Corporate Culture

Why organisations work with Roger Steare His ethicability RIGHT framework was adopted by BP into its 2011 Code of Conduct after Deepwater Horizon, and the programme was later recognised by the US Department of Justice in BP’s US$20.8 billion Consent Agreement. Few decision frameworks have been stress-tested at that scale. The MoralDNA psychometric, co-designed with psychologist Pavlos Stamboulides, has profiled more than 180,000 people across 200 countries. It gives boards a measurable language for ethical culture rather than a values poster. He has built ethical leadership programmes for BP, Citigroup, HSBC, PwC, the Financial Services Authority and the Serious Fraud Office. His client list is the regulator and the regulated, which is rare. He writes for the Financial Times as a columnist and reports for the Chartered Management Institute on the link between moral character and organisational performance. The argument is empirical, not aspirational. He brings the same ethical reasoning to AI governance that he applied to banking and energy. Boards confronting AI deployment get a method, not a moral panic. Biography highlights Honorary Visiting Professor of Organisational Ethics, Cass Business School (now Bayes), City, University of London Visiting Professor of European Studies, College of Europe, Bruges Co-designer of MoralDNA, used by more than 180,000 people in over 200 countries Author of Ethicability (5th edition) and Thinking Outside the Inbox; author of The MoralDNA of Performance for the Chartered Management Institute Designer of BP’s global ethical leadership programme for 4,000 leaders following Deepwater Horizon; framework cited in BP’s US Department of Justice Consent Agreement Financial Times columnist; Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts Biography Most ethics work in large organisations is theatre. Codes of conduct sit on intranets, e-learning modules are completed quickly, and the actual decisions get made the same way they always were. The MoralDNA work, built with psychologist Pavlos Stamboulides and now profiling over 180,000 people across 200 countries, was designed to interrupt that pattern. It measures how people actually reason about right and wrong, not what they say they value. The ethicability RIGHT framework took the same logic into operational decision-making. After Deepwater Horizon, BP incorporated it into the 2011 Code of Conduct and rolled an associated programme out to 4,000 leaders. In 2016 the US Department of Justice cited that programme as part of BP’s US$20.8 billion Consent Agreement. It is one of very few ethical decision tools stress-tested under genuine regulatory and reputational fire. The broader client list spans Citigroup, HSBC, PwC, Nationwide, Openreach, the Financial Services Authority and the Serious Fraud Office. As Honorary Visiting Professor at Cass Business School (now Bayes) he taught the same material to Executive MBA cohorts, and as Visiting Professor at the College of Europe he extended the work into European public policy. His Financial Times column and his Chartered Management Institute report, The MoralDNA of Performance, argue that moral character is correlated with measurable organisational outcomes. That argument now extends to AI. The questions a board faces about model deployment, accountability and bias are not new ethical questions, they are old ones in faster machinery. The work he brings to AI governance is the same reasoning he brought to banking after 2008 and to oil after 2010: a tested method for deciding what is right when commercial, legal and moral answers diverge. Key speaking topics Values-based leadership and ethical decision-making AI ethics and responsible technology governance Organisational culture and integrity Trust and the social contract of business Moral reasoning at board level Ethics in financial services and regulated industries Ideal for Boards and executive committees facing ethical or reputational exposure Chief Risk Officers, General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officers shaping culture beyond compliance Senior leaders in regulated sectors: financial services, energy, healthcare, defence Heads of AI, Chief Data Officers and technology leaders setting deployment standards Audience outcomes A tested method (ethicability RIGHT) for making decisions when commercial, legal and ethical pressures conflict A common language for ethical culture grounded in the MoralDNA evidence base A clearer account of why values-based leadership is correlated with organisational performance A practical framing for AI governance questions that boards can act on

Why organisations work with Alessandra Dabul A board chair and M&A lawyer who has spent three decades inside cross-border deals, so her ESG perspective lands as governance and diligence content, not as advocacy. President of the Board at Gavea Angels and board member at AmCham Brasil, giving her a working line of sight into how investors and corporates in Latin America are actually pricing ESG into capital decisions. Brings the rare combination of IBGC corporate governance certification with executive education in Sustainable Capitalism at UC Berkeley Law and Sustainable Business Strategy at Harvard Business School, applied to live private and public company boards. Speaks fluently in English and French to international audiences, with deep specificity on the Brazil and broader Latin American context that most global ESG speakers cover only thinly. Founding partner of two Brazilian firms focused on M&A and family business governance, which gives her credibility on succession, owner transitions, and the ESG questions that surface during ownership change. Biography highlights Founding partner of Pereira, Dabul Advogados and of RCA Governanca e Sucessoes, both Brazil-based firms. President of the Board at Gavea Angels, one of Brazil’s longest-standing angel investor networks. Board member at AmCham Brasil and member of Women Corporate Directors Brazil Chapter. Former director at Deloitte and senior manager at KPMG, with prior leadership at EY in southern Brazil. Masters and PhD in Economic Law and Social and Environmental Law; IBGC corporate governance certification. Executive education in Sustainable Capitalism and ESG at UC Berkeley Law, and in Sustainable Business Strategy at Harvard Business School. Biography Most boards in emerging markets are still treating ESG as a reporting exercise. The directors who have lived through cross-border M&A know the cost of that posture. Diligence opens up environmental liabilities, governance gaps, and labour exposures that were invisible in the management deck, and the deal repricing happens in the room. Alessandra Dabul has spent close to thirty years