Employee Engagement

Why organisations work with Paul Redmond He brings a five-generation diagnostic, not a Millennials-versus-Boomers cliche, that gives HR and commercial leaders a working language for friction they can already feel. His employability research, built across senior roles at the University of Liverpool, lets him speak credibly to graduate-recruitment, early-careers, and talent-pipeline audiences other generational speakers cannot. His Zombie Jobs thesis, anchored in his 2019 TED Talk and 2024 Trotman book on the AI age, gives leadership audiences a sharp, named frame for which roles AI hollows out and which it does not. He moves comfortably between commercial keynotes and broadcast work, including BBC and ITV current affairs, which translates into a polished platform presence for high-stakes events. Biography highlights Director of Student Experience and Enhancement, University of Liverpool, with continuing lecturing responsibilities. Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (2010), awarded for writing and research. Author of The Graduate Jobs Formula, Talking about my Generation, A Parent’s Guide to Graduate Jobs, and The Graduate’s Guide to Future-Proofing Your Career (Trotman, 2024). TED speaker: Zombie Careers: Will You Lose Your Job to AI? (2019). Regular contributor to BBC and ITV current affairs; collaborator on the BBC and Tiger Aspect documentary Who Gets the Best Jobs? Speaks across financial services, technology, healthcare, and travel, with named clients including Google, Hargreaves Lansdown, Janus Henderson, Royal London, the NHS, and ABTA. Biography Five working generations now sit inside the same organisation. Each one learned to work under a different economy, a different communication norm, and a different settlement with the employer. The friction this produces shows up in engagement scores, retention numbers, and customer outcomes. Redmond’s work names that friction and gives leaders a way to act on it. His vantage is unusual. As Director of Student Experience and Enhancement at the University of Liverpool, he has spent years inside the machinery that produces the next generation of the workforce, and in continuous research conversation with the employers buying that talent. That has made his commentary on Gen Z and the post-Covid graduate market a regular fixture on BBC and ITV current affairs, and a reference point for HR and early-careers teams across UK plc. The future-of-work strand runs alongside it. His TED Talk Zombie Careers, published in 2019, set out the roles most exposed to AI and robotics, and the cognitive and human skills that survive automation. The Graduate’s Guide to Future-Proofing Your Career, published by Trotman in 2024, extends that argument into a working guide for the AI age. The thesis lands because it is grounded in named research, not in tech-keynote futurism. His books include The Graduate Jobs Formula, Talking about my Generation, A Parent’s Guide to Graduate Jobs, and Making it Happen. In 2010 he was awarded a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts for his writing and research. Key speaking topics The multigenerational workplace Gen Z and the post-Covid workforce The future of work and AI exposure Graduate recruitment and early-careers strategy Selling and marketing across generations Wellbeing and the staff-customer link Employability and career resilience Ideal for CHROs, heads of talent, and early-careers leads designing pipelines around Gen Z and a five-generation workforce. Commercial and marketing leaders building proposition and channel strategy across generational customer segments. Executive teams stress-testing which roles AI will hollow out and which human capabilities to invest in. Boards and leadership conferences in financial services, technology, healthcare, and professional services. Audience outcomes A working language for the five generations now in the workforce and the specific friction points each pair produces. A named view of which roles are most exposed to AI and robotics, and which capabilities buyers and employers should be investing in. Practical engagement and retention moves calibrated to Gen Z and post-Covid graduate expectations. A sharper read on how generational difference shows up on the customer side, in buying behaviour and channel preference.

