Corporate Culture

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 Karen Eber She has run culture and learning inside two of the largest professional environments in the world, GE and Deloitte, so her storytelling work is built around how decisions actually get made in a 90,000-person organisation. Her Perfect Story method is grounded in neuroscience, including how attention, empathy, and trust are formed in the brain during a story, giving leaders a defensible reason to invest in communication craft beyond presentation polish. She works fluently across storytelling for leadership, storytelling for change, and storytelling with data, which means a single engagement can serve a town hall, a board update, and a sales conversation. Her book carries genuine third-party validation: Axiom Business Book Award Silver Medal, International Book Awards winner, and Next Big Ideas Club selection, signalling editorial quality rather than self-published reach. Biography highlights Author of The Perfect Story: How to Tell Stories that Inform, Influence, and Inspire, HarperCollins Leadership / Harper Horizon. TED speaker: “How your brain responds to stories, and why they’re crucial for leaders”. Former Head of Culture and Head of Leadership Development at General Electric. Former Chief Learning Officer / Head of Leadership Development at Deloitte. Guest lecturer at London Business School, MIT, and Stanford. Featured in Fast Company, Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur, NPR, CNBC, Quartz, and Business Insider. Biography Most internal communication inside large organisations is information transfer in slide form. Strategy is announced, change is rolled out, performance is reported, and almost none of it changes how a manager behaves on a Tuesday morning. Karen Eber’s work begins from that problem. She spent two decades inside the kind of environment where this matters most. At General Electric she led Culture and Leadership Development across a global workforce. At Deloitte she ran leadership development for the firm. Those roles required her to land complex messages, on diverse audiences, in cultures that were already crowded with corporate noise. Her book The Perfect Story sets out a practical neuroscience-based method for how leaders find, shape, and deliver stories that hold attention and shift behaviour. It has been recognised with an Axiom Business Book Award Silver Medal, an International Book Awards win, and a Next Big Ideas Club “Must-Read” selection. Her TED talk on the neuroscience of leadership storytelling extended the argument to a public audience. What buyers tend to remember from her sessions is that the craft is teachable. She separates storytelling from charisma, breaks down the brain mechanics of attention and trust, and gives senior people specific tools they can use the same week, whether the audience is a board, a sales team, or a hundred frontline managers reading a town hall transcript on a phone. Key speaking topics Storytelling for leadership and influence Storytelling with data Culture change and communication Executive presence and communication craft Neuroscience of attention, trust, and persuasion Employee engagement and internal communication Ideal for CHROs, Chief Learning Officers, and Heads of Leadership Development designing executive communication and culture programmes. Chief Communications Officers and internal communication leaders responsible for change narratives and town hall content. Sales and marketing leadership teams who need to convert data into narrative buyers act on. Senior leadership teams preparing for major strategy, restructure, or integration announcements. Audience outcomes A working neuroscience-based model for how stories hold attention and create trust. Specific techniques for turning data and strategy slides into narratives that move an audience. A clearer separation between what is rhetoric, what is communication craft, and what is leadership behaviour. Tools senior leaders can apply immediately to town halls, board updates, and customer conversations.

