Corporate Culture speakers

Why organisations work with Shela Gobertina von Trapp She brings twenty years of sustainability operating experience to a story most people only know from the screen: founding partner of the Circular Electronics Partnership and a decade leading corporate sustainability at Office Depot across the US and Europe. She gives boards and leadership teams a usable frame for decisions whose payoff sits well beyond the current leadership’s tenure, which is the practical problem behind most long-term commitments. She is the one speaker who can connect a globally recognised family legacy directly to corporate questions of brand stewardship and long-term value, which makes the argument land rather than feel borrowed. In her previous role at the Global Electronics Council, managers of the EPEAT ecolabel, she worked inside the procurement standards and circular-economy roadmaps that large buyers actually use. Biography highlights Founder of Celebrity Legacy, including its advisory practice von Trapp Consulting, and co-founder of the Georg & Agathe Foundation, home to the heritage project vonTrapp.org and vonTrapp.art, an e-commerce initiative supporting cultural heritage Founding partner of the Circular Electronics Partnership (CEP), the cross-industry roadmap toward a circular electronics value chain by 2030 Former Director of Global Relations & Partnerships at the Global Electronics Council, managers of the EPEAT environmental ecolabel Roughly a decade in corporate sustainability at Office Depot, a Fortune 500 company, across the United States and Europe Master’s in Energy and Environmental Analysis from Boston University, with a Bachelor’s in Environmental Analysis and Policy awarded Magna Cum Laude Great-granddaughter of Captain Georg von Trapp and Agathe Gobertina Whitehead, and granddaughter of Johanna von Trapp, portrayed as Marta in The Sound of Music Biography Most companies plan in quarters and report in years. The choices that shape a brand compound over decades, long after the leaders who made them have gone. Sustainability lives in that gap, judged on short cycles and paid for over much longer ones. Shela Gobertina von Trapp spent two decades working that gap from inside large organisations. At Office Depot, a Fortune 500 company, she led corporate sustainability across the United States and Europe. At the Global Electronics Council, managers of the EPEAT ecolabel, she became a founding partner of the Circular Electronics Partnership, an industry roadmap toward a circular electronics value chain by 2030. What makes her perspective unusual is its source. She is a great-granddaughter of Captain Georg von Trapp and Agathe Gobertina Whitehead, and a granddaughter of Johanna von Trapp, portrayed as Marta in The Sound of Music. She has spent years researching how that family held its identity through war, exile, and reinvention, and what allowed the name to outlast the people who carried it. She now puts the same question to companies in commercial terms: how does a brand earn the right to last? Drawing on the family archive and her sustainability work, she helps boards treat reputation and environmental commitment as assets that are stewarded across generations, the way the von Trapp name was. Key speaking topics Corporate sustainability and the circular economy Long-term value and legacy thinking Brand longevity and stewardship Heritage and historical preservation Leadership lessons from the von Trapp family Values-based and purpose-driven leadership Sustainable procurement and electronics circularity Ideal for Chief Sustainability Officers and ESG teams moving from reporting cycles to long-term substance Boards and family businesses weighing brand stewardship and succession across generations Heritage brands and organisations whose long-term reputation is itself a core asset Leadership and culture programmes wanting a substantive story about values that outlast their founders Nonprofit leaders, foundations, and cultural institutions balancing mission with long-term stewardship Audience outcomes A way to test today’s decisions against their consequences decades out, not just the current cycle A concrete account of how one family held its name through war and exile, and why that matters for institutions that want to last Sustainability reframed as a long-horizon asset that boards steward, illustrated with circular-economy examples from the electronics industry Reputation and brand understood as inheritances, built deliberately or eroded by default

Why organisations work with Shil Shanghavi His methodology has been stress-tested against the hardest possible conditions. Shanghavi manages a severe stutter and has built his entire framework from the requirement to communicate fluently under pressure. When he teaches communication, there is no abstraction – the techniques work because they had to. He turns a soft skill into a data problem. The SpeakerLab AI platform he developed measures pace, structure, eye contact, jargon, repetition, and narrative flow, giving organisations a means to track communication development in the same way they would any other performance metric. The music-based delivery technique is genuinely novel. His method of using musical time signatures and rhythm to manage presence, pacing, and fluency is not borrowed from conventional coaching. It is proprietary, demonstrably effective, and unmatched by other communication speakers in the market. His coaching background shapes the quality of practical output. As Head of Speaker Coaching for TEDxPerth, he works with speakers whose performance is publicly scrutinised against one of the most demanding spoken-word formats in the world. That standard transfers to boardroom and conference work. Cross-cultural reach is operationally demonstrated. He has delivered keynotes and workshops to audiences across more than 70 countries, which means his frameworks have been tested for cultural transference, not just constructed for a single market. Biography highlights Head of Speaker Coaching at TEDxPerth and presentation mentor for IMPACT 100 WA Creator of SpeakerLab, an AI-powered platform that measures and analyses communication performance Author of Broken Words (2026), a memoir on fluency and communication built around speaking engagements in nineteen cities Subject of SHIL, an award-winning short film documentary (2021) chronicling his communication journey LinkedIn Top Voice for Public Speaking Has delivered keynotes and workshops to audiences across more than 70 countries Developed a proprietary communication technique using musical time signatures to manage fluency and stage presence Biography The most persistent failure in leadership development is not a shortage of smart people. It is a shortage of leaders who can make their thinking land. Communication breakdowns are rarely about content; they are about trust, presence, and the ability to make an audience believe that the person speaking has actually lived what they are saying. That problem sits at the centre of Shil Shanghavi’s work. Shanghavi built his communication framework from necessity. Managing a severe stutter since childhood, he developed a proprietary technique rooted in musical time signatures: using rhythm, pace, and structure drawn from progressive house music to achieve fluency and presence on stage. What began as a personal survival mechanism became a coaching methodology, tested over decades of practice and sharpened in his role as Head of Speaker Coaching for TEDxPerth, one of the most demanding public speaking environments in the world. His contribution to the field extends beyond