Creativity speakers

Why organisations work with Jon Carmichael He brings a single, verifiable feat that anchors every claim he makes about creative ambition: the 2017 “108” photograph, captured aboard Southwest Airlines flight 1368 after the captain secured FAA approval to perform five 180-degree turns mid-flight. The story has been covered by Good Morning America, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Inc., which gives the keynote external validation few inspirational speakers can match. He has presented at NASA’s Hubble Auditorium and at TEDxManchester, two audiences with low tolerance for thin material, which signals he can hold a room of senior or technical attendees. His “Eclipse Mindset” gives sales conferences, innovation summits, and culture events a non-corporate frame for talking about ambition, alignment, and risk without sounding like internal-comms language. Biography highlights Astrophotographer; sixteen years documenting corporate and political events. Photographed the 2017 total solar eclipse from 39,000 feet aboard Southwest Airlines flight 1368, image titled “108”. Has spoken at NASA’s Hubble Auditorium and at TEDxManchester to an audience of around 2,500. Eclipse work featured by Good Morning America, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Inc., and Weather.com. Visual storytelling engagements with Twitter, Dell and ESPN; collectors of his fine art work include Sir Elton John. Unveiled the “108” image at a Twitter company event at the invitation of Jack Dorsey. Biography In August 2017, a commercial Southwest Airlines flight from Portland to St. Louis made five 180-degree turns at 39,000 feet so a single passenger in seat 1A could photograph a total solar eclipse over the Snake River. That passenger had spent two years mapping flight paths against the moon’s shadow, persuading an airline and a captain to accept the risk, and securing FAA approval the morning of the flight. The resulting image, titled “108”, is the spine of Jon Carmichael’s keynote work. Buyers do not commission him for technical photography. They commission him for what the project demonstrates about how teams attempt things that are not yet possible. The “Eclipse Mindset” he draws from the story is a practical frame, not a metaphor: identify the constraint, recruit unlikely partners, accept that the plan will change in execution, and prepare so that when conditions narrow to a two-minute window, the team can act. His credibility for serious audiences comes from where the work has been received. The image was covered by Good Morning America, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Inc. and Weather.com. He was invited to present at NASA’s Hubble Auditorium, with the talk broadcast to other NASA centres, and at TEDxManchester to roughly 2,500 attendees. Jack Dorsey invited him to unveil the photograph at a Twitter company event. For sales conferences, innovation kick-offs and culture moments where the brief is to lift the room without resorting to standard motivational fare, Carmichael offers a verifiable feat, a named project, and a usable frame, anchored by a story that audiences can recall and repeat months later. Key speaking topics The Eclipse Mindset Creativity and perspective shift Bold execution under constraint Visual storytelling Innovation through ambition Team alignment around a high-stakes vision Ideal for Sales conferences and annual kick-offs seeking a non-corporate opening or closing keynote Innovation, R&D, and product leadership offsites Culture, brand and marketing events CMOs and creative leadership audiences Audience outcomes A specific story they can quote, with named brands and dates, to anchor internal conversations about ambition A practical frame (“Eclipse Mindset”) for identifying which constraints are real and which are inherited Renewed appetite for projects that require unlikely partners and mid-execution adjustment A reminder that bold work is rarely solo: the eclipse image required an airline, a captain, a regulator, and years of preparation

Why organisations work with Abigail Posner Holds a rare combination of credentials in cultural anthropology (Harvard, magna cum laude), creative strategy (Publicis New York, DDB New York), and senior technology leadership (13 years at Google). Few speakers can address AI and human creativity from inside all three worlds. Pioneered Humanizing Digital at Google, an anthropology-led research programme exploring the emotional relationship between people and technology. Her frameworks come from original fieldwork conducted inside Google. Led AI integration and a cultural transformation programme for 4,000+ Google sales professionals. Speaks from direct experience about what works and what fails inside one of the most AI-fluent companies in the world. Provides concrete methodologies, the Expansiveness Edge framework and the Human Code approach, that teams can apply immediately to specific business problems. Biography highlights Former Director, U.S. Creative Works at Google; thirteen years at the company Pioneered Humanizing Digital, Google’s anthropology-led thought leadership series on the emotional relationship between people and technology Founder of Human Code Company; host of the Human Code podcast Magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University in social anthropology Contributor to The Economist, The New York Times, Business Insider, CNBC, Forbes, and Fast Company; ongoing columnist for The Drum Recipient of the United Nations Media Impact Award Biography Google spent more than a decade trying to understand the emotional logic behind why people engage with digital content. The Humanizing Digital research programme came out of that effort, an anthropology-led series Abigail Posner pioneered while at the company. The route there was unusual. Posner is a magna cum laude graduate in social anthropology from Harvard who spent years in brand strategy at Publicis New York and DDB New York. As Director of U.S. Creative Works at Google, she led creative strategy for YouTube’s largest global advertisers and ran a cultural transformation programme for over 4,000 sales professionals. Posner now leads Human Code Company, the consultancy she founded after leaving Google. Her Expansiveness Edge and Human Code frameworks address the question every leader is asking: what do my people uniquely contribute when every competitor has the same AI tools. Both frameworks come from years of anthropological fieldwork done inside Google. Her writing appears in The Economist, The New York Times, Business Insider, CNBC, Forbes, and Fast Company; she is an ongoing columnist for The Drum. The United Nations awarded her its Media Impact Award for the work. Key speaking topics Human creativity in the AI age The Expansiveness Edge framework AI as a creative amplifier Cultural anthropology applied to business The future of work in an AI economy Ideal for CMOs, brand and marketing leaders working out how AI changes their craft Chief Innovation Officers and senior creative leaders inside marketing, product, or innovation teams CHROs and learning leaders building creative capacity across the workforce Senior leadership teams setting an organisation-wide position on what humans do and what AI does Audience outcomes A named framework, the Expansiveness Edge, for combining different disciplines and perspectives within an individual to produce ideas competitors cannot replicate A working answer to where human judgement still beats AI in their function, and which work to defend against automation Specific exercises they can run inside their own teams to activate creative thinking on demand A reframe of AI as an amplifier of human ingenuity, with concrete ways to deploy it that way