Why organisations work with Laura Bates Over 200,000 firsthand testimonies collected through the Everyday Sexism Project give her an evidence base on workplace and institutional sexism that no consultancy or HR function can replicate. Two years of undercover research inside incel, pickup-artist and men’s rights forums, published as Men Who Hate Women, means she can speak credibly about how online radicalisation enters workplaces through younger employees and customers. Her work has produced operational outcomes, not just commentary: Facebook policy changes on rape and abuse content, sexual consent education added to the national curriculum, and revised British Transport Police protocols on sexual violence. She translates a politically charged subject into language senior leaders can act on, with the credibility of a BEM, a Royal Society of Literature fellowship and ten years of reporting in The Guardian and The New York Times behind her. Biography highlights Founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, with over 200,000 testimonies collected globally since 2012. Author of Everyday Sexism (shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year), Sunday Times bestseller Girl Up, Men Who Hate Women, and Fix the System, Not the Women. British Empire Medal in the 2015 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to gender equality. Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge; Vice President of the Hay Festival. Regular contributor to The New York Times and The Guardian; named one of the BBC’s inaugural 100 Women and Woman of the Year by Cosmopolitan, Red and The Sunday Times Magazine. Recipient of the Internet and Society Award from the Oxford Internet Institute alongside Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Biography Workplace sexism is rarely a single visible incident. It is the accumulation of small, normalised behaviours that policies on paper do not catch, and that employees, especially women and younger staff, stop reporting because they have learned reports go nowhere. The Everyday Sexism Project, founded in 2012, was built to make that accumulation visible. More than 200,000 testimonies later, it has become one of the largest qualitative datasets on gender inequality in existence. The project’s founder, Laura Bates, has spent over a decade translating those testimonies into work that organisations can use. Her books, Everyday Sexism, Girl Up, Misogynation, Men Who Hate Women and Fix the System, Not the Women, move from individual experience to institutional pattern. The work has produced concrete policy outcomes: Facebook revised its rules on rape and abuse content, sexual consent education entered the national curriculum, and British Transport Police updated how it handles reports of sexual violence on public transport. A second strand of her work is investigative. For Men Who Hate Women, Bates spent two years undercover in incel, pickup-artist and men’s rights forums, mapping how extreme misogyny is now produced and distributed online. That work matters for organisations because the audience for it is in classrooms now and entering workforces within a few years; HR leaders and school heads cannot afford to be unfamiliar with it. The credentials are serious. A British Empire Medal in 2015 for services to gender equality. Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. Vice President of the Hay Festival. Regular columns in The New York Times and The Guardian. The Internet and Society Award from the Oxford Internet Institute, shared with Tim Berners-Lee. The work has been judged on substance by serious institutions, which is what allows a sceptical executive committee to take the argument seriously. Key speaking topics Everyday sexism and institutional inequality Workplace harassment and bystander response Male allyship and positive masculinity Online misogyny, incels and the manosphere Gender, consent and education Media representation of women Ideal for CHROs, heads of DEI and culture leads designing policy that will hold up under scrutiny Senior leadership teams and boards examining harassment, retention and reputational risk Heads of school, university leadership and education policymakers Internal employee networks and male allyship programmes inside large organisations Audience outcomes A clearer picture of how harassment patterns form in their own organisation, drawn from the largest qualitative dataset on the subject. Specific language for talking to men about allyship without defensiveness shutting the conversation down. A working understanding of incel and manosphere content that is influencing employees, students and customers. Confidence to challenge policies and processes that look good on paper but fail in practice.

Why organisations work with Melissa Majors She gives managers a behavioural model, not a values statement. The seven habits in her book are written for the team-lead who has fifteen minutes between meetings, not for the chief diversity officer. She speaks from operator credibility, having rebuilt the education function at Ellucian for more than half a million clients and partners and run global education at Meeting Professionals International. She makes inclusion commercially legible. The argument she lands with senior buyers is innovation, retention and team output, which keeps the conversation alive when political appetite for DEI has cooled. She brings packaged IP, in’klooded for strategic planning and Community Keynotes for surfacing ideas, that clients can put to work after the keynote rather than translating principles into practice on their own. Biography highlights Author, The 7 Simple Habits of Inclusive Leaders; also author of Help Them Thrive: Leadership Coaching for Humans Leading Humans. Former Director, Global Education Services, Ellucian; former Director of Global Education, Meeting Professionals International. Career across Nationwide Insurance, Wells Fargo and HD Vest Financial Services before moving into education and consulting. Founder of Melissa Majors Consulting; creator of the in’klooded inclusive strategic planning methodology and Community Keynotes. Advanced study in strategy and innovation at Harvard University; guest lecturer in leadership and inclusion at San Diego State University. Featured contributor and