technique. Shanghavi developed SpeakerLab, an AI platform that analyses communication performance across dimensions including eye contact, pacing, structure, jargon, and narrative coherence – translating what most coaches treat as intuition into measurable, actionable data. For organisations that have tried conventional presentation training and found it evaporates within weeks, the ability to quantify progress changes what improvement looks like in practice. His work spans more than 70 countries, with clients that include senior executives, leadership teams, and TEDx speakers preparing for high-scrutiny stages. He is a LinkedIn Top Voice for Public Speaking and the subject of SHIL, a 2021 documentary tracing his path from communication fear to the global stage. His 2026 memoir, Broken Words: Finding Fluency as a Global Speaker Who Stutters, follows nineteen speaking engagements from Nairobi to Singapore and puts the mechanism on the page: the breathing patterns behind a fluent keynote, and the days the speech system collapses in front of a paying audience. Key speaking topics Storytelling as a leadership and trust-building discipline Communication under pressure and high-stakes environments AI and measurement in communication development Executive presence and authentic leadership communication Building organisational culture through narrative Cross-cultural communication and global audiences Overcoming communication fear and building confidence Ideal for CHROs and L&D leads commissioning leadership communication programmes Senior executive and C-suite teams preparing for high-visibility engagements Conference organisers seeking a keynote that combines personal narrative with practical communication frameworks Organisations embedding authenticity and trust as cultural values at senior level Audience outcomes A practical framework for structuring stories in professional contexts – pitches, presentations, and leadership communications Familiarity with the SpeakerLab AI approach to measuring and improving communication performance Techniques for managing pressure, presence, and fluency in front of audiences of varying sizes and seniority A reframed understanding of authenticity as a practical communication tool, not a personality trait Confidence in applying storytelling principles to business communication across digital and in-person formats

Why organisations work with Shola Kaye Her Emotional Audacity™ framework reframes empathy as an organisational capability – not a personal virtue – giving leaders a structured approach to courageous communication that is immediately applicable in high-pressure, high-stakes environments She holds an unusual credibility position: a Cambridge and Emory-trained scientist who also performed professionally on four continents. That combination makes her content land differently with technical and analytical audiences who typically resist people-skills programming Her work addresses a gap that DEI programmes and EQ training often miss separately: the intersection of speaking up, psychological safety, and inclusive communication as a single, integrated practice Her two published books and LinkedIn Learning instructor role mean buyers are extending into a content ecosystem, not just a single keynote She has worked across the full range of organisational contexts – from board-level at institutions including The United Nations and Deloitte to company-wide culture programmes – with consistent evidence of rebooking Biography highlights BA Natural Sciences, Cambridge University; PGCE, Oxford University; MSc Analytical Chemistry / Neuropharmacology, Emory University, with postgraduate research at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control Early career in IT management consulting with clients including Goldman Sachs and Prudential Assurance, followed by account director roles in aviation and finance Professional entertainer and jazz singer; performed on four continents including BBC appearances Author of How to be a D.I.V.A. at Public Speaking (Amazon.com #1 bestseller) and Big Talk, Small Talk and Everything in Between (Callisto Media, 2020) Winner of the Jenny Seagrove Speaking Award (2016); Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM), Toastmasters International; Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) Regular contributor to Management Today, HR Zone, and People Management; featured in Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, Forbes, and BBC; TEDx speaker on empathy in the workplace Biography Shola Kaye spent her early career moving between worlds that rarely overlap: neuroscience research at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, management consulting at investment banks in New York and London, and professional performance on stages across four continents. That trajectory is not a curiosity: it is the basis of her work. She understands analytically rigorous environments, the dynamics of corporate invisibility, and what it takes to hold a room. The core tension she addresses is one that organisations consistently underinvest in: the gap between stated inclusion values and the actual behavioural competencies required to make them real. Most people, even experienced leaders, struggle to give honest feedback, speak up under pressure, or navigate difficult conversations without defensiveness. Kaye’s Emotional Audacity™ framework names this gap explicitly: combining empathy, self-regulation, and courageous communication into a single, teachable practice. Her two books and a TEDx talk on workplace empathy establish the intellectual architecture behind the keynotes. Her contributors to Management Today, HR Zone, and People Management position her as a credible voice in the professional management conversation, not only on the conference circuit. Clients including The United Nations, Deloitte, HSBC, Google, and IBM have rebooked or extended her programmes into training formats, evidence that the content holds beyond a single session. What makes Kaye distinctive in a crowded DEI and communication space is the precise nature of her argument: that empathy, done seriously, is not a softening of leadership but a structural condition for high performance. For organisations navigating transformation, hybrid work, or underrepresentation challenges, that reframe tends to land where other approaches have not. Key speaking topics Empathy at work Inclusive leadership Psychological safety and communication Emotional intelligence Courageous workplace communication Diversity, equity and belonging People-first culture Feedback and difficult conversations Ideal for CHROs and People Directors building cultures where psychological safety is a practical reality, not an aspiration Leadership development programmes targeting mid-to-senior leaders managing diverse, distributed, or technically-oriented teams Organisations running DEI initiatives that need to move beyond awareness into behavioural change International Women’s Day and women’s leadership events where communication confidence and visibility are the focus Audience outcomes A named framework (Emotional Audacity™) for integrating empathy, courageous communication, and inclusive behaviour into daily leadership practice Practical tools for navigating difficult conversations, delivering constructive feedback, and creating environments where people feel safe to speak up Greater understanding of the structural conditions – not just the personal attitudes – that determine whether inclusion is felt in practice Specific techniques for communicating with clarity and impact, particularly for those in technical, analytical, or STEM-rooted working environments Renewed understanding of how communication behaviours at the manager level directly affect team performance, retention, and innovation output