Why organisations work with Rene Godefroy He brings a named, ownable philosophy. The “Village Hero” frame gives leaders a vocabulary for belonging that survives the keynote and shows up in daily behaviour. His client roster is unusually concentrated in frontline, customer-facing organisations. Coca-Cola, Aflac, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Marriott, Hyatt, the U.S. Army. He speaks to the people who actually carry the brand. The resilience material is grounded in a specific lived narrative, not borrowed research. That gives the message authority with audiences who have heard the standard motivational circuit. He writes and speaks for retention and morale outcomes, not abstract inspiration. The brief he answers best is the one that mentions turnover, change fatigue, or a workforce that has stopped believing the slogans. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Village Hero, Inc., Atlanta. Author of Kick Your Excuses Goodbye: No Condition Is Permanent. Keynote work for Coca-Cola, AT&T, Aflac, Verizon Wireless, Marriott Hotels, Hyatt Hotels, and the U.S. Army. Speaker at the National Association for Pupil Transportation and the Michigan Assisted Living Association annual conference. Recognised by the City of Smyrna, Georgia with a dedicated “Rene Godefroy Day”; granted a key to the city by Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Runs humanitarian work supporting orphanages and health clinics in Haiti, partly funded by program fees. Biography Most workplace culture problems are not really about culture. They are about belonging. People decide to stay, contribute and look out for one another long before any engagement survey captures it, and they decide on the basis of small, daily signals from the people above them. That is the territory the “Village Hero” philosophy sits in. The frame comes from a specific origin. Godefroy grew up in a rural Haitian village, arrived in the United States as a young man with almost nothing, and worked through janitorial and service jobs before building a speaking practice. The argument he draws from that life is not biographical theatre. It is a working theory of how belonging is built one act at a time, and how leaders carry disproportionate responsibility for those acts inside an organisation. That theory has been tested against a particular kind of audience. His client list, Coca-Cola, AT&T, Aflac, Verizon Wireless, Marriott, Hyatt, the U.S. Army, is heavy on frontline and customer-facing workforces, where morale, retention and belief in the mission show up directly in operational performance. Kick Your Excuses Goodbye: No Condition Is Permanent extends the same material into individual accountability for change, particularly under pressure and constraint. He is most useful to organisations that have already tried the values posters and the engagement task force, and are now asking a more honest question. What behaviour, repeated daily by managers, would actually rebuild the social contract here. The Village Hero framework gives them a starting answer, and the City of Smyrna, Georgia, which declared a “Rene Godefroy Day” in his honour, gives a small civic indicator of the impression that practice has left. Key speaking topics Resilience and change leadership Workplace culture and belonging Employee engagement and morale Team performance under pressure Frontline leadership Purpose-driven leadership Personal accountability and mindset Ideal for HR, people and culture leaders rebuilding engagement and retention in frontline-heavy workforces Operations and customer experience leaders in retail, hospitality, telecoms, insurance, and logistics Sales kick-offs and dealer or franchisee networks that need a morale reset, not a tactics talk Defence, public sector and uniformed services audiences with high-pressure operating conditions Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for belonging that managers can use the next day, anchored in the “Village Hero” frame A direct, personal challenge to the stories teams tell themselves about change and constraint Concrete behaviours that lift morale and retention without waiting for a new culture programme A renewed sense of purpose for workforces fatigued by repeated restructuring and uncertainty

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 Thomas Erikson A four-colour behavioural vocabulary that a 200-person sales team or a board can adopt in a single session and use in the next meeting, with no consultancy follow-up required. One of the highest-recognition author brands in European business: “Surrounded by Idiots” alone is one of Sweden’s best-selling non-fiction titles ever, with the series at over seven million copies in more than 70 languages. Direct application across the hardest interpersonal terrain leaders actually face: difficult bosses, narcissistic colleagues, manipulative behaviour, conflict in cross-cultural and hybrid teams. More than two decades inside companies such as IKEA, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Volvo and KIA, with roughly 120 keynotes a year keeping the material tested against live corporate audiences. A communicator first: the material is built for retention by non-specialists, so the language survives the journey from the keynote room into Monday-morning behaviour. Biography highlights Author of the “Surrounded by” series, including Surrounded by Idiots, Surrounded by Psychopaths, Surrounded by Bad Bosses and Lazy Employees, Surrounded by Narcissists, Surrounded by Setbacks, Surrounded by Energy Vampires and Surrounded by Liars. More than 12 million books sold across the series, translated into over 70 languages; one of the most translated living Swedish authors. Delivers approximately 120 keynote lectures per year to executive and corporate audiences across Europe. Has mentored executives and run sessions at companies including