Executive Development

Why organisations work with Joy Poole Joy addresses a gap most leadership development programmes leave entirely open: not what leaders should do under pressure, but how they actually operate internally when clarity is scarce, the stakes are high, and the team is watching. Her background at Meta, in large-scale consulting environments, and across high-growth technology companies gives her a working knowledge of the specific pressures that senior audiences are navigating. As a credentialed executive coach with a practice built around leaders under sustained load, she brings a level of depth and practical tool-transfer that most leadership keynote speakers cannot replicate from the stage. The sailing narrative, crewing an ocean circumnavigation as part of a team, is not an adventure story bolted onto a leadership talk. It provides an environment in which the same principles about self-leadership under pressure have been tested and proven. Joy customises her engagements as a matter of principle. A leadership team at a fintech navigating rapid growth is not the same audience as a professional services firm managing restructuring, and she treats them accordingly. Biography highlights 20 years in senior sales, consulting and leadership roles across Google, Facebook/Meta, Capgemini, and Arthur Andersen Certified Professional Coach, Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC); Master Practitioner of the Energy Leadership Index; Transitions Dynamics Specialist Executive Programme certificates from the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics Speaker at internal leadership forums for Meta and at industry conferences across technology, media, and financial services Completed a round-the-world sailing circumnavigation – her second parallel environment for testing how leaders perform when conditions are extreme Biography Senior leadership in fast-moving technology and consulting organisations teaches you a great deal about performance under pressure. It teaches you rather less about what is actually happening inside a leader while all of that performance is required. Joy Poole spent two decades at the centre of that tension in senior roles at Meta, Capgemini, and Arthur Andersen, before building a practice around the gap she identified. Her core argument is precise: when organisations face uncertainty, change, or sustained pressure, the variable that most determines leadership quality is not expertise or experience alone. It is how clearly and calmly a leader can operate within themselves; how they think when the picture is incomplete, how they make decisions when there is no clean answer, and how they show up for their teams while also carrying their own uncertainty. This is self-leadership, and she treats it as a practical capability, not a motivational concept. Joy holds executive credentials from the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics alongside certification from the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching. She brings to the stage what most leadership speakers cannot: a decade of operational experience at genuine scale, combined with years of coaching senior executives through exactly the internal dynamics she speaks about. An unusual secondary proof point sits alongside her professional record. Joy is currently completing a round-the-world sailing circumnavigation; an environment that applies the same conditions her leadership audiences face, stripped to their essentials. The lessons from both settings reinforce the same argument: what determines performance under pressure is not position or preparation. It is the quality of self-leadership. Key speaking topics Self-leadership under pressure and uncertainty Decision-making in ambiguous conditions Composure and credibility under sustained organisational load Leadership during restructuring and change Confidence and presence for senior leaders Trust as a leadership capability Ideal for HR and L&D directors commissioning leadership development sessions for offsites, internal forums, or away-days during periods of significant organisational change: restructuring, reorganisation, or high-growth phases Executive and senior leadership programme managers looking for a session that is grounded and practical rather than motivational Senior leadership teams in technology, financial services, professional services, and consulting where pace and pressure are structural features of the environment Audience outcomes A clearer, more honest account of how they actually operate under pressure, not how they think they should operate Practical tools for improving self-leadership composure in high-stakes situations that can be applied immediately A reframe of uncertainty and incomplete information as conditions to be navigated rather than problems to be solved Greater understanding of how their own internal state affects team performance and organisational credibility A shared vocabulary for a leadership conversation that most organisations do not currently have language for

Why organisations work with Steven D’Souza The «Not Knowing» framework gives organisations a precise and credible language for something most leadership programmes refuse to address directly: that the expectation of certainty from leaders is itself a liability in complex environments. That reframe changes how organisations design capability programmes. His intellectual approach – drawing on Gestalt psychology, Theory U, Adaptive Leadership and Eastern wisdom traditions – produces a more durable intervention than conventional leadership tools. Organisations working on long-term leadership capability find it gives senior executives a framework rather than a set of techniques. His practitioner background spans Senior Client Partner of Leadership & Professional Development at Korn Ferry in London and Riyadh, Global Head of Leadership at Philip Morris International, VP of Leadership and Talent Management at Merrill Lynch, and Head of Diversity at Santander UK. That breadth of first-hand experience in high-stakes leadership contexts makes him unusually credible at board and C-suite level. His published body of work now spans six books – Not Knowing, Not Doing, Not Being, Shadows at Work, Brilliant Networking and Made in Britain – giving organisations a cumulative architecture for multi-year leadership development that moves from navigating uncertainty, to purposeful restraint, to identity transformation, to the unconscious patterns that derail capable leaders. A CMI Management Book of the Year and a Thinkers50 Radar recognition give senior buyers independently validated signals of intellectual credibility, reducing the due-diligence burden when positioning a leadership development investment internally. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Liminal Edge Consulting (UAE), and Senior Fellow and Executive in Residence at the Centre for the Future of Organisation, Drucker School of Management Author of Not Knowing – CMI Management Book of the Year, translated into ten languages – and the broader Not trilogy: Not Knowing, Not Doing, Not Being, published by LID Author of Made in Britain and Brilliant Networking by Pearson. Author of Shadows at Work (2026) – on unconscious behaviour, the leadership shadow, and how hidden traits shape organisational culture Named on the Thinkers50 Radar among management thinkers most likely to change the future of leadership thinking Named in HR Magazine’s Top 30 Most Influential Thinkers Guest faculty, Adaptive Leadership programme, Harvard Kennedy School; Associate Fellow, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford; Executive Fellow and Associate Professor, IE Business School Work featured in Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg, BBC, The Guardian and The Sunday Times Previous leadership roles: Senior Client Partner, Leadership and Professional Development practice, Korn Ferry London and Riyadh; Global Head of Leadership and Executive