Executive Development

Why organisations work with Tom Gimbel Twenty-six years running a staffing firm gives him unusually direct visibility into why employees actually leave: it shows up in his content as specific tactical guidance, not generalised culture theory. He treats middle managers as the operating layer where culture is either built or broken, and gives leadership teams a practical agenda for upgrading that layer. His perspective on hiring, onboarding and retention is the perspective of a CEO who has had to make payroll, not a consultant selling frameworks. Inc. 5000 recognition for twelve consecutive years and a Staffing Industry Analysts Staffing 100 listing back the credibility of his operating record on talent. Biography highlights Founder of LaSalle Network, a national staffing, recruiting and culture firm headquartered in Chicago. LaSalle Network named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies for 12 consecutive years. Named to Staffing Industry Analysts’ Staffing 100 list of the most influential people in staffing, multiple years. Inducted into the Chicago Area Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame; named to Crain’s Chicago Business 40 Under 40. Regular media commentator on hiring, careers and company culture across CNBC Squawk Box, TODAY, Fox Business, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, The New York Times and Entrepreneur. Board roles include American Staffing Association and Start Early; member of YPO, the Economic Club of Chicago and Entrepreneurs’ Organization. Biography People do not quit companies. They quit managers. That observation, which sits at the centre of Tom Gimbel’s work, sounds simple but is uncomfortable for most executive teams, because it locates the retention problem in the layer of the organisation where the least leadership development happens. Gimbel founded LaSalle Network in Chicago in 1998 and ran it as CEO for 26 years. The firm reached the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies for 12 consecutive years and was repeatedly named to “best places to work” lists by Glassdoor, Fortune, Inc. and Crain’s Chicago Business. He was named to Staffing Industry Analysts’ Staffing 100 list of the most influential people in the industry. That operating record is what makes his content credible to senior buyers. He is a regular commentator on hiring and culture for CNBC, TODAY, Fox Business, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, The New York Times and Entrepreneur, and his core argument is consistent across those appearances: middle-manager capability is the real engine of retention, and most companies underinvest in it. Gimbel’s keynote material focuses on the practical levers a leadership team can pull, hiring discipline, onboarding, manager development, the often-overlooked “B player” cohort, and how to build a retention-focused culture that survives growth. The audience is the CEO, COO and CHRO who already know they have a culture problem and want a sharp operator’s view on what to do about it. Key speaking topics Company culture and retention Middle-manager development Hiring, onboarding and talent strategy Employee engagement Building and protecting workplace culture through growth The labour market and the future of work Ideal for CEOs, COOs and CHROs leading high-growth or post-acquisition organisations facing retention pressure. Executive teams looking to upgrade their middle-manager population as a strategic priority. HR and talent leadership communities at industry conferences and association events. Audience outcomes A clear-eyed view of why retention numbers move and which decisions actually shift them. A specific agenda for upgrading middle managers from individual contributors to people leaders. Tactical guidance on hiring and onboarding processes that protect culture as headcount scales. An operator’s perspective on company culture, distinct from consulting frameworks.

Why organisations work with Tim Foster He has coached at the elite level of two distinct high-pressure domains, Olympic rowing and Premier League football management, and can speak credibly to either room. He sat inside the Sydney 2000 coxless four with Redgrave, Pinsent and Cracknell, and writes and speaks honestly about the conflict, ego and near-collapse that preceded the gold medal, not the sanitised version. As Head of Performance at the League Managers Association he advises serving managers in the Premier League, EFL and WSL on their own performance, which is a vanishingly rare vantage point on leadership at the top of a public, results-driven business. He pairs that operational depth with an Oxford Saïd Executive MBA, so the language and frame translate cleanly into board and executive education contexts. His coaching career, as Head Coach of the Swiss national rowing team from 2007 to 2012 and earlier within the GB programme, gives him the rebuild-and-sustain story, not just the peak-moment story. Biography highlights Olympic gold medallist, men’s coxless four, Sydney 2000. Olympic bronze medallist, men’s coxless four, Atlanta 1996. Nine World Championship medals across a Great Britain career spanning three Olympic Games. Co-author, Four Men in a Boat: The Inside Story of the Sydney 2000 Coxless Four (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004). Head Coach, Swiss National Rowing Team, 2007 to 2012. Head of Performance, League Managers Association, advising managers in the Premier League, EFL and WSL. MBE, 2001 New Year Honours; Executive MBA, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Biography The coxless four that won gold in Sydney in 2000 is now part of British sporting folklore. Inside the boat it nearly came apart. Four strong-minded athletes, including Steve Redgrave chasing a fifth Olympic gold, spent four years managing each other as much as the racing. Tim Foster sat in the two seat, and his book Four Men in a Boat tells the version that does not make the highlight reel. That experience is the spine of the speaking work. The argument is not that elite sport maps neatly onto business; it is that the human mechanics of holding