Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

Why organisations work with Ebony-Jewel Rainford-Brent She built the ACE Programme from a Surrey initiative in 2020 into a national charity with hubs in six cities, giving boards a working example of how inclusion moves from statement to system. As ECB Non-Executive Director and Surrey’s first female Director of Women’s Cricket, she speaks from inside governance, not as an external observer of it. Her career as the first Black woman to play cricket for England gives a credibility on race, talent pipelines and belonging that few business speakers can match. She translates elite-sport performance habits, preparation under pressure, recovery, decision-making in narrow margins, into language operating teams recognise. Through The Art of Success podcast and her broadcasting work for BBC Test Match Special and Sky Sports, she has interviewed and dissected the methods of high performers across sport and business at length. Biography highlights World Cup winner with England, 2009 ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup, Sydney First Black woman to play cricket for England MBE for services to cricket and charity, 2021 Birthday Honours Founder of the ACE Programme; the charity now operates hubs across six English cities ECB Non-Executive Director; first female Director of Women’s Cricket at Surrey CCC BBC Test Match Special commentator and Sky Sports cricket pundit; host of The Art of Success podcast Honorary degree, Loughborough University, 2023 Biography Most diversity initiatives in professional sport collapse at the first hard year. ACE has not. Founded at Surrey in January 2020 in response to a sharp decline in Black British professional cricketers, the programme became an independent charity and now runs hubs in London, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham and Sheffield. Its founder built it while serving as Surrey’s first female Director of Women’s Cricket and now sits on the ECB Board as a Non-Executive Director. That operational record is what gives the speaking work its weight. The argument is not that inclusion matters in principle. It is what governance, scouting, scholarships and academy pathways have to look like for the numbers to move, and what stops them moving when the early enthusiasm fades. The performance content draws on a playing career that ended in a World Cup-winning England side in Sydney in 2009 and an Ashes retention later that year. It runs through the BBC Test Match Special commentary box, the Sky Sports studio, and seven years of conversations with high performers on The Art of Success podcast. The texture is specific: how teams handle narrow margins, how individuals rebuild after injury and selection setbacks, how a culture either absorbs pressure or buckles under it. The MBE in 2021 and the honorary degree from Loughborough in 2023 are recognition of work already in motion, not the point of the story. The point is a body of practice on representation and high performance that organisations can actually use. Key speaking topics Inclusion as institutional practice High-performance culture in elite teams Resilience and decision-making under pressure Talent pipelines and representation Leadership in male-dominated environments Building programmes that survive their first hard year Performance lessons from elite sport for business Ideal for CHROs and Chief People Officers redesigning inclusion strategy beyond brand statements Boards and ExCos confronting representation gaps with hard data, not narrative Leadership and talent functions building cross-cultural pipelines Senior teams under sustained pressure looking for usable lessons from elite sport Audience outcomes A clear-eyed view of why most inclusion programmes stall and what design choices keep ACE moving A vocabulary for performance under pressure that elite teams actually use, separated from motivational generalities Specific examples of governance, sponsorship and pathway design that change participation numbers Renewed conviction that representation work is a leadership discipline, not a communications exercise

Why organisations work with Aaron Phipps A first-person account of high performance under genuinely extreme physical constraint, told by a Tokyo 2020 gold medallist on the first GB team to win a team-sport Paralympic gold. Specific stories built around named decisions: continuing the Kilimanjaro climb on hands and knees for four days when the chair failed, returning to elite sport at three Paralympic Games across twelve years. Material that travels into senior leadership conferences without sliding into generic motivation. The talks are structured around setbacks, recalibration, and execution, not slogans. Co-delivered Path to Gold session with performance coach Jon Cooper, which gives senior teams the athlete and coach view of the same elite partnership. Track record with FTSE 100 audiences including PwC, Google, HSBC, Deloitte, Allianz, Salesforce and Nestle. Biography highlights Three-time Paralympian for Great Britain in wheelchair rugby: London 2012, Tokyo 2020, Paris 2024. Tokyo 2020 gold medallist as part of the first GB team to win a team-sport Paralympic gold. Appointed MBE in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to wheelchair rugby. First disabled British person to summit Mount Kilimanjaro, completing the final four days on hands and knees in May 2016 after his adapted wheelchair failed. Lost both legs and most of his fingers at age 15 to meningococcal sepsis after contracting Meningitis C in January 1999. Keynote client list includes PwC, Google, HSBC, Bupa, Allianz, Deloitte, Salesforce, Nestle and O2. Biography A Meningitis C infection on 7 January 1999 put a fifteen year old Aaron Phipps into a two week induced coma. He came out of it without both legs and without most of his fingers, and spent the next year in hospital. The recovery story matters less than what he chose to do with it. He went back into competitive sport, completed two London Marathons by 2009, and was selected for the GB wheelchair rugby squad ahead of London 2012. The Kilimanjaro climb in May 2016 is the story most senior audiences remember. The adapted wheelchair built for the route gave way early. Rather than turn back, Phipps spent four days crawling on hands and knees to the summit, becoming the first disabled British person to reach it. The point that lands in a corporate room is not the heroism. It is the decision architecture: keep going under conditions you did