subject in Forbes, Smart Meetings, PCMA Convene and The Meeting Professional. Biography Most inclusion programmes were built for a different political climate. They assumed senior sponsorship would hold, that the language would be uncontested, and that managers would translate principles into practice. None of that is reliable now. The work that survives is the work that turns inclusion into something a busy manager can do, repeatedly, without thinking of it as a programme at all. That is the territory Melissa Majors has spent more than two decades inside. She ran global education at Meeting Professionals International and rebuilt the education services function at Ellucian, where she was responsible for more than 500,000 clients and partners. Before that, her career sat inside Nationwide Insurance, Wells Fargo and HD Vest Financial Services. The pattern is consistent: large, regulated, performance-measured organisations where culture work has to justify itself in operating terms. Her book The 7 Simple Habits of Inclusive Leaders is the spine of her speaking work. It reframes inclusion as a set of repeatable behaviours, including how decisions get made, how empathy is applied tactically, and how dissent is invited rather than tolerated. The companion methodologies, in’klooded for strategic planning and Community Keynotes for idea generation, give clients something to use after the room clears. She has been featured in Forbes, Smart Meetings, PCMA Convene and The Meeting Professional, and lectures on leadership and inclusion at San Diego State University. The work she is booked for is straightforward: take inclusion off the values poster and put it back into the operating practice of managing a team. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership as everyday management practice Behavioural habits of high-performing inclusive teams Women’s leadership and progression Manager effectiveness and team performance Psychological safety and team trust Talent retention through inclusion Tactical empathy in leadership Ideal for CHROs, heads of DEI and heads of L&D rebuilding inclusion programmes for a more contested environment People-leader populations: front-line managers, mid-level leaders and newly promoted team leads Women’s leadership networks and ERGs inside large organisations Member associations and professional bodies addressing the meetings, events and education sectors Audience outcomes A behavioural model managers can apply in the next team meeting, not after the next training cycle Language for inclusion that holds up commercially when sponsorship has cooled A clearer read on where current inclusion efforts are stalling and which habits would shift them Practical mechanisms for surfacing dissent and quieter voices inside decision-making

Why organisations work with Risha Grant A direct, behaviour-first approach to inclusion that holds up when the political climate around DEI is hostile, because the work targets individual bias and culture, not slogans or programmes. The BiaSphere framework, drawn from her book Be Better Than Your BS, gives leaders and employees a shared vocabulary for the belief systems that shape how they hire, promote, sell, and lead. More than twenty five years operating her own diversity consulting firm, which means the perspective in the room is that of a practitioner who has rebuilt cultures, not a commentator describing them. Credibility with both senior executives and broad employee audiences, evidenced by engagements at Google, Samsung, Procter and Gamble, the US Air Force, and Harvard University. A commercial frame on inclusion, connecting culture work to talent retention and to the customer markets organisations are otherwise leaving on the table. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Risha Grant LLC, founded in 1998 as the first diversity communications firm in Oklahoma. Author of Be Better Than Your BS: How Radical Acceptance Empowers Authenticity and Creates a Workplace Culture of Inclusion (Hay House, 2023), and of That’s BS! How Bias Synapse Disrupts Inclusive Cultures. Creator of DiversityConneX.com, a recruitment platform connecting diverse professionals to corporate roles, internships, and board seats. Named one of the Top 10 Most Powerful Women Leaders in HR (PeopleHum), NBA OKC Thunder Changemaker, and one of Real Leaders’ 40 Top Women Keynote Speakers. Featured in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, Bloomberg, Glamour UK, and Black Enterprise. Client engagements include Google, Levi Strauss, Samsung Electronics, Procter and Gamble, Intuit, Nestle Purina, the US Air Force, and Harvard University. Biography Most inclusion work fails for the same reason. It tries to change behaviour without ever touching the belief systems underneath it. Grant’s career has been a sustained argument that bias lives in personal stories before it lives in policies, and that organisations cannot get culture right until people are willing to examine the BS they bring to work. She built Risha Grant LLC in 1998, the first diversity communications firm in Oklahoma, and has run it ever since. That longevity matters. It means her view of what works in inclusion has been tested across more than two decades of changing political conditions, from the early diversity training era to the post 2020 acceleration and the current backlash. The framework she now teaches, the BiaSphere, came out of that long arc of practical work, not academic theory. Her 2023 book Be Better Than Your BS, published by Hay House and a Wall Street Journal bestseller per her publisher, set out the BiaSphere thesis in full: the subconscious beliefs that drive judgement of self and others, and the inner work required to dismantle them before any culture programme can stick. The book has anchored a speaking practice that reaches Google, Samsung, Procter and Gamble, the US Air Force, and Harvard University, and a media presence across Forbes, Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times, and Bloomberg. What separates her in the current climate is the refusal to soften the work or dress it in safer language. The premise is that inclusion is a behavioural and commercial capability, that organisations leave talent and customer revenue on the table when they get it wrong, and that the route to