Corporate Culture

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 Johnny C Taylor Jr He speaks for the formal voice of the global HR profession. SHRM represents nearly 340,000 members influencing more than 362 million workers, which gives his read on workforce trends institutional weight no individual consultant can claim. His book RESET gives executives a structured argument for treating talent, culture, and inclusion as the primary commercial constraint, not technology or capital. He has testified to Congress on workforce policy and chaired the President’s Advisory Board on HBCUs, so he can frame people decisions inside the actual policy and regulatory weather boards are operating in. He writes USA Today’s weekly “Ask HR” column and co-hosts The Work Wire podcast, which keeps his content tested against real questions from working managers, not theory. He has run the talent function at large operating companies including Paramount Pictures, Blockbuster, IAC, and Compass Group, so the perspective is operator-grounded, not academic. Biography highlights President and CEO of SHRM, the largest HR professional body in the world, with members in 180 countries. Author of RESET: A Leader’s Guide to Work in an Age of Upheaval, a Wall Street Journal and national bestseller. Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources; named Distinguished Executive of the Year by the Academy of Management. Former CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund; chaired the President’s Advisory Board on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Board director at XPO, Inc. (NYSE: XPO), Guild Education, and Flores HR; Vice Chair, University of Miami Board of Trustees. USA Today columnist on workplace questions; co-host of The Work Wire podcast. Biography The workforce that most boards still describe is the workforce they had in 2019. The one they actually employ has been remade by remote work, AI deployment, five generations on the org chart, and political tension that now arrives at the office door. SHRM’s research, and the questions arriving in Taylor’s USA Today column every week, point at the same gap. Taylor leads SHRM, the global professional body for human resources, with nearly 340,000 members across 180 countries. The seat gives him a working dataset of how organisations of every size are responding to AI adoption, hybrid work, talent scarcity, and contested cultural questions. RESET, his 2021 Wall Street Journal bestseller, made the central argument plainly: the binding constraint on most companies is not capital or technology, it is whether they can find, hire, and engage the people who can use either one. That argument is unusual because it comes from an operator. Before SHRM he was CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund and held senior HR and legal roles at Paramount Pictures, Blockbuster, IAC, and Compass Group USA. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources, holds a JD and MA from Drake University, and is admitted to the bar in Florida, Illinois, and Washington, D.C. He has testified to Congress on sexual harassment, paid leave, and workforce development, chaired the President’s Advisory Board on HBCUs, and serves on the boards of XPO, Guild Education, and Flores HR. The Academy of Management named him Distinguished Executive of the Year in 2020. For senior teams trying to run a credible people strategy in front of a board that wants commercial answers, that combination of practitioner authority, policy access, and published thesis is hard to assemble from any other speaker on the topic. Key speaking topics Future of work Talent acquisition and retention Workplace civility and culture AI and the human workforce Workforce policy and regulation Inclusion in a contested political climate Multigenerational workforce dynamics Employee engagement and the social contract of work Ideal for CHROs and senior HR leadership wrestling with talent, engagement, and culture as board-level metrics. CEOs and boards of directors recalibrating workforce strategy around AI, hybrid models, and inclusion. Industry associations and member events convening HR, legal, and operations leaders. Executive offsites and town halls where the people agenda is the central commercial question. Audience outcomes A clearer view of which workforce shifts are temporary and which are structural. A defensible case for treating culture, civility, and engagement as commercial inputs, with evidence drawn from SHRM’s member data. A sharper read on how policy, regulation, and political climate will shape people decisions over the next 12 to 24 months. Practical positions on AI adoption, hybrid work, and inclusion that can survive contact with a sceptical board. A vocabulary for talking about talent that aligns HR, finance, and the C-suite around the same problem.