IKEA, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Volvo and KIA Motors. Twenty-plus years specialising in communication, personality dynamics and interpersonal behaviour in professional settings. Built his keynote material on the colour-coded DISC framework (Red, Yellow, Green, Blue), used to map how people decide, communicate and react under pressure. Biography Most workplace tension is not philosophical. It is two competent people reading the same situation in incompatible ways and deciding the other one is the problem. The “Surrounded by Idiots” series turned that observation into a vocabulary that millions of readers now apply at work without having to read a textbook to use it. The series, beginning with Surrounded by Idiots, has sold more than 12 million copies across more than 70 languages, with subsequent titles extending the framework to psychopaths, narcissists, bad bosses, setbacks, energy vampires and liars. The books rest on the colour-coded DISC model, mapping behaviour onto four types (Red, Yellow, Green, Blue) that describe how different people make decisions, give feedback and behave under pressure. The keynote work has run in parallel for over two decades, with roughly 120 corporate lectures a year. Audiences have included IKEA, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Volvo and KIA Motors. The session is built to leave a room of 50 or 500 with the same shared language, so the colour-coding survives into the next sales call, the next performance review and the next conflict between two senior people who quietly cannot stand each other. What is unusual is the reach. Most communication frameworks live inside training departments. This one has crossed into mass-market reading culture, which means a leadership audience often arrives already half-fluent. The job of the keynote is to turn that recognition into something the organisation can actually use. Key speaking topics Behavioural styles and the DISC colour model Communication across different personality types Difficult colleagues, manipulation and narcissism at work Leadership and how to read your team Sales and the behaviour of the buyer Conflict, feedback and tough conversations Resilience and managing setbacks Ideal for Leadership teams that want a shared language for behaviour and communication Sales and customer-facing organisations whose results depend on reading the other side of the table HR, L&D and culture leads designing development around feedback, conflict and team dynamics Cross-cultural, hybrid and matrix teams where misreads between colleagues compound quickly Audience outcomes A shared four-colour vocabulary the whole audience can use to describe colleagues and clients within the same week A clearer read on their own default style and how it is experienced by people who do not share it Practical adjustments for handling the colleague, boss or client they currently find hardest to deal with A working frame for recognising manipulation, narcissism and other high-cost behaviours before they damage the team A common reference point that survives the keynote and shows up in the next round of meetings, reviews and sales calls

Why organisations work with Ross Reekie He brings primary research material that most engagement speakers do not have: the Fun Jobs Project is a multi-year field experiment in which he personally took on roles from ski instructor to stand-up comedian to test where meaning actually originates at work. He treats meaning as a performance variable, not a wellbeing variable. The argument lands with operating leaders who have stopped believing engagement programmes pay back. His academic base is serious. An Engineering degree from Edinburgh, an MBA and a Master’s in Sustainable Leadership from MGSM Sydney, and PhD-track research at Macquarie give him a credible research spine to sit alongside the field work. He is built for interactive formats. His keynote uses live experiments, props and audience participation rather than slide narration, which suits internal leadership offsites and culture-launch events. He has tested the same content across two continents and across sectors, with named conference platforms including TEDxMonashUniversity, TEDxGlasgowCaledonianUniversity, and the Urban Future Global Conference. Biography highlights Founder of Rise Consulting, Sydney, working with leadership teams on meaningful work and workplace culture. TEDx speaker at TEDxMonashUniversity (2019) and TEDxGlasgowCaledonianUniversity (2019). Creator of the Fun Jobs Project, a live research experiment into the sources of meaning at work. Host of The Meaning of Work podcast, with hundreds of interviews from interns to chief executives. MBA and Master’s in Sustainable Leadership from MGSM Sydney; Engineering degree from the University of Edinburgh; Master’s in Research underway at Macquarie University. Twenty years of consulting work with leadership teams across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Australia. Biography Most organisations have stopped believing their own engagement data. Scores hold steady, but discretionary effort drains away, and the standard interventions of values workshops, recognition platforms and mission refreshes no longer change behaviour. The interesting question is no longer whether people are engaged. It is what they are committing to, and why. Ross Reekie has spent two decades inside that question. He founded Rise Consulting in Sydney to work with leadership teams on meaningful work and workplace culture, building on twenty years of consulting across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Australia. His academic base sits alongside the practice: an Engineering degree from the University of Edinburgh, an MBA and a Master’s in Sustainable Leadership from MGSM Sydney, and Master’s research at Macquarie University on what makes work matter. The Fun Jobs Project is what sets the work apart. After burning out as the