Culture Transformation

Why organisations work with Didier Marlier Co-author of Engaging Leadership (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), which set out the Logos, Ethos and Pathos framework now used inside executive programmes at IMD, INSEAD, Nyenrode and Fundação Dom Cabral. Three decades of close work with European industrials, financial institutions and professional service firms, including BASF, Credit Suisse, Bank Julius Baer, Dow Chemical, Firmenich, KPMG and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. Founded and ran the Enablers Network for almost thirty years before donating the brand to an independent association in 2024, an unusual signal of operating from conviction rather than commercial capture. Teaches change leadership across four continents in French, English and Portuguese, with deep practical exposure to Brazilian as well as European corporate cultures. Brings the same engagement methodology into professional sports environments, where the cost of disengagement is measurable on the scoreboard, and translates those lessons back into corporate boardrooms. Biography highlights Co-author of Engaging Leadership: Three Agendas for Sustaining Achievement, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Faculty and guest professor on executive programmes at IMD, INSEAD, Nyenrode, NEOMA and Fundação Dom Cabral. Founder of the Enablers Network, a European partnership of leadership and change practitioners, donated to the Enablers Association in 2024. MBA from IMD; law degree from Université de Lausanne. TEDx speaker and keynote at the GBTA Europe Conference 2013 in Prague. Long-standing client work with BASF, Credit Suisse, Dow Chemical, KPMG, Bank Julius Baer, Firmenich, Solvay, SAP and Total. Biography Strategy decks rarely fail on their logic. They fail because the people expected to deliver them never genuinely sign up. That gap, between the intellectual case for change and the behavioural reality of an organisation, is the territory Didier Marlier has worked in for three decades. His framework, set out with Chris Parker in Engaging Leadership (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), borrows from classical rhetoric. Logos is the strategic argument. Ethos is the behaviour and tone leaders model day to day. Pathos is the emotional commitment that turns compliance into ownership. The book argues that serious change requires all three running together, not strategy first and culture later. The client list reflects the breadth of that idea in practice: BASF, Credit Suisse, Bank Julius Baer, Dow Chemical, Firmenich, KPMG, Solvay and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer among them. He teaches the same material on executive programmes at IMD, INSEAD, Nyenrode and Fundação Dom Cabral, which gives him an unusually direct read on how European and Latin American executives experience change differently. In 2024 he donated the Enablers Network brand, which he had built over almost thirty years, to an independent association, and now works through DMD. He also applies the same engagement methodology inside professional sports teams, where disengagement shows up immediately in performance data and feeds back into how he advises corporate clients. Key speaking topics Leadership in the disruption economy Engagement through strategic, behavioural and emotional change Post-merger and post-acquisition integration Cultural transformation in multinational organisations Board and executive team effectiveness Change leadership across European and Latin American contexts Ideal for CEOs, executive committees and boards leading strategic, cultural or post-merger transformation CHROs and transformation leads responsible for behavioural adoption of new strategies Senior leadership programmes in multinational organisations with cross-cultural workforces Professional service firm partnerships managing change without command authority Audience outcomes A working language for diagnosing why a current change initiative is stalling A clearer line of sight between the strategic case for change and the day-to-day behaviour leaders must model Specific signals to watch for when intellectual buy-in masks emotional disengagement Cross-cultural reference points from European and Brazilian corporate practice

Why organisations work with Dan Pontefract The Work-Life Bloom model is not a concept – it is a research-backed framework with 12 named factors, four defined employee personas, and a structured approach that leaders can apply to their teams immediately. It gives organisations something specific to replace the work-life balance language they already know is not working. His decade as Chief Envisioner and Chief Learning Officer at TELUS – where he launched the TELUS MBA, the Transformation Office, and a leadership philosophy that drove employee engagement to nearly 90% – means he is not theorising about culture change from the outside. He has built it at scale. His five award-winning books each address a discrete organisational tension with a named model: the three-level purpose sweet spot (The Purpose Effect), the cyclical Open Thinking framework (Open to Think), the nine-lesson caring leadership model (Lead. Care. Win.), and the 12-factor Work-Life Bloom. Audiences leave with named frameworks they can act on, not just ideas they can reflect on. His sixth book, The Future of Work Is Grey (May 2026), positions him on a strategic workforce issue that most boards are not yet treating as a risk: age debt – the growing talent and productivity shortfall created by demographic ageing – and the experience dividend available to organisations that treat older workers as assets. He is one of the few leadership voices in this space with a complete framework already developed. Thinkers50 Radar recognition (Class of 2018) and the Thinkers50 Best New Management Book designation for Work-Life Bloom (2024) provide intellectual validation beyond the speaking circuit. His ideas are credentialed within the management thinking community, not only the keynote market. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Pontefract Group; former Chief Envisioner and Chief Learning Officer, TELUS Author of five award-winning books: Flat Army, The Purpose Effect, Open to Think, Lead. Care. Win., and Work-Life Bloom; sixth book, The Future of Work Is Grey, publishing May 2026 Work-Life Bloom: 2024 Thinkers50 Best New Management Book and Axiom Business Book Awards Gold Medal, Leadership category Open to Think: 2019 getAbstract International Book of the Year; Lead. Care. Win.: 2022 Nautilus Awards Silver Medal for Leadership Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2018; shortlisted, Thinkers50 Talent Award, 2019 Adjunct Professor, Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria Contributor to Forbes and Harvard Business Review Presented at four TED events; delivered more than 1,000 keynotes across North America, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East Biography Work-life balance has been the default language of organisational culture for three decades. The data says it is not working. Engagement has flatlined, burnout has become a structural feature of corporate life, and the gap between what leaders promise their people and what they actually deliver keeps widening. The framework itself is the problem. Dan Pontefract has spent two decades inside and alongside organisations asking why the standard tools keep failing. His Work-Life Bloom model, built on primary research with more than 8,000 leaders and team members across 15 countries, maps 12 factors that determine whether people can genuinely flourish in both work and life. The insight spans five award-winning books and gives leaders a practical operating system to act on, not just a new way of describing the problem. That credibility is not theoretical. As Chief Envisioner and Chief Learning Officer at TELUS, Pontefract launched the TELUS MBA, the company’s Transformation Office, and a leadership philosophy that drove employee engagement to nearly 90%. Since founding Pontefract Group in 2018, he has worked with organisations including Salesforce, Nestlé, Manulife, and Virgin Media O2. His sixth book, The Future of Work Is Grey, publishing May 2026, tackles a challenge most boards have not yet named. As populations age and birth rates fall, organisations are accumulating what he calls age debt – a growing talent and productivity shortfall they are unprepared for. His Rivers, Rocks, and Rubies framework gives leaders a practical approach to treating experience as a competitive asset. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria’s Gustavson School of Business and a contributor to Forbes and Harvard Business Review. Thinkers50 named him to the Radar Class of 2018. Key speaking topics Work-life bloom and the conditions for employee flourishing Culture transformation and employee engagement Purpose-driven leadership Caring and human-centred leadership practice The multigenerational workforce and age as a strategic asset Open thinking, decision-making, and organisational performance The future of work Ideal for CHROs and People and Culture leaders redesigning engagement, wellbeing, and culture strategy CEOs and senior leadership teams navigating cultural transformation or significant workforce change Transformation leads and Learning and Development heads building leadership capability at scale Executive teams and boards confronting multigenerational workforce planning and the talent implications of demographic ageing Audience outcomes A named, practical alternative to work-life balance – the Work-Life Bloom model and its 12 factors – that leaders can apply to their teams immediately after the session Clarity on the four work-life personas (blooming, budding, stunted, in renewal) and how to identify and respond to each within their own organisations A framework for three-level purpose alignment – between individual, role, and organisation – drawn from The Purpose Effect model Nine concrete leadership practices from the Lead. Care. Win. model for building caring, high-trust teams in everyday conditions An initial strategic lens on the multigenerational workforce challenge and the actions leaders should be prioritising now

Why organisations work with Sir Clive Woodward Built the same culture system in two radically different contexts. In rugby, England moved from sixth in the world to World Cup winners. Across Team GB’s 26 Olympic sports he contributed to the country’s most successful modern Games at London 2012. The framework travels. His “Teamship” model is a written operational system. England’s Black Book ran to roughly 240 rules across 35 sections, drafted and owned by the players themselves. Audiences work with a documented method they can apply. One of the very few elite sports coaches to have turned his own methodology into an enterprise learning platform. Hive Learning, founded with Blenheim Chalcot in 2012, now works with Sky, Deloitte, Jaguar Land Rover, PepsiCo, Halma and the International Olympic Committee among others. Named tools audiences can use: Teamship, TCUP (thinking correctly under pressure), the DNA of a Champion and critical non-essentials. Each is a specific leadership discipline with a defined practice. Biography highlights Head Coach of the England men’s rugby union team from 1997 to 2004, winning the 2003 Rugby World Cup. England reached world number one during his tenure and remain the only Northern Hemisphere side to have won a World Cup. Director of Sport at the British Olympic Association, supporting Team GB across the Beijing, Vancouver and London Olympic Games. London 2012 produced Britain’s most successful modern Games by medal count. Head Coach of the British & Irish Lions for their 2005 tour to New Zealand. Founder of Hive Learning, a digital learning platform built with Blenheim Chalcot and now working with organisations including Sky, Deloitte and Jaguar Land Rover. Author of Winning! (2004) and How to Win (2019), both setting out the Teamship methodology. Inducted into the World Rugby Hall of Fame; knighted in the 2004 New Year Honours; member of the IOC Entourage Commission since 2012. Biography England rugby were sixth in the world when Woodward took the head coach’s role in 1997. Six years later the team lifted the Rugby World Cup in Sydney, holding the world number one ranking and an unbeaten home record at Twickenham. England remain the only Northern Hemisphere team to have won the tournament. The underlying framework was what Woodward called Teamship: a written, player-owned set of behavioural standards covering everything from punctuality to media conduct. The Black Book that held these rules ran to roughly 240 entries across 35 sections. Its premise was that values only matter when they translate into specific daily behaviours, and that the team should write those rules itself. He took the same approach into the British Olympic Association from 2006, serving as Team GB’s Director of Sport through the Beijing, Vancouver and London cycles. London 2012 produced Britain’s most successful modern Games by medal count. The task across 26 Olympic sports was closer to running a diversified business than to coaching a single squad. In 2012 he founded Hive Learning with Blenheim Chalcot, codifying the Teamship approach into an enterprise learning platform now used by Sky, Deloitte and Jaguar Land Rover, among others. His books Winning! (2004) and How to Win (2019) document the same method in full. The underlying conviction: culture is a design problem, and the rules that sustain it should be written