not plan for, with equipment that no longer works, when nobody would blame you for stopping. Tokyo 2020 produced the result that defines his sporting career. Great Britain won the wheelchair rugby final, the first team-sport gold any GB Paralympic team has ever taken. Phipps was central to it, and was appointed MBE in the 2022 New Year Honours. He competed at a third Paralympic Games in Paris 2024, twelve years after his first. He is not a management theorist and does not present himself as one. He is booked because he tells specific stories about staying functional under genuinely extreme conditions, and because senior buyers at PwC, Google, HSBC, Deloitte and others find that those stories survive the translation into a leadership conference room better than most. Key speaking topics Resilience under sustained adversity High performance and elite team partnership Mindset and recovery from setback Goal pursuit when the original plan fails Paralympic sport and disability inclusion Self-leadership through extreme constraint Ideal for Senior leadership conferences and executive offsites where the brief is composure under pressure Sales kickoffs, performance teams and high-stakes commercial groups closing demanding cycles Organisations going through restructure or sustained change where workforce fatigue is the named risk Inclusion and disability-focused programmes that want a substantive lived account rather than a panel Audience outcomes A specific, retold account of a senior person continuing to execute when conditions are worse than planned Sharper language for the difference between motivation and the practical mechanics of recovery A reference point teams use back at work when the discussion turns to whether to push on or stop Recalibration of what counts as a serious obstacle inside the audience’s own commercial context

Why organisations work with Amy Purdy She offers a first-hand account of performance under permanent constraint that senior leaders recognise as substantive, not motivational filler. She has changed the rules of her own sport: co-founded Adaptive Action Sports in 2005 and was central to adding Para snowboarding to the 2014 Paralympic programme, a concrete example of building a category where none existed. Her book “On My Own Two Feet” (William Morrow, 2014) sits on New York Times bestseller shelves and gives her argument a durable reference point buyers can hand to executives before or after a session. She holds audiences that include mainstream corporate, healthcare, and sport: Dancing with the Stars finalist, TED speaker, Toyota Super Bowl commercial subject, which means she is legible to wide leadership groups. Her content translates directly to questions boards are actually asking: how to keep teams performing through sustained uncertainty, and how to lead when the original plan is no longer available. Biography highlights Three-time Paralympic medallist in Para snowboarding: bronze, Sochi 2014; silver and bronze, PyeongChang 2018. Co-founder, Adaptive Action Sports (2005), a 501(c)(3) based at Copper Mountain, Colorado. Author, “On My Own Two Feet: From Losing My Legs to Learning the Dance of Life” (William Morrow, 2014), New York Times bestseller. TED speaker, “Living Beyond Limits” (TEDxOrangeCoast, published on TED.com). Finalist, ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, Season 18 (2014); contestant, CBS’s The Amazing Race (2012). Featured in a Toyota Super Bowl commercial and on Oprah Winfrey’s The Life You Want Tour. Biography At nineteen, a case of bacterial meningitis took Amy Purdy’s legs below the knee, her spleen, and the function of both kidneys. A transplanted kidney from her father kept her alive. Within two years she was back on a snowboard. Within a decade she was on the Paralympic podium. The athletic record is specific. Three Paralympic medals across two Games: bronze at Sochi in 2014 and silver and bronze at PyeongChang in 2018, all in snowboard disciplines she helped argue into existence. In 2005, with Daniel Gale, she co-founded Adaptive Action Sports, the organisation that did much of the quiet work to get Para snowboarding onto the 2014 Paralympic programme. Changing the rules of a sport is a rarer credential than winning inside them. The communication record sits alongside the athletic one. “On My Own Two Feet,” published by William Morrow in 2014 and co-written with Michelle Burford, became a New York Times bestseller and remains her primary reference text. The TEDxOrangeCoast talk “Living Beyond Limits” travelled from conference room to the main TED library. A finalist run on Dancing with the Stars, a Toyota Super Bowl commercial and a place on Oprah Winfrey’s The Life You Want Tour followed, each adding a different audience to her reach. What she offers a corporate room is narrower and more useful than the biography suggests. Her argument is about operating when the original plan has been cancelled: recovering quickly, finding the next move, keeping a team moving while the ground is still shifting. It is a working account of constraint. For leaders building organisations that have to hold together through uncertainty, that is a reference worth hearing directly. Key speaking topics Resilience as a working practice Leading through setback and reinvention Performance under constraint Purpose and reinvention after disruption Category creation and changing the rules of a system High performance in endurance and sport Ideal for Senior leadership offsites and CEO forums focused on resilience, reinvention, and leading through sustained uncertainty. Healthcare, life sciences and patient-facing organisations where the lived-experience dimension carries commercial and cultural weight. Sales kick-offs and all-hands moments that need a serious anchor point rather than generic motivation. Diversity, inclusion and talent events where disability, advocacy, and category creation are part of the conversation. Audience outcomes A sharper working definition of resilience that leaders can apply to their own teams, not just admire in others. A concrete model for operating when the original plan has been removed and a new one has to be built under time pressure. A reference example of building a category (a sport, a product, a business line) where none previously existed. Renewed clarity about the relationship between personal setback and professional performance, useful for high-stakes leadership transitions. Language and framing senior leaders can reuse with their own people after the session ends.