getting it right runs through individual honesty before it runs through policy. That is a harder message to sell now than it was five years ago, which is precisely why the organisations still serious about culture keep buying it. Key speaking topics Inclusive culture and belonging Unconscious bias and the BiaSphere Radical acceptance and authenticity at work Inclusive leadership behaviour Talent attraction and retention through inclusion Diverse customer markets and commercial inclusion Psychological safety in mixed teams Ideal for CHROs, chief diversity officers, and heads of talent rebuilding inclusion strategy after recent rollbacks Executive teams and boards under pressure to articulate a defensible position on culture and inclusion Senior leadership offsites where the brief is honest conversation about bias, not a training exercise All-employee and ERG audiences where credibility with both sceptics and advocates matters Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary, drawn from the BiaSphere framework, for the personal belief systems that drive bias at work A clearer view of where unconscious bias is costing the organisation in hiring, promotion, retention, and customer reach Permission and a method to have direct conversations about inclusion without defaulting to compliance language A behavioural starting point for leaders who want to model inclusive practice rather than delegate it to a function A reframing of inclusion as a commercial capability tied to talent and market access, not a values statement

Why organisations work with Brant Menswar A defined methodology, Black Sheep Values, that gives leaders a shared language for the five values their organisation will not trade away under pressure. Behavioural-science grounding through an eCornell Psychology of Leadership certification, applied to the everyday mechanics of trust, vulnerability and team performance. Author of two trade-published books on the same thesis: Black Sheep (Page Two, 2020) and Designing Momentum (Wiley, 2025), giving the work a documented intellectual spine rather than a slide deck. A 20-year career as a recording artist before the speaking work, which means a keynote that lands as a live performance, not a talk read off a screen. Track record inside large, brand-sensitive organisations including Netflix, Verizon, Microsoft, ESPN and Hilton, where the culture stakes are high and the audience is sceptical of motivational content. Biography highlights Author, Black Sheep: Unleash the Extraordinary, Awe-Inspiring, Undiscovered You (Page Two, 2020). Author, Designing Momentum: A Big Goal Blueprint for Transforming Everyday Moments into Massive Success (Wiley, 2025). Certified in Psychology of Leadership, eCornell, Cornell University. Founder and CEO of Black Sheep Foundry; previously founder of Rock Star Impact and partner at Banding People Together. Host of Just a Moment, a podcast distributed by SURROUND Podcast Network. Keynote work delivered for organisations including Netflix, Verizon, Microsoft, ESPN, Hilton, Anthem, Sony Pictures and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Biography Most companies can recite their stated values. Far fewer can name the values their teams actually use when a project slips, a leader leaves or a quarter goes sideways. That gap is the working territory of Brant Menswar’s keynote practice and the through-line of his two books. The methodology has a name and a structure. Black Sheep Values are the five non-negotiable values that, in Menswar’s framing, sit underneath every meaningful decision a person or a team makes. The argument is that culture only holds when those values are explicit, shared, and used as a decision filter, rather than printed on a wall poster. Black Sheep (Page Two, 2020) introduced the framework. Designing Momentum (Wiley, 2025) applies it to how teams convert ordinary moments into compounding progress. The credentials behind the work are concrete. Menswar holds a Psychology of Leadership certification from eCornell at Cornell University, and built the consulting practice through Banding People Together and Rock Star Impact before founding Black Sheep Foundry in 2023. The client list, including Netflix, Verizon, Microsoft, ESPN, Hilton, Anthem, Sony Pictures and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, sits inside industries where culture programmes are routinely cynical, and where a generic motivational keynote does not survive the room. What separates the delivery from a standard culture talk is the craft of the room itself. Menswar spent twenty years as a recording artist before the keynote work, and the live performance discipline shows: pacing, music, structure, and a refusal to default to slide-driven exposition. The result is a session leadership teams can recall in detail months later, which is the only useful test of a culture keynote. Key speaking topics Values-based culture and the Black Sheep Values methodology Connection, trust and team vulnerability Employee engagement and retention through values alignment Leading change without losing the workforce Personal and team resilience under pressure Authenticity and identity in professional life Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers rebuilding culture after restructure, merger or rapid growth Sales, customer and client-facing leadership teams whose performance depends on trust All-employee or all-leader gatherings where the brief is engagement and connection, not strategy content Organisations using offsites to reset team norms after a period of fatigue or turnover Audience outcomes A method for naming the five non-negotiable values a team will not trade away A clearer read on why specific cultural commitments are failing in the organisation today Language and a shared frame leaders can use back at work, not just in the room A more honest conversation about trust, vulnerability and what teams owe each other