Why organisations work with Simon Hartley Nearly three decades inside elite sport, including Premier League football, the English Institute of Sport, Olympic teams and the Fijian rugby 7s programme, give him a working library of what world-class actually looks like in practice. He treats mindset and culture as engineered outcomes, not motivational ideas, with a published body of work (twelve books including Peak Performance Every Time and Stronger Together) that gives buyers a concrete intellectual product to point at. His client list crosses sectors that rarely share a stage, from Adidas, GE, Siemens, Sky, NatWest and The North Face to Bayer Leverkusen, FC Bayern Munich and Team GB, which makes the translation from sport to business credible rather than asserted. Founder of Be World Class and co-founder of Success Engineers, he runs a long-form consulting practice alongside the keynote work, so what audiences hear has been tested with the same leadership teams he later embeds with. Biography highlights Founder of Be World Class (2008) and co-founder of Success Engineers (2017). Former Consultant Sports Psychologist, English Institute of Sport; former Head of Sport Science, Sunderland AFC. Author of twelve books on performance, character, teams and hiring, including Peak Performance Every Time, Stronger Together and How to Develop Character. Worked with Olympic teams, Premier League clubs, Bundesliga sides (including Bayer Leverkusen and FC Bayern Munich), the Fijian rugby 7s programme, and Formula One. Corporate clients include Adidas, GE, Siemens, Sky, NatWest and The North Face. Featured in Personnel Today, Management Today, The Times and Bundesliga Weekly; on-screen consultant for the Fiji Time documentary series. Biography Elite sport offers a controlled study in performance. The conditions are public, the consequences are immediate, and the gap between teams that win consistently and teams that almost win is usually invisible to outsiders. Simon Hartley has spent close to thirty years inside that gap. He held senior roles at the English Institute of Sport and Sunderland AFC, worked across Premier League football, the Bundesliga, Olympic programmes and Formula One, and was part of the support team behind the Fijian rugby 7s side that became one of the most-watched sporting stories of recent years. In 2008 he founded Be World Class to apply what he had learned in those environments to organisations outside sport. The premise is straightforward. World-class performance is not a personality trait or a slogan. It is a set of habits, behaviours and cultural conditions that can be identified, taught and reinforced. His work for Adidas, GE, Siemens, Sky, NatWest, The North Face and others tests that premise against the practical questions senior leaders actually ask, about teams, hiring, character, and decision-making under load. Across twelve books, including Peak Performance Every Time, Stronger Together, How to Develop Character and Hire Great People, he has built a body of work that takes the language of elite sport and translates it into something a board or an executive committee can use. The books are short, deliberately, because they are written to be read by people who already have a day job. He has been featured in Personnel Today, Management Today, The Times and Bundesliga Weekly, and is a regular on-screen contributor to sports documentary work. The throughline in his speaking is a refusal to treat mindset as a soft topic. Resilience, character, team chemistry and culture are presented as variables that leaders can shape with the same discipline they apply to revenue and operations. That framing is why his audiences tend to leave with a checklist, not a feeling. Key speaking topics World-class team performance Winning mindset and mental toughness Resilience and performance under pressure Values-driven culture and leadership Hiring for character Sustaining high performance in volatile conditions Ideal for Senior leadership teams and executive committees aiming to lift their performance ceiling, not their average CHROs and people leaders responsible for team performance, culture and hiring practice Sales and commercial leadership teams operating in high-pressure markets Conference audiences of senior leaders looking for substance behind the language of resilience and high performance Audience outcomes A clear distinction between good, great and world-class as operating standards, and what separates them in practice A working understanding of the behaviours and conditions that build resilient, high-performing teams Specific reference points from elite sport that translate to commercial settings, not analogies for their own sake A view of culture and mindset as engineered outcomes that leaders can influence directly Language and frameworks senior teams can take back into their own performance conversations

Why organisations work with Simon Sinek The Golden Circle gives leadership teams a named, diagrammatic model for examining whether their communication and strategy starts from purpose or defaults to product; concrete enough to run a board session around, not just a concept to absorb from a stage. The Infinite Game framework reframes how organisations think about competition: the argument that most organisations are playing a finite game in an inherently infinite one gives senior leaders a precise diagnostic for why short-termism is corroding their culture and decision-making. His work on the Circle of Safety – drawn from military and organisational research – gives leaders a specific language and accountability structure for psychological safety, distinguishing it from vague “culture” conversations. Three consecutive Thinkers50 appearances (2017, 2019, 2021), including the Future Thinker award, position him inside the recognised canon of serious management thinking – relevant where senior buyers are evaluating credibility, not just popularity. His reach into the US Armed Forces, the United Nations, and the US Congress alongside global corporate work gives his frameworks a cross-sector validation that most leadership speakers cannot match. Biography highlights Author of five books on leadership and purpose, including Start with Why (global bestseller, over one million copies sold in the US alone), Leaders Eat Last (New York Times bestseller), and The Infinite Game (New York Times bestseller); published by Portfolio/Penguin and Penguin Random House Creator of the Golden Circle framework, one of the most widely adopted models in leadership communication and organisational purpose TED Talk “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” (2009) is the third most-watched talk on TED.com, with over 60 million views Named to the Thinkers50 ranking three consecutive times (2017, 2019, 2021); recipient of the Thinkers50 Future Thinker Award Adjunct staff member, RAND Corporation (since 2010); former instructor in Strategic Communications, Columbia University Founder of The Optimism Company, a leadership learning and development platform, and Optimism Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House; has spoken at the United Nations, US Congress, and across senior US military leadership Biography Most leadership conversations begin in the wrong place. They start with what an organisation does or how it does it – and never reach the question that actually determines whether people are engaged, aligned, and willing to give discretionary effort: why. The