Why organisations work with Nihal Arthanayake A daily-broadcast interviewer’s instinct for live conversation. Over eight years presenting the BBC Radio 5 Live afternoon show, plus the Headliners interview series, mean panel craft built across thousands of hours of unscripted live radio. A named winner at the 2019 BBC Radio & Music Awards for Interview of the Year. The room can feel the difference when an interviewer can actually draw out a senior guest, not just read questions in order. The author of a serious trade book on conversation. Let’s Talk (Hachette, 2022) is built on interviews with figures from Mary McAleese to hostage negotiators, which gives Nihal a content keynote that other hosts simply cannot offer. Twenty-five years of cultural fluency across BBC, MTV, Channel 4 and BBC Two. Comfortable on a Hugo Boss or Mercedes stage and equally credible chairing a panel on race, identity or media. Few hosts cover both rooms. Public-trust credentials that travel well into sponsor-sensitive briefs. Appointed to the BBC’s Independent Diversity Advisory Board alongside Sir Lenny Henry and Dame Floella Benjamin; trustee at HOME Manchester; ambassador for the British Asian Trust. Biography highlights BBC Radio 5 Live presenter; eight-plus years on the afternoon show; current host of the Headliners interview series. Winner of Interview of the Year, 2019 BBC Radio & Music Awards. Author of Let’s Talk: How to Have Better Conversations (Hachette, 2022). BBC Radio 1 alumnus; co-host of Asian Beats (Sony Radio Award winner) and host of Review with Nihal. Appointed to the BBC’s Independent Diversity Advisory Board in 2014 by the BBC Director General. Trustee, HOME Manchester. Former trustee, Southbank Centre and British Council. Ambassador, British Asian Trust. Biography Live conversation is harder than it looks on a run sheet. A guarded executive answers in talking points. A four-person panel splinters. An awards stage drifts by the third category. The job of the host is to recover all of that without the audience noticing. That is the craft Nihal Arthanayake has spent twenty-five years building. Eight years presenting the afternoon show on BBC Radio 5 Live, plus the Sunday interview series Headliners, mean a live-radio interviewer who reads a room in real time. The 2019 BBC Radio & Music Award for Interview of the Year recognised the same skill in a different setting: a candid, on-the-record conversation that other interviewers could not have got. That craft is the subject of his 2022 Hachette book, Let’s Talk: How to Have Better Conversations. The book draws on conversations with former Irish president Mary McAleese, Professor Tanya Byron, Lorraine Kelly and Johann Hari, plus hostage negotiators and clinicians, to ask what actually changes when two people listen to each other properly. It gives organisations a content keynote on dialogue, listening and disagreement that most hosts cannot offer. The broader public-trust footprint is what makes the work travel into sponsor-sensitive briefs. Appointed to the BBC’s Independent Diversity Advisory Board in 2014 by the Director General, alongside Sir Lenny Henry, George the Poet and Dame Floella Benjamin. Trustee at HOME Manchester. Ambassador for the British Asian Trust. Corporate hosting clients include Adobe, Google, X, GQ, Hugo Boss, Mercedes-Benz, Tottenham Hotspur and Boots. Key speaking topics Conference and awards hosting Panel moderation and on-stage interviewing The craft of conversation and dialogue Communication and listening as leadership skills Diversity, representation and identity in media Cultural commentary and the public conversation Ideal for Senior corporate awards, summits and gala dinners that need a host who can carry a long-form running order Town halls, leadership conferences and offsites where a CEO or chair will be interviewed live on stage Panel sessions on culture, identity or representation that need an experienced moderator on contested ground Internal communication, L&D and people-team events on listening, dialogue and conversation skills Audience outcomes A live event that holds energy from welcome to close, with senior guests drawn out rather than read at A clearer practical sense of what makes a conversation actually work, drawn from Let’s Talk and twenty-five years of interviewing A panel that moves, with a moderator who reads the room and lets the strongest contributions land A host who is credible on both commercial and culture-and-identity briefs, without switching register awkwardly between them

Why organisations work with Eliza VanCort A working method for executive presence rooted in Meisner acting technique, not generic confidence coaching. Voice, posture and physicality are treated as trainable instruments, not personality traits. An intersectional lens that takes inclusion past slogans. Her sessions address how mansplaining, interruption, and microaggression actually move through a meeting, and what a leader can do in the moment. A bestselling book, A Woman’s Guide to Claiming Space, that gives delegates a structured framework before and after the room, with named behaviours and language. Mainstream media reach. Appearances on The Drew Barrymore Show, Forbes, Fast Company and CNBC give her work cultural traction outside corporate L&D, which travels with audiences. Co-founder of Think Twice Labs with Alma Derricks, former CMO of Cirque du Soleil, building emotional intelligence and cross-difference communication tools used inside organisations. Biography highlights Author of A Woman’s Guide to Claiming Space: Stand Tall. Raise Your Voice. Be Heard, Berrett-Koehler, May 2021. Cook House Fellow, Cornell University. TEDxRochester speaker, “Women, Power and Revolutionizing Speech”. Founder of The Actor’s Workshop of Ithaca, a Meisner Technique studio. Co-founder of Think Twice Labs with Alma Derricks, former CMO of Cirque du Soleil. Featured in The Drew Barrymore Show, Forbes, Fast Company, CNBC, and Success magazine. Biography Most executive presence work treats authority as a personality trait. Eliza VanCort treats it as a craft. Her starting point is that voice, posture and language are trainable instruments, the same way an actor’s are, and that women and underrepresented leaders are routinely operating those instruments inside rooms that were not built for them. That argument has a specific origin. She founded The Actor’s Workshop of Ithaca, the region’s Meisner Technique studio, and spent years teaching how performers hold a stage. She then applied the same discipline to meeting rooms and boardrooms. A Woman’s Guide to Claiming Space, published by Berrett-Koehler in 2021, sets out the framework: five behaviours that shift how a leader is read, from posture and vocal placement to ending self-sabotage and building cross-difference coalitions. The work has reach beyond corporate L&D. Her TEDxRochester talk on women, power and speech has been viewed widely. Appearances on The Drew Barrymore Show, Forbes, Fast Company and CNBC have built a public audience of more than 250,000 followers. Inside organisations, she co-founded Think Twice Labs with Alma Derricks, former CMO of