down. Key speaking topics High-performance culture Leadership under pressure Team performance and behavioural standards Building winning teams Learning cultures Performance in elite environments Culture change across large, federated organisations Ideal for Executive teams and boards treating culture as a measurable performance lever CEOs, CPOs and heads of learning leading organisation-wide behaviour and capability programmes Leadership teams integrating businesses after mergers or major reorganisations Organisations operating in high-stakes environments where team cohesion directly affects outcomes Audience outcomes A working method for writing behavioural standards that teams author and enforce themselves, drawn directly from England’s Black Book Specific language for diagnosing culture problems in behavioural terms A framework for running performance culture change across large, federated organisations where no single leader commands the whole system Perspective on building through setbacks, grounded in the six-year arc between the 1999 and 2003 Rugby World Cup campaigns Named leadership tools including Teamship, TCUP (thinking correctly under pressure), the DNA of a Champion and critical non-essentials

Why organisations work with Chester Elton His frameworks are grounded in the largest empirical base of any comparable culture speaker: studies of more than one million working adults, anchored by a 300,000-person study conducted with Towers Watson for All In – giving boards and HR leaders data they can defend internally. The Carrot Principle and Anxiety at Work sit at opposite ends of the engagement challenge; his ability to address both recognition strategy and workplace anxiety within a single coherent body of work means organisations do not need two different conversations. As a Thinkers50 Coaching Award winner and member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches, his executive coaching practice carries independent third-party validation that extends his value beyond the main stage. His work provides a specific, operational diagnosis – the breakdown between what leaders say they value and what managers actually do day to day – and a toolkit that works at every level of the organisation, not just the C-suite. Named to Inc.’s 2025 Top 50 Leadership & Management Experts and consistently ranked among the world’s top organisational culture authorities by Global Gurus (2017–2025), his standing is validated by named external bodies rather than self-reported credentials. Biography highlights Co-author of five New York Times bestselling books, including The Carrot Principle, All In, Leading with Gratitude, and Anxiety at Work (Harper Business), co-written with Adrian Gostick Books sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide; translated into more than 30 languages Thinkers50 Coaching Award winner; member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Leadership (SCL) Certified Executive Coach Global Gurus research organisation: ranked consistently among the world’s top leadership and organisational culture experts, 2017–2025 Named to Inc.’s 2025 Top 50 Leadership & Management Experts (October 2025) Co-founder, The Culture Works, a global leadership and culture consultancy Media: NBC Today, CBS 60 Minutes, CNN, ABC; quoted in Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Fast Company, Financial Times Biography Culture does not fail organisations because leaders lack values. It fails because most managers do not know how to make those values visible in the daily behaviours of their teams. Chester Elton has spent more than two decades building the research base that explains this gap, and identifying what high-performing organisations do differently. His work draws on studies of more than one million working adults, compiled across several large-scale research partnerships. The Carrot Principle established the direct, measurable link between purposeful employee recognition and business outcomes including retention, productivity, and customer satisfaction. All In, produced with research firm Towers Watson, drew on a 300,000-person study to identify the seven practices that generate genuine organisational buy-in. Anxiety at Work – published by Harper Business and the most recent of his five New York Times bestsellers – addressed the other side of the same equation: what happens when uncertainty goes unmanaged and workplace anxiety erodes the culture leaders worked to build. Taken together, these books form one of the most evidence-based frameworks available to executives on how culture is created, sustained, and recovered. Elton is a Thinkers50 Coaching Award winner, a member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches, and a Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Leadership certified executive coach. Global Gurus has ranked him among the world’s top leadership and organisational culture experts every year from 2017 to 2025. Inc. named him to its 2025 Top 50 Leadership & Management Experts list. He is co-founder of The Culture Works and has consulted with organisations including American Express, The World Bank, and the New Jersey Devils. What distinguishes him is the range the research covers. Most speakers in this space address either motivation or stress. Elton’s body of work addresses both, and the connection between them. Key speaking topics Employee recognition and culture-building Organisational culture and high-performance teams Workplace anxiety and psychological safety Leading with gratitude Employee engagement strategy Multigenerational workforce leadership Manager capability and team trust Ideal for CHROs and People leaders designing, resetting, or embedding organisational culture programmes CEOs and senior leadership teams navigating workforce anxiety, change, or post-transformation culture repair Talent and leadership development functions seeking research-grounded frameworks for manager effectiveness HR and management associations and industry conferences where practitioner credibility and data-backed content are audience expectations Audience outcomes A diagnostic framework for identifying where culture commitment breaks down between leadership intent and frontline management behaviour Recognition practices tied directly to engagement and retention outcomes, grounded in large-scale empirical research rather than anecdote Practical strategies for identifying workplace anxiety early – before it affects team performance, absenteeism, or attrition A shared organisational vocabulary for discussing culture, gratitude, and psychological safety in operational rather than abstract terms Immediate, actionable steps that managers at any level can apply to strengthen trust and discretionary effort within their teams