Why organisations work with Adam Kingl A decade-plus of original research into how Generation Y expects to work and be led, conducted while at London Business School and Duke Corporate Education, now applied to advising boards on talent and culture strategy. Author of two books from mainstream business publishers (Next Generation Leadership with HarperCollins, Sparking Success with Kogan Page), the second shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2024 in the Smart Thinking category. Primary research inside the creative industries (Carnegie Hall, Disney Imagineering, Broadway theatre, the writers’ room of Friends) translated into leadership practice for companies including Pixar, Panasonic, Bosch and Netflix. Very few leadership speakers work from that source base. Adjunct teaching at UCL School of Management, Hult Ashridge, Imperial College Business School and the Møller Institute at Churchill College, Cambridge. These appointments come through competitive academic review and carry live executive programme responsibility. A decade as Executive Director of Thought Leadership at London Business School and Regional Managing Director (Europe) at Duke Corporate Education. He has designed and run executive development at scale, which shapes how he reads a boardroom. Biography highlights Author of Next Generation Leadership (HarperCollins, 2020) and Sparking Success (Kogan Page, 2023), the second shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2024 in the Smart Thinking category Former Executive Director of Thought Leadership and Learning Solutions at London Business School (nearly a decade in post) Former Regional Managing Director (Europe) at Duke Corporate Education, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University Adjunct Faculty at UCL School of Management, Hult Ashridge International Business School and Imperial College Business School Associate of the Møller Institute at Churchill College, University of Cambridge Contributor and interviewee for the Financial Times, Forbes, Fortune, The Guardian, Fast Company and The Sunday Times Biography 80% of CEOs name innovation and creativity among their top three priorities. In the same surveyed organisations, 94% of employees rate their company as poor at both. That gap, between what executives say matters and what their organisations actually produce, is the starting point for most of Adam Kingl’s work. Kingl spent nearly a decade as Executive Director of Thought Leadership at London Business School, then led Duke Corporate Education’s European business as Regional Managing Director. He now teaches at UCL School of Management, Hult Ashridge, Imperial College Business School and the Møller Institute at Churchill College, Cambridge. His material is built and tested inside those programmes before it reaches any commercial audience. Next Generation Leadership (HarperCollins, 2020) grew out of a decade of original research into how Generation Y expects to work and be led. It treats generational change as a management design problem. Kingl’s argument is that the old playbook, built on hierarchy and productivity, produces the disengagement and attrition the same playbook is then used to diagnose. Sparking Success (Kogan Page, 2023), shortlisted for the Business Book Awards in the Smart Thinking category, goes inside the arts. Carnegie Hall, Disney Imagineering, Broadway theatre and the writers’ room of Friends are interviewed on how they produce creative output under commercial pressure. Those habits are then mapped into corporate practice at Pixar, Bosch, Panasonic and Netflix. His advisory work spans the BBC, BP, Disney, HSBC, LVMH, Shell and the European Central Bank. Key speaking topics Generational paradigms in leadership Creativity and creative mindset in business Culture and talent strategy Future of work Leadership and management innovation Executive education and capability building Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers reshaping leadership development for a multigenerational workforce CEOs and executive committees where stated innovation and engagement ambitions are outrunning the culture and talent practices meant to deliver them Boards and executive education programmes investing in next-generation leadership capability Learning and development leaders designing curricula for leadership at mid-career and senior level Audience outcomes A sharper diagnostic for why stated priorities on innovation and engagement keep failing to show up in organisational behaviour A set of creative practices borrowed from arts organisations (including how Pixar, Disney Imagineering and the Friends writers’ room actually work) and a route to adopting them in a corporate setting A clearer read on what younger talent actually expects from work, and which of those expectations are non-negotiable for retention A vocabulary for talking about generational differences in the workplace that avoids the usual folklore about “millennials” and “Gen Z”

Why organisations work with Adam Morgan Morgan coined the challenger brand concept in a named, commercially researched framework – the eight challenger credos in Eating the Big Fish – giving organisations a specific strategic vocabulary that has been in active use across global marketing for over two decades. His most recent research project, The Extraordinary Cost of Dull, quantifies in IPA-backed data what strategic sameness actually costs a business: dull communications require up to 2.6× the media spend of interesting ones to generate the same commercial result – a figure that reframes brand strategy as a finance conversation. Where most brand strategists stop at positioning, Morgan extends the argument to internal culture: The Pirate Inside addresses the behavioural and organisational conditions needed to sustain a challenger strategy over time. A Beautiful Constraint gives leadership teams a practical method for treating budgetary and structural limitations as strategic inputs rather than blockers – directly applicable to any growth brief operating under resource pressure. His work sits at the junction of brand strategy, marketing effectiveness, and organisational behaviour – a combination that is unusually rare in a single practitioner. Biography highlights Founder and Chair of eatbigfish, the international challenger brand consultancy Author of Eating the Big Fish (Wiley, 1999; 2nd ed. 2009) – international bestseller, translated into eight languages; coined the term “challenger brand” Author of The Pirate Inside (Wiley, 2004) and co-author of A Beautiful Constraint (2015, with Mark Barden) Former Joint European Planning Director, TBWA\Chiat\Day; TBWA clients included Apple, Absolut, and Sony PlayStation Co-creator of The Extraordinary Cost of Dull – multi-partner research with Peter Field, System1, the IPA, and Dr Karen Nelson-Field Speaker at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2023 and 2024 Host of the Let’s Make This More Interesting podcast (eatbigfish) Consultancy clients have included IKEA, Unilever, Lexus, and PepsiCo Biography Adam Morgan spent the formative years of his career at TBWA\Chiat\Day, the agency behind Apple’s relaunch, Absolut, and Sony PlayStation. When