inability to answer that question convincingly is not a branding gap; it is a leadership gap, and Simon Sinek has built one of the most recognised frameworks in contemporary management thinking to address it. His Golden Circle model – introduced in Start with Why (2009) and subsequently the subject of the third most-watched TED Talk in history – provides organisations with a structured means of diagnosing whether their leadership, communication, and strategy is purpose-led or merely product-led. The argument is grounded in the biology of decision-making: people do not respond primarily to logic and features, but to belief and identity. The practical implication for leadership is significant, and it is why the framework has moved from conference rooms into board strategy sessions, culture programmes, and military leadership curricula. His later work extends the argument. The Infinite Game (2019, New York Times bestseller) identifies a structural problem in how most organisations compete: treating an inherently infinite game – business, leadership, institutional relevance – as if it has a finish line. Leaders operating with a finite mindset optimise for short-term metrics and burn through the trust, culture, and purpose that actually determine longevity. This is not motivational language; it is a specific claim about strategic error, and it gives senior leaders a framework for examining decisions that are degrading their organisations from the inside. Sinek’s affiliations reflect the range at which his work operates. As an adjunct staff member at the RAND Corporation since 2010, advising on military innovation, and having spoken at the United Nations Global Compact Leaders Summit and directly to senior leadership across every branch of the US Armed Forces, he brings institutional credibility that extends well beyond the corporate speaker circuit. Three consecutive Thinkers50 appearances, including the Future Thinker Award, confirm his standing within the serious canon of management thinking. Key speaking topics Purpose-driven leadership and the Golden Circle Organisational trust and psychological safety Finite vs. infinite mindset in strategy and leadership Leadership culture and the conditions for engagement Long-term organisational performance and decision-making Inspiring communication for leaders and teams Values, identity, and organisational alignment Ideal for C-suite and board-level leadership development programmes where the strategic case for culture and purpose needs to be made at an executive level CHROs and People directors working on engagement, trust, and the conditions under which employees perform at their best Transformation leads and strategy teams examining how short-term competitive pressures are eroding long-term capability Senior leadership conferences requiring a speaker with both mass-market name recognition and a defensible intellectual framework Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary – Golden Circle, Circle of Safety, Infinite Game – that gives leadership teams a common reference point for conversations about purpose, trust, and strategy A framework for diagnosing whether their organisation’s leadership and communication starts from why or defaults to what A reframe of competitive strategy: the finite vs. infinite mindset distinction as a diagnostic tool for identifying decisions that are weakening organisational resilience Greater clarity on the specific leadership behaviours – protection, consistency, accountability – that build psychological safety and sustain discretionary effort A practical case for why culture and purpose are strategic variables, not HR programmes

Why organisations work with Simon T. Bailey Original research on workforce resilience. His State of Working America: Thriving in Resilience and Brilliance study surveyed over 1,000 US workers and underpins his keynotes with current data rather than received wisdom. A customer experience playbook rooted in operational reality. His SPARK methodology distils what he learned as Sales Director of the Disney Institute into practices that frontline teams can apply. Award-winning published work. Resilience@Work won both the Next Generation Indie Book Award and the Independent Press Award, signalling editorial credibility beyond bureau-circuit hype. Reach that translates into recognition inside client organisations. His 14 LinkedIn Learning courses have reached more than 400,000 professionals, so audiences often arrive already familiar with the material. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Brilliance Institute, Inc. Former Sales Director, Disney Institute (seven years as a Disney cast member). Author of 11 books, including Release Your Brilliance (HarperCollins), ranked No. 17 by 800-CEO-Read among the top 100 books being read by corporate America. Resilience@Work recipient of the Next Generation Indie Book Award and the Independent Press Award. Named to Success magazine’s Top 25 thought leaders alongside Brené Brown, Tony Robbins, and Oprah Winfrey. 14 LinkedIn Learning courses with a combined audience of 400,000+ professionals. Executive MBA, University of East London; three honorary doctorates, most recently a Doctorate of Science in Business Administration from Cleary University. Biography Disney spent decades teaching the world that service is a system, not a personality trait. Bailey was inside that system as Sales Director of the Disney Institute, and his work since has carried that operating discipline into the wider corporate world. The premise of his current research is straightforward. Engagement scores plateaued during the pandemic and have not recovered. His State of Working America: Thriving in Resilience and Brilliance report, drawn from over 1,000 US workers, gives leaders an evidence base for why and what to do about it. Resilience@Work, the book built on that research, won the Next Generation Indie Book Award and the Independent Press Award. The intellectual through-line across his 11 books is the connection between how people feel about their work and what customers experience at the other end. Release Your Brilliance, published by HarperCollins, was ranked among the top 100 books being read by corporate America. His SPARK methodology turns that thesis into operating practice for frontline teams. His reach inside organisations is unusual for a keynote author. 14 LinkedIn Learning courses have placed his material in front of 400,000+ professionals, which is why Success magazine listed him among its Top 25 thought leaders, in the company of Brené Brown, Tony Robbins, and Oprah Winfrey. Key speaking topics Workforce resilience Employee engagement and retention Customer experience and service culture Leadership development Personal and professional brilliance Inclusive and values-based leadership Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers rebuilding engagement after sustained workforce fatigue Customer experience and service leaders translating brand promise into frontline behaviour Sales and commercial leadership teams looking to renew energy and conviction HR and L&D summits, organisational town halls, and customer-facing field events Audience outcomes A current evidence base, drawn from Bailey’s State of Working America research, on what is driving disengagement and what restores it. The SPARK service framework, translated into specific behaviours frontline teams can adopt the following week. Renewed conviction in the link between how employees feel and what customers experience. A vocabulary leaders can use to talk about resilience and brilliance without slipping into wellness platitudes.

