Culture Transformation

Why organisations work with Beth Davies She ran learning and development at Tesla through a workforce expansion from roughly 600 to 33,000 employees, so her playbook on hypergrowth culture is built from the inside, not observed from outside. She led retail talent development at Apple during the iPhone launch and was on the founding team that built Microsoft’s retail stores from zero to fifteen in eighteen months, giving her rare comparative insight into how two very different consumer technology giants trained their customer-facing workforces. She teaches on IE University’s Master in Talent Development and Human Resources, which keeps her arguments tested against the next generation of HR leaders rather than frozen at the point she left corporate roles. McKinsey invited her into its Consortium for Advancing Adult Learning and Development, a signal that her views on workplace learning are taken seriously by the people advising the world’s largest employers. She speaks in concrete operational detail: what the onboarding looked like, how the first week was designed, what broke at which headcount, what the CEO actually said in the room. Biography highlights Former Director of Learning and Development, Tesla (2011 to 2017) Former Director of Retail Talent Development, Apple (2003 to 2008) Former Director of Customer Experience and Training, Microsoft (2009 to 2011) Adjunct Professor, Master in Talent Development and Human Resources, IE University, Madrid Founder and host of the Career Curves podcast JD, Stanford Law School; BA, Indiana University; named Luminary by Indiana University in 2016 Biography Tesla grew from around 600 people to 33,000 in the six years Beth Davies ran its learning and development function. That scale of expansion usually breaks culture. Keeping it intact was her job. Before Tesla, she had already done two of the hardest workforce build-outs in modern retail. At Apple, she was head of retail talent development during the years the stores were becoming the company’s most important customer relationship. She trained teams across the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia and prepared thousands of store employees to sell the iPhone on day one. At Microsoft, she joined the small founding team that built the company’s own retail operation from zero to fifteen stores in eighteen months, setting the customer experience standards and the training that went with them. Her argument to senior leaders is that culture is not a slogan or a values poster. It is the behaviour that shows up in onboarding, in manufacturing floor routines, in how a new hire’s first week is designed, and in what managers are actually trained to do. When companies scale quickly, those details get delegated and diluted, and the product suffers. Protecting them is a leadership discipline, not an HR programme. She now teaches on IE University’s Master in Talent Development and Human Resources, advises EdTech founders, and hosts the Career Curves podcast. McKinsey’s Consortium for Advancing Adult Learning and Development invited her in as one of forty thought leaders it wanted in the room. Her Stanford law training shows up in how she structures an argument: specific, evidenced, and unsentimental about what works. Key speaking topics Scaling culture through hypergrowth Onboarding design for new hires Leadership development inside fast-moving companies Learning and development strategy on constrained budgets Customer experience training for retail and consumer businesses The CHRO agenda in technology-led organisations Talent retention in competitive labour markets Ideal for CHROs and heads of L and D in companies scaling past 1,000 employees CEOs and founders protecting culture through a growth phase Retail, consumer, and manufacturing leaders rebuilding customer-facing training HR leadership teams redesigning onboarding and manager capability Audience outcomes A concrete view of what culture preservation looks like at Tesla and Apple scale, in the detail of day-one onboarding and manager routines A sharper test for whether their current learning investment is protecting or eroding the customer experience Specific design principles for onboarding that holds up when headcount doubles A more honest read on which parts of their people strategy are load-bearing and which are ceremonial Comparative lessons from two consumer technology giants that solved retail workforce problems very differently

Why organisations work with Amy Cappellanti-Wolf She has held the CHRO seat at Dayforce, Cohesity, Symantec and Silver Spring Networks, including taking Silver Spring Networks public on the NYSE in 2013. Her HR career runs from Frito-Lay and The Walt Disney Company through Sun Microsystems and Cisco, so she can speak credibly to consumer, entertainment and enterprise tech leadership teams in their own language. At Dayforce she runs people strategy at an HR technology vendor and acts as “Customer Zero” for the company’s AI-powered HR releases, which gives her an unusually concrete view of where AI lands in real HR operations. She works at board and committee level on talent and rewards, currently as Compensation Committee Chair at Softchoice and as a director or advisor at D-Wave Quantum, Betterworks and Wellist. Recognised externally on people and tech leadership: National Diversity Council Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology, Silicon Valley Business Journal Women of Influence, and the Forbes Human Resources Council. Biography highlights EVP and Chief People Officer, Dayforce, since April 2024. Former CHRO at Cohesity, Symantec and Silver Spring Networks; led people strategy through Silver Spring Networks’ 2013 IPO. Earlier senior HR roles at Cisco Systems (2001 to 2009), Sun Microsystems, The Walt Disney Company and Frito-Lay (PepsiCo). Compensation Committee Chair at Softchoice (TSX: SFTC); board and advisory roles at D-Wave Quantum, Betterworks and Wellist. Forbes Human Resources Council member since 2018; National Diversity Council Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology. Inducted into the Roll of Distinguished Alumni, WVU’s John Chambers College of Business and Economics, in 2019. Biography Few CHROs have stood in the room for a Cisco-era leadership build, a Disney creative organisation, a Symantec security business and a Silver Spring Networks IPO. Amy Cappellanti-Wolf has. That cross-section is what gives her practical authority on what culture and talent actually take when a company changes shape. Her current seat sharpens the point. As EVP and Chief People Officer at Dayforce, she runs people strategy