he left to found eatbigfish in 1997, his question was specific: how do brands with fewer resources than the market leader compete – and win? Eating the Big Fish, published in 1999, answered that question with a named framework: eight challenger credos drawn from research into forty brands that had grown rapidly against dominant incumbents. The book introduced the term “challenger brand” to a global marketing audience, became an international bestseller in eight languages, and established a body of research – The Challenger Project – that has continued to evolve through four further books and three decades of consultancy work. The most recent extension of that work is The Extraordinary Cost of Dull, a research collaboration with Peter Field, System1, the IPA, and Dr Karen Nelson-Field. Analysing IPA Effectiveness Databank data, the project quantifies what strategic sameness costs organisations at the P&L level: brands running dull communications need up to 2.6 times the media investment of those running interesting ones to achieve equivalent commercial returns. The finding moves brand strategy from a marketing conversation into a boardroom one. What makes Morgan’s perspective directly useful to senior leaders is the consistency of the underlying argument across all three registers – strategy (Eating the Big Fish), culture (The Pirate Inside), and resource constraint (A Beautiful Constraint). The thesis is the same in each case: ambition and specificity of point of view are not optional extras for challengers. They are the mechanism. Key speaking topics Challenger brand strategy Differentiation and market positioning Growth under resource constraint The commercial cost of strategic sameness Brand culture and internal challenger behaviour Marketing effectiveness and creative impact Constraint as competitive advantage Ideal for CMOs and marketing leadership teams responsible for brand growth and differentiation CEOs and strategy directors in organisations competing against dominant category incumbents CFOs and senior leadership teams seeking to connect brand investment to commercial return Brand and innovation teams operating under budget or resource pressure Audience outcomes A working definition of challenger strategy – and a clear way to assess whether it applies to their organisation’s current position Familiarity with the eight challenger credos as a practical diagnostic and planning tool A data-backed understanding of what strategic sameness costs in media spend terms, and how to use that argument internally A framework for identifying where organisational constraints can be reframed as strategic advantages rather than blockers Specific behavioural markers of a challenger culture – and how to diagnose whether their organisation has them

Why organisations work with Albert Read He ran Conde Nast Britain through the most disruptive decade in publishing, taking titles such as Vogue, GQ and Wired through a shift from print to multi-platform commerce. The lessons translate directly for any business whose product was built for an earlier distribution model. His book The Imagination Muscle (Hachette, 2023) makes a specific argument: imagination is a faculty that can be trained, measured against output, and embedded in how teams work. It gives a leadership audience something more useful than a creativity pep talk. He built and launched Conde Nast operations in China, India and the UAE, which gives him concrete experience of exporting a creative business into new commercial and regulatory environments. As a Senior Advisor to the Milken Institute and External Advisor to Bain and Company, he is engaged by serious institutions for strategic counsel, not as a celebrity author. He is the rare speaker on creativity who has actually carried operating P and L responsibility for creative businesses at scale, which makes the argument credible in a CEO or board setting. Biography highlights Managing Director, Conde Nast Britain, 2017 to 2024. Oversaw British Vogue, GQ, Wired UK, Vanity Fair, Tatler, Conde Nast Traveller, Glamour, House and Garden and World of Interiors. Executive Chairman, The Evening Standard, from September 2024. Author, The Imagination Muscle: Where Good Ideas Come From (Hachette, 2023). Senior Advisor, Milken Institute. External Advisor, Bain and Company. Launched Wired UK in 2009 and led Conde Nast market launches in China, India and the UAE. Classics, New College, Oxford. MBA, INSEAD. Contributor to The Spectator, The Telegraph and The Times of London. Biography For most of the past two decades, the question facing legacy media businesses has been the same one now reaching every other industry. The product was designed for one distribution model, the audience moved to another, and the response cannot be a slower version of what already exists. Albert Read spent twenty-five years at Conde Nast inside that question, and as Managing Director of Conde Nast Britain from 2017 to 2024 he was the executive accountable for the answer across British Vogue, GQ, Wired, Vanity Fair, Tatler, Conde Nast Traveller and the rest of the UK portfolio. His operating record covers the parts of reinvention that are easy to claim and hard to do. He launched Wired in the UK, took Conde Nast into new digital products, conferences, awards and education, and led the company’s market launches in China, India and the UAE. In September 2024 he was appointed Executive Chairman of The Evening Standard, taking on the title’s shift from daily to weekly. His book, The Imagination Muscle: Where Good Ideas Come From, published by Hachette in 2023, argues that imagination is not a temperament but a faculty that can be trained, exercised and built into how an organisation works. Spanning examples from cave painting to Steve Jobs, it gives senior leaders something more practical than the usual creativity literature: a way of thinking about creative output as a discipline that responds to environment, observation and routine. Read is a Senior Advisor to the Milken Institute and an External Advisor to Bain and Company. He read Classics at New College, Oxford, holds an MBA from INSEAD, and has written for The Spectator, The Telegraph and The Times of London. He is the son of the novelist Piers Paul Read and grandson of the art critic Sir Herbert Read, founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Key speaking topics Creativity and imagination as commercial discipline Leadership through digital disruption in legacy businesses Brand reinvention at scale Human creativity in the age of artificial intelligence Entrepreneurial culture inside large organisations The new responsibilities of the modern leader Ideal for CEOs and executive teams in legacy businesses facing structural reinvention CMOs, brand and content leaders responsible for creative output at scale Innovation, R and D and strategy leaders building creative capability inside large organisations Boards and leadership offsites looking at the human counterweight to AI investment Audience outcomes A working definition of imagination as an organisational capability that can be developed, not a personality trait you either have or do not. Concrete examples from Conde Nast and beyond of how creative businesses survived and grew through digital disruption. A sharper view of where AI extends human creative capacity and where it crowds it out. Specific habits, environments and decisions that make teams more inventive without losing operational discipline.