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. 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. Through The Modern CEO, her leadership framework for organisations, she takes the multigenerational engagement debate out of HR theory and into the specifics of daily leadership communication, psychological safety, and behavioural design across teams. She has operated inside large organisations and built independent businesses, so she can speak to the intrapreneurship and autonomy conversation from both sides of the corporate boundary. Operating experience across fourteen countries, with a community of more than a thousand independent founders behind her, 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. Biography highlights Opened the 2026 Learning Technologies conference programme on the human side of the future of work, at Europe’s largest workplace learning event 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 Published in The World Financial Review on the application of behavioural science to customer experience design, and featured in MSN’s “Top 10 Leading Speakers to Follow” (2025) Member of the UN Innovation Network (UNIN) Graduate of the University of Oxford (English, Somerville College) and an Alumni Ambassador for the college; has guest lectured at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Edinburgh Founder of ImagineThat, a global community for entrepreneurs with more than 1,000 members across multiple countries 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. She now takes that thinking to the stage. In 2026 she opened the Learning Technologies conference, Europe’s largest workplace learning event, on the human side of the future of work, and she is a member of the UN Innovation Network. Her writing on behavioural science and customer experience has appeared in The World Financial Review. That work rests on an unusual operating base. Three businesses, fourteen countries of operating experience, and a community of more than a thousand independent founders gave her the empirical foundation for The Modern CEO, a leadership framework focused on engagement, communication, psychological safety, and intrapreneurship across multigenerational teams. She works with senior leaders to move organisations beyond outdated management models towards cultures built on clarity, trust, and sustainable performance. 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 Glenn Marsden In his hands, mental health becomes a business conversation that senior leaders take responsibility for, grounded in lived experience of body dysmorphia and the loss of a close friend. He has built and scaled a global advocacy platform from zero, the Imperfectly Perfect Campaign, which gives him direct evidence of what changes when people in positions of influence speak openly about their own pressure. His keynote treats wellbeing as a leadership issue, connecting how senior people hold identity and performance under change to the cultural cost of silence at the top. His content travels: a published book series, the ImperfectlyPerfect Podcast, and hundreds of public-figure interviews give audiences a body of work to carry on with long after the keynote. Biography highlights Founder, Imperfectly Perfect Campaign, launched 2018, a global mental wellbeing advocacy movement. Author of the Imperfectly Perfect Campaign book series, with Volume 3 released January 2026. Host of the ImperfectlyPerfect Podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, interviewing public figures on mental health and wellbeing. Has delivered speaking engagements across Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Dubai, Thailand, and Japan. Biography The cost of mental health pressure inside organisations is now showing up where it used to stay hidden. It sits with the people running them. Glenn Marsden built the Imperfectly Perfect Campaign in 2018 to make that conversation possible, starting with a question senior leaders rarely answer in public: what does it actually cost you to keep up appearances? The campaign was founded after the suicide of a close friend and Marsden’s own struggle with body dysmorphia. What began as a single advocacy project has grown into a content platform with a published book series, the ImperfectlyPerfect Podcast, and a long roster of public-figure interviews. The argument that runs through all of it is simple: when people in positions of visibility speak openly about their own pressure, the social permission for everyone else to do the same expands. What audiences get is a working argument, made by someone who has spent years getting senior people to say in public what they say to each other in private: that perfectionism is expensive, silence at the top sets the tone for the rest of the organisation, and the leaders who name the pressure first are the ones who change the culture. Key speaking topics Mental health and the cost of perfectionism Identity and self-worth through change Resilience under sustained pressure Authentic leadership and lived experience Building advocacy platforms from zero Storytelling and public influence Ideal for CHRO and chief people officer audiences setting the mental health agenda Executive leadership offsites where wellbeing is treated as a strategy issue Senior leadership development programmes addressing perfectionism and burnout in high performers Conferences on workplace wellbeing, culture, and mental health where lived experience adds credibility to the data Audience outcomes A direct, founder-led account of how mental health pressure operates at senior levels and why it stays hidden. Words for naming perfectionism and silence inside organisations, without the wellness clichés. A map of how identity loss works after disruption, and how people find direction again, drawn from what the campaign has surfaced across cultures and industries. Evidence, from the Imperfectly Perfect Campaign and the hundreds of public-figure conversations it has gathered, of what changes when people in positions of influence speak openly.