Development, Philip Morris International; VP Leadership and Talent Management, Merrill Lynch; Head of Diversity, Santander UK; Director of Programmes, FT/IE Corporate Learning Alliance Biography Not Knowing – co-authored with Diana Renner and published by LID – won the CMI Management Book of the Year and has since been translated into ten languages. Its central argument is that the pressure on leaders to perform certainty is itself a liability when the environment is genuinely ambiguous. That argument proved durable enough to generate two sequels: Not Doing, on the discipline of purposeful restraint in leadership, and Not Being, on identity, self-transformation and renewal. His 2026 book Shadows at Work extends that body of work into examining the leader’s shadow from the lens of psychology, biology, culture and meaning. He shows how the unconscious traits leaders repress become the behaviours that most undermine the cultures they are trying to build – and how to surface and redirect them. The trilogy draws on Gestalt psychology, Theory U, Adaptive Leadership and Eastern and Western wisdom traditions. That blend is not incidental – it is what separates D’Souza’s framework from leadership development built around models and process tools. The approach asks executives to examine how their identity as leaders shapes what they can see and do in genuinely complex situations. The practitioner credibility that anchors that philosophy is substantial. Steven was formerly a Senior Client Partner at Korn Ferry in London and Riyadh, speaking to C-suite audiences across consumer, energy, industrial and technology sectors. As Global Head of Leadership and Executive Development at Philip Morris International, he worked with the company’s top 200 leaders through a major industry transformation. As VP of Leadership and Talent Management at Merrill Lynch and Head of Diversity at Santander UK, he worked on the kind of complex, people-facing challenges that most leadership theorists observe at a distance. His academic record spans the Drucker School of Management where he is currently a Senior Fellow and Executive in Residence, Oxford’s Saïd Business School, INSEAD, IE Business School, and guest faculty status at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Adaptive Leadership programme. Thinkers50 named D’Souza among the management thinkers most likely to change the future of leadership thinking. HR Magazine included him in its Top 30 Most Influential Thinkers. His work has appeared in the Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg, the BBC, The Guardian and The Sunday Times. Key speaking topics Leadership under uncertainty and complexity The «Not Knowing» framework: turning ambiguity into organisational advantage Sustainable leadership and the discipline of effortless action Identity, self-transformation and leadership renewal Diversity, inclusion and social capital Leadership capability design for senior executives Contemplative and philosophy-based approaches to organisational development The leader’s shadow: unconscious behaviour, derailers and organisational culture Ideal for CHROs and Chief People Officers designing senior leadership development programmes Boards and C-suite teams navigating transformation, major strategic pivots or cultural change Executive education and MBA programme directors at business schools Learning and development leaders investing in long-term leadership capability at global organisations Audience outcomes A reframed relationship with uncertainty – from a condition to be managed to a resource to be developed as a leadership capacity A clear distinction between problems that respond to expertise and those that require adaptive, inquiry-led approaches – and practical tools for each Awareness of how leadership identity built on authority and answers can become a liability in genuinely ambiguous situations Practical techniques – drawn from philosophy, Gestalt psychology and organisational development – for leading with more presence, less reactivity and greater sustainability A framework for individual and team reflection on where current leadership practice is serving the organisation and where it is reinforcing defensive patterns

Why organisations work with Mark Ritson His “diagnosis, strategy, tactics” framework gives marketing functions a structure for connecting brand spend to commercial outcomes – a discipline most organisations have never been taught and cannot easily develop internally. He spent 13 years as in-house brand consultant for LVMH, working with Louis Vuitton, Dom Perignon, and Hennessy. His commercial credibility comes from inside the world’s most valuable luxury portfolio, not from agency pitches or conference circuit opinion. His doctoral thesis on the social uses of advertising won the 2000 Ferber Award – the first non-US researcher to receive it – and his co-authored pricing research was cited by George Akerlof in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. No other marketing speaker working today holds that combination of peer-reviewed standing and practitioner track record. The MiniMBA, which he founded and teaches personally, has graduated more than 20,000 practitioners globally. That scale gives him a precise, evidence-based view of where marketing competence breaks down in real organisations – and what it costs them commercially. Nearly 20 years of weekly column-writing in Marketing Week – and multiple PPA Business Columnist of the Year awards – have made him the most credible dissenting voice against marketing faddism. Organisations bring him in when they need someone to challenge internal orthodoxies with evidence rather than instinct. Biography highlights PhD in Marketing, Lancaster University; doctoral thesis won the 2000 Ferber Award as the best dissertation published in the Journal of Consumer Research – the first non-US recipient in the award’s history Faculty positions at London Business School, the University of Minnesota, Melbourne Business School, MIT Sloan (visiting), and Singapore Management University (visiting); MBA Best Teacher prizes at all four institutions In-house brand consultant for LVMH from 2002 to 2015, working directly with senior executives at Louis Vuitton, Dom Perignon, and Hennessy Marketing Week columnist for approximately 20 years; multiple PPA Business Columnist of the Year awards, the highest award for magazine journalism in the UK; British Society of Magazine Editors Business Columnist of the Year in 2018 and 2022 Founder and lead instructor of the MiniMBA in Marketing and MiniMBA in Brand Management; more than 20,000 graduates globally AMI Sir Charles McGrath Award (the highest marketing honour in Australia); IPA Honorary Fellow (2024); co-authored pricing research cited by Nobel Laureate George Akerlof in his 2001 acceptance speech Published in Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Journal of Consumer Research, and Journal of Advertising Biography Marketing departments spend. The harder question – what that spending actually produces commercially – is the one most organisations cannot answer. Mark Ritson has spent over two decades building the frameworks that make that answer possible, working from inside business schools, luxury brand headquarters, and the pages of Marketing Week simultaneously. His academic foundation is unusually strong. His PhD thesis, “The Social Uses of Advertising,” won the 2000 Ferber Award as the best doctoral dissertation in the Journal of Consumer Research – the first time a researcher outside the United States had received the honour. A Thouron Scholar at Wharton in 1995, he went on to hold faculty positions at London Business School, the University of Minnesota, Melbourne Business School, and MIT Sloan, winning the best teacher prize at each institution. His co-authored pricing research was cited by George Akerlof during his 2001 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. What separates Ritson from other marketing academics is