a small, ambitious team together under sustained pressure are the same. Standards drift, conflict gets postponed, and somebody has to be honest enough to call it. Foster has carried that practice into two further chapters of senior coaching. As Head Coach of the Swiss national rowing team from 2007 to 2012 he rebuilt a programme that had been adrift for years. As Head of Performance at the League Managers Association he now advises serving Premier League, EFL and Women’s Super League managers on their own leadership and career development, a counsel role inside one of the most exposed leadership jobs in British public life. He completed his Executive MBA at Saïd Business School after the coaching career was already well established, and now teaches and convenes at Saïd and Oxford Brookes alongside the consultancy work. The combination is unusual: a coach who has won at the highest level, who has rebuilt a national programme, who currently advises elite managers under public scrutiny, and who has the formal business education to speak to a board in its own language. Key speaking topics High-performance team dynamics Leadership under sustained pressure Coaching and talent development Performance culture Resilience and sustained excellence Lessons from elite sport for senior business teams Ideal for Executive committees and senior leadership offsites focused on team performance High-potential and succession development programmes CHRO and people-function leadership convenings Sales leadership and commercial leadership conferences with a performance frame Audience outcomes A clearer view of what actually holds an elite team together when pressure rises Specific, named examples from inside the Sydney 2000 crew that illustrate how conflict was managed, not avoided A frame for diagnosing where standards are drifting in their own teams A working language for coaching senior people who are not used to being coached Permission to address the human mechanics of performance directly, rather than through proxies

Why organisations work with Tim Collins He has commanded under live fire. The lessons on composure, communication, and accountability are drawn from running the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment Battle Group in Iraq, not a leadership model. His eve-of-battle speech is one of the most studied pieces of leadership communication of the last twenty years, hung in the Oval Office and quoted in business schools. Few speakers can talk about leadership communication from that position. Eight years as an officer in 22 SAS, including as Operations Officer, gives him a vocabulary on small-team performance, selection, and trust that very few corporate speakers can match credibly. He builds the talk around the audience’s actual leadership tension. The military stories are evidence, not the point. Biography highlights Commanded the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment Battle Group during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Eight years as an officer in 22 SAS, including service as Operations Officer. Appointed OBE in 2003 for service in Iraq. Author of Rules of Engagement: A Life in Conflict (Headline, 2006). Co-founder and Chairman of New Century Consulting, an intelligence-led security services firm working with government clients since 2006. Regular media commentator and columnist on defence and security, with bylines in the Telegraph and other UK national press. Biography The eve-of-battle address to the Royal Irish Regiment Battle Group, delivered in Kuwait on 19 March 2003, was extemporised and recorded in shorthand by a single journalist. President George W. Bush later had a copy hung in the Oval Office. It is now a fixture on leadership reading lists, taught for what it does in five minutes: set the moral frame, give the team something to hold onto, and accept the weight of command without flinching. The speech is not why senior leaders book Collins, but it explains what they get. He commanded a battalion in combat, with all that implies for accountability, communication, and the long shadow that command throws over a career. He came back to allegations of war crimes, cleared his name, and was promoted to colonel. That sequence, command, scrutiny, recovery, is the substance of what he teaches. Before Iraq, Collins served eight years in 22 SAS, including as Operations Officer, and led troops through Northern Ireland, the Falklands, and Cyprus. The earlier work shapes how he talks about selection, small-team trust, and what actually holds a unit together when the plan fails. His memoir Rules of Engagement (Headline, 2006) is the long-form version. Since retiring from the army in 2004 he has built New Century Consulting, an intelligence-led security firm working largely with government, and become a regular commentator on defence and security in the UK national press. The corporate keynote work draws on all of it: the command experience, the public scrutiny, the second career building a business with a payroll and contracts. Key speaking topics Command leadership under pressure Leadership communication in high-stakes moments Small-team performance and trust Decision-making with incomplete information Accountability and the weight of command Resilience after public scrutiny Lessons from operational command for civilian leaders Ideal for CEOs, executive committees, and divisional MDs preparing teams for high-stakes operational moments Leadership development programmes for newly senior leaders taking on command-level accountability Sales and operations conferences where the central leadership question is composure under pressure Board offsites focused on crisis readiness, succession, or the human side of restructure Audience outcomes A clearer picture of what leadership communication actually does in the moment that counts. Practical handles on composure, accountability, and team trust, drawn from command experience rather than theory. A more honest reading of what holds a team together when the plan changes. A reference point, the eve-of-battle speech, that audiences carry back into their own leadership conversations.

