Corporate Culture speakers

Why organisations work with Pete Cann He shifts the energy of a conference room in minutes, which is what event owners are actually buying when they book a wellbeing slot after lunch or before a heavy strategy session. He gives a wellbeing message a physical experience, not a slide. Audiences leave having done the thing, not having been told about it. He is comfortable across formats most keynote speakers will not touch: opener, closer, after-dinner, awards host, virtual energiser, team-building lead. The brand is unusually defensible. There is no other UK speaker selling laughter yoga at this scale into corporate audiences, which removes the comparison shop for buyers commissioning a wellbeing or culture moment. Biography highlights Founder of Canned Laughter (2019), the corporate laughter yoga practice trading as Pete Cann “The Laughter Man”. Managing Director and co-founder of The Chef Tree, a UK chef recruitment business he built with his wife Chloe before launching the speaking practice. International corporate client base spanning the UK, the USA and India, delivered in-person and virtually. Host of the podcast “Laughter & Positivity with Pete” on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Featured on Britain’s Got Talent as a laughter yoga teacher. Active YouTube channel and Laughter Club community under the “The Laughter Man” brand. Biography Most corporate wellbeing content is delivered as instruction. People sit, take notes about resilience, and return to their desks unchanged. Pete Cann sells the opposite product. The audience laughs for fifteen minutes and leaves the room with a different nervous system than the one they walked in with. He came to this from business, not from wellness. Pete and his wife Chloe built The Chef Tree, a chef recruitment company, from a spare room into a multi-office operation, where he remains Managing Director. The laughter yoga practice started after a session at a summer wellness festival, and in 2019 he launched Canned Laughter as a separate corporate-facing brand. Since then the work has scaled internationally. Clients book him in the UK, the USA and India, in person and on video, for conference openers, after-lunch resets, awards hosting, team-building days and wellbeing programmes. His podcast “Laughter & Positivity with Pete” runs alongside the keynote work, and a Britain’s Got Talent appearance gave the brand a national audience. What he is selling is unusual in the bureau market. It is not a keynote on resilience theory. It is a physical wellbeing intervention that doubles as event energy, delivered by an operator who understands what it costs to run a business with a payroll attached. Key speaking topics Laughter yoga in the workplace Corporate wellbeing and stress reduction Team energy and engagement Mental health at work Event hosting and audience activation Hybrid and virtual team connection Ideal for Conference organisers booking a wellbeing slot, an opener, a post-lunch reset or an after-dinner act HR, internal communications and culture leads running wellbeing weeks or mental health awareness moments Sales kickoffs, awards nights and town halls that need an energiser rather than a strategy keynote Distributed teams running virtual culture or connection sessions Audience outcomes A measurable shift in room energy that carries into the next session of the agenda Direct experience of laughter as a stress and tension release, not a description of it A simple set of practices people can use on their own when they need to reset A shared moment that breaks formality and helps a group connect across hierarchy A wellbeing message that lands without lecturing

Why organisations work with Peter Anderton His TEDxDerby talk “Great Leadership comes down to only two rules” is used inside MBA programmes and gives senior teams a shared, memorable language for leadership that survives the room. He treats organisations as systems, drawing on his Chartered Engineer background and early career as a manufacturing systems engineer at ICI, which lands credibly with technical directors and operational leadership teams. He has worked inside leadership populations at Jaguar Land Rover, 3M, KPMG, HSBC, Atkins and NHS leadership academies, so the content arrives already tested against complex matrixed organisations. He cuts through the leadership-development noise. Two rules, three secrets of high-performing teams, applied to the specific bottleneck the senior team is currently sitting on. He is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD, which gives the work professional weight with HR and people directors commissioning leadership programmes. Biography highlights Founder of Internal Alignment, a leadership consulting and executive development practice. TEDxDerby speaker, “Great Leadership comes down to only two rules”, used in MBA curricula internationally. Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD). Chartered Engineer; began career as a manufacturing systems engineer at ICI. Named client work includes Jaguar Land Rover, 3M, KPMG, HSBC, Atkins, Huntsman, Equifax and NHS leadership academies. Signature frameworks: “The Two Rules of Leadership” and “CPR: Connection, Purpose, Results” for high-performing teams. Biography The hardest leadership transition is the one nobody schedules. A capable individual gets promoted, then promoted again, until the job is no longer about what they personally deliver but about what their team delivers without them. That shift is where most leadership development quietly fails. It teaches more models when what the leader needs is fewer. This is the territory Peter Anderton has built his work around. As founder of Internal Alignment, he works with directors, MDs and senior teams who have outgrown their own operating habits and need to convert personal capability into team capability. His TEDxDerby talk, “Great Leadership comes down to only two rules”, is now used in MBA programmes internationally and sets out the spine of his thinking: leadership is not about the leader, except in the specific way that it entirely is. His credibility is unusual for the field. Anderton is a Chartered Engineer who started his career as a manufacturing systems engineer at ICI, and he still reads organisations as systems rather than as cultures. That framing travels well into technical and operational businesses such as Jaguar Land Rover, 3M, Atkins and Huntsman, and into financial and professional services including HSBC, KPMG and Equifax. He is also a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD, which anchors the work in the professional standards people directors recognise. What he gives a senior team is compression. Two rules of leadership, three components of a high-performing team in his CPR model: Connection, Purpose, Results. The argument is that most leadership populations do not need more frameworks; they need to act differently on the few that matter. That is the bet his clients are buying when they put him in front of their leadership cohorts. Key speaking topics Leadership fundamentals for senior leaders and directors Leadership in the age of AI and exponential change High-performing teams The leadership transition from doer to enabler Executive development and leadership populations Change leadership and the human side of transformation Difficult conversations and leadership courage Employee engagement through leadership behaviour Ideal for Director, MD and senior leadership populations making the shift from individual contributor to team leader. CHROs, people directors and L&D leaders commissioning flagship leadership programmes. Executive teams in technical, engineering, manufacturing or operationally complex businesses. Senior leadership cohorts inside organisations going through restructure, integration or sustained change. Audience outcomes A shared, memorable language for leadership across a senior cohort, anchored in the Two Rules. A clearer read of where each leader is personally creating the bottleneck their team is working around. Practical handles for handling difficult conversations without the usual avoidance and rework. A working model for high-performing teams using Connection, Purpose, Results. Renewed confidence that leadership effectiveness is a small set of disciplined behaviours, not a longer reading list.