Why organisations work with Ben Ainslie The 2013 America’s Cup comeback – Oracle Team USA recovering from 8-1 down to win 9-8, with Ainslie as a late-joining tactician – is one of the most documented examples in sport of collective decision-making under existential, real-time pressure; he was inside it, not watching it. He has led the British America’s Cup team across four consecutive editions from founding to Louis Vuitton Cup victory, navigating a sponsor exit, a team restructure, and a PE-backed rebuild – the leadership challenges here sit closer to a turnaround CEO than a sporting champion. Where most elite sport speakers speak from an individual athlete’s perspective, Ainslie has built and led a 200-person high-performance organisation with institutional investors, commercial partners, and multi-year competitive strategy – his understanding of what performance culture requires at scale is operational. He founded BAR Technologies in 2016 to commercialise elite sailing engineering in commercial marine industries, demonstrating that his thinking about high-performance systems translates into product development and industrial innovation beyond competition. As founder of the 1851 Trust – which has engaged over 1.5 million young people globally in STEM and climate education – he has built long-term talent and education infrastructure alongside his competitive programme: a model directly relevant to organisations thinking about capability pipelines rather than just current performance. Biography highlights Four Olympic gold medals (Sydney 2000, Athens 2004, Beijing 2008, London 2012) and one silver (Atlanta 1996) across five consecutive Olympic Games Tactician for Oracle Team USA in the 2013 America’s Cup, contributing to one of sport’s most documented competitive comebacks: from 8-1 down to a 9-8 series win Founded the British America’s Cup team in 2012; led it – through successive iterations as Ben Ainslie Racing, INEOS Team UK, and INEOS Britannia – to win the 2024 Louis Vuitton Cup in Barcelona, Britain’s first America’s Cup match appearance in 60 years Emirates Great Britain SailGP Team (Athena Sports Group) won the 2025 SailGP Championship Founder, BAR Technologies (2016): maritime innovation company applying high-performance sailing engineering to commercial marine industry Founder, 1851 Trust (2014): sport-inspired STEM and climate education charity; Royal Patronage from HRH The Princess of Wales; over 1.5 million young people engaged globally Knighted for services to sailing; previously appointed MBE, OBE, and CBE; ISAF World Sailor of the Year four times (1998, 2002, 2008, 2012) Biography The 2013 America’s Cup in San Francisco produced one of the most compressed examples of collective decision-making under competitive pressure in the history of sport. Oracle Team USA, trailing 8-1 in a first-to-nine series, won eight consecutive races to take the Cup 9-8. Ben Ainslie joined as tactician mid-series and is recognised as a central figure in that turnaround. That moment belongs to a much longer record. Ainslie won medals across five consecutive Olympic Games between 1996 and 2012 – silver in Atlanta, then four consecutive golds across the Laser and Finn classes – establishing himself as the most successful Olympic sailor in history. What the record demonstrates is not simply exceptional individual talent, but the capacity to sustain competitive performance across two decades of changing conditions, equipment classes, and rivals. Since 2012, the same discipline has been applied to building organisations. The British America’s Cup team Ainslie founded – through successive iterations as Ben Ainslie Racing, INEOS Team UK, and INEOS Britannia – won the 2024 Louis Vuitton Cup in Barcelona, making it the first British team in 60 years to qualify for the America’s Cup match, and the first in 90 years to score points in the match itself. Alongside the racing programme, he founded BAR Technologies in 2016 to commercialise high-performance marine engineering, and the 1851 Trust in 2014, which has engaged over 1.5 million young people globally in STEM and climate education – both carrying Royal Patronage. For senior leaders, the combination is specific and current. Ainslie’s experience covers individual elite performance, real-time decision-making in competitive crises, multi-cycle team leadership, and the structural work of building and rebuilding high-performance organisations under financial and competitive pressure. The Emirates Great Britain SailGP Team, part of his Athena Sports Group, won the 2025 SailGP Championship – evidence that the performance culture he has built is still being tested, and still delivering. Key speaking topics High-performance team leadership across competitive cycles Decision-making under competitive pressure Organisational resilience and rebuilding after setback Elite team culture and identity Strategic risk in high-stakes environments Performance under sustained adversity Talent development and long-term performance pipeline Ideal for Senior leadership and C-suite teams navigating high-stakes competitive environments or post-setback rebuilds Chief People Officers and HR leadership focused on building durable, high-performance cultures rather than episodic peak performance Boards and executive committees managing structural transitions, sponsor or investor changes, or long-horizon competitive strategy Conferences focused on leadership excellence, organisational performance, and team culture Audience outcomes A concrete reference framework – drawn from five Olympic campaigns and four America’s Cup cycles – for what distinguishes teams built to perform once from teams built to perform repeatedly First-hand perspective on real-time collective decision-making under existential competitive pressure, with reference to the 2013 America’s Cup comeback A clearer understanding of what high-performance culture requires at the systemic level – identity, accountability, recruitment, and succession – rather than in peak-moment inspiration Practical reference points from building, losing, and rebuilding a 200-person elite organisation across multiple competitive and commercial cycles A perspective on running performance culture and innovation infrastructure in parallel, drawn from Athena Sports Group, BAR Technologies, and the 1851 Trust