inside that room. She built her career advising European, North American, and Canadian corporates entering Brazil through acquisition, first as a director at Deloitte and senior manager at KPMG, with earlier leadership at EY, and now as founding partner of Pereira, Dabul Advogados and of RCA Governanca e Sucessoes. The second firm reflects the part of her practice focused on family business succession, where ownership transitions surface governance and ESG questions that cannot be deferred. Her board work runs in parallel. She is President of the Board at Gavea Angels, one of Brazil’s longest-standing angel investor networks, and a board member at AmCham Brasil. She holds IBGC corporate governance certification and has completed executive education in Sustainable Capitalism at UC Berkeley Law and Sustainable Business Strategy at Harvard Business School. The combination matters because the substance of ESG governance, as she frames it, is whether the board can defend a capital allocation, a deal, or a succession decision when it is questioned by an acquirer, a regulator, or a limited partner. That is the conversation she brings into the room: ESG as a discipline of decision, tested against the realities of M&A, board accountability, and investor capital in a Latin American market that does not yet have the regulatory scaffolding of Europe, but increasingly has the scrutiny. Key speaking topics ESG governance for boards and investment committees Sustainable business strategy in emerging markets Corporate governance and board effectiveness Cross-border M&A and post-acquisition integration in Latin America Family business succession and ownership transitions Angel investment and early-stage capital in Brazil Ideal for Boards and audit committees of multinationals with Brazilian or Latin American operations Chief sustainability officers and general counsel managing ESG diligence and reporting Private equity, venture capital, and angel investor networks pricing ESG into deal flow Family business owners and family office leadership facing succession or governance reform Audience outcomes A clearer view of the specific ESG questions that surface in cross-border M&A diligence, and how to answer them at board level. A working framework for distinguishing ESG narrative from ESG governance, with examples from Brazilian and Latin American board practice. Practical reference points on how angel investor networks and corporate boards are integrating ESG into capital decisions today. A grounded perspective on family business succession, including where ownership transitions create governance risk.

Why organisations work with Jason Harris He brings a working framework, No Fail Trust, that he has applied with Cisco Systems, Caterpillar, Ford and Lockheed Martin, not a set of war stories repackaged as leadership lessons. His operational credibility is current. He still flies commercial widebody aircraft for American Airlines, so the standards he teaches are standards he is still held to. He commanded a KC-46 air refuelling squadron, which means he has run a real organisation with real accountability for safety, performance and people, not only led from the cockpit. He taught Strategy and Innovation at the US Air Force Academy, which gives the framework an academic spine that most ex-military speakers do not have. His material translates cleanly to civilian teams under restructure, hybrid working strain or post-incident recovery, where the question is whether trust will hold when conditions degrade. Biography highlights Retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, nearly 30 years of service across active duty and the Air Force Reserve Command, concluding as a flying Squadron Commander. US Air Force Academy graduate, later instructor in the Academy’s Military and Strategic Studies department. 11 combat deployments, 470 combat sorties, more than 2,000 combat hours across Iraq, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. Co-author of “Aiming Higher: A Journey Through Military Aviation Leadership” (RTI Press, 2022), reviewed in the USAFA Journal of Character and Leadership Development. Commercial pilot with American Airlines, type-rated on the Airbus A320 family and Boeing 757, 767 and 777. Featured in Forbes and on the History Channel series “Bermuda Triangle: Into Cursed Waters”. Biography A cargo aircraft taking fire on approach is not the place to discover that a crew does not trust each other. The cost of unspoken doubt in that environment is measurable in seconds and lives. Jason Harris flew 470 combat sorties in environments where that calculation was not theoretical. That operating context shaped a leadership method, not a memoir. The No Fail Trust framework codifies what high-functioning aircrews actually do: the habits of disclosure, calibration and accountability that hold a team together when conditions degrade. He has carried it into Cisco Systems, Caterpillar, Ford and Lockheed Martin, where the trust problem looks different on the surface but obeys the same logic underneath. Harris also brings the structural side. He taught Strategy and Innovation at the US Air Force Academy and commanded a KC-46 air refuelling squadron, which means he has been responsible for organisational design, safety culture and people decisions, not only flight operations. His co-authored book “Aiming Higher” (RTI Press, 2022) was reviewed in the Academy’s Journal of Character and Leadership Development, which is rare for a bureau speaker working in this lane. He still flies. As an American Airlines pilot type-rated across the Airbus A320 family and the Boeing 757, 767 and 777, the standards he asks corporate teams to consider are standards he is still operating under in the next week’s flight schedule. Key speaking topics Trust as an operational capability Leadership under high-consequence pressure Team performance in distributed and hybrid environments Psychological safety and crew resource management Decision-making under uncertainty Culture in safety-critical organisations Leading after restructure or incident Ideal for Boards and executive teams confronting a trust gap after restructure, leadership change or a public incident CHROs and culture leads designing for safety-critical or distributed teams Operational leadership cohorts in regulated sectors: aviation, energy, defence, logistics, financial services Sales kick-offs and leadership summits where the brief calls for credibility under pressure rather than motivational lift Audience outcomes A working definition of trust that can be observed, measured and rebuilt, rather than asserted A method for surfacing unspoken doubt inside senior teams before it becomes an operational cost A clearer view of how psychological safety, accountability and decision speed reinforce each other under pressure Specific behavioural habits drawn from aircrew practice that translate to civilian operating environments A sharper read on what leadership presence looks like when conditions are not stable