sustained proximity to practice. From 2002 to 2015, he served as in-house brand consultant for LVMH, working with senior executives across Louis Vuitton, Dom Perignon, and Hennessy. That access – combined with nearly two decades writing a weekly column for Marketing Week – gave him a vantage point that bridges research, boardroom, and brand operations in a way few practitioners have held at the same time. In 2019, he left academia to focus on the MiniMBA, an online platform he founded to make evidence-based marketing education available at scale. More than 20,000 practitioners have now completed the programme, built around his “diagnosis, strategy, tactics” framework. The AMI gave him the Sir Charles McGrath Award – the highest honour for marketing in Australia – and the IPA made him an Honorary Fellow in 2024. His consistent argument is that marketing’s commercial standing in the boardroom depends not on new technology or new trends, but on practitioner competence. Key speaking topics Marketing strategy and brand management Pricing strategy and commercial decision-making Marketing effectiveness and measurement Brand building versus performance marketing Marketing capability and practitioner competence Evidence-based marketing frameworks Ideal for CMOs and senior marketing leaders facing board-level scrutiny of marketing budgets and accountability Executive leadership teams seeking a commercial framework for evaluating marketing investment Organisations investing in marketing capability development at scale Strategy, brand, and commercial functions in consumer-facing businesses where the link between brand and revenue is contested Audience outcomes A working framework for connecting marketing strategy to commercial outcomes, grounded in the “diagnosis, strategy, tactics” model Clarity on the evidence base for brand building versus short-term performance marketing, and practical guidance on how to argue for the right balance internally Sharpened understanding of pricing as a strategic rather than a tactical discipline Practical tools for improving the quality of marketing decisions: briefing standards, brand positioning, and market orientation The language and evidence to challenge marketing orthodoxies and fads in their own organisations

Why organisations work with Olivier Sibony He co-authored Noise with Daniel Kahneman and Cass Sunstein, which means a board hears the original behavioural science argument from one of the people who built it, not a secondhand interpretation. Twenty-five years at McKinsey, including running the Global Corporate Strategy Practice, gives him a working vocabulary for the actual decisions executive committees argue about: portfolio bets, M&A, market entry, capital allocation. His framework converts cognitive bias from an interesting concept into a procurement question: what does your decision architecture look like, and which specific traps does it fail to catch. He is one of a small group who can sit in a HEC Paris and Saïd Business School classroom and a CEO’s strategy offsite in the same week, and translate without losing either audience. Biography highlights Co-author of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment with Daniel Kahneman and Cass R. Sunstein, New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller Author of You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake!, winner of the 2019 Manpower Foundation Grand Prize for best management book Professor of Strategy at HEC Paris and Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company for 25 years, leading the firm’s Corporate Strategy Practice globally Co-author with Daniel Kahneman and Dan Lovallo of “Before You Make That Big Decision,” selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Making Smart Decisions Knight in the French Legion of Honour and recipient of the Vernimmen Teaching Award at HEC Paris Biography Most strategic mistakes do not come from missing information. They come from the way executives process the information they already have. Behavioural strategy is the discipline of catching those errors before they reach the board paper, and Olivier Sibony has spent two decades building the case for treating it as a serious management practice rather than a curiosity. His credentials sit on both sides of the divide that usually separates academics from operators. He spent 25 years at McKinsey & Company, eventually as Senior Partner running the firm’s Global Corporate Strategy Practice and a European leader of the Consumer sector. In 2015 he moved full time into teaching, joining HEC Paris as a Professor of Strategy and taking up an Associate Fellowship at Oxford’s Saïd Business School. The intellectual work shows up most clearly in the books. Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, co-authored with Daniel Kahneman and Cass R. Sunstein, became a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller and reframed an entire category of judgment error that bias literature had ignored. You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake! won the Manpower Foundation Grand Prize and turned the academic case into 40 specific techniques executives can use. Earlier, his Harvard Business Review article with Kahneman and Dan Lovallo, “Before You Make That Big Decision,” was selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Making Smart Decisions. What makes him useful in a room full of operators is the McKinsey vocabulary underneath the behavioural science. He talks about decision architecture the way other people talk about org design: as something you build deliberately, audit regularly, and rebuild when it stops catching the errors it was meant to catch. Key speaking topics Behavioural strategy and decision quality Cognitive bias in executive judgment Noise and inconsistency in organisational decisions Decision architecture in senior teams Strategic choice under uncertainty Algorithms, AI, and the limits of human intuition Diversity and personnel decision-making Ideal for CEOs, executive committees, and boards reviewing how major capital allocation and strategy decisions get made Chief Strategy Officers and corporate development teams running M&A, portfolio, and market-entry processes CHROs and senior HR leaders responsible for hiring, performance review, and promotion systems where noise quietly distorts outcomes Investment committees and risk leadership teams whose decisions repeat under uncertainty Audience outcomes A clearer view of where their own decision processes are most exposed to bias and noise A vocabulary to challenge confident recommendations without attacking the people making them Specific techniques for building dissent, structured disagreement, and pre-mortems into existing governance A framework for deciding when to trust judgment, when to trust data, and when to trust an algorithm A sharper sense of which decisions deserve the heaviest process and which do not