inside an HR technology vendor and uses Dayforce’s own platform as “Customer Zero” for AI-powered HR releases. That gives her a working view of where AI lands in payroll, performance and workforce planning, not as a forecast but as a live deployment. Boards use her where rewards, governance and people risk meet. She chairs the Compensation Committee at Softchoice, sits on the board at D-Wave Quantum, and advises Betterworks and Wellist. Her recognition track record, Forbes HR Council, the National Diversity Council Top 50 in Technology, Silicon Valley Business Journal Women of Influence, sits alongside the operating record, not in place of it. For senior buyers, the practical value is specific. She can talk credibly to a CHRO planning an IPO, a CEO integrating an acquisition, an HR team rebuilding engagement after a restructure, or a board asking what AI in HR really changes. The answers come from having done it, not from observing it. Key speaking topics People strategy through IPO, M&A and divestiture AI in HR and the future of the people function High-performance culture in scaling tech companies Diversity, equity and inclusion as an operating discipline Leadership and talent for enterprise transformation The CHRO as a board-level voice on people risk Ideal for CHROs and senior HR leaders preparing for IPO, M&A or large-scale restructure CEOs and boards weighing the people implications of AI deployment in core operations Compensation and talent committees considering rewards, succession and culture risk Technology, consumer and entertainment leadership teams running concurrent transformations Audience outcomes A clear sense of how to sequence people priorities through IPO, integration and restructure A practical view of where AI changes HR operations now, drawn from a live enterprise deployment Sharper questions for boards and executive teams on culture, rewards and talent risk Concrete language for inclusion outcomes that survive a politically contested environment

Why organisations work with Yves Morieux Smart Simplicity® is a proprietary BCG framework built on social science – game theory, organisational sociology, economics – not management intuition. Leaders take away a testable model, not a set of principles. His argument is counter-intuitive and specific: the problem is not complexity itself, but the organisational response to it. That reframe changes where leadership teams look for solutions. His two TED talks on the subject have exceeded 5 million views, which means senior audiences often arrive having already encountered the framework and wanting to operationalise it. Six Simple Rules, published by Harvard Business Review Press, gives organisations a durable reference point that outlasts a single event and shapes how teams implement change. His 2019 BCG Fellow research introduced “Relational Productivity”, extending the Smart Simplicity model into how digital ways of working reshape cooperation and output. Organisations dealing with hybrid work and digital transformation get a framework grounded in his earlier work but updated for current conditions. Biography highlights BCG Fellow since 2008; Managing Director and Senior Partner at Boston Consulting Group; Director of the BCG Institute for Organization Creator of Smart Simplicity®, BCG’s registered framework for managing organisational complexity and rebuilding cooperation Author of a second BCG Fellow research concept, Relational Productivity, developed in 2019 Co-author of Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014), with Peter Tollman Two TED talks on organisational complexity and workplace effectiveness, collectively exceeding 5 million views Published in Harvard Business Review, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Le Monde; author of more than 45 articles and book chapters Lecturer in the advanced sociology programme and professor in the master of public affairs programme at Sciences Po, Paris PhD in industrial marketing, University of Strathclyde; DEA in organisational sociology, Sciences Po Biography Organisations under pressure tend to reach for familiar tools: clearer accountability frameworks, more robust reporting, additional coordination structures. Yves Morieux has spent his career at BCG demonstrating that this instinct is the source of the problem, not the solution. The more complex the operating environment, the more those tools erode the cooperation that performance actually depends on. His framework, Smart Simplicity®, was developed through research at the BCG Institute for Organization where he has served as a BCG Fellow since 2008, and grounded in social science disciplines unusual in consulting: game theory, organisational sociology, economics. The six rules at its core are not management principles but structural interventions that change the conditions under which people decide whether to cooperate. His 2019 BCG Fellow work extended the model into Relational Productivity, examining how digital ways of working reshape those same dynamics. Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated, co-authored with Peter Tollman and published by Harvard Business Review Press, codified the framework for practitioner use. His two TED talks on the subject, delivered as part of a series curated with BCG, have collectively exceeded 5 million views, making Smart Simplicity one of the most widely seen management arguments of the past decade. Morieux also lectures in the advanced sociology programme and the master of public affairs at Sciences Po in Paris. His work has been covered and published in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Fast Company, and Le Monde, and spans more than 45 articles and book chapters. Key speaking topics Organisational complexity and its management Smart Simplicity® framework and the Six Simple Rules Cooperation as a performance driver Relational Productivity and digital ways of working Organisational design and behavioural architecture Leadership under complexity Productivity, engagement, and the failure of conventional management tools Ideal for C-suite and senior executive teams undertaking transformation or restructuring CHROs and people function leaders diagnosing engagement and performance gaps Strategy and organisational design leaders evaluating how structure is shaping behaviour Leadership teams navigating post-merger integration, scaling, or operating model change Audience outcomes A concrete diagnosis of how conventional management responses to complexity generate the performance and engagement problems they were designed to solve Understanding of the six Smart Simplicity® rules and how each changes the structural conditions for cooperation A framework to identify which processes, metrics, and accountabilities in their own organisation are creating complicatedness rather than managing complexity Exposure to the Relational Productivity concept and its implications for hybrid and digital-first operating environments Practical language to take back to leadership teams for evaluating organisational design decisions