Why organisations work with Sydney Finkelstein His work is grounded in two decade-long research programmes: one into executive failure, published as Why Smart Executives Fail, and one into talent-generating leaders, published as Superbosses. Both give clients an evidence base that a typical leadership keynote does not. As Steven Roth Professor of Management at Dartmouth Tuck and Director of the Tuck Executive Program, he is embedded in the executive development the organisations he speaks to actually attend. Thinkers50 recognition, Fellowship of the Academy of Management, and multiple Best Paper Awards provide the independent external validation that boards and chief people officers look for before investing in a headline speaker. His client list, including American Express, Barclays, Boeing, Chevron, Deutsche Bank, GE, Glaxo and Heinz, means his material has been tested in front of some of the same leadership teams his audiences sit in. He presents research-heavy material in plain English, a point the Wall Street Journal called out explicitly in its review of Why Smart Executives Fail. Biography highlights Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College Director of the Tuck Executive Program Author of Superbosses (Penguin Portfolio, 2016) and Why Smart Executives Fail (Penguin Portfolio, 2003), among 20-plus books and 90-plus articles Thinkers50 ranked management thinker Fellow of the Academy of Management; Academy of Management Executive Best Paper Awards (1997, 2004) Regular BBC contributor; consulting clients including American Express, Barclays, Boeing, Chevron, Deutsche Bank, GE, Glaxo and Heinz Biography Why executives fail is a more answerable question than most organisations assume. Sydney Finkelstein’s career has been built around answering it. As Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and Director of the Tuck Executive Program, he has spent two decades combining academic rigour with the specifics of named corporate failures, a body of work that is now a standard reference in leadership and strategy literature. Why Smart Executives Fail, published in 2003 by Penguin Portfolio, remains the book that sets out the diagnostic pattern. The Wall Street Journal described it as «a marvel, a jargon-free business book based on serious research». His subsequent book, Superbosses, took the opposite question, why some leaders produce more outstanding talent than their peers, and spent ten years answering it through figures ranging from Ralph Lauren, Lorne Michaels and George Lucas to hedge fund founder Julian Robertson and chef Alice Waters. The thesis has since shaped how senior HR and CEO succession teams think about talent generation at the top of organisations. Finkelstein is one of the recurring names on the Thinkers50 list, a Fellow of the Academy of Management and the recipient of multiple Academy of Management Executive Best Paper Awards in 1997 and 2004. His writing extends beyond books to more than 90 articles, and he contributes regularly to the BBC. The consulting and speaking work sits with organisations including American Express, Barclays, Boeing, Chevron, Deutsche Bank, GE, Glaxo and Heinz. For boards and executive teams facing difficult succession, integration or leadership-change questions, the useful thing about Finkelstein is the combination of research archive and plain-language delivery. He arrives with frameworks his audiences have probably read in HBR, but with the corporate case material to apply them without slipping into abstraction. Key speaking topics Why smart executives fail Superbosses and talent-generating leadership Leadership decision-making under pressure Strategic renewal and «built to change» organisations Succession, talent pipelines and HR strategy for the C-suite Innovation leadership Ideal for Boards, CEOs and executive committees working through succession, turnaround or post-M&A leadership decisions CHROs and heads of executive development designing senior leadership and succession programmes Corporate universities and executive education programmes looking for a Thinkers50 headliner with teaching credentials Industry conferences and CEO summits where research-grade leadership content is expected Audience outcomes A specific framework for identifying the decision patterns that precede executive failure The Superbosses model of talent generation, translated into practical leadership behaviours Named case material drawn from high-profile corporate failures and successes, usable in the audience’s own context Reference points that connect academic research with clients including American Express, Barclays, Boeing and GE A sharper view of the link between leadership behaviour, talent pipeline and long-run organisational performance

Why organisations work with Stuart Lancaster A coaching record that proves the method twice: a national team rebuild with England and a sustained European-winning culture with Leinster, where the same principles produced different results in different conditions. Direct authorship of the 2018 Heineken Champions Cup-winning Leinster culture, alongside Leo Cullen, plus four consecutive PRO14 titles between 2018 and 2021. Few corporate speakers can point to a documented seven-year run of trophy-level output in their primary domain. A structured leadership masterclass product, not a one-off war-stories keynote. Lancaster runs his own corporate programme through Stuart Lancaster Leadership, which means the material has been used and refined with executive audiences over years. Hands-on practitioner credibility on the specific question senior leaders find hardest: how to set behavioural standards inside a high-status, high-ego