Why organisations work with Peter Avis A career from dishwasher to General Manager of Galvin at Windows at the London Hilton on Park Lane, giving him operational credibility with both frontline teams and executive leadership in the same room. Fifteen years inside the Virgin Group, working alongside Sir Richard Branson on the London Roof Gardens, Mont Rochelle and Kasbah Tamadot, where service culture is a measurable commercial asset. UK Restaurant Manager of the Year in 2009 and Chairman of the UK Guild of Restaurant Services, recognised credentials that translate hospitality language into commercially serious customer experience. A working operator’s view of employee engagement, not a consultant’s deck: how rosters, recognition and recruitment actually change guest outcomes. Biography highlights General Manager of Galvin at Windows and 10 Degrees Bar at the London Hilton on Park Lane from February 2020, succeeding Fred Sirieix. UK Restaurant Manager of the Year, 2009, while running Babylon Restaurant at The Roof Gardens, which won Best London Restaurant at the Visit London Awards in 2008. More than 15 years with the Virgin Group, including involvement in the launches of Virgin Limited Edition properties Mont Rochelle in South Africa and Kasbah Tamadot in Morocco. Chairman of the UK Guild of Restaurant Services and Fellow of the Institute of Hospitality. Recipient of the 2014 Richard Branson Special Award for Services to the Community and the 2014 Carey Award Manager of the Year. Awarded the Platinum Jubilee Medal in 2022 and inducted into the Seal of Excellence at the House of Lords for services to hospitality. Biography Service businesses can describe their brand promise clearly. The difficulty is keeping it intact across a 14-hour service, three sittings, a kitchen running short and a new starter on the floor. That gap, between corporate standard and the table the guest is actually sitting at, is the problem Peter Avis has spent a career solving. He began as a dishwasher in Liverpool and ran kitchens, floors and rooms up through the ranks at named London venues. By 2009 he was UK Restaurant Manager of the Year at Babylon Restaurant in The Roof Gardens, Kensington. Babylon had taken Best London Restaurant at the Visit London Awards a year earlier under his management. Fifteen years inside the Virgin Group followed, working closely with Sir Richard Branson and the Virgin Limited Edition team. He was part of the launch teams for Mont Rochelle in South Africa and Kasbah Tamadot in Morocco, brands where service is the product. In 2020 he was appointed General Manager of Galvin at Windows and 10 Degrees Bar at the London Hilton on Park Lane, succeeding Fred Sirieix. That breadth gives him an unusually grounded view of engagement, recognition and service culture. He chairs the UK Guild of Restaurant Services and holds Fellow status at the Institute of Hospitality. Boards and operational leaders book him because he can talk about engagement, retention and customer experience in the language of a working operator, not a consultant. Key speaking topics Customer service and guest experience Employee engagement in service businesses Building high-performing hospitality teams Leadership in service operations Delivering on a brand promise Recognition, retention and culture in frontline industries Ideal for Hospitality, leisure and retail leadership teams and operations directors Customer experience and service excellence functions across consumer-facing industries HR and people leaders working on engagement and retention in frontline workforces Conferences focused on service culture, brand delivery and operational excellence Audience outcomes A practical view of how recognition, recruitment and floor leadership change guest outcomes A clearer understanding of where brand promise breaks down between executive intent and frontline delivery Specific examples from named flagship operations rather than generic service theory Confidence that service excellence is a managed system, not a personality trait

Why organisations work with Peter Baines His authority on crisis leadership is operational, not theoretical. He led international forensic teams in Thailand after the Boxing Day tsunami and held senior roles in the response to the Bali bombings, the 2010 Jeddah floods and the 2011 Japan tsunami. Few speakers can talk credibly about international counter-terrorism work from the inside. He spent his final police years seconded to the National Institute of Forensic Science on counter-terrorism and leadership capacity building, advising Interpol in France and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime across South East Asia. He brings a 20 year, AUD 40 million case study in purpose at scale through Hands Across the Water, which lets him talk about values, culture and CSR with real numbers behind him rather than slogans. He has published with Wiley twice on the substance of his work, Doing Good By Doing Good (2014) and Leadership Matters (2023), giving organisations a coherent body of thinking to engage with beyond the keynote. He carries an Order of Australia Medal and a royal Thai honour, which gives the talk a level of public standing that lands credibly with boards, philanthropic committees and senior leadership audiences. Biography highlights 22 year career as a forensic investigator with NSW Police, holding qualifications in Law, Forensic Science, and postgraduate Management, with leadership roles in the response to the 2002 Bali bombings and the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Thailand Spent his final police years seconded to the National Institute of Forensic Science on counter-terrorism and leadership capacity building, advising Interpol in France and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in South East Asia Founder of Hands Across the Water, an Australian charity that has raised more than AUD 40 million for children in Thailand since 2005 Awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in 2014 for international humanitarian work, and the Most Admirable Order of the Direkgunabhorn by the King of Thailand in 2016 First Australian to receive the Rotary International Professional Excellence Award (2008), a NSW finalist for Australian of the Year (2010), and recognised in 2025 as one of the top five most influential Australians working in Thailand Author of four books: Hands Across the Water (Pan Macmillan, 2011), Doing Good By Doing Good (Wiley, 2014), Leadership Matters (Wiley, 2023), and Together We Can: 33 Marathons in 26 Days (2025) In December 2024, ran 1,400 km across Thailand in 26 days, the equivalent of 33 marathons, in support of Hands Across the Water Biography The bodies were still being recovered in Thai temples when the question of leadership stopped being abstract. In the weeks after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the Australian and international forensic teams operating out of Phuket and Khao Lak had to identify thousands of victims with limited infrastructure, exhausted personnel and grieving families waiting for answers. The leader running multiple rotations of that operation was a NSW Police forensic investigator on secondment. That