Cirque du Soleil, to translate the same material into emotional intelligence and communication tools teams can use across difference. She is a Cook House Fellow at Cornell University and an advisory board member of Performing Arts for Social Change. The intellectual frame is intersectional: most of her organisational work is about what happens to people with less institutional power when they intersect with structures designed around someone else’s authority. The output is concrete. Delegates leave with named behaviours, specific language and a vocabulary for the dynamics they have been navigating without naming for years. Key speaking topics Executive presence and communication craft Women in leadership and the politics of voice Anti-racist and cross-difference communication Emotional intelligence in senior teams Inclusion under pressure Confidence, posture and physicality for leaders Power dynamics in everyday workplace interaction Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers building executive-presence programmes for senior women Leadership-development leads designing high-potential and sponsorship pathways ERG sponsors and DEI heads commissioning substantive, non-performative inclusion content Senior women’s leadership summits, partner-track development programmes, and emerging-leader cohorts Audience outcomes A vocabulary for the meeting-room behaviours that quietly cost women authority, and language to interrupt them in the moment Specific techniques for voice, posture and physicality drawn from Meisner training, applied to senior business settings A framework from A Woman’s Guide to Claiming Space delegates can carry back into their teams Practical anti-racist and cross-difference communication moves that work inside live conversations, not only in policy documents A clearer reading of how power moves through an organisation’s everyday talk, and where to act on it

Why organisations work with Marcus Collins He translates cultural anthropology into commercial decisions, turning ideas that usually live in academic departments into practical inputs for brand, product, and growth strategy. His book For the Culture provides a single thesis with named mechanisms for how meaning, identity, and belonging move markets. Buyers get an argument they can hand to a team, not a set of trend observations. He has run the work he teaches. Apple’s iTunes and Nike sport music, Beyonce’s digital strategy, Wieden+Kennedy New York, and named campaigns for Google, Brooklyn Nets, and State Farm sit behind every claim. Thinkers50 named him to the 2023 Radar with the Distinguished Achievement Award for the idea most likely to shape the future of business management. That puts him among a small group of new voices the global management community has formally endorsed. He sits inside the platform side of culture as Professor in Residence at TikTok, which means his read on how brand meaning forms and spreads is current, not retrospective. Biography highlights Clinical Professor of Marketing, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan Professor in Residence, TikTok Former Chief Strategy Officer, Wieden+Kennedy New York Author, For the Culture (PublicAffairs, 2023); Thinkers50 2023 Best New Management Booklist Thinkers50 Radar Distinguished Achievement Award, 2023 American Advertising Federation Advertising Hall of Achievement; Ad Age and Crain’s 40 Under 40 Columnist, Adweek and Forbes Biography Culture, not demographics, decides what consumers buy and what they refuse. Marcus Collins built a career inside that observation. He ran digital strategy for Beyonce, worked on iTunes and Nike sport music at Apple, and went on to serve as Chief Strategy Officer at Wieden+Kennedy New York, the agency behind Nike’s most enduring brand work. His doctorate at Temple University was in cultural contagion and meaning-making, the academic foundation that now sits behind his book For the Culture. Published in 2023, it landed on the Thinkers50 Best New Management Booklist and won him the Radar Distinguished Achievement Award the same year, naming his thinking as the idea most likely to shape the future of business management. He teaches marketing at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, holds a Professor in Residence role at TikTok, and writes columns for Adweek and Forbes. His commercial fingerprints are on Google’s Real Tone, the relaunch of the Brooklyn Nets, the Made In America festival, and State Farm’s Cliff Paul campaign. For senior commercial audiences, his value is specific. He gives marketing, growth, and brand teams a working theory of why some ideas move through a culture and most do not, and he ties that theory to operating choices about positioning, audience, and product. Key speaking topics Cultural contagion and consumer behaviour Brand strategy and meaning-making Marketing in a fragmented media environment The role of identity in consumption Building brands that earn cultural relevance Storytelling and business communication Customer experience and brand Ideal for CMOs and brand leaders rebuilding marketing strategy for a post-demographic environment Growth and commercial leadership teams trying to understand why their category narrative has stopped working Creative agencies and in-house brand teams looking for an applied framework on cultural relevance Consumer-facing businesses, retail, media, sport, technology, where brand meaning is a competitive variable Audience outcomes A working definition of culture that explains why messages succeed or fail, beyond demographic targeting A clear view of how meaning, identity, and belonging move audiences toward or away from a brand Named mechanisms from For the Culture that brand and marketing teams can apply to live campaigns Examples drawn from Apple, Nike, Beyonce, Brooklyn Nets, Google, and State Farm, showing how cultural strategy operates inside real commercial work A sharper sense of why most brand and growth strategies underperform in fragmented markets, and what changes when culture becomes the unit of analysis

Why organisations work with Henry Bonsu Thirty years of live broadcast experience, from BBC Radio 4’s Today to Times Radio, produce a chair who can steer a twelve-person panel in real time without losing either the agenda or the audience. He is the annual host of the African Banker Awards since 2008 and a repeat moderator for the UNDP, WHO Africa Region, UNHCR, and the African Union. When an institution has a reputational stake in the room, it books him back. He has introduced UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and World Bank President Jim Kim on the same stage at the Financing for Development conference in Addis Ababa, and chaired sessions at COP21 in Paris. He handles heads-of-state protocol without friction. Oxford-trained in German and French, fluent across African political economy, Westminster politics, and US affairs, which matters when a panel crosses jurisdictions and language registers in the same hour. Corporate conveners including Maersk, KPMG, and Cartier International use him for sustainability, diversity, and development briefs where a sharp, well-briefed