Why organisations work with Andy Bass His Suits & Geeks Trap framework gives leaders a named, structured diagnosis for one of the most persistent and underacknowledged barriers to growth in technology-driven businesses – the breakdown between commercial and technical functions – and a clear method for resolving it. His Start With What Works thesis (Pearson) challenges the default assumption that growth requires new investment; the argument is that most organisations are sitting on underused capabilities, relationships and knowledge that can be mobilised before new capital is sought. His C.E.O. Roadmap from Committed Action – Curiosity, Exploration, Ownership – gives leaders a specific, repeatable method for moving people from passive compliance to genuine ownership of strategic priorities. His PhD in Software Engineering and early career at BT Research Labs give him standing inside technical organisations that a leadership generalist cannot credibly claim – he can hold the room with engineers and commercial directors simultaneously. Inducted into the Million Dollar Consulting Hall of Fame (2017) and named to Ogilvy’s #ogilvychange Big Thinkers panel – external recognitions of consulting practice, earned outside the speaking circuit. Biography highlights Founder and principal of BassClusker Consulting; advisory work spanning more than 30 industries across 12 countries PhD in Software Engineering and BSc in Computer Science and Ergonomics, both from Aston University; career began at BT Research Labs, Human Factors Division Executive educator at Oxford Saïd, Warwick, Aston and Strathclyde Business Schools; Visiting Professor in Consulting Practice, Birmingham City University Inducted into the Million Dollar Consulting Hall of Fame (2017) by Alan Weiss Author of five books including The Suits & Geeks Trap, Start With What Works (Pearson) and Committed Action Named to Ogilvy’s #ogilvychange ‘Big Thinkers’ panel of experts Corporate clients include L’Oréal, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, KPMG and International Automotive Components Group Biography In technology-driven organisations, one of the most consistent barriers to growth is not the strategy, it is the relationship between the people who build things and the people who sell them. Andy Bass, founder of BassClusker Consulting and author of The Suits & Geeks Trap, has spent over two decades working on that specific problem: helping senior leaders diagnose and close the gap between strategic intent and organisational execution. His Suits & Geeks Trap framework identifies a pattern that recurs across industries: commercial and technical teams defaulting to stereotyping and blame, with leaders drawn into refereeing internal politics rather than facing the market. The framework, developed through advisory work with organisations ranging from Deutsche Bank and L’Oréal to mid-sized growth businesses across 12 countries, gives leaders a structured way to reverse that dynamic and redirect energy toward the customer. His parallel argument, developed in Start With What Works (Pearson), challenges what he calls one of the most persistent thinking traps in business: that growth requires new investment. Bass makes the case (supported by client work across 30 industries) that most organisations have more usable capability than they recognise. The book presents practical tools for identifying and deploying those hidden assets before leaders turn to capital-intensive alternatives. His third major framework, the C.E.O. Roadmap from Committed Action, addresses the question leaders ask most consistently: why their people do not engage with strategic priorities as fully as intended. Bass’s answer, structured around Curiosity, Exploration and Ownership, gives leaders a repeatable method for building genuine commitment rather than managed compliance. His credentials span both sides of the technical-commercial divide he studies: a PhD in Software Engineering from Aston University, an early career at BT Research Labs, executive education delivered at Oxford Saïd, Warwick, Aston and Strathclyde business schools, and induction into the Million Dollar Consulting Hall of Fame in 2017. Key speaking topics Commercial and technical team alignment Organisational learning and execution Growth strategy using existing resources Leadership and committed action Change management and strategic engagement Organisational culture in technology-driven businesses Executive decision-making and capability development Ideal for CEOs and MDs of technology-driven, engineering-led or innovation-focused organisations managing persistent commercial-technical friction Senior leadership teams where execution consistently falls short of strategic ambition CHROs and organisational development leads working on engagement, ownership and culture in mixed commercial-technical workforces Professional services, financial services, manufacturing and growth-stage businesses navigating rapid change Audience outcomes A named framework for diagnosing commercial-technical team friction – and a clear method for resolving it before it becomes a leadership crisis Practical tools for identifying underused organisational assets and applying them to growth priorities, before seeking new capital or resource The C.E.O. Roadmap – a three-stage method for building genuine team commitment rather than surface-level compliance Sharper understanding of how leadership behaviour, not strategy alone, determines whether execution succeeds Specific questions and diagnostic approaches leaders can apply immediately to unlock stalled priorities or disengaged teams

Why organisations work with Marina Ibrahim She has run cross-cultural integration work inside named multinationals including BMW Group, Bentley, Nike, Kellogg’s, PepsiCo, BP, UBS and Deutsche Telekom, across automotive, FMCG, financial services and life sciences. Her own biography (British-German, born to a German mother and Egyptian father, bilingual in English and German) is the lived case study behind the work, which lands with international audiences in a way a single-culture expert cannot match. She brings instrument-led rigour, not opinion. GLOBE+, her signature framework, integrates Country Navigator, Wiley Everything DiSC Certified Partner, Wiley Five Behaviours Certified Partner (Lencioni’s Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team), GlobalDISC and ICQ Growth 2.0 into diagnostic data on team performance. She has worked the British-German interface specifically, including post-merger cultural integration, where most cross-cultural speakers stay at a generic level. Externally judged: FSB West Midlands Diversity and Inclusion Award 2024 for the consultancy she founded, and Professional Speaker of the Year Staffordshire 2025. Biography highlights Founder of Globility Insights, the West Midlands-based cultural agility and inclusive leadership consultancy she established in 2011. Creator of GLOBE+, her signature cultural agility framework, used with multinational clients across automotive, FMCG, financial services and life sciences. Senior Culture Coach at Country Navigator, the cultural intelligence training platform. Federation of Small Businesses West Midlands Diversity and Inclusion Award 2024; Professional Speaker of the Year, Staffordshire 2025; Cartus Service Excellence Award 2020. Client organisations include BMW Group, Bentley, Nike, Kellogg’s, PepsiCo, EMI, Commerzbank, BP, UBS, Deutsche Telekom and Wood PLC. Wiley Everything DiSC Certified Partner; Wiley Five Behaviours Certified Partner (Lencioni’s Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team); Country Navigator, GlobalDISC and ICQ Growth 2.0 Coach; MirrorMIRROR Certified Team Coach; NLP Practitioner; MCIM Chartered Marketer. British and German national with Egyptian heritage; bilingual English and German. Biography Most multinational organisations treat culture as a soft variable. Strategy is hard, culture is decoration. The teams running the actual work know better. They are the ones absorbing the friction when a German engineering function tries to land a project inside a Brazilian commercial team, or when a British acquirer tells a Japanese subsidiary that “nothing will change”. Marina Ibrahim has spent more than 25 years inside that gap. Through Globility Insights, the consultancy she founded in 2011, she has worked with BMW Group, Bentley, Nike, Kellogg’s, PepsiCo, BP, UBS and Deutsche Telekom on the parts of cross-cultural collaboration that do not show up on a strategy slide: trust between merged teams, decision-making across British and German operating styles, the difference between an inclusion statement and a multicultural team that actually functions. Her own profile is part of the credibility. Born to a German mother and Egyptian father, British-German, bilingual in English and German, she is the lived case study behind the work. The method is not. GLOBE+, her signature framework, runs senior teams through Country Navigator, Wiley Everything DiSC, Wiley Five Behaviours, GlobalDISC