investigator was Peter Baines. Before leaving the force, he had also worked through the Bali bombings, spent his final police years seconded to the National Institute of Forensic Science on counter-terrorism and leadership capacity building, and advised Interpol in France and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime across South East Asia. The Saudi government later engaged him to review the response to the Jeddah floods. He was deployed again after the 2011 Japan tsunami. The leadership argument he draws from that work is simple but unfashionable: authority comes from how you behave when nobody is keeping score, and culture is what survives a bad day. He set out to test it in practice. In 2005 he founded Hands Across the Water, an Australian charity that has now raised more than AUD 40 million for children in Thailand and supported 46 of them through university degrees. He has written it up in two Wiley books, Doing Good By Doing Good (2014) and Leadership Matters (2023), and most recently in Together We Can (2025), the account of his 1,400 km, 26 day run across Thailand at age 57. The Order of Australia Medal and the King of Thailand’s Most Admirable Order of the Direkgunabhorn followed, but the real proof point is that the operation he started in a tent of orphaned children in 2005 is still functioning, and growing, twenty years later. Key speaking topics Leadership in crisis and disaster response Decision-making under uncertainty and operational pressure Purpose-driven leadership and culture Corporate social responsibility and shared value Resilience and recovery after shock Building and sustaining high performing teams Storytelling and humanitarian impact Ideal for Boards and executive committees rebuilding leadership credibility after a crisis, restructure or reputational shock CHROs, CSOs and culture leads designing values-based leadership programmes with substance behind them CSR, sustainability and foundation leads who need a credible voice on shared value and authentic purpose Senior leadership offsites and partner conferences in professional services, financial services and complex operating environments Audience outcomes A clearer view of what authority actually looks like when titles, scripts and procedures stop helping Specific reference points for decision-making under fatigue, ambiguity and public scrutiny A practical model for connecting organisational purpose to measurable community outcomes, not slogans Renewed appetite to hold leadership teams to a higher standard of behaviour in ordinary, not just exceptional, conditions A repertoire of concrete stories, tested in disaster response and humanitarian work, that senior leaders can carry into their own teams

Why organisations work with Peter Crolla He has helped build two Formula 1 teams from scratch. He joined Haas in 2015 as the team’s 14th employee and joined Cadillac in 2025 to prepare its 2026 debut. Few F1 practitioners have stood up a competitive operation from zero more than once. His content is grounded in operational mechanics. Audiences leave with how the pit wall actually works, how a 1.8-second pit stop with 22 staff and 36 tasks is choreographed, and how compliance with FIA scrutineering is built into every weekend. Formula 1 sits where exacting regulation meets competitive margins of milliseconds. Leaders in pharmaceuticals, financial services, aviation, and energy find the comparison directly applicable to their own environments. He can explain how F1 reduced driver fatalities from over 40 between 1950 and 1994 to one in the three decades since. The shift came from a system in which safety stopped being a source of competitive advantage and was shared across rival teams. Two decades across British Touring Cars, F3, McLaren, Haas, and Cadillac give him grounded comparative views on which high-performance practices transfer between organisations and which collapse outside their original context. Biography highlights Race Team Manager at the Cadillac F1 Team, preparing the operation for its 2026 Formula 1 debut. Team Manager at Haas F1 Team for eight seasons, joining as the 14th employee in 2015 ahead of the team’s 2016 debut. Previously Team Leader at McLaren Racing, working alongside World Champions Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso. Oversaw Haas’s maiden Formula 1 pole position at the 2022 Brazilian Grand Prix. Helped Haas secure FIA Three-Star Environmental Accreditation ahead of the 2023 season. Awarded the Teamwork Award at the 2013 MIA Business Excellence Awards during his time at Team Dynamics in the British Touring Car Championship. Biography In Formula 1, a pit stop now takes 1.8 seconds. Twenty-two people complete thirty-six tasks while the car is stationary. One missed cue and a podium becomes a points-paying afternoon. That kind of choreography is what Peter Crolla has spent his career producing. He joined the Haas F1 Team in 2015 as its fourteenth employee, before the team had been on a grid, and stayed for eight seasons as Team Manager. In 2025 he left to take the same role at the Cadillac F1 Team, where he is preparing the operation for its 2026 debut. Doing this work twice in a decade puts him in a small group of practitioners who have stood up a competitive Formula 1 team from a standing start. F1 teams of 1800 staff coordinate around twenty-four non-negotiable race weekend deadlines a year, under one of the most exacting regulatory regimes in commercial sport. Crolla speaks about how that machine actually runs. He explains the daily tension between psychological safety and personal accountability, and how F1 turned over forty driver fatalities between 1950 and 1994 into one in the three decades since. The change came from stopping competitive teams from hoarding what they learned about safety. Key speaking topics High-performance team operations Leadership in regulated, high-pressure environments Operational excellence under non-negotiable deadlines Safety culture and risk transformation Building organisations from a standing start Continuous improvement and marginal gains Sustainability in elite motorsport Ideal for COOs and operations directors in regulated sectors such as financial services, pharmaceuticals, aviation, and energy, where compliance and competitive performance have to be solved together. Founders, transformation leads, and executive teams building or rebuilding an organisation from a standing start. Senior risk and safety leaders looking at how F1’s cultural transformation was actually achieved over three decades. HR and people leaders focused on psychological safety and accountability in technical or engineering-led organisations. Audience outcomes The choreography of a 1.8-second pit stop across 22 staff, including where it most often breaks down. The specific practices that keep psychological safety and personal accountability in balance inside an F1 operation. How F1’s safety record went from over forty driver fatalities in its first four decades to one in its last three, including the specific decision to stop competing on safety. A clear separation between high-performance practices that transfer between industries and those that depend on the specifics of F1.