meaningful-work expert who had lost meaning in his own work, Reekie ran a live experiment on himself, taking roles from ski instructor to stand-up comedian to opera extra to test where engagement actually comes from. The output is a model of meaning that starts with a playful, exploratory mindset rather than with mission statements, and that treats curiosity and connection as performance inputs. He brings the same material to TEDx stages at Monash and Glasgow Caledonian, to the Urban Future Global Conference, and to private leadership rooms. His keynote runs as a live, interactive session rather than a talk, with props and audience experiments built in. For a senior people or transformation leader trying to revive a tired culture, he gives them a research-grounded argument they can hand to an operating board. Key speaking topics Meaningful work and workplace culture Employee engagement and the social contract of work Purpose and authenticity in leadership Burnout and recovery in senior teams Belonging and team connection Fear as a performance blocker Playful curiosity as a leadership capability Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers rebuilding engagement after a period of flat scores or fatigued change programmes Heads of culture and internal communications launching or refreshing a purpose narrative Leadership teams and executive offsites looking for a working session rather than a talk Conference organisers in the future-of-work, employee experience, and urban or civic-leadership space Audience outcomes A research-grounded view of why meaning at work is a performance question, not a wellbeing question A clear distinction between engagement programmes that move behaviour and those that do not Specific language for the mindset shifts that produce more discretionary commitment at work Practical prompts for leaders to test on their own teams before changing anything organisation-wide A felt experience of a working session, not a lecture, that participants can replicate in their own offsites

Why organisations work with James Peach Twenty years of senior in-house brand work at Innocent, Coca-Cola, Uber and Vinted, including running a 120-person team across 18 countries through Vinted’s first profit milestone. He speaks from the operator’s seat, not the consultant’s chair. The Growth Project, his own framework, replaces the generic growth-mindset language most leadership programmes default to with a behavioural model built around how teams actually break and recover. A solo unsupported world cycle of 41,000km across 38 countries gives him a working laboratory for sustained performance under pressure that most performance speakers do not have. The expedition material is evidence, not metaphor. Active ambassadorship for CALM and visible mental health advocacy mean he can speak honestly about burnout and recovery without slipping into the wellness-industry register that senior audiences reject. Equally credible on brand and marketing strategy when the brief calls for it, drawing on direct accountability for some of the most-watched consumer brands of the last two decades. Biography highlights Former Global Brand Director, Vinted, leading a team of 120 across 18 countries during the platform’s path to first profit Former Head of Brand & Campaigns UKI, Uber, and former UK Senior Brand Manager, Innocent Drinks Career experience also includes Coca-Cola, alongside founder mentoring from seed to scale-up Founder of The Growth Project, a proprietary framework on resilience, performance and team growth Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society; Ambassador for CALM, the Campaign Against Living Miserably Cycled 41,000km solo and unsupported around the world over two years, across 38 countries; completed the UK’s first full-country triathlon spanning its length, width and height Biography Most senior teams are not short of strategy. They are short of the human bandwidth to execute it after three years of restructure, cost programmes and AI-driven redesign. Resilience, in that context, is not a wellness benefit. It is whether your leadership bench can still make sharp decisions on a Friday afternoon in month thirty of permanent change. That is the working problem James Peach addresses. Twenty years inside Innocent, Coca-Cola, Uber and Vinted, including a Global Brand Director role at Vinted leading 120 people across 18 countries through the platform’s first profit milestone, gave him a direct view of how brand-led businesses hold together when growth flattens and pressure builds. The Growth Project, his own framework, sits on that experience. The expedition record is the second source. Two years cycling 41,000km solo and unsupported across 38 countries, hikes across South and Central America and Scandinavia, and the first full-length, full-width, full-height triathlon of the United Kingdom are not anecdotes in his talks. They are case material on sustained performance, recovery cycles, and decision quality when conditions degrade. His Royal Geographical Society fellowship sits behind that work. The third strand is his ambassadorship for CALM, the Campaign Against Living Miserably. It lets him speak about burnout, recovery and mental health in operator language, with the credibility of someone who has done the corporate hours and the physical extremes, and stayed honest about both. Key speaking topics Resilience and performance under sustained pressure Team and culture leadership through change Brand-led business growth and reinvention Mental health, burnout and recovery in senior leadership Lessons from extreme endurance applied to commercial teams High-performance team behaviours Building cultures that compound growth Ideal for CHROs, transformation leads and senior HR teams running multi-year change programmes CMOs and brand leaders rebuilding marketing functions for relevance and growth Executive teams entering a profitability or efficiency phase after a long growth cycle Leadership offsites and senior all-hands focused on team performance and wellbeing Audience outcomes A working definition of resilience that holds up in operating reviews, not only in HR comms A concrete read on what changes inside a high-performing team when pressure becomes constant Specific behaviours leaders can name and reinforce to stop quiet attrition and burnout in senior layers Honest language for talking about mental health with senior people without defaulting to wellness cliches A renewed argument for why brand and culture are operating assets, drawn from inside Innocent, Uber and Vinted