Why organisations work with Alexandra Shulman She ran British Vogue for a quarter of a century across three recessions and the collapse of the print advertising model, and can speak with evidence about what protects a consumer brand’s authority through structural change. She has first-hand judgement on the fashion and luxury economy that organisations rarely access at this level, including on body image, diversity on the cover, and the commercial consequences of editorial choices. Her work on the Vogue centenary issue with the Duchess of Cambridge, documented by BBC Two, is a case study in how a legacy title uses a single moment to reset its cultural position. As a monthly Business of Fashion columnist and Mail on Sunday writer, she has a continuing, named public record on industry shifts, so audiences get a point of view grounded in current analysis, not reminiscence. Her three books, including the Sunday Times bestseller Clothes and Other Things That Matter, give her a body of published work on women, consumer culture, and the business of appearance that goes beyond the editor role. Biography highlights Editor-in-Chief, British Vogue, 1992 to 2017, the longest-serving editor in the title’s history. Editor of British GQ, 1990 to 1992, before moving to Vogue. CBE (2018) for services to fashion journalism; OBE (2005) for services to the magazine industry. Author of Inside Vogue: A Diary of My 100th Year (2016) and the Sunday Times bestseller Clothes and Other Things That Matter (Cassell, 2020), alongside two novels. Monthly columnist, The Business of Fashion, from 2017; regular columnist, The Mail on Sunday. Subject of the BBC Two documentary Absolutely Fashion: Inside British Vogue (2016). Strategic advisor to the online fashion marketplace Atterley. Biography British Vogue was a profitable but narrow title when Alexandra Shulman took it over in 1992. Over the next 25 years, she grew monthly circulation to around 200,000, ran the magazine through three recessions, and held its cultural authority as the advertising base of print magazines collapsed around it. When she left in 2017, she had edited more issues of British Vogue than anyone in its history. The commercial case for her voice starts there. The work was not only editorial. It was running a consumer brand at the top of a crowded category, deciding every month which photographers, writers, models and stories earned the cover, and taking the commercial consequences. Her 2009 open letter to fashion houses, pushing back on sample-size-only clothes and the implications for body image on the page, is one example of an editorial call with direct business and cultural weight. Since leaving Vogue, she has kept a continuing public record on the industry as a monthly columnist for The Business of Fashion and as a Mail on Sunday writer. Her books include the diary-memoir Inside Vogue: A Diary of My 100th Year, written around the magazine’s centenary, and Clothes and Other Things That Matter, a Sunday Times bestseller that reads the wardrobe as a way into questions about work, ambition, ageing, and the female consumer. She was appointed OBE in 2005 and CBE in 2018. She advises the online fashion marketplace Atterley. The BBC Two documentary Absolutely Fashion: Inside British Vogue filmed her in 2016 assembling the centenary issue with the Duchess of Cambridge on the cover, a piece of work now used as a reference point for how legacy titles use a single edition to reset their place in the culture. Key speaking topics Brand authority in consumer media and luxury Creative leadership and long-tenure editorial judgement The business of fashion and the luxury economy Women, work, and the culture of appearance Body image, diversity, and the responsibility of the page Reinvention after a long institutional career Ideal for CMOs and brand leaders in luxury, beauty, retail, and consumer media Boards and executive teams of cultural or heritage brands working through audience and format change CHROs and leadership development programmes focused on long-tenure creative leadership and succession Conferences on women in business, consumer culture, and the creative industries Audience outcomes A named insider’s read on how fashion and luxury actually make commercial decisions. A working definition of brand authority that holds up across a generational shift in media. A clearer view of the trade-offs between editorial point of view and commercial reach. A usable perspective on long-tenure creative leadership: how to stay current, when to change, when to hold. A frank account of reinvention after a defining role, drawn from her own post-Vogue work.

