Employee Engagement

Why organisations work with Javier Bajer He treats culture as a system of habits, not a communications exercise, and builds timelines measured in months rather than multi-year programmes. His training sits in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, which lets him speak to behaviour change with evidence, not slogans. He has run this work inside large, complex institutions on both sides of the corporate and public divide: HSBC, Shell, Google, Buckingham Palace, and the City of Buenos Aires. As Editor-in-Chief of Strategic HR Review, he works at the interface between HR practice and academic research, which gives senior people leaders a counterpart who is credible in both rooms. He founded The Talent Foundation and has spent two decades translating values statements into observable behaviour, so the client conversation starts at execution rather than diagnosis. Biography highlights Founding CEO of The Talent Foundation Editor-in-Chief of Strategic HR Review, Emerald Publishing PhD in Behavioural Change and MSc in Neurosciences; cognitive psychologist by training Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts Professor of culture change at Universidad de San Andres and Visiting Fellow of the Business School at the University of Surrey Advisory work with HSBC, Shell, Google, Accenture, Hewlett-Packard, Buckingham Palace and the City of Buenos Aires Biography Most culture work fails in the same place. A values statement gets written, a town hall gets held, and the behaviour people see around them in meetings, decisions and email threads does not move. Javier Bajer has spent two decades working on that specific gap, and his argument is that culture is not a message problem. It is a habit problem. The foundation is technical. He trained as a cognitive psychologist, holds an MSc in Neurosciences and a doctorate in behavioural change, and uses that grounding to treat culture as a system of learned behaviours that can be redesigned on a defined timeline. He founded The Talent Foundation to apply that thinking at organisational scale, and he edits Strategic HR Review at Emerald, which keeps him close to both research and practice. The client record is unusually wide for the field. He has advised HSBC, Shell, Accenture, Hewlett-Packard and Google on the corporate side, Buckingham Palace in a royal institutional context, and the City of Buenos Aires at municipal scale. The through-line is not the sector; it is that each of these organisations had a gap between what leadership said and what staff did, and needed that gap closed in months rather than years. His academic affiliations reinforce the practitioner work. He is a Fellow of the RSA, professor of culture change at Universidad de San Andres, and Visiting Fellow of the Business School at the University of Surrey. On stage, the argument he brings to senior audiences is that good intentions are cheap, sustainable habits are rare, and the route from one to the other is a design problem leaders can actually solve. Key speaking topics Culture change and transformation Behavioural science in organisations Translating values into daily behaviour Leadership and cultural alignment Employee engagement beyond incentives Purpose and meaning at work Culture change in public institutions and cities Ideal for CHROs and senior HR leaders holding the mandate for culture and engagement CEOs and executive teams running a values refresh, post-merger integration or strategy reset Transformation and change leaders whose plans depend on observable behaviour shifts Public sector leaders working on institutional or city-level behaviour change Audience outcomes A working definition of culture as a system of habits rather than a communications output A sharper view of why values statements usually fail to change behaviour, and what replaces them Language for separating leadership intent from the daily signals that shape staff behaviour Reference points from corporate, royal and city government culture programmes that have moved in months A set of questions leaders can take into their next culture or engagement conversation