Why organisations work with Gabriela Salinas She converts brand into a number a CFO will defend. Her methodology training underpins valuations used in M&A, licensing, litigation, and tax disputes at companies including Bank of America, Telefónica, and Repsol. She sits inside the rulebook. Membership of ISO/PC 231, the committee behind the international brand valuation standard, means she can speak with first-hand authority on what counts as a credible valuation and what does not. Her sustainability research pushes back on the prevailing ESG storyline. Perceived sustainability lifts brand value only when customers see it improving the product, a finding that reframes how marketing teams should brief CFOs on ESG spend. Three published books on brand valuation, including the Wiley reference manual cited across the discipline, give her a depth of source material that bureau speakers in marketing rarely match. She teaches the next generation of CFOs and CMOs at IE Business School, which means her frameworks are tested every term against live cases brought by senior executives. Biography highlights Senior Director, Brand Finance, and Global Managing Director of the Brand Finance Institute Adjunct Professor of Strategic Brand Management and Brand Valuation at IE Business School since 2011 Author of The International Brand Valuation Manual (Wiley, 2009) and two earlier brand valuation titles Member of ISO/PC 231, the international committee for the brand valuation standard Published in the Journal of Brand Management, Marketing Science Institute, and Harvard Deusto Business Review Previously Global Senior Brand Manager at Deloitte and Managing Director at Brand Finance Iberia Biography Brand is the largest single intangible on many corporate balance sheets, and one of the least understood by the people who sign off on its budget. Boards approve brand investment with little sense of how it converts to enterprise value. CFOs ask for a number and receive a story. Gabriela Salinas works at the seam between marketing and finance, where that confusion is most expensive. As Senior Director at Brand Finance and Global Managing Director of the Brand Finance Institute, she advises corporations on what their brand is worth, how to measure it, and how to manage it as a financial asset. Her client work has included Bank of America, Telefónica, Repsol, Mapfre, Iberia, LaLiga, and Johnson & Johnson. Her authority rests on three foundations. Twenty years of practitioner work across Brand Finance, Deloitte, and FutureBrand in New York, Madrid, Singapore, and Buenos Aires. Three published books on brand valuation, including the Wiley manual that remains a standard reference in the field. And membership of ISO/PC 231, the international committee that wrote the global standard for brand valuation methodology. Her recent research with Carmen Abril at Complutense University tests a question CFOs have been asking quietly for years. Does sustainability add brand value? The finding: only when customers see it improving the product. That answer travels well in rooms where marketing teams are under pressure to justify ESG spend in financial terms. Key speaking topics Brand valuation and intangible asset measurement Brand as a financial asset on the balance sheet Sustainability and brand value Corporate reputation and brand architecture Strategic brand management Brand portfolio strategy in M&A and licensing Ideal for CFOs and CMOs working to align brand investment with measurable enterprise value Boards reviewing brand performance, M&A intangibles, or ESG capital allocation Marketing and finance leadership teams jointly accountable for brand strategy Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for discussing brand in financial terms with CFOs, auditors, and investors Clarity on which brand metrics actually predict commercial outcomes and which are noise A defensible position on whether and how sustainability investment translates into brand value Familiarity with the ISO methodology that underpins formal brand valuation in M&A, tax, and litigation

Why organisations work with Jeanette Bronée She treats self-care as a leadership discipline, not a wellbeing programme. Her Power-Pausing method is built for executives who cannot afford to slow down but cannot afford to decide badly either. She brings two decades of work with Fortune 500 organisations including Microsoft, BlackRock, HSBC, Siemens, and the U.S. Navy, and has presented at the United Nations. Her book The Self-Care Mindset (Wiley, 2022) gives clients a tested framework leaders can apply between sessions, not a speaker high that fades by Monday. She contributed the chapter on Power-Pausing in Thinkers50 and Wiley’s Connectedness, a recognition that places her work alongside the field’s most cited voices on human connection and leadership. Her Danish business background and US executive experience give her a register that travels comfortably across European and North American leadership audiences. Biography highlights Author, The Self-Care Mindset, Wiley (2022) Contributing author, Connectedness, Thinkers50 and Wiley, foreword by Rita McGrath Three-time TEDx speaker, including TEDxUNCPembroke Founder of Path for Life, established 2004 Former Board