Why organisations work with Eric Termuende He gives leadership teams a working language for incremental change. The “one-degree shift” framework reframes culture work as a sequence of small, low-resistance moves teams can actually make, instead of a programme to be launched. His research base is original. Rethink Work and the surveys behind it focus on what attracts and retains the right people for a specific workplace, not the best people in the abstract, which is a more useful question for most CHROs. He pitches at team level, not enterprise level. Most future-of-work speakers operate at workforce-strategy altitude. Termuende speaks to the manager and the leader of leaders, which is where engagement and retention are actually won or lost. He has tested the material against operating environments at Amazon, IBM, Coca-Cola, Toyota, and Nokia. The keynotes have been refined through repeated commercial use, not built for the stage. Biography highlights Co-Founder of NoW of Work, a workplace innovation and leadership consultancy. Author of Rethink Work (Barlow Books), an Amazon best-seller on engagement and retention. Named to American Express’s Top 100 Emerging Innovators under 35. 2022 Arch Award for Early Career Achievement, Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. TEDx speaker (TEDxBCIT, “Bigger than Work”) and Walrus Talks contributor. Host of the One Degree Shift podcast, interviewing operators and executives on incremental team change. Biography Most culture programmes fail not because the diagnosis is wrong, but because the prescribed change is too big to land. Teams are asked to adopt new behaviours on top of existing workload, and the new behaviours do not survive the first quarter. Eric Termuende’s work begins from this observation. The argument running through Rethink Work and the surveys behind it is that engagement and retention are decided at the team level, by a small number of recurring behaviours, and that the right intervention is operational rather than aspirational. NoW of Work, the consultancy Termuende co-founded, is built around that premise. The “one-degree shift” framework is its working vocabulary: small, specific behaviour changes designed to reduce friction and build trust without triggering another transformation initiative. The credentials sit underneath the argument. American Express named him to its Top 100 Emerging Innovators. The University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business gave him its Arch Award for Early Career Achievement in 2022. The material has been refined in front of audiences at Amazon, IBM, Coca-Cola, Toyota, Nokia, and Zoom, and on TEDx and Walrus stages. For senior people leaders, the proposition is unusually concrete. Termuende leaves an audience with a way to act on Monday morning, not a thesis to debate. That is rare in the future-of-work category, where most speakers operate one level too high to be useful to the line managers who actually run the teams. Key speaking topics Future of work and workforce design Team performance and trust Talent attraction and retention Workplace culture and engagement Multigenerational teams Leadership in uncertainty AI and the manager’s role Ideal for CHROs and people leaders responsible for engagement and retention strategy Leadership development and learning teams designing manager curricula Operations and divisional leaders running multigenerational teams under change Executive offsites focused on culture and talent in growth or post-merger contexts Audience outcomes A working framework for designing small behavioural shifts that hold at team level A clearer answer to which people the organisation should be attracting, not just how to attract more Practical positions on the multigenerational workforce that line managers can apply A reframing of culture work as operational practice, not communications activity

Why organisations work with Lisa Snowdon She has spent two decades in front of national audiences on Capital FM, ITV and Sky, and brings that presence into a room that has never discussed menopause out loud before. Her advocacy is organised, not anecdotal. As a founding voice in Menopause Mandate alongside Davina McCall and Mariella Frostrup, she has helped move menopause from a private health issue into a policy and workforce conversation. Just Getting Started (HarperCollins, 2023) gives the talk a specific evidence base on perimenopause, HRT, and the lived realities of midlife, rather than a generic wellbeing pitch. She makes the topic accessible to mixed audiences, including male senior leaders who may never have heard the word “perimenopause” used in a professional setting. Her fashion correspondent role on This Morning and her We’re Not Getting Any Younger podcast keep her closely connected to how midlife women actually talk about their lives, which informs how she addresses them at work. Biography highlights Fashion correspondent, ITV This Morning. Author, Just Getting Started: Lessons in life, love and menopause, HarperCollins, 2023. Co-presenter, Capital FM Breakfast Show, London, 2008 to 2014. Show won Breakfast Show of the Year at the 2014 Sony Radio Academy Awards. Host, Britain’s Next Top Model, Living TV / Sky, 2006 to 2009. Celebrity MasterChef Champion, BBC, 2022. Founding voice in Menopause Mandate alongside Davina McCall, Mariella Frostrup and MP Carolyn Harris. Biography Most workplaces have a policy on parental leave. Very few have anything coherent on the decade that follows it. Menopause sits in that gap, and it is one of the most consistent reasons women leave senior roles in their late forties and fifties. Snowdon’s contribution is to make that conversation routine rather than uncomfortable. She came to it through her own experience and a national platform. After two decades modelling at the top of the industry, including the Gucci campaigns, she moved into broadcasting, co-hosting Capital FM’s London Breakfast Show for six years and presenting Britain’s Next Top Model on Sky. The Capital show won Breakfast Show of the Year at the 2014 Sony Radio Academy Awards while she was on it. The advocacy work is structured. Just Getting Started (HarperCollins, 2023) sets out what perimenopause actually feels like, what the treatment options are, and where the gaps in clinical and workplace support sit. Through Menopause Mandate, alongside Davina McCall, Mariella Frostrup and MP Carolyn Harris, she has pushed for changes to NHS prescribing, HRT availability and workplace policy. For organisations, the