Why organisations work with Stuart Lancaster A coaching record that proves the method twice: a national team rebuild with England and a sustained European-winning culture with Leinster, where the same principles produced different results in different conditions. Direct authorship of the 2018 Heineken Champions Cup-winning Leinster culture, alongside Leo Cullen, plus four consecutive PRO14 titles between 2018 and 2021. Few corporate speakers can point to a documented seven-year run of trophy-level output in their primary domain. A structured leadership masterclass product, not a one-off war-stories keynote. Lancaster runs his own corporate programme through Stuart Lancaster Leadership, which means the material has been used and refined with executive audiences over years. Hands-on practitioner credibility on the specific question senior leaders find hardest: how to set behavioural standards inside a high-status, high-ego group of professionals without losing performance. Biography highlights Head Coach, England Rugby, 2011 to 2015. Forty-six tests, twenty-eight wins, a Triple Crown and four Calcutta Cups. Senior coach, Leinster Rugby, 2016 to 2023. One European Rugby Champions Cup (2018) and four consecutive PRO14/URC titles (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021). Head Coach, Racing 92, from 2023. Head Coach, Connacht Rugby, from June 2025. Three Churchill Cup titles as Head Coach of England Saxons (2008, 2010, 2011) and National Division One title with Leeds Tykes (2006 to 2007). Founder of Stuart Lancaster Leadership, running corporate masterclasses and keynotes for business audiences. Biography Rebuilding a national rugby programme after a public failure is a leadership problem before it is a technical one. When Lancaster took the England head coach role in 2012, the squad was carrying the reputational damage of a disastrous 2011 World Cup. He spent the next four years rebuilding the behavioural standards, won twenty-eight of forty-six tests, took a Triple Crown and four Calcutta Cups, and then watched it end in the group stages of the 2015 World Cup on home soil. The next chapter is what makes the leadership argument credible. Joining Leinster as a senior coach in 2016, Lancaster worked alongside Leo Cullen on a culture that produced the 2018 European Rugby Champions Cup final, won 15-12 against Racing 92, and four consecutive PRO14/URC titles between 2018 and 2021. The same person, the same principles, a different system, and a sustained run of European and domestic trophies. That sequence is now the source material for his work with senior executives. Through Stuart Lancaster Leadership, he runs masterclasses and keynote sessions for corporate audiences on building high-performing teams, leadership under pressure, and the practical detail of culture inside elite groups. The work is structured, not anecdotal: behavioural standards, feedback mechanics, role clarity, how leaders show up in front of their group when results are poor. Since 2023 he has continued to coach at the highest level, first at Racing 92 in the Top 14 and now as Head Coach of Connacht Rugby, appointed in June 2025. The leadership method is not retrospective; it is being tested again, on the field, while the corporate audience is watching. Key speaking topics Building high-performing teams Culture and behavioural standards in elite groups Leadership under public scrutiny and after setback Trust, feedback and communication inside senior teams Resilience and sustained performance through change Authentic leadership for introverts and extroverts Ideal for Chief executives, executive committees and senior leadership groups responsible for performance over multi-year cycles Chief people officers and HR directors building leadership development programmes anchored in real team-leadership practice Sales, professional services and trading leadership teams operating under high pressure and public results Conference audiences of senior managers where leadership and team-performance content is the primary brief Audience outcomes A concrete reference model for what cultural standards look like inside an elite-performance group, drawn from named examples at England and Leinster Sharper thinking on the difference between leading through good results and leading through bad ones Practical language for the behavioural side of leadership: standards, feedback, role clarity, the leader’s own conduct in front of the group A counterpoint to abstract leadership content, grounded in a domain where results are public, weekly and unforgiving

Why organisations work with Steven van Belleghem His Diamond in the Rough framework addresses a specific, documented paradox: Bain research shows 80% of CEOs consider their company customer-centric; only 8% of customers agree. Van Belleghem gives executive teams a precise diagnosis for this failure and a structured path out of it, not a motivation to try harder. His six books spanning the shift from social commerce (The Conversation Manager) through AI’s impact on customer relationships (Customers the Day After Tomorrow) to the execution problem (A Diamond in the Rough) mean audiences arrive with context. The keynote becomes a working session rather than a first exposure. His investor position in Hello Customer, an AI-driven customer experience platform, means his claims about AI and CX come from operational skin in the game, not conference-circuit commentary. He makes AI relevant to commercial and marketing leaders without requiring a technology background, situating AI investment specifically in terms of what it does to customer expectations and competitive differentiation. His thinking has been tested in front of organisations where customer experience is not an internal initiative but a revenue-critical priority: Disney, Mastercard, Heineken, Rabobank, Airbus and Salesforce are among his documented client base. Biography highlights Adjunct Professor of Marketing at Vlerick Business School; guest lecturer at London Business School Author of six international bestselling books on customer experience, including When Digital Becomes Human, Customers the Day After Tomorrow, The Offer You Can’t Refuse, and A Diamond in the Rough: over 150,000 copies sold in seven languages A Diamond in the Rough featured by Forbes as the #1 pick in its Top 10 must-read business books for 2024 Co-founder of Nexxworks, a global innovation and inspiration agency, and Snackbytes, a creative content agency Investor in Hello Customer (AI-driven CX platform) and iO Digital Board director of Plan International Belgium Clients include Disney, Mastercard, Heineken, Booking.com, Rabobank, Airbus, Salesforce and Google; regular keynote speaker at Oslo Business Forum Biography Research by Bain puts a number on one of the most persistent problems in commercial strategy: 80% of CEOs describe their company as customer-centric; only 8% of customers agree. Steven van Belleghem has spent twenty years studying that gap: why it exists, why it persists despite genuine investment, and what it actually takes to close it. His six books trace the problem across different phases of digital change. The Conversation Manager addressed the shift toward social and conversational commerce. When Digital Becomes Human made the case that automation, done right, creates more space for meaningful human contact, not less. Customers the Day After Tomorrow mapped how AI would reshape customer expectations before most organisations had an AI strategy to speak of. A Diamond in the Rough, recommended by Forbes as the #1 business book of 2024, takes the execution problem head-on: over 100 concrete actions for organisations that have the ambition but are stuck at the intention stage. Van Belleghem is Adjunct Professor of Marketing at Vlerick Business School and a guest lecturer at London Business School. He co-founded Nexxworks, an inspiration agency that runs global innovation tours for executive teams, and is an active investor in Hello Customer, an AI-driven customer experience platform. These are not decorative credentials, they place his arguments in direct contact with the operational realities he describes. His work is directly relevant to organisations facing a specific commercial pressure: AI is accelerating the baseline of what customers expect, and the companies that win on experience do so through culture and execution discipline, not technology spend alone. That argument has been made in front of audiences at Oslo Business Forum and tested with client organisations including Disney, Mastercard, Heineken, Rabobank, Airbus and Salesforce. Key speaking topics Customer experience strategy and execution Customer-centric culture and organisational behaviour AI and the future of customer relationships Digital transformation and competitive baseline The gap between CX ambition and CX delivery Long-term customer value and loyalty strategy Human experience in an automated world Ideal for Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Customer Officers leading experience transformation Commercial leadership teams where customer retention and loyalty are revenue-critical Executive and board-level audiences shaping digital and AI investment strategy Organisations that have invested in CX programmes and are not seeing the returns they expected Audience outcomes A specific framework for diagnosing the gap between customer-centric intention and customer-felt reality Clearer understanding of how AI is raising the competitive baseline for customer expectations – and what that means for strategy now Concrete, actionable steps for embedding customer culture at an organisational level, beyond the leadership team A reframe of digital investment: technology as a means to better human relationships, not a substitute for them A shared language for leadership teams to discuss CX execution failure without attributing it to effort or intent

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

Why organisations work with Skip Bowman The Safe2Great model is the only publicly available integrated framework that treats psychological safety and growth mindset as a single system – giving organisations one coherent diagnostic language that connects leadership behaviour, team dynamics, and organisational culture without requiring them to hold multiple competing frameworks simultaneously. The Growth Mindset Leadership 360 converts leadership culture into quantified, benchmarked data – replacing the subjective impressions that dominate most culture assessments with comparative insight on where specific leaders are enabling or blocking growth, measured against a global dataset. His research found that more than 60% of leaders assess their own impact inaccurately relative to how their teams experience them – a specific, repeatable finding that reframes the conversation with senior leadership teams from aspiration to accountability. The Safe2Great model names and maps three distinct protective mindsets – controlling-competitive, complying-complacent, and critical-skeptical – that remain invisible in standard leadership frameworks, enabling organisations to identify the specific cultural blockers at play rather than working against a generic leadership gap. Both the book and the assessment tools are designed for practitioner deployment through a formal accreditation programme, meaning organisations can embed the methodology independently – Bowman’s work scales beyond the keynote. Biography highlights Author of Safe to Great: The New Psychology of Leadership (Figure 1 Publishing, 2023) Creator of the Safe2Great model and suite of four proprietary diagnostic tools including the Growth Mindset Leadership 360 – available in over ten languages Founder and CEO of Global Mindset, leadership and organisational development consultancy based in Denmark MA in Psychology and Languages (Copenhagen); MA in Organisational Psychology (Denmark); trained in cross-cultural management, group dynamics, and coaching Over 25 years of applied consulting with global organisations including Danfoss, Siemens, Nestlé, Ericsson, VELUX, and Merck Bilingual in English and Danish; consulting engagements across Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East Biography Skip Bowman starts from a finding that most leadership programmes prefer to avoid: the majority of leaders believe they behave very differently from how their teams actually experience them. His Safe2Great research, conducted across more than 500 leadership teams, found that over 60% of leaders inaccurately assessed their own impact. That data point is the foundation of everything he does. His 2023 book, Safe to Great: The New Psychology of Leadership (Figure 1 Publishing), sets out the argument in full. The central claim is that psychological safety is not a cultural aspiration that organisations approach through