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

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

Why organisations work with Joel Zeff He pulls people out of their seats and into the room. Improv games run live with audience volunteers, not slides about engagement, are the mechanism the audience remembers a week later. He has done this more than 2,500 times since 1997, for buyers including Wells Fargo, Samsung, KPMG, PepsiCo, Walmart, and the IRS. The format is tested at scale. His book Make the Right Choice (Wiley, 2nd edition) gives leaders a written reference for the principles, so the keynote leaves a tangible artefact for managers to apply. He writes and performs his own material. The journalism background, including a recruited move to the Dallas Times Herald and freelance work for Newsday, shows up in tight scripting and audience-aware writing. For internal sales kickoffs, leadership offsites, and culture moments where the room needs to be activated rather than briefed, Zeff is one of the few keynote speakers whose primary craft is the performance itself. Biography highlights Author of Make the Right Choice: Lead with Passion, Elevate Your Team, and Unleash the Fun at Work, second edition published by Wiley More than 2,500 keynote events for corporate and association audiences since 1997 Former newspaper journalist; recruited to the Dallas Times Herald in 1991, with freelance bylines for Newsday and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Former account executive at Edelman Public Relations Appeared on CNBC’s The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch Named clients include Wells Fargo, Samsung, KPMG, PepsiCo, Walmart, and the IRS Biography Engagement is the corporate problem that has resisted three decades of solutions. Surveys, town halls, pulse tools, and culture decks all describe it well. Almost none of them change the temperature in the room. Joel Zeff’s keynotes start from a different premise. If the room feels alive, the conversation about engagement starts to mean something. If it does not, no framework will fix that. Zeff trained as a newspaper journalist before he was a speaker. He started at the Saginaw News covering crime and accidents, was recruited to the Dallas Times Herald in 1991, and freelanced for Newsday and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram after the Herald closed. He then worked as an account executive at Edelman Public Relations and founded his own consulting practice in 1994. The improv comedy he was doing on weekends turned into his career when Texas Instruments asked him to bring the act to an executive retreat. The format he has built over 2,500 events since 1997 is unusual in a corporate setting. Audience members come on stage, play improvisation games, and produce, in real time, the behaviours the keynote is describing: listening, building on each other’s ideas, taking initiative, recovering from mistakes in front of a crowd. Wells Fargo, Samsung, KPMG, PepsiCo, Walmart, and the IRS have all booked the act. His book Make the Right Choice, now in its second edition with Wiley, sets out the principles in writing for leaders who want a reference after the room has gone home. What organisations actually buy from Zeff is a live demonstration that the soft skills they keep training for are produced under pressure, not in workshops. The improv stage is a faster way to see them than any management exercise. Key speaking topics Employee engagement Workplace culture Team collaboration and communication Change and adaptability at work Creativity and innovation in everyday work Leadership and motivation Workplace humour and human connection Ideal for Sales kickoffs and annual conferences where the opening or closing keynote needs to lift the room, not brief it Leadership offsites focused on team behaviour, communication, and collaboration Culture, engagement, and HR-led events where managers leave needing something they can act on with their teams Association conferences and customer events that combine substance with a live, interactive set piece Audience outcomes A shared, recent experience of what genuine collaboration looks like, generated live in the room rather than described in slides Specific language and prompts from improv (listening, “yes and”, supporting the person on stage with you) that managers can carry back into team meetings A reset on the role of humour, energy, and play in serious work, with named examples from organisations the audience recognises A written reference, via Make the Right Choice, for leaders who want to extend the keynote ideas into team practice

Why organisations work with Morten Toft Two decades of repeat innovation facilitation work for Grundfos, Danfoss and other large Danish manufacturers, which is unusual longevity for a process consultant. Author of Innovationsrecepten (The Innovation Recipe), Jyllands-Postens Forlag, a text used as a teaching reference on Danish innovation and entrepreneurship programmes, giving his methodology a documented, teachable form. Operating background as sales and marketing director at Photo Experten across 146 stores, so the co-creation work is grounded in line-management experience, not pure consultancy. Initiator of Danske Hospitalsklovne and the MAD House Denmark Innovation Centre, which gives him a track record of building functioning organisations from a standing start, not only advising existing ones. Sessions are designed for engagement and recall, with humour and physical staging used deliberately to lock in concepts that pure presentation tends to lose. Biography highlights Author of Innovationsrecepten (The Innovation Recipe), Jyllands-Postens Forlag, 2007, with Ole Vestergaard Poulsen, used as a teaching text on Danish innovation and entrepreneurship programmes. Author of To Be Perfectly Honest (Aschehoug, 2001) on authentic leadership, and Changemakers (2020, with Rachel Rouncefield). Co-developer with Rachel Rouncefield (De Montfort