value is specific. Many internal menopause initiatives stall because the topic feels too clinical for HR and too personal for line managers. Snowdon’s sessions move the conversation past that block by giving people permission, vocabulary and a credible voice they recognise from their living rooms. Key speaking topics Menopause in the workplace Midlife women’s health Breaking workplace taboos Confidence and reinvention after forty Women, ageing and visibility Body image and self-image Ideal for HR, DEI and wellbeing leads designing menopause and women’s health policy Leadership audiences where the topic has not yet been opened Internal networks for women in midlife and their allies Industry events seeking a recognisable voice on midlife and longevity Audience outcomes A clear sense of how menopause shows up in performance, retention and engagement data Language that line managers can actually use without embarrassment Familiarity with the current UK policy and clinical landscape, including HRT access Honest, lived perspective from someone who has navigated the transition publicly A starting point for designing or strengthening a menopause-at-work programme

Why organisations work with Zing Tsjeng A working journalist’s instinct for what an audience actually wants to hear, sharpened across VICE, the BBC and the i newspaper, brought to corporate stages where most speakers sound rehearsed. A four-volume body of work in Forgotten Women that pulls 190 named historical women into business and cultural conversations, giving inclusion content that is specific rather than slogan-driven. Co-hosting Good Bad Billionaire with BBC Business Editor Simon Jack means she can interrogate wealth, power and ambition with a financial-journalism register, not a generic culture take. A presenter’s hosting craft tested on Question Time, Have I Got News For You and Front Row, useful when the brief is moderation, panel chairing or on-stage interview rather than a solo keynote. An Oxford visiting professorship in Creative Media gives the academic credential to anchor talks on media, narrative and identity for senior internal communications and brand audiences. Biography highlights Former Editor-in-Chief, VICE UK and VICE.com; launched Broadly in 2014. Co-host, Good Bad Billionaire, BBC Sounds, with Simon Jack. Author, Forgotten Women series, Octopus Publishing, anthologised by Brazen in 2022. Visiting Professor of Creative Media, University of Oxford, since 2022. Highly commended, British Journalism Awards 2020. Columnist for the i newspaper; contributor to British Vogue, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, Dazed. Biography Inclusion content inside large organisations has a credibility problem. Most of it is either statement-led or driven by external pressure, and very little of it is grounded in the actual content of the histories it claims to recover. That gap is where Tsjeng’s work begins. The Forgotten Women series is a four-volume project that profiles more than 190 women, scientists, leaders, artists, reformers, who shaped fields that later forgot them. Octopus published the books between 2018 and 2019; Brazen reissued the anthology in 2022. The work is research, not advocacy, and it gives senior audiences a vocabulary for inclusion that does not collapse the moment scrutiny arrives. She runs a parallel journalism career that gives her a working register most cultural speakers do not have. As Editor-in-Chief of VICE UK she managed teams across the US and UK, launched Broadly, and oversaw video work that drew tens of millions of views. With Simon Jack on the BBC’s Good Bad Billionaire she now interrogates wealth, power and ambition for a mainstream business audience, with the show topping UK audio charts in 2024. The credential anchor is real. Oxford appointed her Visiting Professor of Creative Media in 2022; she lectures in journalism at City, University of London; she was highly commended at the British Journalism Awards 2020. Question Time, Have I Got News For You and Front Row have all used her as a contributor, which is why corporate clients including SXSW, Web Summit, Netflix and Sky tend to book her to chair, moderate or interview at the moments where the room expects a working broadcaster, not a motivational voice. Key speaking topics Hidden histories of women in business, science and leadership Wealth, power and the lives of billionaires Media, journalism and the modern news industry Inclusion, identity and cultural narrative LGBTQ+ representation in public life On-stage hosting, moderation and panel chairing Ideal for CHROs, heads of DEI and internal communications leaders briefing audiences on inclusion with substance Brand, marketing and editorial leaders working on culture-led storytelling Conference programmers needing a senior journalist to chair, moderate or interview on the main stage Leadership teams hosting International Women’s Day, Pride or cultural anniversary events that need a credible voice rather than a generic one Audience outcomes Specific historical reference points that make inclusion content land with executive audiences A clearer view of how wealth, power and ambition are reported and judged in mainstream media today Confidence in handling identity and cultural topics from a journalist’s evidence base, not a political register Practical reading on how stories travel in modern media, drawn from VICE, the BBC and national press A sharper sense of what audiences want to hear from leaders speaking about inclusion and culture

Why organisations work with Jamie Theakston Heart Breakfast reaches a daily UK audience in the millions, which means an internal audience recognises him on sight and an external audience trusts the room he is in. He has hosted live network television in formats that test pacing and composure: Live & Kicking on BBC1, Top of the Pops, The Games on Channel 4. Long-form live experience translates directly to long awards evenings. His on-air partnership with Amanda Holden on the UK’s biggest commercial breakfast show is built on interview craft, which carries into panel moderation and senior interview slots on conference stages. He works comfortably across formats: awards host, conference MC, after-dinner host, panel moderator, all from the same booking. Biography highlights Co-host of Heart Breakfast, Heart Radio’s national UK breakfast show, with Amanda Holden. Co-presenter, with Zoe Ball, of Live & Kicking on BBC1, 1996 to 1998. The show won a BAFTA. Host of Top of the Pops, BBC1, 1998 to 2003. Narrator of Traffic Cops, on BBC and Channel 5 since 2003. Co-host, with Alexander Armstrong, of a wine podcast. Trained at the National Youth Theatre from age 13. Biography National breakfast radio is the hardest live shift in British