Why organisations work with Amanda Wakeley She has lived the complete founder’s arc – from a self-funded Chelsea launch in 1990 to international retail distribution, a £1 million buyback from investors in 2009 to reclaim creative control, and ultimately administration in 2021. That full sequence, spoken about with candour, is a business case study that cannot be manufactured. Her client roster – Diana, Princess of Wales, Queen Rania of Jordan, Meghan Markle, Beyoncé, and Michelle Obama among them – is a direct, unanswerable proof of premium brand positioning. It gives her authority to discuss luxury aspiration in terms no white paper or case study can match. She offers a rare dual perspective on founder-investor dynamics: the 2009 buyback and the 2021 administration are two distinct data points on what happens when a founder’s vision and commercial structures diverge. For boards and investors in consumer brands, this is unusually instructive. Three British Fashion Awards and an OBE for services to fashion provide independently verifiable validation of her standing – relevant where audiences need assurance that the speaker’s authority is recognised beyond self-promotion. Having rebuilt her professional identity through podcasting, broadcasting, and speaking after brand closure, she brings a credible and specific account of reinvention that resonates with executives navigating their own pivots – professional, organisational, or strategic. Biography highlights Founded her eponymous luxury womenswear label in 1990; built international distribution through Harvey Nichols, Harrods, and more than 50 retailers across Europe, America, and the Middle East Three-time winner, British Fashion Award for Glamour OBE, 2010, for services to the fashion industry Co-chair of Fashion Targets Breast Cancer since 1996; the campaign has raised more than £16 million for Breast Cancer Now Sky News commentator, live coverage of the 2018 royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Host of the Style DNA podcast (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, British Airways in-flight entertainment); 4.5 million listeners across its first four seasons, now in its ninth season Biography A luxury brand is only as durable as the proposition holding it together. Amanda Wakeley launched her womenswear label in 1990 with a £20,000 loan from her father, having taught herself design while working for a New York retailer. She built the business into a flagship in Mayfair and a presence across Harvey Nichols, Harrods, and more than 50 retailers spanning Europe, America, and the Middle East. Three British Fashion Awards and an OBE for services to fashion followed. Her clientele – Diana, Princess of Wales, Queen Rania of Jordan, Meghan Markle, Beyoncé, Michelle Obama – was itself an argument about what premium positioning can achieve. The business encountered every pressure a founder can face. Acquired by external investors in 2000, Wakeley fought to maintain creative control before buying the label back for £1 million in 2009. COVID-19 dismantled the occasion-wear market the brand depended on. In May 2021, the company went into administration; liquidation concluded in December 2023. Wakeley has spoken with unusual candour about that experience – what she got right, what she would change, and what it reveals about the relationship between a founder’s vision and the commercial structures built around it. Since then, she has rebuilt her platform through broadcasting and media. Her podcast, Style DNA, launched in 2022 and reached 4.5 million listeners within its first four seasons, securing a place on British Airways in-flight entertainment. She remains co-chair of Fashion Targets Breast Cancer, the campaign she helped found in 1996, which has raised more than £16 million for Breast Cancer Now. What organisations receive from Wakeley is something that cannot be taught through a framework: three decades of building a premium brand under real commercial conditions, the full weight of what it costs to maintain creative control, and a frank account of what happens when external forces overwhelm even a well-established brand identity. The reinvention that followed is part of the argument. Key speaking topics Luxury and premium brand building Founder-investor dynamics and creative control Entrepreneurship and self-funded growth Brand reinvention and recovery after setback Personal branding and creative identity Female entrepreneurship and leadership The evolution of the British fashion industry Ideal for Founders, entrepreneurs, and brand leaders in luxury, premium, or lifestyle sectors grappling with growth, investment, or identity decisions Senior marketing and commercial leaders where brand differentiation is a strategic priority Audiences at women’s leadership forums, female entrepreneurship conferences, and diversity summits Executive teams and boards in consumer brands navigating reinvention, restructuring, or recovery Audience outcomes A clearer understanding of the trade-off between scaling a brand and preserving the founding distinctiveness that gives it value First-hand perspective on founder-investor dynamics – the decision points Wakeley faced, what she did, and what she would do differently A specific, candid account of navigating business failure and professional reinvention, grounded in named decisions rather than generic resilience messaging Practical insight into how luxury positioning is built and maintained through choices about distribution, clientele, and product range An understanding of how personal identity and professional brand intersect, and how to manage that intersection deliberately under pressure

Why organisations work with Andrew Grant His central argument – that the organisational push to innovate faster actively undermines the creative capacity required for innovation – inverts the standard case most leadership teams are making internally, and is backed by three decades of research across more than 40 cultures. The Innovation Climate Indicator (iCLi) and Dynamic Polar Positioning (DPoP) tool give leadership teams validated instruments to assess their actual innovation readiness – scored diagnostic outputs, not a conceptual model to discuss. His books draw on the concept of “creativogenic cultures” – the specific conditions under which creativity can survive organisational pressure – giving the cultural argument cross-cultural evidence that few other innovation speakers can produce. Clients including Google, Goldman Sachs, Boeing, Disney, PwC, and Salesforce have engaged Tirian at C-suite and country manager level, not just for conference keynotes – the repeat and depth of engagement reflects the consultancy proposition, not the speaker circuit. As a facilitator for Duke University Corporate Education and consistently the top-rated speaker at YPO (9.6/10) and APEC CEO Summit, Grant operates credibly across executive development, board-level strategy conversations, and large-scale conference formats. Biography highlights Founder and director of Tirian Innovative Solutions, an international innovation and culture consultancy Co-author of Who Killed Creativity?