and ICQ Growth 2.0, so leaders leave with diagnostic data on how their teams actually operate, not a set of stories. In 2024, the Federation of Small Businesses named Globility the West Midlands Diversity and Inclusion Award winner, an externally judged signal that the practice she built holds up under scrutiny. For senior teams trying to make global structures actually perform, that is the relevant test. Key speaking topics Cultural agility as a competitive advantage Inclusive leadership in multinational organisations High-performing multicultural teams Post-merger cultural integration British and German business cultures and operating styles Unconscious bias and inclusive decision-making in practice Leading internationally distributed and hybrid teams Ideal for CHROs and DEI leads embedding inclusion beyond policy into team behaviour Executive teams running cross-border integrations or post-merger collaboration Global function heads managing multicultural and internationally distributed teams Leadership development programmes for senior leaders preparing for international roles Audience outcomes A working definition of cultural agility that names what behaviours actually shift performance across borders A diagnostic view of where their own multicultural teams break down, drawn from established cultural instruments rather than opinion Specific moves leaders can use the next day to manage British, German and broader European operating differences A sharper sense of where current inclusion efforts are stalling and what to do about it

Why organisations work with Sarah Furness The H.A.B.I.T.S. (Healthy Automatic Behaviours In Threatening Scenarios) formula gives leaders a structured, repeatable system for sustaining performance under pressure – not a set of principles, but a behavioural methodology built from combat aviation and formal human factors instruction. Her “Practise Scared” methodology reframes discomfort as a development mechanism directly addressing the conditions under which most leadership training fails to stick. Her argument in The Uni-tasking Revolution, that focus is a competitive performance variable that organisations are systematically destroying through multitasking culture, gives senior teams a specific, actionable lens for redesigning how work gets done. She brings an instructor’s precision, not only a practitioner’s story: she taught human performance and risk management at the Defence Academy of the UK, which means the frameworks she delivers have been built and tested in a formal training environment, not assembled retrospectively for a speaking career. Her status as the first female helicopter pilot to fly and lead UK Special Forces missions in Iraq is not a biographical detail, it is evidence of what her approach to fear, credibility, and inclusion in high-performance cultures actually looks like in practice. Biography highlights RAF Squadron Leader; approximately 20 years of service including operational combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan First female helicopter pilot to fly and lead UK Special Forces missions in Iraq Graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge University (Natural Sciences and Theology) Instructor in human performance and risk management at the Defence Academy of the UK, Shrivenham Creator of the H.A.B.I.T.S. (Healthy Automatic Behaviours In Threatening Scenarios) performance framework and the “Practise Scared” methodology Author of two Amazon no.1 bestselling books: Fly Higher and The Uni-tasking Revolution Founder of Well Be It, an executive coaching and leadership development practice (est. 2020) Qualified mindfulness coach and human factors facilitator; trained in cognitive behavioural techniques Biography Most performance under pressure research stays theoretical. Sarah Furness spent two decades testing it as a Cambridge-educated RAF helicopter pilot, then as a Squadron Leader leading combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, then as the first female pilot to fly and lead UK Special Forces missions in Iraq. That operational record informs everything she brings to organisations. But it is not the point of the work. The point is that she identified, in conditions of genuine risk, that resilience and performance under pressure are not instinctive. They are skills. And skills can be built. This observation – simple in articulation, significant in implication – is the foundation of her H.A.B.I.T.S. framework and her “Practise Scared” methodology, both of which sit at the centre of her leadership development work. Before founding Well Be It in 2020, Furness formalised that thinking as an instructor in human performance and risk management at the Defence Academy of the UK. That background gives her frameworks a rigour that distinguishes them from testimony alone: these are methods that were built in a professional military training environment before they were taken to the boardroom. Her two no.1 bestselling books, Fly Higher and The Uni-tasking Revolution, extend the argument into self-leadership and organisational focus respectively. Together, they represent a coherent intellectual position: that the gap between how capable leaders look and how they actually perform under pressure is a structural problem, and that closing it requires deliberate behavioural practice, not motivation. Key speaking topics Leadership under pressure Resilience and mental performance Human factors in high-stakes decision-making Focus, attention, and uni-tasking as a performance strategy Psychological safety and growth culture Inclusive leadership and leading in the new era Decision-making and gut instinct under pressure Ideal for Senior leadership teams preparing for high-stakes change or transformation CHROs and L&D leaders building performance and resilience programmes Executive development audiences where the gap between visible capability and felt confidence is a recognised issue Organisations in sectors where pressure, speed, and accountability are structural features – professional services, financial services, defence, manufacturing, engineering Audience outcomes A clear understanding of why performance under pressure is a trainable skill, not a personality trait, with a framework for developing it Practical application of the H.A.B.I.T.S. formula and “Practise Scared” methodology to real workplace conditions A concrete argument for redesigning how attention and focus are managed at team and organisational level Greater leader confidence in decision-making under time pressure and ambiguity A reframe of fear, failure, and discomfort as development data rather than performance problems

Why organisations work with Jennifer Willey The Certified Speaking Professional designation from the National Speakers Association is held by fewer than 12% of NSA members. For a main-stage keynote where delivery quality is part of the decision, that level of platform competence reduces the risk on the booking. Behind every keynote sits a deployable methodology, the Fearless Fundamentals framework (Confidence, Communication, Connection, Control and Courage), built from Wet Cement’s Fearless@Work Survey and a decade of leadership programme delivery. The work can continue inside the organisation after the event. The career arc, from TV news anchor to senior commercial leader at Yahoo, AOL and The Trade Desk to founder of a leadership development firm, gives her credibility with two audiences at once: the people running culture and the people running the business. Wet Cement is dual-certified as a Woman-Owned (WBENC) and Disability-Owned (Disability:IN) business, which matters for organisations applying supplier diversity criteria in procurement, and reinforces the lived basis of her work on confidence, voice and inclusion. Her book Fearless in 5: Confidence, Communication, Connection, Control and Courage is being published by Pearson in September with a UK and European launch, giving clients in the region a credible local moment to anchor a leadership programme around. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Wet Cement (founded 2017); dual-certified Woman-Owned (WBENC) and Disability-Owned (Disability:IN) business Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), National Speakers Association Author, Fearless in 5: Confidence, Communication, Connection, Control and Courage (Pearson, September 2026; UK and European launch) Creator of the Fearless in 5 microlearning series and the Advance Women at Work practice; co-founder of WE.DOOH at the Digital Place Based Advertising Association Twenty-year commercial career across Yahoo, AOL, pwc, WebMD, Sharecare and The Trade Desk; earlier career as a TV news anchor and reporter for ABC and CBS affiliates Clients include Johnson & Johnson, Nissan, Paramount, Samsung, Genentech, NBCUniversal, Comcast, NPR, Walmart and Wesco Biography The leadership capabilities that mattered most a decade ago are not the ones under most pressure now. The pressure has shifted to composure, to communicating clearly when the brief keeps changing, and to keeping teams engaged through the third or fourth restructure of the year. That is the work Wet Cement was built around. Jenn Willey founded the firm in 2017 after twenty years leading sales and marketing teams at Yahoo, AOL, pwc, WebMD and The Trade Desk, with an earlier career as a TV news anchor and reporter for ABC and CBS affiliates. The firm’s methodology, the Fearless Fundamentals framework, is anchored on five capabilities: Confidence, Communication, Connection, Control and Courage. It draws on the Wet Cement Fearless@Work Survey and a research collaboration with Wharton behavioural scientists, and has been deployed at Johnson & Johnson, Nissan, Paramount, Samsung and Genentech. The September publication of Fearless in 5: Confidence, Communication, Connection, Control and Courage with Pearson is the first time the methodology has been put between hard covers. The retitling, from a women’s leadership guide in earlier framing to a broader leadership framework now, mirrors a real shift in how Wet Cement is bought. Women’s leadership remains a substantial specialty, anchored by the Advance Women at Work practice and her co-founding role at WE.DOOH at the Digital Place Based Advertising Association. The primary work is now leadership development for change-fatigued teams across the seniority range. The Certified Speaking Professional designation from the National Speakers Association, earned by fewer than 12% of NSA members, is the platform credential most large rooms screen for. It marks Jenn out from most leadership development founders, who do not keynote at her standard. The combination of CSP-grade delivery and a deployable methodology is what makes her work usable past the event itself. Key speaking topics Fearless leadership and team capability under repeated change Self-leadership and resilience under sustained pressure Executive presence and confident communication for senior leaders Inclusive leadership and the next phase after DEI Women’s leadership and the Advance Women at Work approach Career navigation, sponsorship and the personal board of directors Ideal for Heads of leadership development and CHROs designing executive and senior-leader programmes for change-fatigued teams Executive teams and senior off-sites looking for a speaker who can also run the programme behind the keynote Women’s leadership networks, ERGs and high-potential cohorts that need a credible voice on confidence, advancement and inclusion without performative DEI framing Media, technology, advertising and life sciences organisations where her commercial vocabulary maps directly onto the audience Audience outcomes A working version of the Fearless Fundamentals (Confidence, Communication, Connection, Control and Courage) applied to their own context Specific behaviours for staying composed and decisive when the brief keeps changing, drawn from the Wet Cement Fearless@Work research The vocabulary to coach team members through impostor patterns, confidence gaps and self-advocacy challenges A defensible argument for why inclusion still matters as a leadership capability, useful in rooms where DEI as a label has been retired A method for designing and using a personal board of directors as a working career navigation tool

Why organisations work with Jeremy Blain He has published the operating detail behind distributed leadership, including a five-point organisational blueprint and a 90-day implementation roadmap, so the conversation moves past intent into execution. His OpenHR framework, co-authored with Dr. Rochelle Haynes, gives HR and people leaders a working model for designing a workforce that blends employees, contractors, and open talent without losing coherence. Twenty-five years operating as a CEO and board officer across the UK and Asia, including seven years running an international consultancy from Singapore, mean the boardroom register is native, not learned. Recognition from credible third parties, Gold at the 2024 Global Book Awards for Unleash the Inner CEO and ACQ5 International Gamechanger of the Year 2023, confirms the work has been independently judged on substance. He brings frameworks that travel beyond the keynote, with diagnostic tools and culture-building activities organisations can take into their own leadership development programmes. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Performance Works International, advising boards and executive teams on leadership and digital transformation. Author of The Inner CEO and the second edition Unleash the Inner CEO, both award-winning titles on distributed leadership. Co-author with Dr. Rochelle Haynes of OpenHR: The Human Capital Framework for the Blended Workforce. Fellow of the Institute of Directors, London since 2003; senior board advisor to WDHB and co-founder of the Transformational Leadership Acceleration Institute. Named International Gamechanger of the Year by ACQ5 in 2023. Featured in Forbes, The Times of London, CEO Today, Dialogue by Duke CE, and Business Matters; host of the Rethink Leadership podcast. Biography Distributed leadership has been talked about for two decades. What has been missing is a working model that boards and operating committees can actually run. Jeremy Blain has spent his career building that model, first as a CEO and board officer in the UK and Asia, and now as the founder of Performance Works International. The argument is set out in The Inner CEO and its updated second edition, Unleash the Inner CEO, which won Gold in the Business Leadership category at the 2024 Global Book Awards. The book offers a five-point blueprint for the conditions, structures, and processes that make distributed leadership operational, plus a 90-day roadmap for managers and individual contributors. It is closer to an implementation manual than a thesis. A second strand of the work, OpenHR, co-authored with Dr. Rochelle Haynes, addresses what happens when the workforce itself is no longer a single category. As organisations blend employees, contractors, freelancers, and open talent, traditional human capital systems strain. OpenHR offers a framework, glossary, and templates for designing people strategy across that mix. The credibility behind the frameworks is operational. Seven years running an international consultancy from Singapore. Twenty-five years in corporate learning and human capital. Senior board roles at WDHB and the Intercontinental School of Economics and Applied Sciences. ACQ5 named him International Gamechanger of the Year in 2023, and his commentary appears in Forbes, The Times of London, and Dialogue by Duke CE. Boards work with him because the prescriptions come with the receipts. Key speaking topics Distributed leadership as an operating model Digital and AI transformation for boards and executive teams Human capital strategy for the blended workforce Empowerment and accountability at scale Leadership development across multinational and multi-generational teams Culture and capability for hybrid, AI-enabled organisations Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and executive committees rewiring decision rights and accountability across the organisation CHROs and chief people officers designing for a workforce that combines full-time, contract, and open talent Boards reviewing the leadership and culture preconditions for digital and AI transformation Transformation, change, and leadership development leads building scalable programmes across regions Audience outcomes A clearer view of where authority and accountability are misaligned in their own organisation A practical reference model for distributing leadership without losing strategic coherence A framework for designing human capital strategy across employees, contractors, and open talent Specific diagnostic questions to take into the next executive committee or board agenda Language for confronting the gap between stated leadership values and observed leadership behaviour