media. Three hours, every weekday, with no script that survives contact with breaking news, traffic, listener calls or a co-host on a tangent. Jamie Theakston has held one of those chairs since 2005, currently alongside Amanda Holden on Heart Breakfast, the UK’s largest commercial breakfast show. Before Heart, he co-presented Live & Kicking on BBC1 with Zoe Ball from 1996 to 1998, the BAFTA-winning Saturday morning show that pulled twice the audience of any rival in its slot. He hosted Top of the Pops through its final mainstream era between 1998 and 2003, interviewing every major artist that passed through it. He has narrated Traffic Cops on BBC and Channel 5 since 2003. That mileage is the product organisations book. Awards evenings, internal conferences, customer events, after-dinner formats: the work that goes wrong when the host cannot read a room, cannot recover when an autocue fails, cannot move from a comedy bit to a moment of genuine recognition without breaking tone. Theakston has done that work on live national television and live national radio for nearly three decades. He hosts as a known quantity. The audience knows the voice and the face. The executive team gets a host who has covered everything from royal memorial broadcasts to chart shows and treats both with the same level of preparation. Key speaking topics Awards hosting Conference and event MC Panel moderation Senior leader interviews on stage After-dinner hosting Ideal for Internal awards and recognition evenings Annual customer and partner conferences Sales kick-offs and all-hands events Charity galas and fundraising dinners Audience outcomes A live event that runs to time, holds energy through the long middle section, and lands its key recognition moments cleanly. Senior leader interviews and panels that produce usable answers rather than rehearsed talking points. A familiar broadcast voice on stage that warms the room before the substantive content begins.

Why organisations work with Colette Carlson A Master’s in Human Behavior anchors the content in behavioural science rather than speaker anecdote, which holds up in front of senior, sceptical audiences. The Human Edge framework organises five distinct programmes against specific buyer briefs: leadership, sales, team performance, burnout and resilience, and women’s leadership. CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame membership signals platform reliability for high-stakes conferences and executive offsites where delivery risk is itself a procurement criterion. A career arc that begins on straight commission and ends in front of Microsoft, PepsiCo, and Boeing audiences makes the trust and connection content land with sales and revenue teams, not only with HR. Biography highlights Master’s Degree in Human Behavior. Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), a credential held by fewer than 10% of International Federation for Professional Speakers members. Inducted into the CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame in 2017. Founder of Speak Your Truth, Inc. and author of Stop Playing Fictionary: Speak Your Truth to Stress Less and Connect More. Keynote work for Microsoft, PepsiCo, FedEx, ExxonMobil, Procter & Gamble, Fidelity, Costco, Domino’s, Boeing, PwC, and Accenture. Contributor to Success, Business Management Daily, and Working Mother; co-authored Conversations on Success Vol. 4 alongside Deepak Chopra and Mark Victor Hansen. Biography The relational fabric of most organisations has thinned. Hybrid schedules, lean middle layers, and rapid restructures have left teams collaborating by habit rather than by design, and the result shows up in disengagement scores, deal cycles that stall, and change programmes that miss the people piece. Colette Carlson works on that exact problem. Her content draws on a Master’s in Human Behavior and two decades on commission-based sales floors, then translates the behavioural science into communication moves senior leaders, salespeople, and team managers can use the next morning. The Human Edge framework organises this into five keynote programmes spanning leadership, sales, team performance, resilience, and women’s leadership. The credential trail is unusually concentrated. She holds the CSP designation held by under 10% of IFPS members and was inducted into the CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame in 2017, an NSA lifetime award. Her client list, including Microsoft, PepsiCo, FedEx, ExxonMobil, Procter & Gamble, Boeing, and Accenture, indicates a track record across both regulated and consumer-facing environments. What separates her in the workplace-culture pillar is the bridge between scientific framing and revenue-floor experience. Buyers booking a culture or engagement keynote often get one or the other. Carlson is fluent with HR audiences and with sales kick-offs, which is why her work travels across the org chart rather than sitting only in the people function. Key speaking topics Trust and connection in hybrid organisations Psychological safety and team performance Communication under pressure Resilience and burnout prevention Sales relationships and influence Women’s leadership and executive presence Human skills in an AI-augmented workplace Ideal for CHROs and people leaders rebuilding engagement after restructure or hybrid transition Sales leaders running national kick-offs that need a behavioural, relationship-led keynote Executive teams introducing psychological safety and trust as operating principles Women’s leadership networks and ERG flagship events Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for trust and psychological safety that leaders can use in their next team meeting Specific communication moves for difficult conversations, candour, and feedback Behavioural tools to protect focus and energy through sustained organisational pressure A relationship-first sales mindset that closes the gap between rapport and revenue Practical confidence cues for women navigating senior rooms and negotiation moments