values statements and team workshops – it is a direct output of specific, identifiable leadership behaviours. The Safe2Great model maps those behaviours against three protective mindsets – controlling-competitive, complying-complacent, and critical-sceptical – and connects them to a suite of validated diagnostic tools that make the invisible visible. The Growth Mindset Leadership 360 is the operational core of this system. It benchmarks leaders against a global dataset, measuring the behaviours that enable or obstruct growth-oriented team dynamics. Combined with the Great Teams Assessment and Culture for Growth Survey, the result is an assessment architecture that links individual leadership behaviour to team experience to organisational culture in a single, connected methodology. The tools are available in over ten languages and come with a formal practitioner accreditation programme. Bowman grew up in Perth, Australia, and has spent the majority of the last 25 years in Europe – working in Switzerland, England, France, and Denmark and consulting across Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. He holds an MA in Psychology and Languages from Copenhagen and an MA in Organisational Psychology from Denmark, with additional training in cross-cultural management, group dynamics, and coaching. His consulting client history includes Danfoss, Siemens, Nestlé, Ericsson, VELUX, and Merck. Key speaking topics Psychological safety and leadership behaviour Growth mindset in leadership and organisational culture The Safe2Great model and leadership diagnostics Transforming organisational culture Leading change and transformation Cross-cultural and global leadership Leadership development and behavioural change Ideal for Senior leadership teams and executive committees navigating transformation or cultural change CHROs and people directors responsible for leadership development strategy and investment decisions L&D and organisational development leads in multinational or cross-border organisations Boards evaluating the relationship between leadership behaviour and organisational performance Audience outcomes A clear, working model for understanding how leadership behaviour directly creates or dismantles psychological safety in teams – beyond the concept, into measurable practice Ability to identify the three protective mindsets that most commonly obstruct cultural change, and to recognise them in their own leadership environment A shared organisational language connecting leadership assessment, team dynamics, and culture in a single coherent framework Practical understanding of what a diagnostic-led approach to leadership development looks like, and why design matters more than content in producing lasting behavioural change The research basis for understanding why leadership development programmes frequently fail to change the behaviours they are designed to change

Why organisations work with René Carayol His SPIKE framework (Strengths Positively Identified Kick-Start Excellence) gives leadership teams a diagnostic for identifying the two or three individual strengths that drive high performance, rather than a generic conversation about development areas. It changes how teams are built, not just how leaders think. His case for inclusive leadership is grounded in firsthand board experience, including appointment as a Non-Executive Director of the Inland Revenue in 2001, at a time when no diversity representation existed at that level in UK public institutions. The argument carries a credibility that cannot be borrowed from research alone. Coaching and advisory engagements with senior leaders across business and government: clients and counterparts include Ralph Hamers (former CEO, ING and UBS), Sir Richard Branson, and Sir Tony Blair His “Everybody In, Nobody Out” framing positions inclusion as a performance architecture rather than an HR compliance function, directly relevant to organisations where DEI has stalled because it has not been connected to business outcomes. His executive and governance track from Marks & Spencer, PepsiCo, and IPC Media to Inland Revenue board and Computacenter plc, means his observations on leadership culture are drawn from the inside of institutions, not from coaching their periphery. His academic teaching (Cass Business School, MSc in Management) and media fluency (BBC, Channel 4, Sky News) mean he can move between rigorous argument and compelling narrative in a single session. His events consistently produce behavioural commitments rather than inspiration that dissipates. Biography highlights Decade-long career at Marks & Spencer (Senior IT Manager); IT Systems Director, PepsiCo; CIO then Managing Director of IPC Electric, IPC Magazines, driving Europe’s largest MBO at £860m, culminating in the sale to AOL Time Warner Non-Executive Director, Inland Revenue (appointed 2001); current Independent Non-Executive Director, Computacenter plc (FTSE-listed), sitting on Audit, Nomination and Remuneration Committees Executive Vice President for ESG, Medallia; member of the Global Executive Leadership Team Visiting Professor, Cass Business School; lectured on MSc in Management programme MBE (2004), services to the business community; undergraduate degree, London School of Economics; Honorary Doctorate, University of Roehampton Author, SPIKE: What Are You Great At?; co-author, Corporate Voodoo (third edition) and My Voodoo Broadcaster and commentator: BBC Two, Channel 4, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 5 Live, Sky News; former Sunday Telegraph Business Reporter columnist Biography Most leadership cultures are built around a small number of star performers at the top. SPIKE, René Carayol’s published strengths framework, challenges that model directly. The argument comes from someone who has led, governed, and coached at the highest levels of British and international business. Carayol spent a decade at Marks & Spencer in senior IT roles, then moved to PepsiCo as IT Systems Director before joining IPC Magazines as CIO. He rose to Managing Director of IPC Electric, the internet business at the centre of Europe’s largest MBO, a £860 million transaction that ended with the sale to AOL Time Warner. He went on to serve as Non-Executive Director of the Inland Revenue through its merger into HMRC, and currently sits on the board of FTSE-listed Computacenter plc. SPIKE (Strengths Positively Identified Kick-Start Excellence) is the framework that emerged from this experience. Its core argument: every person carries at least one genuine strength, and organisations that build around those strengths consistently outperform those that