Why organisations work with Jacob Morgan His “Vulnerable Leader Equation” offers a specific, research-backed counter-argument to the dominant leadership vulnerability narrative – making the case that vulnerability without competence actively undermines trust, not builds it. Boards and CHROs get a framework they can act on, not a platitude. The research underpinning The Future Leader (140 CEO interviews, 14,000-person LinkedIn survey) gives senior audiences data that reflects their own peer group back at them – a rare source of authority in a crowded leadership development market. His founder role at Future of Work Leaders – a by-invitation CHRO community including members from Johnson & Johnson, Dow, and Lego – means his frameworks are stress-tested against the most senior people leaders in the world, not just conference rooms. The Future Leader won the CMI Management Book of the Year 2021, providing external, peer-validated credibility beyond self-reported authority. Organisations navigating the tension between AI adoption and human leadership capability get a framework that treats the two as interdependent – not competing priorities – grounded in his three-environment model of employee experience (culture, technology, physical workspace). Biography highlights Bestselling author of six books published by Wiley and McGraw-Hill, covering collaboration, the future of work, employee experience, leadership, and vulnerability The Future Leader (Wiley, 2020) – winner of the CMI Management Book of the Year 2021 Research base includes 140+ CEO interviews and a LinkedIn-partnered survey of nearly 14,000 employees for The Future Leader; 100+ CEO interviews and a DDI-partnered survey of 14,000 employees for Leading With Vulnerability Founder of Future of Work Leaders, a by-invitation global CHRO community with members from Johnson & Johnson, Dow, Lego, Northrop Grumman, and Neiman Marcus Contributed to and cited in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, NPR, and CNN Host of Great Leadership With Jacob Morgan; featured guest on the Harvard Business School Managing the Future of Work podcast Biography Jacob Morgan has spent more than a decade asking a question most organisations avoid: why do capable leaders so consistently fail to produce the organisations they intend? His answer, built across six books and primary research involving hundreds of CEOs and tens of thousands of employees, is both precise and uncomfortable – the model of leadership most executives were trained in was designed for a world that no longer exists. His most cited framework, the Vulnerable Leader Equation, makes a specific argument: vulnerability in isolation is not a leadership quality, it is a liability. The research underpinning Leading With Vulnerability (Wiley, 2024) – drawn from over 100 CEO interviews and a DDI-partnered survey of 14,000 employees – shows that leaders who combine openness about their gaps with clear, competence-driven responses to those gaps outperform peers on trust, engagement, and team performance. It is a direct challenge to the feel-good vulnerability conversation, and it is grounded in data. The Future Leader (Wiley, 2020), winner of the CMI Management Book of the Year 2021, applied the same research discipline to the broader question of what leading through disruption actually requires. Based on interviews with over 140 CEOs at organisations including Unilever, Mastercard, and KPMG – paired with a LinkedIn-partnered survey of nearly 14,000 employees – it identified four specific mindsets and five specific skills that define readiness for leadership in uncertain conditions. Morgan is also the founder of Future of Work Leaders, a by-invitation CHRO community whose members include Johnson & Johnson, Dow, and Lego. His work has been featured in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, and MIT Sloan Management Review. He hosts the Great Leadership With Jacob Morgan podcast and has been a featured guest on the Harvard Business School Managing the Future of Work series. Key speaking topics Future-ready leadership Vulnerability and trust in organisations Employee experience strategy Leadership in the age of AI Future of work Organisational culture and performance Executive development and people strategy Ideal for CHROs and CPOs navigating the gap between leadership investment and employee outcomes Senior leadership teams preparing for AI-driven workforce transformation Boards and executive committees reviewing leadership capability and succession HR and people functions building future-ready culture frameworks Audience outcomes A named framework – the Vulnerable Leader Equation – for understanding when and how vulnerability strengthens rather than undermines leadership authority The four mindsets and five skills that Morgan’s CEO research identified as defining future-ready leaders, with practical application at individual and team level A clearer model for diagnosing where employee experience is breaking down across culture, technology, and physical environment Research-grounded perspective on how AI is reshaping the leadership role – and what human capability this places at a premium Practical tools for assessing the gap between how leaders perceive their impact and how their people experience it