Why organisations work with Peter Cross He has held the customer experience seat at one of the UK’s most service-known retailers. As Customer Experience Director at the John Lewis Partnership, he was responsible for the customer agenda across both John Lewis and Waitrose at a moment of acute pressure on British retail. His thinking is now codified in book form. Start with the Customer, published by Pearson in 2025 and called “the essential text on customer experience” by The Grocer, gives audiences a usable framework, including a “lexicon of customer needs” that distinguishes transactional, interactional, core and higher-level requirements. As Vice President of the Institute of Customer Service, he sits at the centre of the national conversation about service standards, with sight of how the issue plays out across sectors rather than inside a single company. His career holds two seats most operators never combine: ten years inside the Mary Portas consultancy that worked on the 2011 Portas Review, and eight years inside the John Lewis Partnership. He has built the strategy and lived with the consequences. Biography highlights Former Customer Experience Director at the John Lewis Partnership, with the brief extended to cover Waitrose Co-author of Start with the Customer (Pearson, 2025), called “the essential text on customer experience” by The Grocer Vice President of the Institute of Customer Service Ambassador for the Retail Trust and Leader in Residence at Leeds University Business School Ten-year business partnership with Mary Portas at her retail agency Earlier senior roles at L’Oréal, Burberry and Alfred Dunhill Biography Between 2017 and 2021, two of Britain’s most service-known retailers, John Lewis and Waitrose, were pressured by pure-play online players and a public mood shifting hard toward speed. Holding their character through that period was the customer experience brief, and it sat with Peter Cross. Before John Lewis, he spent ten years as business partner to Mary Portas at her retail agency. Their work together included charity-shop reinvention and the 2011 Portas Review of the British high street, commissioned by government. Earlier still came senior marketing roles at L’Oréal, Burberry and Alfred Dunhill. He has occupied both the operator’s chair and the advisor’s chair. Start with the Customer, his 2025 Pearson book co-written with Institute of Customer Service CEO Jo Causon, was called “the essential text on customer experience” by The Grocer. The book argues that service has been quietly reduced to process, and that technology cannot substitute for the cultural work of building a service organisation from the CEO’s desk down. He now serves as Vice President of the Institute of Customer Service, Ambassador for the Retail Trust, and Leader in Residence at Leeds University Business School. The thinking he brings to senior teams centres on a framework from his book: the “lexicon of customer needs,” which separates requirements into transactional, interactional, core and higher-level categories. The standards he asks organisations to meet are ones he held himself, for eight years, on the customer agenda at the John Lewis Partnership. Key speaking topics Customer experience strategy Service culture The lexicon of customer needs Customer behaviour and expectation Leadership in customer-facing organisations Employee engagement and frontline empowerment The future of retail Ideal for Boards and CEOs setting the customer agenda for the next strategic cycle CMOs, Chief Customer Officers and Customer Experience Directors making the case for cultural investment alongside technology spend Retail and consumer-facing leadership teams under pressure from online competitors HR and people leaders responsible for service culture and frontline engagement Audience outcomes A vocabulary for the different types of customer need (transactional, interactional, core, higher-level) and where each one surfaces across the customer journey The case, evidenced through John Lewis and Mary Portas-era examples, for treating service culture as a board-level discipline A way to test whether technology investment is enabling service or quietly substituting for it The “golden rules and cardinal sins” of service that separate brands customers stay with from brands they leave

Why organisations work with Peter Guber He has built and led organizations across film, music, professional sports, and esports. The storytelling framework that runs through his work has been pressure-tested in each, and senior audiences hear it from someone who has actually used it to move boards, talent, partners, and capital. He authored the only mainstream business book on storytelling to hit #1 on the New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists simultaneously. Tell to Win and his HBR cover article The Four Truths of the Storyteller give audiences a portable framework they can take into their own communications work, not a collection of war stories. He speaks from current operating experience as Chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment, co-executive chairman of the Golden State Warriors, and owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The material reflects problems he still has to solve every week. The same discipline has been honed across more than forty consecutive years of teaching at UCLA Anderson School of Management and the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, recognized in 2017 with the UCLA Medal, the university’s highest honor. Biography highlights Chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment Group; former Chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment; former Chairman and CEO of Polygram Entertainment; former President of Columbia Pictures; co-founder of Casablanca Record & Filmworks. Films he produced or executive produced have grossed over $3 billion worldwide and received 50 Academy Award nominations, including five Best Picture