Why organisations work with Charles Hazlewood He founded the world’s first large-scale professional ensemble of disabled and non-disabled musicians, Paraorchestra, and can speak from direct experience about building a high-performing team by designing the assumptions out, not papering over them. His TED talk “Trusting the Ensemble” has been watched by more than half a million people and is used inside leadership programmes because it demonstrates, live on stage with a string ensemble, how trust is given, withheld and rebuilt in real time. He works regularly with the Royal Concertgebouw, the Philharmonia, the London Philharmonic and the BBC Concert Orchestra, so when he talks about getting sixty independent experts to act as one organism, he is describing his day job, not a metaphor. He converts conducting into a usable language for executives: how a leader holds the room without micromanaging it, how authority sits alongside vulnerability, how a single bad cue ripples through a group for the rest of the performance. He has been recognised by Making Music with the 2023 Sir Charles Groves Prize for outstanding contribution to UK musical life and holds an honorary doctorate in Social Inclusion from Bath Spa University, which locates him credibly at the intersection of artistic excellence and inclusive leadership. Biography highlights Founder and Artistic Director of Paraorchestra, the first large-scale integrated ensemble of professional musicians with and without disabilities. Won first prize at the European Broadcasting Union Conducting Competition, Lisbon, 1995. Conducts the Royal Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the Philharmonia, the London Philharmonic, the Swedish Radio Symphony and the BBC Concert Orchestra. Delivered the TED talk “Trusting the Ensemble” in 2011, viewed more than half a million times; one of three TED and TEDx appearances. Three Sony Radio Academy Awards for BBC Radio 2 music programming; Sky Arts Ambassador for Music since 2021. Awarded the Sir Charles Groves Prize by Making Music in 2023 and an Honorary Doctorate of Social Inclusion by Bath Spa University in 2025. Biography A good orchestra looks nothing like a command hierarchy once the baton comes down. Sixty independently brilliant specialists have to act as one living thing, at speed, with no time for committee. Charles Hazlewood has spent thirty years inside that problem, and has built a second career translating what he has learned back out to people running companies. He came up through the classical mainstream. An organ scholarship to Keble College, Oxford, first prize at the European Broadcasting Union conducting competition in Lisbon in 1995, and a conducting life that now runs through the Royal Concertgebouw, the Philharmonia, the London Philharmonic and the BBC Concert Orchestra. Over 100 world premieres sit on the record. In 2011 he founded Paraorchestra with director Claire Whalley: the world’s first large-scale professional ensemble of disabled and non-disabled virtuosi. Its closing-ceremony debut at the London 2012 Paralympics, performed alongside Coldplay, reached a stated global audience of around a billion. In 2016 the ensemble became the first orchestral headliner at Glastonbury, with Philip Glass’s “Heroes” Symphony. His 2011 TED talk, “Trusting the Ensemble”, is the core of his work with organisations. He conducts a live ensemble on stage, withholds trust, restores it, and shows what each choice does to the sound. Making Music awarded him the Sir Charles Groves Prize in 2023 for outstanding contribution to UK musical life; Bath Spa University conferred an honorary doctorate in Social Inclusion in July 2025. The through-line is consistent: a room of experts does not become an ensemble by accident, and the leader’s job is to make the conditions in which it can. Key speaking topics Leadership and trust Ensemble performance Inclusive leadership and integrated teams Creativity under constraint Authenticity and vulnerability in leadership Culture change through the lens of a conductor Ideal for Executive teams and boards looking to operate as an ensemble rather than a collection of individual stars. CHROs and culture leads working on inclusive leadership, talent design, and what real integration looks like beyond policy. Leadership development programmes that want an embodied, live demonstration of trust and authority rather than a slide deck. Organisations navigating restructure or post-merger integration where the hard task is getting senior specialists to move as one. Audience outcomes A clear, tangible sense of what trust sounds like when it is present in a team, and what collapses when it is not. Language for talking about authority and vulnerability in leadership without defaulting to cliche. A reframe of inclusion grounded in a real example of professional disabled and non-disabled musicians performing at world-class level together. Specific cues for leading experts: how to hold the room without suffocating it, how to signal without scripting, how to recover from a missed entry. An unusually memorable session with a live conductor working with a live ensemble, not a talking-head keynote, that tends to be referenced back inside the business for months afterwards.

Why organisations work with Brandon Farbstein He has driven actual state legislation, not just inspired audiences. Two Virginia laws exist because of his advocacy before age 18: one on bullying prevention, one requiring empathy and emotional intelligence education in every K-12 classroom in the state. That track record separates him from motivational speakers and positions him as a systemic change agent. Disability is the most consistently overlooked dimension of most DEI programs. Farbstein gives organisations a credible, lived-experience voice in exactly that space, not as a personal narrative alone, but through a framework (Elevate Empathy®) that translates into teachable, practical tools for teams. His vantage point is generational as well as personal. As a Gen Z voice on belonging, recognised by both LinkedIn and Instagram for his advocacy reach, he speaks directly to the expectations gap between younger employees and the organisations they work for: a gap that costs organisations in engagement and trust. He advises boards and senior teams, not just audiences. Farbstein regularly consults organisations on belonging and social impact strategy for the disability community, and publicly declines engagements where inclusion is performative. His presence signals genuine organisational commitment, not a checkbox. His ADL Hero Against Hate designation and UN partnership establish credibility at the highest institutional levels, making him a defensible choice for boards and leadership teams where speaker credibility is itself under scrutiny. Biography highlights Drove two pieces of Virginia state