Why organisations work with Speech Thomas His B.R.A.V.E. framework (Bold, Resilient, Adaptable, Vulnerable, Encouraging) is proprietary, named IP built from firsthand experience navigating commercial failure, personal loss, and creative reinvention across a multi-decade career, not a theoretical model adapted from management literature He integrates live musical performance structurally into the keynote itself, creating a shared emotional experience that makes the framework’s principles felt rather than simply heard – a format no other leadership speaker with equivalent platform credibility replicates The vulnerability pillar of B.R.A.V.E. carries specific weight: his origin story involves growing up in statistically one of the most difficult environments for Black youth in America and losing both his grandmother and brother in the same week; circumstances that directly shaped the framework’s architecture His 16 Bars documentary – in which he led a songwriting and recording collaboration inside a Virginia jail – provides independently verified, third-party evidence that his approach to creativity and leadership character works in conditions far more demanding than any corporate conference room The Dr. Terence N. Thomas Scholarship, a 501(c)3 he established in 1992, has directed over $1M in educational stipends to students from underserved communities – demonstrating that the «encouraging» principle of B.R.A.V.E. is operational, not rhetorical Biography highlights Founder, lead vocalist and producer of Arrested Development; two-time Grammy winner: Best New Artist and Best Rap Performance (1993) Arrested Development’s debut album 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of… achieved multi-platinum certification in the United States «Tennessee» named one of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s «500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll» Solo single «Like Marvin Gaye Said» held #1 on Japan’s Tokio 100 chart for seven consecutive weeks; solo album Spiritual People certified Gold by the RIAJ Producer and collaborator on 16 Bars (2018), an award-winning documentary following a music rehabilitation programme inside Richmond City Jail — winner of Best Documentary at the Downtown L.A. Film Festival Creator of the B.R.A.V.E. leadership framework, now delivered as a keynote at corporate, association and government conferences globally Founder of the Dr. Terence N. Thomas Scholarship (501(c)3, est. 1992), which has provided over $1M in stipends to university students from at-risk communities across three decades Biography The qualities most organisations say they want from their leaders – courage under pressure, the ability to adapt without losing direction, the willingness to be honest when honesty is costly – are precisely the ones that conventional leadership development struggles to instil. Why? Because they cannot be taught from a slide deck. They are formed through experience, reinforced through narrative, and transmitted most effectively when the person articulating them has actually lived them. Speech Thomas built his B.R.A.V.E. framework (Bold, Resilient, Adaptable, Vulnerable, Encouraging) from a career that required each of those qualities under genuine pressure. As the founder and lead vocalist of Arrested Development, he led a group that achieved two Grammy Awards and multi-platinum sales for a debut album that ran directly against the dominant commercial trends of its era. When the group disbanded, he rebuilt independently, building a substantial solo career across five albums and finding his largest audience in Japan – territory he entered without the infrastructure that had supported the group’s earlier success. What distinguishes his keynote from the standard musical-career-as-leadership-metaphor format is that the framework is specific and teachable, and the performance is structural rather than decorative. Speech integrates live music into the keynote itself because the argument he is making – that vulnerability and creative courage are leadership competencies, not personality traits – is demonstrated more effectively through song than through slides. His 16 Bars documentary, in which he led a songwriting and recording programme inside Richmond City Jail, provides third-party evidence that this methodology produces results in conditions that test it genuinely. The Dr. Terence N. Thomas Scholarship, which he established in 1992 following his brother’s death and which has since distributed over $1M to students from underserved communities, is where the «encouraging» pillar of B.R.A.V.E. becomes most legible. For boards and senior leadership teams evaluating whether a speaker’s values are substantive or performative, it is a credible and verifiable answer. Key speaking topics B.R.A.V.E. leadership framework Leadership character development Creativity and the artistic process as organisational tools Storytelling and voice in leadership communication Resilience and adaptability under pressure Music, culture and social impact Criminal justice reform and rehabilitation through creative practice Ideal for Senior leadership and executive teams exploring the relationship between character, culture and organisational performance CHROs and talent development leaders building leadership pipeline programmes that go beyond technical capability Conferences in creative industries, media, entertainment and arts sectors DEI and culture transformation events requiring a speaker whose credibility is built from lived experience rather than consultancy Audience outcomes A named, five-part leadership framework (B.R.A.V.E.) that individuals can apply to their own professional context A reframe of vulnerability from personal risk to leadership asset – with a credible, tested example of why it matters Practical perspective on how storytelling and creative expression function as tools for communication, not just culture A more concrete understanding of what distinguishes leadership under pressure from leadership in comfortable conditions Where a live performance element is included: a shared emotional experience that anchors the session’s themes in a way that participants recall and reference beyond the event itself

Why organisations work with Stefaan van Hooydonk His Global Curiosity Institute has developed individual and organisational diagnostic tools deployed across 16 multinational companies. This means organisations can baseline their curiosity culture before investing in it – a rigour that most L&D and culture interventions do not offer. His core argument is specific and verifiable: 90% of the leaders in his research say investing in curiosity is important for innovation; 50% simultaneously believe innovation distracts from operational focus. That contradiction is not an attitude problem – it is a structural design problem, and he has a method for resolving it. His six Fortune 200 CLO appointments – including Cognizant, where he led learning for more than 300,000 associates globally – mean his diagnostic model was stress-tested against the same conformity pressures he now advises organisations to overcome. Curiosity: The Secret Ingredient for Success in Personal and Professional Growth (Capstone, 2025) provides a durable, publishable framework that sustains the conversation in organisations well beyond a single event. Having lived and worked in nine countries across Europe and Asia, his account of how cultures differ in their