Why organisations work with Ruth Gotian Her research base is unusual in the leadership field: in-person interviews with named peak performers including Anthony Fauci, Nobel laureate Mike Brown, former NASA Chief Astronaut Peggy Whitson, and Steve Kerr, not aggregated case studies pulled from secondary sources. Thinkers50 named her the #1 emerging management thinker in the world in 2021, placed her on the Coaches50 list in 2024, and shortlisted her in 2025 for the Coaching and Mentoring Award, one of eight thought leaders globally. Few executive development voices hold all three. For 29 years inside Weill Cornell Medicine, most recently as Chief Learning Officer, she built and ran the mentoring infrastructure her frameworks describe. The work is operational, not theoretical. Her four-attribute model from The Success Factor (intrinsic motivation, perseverance, strong foundation, constant informal learning) gives leadership teams a shared, testable language for what they are actually selecting and promoting for. Her mentoring work is structural, including how to recognise toxic mentorship and where to find mentors outside the obvious channels, which is what large organisations actually struggle with when formal programmes stall. Biography highlights Faculty member at Teachers College, Columbia University, teaching graduate-level courses on high achievement based on her research. Previously Chief Learning Officer and Associate Professor of Education in Anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medicine, over a 29-year career. Author of The Success Factor (Kogan Page, 2022), co-author of The Financial Times Guide to Mentoring with Andy Lopata (Pearson/FT, 2024), and co-author of Mentoring in Healthcare with Vineet Chopra and Sanjay Saint (2025). Thinkers50 Radar Award, 2021 (#1 emerging management thinker); Coaches50, 2024; shortlisted for the Coaching and Mentoring Award, 2025 (top eight globally). Cited as a leadership expert by The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and NBC News; named a top mentor by Nature, The Wall Street Journal, and Columbia University. Contributing author at Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Psychology Today, and Fast Company; LinkedIn Top Voice in Mentoring, 2023. Semi-finalist for the Forbes 50 Over 50 list. Biography The four attributes that distinguish Nobel laureates, astronauts, Olympic champions, and world-class CEOs are not the ones senior leaders typically optimise for. Intrinsic motivation, perseverance, a strong foundation, and constant informal learning, all running at once. That is the central finding behind The Success Factor, the book that put Ruth Gotian on the Thinkers50 Radar in 2021 as the world’s #1 emerging management thinker. The research is what gives the work its weight. The book is built on direct interviews with named figures, including Anthony Fauci, Nobel laureate Mike Brown, former NASA Chief Astronaut Peggy Whitson, Build-A-Bear founder Maxine Clark, and Steve Kerr. The conclusions are not extrapolated from secondary case studies, which is the standard pattern in the success and performance category. For 29 years inside Weill Cornell Medicine, most recently as Chief Learning Officer and Associate Professor of Education in Anesthesiology, she built and ran the institution’s mentoring infrastructure. That operational base is what separates her advice on building mentoring capability from the lighter material in the field. The Financial Times Guide to Mentoring, co-authored with Andy Lopata, is the practical companion volume; Mentoring in Healthcare, co-authored with Vineet Chopra and Sanjay Saint, extends the work into the sector that taught her the discipline. She now sits on the faculty at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she earned her doctorate in adult learning and leadership, teaching graduate-level courses on high achievement built on the same research. She writes regularly for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Psychology Today, and Fast Company, and was named a LinkedIn Top Voice in Mentoring in 2023. Nature, The Wall Street Journal, and Columbia University have each named her among the top mentors in the world; The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and NBC News have called on her as a leadership expert. The 2025 Thinkers50 Coaching and Mentoring Award shortlist placed her among eight thought leaders globally on the discipline she has spent her career inside. Key speaking topics High performance and the science of extreme success Mentorship as a leadership discipline Executive coaching and senior talent development Authentic professional networks Leadership behaviours of Nobel laureates, astronauts, and Olympic champions Retention of high performers Organisational learning and chief learning officer practice Ideal for CHROs and Chief Learning Officers building leadership and mentoring capability Boards and executive committees thinking through succession and senior talent retention Partner-track and director-level cohorts inside professional services and healthcare Women’s leadership and executive development programmes inside large enterprises Audience outcomes A defined model for what high performance actually consists of, usable inside promotion and selection conversations A practical method for spotting and avoiding toxic mentorship inside formal programmes Concrete language for how senior leaders can develop people, not just deliver results A clearer view of how peak performers maintain momentum after early success Specific examples drawn from named Nobel laureates, astronauts, and CEOs that audiences can cite the next day

Why organisations work with Anna Hemmings A high-performance specialist with a six-time world champion’s record behind her. Fifteen years coaching senior teams, with a method built as much on the psychology of performance as on sport. She has reached the top, lost it, and got back. Diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome at her competitive peak and told she would not race again, she returned to win three more world titles. That comeback is how she teaches recovery as a performance strategy rather than a wellbeing exercise. Her focus is the repeat, not the one-off peak. She works on the behaviours and culture that let teams perform at the highest level and hold it year after year, which is the question most leadership teams actually face. Accredited delivery that runs past the keynote. As a qualified high-performance and leadership coach and an accredited Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team trainer, she takes leadership teams at IBM, Unilever, Novartis, Deloitte, and NatWest through masterclasses and team development. Biography highlights Six-time Marathon Kayak World Champion, including three consecutive titles from 2005 to 2007; Britain’s most successful female marathon kayaker. Two-time Olympian for Great Britain: Sydney 2000 and Beijing 