…And How Do We Get It Back? (Wiley, 2012), an international bestseller, and The Innovation Race: How to Change a Culture to Change the Game (2016) Developer of the Innovation Climate Indicator (iCLi) and Dynamic Polar Positioning (DPoP) tool – validated instruments for assessing innovation readiness and leadership ambidexterity TEDx speaker; opening keynote at the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) Global Leadership Conference; keynote speaker at the APEC CEO Summit, Danang Educator and facilitator for Duke University Corporate Education; top-rated YPO global facilitator (9.6/10) Featured in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, the Wall Street Journal, BBC, Reuters, and ABC TV; clients include Google, Goldman Sachs, Boeing, Disney, PwC, and Salesforce Biography Most organisations treat innovation and creativity as interchangeable – investing in sprints, programmes, and processes designed to produce new output faster. Andrew Grant’s research, conducted across more than 40 cultures over three decades, points to a different problem: the management behaviours used to accelerate innovation are measurably suppressing the creative thinking that makes innovation possible. His co-authored book Who Killed Creativity? names the specific culprits – seven “creativity killers” that emerge under organisational pressure – and maps the conditions required to reverse the decline. Grant founded Tirian to convert that research into tools leadership teams can actually use. The Innovation Climate Indicator (iCLi) profiles a team’s innovation readiness against validated criteria. The Dynamic Polar Positioning (DPoP) tool helps organisations surface the leadership paradoxes – between speed and stability, exploration and execution – that determine whether a creative culture can be sustained under commercial pressure. The output is a management conversation grounded in data, not a framework to be filed after the conference. His second book, The Innovation Race, extends the argument through cross-cultural evidence, examining which societies and organisations have built genuinely enduring innovation capacity – and why. Developed in collaboration with Dr. Gaia Grant, whose PhD research at the University of Sydney Business School provides the academic foundation, the book identifies cultural prerequisites that most innovation investment bypasses entirely. Clients including Google, Goldman Sachs, Boeing, and PwC have engaged Tirian at C-suite level to work through those prerequisites in practice. Grant has delivered the argument at the APEC CEO Summit, the YPO Global Leadership Conference, and through Duke University Corporate Education. His sessions consistently receive the highest ratings at international forums – a pattern most visible in leadership teams navigating the specific tension between the urgency of digital change and the creative culture their strategies ultimately depend on. Key speaking topics Innovation culture and creativogenic conditions The creativity-innovation paradox Leadership behaviours that enable or block creative thinking Organisational culture diagnosis and transformation Innovation readiness assessment and diagnostics Collaborative intelligence in competitive environments AI adoption and the leadership paradoxes of digital change Ideal for CEOs and senior leadership teams investing in innovation capability and not seeing returns on that investment CHROs and culture leads responsible for diagnosing the conditions that either enable or suppress creative thinking Strategy and transformation leads managing the tension between innovation acceleration and organisational stability Corporate learning and development functions building innovation leadership programmes for senior executive cohorts Audience outcomes A specific diagnosis – through the iCLi and DPoP tools – of where their organisation currently sits on the creativity-to-innovation continuum Understanding of the four key innovation paradoxes that shape leadership decision-making under pressure, and how to navigate them without defaulting to either extreme A reframe of what innovation investment should target – cultural conditions rather than programme outputs – that shifts how senior leaders plan and measure culture change Identification of the specific leader behaviours that either enable or shut down creative thinking in teams under pressure Clarity on the distinction between creativity and innovation – and why conflating them is one of the most common reasons innovation programmes underperform

Why organisations work with Annemarie Steen A working method for adaptability rather than a talk about it. Her keynotes ask the room to practise the behaviours she names, so leadership teams leave with something they have already tried, not only heard Faculty credibility on two sides of the discipline: senior facilitator at THNK School of Creative Leadership in Amsterdam and award-winning MBA visiting lecturer at Estonian Business School on Creative and Playful Leadership A clear thesis on why composure and openness matter to commercial decisions, not as soft skills but as the conditions under which good judgement actually happens One of the few European speakers who can hold a serious leadership audience while running an interactive room, useful when a client wants a keynote that does not flatten into a lecture Biography highlights Owner of SteenTrain since 2009, a leadership development practice built around playful, applied-improvisation methods Founder of Play-Break, a concept for short recovery and creativity practices used inside teams and at events Senior facilitator at THNK School of Creative Leadership, Amsterdam Partner at The Core Story, a strategic narrative and storytelling consultancy Visiting lecturer in Creative and Playful Leadership at Estonian Business School for around nine years, awarded Best Visiting Lecturer for the MBA course TEDx speaker (Tallaght, Dublin, 2014, “What happens when you press PLAY”); client work has included the Netherlands Ministry of Defence, KPMG Estonia, the Estonian Employers Confederation, Vlerick Business School and Fontys Biography Most leadership teams know the language of agility and innovation. Far fewer have a working method for the behaviours those words refer to. Steen’s practice fills that gap. She treats playfulness as a discipline, not a mood, and trains senior groups in how to read a room, hold uncertainty without seizing up, and make a decision that is open to revision. The foundation is applied improvisation, taken seriously. At THNK School of Creative Leadership in Amsterdam, where she is a senior facilitator, the methods are used to develop founders and senior leaders running ventures in complex markets. At Estonian Business