Why organisations work with Kevin Brown He brings the operator’s view. Twenty years inside SERVPRO’s leadership team, helping build a franchise system into a billion-dollar category leader, gives him direct credibility with sales, service, and franchise audiences that academic culture speakers cannot match. The HERO Effect is a usable framework, not a slogan. It gives frontline teams and managers a shared language for personal accountability that survives the flight home from the conference. He sits comfortably in front of mixed audiences: sales kick-offs, franchisee conventions, dealer meetings, and customer-experience summits. The same material lands with technicians, agents, and senior leaders. Repeat-booking proof. His client list, which includes American Express, Delta Air Lines, PayPal, ExxonMobil, Chick-fil-A, and Ernst and Young, reflects organisations that buy speakers on outcomes, not on novelty. Recognition from buyer-facing bodies. Global Gurus Top 30 Motivational Speakers (2024), SpeakInc Top 10 Keynote Speakers (2021), and NorthStar Meetings Group Best Keynote Speakers (2019). Biography highlights Author of The Hero Effect: Being Your Best When It Matters the Most (2017) and Unleashing Your Hero (HarperCollins Leadership, 2021). Spent more than 20 years on the senior leadership team at SERVPRO, helping grow the franchise system into a billion-dollar category leader. Creator of the HERO Effect framework, used as the basis of his keynote programmes and books. Named to Global Gurus’ Top 30 Motivational Speakers list (2024). Selected to SpeakInc’s Top 10 Keynote Speakers (2021) and NorthStar Meetings Group’s Best Keynote Speakers (2019). Keynote client list includes American Express, Delta Air Lines, PayPal, ExxonMobil, Chick-fil-A, Verizon Connect, O’Reilly Automotive, Ernst and Young, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Merck. Biography Service-led businesses spend heavily on customer-experience programmes and still lose customers at the moment of contact. The reason is rarely strategy. It is the daily, individual choices of the people closest to the customer, and most cultures do not equip those people to choose well under pressure. That is the territory Kevin Brown has worked in for thirty years, first as an operator and now as a keynote speaker. Two decades of his corporate career were spent on the senior leadership team at SERVPRO, where the team built the franchise system into a billion-dollar category leader. He learned culture from the inside, in a network of independent operators where consistency had to be earned every day rather than mandated from headquarters. Out of that experience came the HERO Effect, the framework that anchors his keynotes and his two books, The Hero Effect (2017) and Unleashing Your Hero (HarperCollins Leadership, 2021). The argument is straightforward. Excellence is a personal practice before it is an organisational outcome, and leaders who treat culture as a behavioural discipline, not a values poster, get measurably different results from their frontline teams. His client list reflects who that argument lands with: American Express, Delta Air Lines, PayPal, ExxonMobil, Chick-fil-A, Verizon Connect, Ernst and Young, Booz Allen Hamilton. Global Gurus named him to its Top 30 Motivational Speakers list in 2024. The work is not theory borrowed for a stage. It is a set of operating principles taken back into the room they came from. Key speaking topics Service excellence and customer experience Culture and frontline accountability Leadership at every level Personal performance and ownership Sales-team motivation and consistency Franchise and dealer-network performance Ideal for CHROs, customer-experience leads, and operations leaders running cultural change inside service-led organisations. Sales kick-offs, dealer conferences, and franchisee conventions where the audience is mixed-seniority and outcome-focused. Front-line and customer-facing teams in retail, hospitality, financial services, and field service. Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for personal accountability that managers can keep using after the keynote. A clearer line between individual behaviour and customer-experience results, made concrete with examples from inside a billion-dollar franchise system. Renewed energy in mixed-audience settings such as sales kick-offs and dealer meetings, where engagement is the usual brief. Practical prompts for managers on how to coach service consistency rather than mandate it.

Why organisations work with Sarah Culberson A first-person story that does the work belonging-themed talks usually fail at: foster care, transracial adoption, and the discovery at 28 that her father was a Mende prince in Sierra Leone. Audiences disengage from abstract DEI framing; this is concrete. Co-author of A Princess Found (St. Martin’s Press, 2009), in development as a Disney live-action film with producer Stephanie Allain. The story has cultural reach beyond the corporate room. President and co-founder of Sierra Leone Rising, an operating nonprofit running water, sanitation, education and coding programmes in the Bumpe Chiefdom. Allyship is something she builds, not theorises. Recipient of the Impact Award at Bounce TV’s 30th Trumpet Awards (2022), with sustained media coverage on CNN, Good Morning America, BBC and The New York Times. Pairs the inspirational keynote with practical content on assumptions, uncomfortable conversations and inclusive team-building, drawn from over 15 years presenting in schools, universities and corporations. Biography highlights Co-author, A Princess Found: An American Family, an African Chiefdom, and the Daughter Who Connected Them All (St. Martin’s Press, 2009) President and co-founder, Sierra Leone Rising (founded 2006, formerly the Kposowa Foundation) Mahaloi (granddaughter of the Paramount Chief) of the Bumpe-Gao Chiefdom, Sierra Leone Disney development deal (2019) for a live-action film adaptation of her memoir, with Stephanie Allain as producer Impact Award, Bounce TV 30th Trumpet Awards (2022) BFA, West Virginia University; MFA, American Conservatory Theater, San Francisco Featured on CNN, Good Morning America, BBC, NPR, The New York Times, People and Newsweek Biography In 2004, an adopted theatre student in San Francisco hired a private investigator to trace her birth family. The trail led from West Virginia to a chiefdom in Sierra Leone still recovering from a brutal civil war. Sarah Culberson’s father was a Mende prince. Her grandfather had been Paramount Chief. The discovery rewrote her sense of identity and gave her a public platform she has been working with ever since. That platform produced a memoir, A