relationship to curiosity and conformity is grounded in direct, cross-cultural professional experience – not comparative research conducted at a distance. Biography highlights Founder, Global Curiosity Institute; developer of individual and organisational curiosity diagnostic tools, applied in 16 multinational companies across a 500-person study Former Chief Learning Officer at Cognizant (L&D responsibility for 300,000+ associates), Royal Philips, Nokia, Saudi Aramco, Agfa Healthcare, and Flipkart Set up and led the executive education arm of the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai Author of The Workplace Curiosity Manifesto (2022) and Curiosity: The Secret Ingredient for Success in Personal and Professional Growth (Capstone, 2025) Executive MBA, Rutgers University; master’s degrees in Economics and Chinese; postgraduate study in Cross-Cultural Management (France); certified executive coach Has lived and worked in nine countries across Europe and Asia Biography The idea that organisations want curious employees rarely survives contact with the way most organisations are actually designed. As companies scale, they reward consistency, structure incentives around delivery, and create management cultures in which asking the wrong question carries professional risk. Stefaan van Hooydonk spent more than two decades inside that structural tension – as Chief Learning Officer at six Fortune 200 companies including Cognizant, Royal Philips, Nokia, Saudi Aramco, Agfa Healthcare, and Flipkart. What distinguishes his perspective is the precision of his diagnosis. Working through the Global Curiosity Institute, van Hooydonk developed two empirical tools: an individual curiosity profile measuring three dimensions of inquisitiveness – toward the world, toward others, and toward oneself – and a nine-dimension organisational diagnostic assessing conditions from psychological safety and manager behaviour to failure acceptance and vision clarity. These instruments have been applied across 16 multinationals and studied across 500 professionals. The research revealed a core tension: 90% of leaders surveyed said investing in curiosity supports innovation, yet 50% simultaneously said innovation distracts from operational efficiency. This is not a values gap. It is a structural contradiction embedded in how most organisations function. His two books – The Workplace Curiosity Manifesto (2022) and Curiosity: The Secret Ingredient for Success in Personal and Professional Growth (Capstone, 2025) – develop the argument in full. The central thesis: curiosity is not a personality trait but a learnable, measurable capability that atrophies in environments that reward conformity. At Cognizant, his final corporate appointment, van Hooydonk oversaw learning and development for more than 300,000 associates across a global workforce. That scale makes the question of how environments either enable or suppress curiosity concrete in a way that purely academic research cannot replicate. Having lived and worked in nine countries across Europe and Asia, van Hooydonk brings an account of curiosity as a culturally shaped organisational condition – one that looks different in a Finnish engineering firm, an Indian e-commerce company, and a Gulf energy business, but is subject to the same structural suppressants in all of them. Key speaking topics Workplace curiosity as an organisational capability Intentional curiosity and learning culture design Curiosity-driven leadership Organisational curiosity diagnostics and measurement Building learning organisations Curiosity and innovation at scale Corporate learning strategy Ideal for CHROs and CLOs driving learning culture or capability transformation Senior HR and L&D leaders designing or evaluating learning ecosystems Leadership teams in large organisations where learning agility and adaptability are strategic priorities Boards and senior executives examining organisational resilience and the cultural conditions that support it Audience outcomes A clear, evidence-based account of why large organisations structurally suppress curiosity – and why standard L&D investment does not resolve it Familiarity with a three-part curiosity model (world, others, self) as a practical design language for leadership and team development Understanding of the nine organisational dimensions that enable or limit curiosity, drawn from research across 16 multinational companies A set of specific, actionable moves – applicable to managers, HR teams, and executives – for building conditions where intentional curiosity is measurable and sustained A framework for distinguishing curiosity as a capability from curiosity as a cultural aspiration – and for making the former real

Why organisations work with Stephanie Davies A working method that gets cynical adult audiences to engage with behaviour change without the eye-rolling that usually accompanies culture training. A track record on hard conversations, with a programme at HSBC training more than 500 leaders to handle performance and feedback without flinching. A point of view on engagement grounded in published psychology, set out in her book Laughology: Improve Your Life with the Science of Laughter (Crown House). Two decades inside corporate culture work across HSBC, Nespresso, Nando’s, and government, so the content lands as practitioner advice rather than commentary. A delivery style that holds the room. The comedy training is a tool for retention and recall, not a gimmick layered on top of the content. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Laughology, founded 2006. Author of Laughology: Improve Your Life with the Science of Laughter, Crown House Publishing. Master’s-level training in psychology, focused on humour and organisational performance. Designed and delivered performance-conversation training at HSBC for 500+ leaders. Culture and behaviour programmes with Nespresso, Nando’s, Virgin, O2, and UK government departments. Regular columnist for Training Journal; previously an award-winning stand-up comedian. Biography Most culture programmes lose the room in the first ten minutes. Adults arrive sceptical, the language is corporate, and the behaviours being asked of them feel performative. Laughology was built to solve that delivery problem. Stephanie Davies founded it in 2006 to pair applied psychology with the craft of stand-up, and uses humour as a mechanism for behaviour change rather than as decoration. The substance sits behind the style. Her book, Laughology: Improve Your Life with the Science of Laughter, sets out humour as a thinking skill, drawing on positive psychology and the cognitive research on how laughter shifts perspective and learning retention. Her master’s-level work in psychology runs through the firm’s programmes on engagement, leadership behaviour, and feedback. The client list reflects the practical bias. HSBC