Why organisations work with Anton Gunn He has operated at the level his audiences operate at. Advising a President on national health policy and running diversity and external affairs inside a federal department is not a case study he read; it is the room he was in. His World-Class Culture framework gives executives a named, structured approach to retention and culture rather than another values poster. It has been applied inside Pfizer, KPMG, Microsoft, HCA Healthcare and Mercedes-Benz Vans. He talks about inclusion as an operating capability, not a political position. For boards navigating contested ground on DEI, that distinction is the reason he gets booked. His credibility carries on both sides of the executive table: a Harvard Institute of Politics fellow with a Certified Speaking Professional designation, an MSW, and seven years inside senior healthcare leadership at MUSC. Biography highlights Former senior advisor to President Barack Obama; Director of External Affairs, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, leading stakeholder engagement for Affordable Care Act implementation Former Executive Director and Chief Diversity Officer, Medical University of South Carolina Resident Fellow, Harvard Institute of Politics Bestselling author of Just Lead, The Presidential Principles, and The Audacity of Leadership Certified Speaking Professional, a designation held by fewer than 10 percent of professional speakers worldwide Featured in TIME, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, NPR, BBC and Good Morning America Biography The Affordable Care Act needed people to believe in it before it could function. As Director of External Affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Anton Gunn led the stakeholder engagement that turned a contested federal statute into something hospitals, employers and citizens could act on. That work, advising President Obama and Secretary Sebelius, is the reference point his clients hire him for. He has since spent close to a decade translating that experience into a body of executive practice. As Chief Diversity Officer and Executive Director at the Medical University of South Carolina, he ran inclusion as an operating function inside a complex healthcare institution, not as a communications exercise. His framework, World-Class Culture, codifies the seven behaviours he saw separate retention-positive cultures from the rest. His three books trace the same argument from different angles. The Audacity of Leadership set out the principles. The Presidential Principles distilled what he learned watching Obama lead in real time. Just Lead, his 2022 bestseller, gave operators 44 specific actions for retention and culture. Pfizer, KPMG, Microsoft, T-Mobile, SHRM and Mercedes-Benz Vans have all brought him in to apply that work. He is a Harvard Institute of Politics fellow and a Certified Speaking Professional, a designation held by under 10 percent of speakers globally. The combination buyers respond to is rarer than either credential alone: a former White House operator who has also run culture and inclusion inside a 17,000-person institution, and who can talk to a board in the language of accountability rather than aspiration. Key speaking topics Values-based leadership Workplace culture and retention Inclusive leadership Trust as an executive capability Crisis leadership and recovery Talent strategy in healthcare and regulated industries Ideal for Boards and CEOs navigating culture and retention under restructure CHROs and Chief Diversity Officers building inclusion as an operating discipline Senior leadership teams in healthcare, financial services and regulated industries Public sector and policy audiences working at the boundary of government and enterprise Audience outcomes A named, repeatable framework for diagnosing and rebuilding workplace culture A clearer view of where executive trust is earned and where it is forfeited Concrete actions for retention drawn from the Just Lead framework A working definition of inclusive leadership that holds up in front of a sceptical board An inside view of decision-making at the senior levels of the Obama administration

Why organisations work with Niluka Kavanagh She co-founded KPMG’s Behavioural Science Unit, giving her a practitioner’s understanding of how psychological insight can be embedded in organisational design: not cited in a presentation, but built into real structures inside a global firm. Building and operating three businesses across fourteen countries, with a community of more than a thousand independent founders behind ImagineThat, gives her a working understanding of what trust, engagement, and team performance look like when conventional structures of co-location and hierarchy do not apply. She has operated inside large organisations and built three independent businesses: she can speak to the intrapreneurship and autonomy conversation from both sides of the corporate boundary. Through The Modern CEO, the organisational arm of her ImagineThat platform, she takes the multigenerational engagement debate out of HR theory and into the specifics of daily leadership communication, intrapreneurship, and psychological safety across teams. The KPMG FutureThinkers initiative she co-founded convening speakers from the BBC, HSBC, and others, gives her direct insight into how large organisations signal innovation internally, and where those signals fall short. Biography highlights Co-founded KPMG’s Behavioural Science Unit and the KPMG FutureThinkers initiative during nearly five years as a consultant and project lead at the firm Advised organisations including Mastercard, Tesco, the London Stock Exchange Group, and Lloyds Bank Founder of ImagineThat, a business school for independent entrepreneurs with over 1,000 members across multiple countries Published in The World Financial Review on the application of behavioural science to customer experience design Opened the 2026 Learning Technologies conference programme on the human side of the future of work, at Europe’s largest workplace learning event Featured in a University of Oxford alumni profile on entrepreneurship and alternative career models Guest lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, the University of Edinburgh, and Somerville College, Oxford Graduate of the University of Oxford (English, Somerville College) Biography Most organisations still use presence as a proxy for productivity and hierarchy as a proxy for trust. Neither assumption holds for the workforce that is now entering and increasingly leaving corporate life. Niluka Kavanagh’s work sits precisely at that fault line: the widening gap between how organisations are designed and what the people inside them now expect. Her grounding in this is practical. At KPMG, she spent nearly five years consulting for organisations including Mastercard, Tesco, and the London Stock Exchange Group, co-founding both the firm’s Behavioural Science Unit and its FutureThinkers initiative. Both projects were about the same thing: applying psychological and behavioural insight to how organisations lead change, design experiences, and engage the people doing the work. After leaving KPMG, she tested the same ideas from the outside. Three businesses, fourteen countries of operating experience, and a community of more than a thousand independent founders gave her the empirical base for The Modern CEO, the organisational branch of her ImagineThat platform. It is a leadership model focused on