Princess Found, co-written with Tracy Trivas and published by St. Martin’s Press in 2009. Disney signed a development deal in 2019 to adapt the book into a live-action film, with Stephanie Allain producing and Culberson serving as executive producer. The story has been covered on CNN, Good Morning America, BBC and The New York Times. The substantive work, though, sits inside Sierra Leone Rising, the nonprofit she co-founded in 2006. It runs sanitation, clean water, education and coding programmes in the Bumpe Chiefdom. The nonprofit is what gives her belonging keynote its weight. She is not asking organisations to consider allyship as a concept; she has spent two decades building it across two cultures. For corporate audiences she translates that experience into the practical content of belonging: how assumptions form, how uncomfortable conversations are conducted, how cross-cultural teams move past politeness into trust. In 2022 she received the Impact Award at Bounce TV’s 30th Trumpet Awards, recognition for a body of work that joins a personal story to operating institutions on two continents. Key speaking topics Belonging and allyship in the workplace Cross-cultural identity and biracial experience Inclusive team-building Diversity, equity and inclusion Personal transformation and purpose Humanitarian leadership and social impact Ideal for CHROs, heads of DEI and culture leads commissioning belonging or inclusion programmes Employee resource groups and women’s leadership networks Annual company conferences and kick-offs seeking an inspirational anchor with substantive content Education and nonprofit sector audiences working on equity and social impact Audience outcomes A vivid, memorable narrative that grounds inclusion conversations in lived experience rather than policy language A working vocabulary for assumptions, allyship and cross-cultural difference inside teams Concrete examples of how a Western-educated outsider built trust and impact in a post-conflict community in Sierra Leone Renewed commitment to belonging as a daily leadership practice, not a programme

Why organisations work with Charlie Rocket A first-person reinvention story with hard credentials behind it: Grammy win as 2 Chainz’s manager at Street Execs, then a public health and athletic transformation rather than a curated brand exercise. The Nike «Dream Crazy» connection gives the keynote a culturally recognisable anchor. The Kaepernick spot won the 2019 Outstanding Commercial Emmy, and audiences place the story instantly. He moves a room emotionally without leaving it there. The Dream Machine Foundation gives the talk a working example of putting ambition into operational practice, not just rhetoric. He pairs naturally with leadership offsites, sales kick-offs, and culture moments where the brief is not analysis but a step-change in energy and self-belief at the top of the organisation. Biography highlights Founder of the Dream Machine Foundation, a non-profit funding individual dreams, small businesses and community recovery projects since 2018. Former CEO of Street Execs, the artist management company behind 2 Chainz, with a Grammy win to his name during that period. Featured in Nike’s «Dream Crazy» campaign with Colin Kaepernick, winner of the 2019 Creative Arts Emmy for Outstanding Commercial. Endurance athlete: marathon finisher and Ironman finisher following a documented health turnaround that included losing approximately 125 lbs. Profiled by CNN in its Turning Points series on his decision to leave the music business to focus on health. Speaks internationally on reinvention, mindset and culture for corporate audiences across sectors. Biography A music executive walks away from a multimillion-dollar artist management business at 31 because his body has stopped cooperating. That is the hinge moment in Charlie Rocket Jabaley’s story, and the reason it lands in corporate rooms. He had built Street Execs into the company behind 2 Chainz, taken home a Grammy, and was, by his own account, 300 lbs and out of road. What he did next is what makes the talk usable for organisations rather than just moving. He treated his own life as a turnaround project. He lost roughly 125 lbs, became a marathon and Ironman finisher, and ended up in Nike’s «Dream Crazy» advertisement with Colin Kaepernick, the spot that won the 2019 Creative Arts Emmy for Outstanding Commercial. CNN profiled the decision in its Turning Points series. The corporate keynote sits on top of that arc. The argument is straightforward: ambition is a renewable practice, and most senior teams have quietly let theirs decay under operational load. He extends the personal frame outward through the Dream Machine Foundation, which has been funding individual dreams and small business launches since 2018, as a working proof that the discipline scales beyond one person. The fit is specific. This is a speaker for moments when a leadership group, a sales force, or a culture programme needs a step-change in energy and self-belief, with credible substance behind the inspiration. It is not a research keynote. It is a reinvention keynote with the receipts. Key speaking topics Personal reinvention and mindset Resilience after health and career shock Culture shift and team ambition Purpose-driven leadership Storytelling and brand-led motivation Philanthropy and impact Ideal for Leadership offsites and CEO summits opening or closing on a culture moment Annual sales kick-offs and revenue team gatherings Employee experience and wellbeing programmes that need a credible voice on resilience Foundation, ESG and corporate responsibility events where the brief calls for substance behind the inspiration Audience outcomes A vivid case for treating personal ambition as a leadership discipline, not a private matter Specific behavioural anchors he has used in his own reinvention, transferable into team practice A reset on what individual leaders are willing to ask of themselves and their teams A working model, the Dream Machine Foundation, of how ambition becomes operational rather than aspirational