Why organisations work with Imran Rehman He runs a working team-measurement platform, Kokoro, so his sessions draw on live data from teams rather than abstract models. His thesis reframes the problem: fix the environment, not the individual. That shift gives HR and transformation leaders a more tractable lever than personality interventions. He combines executive coaching practice with product building, which gives senior teams a rare mix of one-to-one diagnostic instinct and systems thinking in the same room. He works fluently in English and German and operates across European corporate and multinational contexts, which suits international leadership audiences. His book “Sum of Many” gives the work a named, published argument leaders can reference after the session. Biography highlights Co-founder of Kokoro (Kokoro GmbH, Vienna), a real-time team and leadership analytics platform founded in 2018. Author of “Sum of Many,” featured on the Chapters Of My Life podcast (Life Book 45). Certified business and executive coach, European Business School (EBS). Bilingual working languages: English and German; based in Vienna, Austria. Signature talks include “The Science of Great Teams,” “The Myths of Measuring Humans,” and “Preventing Team Burnout: 6 Evidence-Based Actions for Success.” Professional coaching practice spanning multiple sectors and geographies, with a focus on senior leadership teams and organisational development. Biography Most teams are not underperforming because the people in them are weak. They are underperforming because the environment around them quietly punishes candour, overload is treated as a personal resilience problem, and the signals that matter are read too late. This is the terrain Imran Rehman works in. He is co-founder of Kokoro, a Vienna-based platform that measures psychological safety, belonging, and the conditions of healthy high performance in real time. Kokoro was founded in 2018, and the product sits behind his speaking: the data he references is the data his clients are generating, not borrowed survey research. His book “Sum of Many” argues the same point in long form. Stop trying to fix individuals. Build environments where ordinary people can do unusually good work together. It is a direct challenge to a lot of standard leadership development, and it gives his keynotes a single, testable claim rather than a list of tips. He is a certified executive coach through the European Business School and works fluently in English and German across European and multinational organisations. The coaching practice and the product are not separate lives. One informs the other, which is why his sessions land with HR directors and operating leaders who have already sat through the generic version of this topic. Key speaking topics Psychological safety in teams Belonging and team dynamics Data-informed team performance Healthy high performance and burnout prevention Leadership development and coaching Organisational development and culture Ideal for CHROs, CPOs, and heads of organisational development responsible for team effectiveness at scale Senior leadership teams preparing for a step-change in performance expectations Transformation and change leaders who need measurable people indicators alongside operational ones International and German-speaking leadership audiences in multinational corporate settings Audience outcomes A working definition of psychological safety that is specific enough to act on, not just reference A shift in framing from individual performance fixes to environmental design A view of what can and cannot be usefully measured in team behaviour, and why most surveys fail Evidence-based moves for preventing team burnout before it shows up in attrition figures A shared language for senior teams to diagnose their own dynamics in the weeks after the session

Why organisations work with Gianpiero Petriglieri He gives senior teams a clinical reading of leadership. Trained as a psychiatrist before joining INSEAD, he can speak about identity, authority and anxiety inside an organisation in language that a CEO recognises and a HR director can act on. He owns a named idea. “Nomadic professionalism,” developed across his Harvard Business Review essays, gives boards a clear way to think about leading people who are deeply bonded to their work but loosely tied to the company. He directs INSEAD’s Management Acceleration Programme, the school’s flagship executive development course for emerging leaders, which means his frameworks are tested every year on the next layer of senior management at global firms. He has been ranked twice in the Thinkers50 Top 50, in 2017 and 2021, and shortlisted across the Future Thinker, Leadership, Talent, and Coaching & Mentoring awards. The recognition is consistent, not a single moment. He pushes back on the wellness-industry version of leadership. His work is about humanising leadership without sentimentalising it, useful for executive teams tired of trainings that confuse care with capability. Biography highlights Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD, holding the Alumni Fund Chair in Leadership Development. Director of INSEAD’s Management Acceleration Programme, the school’s flagship executive education course for emerging leaders. Medical Doctor and Psychiatrist by training; has practised as an executive coach and psychotherapist. Thinkers50 Top 50 (2017, 2021); shortlisted for Future Thinker, Leadership, Talent, and Coaching & Mentoring awards. Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review; quoted in the Financial Times, The Economist, BBC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, and The Guardian. Former Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on New Models of Leadership; visiting positions at Harvard Business School and Copenhagen Business School. Biography Most leadership development assumes the organisation is the stable thing and the leader is the variable. That assumption no longer holds. People build careers across firms, geographies, and modes of work, and the bond they trust most is to their craft, not their employer. The work of leading anchors itself somewhere else. This is the territory Petriglieri has spent two decades mapping at INSEAD, where he is Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour and directs the Management Acceleration Programme, the school’s flagship executive education course for emerging leaders. His framing of “nomadic professionalism,” developed across essays in Harvard Business Review, gives senior teams a precise way to talk about why competent people drift, why authenticity has replaced loyalty as the language of work, and what holds them in place. The clinical training matters. Before academia, Petriglieri trained as a Medical Doctor and Psychiatrist, and has worked as an executive coach and psychotherapist. That background lets him speak about identity, authority, and anxiety inside an organisation in language that is neither clinical jargon nor corporate hygiene. His peer-reviewed research appears in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, and Organization Studies; his commentary appears in the Financial Times, The Economist, the BBC and the New York Times. He chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on New Models of Leadership and has been ranked in the Thinkers50 Top 50 in 2017 and 2021. The argument that runs through all of it is that leadership is not a set of behaviours bolted on top of a career. It is what makes a person trustworthy enough to hold authority in a workplace that no longer holds itself together. Key speaking topics Leadership development in an age of mobile careers Nomadic professionalism and meaningful work Trustworthy leadership and authority in low-trust workplaces Authenticity, identity and the practice of leading Humanising leadership in the digital age Executive development and the role of HR Self-awareness as a leadership discipline Ideal for CEOs, executive committees and boards setting leadership direction during sustained organisational change. CHROs, CLOs and heads of executive development designing senior leadership pipelines. High-potential cohorts and emerging leader programmes inside global firms. Talent and culture leaders rebuilding the relationship between the firm and people who think of themselves as professionals first. Audience outcomes A named frame, nomadic professionalism, for diagnosing why competent people stay, leave, or drift. Sharper language for talking about authority, authenticity, and trust at the top of an organisation. A more clinical view of what leadership development is actually doing to the people inside it. A useful argument against treating wellbeing programmes as a substitute for trustworthy leadership. A clearer set of questions for senior teams designing the next generation of leaders.