School, her course on Creative and Playful Leadership has run for around nine years on the MBA, and was awarded Best Visiting Lecturer. The work travels because it is built around behaviours that hold up under business pressure, not just classroom exercises. Her client list reflects that reach. The Netherlands Ministry of Defence, KPMG Estonia, the Estonian Employers Confederation, Vlerick Business School and Fontys have all used her with senior groups. A 2014 TEDx talk in Tallaght, “What happens when you press PLAY”, sets out the underlying argument: that organisations lose access to their own intelligence when they over-perform seriousness, and that recovering creative range is a leadership decision, not a perk. What clients tend to book her for is the combination of a keynote and a room that actually does something. Steen runs the talk as an interactive frame, so a leadership audience leaves having rehearsed presence, listening and response under mild pressure, rather than having taken notes about them. Key speaking topics Playful leadership and leading under uncertainty Applied improvisation for senior teams Creativity, innovation and design thinking in practice Storytelling for business and executive communication Presence, listening and connection at senior level Recovery, attention and team energy at work Ideal for Senior leadership offsites where the brief is to shift behaviour, not deliver information HR, learning and OD leads commissioning executive development on adaptability and creative range Conference organisers looking for an interactive keynote or moderator who can hold a serious leadership room Audience outcomes A direct experience of the behaviours that make a leadership team adaptable, not only a description of them Specific practices for presence, listening and response that can be used inside their own meetings A practical argument for why creative range is a commercial capability, not an HR theme Renewed attention to recovery and energy as inputs to senior decision-making

Why organisations work with Ayse Birsel She brings a method, not a mood. Deconstruction: Reconstruction is a four-step process (deconstruct, point of view, reconstruct, express) developed across two decades of paid client work, and groups can run it on a real problem in the room. Her design credentials are commercial, not theoretical: products and systems for Herman Miller, Toyota, Amazon, IKEA, Knoll, GE and Colgate-Palmolive, with Resolve for Herman Miller named by The New York Times among the defining furniture pieces of the last 100 years. She bridges product innovation and people innovation. The same method behind the Zoë Washlet for TOTO underpins Design the Work You Love, which is why teams leave with a tool they can apply to org design, not just to creativity. She is one of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches, and the cohort itself was formed inside her Design the Life You Love process. That credential signals trust from the most senior coaching network in business. Recognised by Fast Company as one of the Most Creative People in Business and by Thinkers50 on its Radar list of thinkers most likely to shape the future of organisations. Biography highlights Co-founder and Creative Director, Birsel + Seck, New York. Master’s in Industrial Design, Pratt Institute, on a Fulbright Scholarship; undergraduate in Industrial Design at Middle East Technical University. Author of “Design the Life You Love” (Penguin Random House, 2015) and “Design the Long Life You Love” (Running Press, 2022). Thinkers50 Radar list of 30 thinkers most likely to shape the future of organisations. One of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business (2017); member of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches. Work in the permanent collections of MoMA, Cooper Hewitt and the Philadelphia Museum of Art; clients include Herman Miller, Toyota, Amazon, GE, IKEA, Knoll, Staples, Colgate-Palmolive and TOTO. Biography Most organisations treat innovation as a personality trait. Ayse Birsel treats it as a process. Deconstruction: Reconstruction, the method she has used at Birsel + Seck for two decades, is built around four steps: take the problem apart, change the point of view, put it back together within real constraints, and give the result a clean form. It is the same logic she has applied to a Herman Miller workstation, a Toyota concept car and a TOTO washlet. Her credentials are commercial. Birsel + Seck, the New York studio she runs with Bibi Seck, has produced work for Amazon, GE, IKEA, Staples, Knoll and Colgate-Palmolive. The Resolve System for Herman Miller has been cited by The New York Times among the defining furniture pieces of the last 100 years, and her work sits in the permanent collections of MoMA, Cooper Hewitt and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She trained at Middle East Technical University and took a master’s at Pratt Institute on a Fulbright Scholarship. The translation from product to people came through her books. “Design the Life You Love” (Penguin Random House, 2015) and “Design the Long Life You Love” (2022) take the same four-step method and apply it to careers, relationships and ageing well. Marshall Goldsmith ran the program himself, and the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches network was formed inside it. She is a member of that cohort and on the Thinkers50 Radar list of thinkers most likely to shape the future of organisations. For corporate audiences, this matters because the method is the product. Teams do not leave with a story about creativity. They leave having deconstructed a real brief, tested a different point of view and reconstructed an option they can take back to the operating model on Monday. Key speaking topics Innovation method and design thinking in practice Deconstruction: Reconstruction as a creative process for teams Designing the work, not just the workplace Life design and career reinvention for senior leaders Creativity under constraint Human-centred product and service design Long-life and longevity design Ideal for Innovation, R&D and product leaders looking for a repeatable creative method. CHROs and learning leaders running senior leadership offsites or executive development programs. Boards and executive teams working through reinvention, succession and second-act questions. Design, marketing and customer experience functions translate creativity into operating decisions. Audience outcomes A working knowledge of the four-step Deconstruction: Reconstruction process applied to a real organisational brief. A different point of view on a problem the team came in with, tested in the room. Language and structure for talking about creativity that does not depend on individual talent. A personal life-design or career-design artefact that senior leaders can take away from the session. Confidence that innovation can be run as a discipline, not staged as a culture programme.