Why organisations work with Matt Mayberry He gives leaders a working blueprint for culture, not a values exercise. Culture Is the Way sets out a Five-Step Culture-Building Process that McKinsey named a 2024 top business book. He has been ranked in the world’s Top 30 leadership thought leaders by Global Gurus on the basis of a 25,000-respondent CEO and MBA survey, which means buyers can defend the booking internally on credentials alone. His client list, JP Morgan Chase, Allstate, the FBI, DuPont, Lowe’s and Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, signals that the material survives contact with regulated, high-pressure operating environments. The NFL backstory is not the act. He uses a career ended by injury in a Chicago Bears preseason opener as the opening case in a serious argument about reinvention and team behaviour, then moves to the management content quickly. He writes for the same audience that books him. Bylines in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune and Entrepreneur mean a CHRO can hand the keynote thesis to the executive team in printed form before he walks on stage. Biography highlights Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Culture Is the Way (Wiley, 2023), named a 2024 top business book by McKinsey & Company and featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s Next Big Idea Book Club. USA Today bestselling author of The Transformational Leader (Wiley, 2024). Ranked in the Top 30 global leadership thought leaders by Global Gurus. Former Chicago Bears linebacker, signed 2010; college career at Indiana University, recipient of the 2009 Howard Brown Award. Featured in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, Inc., Entrepreneur and Chief Executive; broadcast credits with NBC, ABC, Fox Business and ESPN. Client roster includes JP Morgan Chase, Allstate, the FBI, DuPont, Lowe’s, Optum, Fifth Third Bank, Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, Phillips 66 and Mack Trucks. Biography Most culture work fails for the same reason. It treats culture as the warm story an organisation tells itself, not the set of repeated behaviours that determine whether the strategy lands. Mayberry’s Culture Is the Way (Wiley, 2023) is built around that distinction, and it is why McKinsey selected it as a 2024 top business book and Malcolm Gladwell’s Next Big Idea Club picked it up. The argument has a structure. The Five-Step Culture-Building Process forces senior teams to define the behaviours they want to see, hold leaders accountable for them in public, and connect those behaviours to commercial outcomes. The Transformational Leader (Wiley, 2024), a USA Today bestseller, extends the work into how senior leaders model what they ask of others. Both books sit in front of an audience that includes JP Morgan Chase, the FBI, DuPont and Lowe’s. The credibility on stage comes partly from how the path began. Mayberry signed with the Chicago Bears in 2010 and lost the career to an ankle fracture in the preseason opener against the San Diego Chargers. He uses that moment briefly, as a way into the operating point about how teams rebuild after a setback, then moves to the management material. Global Gurus has placed him in the world’s Top 30 leadership thought leaders on the strength of that combined work. What organisations get is a senior practitioner who has translated the language of high-performing teams into something a CHRO, COO or transformation lead can put to work on Monday. The bylines in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune and Entrepreneur are the public evidence; the Five-Step Process is the working tool. Key speaking topics Workplace culture as an operating system Transformational leadership Employee engagement and team performance Change and disruption Peak performance and resilience Sales performance Leadership in the age of AI Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers leading culture and engagement programmes COOs and transformation leads accountable for cultural execution of a strategy Sales leadership conferences and revenue kickoffs Senior leadership teams running off-sites on team performance and behavioural alignment Audience outcomes A working definition of culture that connects daily behaviour to commercial outcome, drawn from the Five-Step Culture-Building Process A clearer view of what transformational leadership requires from senior leaders, beyond inspirational language Specific moves for rebuilding engagement when the workforce is fatigued by repeated change A vocabulary for how high-performing teams handle setback and recovery A short list of behaviours to take back to the executive team and operationalise

Why organisations work with Zoe Blaskey She addresses the specific reason parents disengage after leave, the loss of identity and confidence psychologists call matrescence, rather than treating the problem as a benefits or flexibility gap. Her material is drawn from coaching thousands of parents and from interviewing experts like Dr Becky Kennedy, Dr Gabor Maté and Philippa Perry on her podcast, so audiences get tested tools, not anecdote. A Sunday Times bestselling book and a podcast with over five million downloads give her a recognition with working-parent audiences that translates into unusually high engagement in the room. She speaks credibly to senior women, having coached the Executive Editor of Goop and worked with brands including Meta and Dove, which makes her relevant to retention conversations at leadership level, not only early-career. Biography highlights Founder of Motherkind, a coaching platform and podcast supporting working parents, and a qualified transformational coach trained at the Co-Active Training Institute. Author of Motherkind: A New Way to Thrive in a World of Endless Expectations, an instant Sunday Times bestseller published by HQ/HarperCollins. Host of The Motherkind Podcast since 2017, with over five million downloads and a top-10 ranking from Apple. Podcast guests include Dr Becky Kennedy, Glennon Doyle, Dr Gabor Maté, Dr Rangan Chatterjee and Philippa Perry. Featured in The Times, The Telegraph, Psychologies, Stylist, Red, Goop, SheerLuxe and the Evening Standard, and invited by Arianna Huffington to write for Thrive. Corporate and brand partners include Meta, Dove, Barbie and Sweaty Betty. Biography Most employers treat the return from parental leave as a logistical event: a date, a phased schedule, a keeping-in-touch day. The harder problem is psychological. The person who comes back is