manage around weaknesses. For Carayol, this is inseparable from the business case for inclusive leadership. His mantra, “Everybody In, Nobody Out,” frames inclusion as a performance imperative, a position he holds with authority as one of the first Black men to serve at board level in a major UK institution. As Visiting Professor at Cass Business School and a regular voice on BBC Radio 4, Sky News, and Channel 4, his thinking reaches well beyond the conference circuit. His books, SPIKE: What Are You Great At? and the co-authored Corporate Voodoo, now in its third edition, extend his frameworks to leadership teams at scale. He was awarded an MBE in 2004 for services to the business community. Key speaking topics Strengths-based leadership Inclusive leadership and culture Leadership and business transformation Collaborative leadership Corporate culture and performance Executive coaching and personal effectiveness Diversity, equity and inclusion Ideal for Senior leadership teams and C-suite executives in FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 organisations navigating culture change or post-merger integration CHROs and Chief People Officers building inclusive, high-performance leadership cultures Board directors and non-executive directors focused on governance, leadership accountability, and succession Transformation leads and executive development programmes where the shift from management to leadership is the central challenge Audience outcomes A working understanding of the SPIKE framework and how to apply it to individual development, team design, and succession planning A reframed case for inclusive leadership as a performance architecture, not a compliance exercise – with the language to make that argument inside their own organisations Practical distinctions between management and leadership behaviours, grounded in frontline C-suite and board experience Insight drawn from Carayol’s direct coaching relationships with named CEOs and institution heads; World Bank, Barclays, ING, Generali, rather than theoretical constructs Clarity on how culture and leadership interact in practice, and what leaders can do immediately to change the pattern

Why organisations work with Peter Senge Built the framework that defined organisational learning. The Fifth Discipline has sold over two million copies; Harvard Business Review named it one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years, and the Financial Times listed it among the five most important management books ever published. Treats systems thinking as a leadership discipline. The Five Disciplines (personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking) give executives a working method for changing the structures that produce their hardest recurring problems. Three decades of applied work with Ford, Shell, BP, Unilever, Intel, and Saudi Aramco, alongside cross-sector initiatives on global food systems, climate, and education. Named “Strategist of the Century” by the Journal of Business Strategy, one of 24 figures judged to have had the greatest influence on 20th-century business strategy. The Fifth Discipline is now in its fourth decade of continuous use on MBA syllabuses and inside operating companies. Biography highlights Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Sustainability at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Founding Chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) and co-founder of the Academy for Systemic Change. Author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, with over two million copies sold worldwide. Co-author of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, The Dance of Change, Schools That Learn, Presence, and The Necessary Revolution. Named “Strategist of the Century” by the Journal of Business Strategy; ranked among the world’s top management thinkers by the Financial Times and BusinessWeek. Convened the Sustainable Food Lab, bringing major food companies and NGOs into shared work on sustainable agriculture. Biography The Fifth Discipline, published in 1990, gave senior executives a working vocabulary for something they kept hitting in practice but could not name: the structure of an organisation tends to produce the very problems its leaders are trying to solve. Thirty-six years later the book is still in print and still the reference text for the field. Peter Senge wrote it at MIT, where he is Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Sustainability at the Sloan School of Management. He is founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning and co-founder of the Academy for Systemic Change. The Fifth Discipline has sold more than two million copies. Harvard Business Review named it one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years; the Financial Times listed it among the five most important management books ever published. The book is organised around five disciplines: personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking. The core argument is that the only sustainable competitive advantage is an organisation’s ability to learn faster than its environment changes. Senge’s later work extended the method into education through Schools That Learn, into large-scale change through The Dance of Change, and into sustainability through The Necessary Revolution. His applied work has run through Ford, Shell, BP, Unilever, Intel, and Saudi Aramco, and across cross-sector initiatives including the Sustainable Food Lab, which brought major food companies and NGOs into shared work on sustainable agriculture, and the Compassionate Systems community in primary and secondary education. The Journal of Business Strategy named him a “Strategist of the Century,” one of 24 figures judged to have had the greatest influence on 20th-century business strategy. Key speaking topics Systems thinking Organisational learning Leadership in complex systems Sustaining change in large organisations Cross-sector collaboration Sustainability and systemic change Ideal for CEOs and senior executive teams running multi-year transformation programmes Heads of strategy and transformation leads diagnosing why change initiatives stall Chief sustainability officers and ESG leads working across sector and stakeholder boundaries Senior leaders in education, healthcare, and government addressing complex public-system challenges Audience outcomes A new vocabulary for talking about why their hardest organisational problems keep returning The Five Disciplines as a working method, applied through cases drawn from Ford, Shell, Unilever, and the Sustainable Food Lab Language to make the structural causes of organisational performance visible to senior teams A sharper read on what leadership in complex, multi-stakeholder environments demands