Her «neurosignature diversity» framework, developed in The Brain-Friendly Workplace, gives leadership teams a precise, science-based explanation for why talent attrition persists after conventional DEI investment – and a specific mechanism to address it. She names the «neurogap» – the structural drift toward dopamine- and testosterone-dominant personality profiles at the top of organisations – and provides a testable diagnostic for closing it, rather than a general aspiration toward inclusion. Her background spans neuroscience research at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and management consulting at McKinsey and Company – a combination that gives her credibility in two domains that most neuroleadership speakers claim from only one. Audiences leave with four mapped neurosignatures linked to specific workplace behaviours, stress responses, and collaboration styles – a concrete tool, not a mindset shift. Her frameworks are published and peer-accessible: a Harvard Business Review article and a Wall Street Journal bestselling book reduce the internal scepticism that evidence-oriented leadership teams typically bring to behavioural science. Biography highlights Neuroscientist trained at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research; alumna of McKinsey and Company Lead author of The Leading Brain: Neuroscience Hacks to Work Smarter, Better, Happier (Random House) – named a Best Management Book by strategy+business Author of The Brain-Friendly Workplace: Why Talented People Quit and How to Get Them to Stay – Wall Street Journal bestseller Harvard Business Review contributor; work featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Newsweek, and CNBC Member of the socio-political council of acatech, The German Academy for Technology, advising the German government on technology, digitalisation, and AI Advisory board member, NeuroColor; LinkedIn Top Voice Biography At the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Friederike Fabritius studied what actually happens inside the brain under pressure. At McKinsey and Company, she saw what organisations actually do – and how rarely those two things match. The gap between them is the problem her work is built to close. Her central argument, developed across two books and field-tested with organisations including EY, BCG, and Google, is specific: most leadership teams over-represent dopamine- and testosterone-dominant personality types, selecting for stress tolerance in ways that systematically exclude other cognitive profiles. She calls this the neurogap. It explains why talented people leave not because of poor managers but because of poorly calibrated environments – and why retention problems persist despite sustained DEI investment. In The Brain-Friendly Workplace – a Wall Street Journal bestseller – Fabritius maps four neurosignatures tied to distinct workplace behaviours, stress responses, and communication preferences. The framework gives HR and leadership teams a diagnostic built on brain chemistry rather than demographic proxies. Her Harvard Business Review article on neurosignature diversity brought the argument to a practitioner audience; her earlier book, The Leading Brain (named a Best Management Book by strategy+business), established the scientific credibility underpinning it. She serves on the socio-political council of acatech, The German Academy for Technology, which advises the German government on digitalisation and AI – a role that reflects the applied, policy-facing dimension of her science. For boards and senior teams wrestling with sustained performance, retention, and culture, she offers something distinctive: a testable causal model, not a call for behavioural change without a structural explanation. Key speaking topics Neurosignature diversity and talent retention Brain-based leadership and decision-making Peak performance and the neuroscience of flow Cognitive diversity and inclusion Neuroscience of change, uncertainty, and resilience Trust, collaboration, and the social brain Learning, neuroplasticity, and habit formation at work Ideal for CHROs and people leaders responsible for talent strategy and retention outcomes Senior leadership and executive teams seeking evidence-based frameworks for culture design Learning and development leaders building performance or cognitive diversity programmes Boards and transformation leads navigating hybrid work, workforce change, and sustained engagement Audience outcomes A named framework – neurosignature diversity – for diagnosing why current culture drives attrition, with specific, actionable steps to address the neurogap Practical understanding of how brain chemistry shapes performance, stress tolerance, collaboration style, and communication preference across a team Clearer grasp of how to design environments that support cognitive diversity beyond demographic targets Concrete approaches to managing hybrid and distributed teams in line with how different brain types actually work best under pressure Evidence-based perspective on why DEI initiatives stall at the neurological layer – and how to move past aspiration to structural change