2008. MBE, 2010 New Year Honours, for services to sport. Founder and Managing Director of Beyond the Barriers, a high-performance consultancy she has run since 2009. Accredited High Performance and Leadership Coach and accredited Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team trainer. Has now spent as long developing senior leaders and teams as she spent competing, with clients including IBM, Unilever, Novartis, Deloitte, British Airways, and NatWest. Biography Reaching the top of a field is hard. Staying there, year after year, while the pressure becomes permanent, is harder, and it is the problem most leadership teams underestimate. It is also the one Anna Hemmings spent her sporting career solving in public. She won six marathon kayak world titles, three of them in consecutive years, and competed at two Olympic Games. The detail that matters most came in between. Diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome at her peak and told she might not race again, she came back to win three more world titles and qualify for Beijing 2008. She treats that comeback as evidence that recovery can be engineered as a performance strategy. The second half of her career has now run longer than the first. Since 2009 she has built Beyond the Barriers into a high-performance consultancy, coaching senior leaders and teams at IBM, Unilever, Novartis, Deloitte, and NatWest. Her method pairs what works at elite level with an applied reading of human behaviour and the psychology of performance. That is why it holds up with executives who have no interest in sport. She is an accredited high-performance and leadership coach and a Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team trainer, so her work runs from keynote into masterclass and team development. She has now spent more years coaching leaders and teams than she spent winning titles, and that is the half of the story that earns her the room. Key speaking topics Achieving and sustaining high performance High-performance culture and world-class teams Resilience and performance under pressure Recovery and refocus as a performance strategy Mindset for thriving under constant demand Leadership and high-performing teams Ideal for Executive and leadership teams under pressure to perform at a high level and repeat it CEOs and senior leaders who have reached a peak and need to sustain it without burning out the team Sales and commercial leadership operating in demanding, target-driven cycles HR and L&D leads designing high-performance and leadership development programmes Audience outcomes What it actually takes to reach a high level and hold it, beyond a single peak The specific behaviours that separate the best teams from the merely good Recovery and refocus methods they can use under pressure, treated as a performance tool, not a wellbeing add-on A first-hand account of being written off at her peak and coming back, used as working material on how resilience is built Language for talking about high performance and its disciplines with their own teams

Why organisations work with Andrew and Gaia Grant The co-presenting format is its own offer. The audience hears two voices working a leadership problem in real time, with the academic and the facilitator perspectives playing off each other. The frameworks come out of Gaia Grant’s PhD research in the Discipline of Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Sydney Business School. The Innovation Climate Leadership Indicator (iCLi) is an academically validated diagnostic, which matters when the work has to defend itself in front of a board or audit committee. They treat the explore-preserve tension as the actual problem. Most innovation speakers present innovation as a simple acceleration story, which leaves leaders without a useful answer for the part of the business that has to stay reliable. The thirty-year working partnership is itself the case study for the leadership content. Andrew and Gaia have built a co-authored body of research while running a global consultancy together, and that lived material reads in the room as something that cannot be performed. Biography highlights Co-authors of The Innovation Race: How to Change a Culture to Change the Game (John Wiley & Sons, 2016) and the international bestseller Who Killed Creativity?…And How Do We Get it Back? (Wiley, 2012) Dr Gaia Grant: PhD researcher and lecturer in the Discipline of Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Sydney Business School Andrew Grant: founder and director of Tirian International Consultancy and a TEDx speaker, with three decades of executive facilitation across more than thirty countries Developers of the academically validated Innovation Climate Leadership Indicator (iCLi) and the Dynamic Polar Positioning (DPoP) framework, used with executive teams from Fortune 500 firms and government innovation programmes Keynote work at YPO Global Leadership Conference, APEC CEO Summit, the PwC US National Conference, Gartner ITxpo, TEDx and the Salesforce ANZ Roadshow Clients include Google, Nestlé, Boeing, Disney, Salesforce, Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, Citibank, Visa, Goldman Sachs, UBS and the UAE Prime Minister’s Office Biography The hardest part of innovation is not coming up with new ideas. It is running the rest of the business while you do it. That tension is the central argument of two books co-authored by Andrew and Gaia Grant: The Innovation Race and Who Killed Creativity?. It is also the problem most organisations get wrong when they accelerate AI adoption. The research backbone is Dr Gaia Grant’s doctoral work in Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Sydney Business School. Her PhD examined what lets some organisations innovate sustainably while others stall. Two tools came out of it: the academically validated Innovation Climate Leadership Indicator (iCLi) and Dynamic Polar Positioning (DPoP), both now used by executive teams worldwide. Andrew Grant founded Tirian International Consultancy and is the working other half of the research in the room. Gaia anchors the academic case; Andrew runs the live facilitation, with simulations, audience experiments and the kind of pacing that keeps a three-thousand-person Salesforce roadshow following the argument. The partnership is thirty years old, which is why the co-presented sessions read as a working dialogue, not a stitched-together keynote. The work has been used by Google, Nestlé, Boeing, Salesforce, Four Seasons and the UAE Prime Minister’s Office, often delivered with partner institutions including Duke Corporate Education. What gets repeated is the clearest signal of fit: roadshows that return, leadership programmes that scale, teams running iCLi diagnostics by the next planning cycle. Key speaking topics Innovation leadership and culture The explore-preserve paradox in AI adoption Sustainable innovation in complex organisations Creative intelligence and critical thinking Ambidextrous leadership Innovation diagnostics and culture transformation Ideal for C-suite teams running concurrent AI adoption and core-business protection mandates Heads of innovation, transformation and strategy in large, complex organisations Boards and CEOs designing a programme of cultural change with a long delivery arc Executive education and leadership programmes that need academically defensible content Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the explore-preserve tension that surfaces in every AI and innovation programme An honest read on where the organisation sits on innovation readiness, supported by the Innovation Climate Leadership Indicator (iCLi) A workable distinction between creative thinking and innovation execution, and where each is breaking down inside the audience’s own teams Visibility into which leadership archetypes in the room pull toward exploration and which pull toward preservation Decisions that hold up in a board paper because the framework behind them is academically validated