legislation before age 18: bullying prevention and mandatory empathy and emotional intelligence education across all K-12 public schools statewide Author of Ten Feet Tall: Step Into Your Truth and Change Your Freaking World and A Kids Book About Self-Love (Penguin) Delivered TEDx RVA at age 15; talk accumulated 85,000+ views LinkedIn Top Voice for disability advocacy (2022); named to TigerBeat/Instagram’s #19Under19 (2018); youngest-ever recipient of Style Weekly’s Top 40 Under 40 Anti-Defamation League Hero Against Hate award recipient Founding partner of Daniel Lubetzky’s Builders Movement; board member, Digital4Good Speaker for Meta, HP, Marriott, LVMH, and the Million Dollar Round Table; partnered with UNICEF and the United Nations on campaigns to end school violence Biography Brandon Farbstein gave his first TEDx talk at 15. By 18, he had driven two pieces of legislation through the Virginia state legislature; one on bullying prevention, the other mandating empathy and emotional intelligence education in every K-12 classroom in the state. That trajectory sets the frame for everything he brings to organisations. Farbstein was born with metatropic dysplasia, a rare form of dwarfism, and spent his high school years navigating severe cyberbullying that eventually drove him off campus. Rather than absorb that experience privately, he built a response: a registered framework, Elevate Empathy®, and a body of work spanning two books, hundreds of corporate stages, and legislative testimony. His book Ten Feet Tall and A Kids Book About Self-Love (Penguin) put the framework into accessible form for audiences ranging from Fortune 100 employees to elementary school students. Farbstein’s value for organisations sits where two problems intersect: DEI programs that systematically underweight disability, and employees with disabilities who know it. He advises boards and senior teams on belonging and social impact strategy, with a specific focus on the disability community: the largest minority group in the world. His credibility in that space is built on more than personal story: it includes legislative impact, a LinkedIn Top Voice designation for disability advocacy, and the Anti-Defamation League’s Hero Against Hate award. He has spoken for Meta, HP, Marriott, LVMH, and at the Million Dollar Round Table, and has partnered with UNICEF and the United Nations on campaigns addressing school violence. As a founding partner of Daniel Lubetzky’s Builders Movement and a board member of Digital4Good, his work operates across corporate, civic, and educational contexts – making him a distinctive voice on how empathy functions not just as a personal quality, but as an organisational practice. Key speaking topics Disability inclusion and belonging Empathy as organisational practice Diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy Resilience and mindset Social-emotional learning and anti-bullying advocacy Gen Z perspectives on workplace culture Purpose-driven leadership and social impact Ideal for Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officers and People & Culture leads with disability inclusion gaps in their DEI programs CHROs and senior HR leadership teams working on belonging, employee experience, and psychological safety Senior leadership teams and boards evaluating the credibility and reach of their DEI commitments Education sector leaders, student-facing organisations, and youth advocacy platforms addressing bullying, empathy, and social-emotional learning Audience outcomes A clear understanding of why disability inclusion is the most consistently underaddressed dimension of DEI – and what the cost of that gap looks like in employee experience and retention Practical tools from the Elevate Empathy® framework for building environments where all employees feel genuinely seen and heard A reframe of lived adversity as a source of leadership strength and authentic influence, rather than a liability to manage Increased capacity to distinguish genuine inclusion from performative inclusion – and the organisational will to act on that distinction Exposure to the specific legislative, cultural, and institutional levers that have moved the dial on disability inclusion at a systemic level

Why organisations work with Bill Taylor His central argument – that the most dangerous thing in a successful organisation is its own track record – gives leadership teams a precise, uncomfortable diagnosis, not a generic call to “innovate more.” Simply Brilliant provides a detailed, case-study-backed framework for achieving breakthrough performance in traditional and unglamorous fields, making it directly applicable to organisations outside tech and consumer markets. His research spans companies most strategy consultants never study – regional banks, industrial manufacturers, office cleaning businesses – which means his examples land with audiences tired of hearing about Apple and Amazon. His Mavericks at Work thesis – that the most successful competitors don’t try to out-execute rivals but redefine the terms of competition altogether – gives strategy teams a concrete alternative to benchmarking their way to mediocrity. As a former HBR editor and founding editor of a magazine that sold for $340 million, he brings practitioner credibility to arguments about how organisations actually change, not just how they should. Biography highlights Co-founder and founding editor, Fast Company, with Alan Webber; magazine sold for $340 million within six years of founding Former editor, Harvard Business Review Author of three books published by Portfolio/Penguin: Simply Brilliant (2016), Practically Radical, and Mavericks at Work Mavericks at Work: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek bestseller; named “Business Book of the Year” by both The Economist and the Financial Times Simply Brilliant named “Best Strategy and Leadership Book of 2016” by 800CEORead Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review; former “Under New Management” columnist, New York Times Sunday Business; former columnist, The Guardian Graduate of Princeton University (BA) and MIT Sloan School of Management (MBA) Named “Champion of Workplace Learning and Performance” by the American Society for Training and Development, alongside past recipients Jack Welch and Fred Smith Biography Fast Company was built on a single provocation: that the rules of business competition were being rewritten, and most organisations were too comfortable to notice. Bill Taylor co-founded the magazine from borrowed office space in Harvard Square, and within six years it had sold for $340 million – at the time, the second-highest price ever paid for a single magazine in the United States. The argument that drove it has shaped his work ever since. Taylor’s three books – Mavericks at