not the person who left, and the gap between their old professional identity and their new reality is where confidence, ambition and retention quietly erode. Zoe Blaskey built Motherkind to close that gap. She came to the work from corporate marketing in London, where the absence of any real support around her own transition into motherhood prompted her to start a podcast in 2017. The Motherkind Podcast has since passed five million downloads and earned a top-10 ranking from Apple, with guests including Dr Becky Kennedy, Dr Gabor Maté and Philippa Perry. The Telegraph called it the antidote to the toxic perfectionism of modern motherhood. Her book, Motherkind, became an instant Sunday Times bestseller on publication by HarperCollins. Underneath the public platform sits a coaching practice: Blaskey trained at the Co-Active Training Institute and has coached thousands of parents, from full-time mothers to global executives, including the Executive Editor of Goop. That range is what lets her speak to a retention problem at every level of an organisation rather than only the early-career tier. For employers, the value is concrete. Parents are among the most expensive talent to replace and the most likely to leave in the years around a child’s birth, and Blaskey’s work targets the confidence and identity collapse that drives those exits. Her corporate sessions draw on the same evidence-based tools she has tested across hundreds of podcast conversations and brand partnerships with Meta, Dove and Sweaty Betty. Key speaking topics Matrescence and parental identity Working-parent retention and engagement Burnout and perfectionism Confidence after parental leave Employee wellbeing for working families Supporting senior women through career and family transitions Ideal for CHROs and heads of talent tackling attrition among working parents DEI and employee-experience leads building parental-transition and returner programmes Employee resource groups and women’s networks Wellbeing and benefits teams looking for substance beyond standard provision Audience outcomes A clear account of why parents disengage after leave and what employers can change Practical tools to manage burnout, guilt and perfectionism that parents can apply immediately A vocabulary for matrescence that helps managers support returning team members Renewed confidence for parents reconciling ambition with a changed sense of identity

Why organisations work with Simon Alexander Ong A serious, published thesis on energy management as a leadership and workforce capability, anchored in Energize (Penguin, 2022) and recognised as Business Book of the Year for Wellness and Wellbeing in 2023. Direct credibility with global employers on people and culture briefs, with named keynote work for Microsoft, Salesforce, Unilever, EY, Adobe and Barclays. A coaching practice behind the content, with qualifications from The Coaching Academy and NLP training, so the material survives contact with senior audiences, not just town-hall settings. Endorsements from Simon Sinek, Marie Forleo and Marshall Goldsmith, giving HR and communications leads confident reference points when pitching internally. Biography highlights Bestselling author of Energize: Make the Most of Every Moment (Penguin Life, 2022). Winner, Business Book of the Year, Wellness and Wellbeing, Business Book Awards 2023. Endorsed by Simon Sinek, Marie Forleo and Marshall Goldsmith. Keynote engagements with Microsoft, Salesforce, Unilever, EY, Adobe, Barclays and DocuSign. Featured on Sky News, BBC Radio London and LBC, with written contributions in Forbes, HuffPost, Virgin and The Guardian. BSc Economics, London School of Economics; coaching qualifications from The Coaching Academy. Biography Most organisations now accept that burnout, disengagement and quiet exit are not edge cases. They are showing up across leadership teams, middle management and frontline staff at the same time. The argument in Energize, published by Penguin in 2022 and named Business Book of the Year for Wellness and Wellbeing in 2023, is that this is an energy problem before it is a wellbeing problem. Simon Alexander Ong treats energy as a managed resource. His work asks leaders to look at how attention, recovery, relationships and purpose are organised across a working week, then to redesign the parts that drain people without producing anything. The same lens is then turned on teams and on the wider employee experience. The practitioner side keeps the material grounded. Ong is a qualified coach through The Coaching Academy, trained in NLP, and works one-to-one with senior leaders alongside the speaking work. That is why a keynote at Microsoft, Salesforce, Unilever or EY tends to land as a conversation with the room rather than a motivational set piece. Endorsements from Simon Sinek, Marie Forleo and Marshall Goldsmith have helped place him on the same shelf as the leadership and performance authors that senior HR and culture functions already trust. For boards thinking about engagement, retention and the human cost of permanent change, his content gives a language and a set of moves that staff and leaders can actually use. Key speaking topics Energy management for leaders and teams Sustainable high performance Employee engagement and wellbeing Purposeful leadership Focus and attention in a noisy work environment Mindset and personal growth Coaching cultures inside organisations Ideal for CHROs, CPOs and heads of employee experience designing wellbeing and engagement strategy Leadership development and learning teams running senior offsites and high-potential programmes Internal communications and culture leads planning all-hands and kick-off events Sales and commercial leadership audiences working under sustained pressure and target intensity Audience outcomes A clear language for energy as a managed resource at individual, team and organisational level Specific practices for protecting focus and recovery inside an existing diary, not in addition to it A more honest view of where current wellbeing efforts are working and where they are decorative Renewed sense of purpose and ownership for senior leaders carrying long change agendas Practical prompts a manager can use with a team the following Monday

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