University) of the Changemakers youth empowerment programme, building on the Butterfly Project in Peterborough. Long-running innovation facilitator for Grundfos and Danfoss. Initiator of Danske Hospitalsklovne (Danish Hospital Clowns), founded after working with Patch Adams at the Gesundheit Institute in West Virginia. Co-initiator of the MAD House Denmark Innovation Centre in Middelfart. Former sales and marketing director at Photo Experten across 146 Danish stores; earlier consultant at GREY. Biography Innovation in large industrial businesses tends to fail in a specific way. Ideas accumulate in the central team. Adoption stalls at the operating units. The work that reaches customers is a thin version of what was originally proposed. Morten Toft has spent over twenty years working inside that gap, mainly with Danish manufacturing groups including Grundfos and Danfoss, designing co-creation processes that bring stakeholders into the work early enough to own it. His methodology is documented in Innovationsrecepten (The Innovation Recipe), co-authored with Ole Vestergaard Poulsen and published by Politikens Forlag. The book is used as required reading on Danish innovation and entrepreneurship programmes, which gives his approach a teachable structure rather than the personality dependence common to facilitator-consultants. The work draws on a line operating background. Before consultancy, Toft was sales and marketing director at Photo Experten, with responsibility across 146 retail stores in Denmark. That experience, alongside earlier work at GREY, shapes a facilitation style oriented to commercial outcomes and to the practical question of who actually executes the change. He is also the initiator of Danske Hospitalsklovne, founded after a period with Patch Adams at the Gesundheit Institute in West Virginia, and a co-initiator of the MAD House Denmark Innovation Centre. Alongside the innovation work, Toft has written on authentic leadership and personal development, including a forthcoming memoir, Journey Out to Find Home (Danish edition August 2026, English edition planned). He also runs Changemakers, a youth empowerment programme co-developed with Rachel Rouncefield of De Montfort University and grounded in the Butterfly Project in Peterborough, which involved several thousand young people over eight years. The connecting argument across his output is straightforward: organisations get more from their people, and societies more from their young people, when those involved feel they built the answer themselves. Key speaking topics Co-creation and stakeholder-led innovation Innovation process design in industrial organisations Authentic leadership Personal development and purpose at work Building healthy organisational cultures Youth empowerment and the changemaker concept Ideal for Innovation, R&D and product directors in industrial and manufacturing businesses HR and learning leaders running leadership development programmes C-suite and senior teams setting direction for cultural change Founders and entrepreneurial leaders running participation-led organisations Audience outcomes A working model for designing innovation processes that build adoption alongside ideas. Specific tools for involving operating-unit stakeholders before, not after, decisions are made. A clearer view of the link between authentic leadership behaviour and commercial culture. Practical examples drawn from long-running work with Grundfos, Danfoss and Danish retail.

Why organisations work with Tom Barton He has the rare combination of operator and supply chain reformer. Honest Burgers is a 39-site casual dining brand that buys whole carcasses directly from regenerative farms, a structural decision most restaurant groups have not been willing to make. His sustainability content carries weight because it is paid for. Honest absorbed the cost of switching to regenerative British beef rather than passing it to customers, a commercial decision a buyer can interrogate, not a marketing claim. He speaks credibly on building a brand from a market stall to a national footprint, with named milestones: the Brixton opening, the Cateys 2021 Restaurateur of the Year (Group) award, and the 2026 National Burger Awards win for “The Honest”. He is a useful voice for boards weighing ESG commitments against margin: the Honest Farming programme is a working example of procurement volume being directed at climate-smart agriculture, not a pledge. Biography highlights Co-founder, Honest Burgers, opened first site in Brixton Market in 2011 Honest Burgers now operates 39+ UK restaurants across London, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Brighton, Manchester, Liverpool and Reading Cateys 2021 Restaurateur of the Year (Group), with Phillip Eeles and Dorian Waite Created “The Honest”, named UK’s Best Burger at the National Burger Awards 2026 Built the first regeneratively farmed British beef supply chain in UK restaurants, in partnership with the Grass Roots Farming Cooperative Founder of the Honest Farming programme, supporting six regenerative farming families through premium pricing and whole-carcass procurement Biography A small marquee with a griddle and fryer at festivals in 2010 became one of the UK’s most respected casual dining brands. Tom Barton and Phillip Eeles ran outdoor catering for a year before raising investment with restaurant operator Dorian Waite and opening a first site in Brixton Market in 2011. The interesting story is what happened after the brand worked. Honest Burgers grew to 39 sites without selling to a private equity roll-up and without losing its product position. The Cateys 2021 award for Restaurateur of the Year (Group) recognised that scale, particularly through the pandemic. In 2026, “The Honest”, a recipe Barton created, was named UK’s Best Burger at the National Burger Awards. The more substantive contribution is a supply-chain one. Honest Burgers became the first UK restaurant group to build a regeneratively farmed British