Member, National Speakers Association New York Speaking clients include Microsoft, BlackRock, HSBC, Siemens, eBay, McKesson, U.S. Navy, SHRM, and the United Nations Biography Most leadership advice on pressure assumes the answer is more discipline. Bronée argues the opposite. The capacity to lead well under sustained load is built by what happens in the seconds before a decision, not by what happens after burnout has already arrived. Her Power-Pausing method, developed over twenty years of consulting work, treats that micro-pause as a metacognitive operating practice, not a wellness habit. The work has a specific origin. She built her first company at 23, ran a team of 50 by 25, and was diagnosed with the early markers of the cancer that had killed both her parents. She left the fashion industry, founded Path for Life in 2004, and spent the next two decades testing what actually changes when leaders rebuild their relationship to attention, stress, and trust. That research now sits in The Self-Care Mindset, published by Wiley in 2022, and in her contributing chapter to Connectedness, the Thinkers50 and Wiley volume on authentic human connection at work, with a foreword by Columbia Business School’s Rita McGrath. She has delivered three TEDx talks and worked with Microsoft, BlackRock, HSBC, Siemens, McKesson, the U.S. Navy, and the United Nations. The current emphasis is on trust and judgement in AI-saturated workplaces. As more cognitive load shifts to machines, the leadership variables that matter most are the ones that cannot be automated: the quality of attention a leader brings to a hard call, and the conditions that allow a team to disagree well. Bronée’s argument is that those variables are trainable. Key speaking topics Self-leadership under pressure Power-Pausing as a decision-making practice Building cultures of trust in AI-saturated workplaces The Self-Care Mindset for senior leaders Care-Driven Leadership Resilience and sustainable performance Human capacity in the age of AI Ideal for CEOs, CHROs and senior HR leaders rebuilding the social contract with their workforce Leadership development sponsors designing programmes for newly senior executives Organisations introducing AI tools and worried about the cultural cost of speed without judgement Conferences for women in senior leadership and executive transition programmes Audience outcomes A working definition of self-care as a leadership capability, separate from wellbeing programming The Power-Pausing practice as a tool for higher-quality decisions under time pressure A clearer view of how trust is built or eroded in the small interactions that precede big calls Language to use with their own teams about capacity, not just performance An honest read on where their current culture rewards urgency at the expense of judgement

Why organisations work with Kelly Mackin A research instrument leaders can actually use. The Motives Met Human Needs Assessment surfaces the 28 psychological, emotional, and social needs that drive a specific employee, team, or culture, replacing one-size-fits-all engagement scores with personalised data. A direct challenge to universal hierarchy thinking. Mackin’s research argues that Maslow-style and engagement-survey frameworks misrepresent how needs actually distribute across a workforce, and gives leaders a defensible alternative. Award-winning published work. Work Life Well-Lived is a Nonfiction Authors Association Bronze Award winner and an Amazon best-seller in its category, giving senior buyers a citable reference point. Practical depth beyond keynote theatre. Mackin trained as a cognitive behavioural coach and meditation teacher and runs assessments, workshops, and leadership accelerators, so the keynote connects to a delivery system the organisation can run after she leaves. Biography highlights CEO and co-founder, Motives Met, the workplace well-being platform behind her research. Author of Work Life Well-Lived: The Motives Met Pathway to No-B.S. Well-Being at Work (Greenleaf Book Group, 2024). Nonfiction Authors Association Bronze Book Award winner. Creator of the Motives Met Human Needs Assessment, identifying 28 motives that drive thriving at work. BA in Communications, Wittenberg University; certified cognitive behavioural therapy practitioner and meditation teacher. Host of DisruptHR San Diego; featured in Authority Magazine and the Human Capital Innovations webinar series. Biography Most workplace well-being programmes assume that everyone is motivated by the same things in roughly the same order. That assumption shapes every engagement survey, every wellness benefit, every “top reasons people quit” list. It is also wrong. Kelly Mackin’s research at Motives Met identifies 28 distinct psychological, emotional, and social motives, and shows that the ranking varies sharply between individuals, teams, and roles. The work sits inside Motives Met, the platform she co-founded and leads as CEO. Its core instrument, the Human Needs Assessment, surfaces an individual’s top motives and maps them against the conditions a manager or organisation is actually providing. The output is a usable diagnostic for leaders who have run out of patience with engagement scores that do not tell them what to do next. Her 2024 book, Work Life Well-Lived: The Motives Met Pathway to No-B.S. Well-Being at Work, became an Amazon category best-seller and won a Bronze Book Award from the Nonfiction Authors Association. The technical foundation comes from her training as a cognitive behavioural therapy practitioner and meditation teacher, which she pairs with quantitative research methods to keep the framework empirical rather than inspirational. For HR and culture leaders, the relevance is operational. Mackin gives them a vocabulary for the gap between what a workforce reports on a survey and what individual people actually need from their work, and a measurement layer they can