chair is more valuable than a keynote. Biography highlights Magdalen College, Oxford graduate in German and French (1986 to 1990). Former producer on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and Black Britain on BBC Two. Co-founder and presenter at Colourful Radio, London, from 2006. Current Times Radio presenter, Thursday and Friday 10pm to 1am slots since 2022. Host of the African Banker Awards every year since 2008. Regular moderator for UNDP, WHO Africa Region, UNHCR, and the African Union; chaired sessions at COP21 Paris, the UN General Assembly in New York, and the Financing for Development conference in Addis Ababa. Biography Some conference chairs open a panel, read the bios, and hand the microphone around. Others run the room. Henry Bonsu is in the second group, and the reason is thirty years of live broadcasting behind the craft. He came to moderation through journalism. After reading Modern Languages at Magdalen College, Oxford, he produced BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, fronted Black Britain on BBC Two, and presented the Drivetime show on BBC London 94.9. In 2006 he co-founded Colourful Radio, one of the first London stations built for a Black audience. He is now a regular evening presenter on Times Radio, where he covers UK and US politics, education, and mental health. That broadcast discipline translates directly into how he chairs. He has hosted the African Banker Awards every year since 2008, moderated at COP21 in Paris, and chaired eight sessions at the Financing for Development conference in Addis Ababa, where he introduced UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and World Bank President Jim Kim. The UNDP, WHO Africa Region, UNHCR, and the African Union use him repeatedly. Corporate conveners including Maersk, KPMG, AfrAsia Bank, and Cartier International bring him in for sustainability, diversity, and development briefs. What the buyer gets is a chair fluent in the policy terrain, calm under heads-of-state protocol, and willing to ask the question a nervous room is avoiding. On a stage where the brief is serious and the speakers are senior, that is what holds the discussion together. Key speaking topics Moderation and chairing for international summits African finance and economic development Climate policy and sustainable development goals UK and US political affairs Race, culture, and public debate Media training and executive broadcast coaching Ideal for Heads of communications and event directors at UN agencies, multilateral institutions, and development banks convening ministerial or heads-of-state panels. Corporate sustainability and ESG leads at multinationals hosting external stakeholder summits on Africa, climate, or development finance. Awards programme organisers in the African business, finance, and diaspora space. Executive teams preparing for high-stakes broadcast interviews or crisis media scenarios. Audience outcomes Panels that reach a defined position within the allocated time, rather than drifting into generalities. Senior speakers drawn out with sharper follow-up questions than a generalist host would ask. A chair who can hold protocol for heads of state and principals without dropping the editorial pace. For media training clients, executives who sound clearer and steadier under hostile questioning.

Why organisations work with Jose Morey He has implemented AI inside an actual clinical and research environment, not theorised about it. As former Associate Chief Health Officer at IBM Watson Health, he sat at the intersection where the Watson promise met hospital reality. He brings genuine NASA insight on how the agency screens emerging health and AI technologies, drawn from his roles as Medical Technology and AI Adviser to NASA iTech and Senior Advisor to the NASA Space Breathing Initiative. He connects medical, space, biosecurity, and transportation domains in a way that lets boards stress-test their AI assumptions against problems harder than their own. Few speakers can move from radiology workflows to Hyperloop systems engineering with credibility in both rooms. He is co-author of Latinx Business Success (Wiley, 2021), which gives him a distinct second register on representation, talent pipelines, and how diverse leadership shows up in technology-driven industries. He is a working radiologist and medical society leader, currently President of the Medical Society of Virginia Foundation, which keeps the keynote material grounded in operational practice rather than commentary. Biography highlights Co-author, Latinx Business Success: How Latinx Ingenuity, Innovation, and Tenacity are Driving Some of the World’s Biggest Companies (Wiley, 2021). Former Associate Chief Health Officer, IBM Watson Health; former Chief Medical Innovation Officer, Liberty BioSecurity. Medical Technology and AI Adviser to NASA iTech and Senior Advisor to the NASA Space Breathing Initiative. Eisenhower Fellow, 2020/2021 Zhi-Xing Fellows Program. Adjunct Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, University of Virginia and Eastern Virginia Medical School; Guest Lecturer, Singularity University. Member, Forbes Technology Council; Informatics Leadership Council, American College of Radiology; public volunteer, NIST Generative AI Public Working Group. CEO and Founder, Ad Astra Media LLC, a STEAM media production company building role models and educational content for under-represented students. Biography Most of the AI conversation inside large organisations is still happening at one remove from where the technology actually meets a patient, a pilot, or a regulator. Jose Morey works at that meeting point. He is a practising radiologist who has built clinical AI tools, advised NASA on which health technologies are worth backing, and helped Liberty BioSecurity think through genetic intelligence and augmented human performance. His operational range is unusually wide. At IBM Watson Health he served as Associate Chief Health Officer during the period when the platform’s clinical claims were being tested against hospital reality. He has advised NASA iTech on the feasibility and commercialisation of emerging health and AI companies, and serves as a Senior Advisor to the NASA Space Breathing Initiative. He sits on the Chief Engineering Council for Hyperloop Transportation Technologies and on the Informatics Leadership Council of the American College of Radiology. The intellectual through-line is translation between domains. Morey co-authored Latinx Business Success with Frank Carbajal (Wiley, 2021), a book built around interviews with Latinx leaders across technology, finance, healthcare and media, and structured around what they call the DIGITAL framework. He is also an Eisenhower Fellow from the 2020/2021 Zhi-Xing programme, an adjunct professor of radiology at the University of Virginia and Eastern Virginia Medical School, and a guest lecturer at Singularity University. He runs Ad Astra Media, a production studio he founded to put serious STEAM role models in front of under-represented students, and contributes as a public volunteer to the NIST Generative AI Public Working Group. The result is a speaker who can take a board from a question about AI hallucination risk to a question about clinical liability to a question about who is actually being trained to build the next generation of these systems, without losing the room. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence in clinical medicine Health technology and the future of patient care AI for space exploration and human performance in extreme environments Emerging technology and innovation strategy Latinx leadership and representation in technology industries Generative AI policy and responsible deployment Frontier infrastructure: Hyperloop, biosecurity, and the new technology renaissance Ideal for Healthcare boards, hospital executives, and CMIOs evaluating clinical AI deployment and governance CTOs, CIOs, and innovation leads in regulated industries who need a practitioner view of frontier technology Public-sector and defence audiences focused on biosecurity, space health, and emerging-technology policy DEI sponsors and talent leaders looking to connect representation with technical workforce strategy Audience outcomes A grounded reading of where clinical and operational AI actually works today and where it is still marketing Specific examples of how NASA, biosecurity, and healthcare institutions evaluate emerging technologies before they buy A framework, drawn from Latinx Business Success, for thinking about leadership, talent and innovation in technology-driven industries A clearer view of which frontier technologies (AI, biotech, space health, hyperloop-class infrastructure) are converging on the same set of organisational problems Direct, practical answers to executive questions on AI governance, regulation, and risk

Why organisations work with Erika Lucas Her accelerator, run in partnership with the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder, has supported more than 220 women and minority-owned startups since 2017. She draws on live operating experience, finding and scaling founders that most capital systems miss. Her venture fund, VEST Her Ventures, invests in women-led companies in the care economy and the future of work. She brings a current portfolio view of where workforce shifts and regulatory pressure are opening commercial opportunities, and the market is under-pricing. She speaks the language of the full capital stack. As a former private equity Partner and as Director of Trade and Foreign Direct Investment at the Oklahoma Department of Commerce, she is fluent in public incentives, PE, VC, and bank credit, which matters for boards making complex allocation decisions. Her TED talk, “America’s Trillion Dollar Blindspot,” makes a market-sizing case for capital flowing to overlooked founders. That is the register that senior leaders and investment committees respond to. She operates from Oklahoma City, away from the coastal hubs from which most speakers on this topic come. For companies building workforce, consumer, or policy strategies outside a handful of metros, her ground-level view is difficult to source elsewhere. Biography highlights Co-founder of StitchCrew, its accelerator with the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder, has supported more than 220 women and minority-owned startups since 2017 Founder and General Partner of VEST Her Ventures, an early-stage venture fund investing in women-led companies in the care economy and future of work TED speaker: “America’s Trillion Dollar Blindspot” (TEDxOU) Host of the VEST Her Podcast, examining the structural barriers to women’s economic advancement Board of Directors at Arvest Bank; Fellow at the Just Economy Institute; Member of the Latino Corporate Directors Association Former Partner at a US and European private equity firm; former Director of Trade and Foreign Direct Investment at the Oklahoma Department of Commerce, where 38 international companies located or expanded during her tenure Biography Only a sliver of venture capital reaches women and founders of colour. The commercial cost of that pattern is usually understated. Whole categories of customers, markets, and operators are being systematically under-priced by capital that is trained to look in the same handful of places. StitchCrew was built on that reading of the market. Co-founded with her husband Chris in 2016, it runs an accelerator in partnership with the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder and has supported more than 220 women and minority-owned founders. The positioning matters. It sits in the middle of the country, not on a coastal hub, and the deal flow reflects markets that most East Coast or Bay Area funds never see. The logic extended into investment. VEST Her Ventures, founded in 2022, backs early-stage women-led companies in the care economy and future of work, two sectors where demand is visibly running ahead of available capital. The fund came together in weeks. Two million dollars was raised in two months, entirely from women limited partners based in the middle of the country. The throughline runs back through her earlier career. She was a Partner at a private equity firm with investments in the United States and Europe, and Director of Trade and Foreign Direct Investment at the Oklahoma Department of Commerce, where 38 international companies located or expanded during her tenure. She sits on the board of Arvest Bank, is a Fellow at the Just Economy Institute, and hosts the VEST Her Podcast, where the repeated question is what it would take for American capital to stop leaving its most profitable markets untouched. Key speaking topics Access to capital and overlooked markets Entrepreneurship and the new majority economy The care economy and future of work Women in leadership and ownership Venture capital and economic inclusion Economic mobility and public-private strategy Ideal for Corporate boards and Chief Investment Officers are looking for the next source of portfolio growth Private equity and venture investment committees assessing deal flow and diversification CHROs and heads of talent building workforce and care infrastructure strategies Economic development agencies, chambers of commerce, and regional leadership forums are working on commercial inclusion Audience outcomes A sharper commercial argument for investing in overlooked founders and markets, drawn from a live accelerator and an active venture portfolio A clearer map of where venture and growth capital actually lands in the United States, and which geographies and founder profiles it consistently misses Named sectors where consumer and workforce change is already running ahead of investment capital, including the care economy and the infrastructure of work A vocabulary for discussing inclusion in commercial terms, usable with boards, investment committees, and senior executives who are sceptical of fairness-led framing