Why organisations work with Oleg Konovalov He has codified vision as a working leadership skill in The Vision Code (Wiley, 2021), drawing on primary interviews with senior visionary leaders rather than abstracted theory. He was named #1 Global Leading Coach at the Marshall Goldsmith Thinkers50 Awards, a credible signal of standing among working executive coaches. His Visionary Leadership Framework gives boards and executive committees a shared vocabulary for diagnosing where a vision is failing, before it shows up in numbers. He works on the C-suite side of the desk: the brief is usually about getting senior teams aligned and credible to their own organisations, not motivational set pieces. His earlier books on organisational anatomy and corporate culture mean he can connect a vision conversation to the structural and cultural conditions that allow it to land. Biography highlights Doctoral degree, Durham University Business School. Author of The Vision Code (Wiley, 2021), with foreword by Marshall Goldsmith. Author of LEADEROLOGY, Corporate Superpower, Organisational Anatomy, Hidden Russia, and The Fisherman’s Path to Leadership. Named #1 Global Leading Coach, Marshall Goldsmith Thinkers50 Awards. Shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Distinguished Award in Leadership, 2021. Listed in Global Gurus Top 30 in Leadership; Forbes contributor. Biography Most corporate visions do not survive contact with the operating year. They sit on a wall, get quoted in townhalls, and quietly disconnect from the decisions executives actually make. Oleg Konovalov’s work begins from that disconnect, and treats vision as a measurable leadership skill rather than a communications artefact. The Vision Code, published by Wiley in 2021 with a foreword by Marshall Goldsmith, set out his Visionary Leadership Framework. The book is built on primary interviews with senior leaders across industries, including Garry Ridge of WD-40 and the branding strategist Martin Lindstrom, and it argues that vision can be diagnosed, taught, and executed with the same rigour as any other senior capability. His earlier books, including LEADEROLOGY, Organisational Anatomy, and Corporate Superpower, sit alongside that work and connect the vision conversation to organisational design and culture. He holds a doctorate from Durham University Business School and writes regularly for Forbes. The recognition reflects working credibility with senior leaders rather than a media profile alone. He was named #1 Global Leading Coach at the Marshall Goldsmith Thinkers50 Awards, shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Distinguished Award in Leadership, and listed in the Global Gurus Top 30 in Leadership. Key speaking topics Visionary leadership Vision execution and strategy alignment Corporate culture in the digital era Leadership in disruption Organisational diagnosis Executive coaching and C-suite development Ideal for CEOs and executive committees setting or resetting strategic direction Board chairs and non-executive directors assessing senior leadership capability CHROs and chief learning officers designing senior leadership development Founders and scale-up leaders translating ambition into an operating vision Audience outcomes A working definition of vision that can be tested against the organisation’s current direction A diagnostic for where a stated vision is failing inside the leadership team A clearer view of how culture, structure, and vision interact in execution Practical questions senior leaders can take into their next strategy or board conversation

Why organisations work with Michael Brenner His core argument; that empathy outperforms authority as both a marketing and a leadership lever, is grounded in practitioner experience inside SAP and NewsCred, not academic research; senior leaders engage with it as a claim someone has actually lived, not theorised His book Mean People Suck gives CMOs and CHROs a shared language for the link between culture, employee engagement, and revenue outcomes, making it useful in conversations that usually stay siloed The “Champion Leader” model is a named, transferable alternative to command-and-control management: specific enough to teach, tested across both large enterprises and early-stage startups His content marketing work is anchored in a measurable ROI framework from The Content Formula, translating content investment into financial terms for leaders who need to justify budgets to the CFO, not just the marketing team He has operated on both sides of the client-agency relationship, which means his diagnosis of where organisations waste marketing spend carries a credibility most single-perspective speakers cannot match Biography highlights CEO and Founder of Marketing Insider Group, a content marketing agency serving Fortune 500 brands and B2B technology companies Former VP of Global Content Marketing Strategy at SAP and Head of Strategy at NewsCred Author of three books: Mean People Suck: How Empathy Leads to Bigger Profits and a Better Life (2019), The Content Formula, and Digital Marketing Growth Hacks Named Top CMO Influencer by Forbes and Top Business Speaker by The Huffington Post Contributor to Forbes, The Economist, and The Guardian; contributor at Content Marketing Institute Featured in Entrepreneur Magazine; facilitated content strategy workshops for MarketingProfs Biography Most organisations treat their marketing problem as a content problem. The more accurate diagnosis is a leadership one: companies default to self-promotion when their customers need help, and they build management cultures that reward compliance when growth requires empathy. Michael Brenner spent two decades working from the inside of that tension – as VP of Global Content Marketing Strategy at SAP, as Head of Strategy at NewsCred, and as CMO across a series of high-growth technology startups. His 2019 book Mean People Suck: How Empathy Leads to Bigger Profits and a Better Life argues that low employee engagement and weak marketing performance share a common root: a leadership culture that has traded empathy for authority. The research and case evidence he assembles make it a commercial argument, not a motivational one. As founder and CEO of Marketing Insider Group, Brenner has built content marketing programmes for more than 75 brands. His earlier book, The Content Formula, provides a practical ROI framework that converts content investment into financial language – useful for marketing leaders who need to make the