Work, Practically Radical, and Simply Brilliant – are each structured around the same core tension: why do organisations with genuine competitive advantages so often fail to sustain them? His answer, developed most fully in Simply Brilliant, is that expertise becomes a trap. The knowledge that produced past performance quietly closes off the thinking that would produce future performance. It is not disruption from outside that limits most organisations – it is the weight of their own accumulated success. What makes this argument useful in practice is where Taylor looks for evidence. His case studies are not drawn from Silicon Valley or the usual gallery of tech unicorns. They come from regional banks, industrial suppliers, auto dealerships, and office cleaning companies – settings where leaders have no option to blame their industry for mediocrity. Simply Brilliant was named the best strategy and leadership book of 2016 by 800CEORead. Mavericks at Work was named “Business Book of the Year” by both The Economist and the Financial Times. Taylor writes regularly for Harvard Business Review and held an editorial role there before Fast Company. His work is consistently focused on a single, testable question: what does it actually take for leaders to let go of what made them successful, and build something better? Key speaking topics Organisational innovation beyond technology Breaking the experience trap in established industries Competitive strategy and differentiation Culture as competitive advantage Leadership imagination and renewal Change management in traditional organisations Talent, engagement, and high-performance culture Ideal for CEOs and senior leadership teams in established, non-tech industries facing competitive reinvention Strategy and transformation leads planning large-scale organisational change programmes Executive conferences where the audience has heard the Silicon Valley playbook and needs a different frame CHROs and culture leads connecting people strategy to competitive performance Audience outcomes A named framework for diagnosing why expertise becomes an obstacle to growth – and what to do about it Case studies from non-tech, traditional industries that reframe what competitive reinvention looks like in their own sector Practical questions for testing whether their organisation’s current strategy is genuinely distinctive or competitively invisible A clearer sense of where leadership imagination, rather than market conditions, is the binding constraint on performance Language for talking to boards and leadership teams about transformation that doesn’t rely on disruption clichés

Why organisations work with Bill Fischer Primary-source access to Haier’s rendanheyi model, one of the most studied organisational experiments of the last two decades, with direct consulting engagement rather than secondary commentary. A working framework for turning a commodity business into a platform of autonomous micro-enterprises, grounded in Reinventing Giants and a decade of fieldwork inside Chinese and Western incumbents. Co-direction of IMD’s Driving Strategic Innovation programme with MIT Sloan gives him a live executive audience and a tested pedagogy, not only a book. A Thinkers50 Hall of Fame induction and a former CEIBS presidency signal range: he reads Chinese industrial strategy and Western corporate transformation from the inside of both. Two decades of work on creative teams, from Virtuoso Teams to The Idea Hunter, give him a practitioner language for how ideas actually get found and executed inside organisations. Biography highlights Professor Emeritus of Innovation Management at IMD, Lausanne. Inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, 2019. Former President of China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), Shanghai, 1997-1999; recipient of Shanghai’s Silver Magnolia award. Co-founder and co-director of IMD’s Driving Strategic Innovation programme with MIT Sloan. Author of Reinventing Giants (Wiley, 2013), The Idea Hunter (Wiley, 2011), and Virtuoso Teams (FT/Prentice Hall, 2005). Forbes columnist, “The Ideas Business”; management innovation consultant to Haier Group. Biography Haier was a near-bankrupt Qingdao refrigerator maker when Fischer first studied it. Three decades later it is the world’s largest home appliance group and the most watched organisational experiment in global management, run as a platform of thousands of autonomous micro-enterprises. Fischer’s book Reinventing Giants documented how that happened, and he has advised the company on its rendanheyi model since. That work sits inside a longer argument. Fischer’s research treats innovation as a social problem, not a creativity problem. Virtuoso Teams looked at how small groups of strong talents produce original work under pressure. The Idea Hunter showed that good ideas are mostly found, not invented, and that the hunt is a disciplined practice. Reinventing Giants pushed the question up one level, to the architecture of the firm itself. His institutional track record reinforces the range. He held an endowed chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for more than two decades, led CEIBS in Shanghai at the point when it became China’s first serious global business school, and has been on the IMD faculty in Lausanne since 1990. With MIT Sloan he co-directs Driving Strategic Innovation, one of the longer-running senior executive programmes on the subject. For buyers, that means a speaker who can move from the CEO question, how do we stop strangling new businesses inside the old one, to the concrete organisational moves that Haier and a small number of other firms have actually made. Key speaking topics Business model innovation in mature incumbents Haier and the rendanheyi platform model Organisational design for innovation Creative teams and talent Corporate transformation in China Leadership of innovation programmes Ecosystems and micro-enterprise structures Ideal for CEOs and boards of large incumbents under pressure to generate new businesses from the core. Chief Strategy, Chief Innovation and Chief Transformation officers redesigning operating models. Senior leadership teams at industrial and consumer-goods firms competing against Chinese platform companies. Executive development audiences on innovation, strategy, and organisational design. Audience outcomes A clear read of what Haier actually did, beyond the slogans, and what parts travel to other firms. Sharper vocabulary for diagnosing why new ideas die inside the existing structure. A working model of the firm as a platform of micro-enterprises, with the trade-offs named. A practitioner frame for finding, developing and scaling ideas through small strong teams. Perspective on Chinese management practice from someone who has taught and led inside it.