Why organisations work with Csaba Toth He runs ICQ Global, a people development business with more than 200 licensed partners across 45-plus countries, which means his methods have been pressure-tested in genuinely multicultural settings rather than theorised in one market. The Global DISC model is ICF and CPD-accredited and gives leaders one common language for personality, generation, profession, and nationality differences inside the same team. He measures and benchmarks psychological safety, motivational drivers, and cognitive diversity, so the conversation moves from cultural awareness slogans to specific data leaders can act on. His credential stack is unusually substantive: John Mattone Intelligent Leadership coach, Hofstede Insights Associate Partner, Richard Lewis-certified behavioural consultant, three Master’s degrees and an Executive MBA. He co-authored Uncommon Sense in Unusual Times with contributions from Marshall Goldsmith and John Mattone, a credibility marker for senior HR and L&D buyers familiar with that lineage. Biography highlights Founder of ICQ Global, a people development organisation with over 200 licensed partners across more than 45 countries. Developer of the Global DISC model, an ICF and CPD Standards-accredited intercultural behavioural framework. Author of Uncommon Sense in Unusual Times, with contributions from Marshall Goldsmith and John Mattone. Forbes Coaches Council member and Harvard Business Review Advisory Council member. Hofstede Insights Associate Partner and Richard Lewis Communications-certified cross-cultural trainer. Holds three Master’s degrees (Italy, UK, Hungary) and an Executive MBA from Quantic School of Business and Technology. Biography Diversity strategies fail at the level of daily team interaction. People with different nationalities, professions, generations, and personalities sit in the same meeting, draw different conclusions from the same words, and lose trust in each other long before anyone names the problem. That is the gap Csaba Toth set out to close. He founded ICQ Global to make cognitive and cultural diversity measurable. The company now operates with more than 200 licensed partners across 45-plus countries, and its core asset is the Global DISC model, an ICF and CPD-accredited framework that extends the most widely used behavioural model in business with a layer for cultural intelligence. Leaders get a single language for the differences that actually slow teams down. The credentials behind the work are unusually deep. Toth is certified through John Mattone’s Intelligent Leadership programme, holds Human Synergistics accreditation, is a Hofstede Insights Associate Partner and a Richard Lewis Communications-certified behavioural consultant, with further certification in CBT, NLP, and Positive Intelligence. He sits on the Forbes Coaches Council and the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council, holds three Master’s degrees from Italy, the UK and Hungary, and an Executive MBA from Quantic School of Business and Technology. His book, Uncommon Sense in Unusual Times, published with contributions from Marshall Goldsmith and John Mattone, sets out how leaders stay relevant when the people around them increasingly do not think, decide, or communicate the same way they do. That is the practical question he answers in a room. Key speaking topics Cultural intelligence and the Global DISC model Psychological safety in multicultural teams Cognitive diversity and team performance Inclusive leadership across generations and nationalities Communication breakdown in global organisations Motivational drivers and behavioural difference Coaching and people development at scale Ideal for CHROs, Heads of L&D, and Heads of Talent leading global or multicultural workforces. DEI and Inclusion leads moving past awareness work into measurable team outcomes. Leadership development and coaching faculties inside multinational businesses. Senior leaders of cross-border teams where communication and trust have stalled. Audience outcomes A common vocabulary for cultural, generational, and personality differences that a team can use the next day. A clearer read on where psychological safety is breaking down inside their own teams and why. The Global DISC lens applied to a real internal dynamic the audience already recognises. Specific behavioural shifts leaders can make when working across cultures, professions, and generations. A more honest assessment of how cognitive diversity is helping or hurting performance in their organisation.

Why organisations work with Shola Kaye Her Emotional Audacity™ framework reframes empathy as an organisational capability – not a personal virtue – giving leaders a structured approach to courageous communication that is immediately applicable in high-pressure, high-stakes environments She holds an unusual credibility position: a Cambridge and Emory-trained scientist who also performed professionally on four continents. That combination makes her content land differently with technical and analytical audiences who typically resist people-skills programming Her work addresses a gap that DEI programmes and EQ training often miss separately: the intersection of speaking up, psychological safety, and inclusive communication as a single, integrated practice Her two published books and LinkedIn Learning instructor role mean buyers are extending into a content ecosystem, not just a single keynote She has worked across the full range of organisational contexts – from board-level at institutions including The United Nations and Deloitte to company-wide culture programmes – with consistent evidence of rebooking Biography highlights BA Natural Sciences, Cambridge University; PGCE, Oxford University; MSc Analytical Chemistry / Neuropharmacology, Emory University, with postgraduate research at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control Early career in IT management consulting with clients including Goldman Sachs and Prudential Assurance, followed by account director roles in aviation and finance Professional entertainer and jazz singer; performed on four continents including BBC appearances Author of How to be a D.I.V.A. at Public Speaking (Amazon.com #1 bestseller) and Big Talk, Small Talk and Everything in Between (Callisto Media, 2020) Winner of the Jenny Seagrove Speaking Award (2016); Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM), Toastmasters International; Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) Regular contributor to Management Today, HR Zone, and People Management; featured in Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, Forbes, and BBC; TEDx speaker on empathy in the workplace Biography Shola Kaye spent her early career moving between worlds that rarely overlap: neuroscience research at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, management consulting at investment banks in New York and London, and professional performance on stages across four continents. That trajectory is not a curiosity: it is the basis of her work. She understands analytically rigorous environments, the dynamics of corporate invisibility, and what it takes to hold a room. The core tension she addresses is one that organisations consistently underinvest in: the gap between stated inclusion values and the actual behavioural competencies required to make them real. Most people, even experienced leaders, struggle to give honest