche, Urenco and Starbucks, among others Speaker at CIPD conferences in the UK and Asia Pacific, Vistage CEO groups and international investment forums Former Marketing and Acquisitions Director at a UK Plc; involved in flotation and the eventual sale of the business Biography Leadership development spending has grown steadily for decades. Engagement numbers have not kept pace. Carole Gaskell, founder of Full Potential Group, has spent more than 25 years working on the reason – and what leadership teams can actually do about it. The diagnostic tools she deploys are specific and measurable. Motivational Mapping identifies nine intrinsic motivators at individual and team level, giving leaders a way to see where energy is being generated and where it is being lost. Insights Discovery profiling and Neuro-agility assessment address the other half of the picture: how people process information, communicate under pressure, and learn. Carole is a Master Certified Practitioner across all three frameworks. Her book Full Potential Leadership argues that high-performing cultures cannot be designed around strategy alone. Leaders who do not understand what motivates their people are solving a human problem with structural tools – and wondering why the results do not last. She makes that argument with organisations, not just to them. Her client work spans Mercer, Tesco, PwC, NHS, JLL and Nationwide Building Society. Conference delivery includes CIPD events in the UK and Asia Pacific and Vistage CEO forums internationally. Before founding Full Potential Group, Carole served as Marketing and Acquisitions Director at a UK Plc, working through flotation and eventual sale. That background sets the frame for how she talks about performance: not as a leadership ideal, but as a commercial outcome that depends on getting the people conditions right. Key speaking topics Motivational intelligence and workforce engagement Leadership culture and high-performance team design Coaching as an organisational capability Neuro-agility and cognitive performance at work Team diagnostics and motivational profiling Employee energy, wellbeing and sustainable performance The future of leadership in changing organisations Ideal for CHROs, CPOs and people directors building engagement and performance strategies that go beyond the annual survey CEOs and senior leadership teams seeking measurable approaches to culture and people performance L&D leaders designing programmes that address motivation and mindset, not just skills Boards and executive teams preparing for significant change where people commitment is the critical variable Audience outcomes A working framework for understanding the nine intrinsic motivators and identifying dominant drivers in themselves and their teams A diagnostic language for motivation that can be applied immediately in 1:1s, team reviews and performance conversations Specific leadership behaviours that build high-performance cultures, and the common patterns that undermine them Practical tools for sustaining motivation and energy through change, pressure and uncertainty A clearer distinction between engagement – a feeling that surveys can capture – and motivation, a variable that can be tracked and acted on