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

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

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

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

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

Why organisations work with Andrew McMillan He ran customer experience for the John Lewis department store division across 26 UK shops, so he speaks from inside one of the most studied service cultures in British retail, not from a framework bought off a shelf. His central argument is operational, not motivational: customer experience is an output of employee engagement and leadership behaviour, and any programme that treats it as a frontline training problem will fail. He has tested the thesis outside retail, with Shell, Air France, United Airlines, Toyota, Barclays, Mercedes-Benz, RBS and NHS foundation trusts among the organisations he has advised through Engaging Service. He chaired Revo’s Customer Experience Committee for seven years, which gives him a sector-wide view of what separates shopping centres, high streets and service organisations that keep customers from those that do not. He is useful in the room with senior leaders because the conversation turns quickly to values, hiring, internal communication and manager behaviour, which is where service actually breaks. Biography highlights 28 years with the John Lewis Partnership, culminating in responsibility for customer experience across the department store division and its 26 UK shops. Founder of Engaging Service, a consultancy on employee engagement, customer experience and the leadership that links the two. Chair of the Customer Experience Committee at Revo from 2010 to 2017, overseeing the growth of the ACE Awards to more than 100 shopping centre entrants. Judge and adviser for the Customer Focus Award at the Lloyds Bank National Business Awards from 2015. Advised named organisations including Shell, Air France, United Airlines, Toyota, Barclays, Mercedes-Benz, RBS, Rightmove, MoneySuperMarket and the Law Society. During his tenure, John Lewis department stores were recognised for customer experience by Which?, Verdict and Retail Week. Biography Service cultures that customers notice are not built on the shop floor. They are built in hiring decisions, in what managers are promoted for, in what the organisation tolerates on a difficult Tuesday. Andrew McMillan spent nearly three decades inside a business that understood this, and now spends his time explaining to other organisations why their service programmes are not working. He joined the John Lewis Partnership as a management trainee at Brent Cross, led selling teams across several branches, headed a department at the Oxford Street flagship, and ran the department stores’ internal intelligence team before taking responsibility, from 2000, for customer experience across the entire department store division. That meant 26 shops and tens of thousands of customer-facing partners. During his tenure, the business was recognised for customer experience by Which?, Verdict and Retail Week. In 2012 he founded Engaging Service and has since worked with more than 40 organisations, among them Shell, Air France, United Airlines, Toyota, Barclays, Mercedes-Benz, RBS, Rightmove, MoneySuperMarket, the Law Society and several NHS foundation trusts. The work is consistent across sectors: diagnose the gap between the experience leaders say they want and the culture they are actually running, and rebuild the link between the two. He chaired Revo’s Customer Experience Committee from 2010 to 2017, growing its ACE Awards to over 100 shopping centre entrants, and has judged the Customer Focus Award at the Lloyds Bank National Business Awards since 2015. The through-line is practical: in an economy where product parity is the norm, the companies customers stay with are the ones whose people want to be there. Key speaking topics Customer experience as an output of culture Employee engagement and service performance Leadership behaviour and organisational values Building and sustaining a service culture at scale Retail and shopping centre customer experience Purpose, values and frontline behaviour Translating the John Lewis Partnership model to other sectors Ideal for CEOs, COOs and boards reviewing why customer experience investment is not producing the promised lift CHROs and heads of employee engagement connecting people strategy to commercial outcomes Customer experience, service and operations leaders in retail, financial services, hospitality, transport and healthcare Shopping centre and retail property leadership working on tenant mix, placemaking and visitor experience Audience outcomes A sharper view of why customer experience programmes fail when they are run as training rather than as culture change Specific, named examples from inside John Lewis of how engagement, leadership behaviour and service performance reinforce each other Practical questions to take back to their own organisation about hiring, manager behaviour and internal communication A clearer sense of where service sits in the operating model, and which leadership decisions actually move the needle