commercial case to a CFO, not just a brand committee. His keynote work is structured around two named concepts: the “Champion Leader,” a model for leaders who close the gap between what organisations ask their teams to do and what actually drives results; and the “Bullseye Organisation,” which frames customer-centricity as a structural discipline rather than a values statement. A contributor to Forbes, The Economist, and The Guardian, and named Top CMO Influencer by Forbes and Top Business Speaker by The Huffington Post, Brenner speaks across the United States and Europe, primarily to senior marketing, commercial, and leadership audiences. Key speaking topics Customer-centric marketing strategy Content marketing ROI and measurement Empathy-led leadership Employee engagement and culture The Champion Leader model Organisational alignment around the customer B2B marketing and demand generation Ideal for CMOs and marketing directors seeking a measurable framework for content marketing investment CHROs and culture leads addressing the connection between employee engagement and commercial performance CEOs and senior leadership teams weighing the limits of authority-based management B2B technology and SaaS organisations building customer-first marketing and go-to-market capabilities Audience outcomes A practitioner-built argument for why empathy is a commercial lever, with specific cases and research rather than aspiration The “Champion Leader” framework as a named, teachable model for shifting from directive to customer-oriented leadership A measurable ROI methodology for content marketing that can be used in internal budget and investment conversations A practical method for identifying where self-promotional bias is costing the business in audience reach and revenue Clearer criteria for distinguishing marketing that serves the customer from marketing that serves the organisation’s ego

Why organisations work with Martin Lindstrom He built his reputation on primary research, not commentary. The fMRI study behind Buyology covered 2,000 consumers across five countries; the fieldwork behind Small Data covered 2,000 families across more than 70 countries. He gives senior teams a method, not a slogan. Small data is a working approach for finding the unspoken consumer signal that quantitative research routinely misses. He has advised brands across categories most consultants never touch in the same year, from Pepsi and Nestle to Burger King, Lowe’s, LEGO, and Disney, which means his diagnoses translate across very different commercial contexts. He treats internal bureaucracy as a brand problem. The Ministry of Common Sense names a tension every CEO recognises: the gap between what the company promises customers and what its own processes allow employees to deliver. His authority is independently signalled. TIME’s 100 Most Influential People, repeated Thinkers50 rankings, and a Wall Street Journal verdict on Brand Sense as one of the five best marketing books ever written are not bureau claims; they are matters of public record. Biography highlights Founder and chairman of Lindstrom Company, advising Fortune 500 clients including Pepsi, Nestle, Google, Burger King, Lowe’s, LEGO, Disney, and Unilever. Named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the Scientists and Thinkers category. Multiple-time Thinkers50 ranked thinker, including positions of #18, #36, and #20 in successive listings. Author of seven New York Times bestsellers, translated into roughly 60 languages, including Buyology, Brandwashed, Small Data, Brand Sense, and The Ministry of Common Sense. Columnist for TIME, Fast Company, and Harvard Business Review; recurring contributor on NBC’s TODAY show. Featured in Morgan Spurlock’s documentary The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (2011). Biography The fMRI study behind Buyology scanned the brains of 2,000 consumers across five countries to test what advertising and branding actually do inside the human head. Most of what the marketing industry believed about why people buy did not survive the data. That study, and the books that followed, made Martin Lindstrom one of the few branding voices senior leaders take seriously on the science of consumer decision-making. He runs Lindstrom Company, a brand and culture transformation firm whose client list reads as a cross-section of the global economy: Pepsi, Nestle, Google, Burger King, Lowe’s, LEGO, Disney, Unilever. The work is not pitch theatre. It is rebuilding brand strategy around evidence drawn from ethnographic fieldwork, neuroscience, and the unguarded behaviour of real customers in their own homes. His Small Data method came out of more than a decade visiting families in over 70 countries, looking for the small inconsistencies that point to unmet consumer needs. The thesis is direct. Big data tells you what is happening at scale. Small data tells you why, and where the next product or positioning idea actually lives. It is a working method, used inside the Lindstrom Company practice, not a publishing concept. The Ministry of Common Sense extends the same instinct inward. Lindstrom argues that most large companies have engineered themselves into a state where employees cannot do the obvious right thing for a customer without breaching a process. Strip the bureaucracy, restore common sense, and brand performance follows. Buyers who book him for the marketing thesis often find the organisational thesis is the one their executive team keeps quoting back six months later. Key speaking topics Brand strategy and consumer neuroscience Small data and ethnographic customer insight Culture transformation and corporate common sense Customer experience and behavioural decision-making Marketing effectiveness in the AI era Future of retail and physical-digital strategy Ideal for CMOs and brand leaders rebuilding propositions around customer evidence rather than category convention. CEOs and COOs whose internal processes are eroding the customer experience their brand promises. Strategy, innovation, and customer insight teams looking for a working method to find unmet needs. Global leadership conferences and senior offsites where the brief is commercial reinvention. Audience outcomes A clearer reading of why current consumer research keeps producing the wrong answers, and what to use instead. A practical introduction to small data as a method for surfacing unmet customer needs. A direct view of where internal bureaucracy is quietly killing brand and commercial performance. Named examples from Fortune 500 engagements that translate into questions a leadership team can ask the next morning.