Why organisations work with Archie Norman He ran the Asda turnaround from 1991 and sold the business to Walmart in 1999 at eight times the starting share price, a reference point that still defines UK retail recovery. He has chaired three FTSE-scale boards in very different states of repair: Asda, ITV and Marks & Spencer. Few speakers can discuss board, CEO and shareholder dynamics from all three seats. He sits at the intersection of commercial leadership and public policy, having served as Conservative MP for Tunbridge Wells, Chief Executive of the Conservative Party, and Lead Non-Executive at BEIS. He co-founded Policy Exchange in 2001, a think tank that shaped UK economic and public service reform, which gives his commentary on business and government real weight. The Institute for Turnaround awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010 for practitioner work on corporate recovery, not for commentary on it. Biography highlights Chairman of Marks & Spencer since September 2017. Chairman of ITV plc from 2010 to 2016. Chief Executive then Chairman of Asda from 1991 to 1999, sold to Walmart in July 1999. Co-founder of the Policy Exchange think tank with Francis Maude in 2001. Lead Non-Executive Board Member at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, 2016 to 2020. Conservative MP for Tunbridge Wells 1997-2005; Chief Executive of the Conservative Party 1998-1999. Institute for Turnaround Lifetime Achievement Award, 2010. Biography Asda was close to collapse when Archie Norman arrived as Chief Executive in 1991. Over the following eight years, he and Allan Leighton rebuilt the operating model, the culture and the commercial pitch. The business was sold to Walmart in 1999 at eight times the starting share price, and the story is still used as a practitioner case at Harvard Business School. What distinguishes his perspective is the seat he has held since. Chairman of ITV from 2010 to 2016 through a hard pivot in the broadcast market. Chairman of Marks & Spencer since 2017, running a multi-year reset of stores, supply chain and digital. Three listed boards, three different forms of inertia, one consistent operating philosophy about how change actually happens inside a large company. The public policy side matters commercially. He was Conservative MP for Tunbridge Wells, Chief Executive of the Conservative Party under William Hague, and Lead Non-Executive at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy from 2016 to 2020. He co-founded the Policy Exchange think tank with Francis Maude in 2001. That background shapes how he reads the interaction between regulators, ministers and boards, which is useful for any chair or CEO managing that perimeter. Youngest partner ever at McKinsey at 28, group finance director at Kingfisher at 32, and recipient of the Institute for Turnaround’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. The point of the sequence is not the speed of it. It is that by the time he arrives in a boardroom to discuss a stalled transformation, he has seen the same patterns from the inside at every scale a UK board is likely to be operating at. Key speaking topics Corporate turnaround and organisational recovery Board and chair leadership Retail strategy and transformation Culture change inside listed companies Business and government Executive leadership under pressure Ideal for Chairs, CEOs and senior independent directors navigating a turnaround or strategic reset. Retail and consumer sector leadership teams. Boards and executive committees managing cultural resistance to change. Senior leaders in regulated industries where government relations shape commercial outcomes. Audience outcomes A concrete view of what the first 100 days of a serious turnaround actually look like at board and operating level. A sharper read on where cultural inertia sits inside a listed business and how to move it. A practitioner perspective on how chair, CEO and shareholder dynamics succeed or fail in a crisis. A clearer picture of how the business-government perimeter is managed in practice, from both sides.

Why organisations work with Andrew McAfee His Geek Way framework – four named cultural norms (science, ownership, speed, openness) derived from evolutionary biology and management research – gives leadership teams a specific, testable diagnostic for why their organisations underperform digitally, not another instruction to move faster or fail more His research at MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy produces evidence-based findings on how AI and automation are actually affecting productivity and competitive structure – drawn from organisations that have already made the transition, not from modelled projections He holds simultaneous positions as MIT Principal Research Scientist, inaugural Visiting Fellow at Google’s Technology and Society group, and co-founder of Workhelix, an AI workforce optimisation startup – a combination that grounds his analysis in research, platform-scale practice, and operating reality at once The Second Machine Age and Machine, Platform, Crowd – both New York Times bestsellers co-authored with Erik Brynjolfsson – established the intellectual framework through which most serious organisations now think about automation, labour displacement, and platform competition; many executives in the room will be updating assumptions formed by those books He and Brynjolfsson are the only individuals named to both the Thinkers50 ranking of the world’s top management thinkers and the Politico 50 group of people transforming American politics – a dual recognition that reflects the reach of his work into the policy questions, not just the business questions, that will define the digital economy’s next decade Biography highlights Principal Research Scientist, MIT Sloan School of Management; co-founder and co-director, MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy Inaugural Visiting Fellow, Technology and Society, Google Co-founder, Workhelix (AI workforce optimisation startup) Six-time Thinkers50 honoree; Thinkers50 Digital Thinking Award 2015 with Erik Brynjolfsson; one of only two individuals named to both the Thinkers50 and the Politico 50 Author of The Geek Way (Economist Best Books 2023; Forbes Top 10 Business Books 2023) and More from Less; co-author of The Second Machine Age and Machine, Platform, Crowd (New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers) Contributor to Foreign Affairs, Harvard Business Review, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times; featured on CNN, 60 Minutes, TED, and the World Economic Forum Biography The gap between digital investment and digital performance is one of the most consequential – and least clearly explained – problems in business strategy. Andrew McAfee, Principal Research Scientist at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and co-founder of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, has spent three decades building the research base to explain it precisely. His 2023 book The Geek Way – named a best book of the year by both The Economist and Forbes – makes a specific argument: the companies consistently outperforming their sectors share four cultural norms (science, ownership, speed, openness), and those norms are not accidents of Silicon Valley geography but replicable patterns grounded in evolutionary science. Organisations that treat digital transformation as an infrastructure challenge, McAfee argues, are misidentifying the problem. The bottleneck is almost always managerial culture, not technology capability. That argument carries weight from multiple directions. McAfee is the inaugural Visiting Fellow at Google’s Technology and Society group and co-founder of Workhelix, an AI startup focused on workforce optimisation – positions that situate his MIT research in both platform-scale and operating practice. His earlier books with Erik Brynjolfsson – The Second Machine Age and Machine, Platform, Crowd, both New York Times bestsellers – established the frameworks that shaped how most serious organisations now think about