nominations and the Best Picture win for Rain Man. Other titles include Batman, The Color Purple, Midnight Express, Flashdance, Gorillas in the Mist, The Witches of Eastwick, and The Kids Are All Right. Co-Executive Chairman and co-owner of the Golden State Warriors (NBA Champions 2015, 2017, 2018); owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers (World Series winners 2020 and 2024); Owner and Executive Chairman of Los Angeles Football Club (MLS); Co-Executive Chairman of aXiomatic Gaming, owner of esports franchise Team Liquid. Author of Tell to Win (Crown Business, 2011), instant #1 New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestseller; named by Fortune one of “5 Business Books You Can Really Use.” Earlier books include Shootout: Surviving Fame and (Mis)Fortune in Hollywood, which became a seven-year AMC television series he hosted. Author of the Harvard Business Review cover article “The Four Truths of the Storyteller” (December 2007). Professor for more than forty years at UCLA Anderson School of Management and UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. UCLA Medal recipient (2017). Appointed to the University of California Board of Regents by Governor Jerry Brown (2017). Biography Sony Pictures Entertainment led the industry in domestic box office market share for four straight years after Peter Guber became Chairman and CEO in 1989. Over the same period, the studio earned 120 Academy Award nominations, the most ever recorded by any company in any four-year stretch. What ran through that work, and through the decades before it at Columbia Pictures, Polygram, and Casablanca Records, was a discipline Guber later codified. He could take a strategic intent and translate it into a story the audience he needed to move had reason to act on. He named it purposeful storytelling. The Harvard Business Review cover article The Four Truths of the Storyteller laid out the four conditions a story has to meet to do real work in a room: true to the teller, the audience, the moment, and the mission. Tell to Win, his expansion of the same thesis, hit number one simultaneously on the New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists in 2011. Fortune named it one of “5 Business Books You Can Really Use.” In Guber’s argument, data is the cost of entry; persuasion is the work that closes the deal. Guber still runs Mandalay Entertainment Group, co-owns the three-time NBA champion Golden State Warriors and the World Series-winning Los Angeles Dodgers, and chairs the esports investment vehicle aXiomatic. He has taught the same craft at UCLA Anderson and the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television for more than forty consecutive years, by the Chancellor’s account never missing a year. In 2017, UCLA awarded him the UCLA Medal, its highest honor, the same year Governor Jerry Brown appointed him to the University of California Board of Regents. Key speaking topics Purposeful storytelling in business Leadership communication and persuasion Leading through uncertainty and disruption Innovation and organizational culture High-performance team building across industries Storytelling for marketing and brand strategy Ideal for CEOs and executive leadership teams preparing to communicate strategic change to internal and external audiences. Chief commercial, marketing, and sales leaders rebuilding the persuasion infrastructure of their organizations. Founders and senior operators raising capital, recruiting talent, or pitching boards. Executive education clients, leadership development programs, and partner or customer summits where the centerpiece is communication craft. Audience outcomes A working test for their own communications: whether the story is true to the teller, the audience, the moment, and the mission. A sharper distinction between informing an audience and persuading them, with a clearer view of where most leadership communication breaks down. Specific examples from film, sports, and the boardroom that they can map onto their own decisions and pitches. A method for finding and shaping the right story for a specific audience and a specific moment. Shared vocabulary they can take back to their teams and demand of communications, marketing, and IR functions.

Why organisations work with Peter Schmeichel Captained Manchester United to the 1999 Treble, the most successful season in the club’s history. The lessons from holding that dressing room together speak directly to what ‘team first’ demands of senior people when stakes are public. Delivered the opening keynote at IMD Business School’s flagship Orchestrating Winning Performance programme to more than 400 senior executives. Few former athletes are invited onto that platform, and the appearance gives the corporate content genuine business-school provenance. Played twenty-two years at top-flight football across England, Denmark and Portugal, winning major titles in three different leagues. The perspective is built on a long career across changing teams and competitions, not a single peak. Goalkeeping is the most unforgiving position in elite team sport. Every mistake is visible and there is nowhere to hide. The lessons on composure and accountability under that exposure carry into senior leadership without strain. Biography highlights Captained Manchester United to victory in the 1999 UEFA Champions League final, completing the club’s only Treble of Premier League, FA Cup and European Cup. Won the UEFA European Championship with Denmark in 1992, defeating Germany in the final after the Danish squad entered as late replacements for Yugoslavia. Voted IFFHS World’s Best Goalkeeper in 1992 and 1993 and named in the FIFA 100 list of 125 greatest living footballers in 2004. Earned 129 caps for Denmark between 1987 and 2001, the Danish national-team caps record for more than two decades. Inducted into the English Football Hall of Fame in 2003 and awarded an honorary MBE in the 2001 New Year Honours. Has