engagement, intrapreneurship, daily communication, and psychological safety across multigenerational teams. Her writing on behavioural science and customer experience has appeared in The World Financial Review. She is a graduate of the University of Oxford and holds a CIMA accounting qualification. Key speaking topics Future of work and workforce transformation The Modern CEO framework for multigenerational leadership Behavioural science in organisational design Multigenerational leadership and team engagement Intrapreneurship and internal innovation Human-centric leadership and trust structures Leadership communication and psychological safety Ideal for CHROs and people leaders managing generational shifts in workforce expectation and culture CEOs and senior leadership teams seeking to align organisational structure with modern ways of working Transformation leads and change teams working on culture, engagement, and talent retention Professional services and entrepreneurial firms navigating the shift to more autonomous, distributed, or flexible operating models Audience outcomes A working understanding of how generational values are reshaping expectations around autonomy, leadership, and work design, and where the organisational cost is already showing up The Modern CEO framework as a practical model for engagement, intrapreneurship, communication, and psychological safety across multigenerational teams Concrete approaches to unlocking intrapreneurial thinking in teams, drawn from real experience building innovation initiatives inside a global consultancy A clearer sense of how behavioural science applies to culture and leadership challenges beyond the theoretical, grounded in organisational practice Practical questions to apply to their own organisation’s structure, communication norms, and talent strategy

Why organisations work with Scott Deming He ran the agency before he ran the keynote. Deming built Ryan Communications to 70 staff and around USD 30m in revenue, serving clients including Benjamin Moore and The Scotts Company, so his views on brand and customer experience come from operating accountability rather than observation. His thesis in The Brand Who Cried Wolf (Wiley, 2007) is unusually concrete for the category: brand is the cumulative outcome of every customer interaction, and most brands fail because they over-promise in marketing and under-deliver in operations. Powered by Purpose gives leadership teams a working language for connecting individual values to customer-facing behaviour, which is where most culture programmes break down. Client list spans regulated and operationally complex environments: AT&T, Verizon Wireless, General Motors, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Delta Airlines, PwC, U.S. Treasury, McDonald’s of Eastern Europe. Useful when buyers want a speaker who has worked inside their kind of complexity, not adjacent to it. He writes regularly for Entrepreneur on customer experience, leadership and innovation, which keeps the material in active circulation rather than locked to a single book cycle. Biography highlights Author, The Brand Who Cried Wolf: Deliver on Your Company’s Promise and Create Customers for Life (John Wiley & Sons, 2007). Author, Powered by Purpose: Identify Your Values, Discover Your Purpose, and Build Success for Life! Founder of Deming Advertising in 1986, later Ryan Communications Inc.; grew the agency to 70 employees and approximately USD 30m in annual revenue before exit in 2003. Regular contributor to Entrepreneur on customer experience, brand, leadership and innovation. Keynote and training work for AT&T, Verizon Wireless, General Motors, Delta Airlines, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, PricewaterhouseCoopers, U.S. Treasury, Hershey Foods, McDonald’s of Eastern Europe, 3M, Chipotle and Frito-Lay, among others. Founder and former board member, Service Nation / Service Roundtable. Biography Brand promises are written in marketing and broken in operations. The book that captures this most directly is The Brand Who Cried Wolf, published by John Wiley & Sons in 2007. Its argument is that customer loyalty is built or destroyed in the routine interactions that no advertising campaign can paper over. That argument has a particular weight because the author spent seventeen years running the kind of agency that produces those campaigns. Scott Deming founded Deming Advertising in 1986 and rebuilt it as Ryan Communications Inc., growing the agency to around 70 staff and USD 30m in revenue before exiting in 2003. Clients included Benjamin Moore and The Scotts Company. The view of brand as an operating outcome, not a creative output, was formed inside that business. His second book, Powered by Purpose, extends the thesis inward. Customer experience is downstream of culture, and culture is downstream of whether individual employees understand their own values and how those values show up in the work. The book is the basis for his leadership keynote, which leaders use as the language for connecting purpose to customer-facing behaviour. The platform work spans large, operationally complex organisations: AT&T, Verizon Wireless, General Motors, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Delta Airlines, PricewaterhouseCoopers, U.S. Treasury, McDonald’s of Eastern Europe and others. He writes regularly for Entrepreneur on customer experience, brand, leadership and innovation, and he was a founding board member of Service Nation / Service Roundtable, the network for service-business owners in the trades. Key speaking topics Customer experience and brand loyalty Brand strategy and brand promise Purpose-driven leadership and culture Employee engagement and customer-facing behaviour Sales and customer service performance Innovation in customer-led organisations Ideal for CMOs, CXOs and brand leaders looking to close the gap between marketing promise and customer reality. CEOs and operating leaders accountable for culture as a commercial lever, not an HR slogan. Heads of customer service, sales and retail operations in regulated or franchised environments. Franchise networks, dealer groups and service-business associations where the brand is delivered by independently operated front lines. Audience outcomes A clearer test for whether your brand promise survives contact with your actual customer journey. A working model for connecting employee purpose and values to customer-facing decisions. Practical changes to customer service routines, from frontline scripts to escalation policy, that compound into loyalty. Confidence that culture work has a measurable commercial return, not just a wellbeing one. A shared internal language for talking about brand as an operational discipline rather than a creative one.