automation, platform competition, and the economics of digital productivity. He and Brynjolfsson are the only individuals named to both the Thinkers50 ranking of the world’s top management thinkers and the Politico 50 group of people transforming American politics – a pairing that reflects how far McAfee’s work extends beyond corporate boardrooms into the policy questions about AI, labour, and economic growth that will define the decade ahead. Key speaking topics AI and digital business performance The Geek Way: cultural norms for the digital organisation Platform competition and digital business models Technology, productivity, and economic growth Machine intelligence and the future of work Dematerialisation and sustainable growth Organisational culture in the technology-driven enterprise Ideal for C-suite and board audiences evaluating digital strategy and competitive positioning against digital-native rivals Strategy and transformation leads in established industries under sustained digital disruption Innovation and R&D leaders benchmarking organisational culture against technology-sector performance models Executive education programmes on digital leadership, AI adoption, and future-of-work strategy Audience outcomes A clear account of why digital-native organisations outperform incumbents structurally – not through superior technology budgets but through specific, replicable management norms A practical diagnostic framework (The Geek Way: science, ownership, speed, openness) for identifying where organisational culture is constraining digital performance Evidence-based perspective on how AI and automation are actually affecting productivity and workforce structure, grounded in MIT research rather than market projections A more disciplined vocabulary for separating genuine digital transformation from technology investment that changes operating performance little Sharper thinking on platform competition and the long-term viability of traditional business models against digital-native challengers

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 Álex Rovira His central argument – that lasting success is created through deliberate preparation, not reactive management – reframes how senior leaders understand the relationship between their own behaviour and organizational performance. It is a leadership accountability argument backed by one of the most widely distributed Spanish-language business books ever published. La buena suerte, co-authored with Fernando Trías de Bes and translated into 42 languages, gives leadership teams a shared conceptual framework for building proactive cultures – one that has already been tested, challenged, and sustained across millions of readers in dozens of countries before it arrives in a corporate setting. His thinking draws on humanist philosophy and classical mythology as well as management practice, giving boards and executive teams a different register for conversations about organizational values, purpose, and identity – one that moves beyond standard competency frameworks and performance metrics. His Escuela de Transformación Vital y Liderazgo, through which more than 70,000 people have engaged with his frameworks, means his arguments are continuously tested against large, diverse audiences – not fixed at the time of publication. Three decades of organizational consulting on cultural change, talent, innovation, and market development provides the applied foundation that keeps his frameworks grounded in the realities of organizational life, not just leadership theory. Biography highlights Business Sciences degree and MBA from ESADE Business School, Barcelona Co-author with Fernando Trías de Bes of La buena suerte (Good Luck), published in English by Jossey-Bass/Wiley; translated into 42 languages, with more than 3 million copies sold in the first two years of publication Author of more than 15 books including La brújula interior (The Inner Compass) and Los 7 poderes (The Seven Powers); total body of work approaching 10 million copies sold across more than 40 languages Founder of the Escuela de Transformación Vital y Liderazgo, with more than 70,000 enrolled students LinkedIn Top Voice; combined following of more than 800,000 across Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube Over 30 years of organizational consulting covering cultural change, talent development, innovation, and market analysis Biography Álex Rovira built his reputation on a deceptively simple argument: that good luck is not random, it is the result of conditions deliberately prepared in advance. That argument, articulated in La buena suerte – co-authored with Fernando Trías de Bes and published in 42 languages – became one of the most widely distributed business books in Spanish publishing history, with more than 3 million copies sold within two years of publication. For organizations, the implication is structural: cultures either develop the habits, values, and practices that generate sustained advantage, or they default to reactive management and wait. Rovira holds a degree in Business Sciences and an MBA from ESADE. He spent more than three decades working as an organizational consultant on cultural change, talent development, innovation, and client-behaviour research with companies across multiple sectors. That applied foundation grounds a body of work – now approaching 10 million copies sold across more than 15 books, including La brújula interior (The Inner Compass) and Los 7 poderes (The Seven Powers) – in the kind of organizational reality that leadership audiences recognize immediately. His thinking draws on an unusual combination of sources: humanist philosophy, classical mythology, and leadership psychology, brought to bear on questions of organizational purpose, cultural alignment, and self-leadership. Where conventional leadership development tends toward competency models and behavioral frameworks, Rovira works at the level of meaning and orientation – helping leaders examine the foundational beliefs that shape culture long before they appear in performance data. Through his Escuela de Transformación Vital y Liderazgo, more than 70,000 people have engaged with his frameworks for self-leadership, organizational culture, and values-based decision-making. That continuing pedagogical practice keeps his thinking in active contact with the challenges organizations are actually facing – and makes him an unusual combination of internationally published author and working educator. Key speaking topics Leadership psychology and self-leadership Creating conditions for sustained organizational advantage Values-based leadership and organizational purpose Cultural transformation and constructive organizational culture Resilience, antifragility, and leading through uncertainty Humanist leadership and ethical organizational management Narrative, myth, and meaning in leadership thinking Ideal for Senior leadership teams and C-suite executives navigating cultural transformation or strategic reinvention CHROs and people leaders designing or refreshing leadership development programmes Corporate conference and offsite audiences where a values-based perspective on leadership is needed to complement strategy or performance-oriented content Boards and executive committees exploring purpose, organizational identity, and long-term cultural alignment Audience outcomes A clear, named conceptual framework – rooted in La buena suerte – for understanding how leaders and organizations build the conditions for sustained success rather than reacting to circumstance Practical distinctions between reactive management and deliberate leadership that participants can apply to their own organizational context A different register for leadership conversations about values, purpose, and culture – one that complements, rather than duplicates, standard competency frameworks Renewed clarity on the relationship between individual self-leadership, team culture, and organizational performance Concrete orientations for building proactive, resilient cultures that generate rather than merely respond to change