worked as a football pundit and analyst for the BBC, the Premier League Channel, CBS Sports and FOX Sports, where he joined the studio for UEFA Euro 2024. Biography Manchester United were a goal down in the 1999 Champions League final with two minutes left. They scored twice in stoppage time and won the European Cup. Peter Schmeichel, captain that night, lifted the trophy in his last game for the club. Those eight years yielded five Premier League titles, three FA Cups and a Champions League. He was twice voted the world’s best goalkeeper. The trophy count is the headline. Holding standards in that dressing room under Sir Alex Ferguson for nearly a decade is the harder achievement. IMD Business School invited him to translate that experience when he opened its flagship Orchestrating Winning Performance programme. His keynote, Putting Everything on the Line, argued that consistency at the top is a different problem from reaching it. Talent reaches the top once. Holding that level for a decade demands a discipline most organisations underestimate. The international career sits behind every story he tells. He earned 129 caps for Denmark and won Euro 1992. The Danish squad had replaced Yugoslavia at ten days’ notice and beat Germany in the final. He now broadcasts for the BBC, the Premier League Channel, CBS Sports and FOX Sports, where he covered UEFA Euro 2024. Key speaking topics Leadership and standards in high-performance teams Sustained elite performance across long careers Captaincy and team-first culture Composure and decision-making under public scrutiny Recovery from mistakes in unforgiving environments Lessons from elite team sport for senior leaders Ideal for Senior leadership teams in industries where performance is publicly scrutinised Conferences, offsites and leadership programmes focused on team standards and accountability Organisations going through periods of sustained success that risk complacency Sales, customer-facing and high-pressure operational teams Audience outcomes A specific account of what ‘team first’ requires of senior people, drawn from inside one of the most successful dressing rooms in modern football The argument that holding standards is a separate problem from reaching them, with a working vocabulary for naming that problem in their own organisations Examples of how elite teams handle mistakes and the temptation to relax once a major goal has been reached A sharper view of the role of the captain in protecting team standards from individual ego

Why organisations work with Peter York He named and codified a market segment that became a global reference point. Co-authoring The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook gave brands a working language for tribal segmentation that is still in use forty years later. He has run the brand-rehabilitation playbook on the actual problem, not the conference version of it. SRU clients have included Dunhill, Coutts & Co, Tiffany, Mont Blanc, Liberty, Jaeger, The Economist and The Financial Times. He moves between editorial authority and consulting authority in a way few speakers can. Harpers & Queen, Management Today and GQ on one side; ICI, Unilever, Marks & Spencer, BAT and WH Smith on the other. He carries a long memory of how consumer culture actually shifts. Two BBC2 series on style and the 1980s, Peter York’s Hipster Handbook, and Dictators’ Homes are the visible output of a thirty-year archive of trend reading. Biography highlights Co-author, The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (with Ann Barr); author of Style Wars, Peter York’s Eighties, and Dictators’ Homes. Co-founder, SRU Ltd, and architect of the SRU Group of nine specialist consultancies; clients have included ICI, Unilever, Marks & Spencer, BAT, Clarks, Allied Dunbar, Thorn EMI, WH Smith and Ladbroke. Style Editor at Harpers & Queen for ten years; columnist at The Independent on Sunday, GQ and Management Today. Brand and positioning advisor to Dunhill, Coutts & Co, Tiffany, Mont Blanc, Liberty, Jaeger, The Economist, The Financial Times, Channel 4, the BBC and UK Government clients. Visiting Professor, University of the Arts London; President of The Media Society. Broadcaster: two BBC2 series on style and the 1980s; Peter York’s Hipster Handbook (BBC4, 2016); The Rise and Fall of the Adman; regular contributor to BBC Newsnight. Biography Most marketing teams describe their customers in language that was already a decade old when they wrote the deck. The Sloane Ranger arrived in Harpers & Queen in 1975 and in The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook in 1982 because Peter York and Ann Barr were watching the same people the rest of the industry was missing. The book sold in millions and became a working reference for any brand trying to talk to a tribe rather than a demographic. That instinct hardened into a consulting practice. With Lord Stevenson, York co-founded SRU Ltd and built it into a group of nine specialist agencies through the 1980s, working on brand positioning, repositioning and what York calls brand rehabilitation for ICI, Unilever, Marks & Spencer, BAT, Thorn EMI, WH Smith and Ladbroke. The luxury and editorial side of the practice ran in parallel: Dunhill, Coutts & Co, Tiffany, Mont Blanc, Liberty, Jaeger, The Economist and The Financial Times. The writing kept pace with the consulting. Style Wars, Peter York’s Eighties, Dictators’ Homes and roughly eleven books in total, alongside columns at The Independent on Sunday, GQ and Management Today, and a long second life on screen with two BBC2 series on style and the 1980s, Peter York’s Hipster Handbook on BBC4, and the documentary The Rise and Fall of the Adman. He is a Visiting Professor at the University of the Arts London and President of The Media Society. For a senior brand or marketing team, the value is specific. York can sit across pricing, positioning and reputation work and tell a board what their customers are about to want, in language