beef supply chain, buying whole carcasses directly from a small group of farming families through the Grass Roots Farming Cooperative. The company absorbed the cost rather than passing it to customers, on the argument that volume procurement is the lever climate-smart agriculture actually responds to. That is the practical content of what Barton brings to a senior audience. Casual dining is a low-margin, high-velocity category. Doing the harder thing on sourcing inside it, at scale, and paying for it out of margin, is a credible operating example for any board that has signed an ESG commitment and is now looking at the bill. Key speaking topics Brand building from start-up to national scale Regenerative agriculture in commercial supply chains Sustainability as an operating decision, not a marketing position Founder leadership through rapid growth Hospitality, food culture and consumer brand Procurement and whole-carcass sourcing Company culture under expansion Ideal for Founders and operating teams scaling consumer brands beyond their first ten sites or stores Boards and CEOs reviewing ESG commitments where supply chain is the largest source of emissions Procurement, sourcing and category leaders in food, retail and hospitality Investor and accelerator audiences interested in entrepreneurship in regulated, low-margin categories Audience outcomes A working example of a regenerative supply chain inside a competitive high-street category, with the commercial trade-offs named A first-hand account of how brand discipline is maintained as a hospitality business moves from one site to forty A clearer sense of where sustainability claims become operating substance, and where they remain marketing Specific decisions about pricing, procurement and farm partnerships that other operators can pressure-test against their own model

Why organisations work with Elizabeth Day A single, named thesis built over hundreds of long-form interviews on How to Fail, applied to the specific cultural problem of how teams talk about setbacks. Journalistic credibility from a decade at The Observer and a Young Journalist of the Year award, which gives her the interviewing range to draw substance out of senior internal speakers and panel guests. Literary authority confirmed by a Royal Society of Literature fellowship and a Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller, which lifts her above the standard wellbeing-speaker field. A direct corporate track record with Google, Facebook, HSBC, JP Morgan, Netflix and Barclays, so the material has been tested on senior commercial audiences. Equally strong as keynote, fireside interviewer, or awards host, which makes her useful for events that need one trusted voice across multiple formats. Biography highlights Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, elected 2024. Host and creator of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, with guests including Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Kate Winslet, Malcolm Gladwell and Gloria Steinem. Winner, Rising Star Award, British Podcast Awards 2019. Winner, Young Journalist of the Year, British Press Awards 2004; Highly Commended Feature Writer, 2012. Author of How to Fail, Failosophy, Friendaholic and Magpie, with Friendaholic entering the Sunday Times charts at No. 1. Host of BBC Radio 4’s Open Book since 2021; co-host of Sky Arts Book Club Live. Biography Most workplaces still treat failure as an event to be hidden. Elizabeth Day has spent years arguing, in print and on air, that the more useful question is what setbacks teach the people who admit to them. How to Fail, the podcast she launched in 2018, has built that argument into one of the most listened-to interview shows in the UK. Her credibility for the topic is not motivational. It is journalistic. She trained on the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary, moved to The Sunday Telegraph as a news reporter, and won Young Journalist of the Year at the 2004 British Press Awards. From 2007 to 2016 she was a feature writer at The Observer, picking up a commendation in the Feature Writer category at the 2012 Press Awards. The literary record sits alongside the broadcasting one. Her novel Scissors Paper Stone won the Betty Trask Award; The Party became a Richard and Judy Book Club pick; Friendaholic entered the Sunday Times charts at No. 1. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2024 and hosts BBC Radio 4’s Open Book. For corporate audiences, the value is the translation. Google, Facebook, HSBC, JP Morgan, Netflix and Barclays have booked her to put failure, friendship and candour onto the table as workplace concerns rather than personal anecdotes. The interviews have produced a working vocabulary that senior teams can actually use when something goes wrong. Key speaking topics Failure as a method for learning and recovery Workplace candour and psychological safety Storytelling and interview craft for senior leaders Friendship, connection and the social fabric of teams Vulnerability as a professional capability Resilience after setback Women, work and visibility Ideal for CHROs and people leaders rebuilding engagement and trust after restructure or underperformance. Communications and internal events teams looking for a host who can interview senior leaders on the record without flattening them. Leadership development programmes for high-potential cohorts working on candour, feedback and self-awareness. Awards evenings and flagship conferences that need one credible voice across keynote, panel and host roles. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for naming and discussing setbacks at work without defensiveness. Specific, repeatable interview and conversation techniques drawn from years of long-form journalism. A clearer view of how candour and vulnerability function as team capabilities, not personality traits. Permission, modelled from named public figures, to treat early-career mistakes as data rather than damage.