commissioned performance-conversation training for more than 500 leaders. Nespresso brought her in to strengthen retail leadership. Nando’s, Virgin, O2, and government departments have used Laughology for culture and behaviour work. Across these, the brief is consistent: get people to commit to a change in how they behave, not just understand why it matters. That practitioner record is what distinguishes her in a crowded happiness-at-work category. Most speakers in the space arrive from coaching, HR, or pop-psychology. Davies arrives from a working comedy career and a psychology specialism in humour, with twenty years of corporate delivery behind her. Key speaking topics Workplace engagement and culture change Psychology of humour at work Performance and feedback conversations Behaviour change in large organisations Leadership development and team culture Mental health and wellbeing in the workplace Resilience and positive psychology Ideal for CHROs and people directors running engagement or culture change agendas. L&D and OD leads commissioning leadership, feedback, or behaviour-change programmes. Boards and executive teams looking for a substantive culture session that an internal audience will actually engage with. Conference organisers programming a keynote that has to do real work on a wellbeing or culture theme. Audience outcomes A working model of humour as a behaviour-change tool, not as entertainment. Language and techniques for running performance and feedback conversations without avoidance. A clearer view of what drives engagement at the level of daily behaviour. Practical positive-psychology techniques for resilience and team morale. A session people actually remember, which is the precondition for any of the above changing behaviour.

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

Why organisations work with Stephen M. R. Covey He treats trust as a measurable economic input, not a cultural sentiment. The Speed of Trust sets out a framework, the 4 cores and 13 behaviors, that converts trust into quantifiable effects on speed and cost. His operating record gives the argument weight. As President and CEO of Covey Leadership Center, he grew the firm into the largest leadership development company in the world before its integration with Franklin Quest, with publisher sources citing a sixty-seven-fold increase in shareholder value during his tenure. Trust & Inspire gives senior leaders explicit operating content for the shift away from command and control, a transition that has been described in management literature for decades but rarely defined in practical terms. He writes from inside the discipline, not outside it. He leads FranklinCovey’s Global Speed of Trust Practice and has worked with organisations across business, government, military, education, healthcare, and NGOs in more than fifty countries. His authority on the subject is independently recognised. Trust Across America/Trust Around the World awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award for “Top Thought Leaders in Trust”. Biography highlights Author of The Speed of Trust, New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller, translated into 22 languages, over 2 million copies sold (Simon & Schuster). Author of Trust & Inspire, Wall Street Journal bestseller, named #1 Leadership Book of 2022 by the Outstanding Work of Literature Awards. Former President and CEO of Covey Leadership Center, which under his leadership became the largest leadership development firm in the world. Co-founder and current leader of FranklinCovey’s Global Speed of Trust Practice; co-founder of CoveyLink Worldwide. Harvard MBA. Has taught trust and leadership in over fifty countries to business, government, military, education, healthcare, and NGO audiences. Lifetime Achievement Award for “Top Thought Leaders in Trust” from Trust Across America/Trust Around the World. Biography Trust is usually treated as the residue of culture, something an organisation either has or does not have. The Speed of Trust argues the opposite: trust is an economic variable, with direct and measurable effects on the speed at which work moves and the cost at which it gets done. The book has sold more than two million copies and been translated into 22 languages, and it remains the reference work in the field. The author is Stephen M. R. Covey. Before he wrote it, he ran the company that taught his father’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to the world. As President and CEO of Covey Leadership Center, he led the strategy that turned the firm into the largest leadership development company in the world; publisher records cite a sixty-seven-fold increase in shareholder value during his tenure. The credibility of his trust thesis sits on that operating record. His second book, Trust & Inspire, takes the argument into leadership style. The case is direct: command and control was an industrial-age design, and most organisations still use it without naming it. Trust and Inspire describes the alternative in operating terms, not in slogans. The book was a Wall Street Journal bestseller and was named #1 Leadership Book of 2022 by the Outstanding Work of Literature Awards. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, leads FranklinCovey’s Global Speed of Trust Practice, and has taught the work in more than fifty countries across business, government, military, education, healthcare, and NGO settings. Trust Across America/Trust Around the World awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award for “Top Thought Leaders in Trust”, recognition from the body that has tracked the discipline for the longest. Key speaking topics Organisational trust Trust as a driver of speed and cost Trust-based leadership The 4 cores and 13 behaviors of high-trust leaders The shift from command and control to trust and inspire Leadership credibility High-trust culture and organisational performance Ideal for CEOs, executive teams, and boards setting the leadership tone for the organisation CHROs and chief people officers redesigning leadership development and culture programmes Transformation, M&A, and post-restructure leaders rebuilding credibility with employees and stakeholders Senior leadership conferences, partner meetings, and government leadership audiences Audience outcomes A working definition of trust as an economic variable, with named effects on the speed and cost of execution The 4 cores and 13 behaviors framework for diagnosing where trust is being earned, eroded, or paid for A clear distinction between command and control leadership and trust and inspire leadership, with operating content for the shift Specific moves for extending, restoring, and embedding trust at the team, organisation, and stakeholder levels A language senior leaders can use with their teams to make trust an explicit competency in hiring, promotion, and performance