feedback, speak up under pressure, or navigate difficult conversations without defensiveness. Kaye’s Emotional Audacity™ framework names this gap explicitly: combining empathy, self-regulation, and courageous communication into a single, teachable practice. Her two books and a TEDx talk on workplace empathy establish the intellectual architecture behind the keynotes. Her contributors to Management Today, HR Zone, and People Management position her as a credible voice in the professional management conversation, not only on the conference circuit. Clients including The United Nations, Deloitte, HSBC, Google, and IBM have rebooked or extended her programmes into training formats, evidence that the content holds beyond a single session. What makes Kaye distinctive in a crowded DEI and communication space is the precise nature of her argument: that empathy, done seriously, is not a softening of leadership but a structural condition for high performance. For organisations navigating transformation, hybrid work, or underrepresentation challenges, that reframe tends to land where other approaches have not. Key speaking topics Empathy at work Inclusive leadership Psychological safety and communication Emotional intelligence Courageous workplace communication Diversity, equity and belonging People-first culture Feedback and difficult conversations Ideal for CHROs and People Directors building cultures where psychological safety is a practical reality, not an aspiration Leadership development programmes targeting mid-to-senior leaders managing diverse, distributed, or technically-oriented teams Organisations running DEI initiatives that need to move beyond awareness into behavioural change International Women’s Day and women’s leadership events where communication confidence and visibility are the focus Audience outcomes A named framework (Emotional Audacity™) for integrating empathy, courageous communication, and inclusive behaviour into daily leadership practice Practical tools for navigating difficult conversations, delivering constructive feedback, and creating environments where people feel safe to speak up Greater understanding of the structural conditions – not just the personal attitudes – that determine whether inclusion is felt in practice Specific techniques for communicating with clarity and impact, particularly for those in technical, analytical, or STEM-rooted working environments Renewed understanding of how communication behaviours at the manager level directly affect team performance, retention, and innovation output

Why organisations work with Raheela Mahomed A working anchor’s interview discipline applied to corporate panels: senior speakers get pressed cleanly on the questions an audience actually wants answered, without the host losing the room. Subject fluency across digital transformation, climate and sustainability, geopolitics and DEI, built from live news coverage rather than a single specialism, useful for agendas that span more than one track. International newsroom credibility from Al Jazeera English, CNN International and DW News, including a co-presented Emmy-nominated programme, NewsGrid, that translates immediately for global audiences. A studio operator who can hold a live, multi-camera broadcast format on stage, demonstrated on SAP’s Sapphire Now and at the Future of Media Leaders Summit in Doha. Biography highlights News anchor, Deutsche Welle (DW News), Berlin, since 2021; presenter of hourly bulletins and DW News Africa. Eight years at Al Jazeera English in Doha, anchoring the flagship Newshour and serving as Indonesia correspondent. Co-presenter and producer of NewsGrid, Al Jazeera English’s interactive news programme, International Emmy nominee in News, 2018. Earlier roles at CNN International, including contribution to the launch of the CNN Freedom Project on human trafficking. Current contributor to BBC World News on Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, and Iran. Conference host and moderator for SAP’s Sapphire Now and the Future of Media Leaders Summit, Doha; UN conference speaker at Shoko Festival Hub in Harare. BA Journalism, University of Westminster; MA International Public Policy, University College London; BRIT School alumna. Biography A live news desk is the closest professional analogue to a complex corporate stage. Both demand fluency across unfamiliar subjects, the ability to ask a sharper question than was scripted, and the composure to keep an audience inside a story that could otherwise unravel. Raheela Mahomed has worked that desk for more than a decade. Her anchoring career runs through three of the major international broadcasters. At CNN International she covered the 2012 Olympics, the Arab Spring and Egypt’s elections, and contributed to the launch of the CNN Freedom Project on human trafficking. From 2012 to 2020 she was based in Doha for Al Jazeera English, presenting the flagship Newshour, serving as Indonesia correspondent, and co-presenting NewsGrid, an interactive news show nominated for an International Emmy in News in 2018. Since 2021 she has been a news anchor at Deutsche Welle in Berlin, hosting hourly English-language bulletins and DW News Africa across the pandemic, Sudan, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the war in Ukraine. She also contributes to BBC World News on Israel and Gaza and on Iran. The same instincts carry into corporate work: hosting SAP’s Sapphire Now in 2021, moderating Digital Transformation at the Future of Media Leaders Summit in Doha, and speaking on the future of broadcasting at the UN’s Shoko Festival Hub in Harare. Her academic grounding is in international public policy, with a master’s from UCL on top of a journalism degree from the University of Westminster and time at the BRIT School. The combination matters at the front of a room: enough policy literacy to chase a serious answer, enough broadcast technique to keep the show moving when a panellist runs long. Key speaking topics Conference hosting and emcee Panel moderation Digital transformation Climate and sustainability International affairs and geopolitics Diversity, equity and inclusion Future of broadcasting and media Ideal for Corporate summits and customer conferences needing a credible main-stage host across a multi-track agenda. Communications, marketing and corporate affairs teams running flagship industry events with senior external speakers. ESG, sustainability and DEI forums where panel discussion needs to be pressed harder than a friendly chair would. Internal leadership town halls and global all-hands where a working broadcast anchor can hold a live format on camera. Audience outcomes A main-stage event that holds shape across keynotes, panels and Q&A, with timing kept and senior speakers asked the questions the audience came for. Panel sessions that surface the actual disagreement on stage rather than a round of prepared statements. A broadcast-grade hosting register suitable for streamed, hybrid and on-camera formats, not only in-room. Coverage of digital, geopolitical and sustainability sessions by a host with the literacy to follow the substance, not only the script.