act on across hybrid teams, multigenerational workforces, and post-restructure cultures. Key speaking topics Workplace well-being and the science of thriving at work Psychological needs and motivation at work Human-first leadership and management practice Stress, burnout, and work-life harmony Psychological safety and emotional inclusion Culture design for hybrid and multigenerational teams Ideal for CHROs and heads of people redesigning engagement and well-being strategy Culture, DEI, and talent leaders responsible for retention and inclusion outcomes Senior managers and team leaders running large or multigenerational teams Leadership development and L&D heads designing manager capability programmes Audience outcomes A working understanding of the 28 motives framework and how it differs from Maslow and engagement-survey models Specific questions leaders can ask their teams to surface individual motives, not just aggregate sentiment A diagnostic lens on where current well-being and engagement spend is misaligned with actual employee needs Language and structure for conversations on burnout, work-life harmony, and psychological safety A clearer link between well-being investment and performance outcomes leaders can defend internally

Why organisations work with Rashmi Airan She has lived the failure she now teaches against. A Columbia-trained lawyer who went to federal prison for fraud tied to the housing crisis is a different category of voice on judgement under pressure than a consultant or compliance trainer. Her Clarity Loop gives leadership teams a four-question, sixty-second discipline they can actually run inside a real decision, not a values poster they nod at and forget. She names the specific mechanisms that erode judgement, rationalisation, normalisation, silence, group pressure, and urgency, from the inside, because they are the ones that took down her own career. Her work connects judgement, resilience, and mental health, which makes her relevant to leaders under sustained strain rather than only to the compliance function. Biography highlights Columbia Law School graduate, with honours; undergraduate degree from UNC-Chapel Hill; former Wall Street investment banker. Served six months in federal prison for fraud tied to the US housing crisis, after a conspiracy conviction as a closing attorney. Creator of the Clarity Loop, a four-question decision framework, and the RISE Through It® process for recovering judgement after setback. Author of ALL RISE: A Lawyer’s Evolution from Prison to Purpose, endorsed by Marshall Goldsmith. TEDx speaker, Against the Slippery Slope (TEDxGreenville), on ethical blind spots and decision-making under pressure. Has delivered keynotes for leaders at Deloitte, Coca-Cola, Merck, Comcast, Cardinal Health, and Medtronic. Media appearances on ABC, PBS, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal; board director, Overtown Youth Center and Alonzo Mourning Foundation. Biography Most damaging decisions in business are not made by reckless people. They are made by capable, experienced leaders under pressure, one reasonable-seeming compromise at a time. Rashmi Airan knows the pattern from the inside. A Columbia Law School graduate and former Wall Street investment banker, she built a successful legal career before a conspiracy conviction tied to the housing crisis sent her to federal prison. That collapse became the subject of her work rather than a footnote to it. For more than a decade she has studied how speed, incentives, and the stories leaders tell themselves quietly bend judgement, and how to interrupt that drift before it hardens into damage. Her central idea is that integrity needs infrastructure: strong values are necessary but not sufficient under real pressure. The practical answer she teaches is the Clarity Loop, a four-question pause that takes about sixty seconds and forces a leader to name the pressure, examine their incentives, find the blind spot, and check the decision before acting. Her longer RISE Through It® process, Reframe, Identify, Surrender, Evolve, addresses the harder climb back after a setback. She has brought both to leadership teams at Deloitte, Coca-Cola, Merck, Comcast, Cardinal Health, and Medtronic. She is the author of ALL RISE: A Lawyer’s Evolution from Prison to Purpose, and her story has been covered by ABC, PBS, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. She serves on the board of the Overtown Youth Center and the Alonzo Mourning Foundation and is an ambassador for The Key Clubhouse, work rooted in mental health and second-chance opportunity, the ground she had to rebuild on herself. Key speaking topics Decision-making under pressure Values-based leadership Resilience after professional setback Decision drift and the conditions for ethical lapse Behavioural science and judgement Mental health and senior leadership Risk awareness for boards and executive teams Ideal for Boards, general counsel, and compliance leadership setting the ethical operating standard for the organisation. Partner groups in law, accounting, banking, and professional services where individual judgement carries firm-wide risk. Senior leadership development programmes inside Fortune-scale companies focused on decision quality and resilience. Women’s leadership forums and emerging-leader cohorts where authority, voice, and self-knowledge are central. Audience outcomes A four-question method, the Clarity Loop, they can run inside a real decision before they act. The vocabulary to name decision drift as it happens in their teams, rather than after the damage. A more honest account of how pressure, incentives, and culture combine to bend capable people’s judgement. Permission to treat mental health, fear, and self-doubt as leadership issues rather than private weakness. A first-person reference point that leaders carry back into their own teams when the pressure starts to rise.