Why organisations work with Adrian Gostick His frameworks are grounded in studies of 300,000 and 850,000 workers – giving organisations credible research evidence, not opinion, when making the internal case for culture investment. The Carrot Principle established employee recognition as a direct performance lever, not a morale initiative – a distinction that changes where CHROs and line managers direct their attention. Anxiety at Work reframes workplace stress as a leadership responsibility rather than an individual failing, making it directly actionable for senior leaders managing high-pressure, post-disruption teams. Named to both Thinkers50’s Coaches50 and Marshall Goldsmith’s MG100 Coaches project – a dual validation from the two most credible bodies in management thinking and executive coaching. The Culture Works extends his frameworks into ongoing consulting and training, enabling organisations to embed behaviour change beyond the event itself. Biography highlights Founder of The Culture Works, a global leadership and culture consultancy New York Times #1 bestselling co-author: All In, The Carrot Principle, Leading with Gratitude, Anxiety at Work – 1.5 million+ copies sold in 30 languages Thinkers50 Coaches50 (2025); Global Gurus top-10 in both leadership and organisational culture (2020) Member of Marshall Goldsmith’s MG100 Coaches Pay-it-forward Project Forbes leadership columnist; featured on NBC Today Show, CNN, and CNBC; cited in The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Fortune Client organisations include American Express, Cisco, Danaher, Merck, Bank of America, and Rolls-Royce Biography Culture change has become one of the most common items on the executive agenda – and one of the most difficult to execute. Adrian Gostick has spent two decades investigating the reason: not that leaders undervalue culture, but that most lack the specific daily behaviours that make it real. Through The Culture Works, he has built that investigation into a body of research that reaches from recognition science to team performance to workplace anxiety. His books provide the empirical foundation. All In drew on a 300,000-person study conducted with Towers Watson, identifying the management practices that create what he calls a “culture of belief” – environments where employees commit fully and performance follows. The Best Team Wins extended that research to 850,000 work teams, isolating the leadership disciplines that determine whether collaboration produces results or friction. The Carrot Principle made the business case for recognition as a measurable driver of engagement and retention. Anxiety at Work reframed stress as a leadership issue, not an individual one. Gostick writes regularly on leadership strategy for Forbes and has been featured on NBC’s Today Show, CNN, and CNBC. His research has been cited in The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Fortune. In 2025 he was named to Thinkers50’s inaugural Coaches50 list; he is also a member of Marshall Goldsmith’s MG100 Coaches project. His consulting and advisory work spans American Express, Cisco, Danaher, Merck, Bank of America, and Rolls-Royce – organisations that have used his frameworks to move culture from aspiration to operational discipline. The Culture Works model means that engagement with his ideas does not have to end when the keynote does. Key speaking topics Organisational culture and culture change Employee engagement and recognition High-performance teams Leadership behaviour and accountability Workplace anxiety and psychological safety Gratitude and motivation in leadership Resilience under pressure Ideal for CHROs and People leaders designing engagement and culture strategy CEOs and executive teams seeking to align culture with business performance Leadership development programme directors and transformation leads Organisations undergoing post-merger integration, rapid growth, or cultural reset Audience outcomes A research-grounded case for treating recognition as a performance lever, not a perks programme Specific leadership behaviours that close the gap between stated organisational values and daily management practice Practical frameworks for reducing workplace anxiety and building team resilience without retreating from accountability Insight into how high-performing organisations use psychological safety and clear expectations together Tools for translating culture strategy into measurable changes in engagement and team output