that does not sound like a trend report. He has been doing it on the same client list, in print and on screen, for forty years. Key speaking topics Brand strategy and brand rehabilitation Luxury markets and high-end consumer behaviour Consumer tribes, segmentation and cultural identity Marketing communications and positioning Cultural change and creative industries Reputation and corporate communications Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and marketing leadership teams running repositioning or rehabilitation work Boards of luxury, premium and heritage brands managing relevance under generational change Senior teams in retail, financial services and media translating cultural shifts into commercial decisions Communications and reputation leads working on category narrative Audience outcomes A sharper read on the cultural drivers behind shifts the data is only beginning to show A working language for tribes and segments that goes beyond demographic categories Specific examples of brand rehabilitation drawn from named luxury and heritage clients A frame for separating real positioning problems from surface communications problems

Why organisations work with Petra Velzeboer A clinical practitioner, not a wellbeing personality. She holds an MSc in Psychodynamics of Human Development from Birkbeck and works as a qualified psychotherapist, which gives her recommendations weight with sceptical executive audiences. She runs the consultancy she speaks from. PVL serves named corporate clients including PwC, Novartis, Accenture, Herbert Smith Freehills, Monzo, and Channel 4, so the case material in the room is current, not anecdotal. A first-person account of recovery from a high-control religious group and addiction, used to draw direct, uncomfortable parallels with corporate cultures that suppress dissent. This is the argument of her book Begin With You, published by Kogan Page. Comfortable across formats. Keynote, masterclass, panel chair, and leadership programme design, which suits clients building a multi-touch internal wellbeing strategy rather than a one-off event. Her TEDx talks and the Adversity to Advantage podcast give organisations a recognisable external voice to anchor internal campaigns around. Biography highlights CEO and founder of PVL, a mental health consultancy working with large employers including PwC, Novartis, Accenture, Herbert Smith Freehills, Monzo, and Channel 4. Author of Begin With You: Invest in Your Mental Wellbeing and Satisfaction at Work (Kogan Page). Finalist, 2024 International Book Awards (Business: Motivational), and finalist, Goody Business Book Award 2024 (Self-Help: Personal Transformation). TEDx speaker. Talks include “Three Ways to Live the Life You Want” and “Reframing Diagnosis and the Road to Recovery.” Qualified psychotherapist with an MSc in Psychodynamics of Human Development, Birkbeck, University of London. Host of the podcast Adversity to Advantage. Biography Most corporate wellbeing programmes are organised around the wrong question. They ask how to support people who are already exhausted, when the harder question is what in the operating culture is exhausting them. Petra Velzeboer built PVL around that distinction. The consultancy works with large employers, including PwC, Novartis, Accenture, Herbert Smith Freehills, Monzo, and Channel 4, advising on the cultural conditions that determine whether a wellbeing strategy lands or quietly fails. Her credibility rests on two unusual lines at once. She is a qualified psychotherapist with an MSc in Psychodynamics of Human Development from Birkbeck, University of London, which keeps the clinical content honest. She also lived through a recovery story that gives her an unusual angle on organisational culture, having grown up inside the Children of God, a high-control religious group, and worked her way back through addiction and depression. Her book Begin With You: Invest in Your Mental Wellbeing and Satisfaction at Work was published by Kogan Page and was a finalist for the 2024 International Book Awards in Business: Motivational. The argument she makes to senior teams is direct. Cultures that punish dissent, reward overwork, and treat vulnerability as weakness produce predictable mental health outcomes, and no amount of mindfulness app subscription will offset them. Her TEDx talks and the Adversity to Advantage podcast extend that case to a wider audience, which is useful when an internal programme needs an external anchor. She is most useful inside boards, executive offsites, and leadership cohorts where the wellbeing conversation has stalled at the level of perks and posters. Her work pushes it back to the design choices that leaders actually control: how teams are structured, how performance is measured, and what behaviour the culture quietly rewards. Key speaking topics Workplace mental health strategy Organisational culture and toxic behaviours Resilience and recovery from adversity Leadership and vulnerability Burnout prevention Future of work and employee wellbeing Digital wellbeing and focus Ideal for CHROs, Chief People Officers, and heads of wellbeing are redesigning a stalled mental health programme. Executive teams and boards are examining the cultural drivers of attrition and burnout. Leadership development cohorts are being trained to manage hybrid, high-pressure, change-fatigued teams. Internal Mental Health Awareness Week, ERG, or culture-change events that need a credible external voice. Audience outcomes A clearer view of which cultural behaviours, not which benefits, drive mental health outcomes inside their own organisation. Practical language for talking about mental health at work without slipping into either clinical jargon or corporate platitude. A reframing of resilience as an organisational design problem, not a personal deficiency. Specific prompts leaders can use with their teams the following week, drawn from clinical practice and Velzeboer’s consulting work.