Why organisations work with Mike Robbins He treats appreciation, vulnerability, and psychological safety as operational levers, not soft values, and gives leaders a vocabulary their teams can act on the next morning. He has spent twenty years inside the cultures of Google, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, eBay, Gap, Schwab, Airbnb, the NBA, and Pixar. The frame is tested against how high-stakes teams actually behave. His book Bring Your Whole Self to Work and the related TEDxBerkeley talk gave senior leaders a usable language for authenticity that does not collapse into oversharing or performance. He holds the Certified Speaking Professional designation from the National Speakers Association, the top earned credential in his profession, and is one of fewer than ten percent of speakers worldwide to hold it. His perspective sits on an unusual seam: elite-level baseball at Stanford and in the Kansas City Royals system, then two decades of cultural work with serious operating companies. The room recognises the standard he is calling for. Biography highlights Author of five books published by Hay House, including Bring Your Whole Self to Work and We’re All in This Together, translated into fifteen languages. Speaker at TEDxBerkeley, with three TEDx talks that have reached close to 2.3 million views. Featured in the New York Times, on ABC News, and in Harvard Business Review; hosts the weekly We’re All in This Together podcast. Stanford graduate (American Studies, specialisation in race and ethnicity); pitched for Stanford in the College World Series. Drafted by the New York Yankees out of high school; played three professional seasons in the Kansas City Royals minor league system. Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), National Speakers Association. Biography Most teams underperform their talent. Not because the people are wrong, but because the cultural conditions around them, trust, candour, appreciation, the willingness to be honest under pressure, are weaker than the work demands. That gap is the territory Mike Robbins has worked in for twenty-five years, across more than 2,000 programmes in 17 countries. His five books, published by Hay House and translated into fifteen languages, build a coherent argument about how authenticity and appreciation operate as performance variables inside teams. Bring Your Whole Self to Work and We’re All in This Together are the most cited. Both have moved from leadership reading lists into the working language that companies like Google, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, Airbnb, the NBA, and Pixar use to describe their own culture work. The intellectual frame is sharpened by an unusual background. Robbins pitched for Stanford in the College World Series and spent three seasons in the Kansas City Royals minor league system before injuries ended his playing career. He understands what high-performance teams demand of the people inside them, and he understands what fails. That perspective sits alongside a Stanford degree in American Studies with a specialisation in race and ethnicity, and the Certified Speaking Professional designation from the National Speakers Association. His TEDxBerkeley talk on bringing your whole self to work has reached audiences far beyond corporate stages, and his Forbes column extends the same argument into how leaders practise appreciation, navigate change, and create psychological safety without slipping into performance. The throughline is consistent: culture is not climate, it is capability, and the leaders who treat it that way get more from their people. Key speaking topics Team culture and psychological safety Authenticity and vulnerability at work Appreciation as a performance practice Emotional intelligence for leaders Belonging and inclusion inside teams Leading through change and uncertainty Trust and high-performing teams Human connection in an AI-accelerating workplace Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers rebuilding engagement and team culture after restructure or hybrid transition Senior leadership teams who want a shared language for trust, candour, and appreciation Heads of talent and learning designing culture and leadership development programmes Sales, R&D, and operating leaders responsible for the performance of large, distributed teams Audience outcomes A practical model for psychological safety that leaders can apply inside their own teams the same week Specific behaviours that turn appreciation from a soft idea into a measurable team practice A clear distinction between authenticity that builds trust and disclosure that erodes it Tools for engaging conflict directly rather than routing around it A shared team vocabulary for the cultural conditions that high performance actually depends on