Why organisations work with Ben Hanlin He has spent twenty years professionally holding the attention of audiences who did not ask to be entertained, a craft most keynote speakers approximate and never master. His engagement and rapport techniques are not theoretical. They are the working methods of a magician adapted for sales teams, client conversations and conference stages, and they were sharp enough to win Best TEDx Speaker at The Speaker Awards 2024. He is one of the few speakers who can credibly anchor a full conference day, opening with a keynote, hosting the agenda, and closing with the awards, without changing register. Major brand audiences including Google, PwC, Coca-Cola and Amplifi book him for the same reason: he reliably resets the energy of a room and gives an audience something to remember about it the next morning. The Speaker Awards 2024 triple, Speaker of the Year, Best Newcomer and Best TEDx Speaker, was judged by industry bookers on content, delivery and bookability. That combination of recognitions in a single year is rare. Biography highlights Creator, writer and star of ITV2’s hidden-camera magic series Tricked, three series broadcast 2013 to 2016. Presenter of Breaking Magic on the Discovery Channel. Series 12 finalist on ITV’s Dancing on Ice (2020), finishing fourth. Speaker of the Year, Best Newcomer and Best TEDx Speaker at The Speaker Awards 2024. TEDx London speaker, “How to Create INSTANT Engagement and Connection” (2024). Combined online following of two million plus across YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. Biography Most keynote speakers learn to hold a room by stepping onto a corporate stage. Ben Hanlin learned it on the street, in pubs and on prime-time television, where the audience has not agreed in advance to pay attention and the speaker has roughly four seconds to earn it. Twenty years of working as a professional magician is, among other things, twenty years of solving that problem. That craft moved onto television with Tricked, the ITV2 hidden-camera magic series he created, wrote and presented across three series between 2013 and 2016, followed by Breaking Magic on the Discovery Channel and a fourth-place finish on series 12 of Dancing on Ice. The work travels: his combined audience across YouTube, Instagram and Facebook now sits above two million. The keynote work is a translation of the same discipline. Hanlin teaches the working methods a magician uses to create rapport, hold attention and make a message stick, applied to sales conversations, client meetings, leadership presence and the inside of a conference room. In 2024 his TEDx London talk “How to Create INSTANT Engagement and Connection” was named Best TEDx Speaker at The Speaker Awards. At the same ceremony he was also named Speaker of the Year and Best Newcomer, judged by industry bookers on content, delivery and bookability. Organisations including Google, PwC, Coca-Cola and Amplifi book him in three modes: keynote on engagement and human connection, full-day conference facilitation, and high-energy awards hosting. The common thread is the same craft applied at different scales, the ability to walk into a room of distracted people and leave it as a connected audience. Key speaking topics Engagement and human connection Instant rapport and audience attention Communication under pressure Innovation and creative confidence Resilience and dealing with failure Conference hosting and awards facilitation Ideal for Sales conferences, kick-offs and national sales meetings Awards nights and gala dinners requiring a host who can also deliver content Leadership and client-facing teams working on rapport, presence and communication Full-day conferences needing a single anchor across keynote, facilitation and after-dinner roles Audience outcomes A working set of rapport and attention techniques drawn from twenty years of professional magic, usable the next morning in client meetings. Sharper instincts for reading a room and recovering it when energy drops. A clearer sense of how to make a message land and be remembered. A shared, high-energy moment that resets the tone of the conference or sales event.

Why organisations work with Billie Whitehouse She has shipped real wearable products at consumer scale, including the Nadi X haptic yoga pant and the Fan Jersey shown around Super Bowl 50, not concept renders or research prototypes. She runs a category-defining company on both sides of the Pacific. Wearable X has been one of the longest-surviving independent smart-apparel businesses in the market, giving her a working view of what the category can and cannot support commercially. She brings a fashion designer’s instinct to a hardware conversation. Her starting question is not what the sensor can do, but what the wearer will accept on their body, which reframes most internal innovation debates about wearables. She has been recognised by Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business and Business Insider’s 30 Most Important Women Under 30 in Tech, giving her credibility in both the technology and the design communities that organisations are trying to bridge. Biography highlights Founder, CEO and Creative Director of Wearable X, headquartered in New York with operations in Sydney. Creator of Nadi X, smart yoga apparel with embedded accelerometers and haptic feedback for posture correction. Designed the Fan Jersey haptic fan-engagement garment associated with Super Bowl 50, and the Foxtel Alert Shirt. Named to Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business and Business Insider’s 30 Most Important Women Under 30 in Tech. Exhibited at the Venice Biennale and the Limits of Humanity exhibition at the Musée de l’Homme, Paris (2021). Keynote speaker at The New Yorker TechFest, Fortune’s Most Powerful Women, Cannes Lions, Wired Retail UK and Wearable Technologies Conference. Biography Wearable computing has spent a decade trapped in the wrist. The watch became the default form factor because it was the easiest place to put a screen, not because it was the most useful place to put a sensor. Wearable X was built on the opposite premise: the garment itself is the device, and the body is where the interface actually lives. That premise has produced shipped products. Nadi X yoga apparel uses accelerometers and haptic modules sewn into the fabric to nudge the hip, knee and ankle into alignment during practice, with no phone in the user’s eyeline. The Fan Jersey, shown around Super Bowl 50, translated live game data into physical sensation on the wearer’s torso. Both products started from the wearer’s experience and worked backwards into the engineering, an order of operations that most hardware companies do not follow. The professional grounding behind that approach is design, not computer science. Whitehouse trained at the Whitehouse Institute of Design in Australia and studied Fashion as Art at Accademia Italiana in Florence before founding Wearable Experiments in 2013, later renamed Wearable X. She has been named to Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business and Business Insider’s 30 Most Important Women Under 30 in Tech, and her work has been shown at the Venice Biennale and the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. For leadership teams thinking about what comes after the smartphone, the most useful thing she brings is a working answer to a specific question: what does it take to make a piece of technology that a person will actually put on their body every day. That answer involves apparel, hardware, software and behavioural design at the same time, and very few operators have shipped against all four constraints at once. Key speaking topics Wearable technology and smart apparel Haptic feedback and ambient computing Fashion technology and consumer hardware Design-led product development Women founders in deep tech The future of human computer interaction Ideal for Chief product officers, CTOs and innovation leads at consumer goods, apparel, sportswear and consumer electronics businesses Corporate innovation and R&D teams exploring wearable, haptic or sensor-based product categories Investors and accelerator audiences focused on hardware, fashion-tech or female-founded deep-tech ventures Senior creative and design leadership inside organisations bringing physical and digital products closer together Audience outcomes A clearer picture of where wearable technology has stalled and where it is genuinely advancing beyond the wrist A working framework for thinking about the garment, not the device, as the next product surface A founder’s honest view of what it takes to commercialise hardware that crosses fashion and technology A more concrete sense of where haptics, sensors and ambient computing are likely to land inside the next consumer cycle