Why organisations work with Poppy Murray She built the BE LADS Campaign on a single operational question, what can men and boys do to help women feel safer, and turned it into training that police forces, regulators, and large employers buy. Her consultancy, Transformative Culture Consultancy, is one of the few in the market designed specifically around the Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act) duty that came into force in October 2024. She has delivered to Tesco Mobile, WSP, Butterfield Bank, the Chelsea FC Foundation, the Royal British Legion, and the City of London Crime Prevention Association. The client list crosses corporate, sport, charity, and policing. The National Police Chiefs’ Council named her runner-up in Making Safer Spaces in 2024, one of only two civilians recognised from 170 nominations. The credential is operational, not honorary. She works without blame or division. Audiences of men leave with something to do, which is why HR and culture leaders book her where other formats have stalled. Biography highlights Founder, BE LADS Campaign, 2021 Co-founder and Director, Transformative Culture Consultancy Global Ltd, 2024 UN Women UK Delegate, 68th Commission on the Status of Women, 2024 Runner-up, Making Safer Spaces, National Police Chiefs’ Council VAWG Recognition Event, 2024 Founder, SafetyNet Guernsey Trustee, Lloyds Bank Foundation for the Channel Islands, since December 2021 Biography The Worker Protection Act put a positive duty on UK employers to prevent sexual harassment before it happens. It moved the question from “how do we handle a complaint” to “how do we change the culture that produced it,” and most organisations are now working out what that means in practice. Poppy Murray works in that gap. She co-founded Transformative Culture Consultancy Global with Brooke Jarvis in 2024, building prevention training that maps directly onto the new legal duty and the operational reality of the workplaces buying it. The firm’s clients sit across corporate, sport, charity, and policing, including Tesco Mobile, WSP, Butterfield Bank, the Chelsea FC Foundation, the Royal British Legion, and the City of London Crime Prevention Association. Her authority on the subject is built on the BE LADS Campaign, which she founded in March 2021 after the murder of Sarah Everard. The campaign asked a precise question, what can men and boys actually do to help women feel safer, and turned the answer into training that engages men without blame. The National Police Chiefs’ Council named her runner-up in Making Safer Spaces in 2024, one of only two civilians recognised from 170 nominations. Her professional background spans journalism, law, finance, and retail, which shapes how she handles sensitive material in front of mixed audiences. She is a UN Women UK Delegate, a trustee of the Lloyds Bank Foundation for the Channel Islands, and the founder of SafetyNet Guernsey, where her “It’s only a touch” campaign placed the criminal penalties for sexual assault in front of the night-time economy in plain language. Key speaking topics Sexual harassment prevention and the Worker Protection Act Workplace culture and safety as a leadership responsibility Engaging men as allies in gender safety Violence against women and girls in corporate and public settings Behavioural change and bystander intervention Inclusion without blame or division Ideal for CHROs and Heads of People preparing for the Worker Protection Act duty DEI, culture, and ER leads designing harassment prevention beyond e-learning Boards and ExCos in regulated and customer-facing industries reviewing safeguarding exposure Police, justice, and public safety leaders working on VAWG prevention Audience outcomes A clear read of what the Worker Protection Act actually requires of employers and where most are still under-prepared A practical framing of male allyship that male audiences engage with rather than resist Specific bystander and intervention behaviours that translate from keynote to workplace A way to talk about VAWG in a corporate setting without losing half the room A model for connecting culture, safety, and inclusion as one operating question, not three

Why organisations work with Princess Rym Ali She has reported on a major conflict from inside it. Her Baghdad coverage for CNN during the 2003 invasion gives her an editorial instinct for how facts, narratives, and reputations move under pressure that few corporate communicators ever develop. She built a working institution, not a campaign. The Jordan Media Institute is a functioning Arab journalism school she founded in 2007, which gives her practical authority on how educational and editorial standards actually take hold in a region. She leads the Anna Lindh Foundation across 42 Euro-Mediterranean member states. The role gives her a working brief on intercultural dialogue at scale, including how to convene parties who fundamentally disagree. Her credentials are issued by named bodies, not bureaus: a Columbia Journalism Award, France’s Legion of Honour, and a Coventry University honorary doctorate. Buyers can verify each. Biography highlights Founder, Jordan Media Institute (2007), the first Arab non-profit centre of excellence for journalism education. President, Anna Lindh Foundation (since 2021), succeeding French politician Elisabeth Guigou. CNN Baghdad correspondent, 2001 to 2004; previously with BBC, UPI, Bloomberg TV, Dubai TV, and Radio Monte-Carlo Moyen-Orient. Knight of the French Legion of Honour; Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Award (2011); Ischia International Journalism Award for Best International Journalist (2011); Coventry University honorary doctorate (2013). Master’s in Journalism, Columbia University; DEA in Political Science, Sciences Po Paris; MA English Literature, Sorbonne. Board of Commissioners, Royal Film Commission of Jordan, since 2005; President, Amman International Film Festival, since 2017. Biography Most organisations underestimate how much of their credibility depends on the information environment around them, not the messages they send into it. Princess Rym Ali has worked on both sides of that environment, first as a CNN correspondent reporting from Baghdad during the 2003 invasion, then as the founder of an Arab journalism school built to raise the editorial standards leaders eventually have to operate inside. The Jordan Media Institute, which she founded in 2007, is the part of her record that explains the rest. It is a functioning institution, not a campaign or a foundation grant. Building it forced her to make decisions about ethics, curriculum, and editorial independence that most commentators on media only describe. That practical grounding is what shapes her view on how trust is built and lost in an organisation. Since 2021 she has been President of the Anna Lindh Foundation, the Euro-Mediterranean intergovernmental body whose 42 member states span a fault line of contested politics, religion, and migration. The role puts her in the middle of conversations that most leaders only see in summary, and gives her a working method for convening people who disagree without collapsing into platitudes. Her credentials are issued by serious institutions: Columbia University, Sciences Po, the Sorbonne, the French Republic. The argument behind them is what matters. She has done the editorial work, built the institution, and now runs the convening platform. For a board navigating reputation, cross-cultural risk, or the civic dimensions of its operating context, that combination of editorial judgement and institutional discipline is rare. Key speaking topics Media credibility and organisational reputation Information literacy in fragmented environments Freedom of expression and editorial responsibility Intercultural dialogue across the Euro-Mediterranean Values-based leadership under public scrutiny Higher education and civic culture Women’s leadership in media and public institutions Ideal for Boards and executive committees managing reputation across regulatory, political, and cultural lines. Heads of communications, corporate affairs, and public policy responsible for credibility in contested information environments. Leadership audiences in media, education, philanthropy, and international institutions. Convenings on cross-cultural strategy, particularly involving the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. Audience outcomes A sharper read on how editorial decisions, algorithmic curation, and platform incentives shape what audiences treat as fact. A working sense of what intercultural dialogue at institutional scale actually requires, drawn from the Anna Lindh Foundation’s 42-member-state remit. A concrete view of how a regional educational institution is built and sustained, taken from the Jordan Media Institute case. Honest framing of the limits of communications strategy when the underlying information environment is fragmented.