Why organisations work with Jake Mazulewicz He has run the work, not just studied it. As HPI Lead for a 3,500-person business unit at Dominion Virginia Power, he applied the same frameworks he now teaches to lineworkers, system operators, and executives. His Near Miss Library generated more than 150 voluntary reports inside one utility, the kind of disclosure rate most safety programmes never achieve, and it carries endorsements from both executives and union leadership. His Scan & Focus model and Four Levels of Decision Making are tools field foremen and substation crews actually use, not concepts that work only in a classroom. He speaks the language of pilots, paratroopers, firefighters, and lineworkers because he has worked alongside them. Audiences in technical industries treat him as one of their own, which is rare for a keynote speaker on safety. His book, Seven Practical Steps, gives senior leaders a defensible operating playbook for human reliability that can be cited inside the business after the keynote ends. Biography highlights Ph.D. in Education, University of Virginia Former Human Performance Improvement Lead, Dominion Virginia Power, 3,500+ person unit Founder and Director, JMA Human Reliability Strategies Author, Seven Practical Steps: How to Build Reliability, Safety, and Trust in Technical Teams Has worked with 250+ teams across energy, manufacturing, healthcare, and government sectors Named clients include the US Department of Energy, Fermilab, NERC, Chevron, Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, Energy Safety Canada Biography The instinct in most safety cultures is to chase zero. Zero incidents, zero errors, zero near misses. The most reliable industries figured out long ago that this target produces the opposite of safety. It produces silence. People stop reporting what they see, the organisation stops learning, and the next failure looks exactly like the last one. Jake Mazulewicz has spent more than two decades inside that contradiction. As Human Performance Improvement Lead for a 3,500-person business unit at Dominion Virginia Power, he led the work of analysing more than 300 incidents, ran root cause analyses on transmission-level switching errors, and built a Near Miss Library that drew more than 150 voluntary reports from a workforce that had every reason not to volunteer them. His Ph.D. in Education from the University of Virginia underpins the teaching method, but the credibility is operational. Lineworkers, system operators, and executives all recognised the same person in the room. In 2015 he founded JMA Human Reliability Strategies and has since worked with more than 250 teams across utilities, manufacturing, energy, healthcare, and government. Named clients include the US Department of Energy, Fermilab, NERC, Chevron, Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, and Energy Safety Canada. His book, Seven Practical Steps, codifies the approach he has used inside those organisations: a learning-based posture, psychological safety as a working condition rather than a slogan, and After Action Reviews treated as a craft. What separates him from other safety speakers is biography. He has served as a firefighter, an emergency medical technician, a wilderness search and rescue field team leader, and a military paratrooper. When he tells a technical audience that errors are signals, not character flaws, the room hears it from someone who has had to act on that belief in conditions where being wrong has consequences. Key speaking topics Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) High-reliability team practice in high-hazard industries Psychological safety in technical teams After Action Reviews and event learning Situational awareness and decision-making under pressure Safety culture and human error reduction Just culture and incident investigation Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and operations leaders in utilities, energy, manufacturing, and other high-hazard sectors Heads of HSE, safety directors, and chief safety officers responsible for organisational reliability HR and people leaders responsible for psychological safety and frontline team culture Field operations leadership: plant managers, station managers, fleet leaders, frontline supervisors Audience outcomes A working definition of psychological safety that survives contact with a unionised, technical workforce The Scan & Focus model as a usable situational awareness tool, applied to their own operating context A practical method for running After Action Reviews that produce learning rather than blame The Four Levels of Decision Making framework, mapped from novice to expert in their environment A reframing of error as a system signal, with the operating implications for how leaders respond to incidents