group of professionals without losing performance. Biography highlights Head Coach, England Rugby, 2011 to 2015. Forty-six tests, twenty-eight wins, a Triple Crown and four Calcutta Cups. Senior coach, Leinster Rugby, 2016 to 2023. One European Rugby Champions Cup (2018) and four consecutive PRO14/URC titles (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021). Head Coach, Racing 92, from 2023. Head Coach, Connacht Rugby, from June 2025. Three Churchill Cup titles as Head Coach of England Saxons (2008, 2010, 2011) and National Division One title with Leeds Tykes (2006 to 2007). Founder of Stuart Lancaster Leadership, running corporate masterclasses and keynotes for business audiences. Biography Rebuilding a national rugby programme after a public failure is a leadership problem before it is a technical one. When Lancaster took the England head coach role in 2012, the squad was carrying the reputational damage of a disastrous 2011 World Cup. He spent the next four years rebuilding the behavioural standards, won twenty-eight of forty-six tests, took a Triple Crown and four Calcutta Cups, and then watched it end in the group stages of the 2015 World Cup on home soil. The next chapter is what makes the leadership argument credible. Joining Leinster as a senior coach in 2016, Lancaster worked alongside Leo Cullen on a culture that produced the 2018 European Rugby Champions Cup final, won 15-12 against Racing 92, and four consecutive PRO14/URC titles between 2018 and 2021. The same person, the same principles, a different system, and a sustained run of European and domestic trophies. That sequence is now the source material for his work with senior executives. Through Stuart Lancaster Leadership, he runs masterclasses and keynote sessions for corporate audiences on building high-performing teams, leadership under pressure, and the practical detail of culture inside elite groups. The work is structured, not anecdotal: behavioural standards, feedback mechanics, role clarity, how leaders show up in front of their group when results are poor. Since 2023 he has continued to coach at the highest level, first at Racing 92 in the Top 14 and now as Head Coach of Connacht Rugby, appointed in June 2025. The leadership method is not retrospective; it is being tested again, on the field, while the corporate audience is watching. Key speaking topics Building high-performing teams Culture and behavioural standards in elite groups Leadership under public scrutiny and after setback Trust, feedback and communication inside senior teams Resilience and sustained performance through change Authentic leadership for introverts and extroverts Ideal for Chief executives, executive committees and senior leadership groups responsible for performance over multi-year cycles Chief people officers and HR directors building leadership development programmes anchored in real team-leadership practice Sales, professional services and trading leadership teams operating under high pressure and public results Conference audiences of senior managers where leadership and team-performance content is the primary brief Audience outcomes A concrete reference model for what cultural standards look like inside an elite-performance group, drawn from named examples at England and Leinster Sharper thinking on the difference between leading through good results and leading through bad ones Practical language for the behavioural side of leadership: standards, feedback, role clarity, the leader’s own conduct in front of the group A counterpoint to abstract leadership content, grounded in a domain where results are public, weekly and unforgiving

Why organisations work with Stew Friedman Total Leadership is one of the few leadership methods built inside a Fortune 10 operating environment, Ford Motor Company, and then road-tested through a top-five business school for two decades. It has the rigour of academic work and the realism of factory-floor change. He gives executive teams a usable language for the trade-off they actually face, which is not work versus life but performance under pressure versus depletion of the people delivering it. His framework converts a soft topic into a measurable one. Participants run small structured experiments and report performance gains across four domains, which gives HR and L&D leaders something concrete to point at. Thinkers50 named him the world’s number one thinker on talent in 2015 and inducted him into the Hall of Fame in 2023, which is unusually strong recognition in a category that buyers are now under board pressure to take seriously. He works at the level senior buyers want, which is senior leaders and high-potential cohorts, and he is comfortable in front of a board, an executive offsite, or a long-form development programme. Biography highlights Emeritus Practice Professor of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, on faculty since 1984. Founder of the Wharton Leadership Program and the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, both established in 1991. Former senior executive for leadership development at Ford Motor Company, where he ran the Leadership Development Center and a corporate programme reaching 2,500 managers a year. Author of Total Leadership (Harvard Business Review Press), Leading the Life You Want, and Parents Who Lead. Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award for Talent, 2015, and inductee into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, 2023. Families and Work Institute Work Life Legacy Award, 2013. Host of Work and Life on SiriusXM Wharton Business Radio. Biography Ford Motor Company in the late 1990s was the proving ground for an idea that most leadership programmes still avoid: that the performance of senior leaders is inseparable from the rest of their lives, and that pretending otherwise produces fragile executives and exhausted teams. Friedman ran that experiment as the company’s senior executive for leadership development from 1999 to 2001, leading the Leadership Development Center and a programme that touched 2,500 managers a year. What he took back to Wharton became Total Leadership, the book and the method. The argument is simple to state and difficult to execute. A leader has four domains, work, home, community and self, and the job is to design small experiments that produce gains across all four at once. The method is taught inside Wharton’s MBA and executive programmes and has been delivered to thousands of leaders inside companies that cannot afford to treat senior burnout as a private matter. The intellectual home for the work is the Wharton Leadership Program and the Work/Life Integration Project, both of which Friedman founded in 1991 and ran for decades. He has written Total Leadership, Leading the Life You Want, and, with Alyssa F. Westring, Parents Who Lead. Harvard Business Review has carried more than fifty of his digital pieces. The external recognition matters because the category does. Thinkers50 ranked him the world’s number one thinker on talent in 2015 and inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2023. The Families and Work Institute gave him its Work Life Legacy Award. For a senior buyer trying to fix the gap between what their leaders are asked to deliver and what their workforce is willing to give, that is the body of work in the room. Key speaking topics Leadership impact in all parts of life Total Leadership and four-way wins Leadership development inside large organisations Work and life integration as a performance question Engagement and the contract between leaders and the people they lead Talent strategy and senior leader development Parenting, career, and the dual-career executive household Ideal for CEO, COO, and executive committees rebuilding the leadership model after restructure or sustained pressure CHRO and chief talent officers responsible for senior leader development and retention Boards looking at engagement and burnout as a governance and risk issue, not a perks question High-potential cohorts inside leadership academies and corporate universities Audience outcomes A different working definition of leadership performance, one that includes the durability of the leader and the team, not just quarterly output A simple structure for designing small experiments that improve performance and wellbeing at the same time A language senior teams can use with each other about pressure, depletion and trade-offs without it sliding into a wellbeing conversation A clearer sense of what the next generation of senior leaders actually need from their organisations, and what they will not accept

Why organisations work with Steve Richards Decades of first-hand interviews with serving and former prime ministers, ministers and senior advisers, which is the basis of an Atlantic Books trilogy on leadership in Number 10 rather than political history written from a distance. A leadership lens on government that translates directly into corporate questions about succession, executive isolation, decision-making under public scrutiny, and the gap between strategy and execution. Editorial credibility built across the New Statesman, The Independent, The Guardian and BBC Radio 4’s Week in Westminster, which gives boards and policy audiences a commentator they already trust. A genuine performer’s command of a room, developed across a decade of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Politics one-man show at the Edinburgh Fringe, which makes him as effective chairing a senior dinner as delivering a keynote. Biography highlights Political Editor of the New Statesman, then Chief Political Commentator at The Independent and Independent on Sunday from 2000. Regular presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Week in Westminster, with BBC television series on Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn. Author of The Prime Ministers: Reflections on Leadership from Wilson to Johnson, Atlantic Books. Author of The Prime Ministers We Never Had: Success and Failure from Butler to Corbyn, Atlantic Books. Author of Turning Points: Crisis and Change in Modern Britain, from 1945 to Truss, Macmillan, named in The Times Best Politics and Current Affairs Books of the Year. Creator and performer of Rock ‘n’ Roll Politics, a touring stage show and podcast that ran for ten consecutive years at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Biography The most useful evidence on leadership under pressure sits in government, where the same individuals can be observed across cabinet, opposition and crisis, often with the receipts public. Steve Richards has spent his career inside that material. As Political Editor of the New Statesman and then Chief Political Commentator at The Independent, he conducted long-form interviews with most living UK prime ministers and the people who advised them. That body of work became a leadership trilogy with Atlantic Books. The Prime Ministers reads ten occupants of Number 10 from Wilson to Johnson against the same questions: what they understood about power before they had it, what they did with the institution once they were inside, and why most of them ended badly. The Prime Ministers We Never Had applies the same lens to the figures who came close, including Butler, Healey and Corbyn. Turning Points, published by Macmillan in 2023, was named in The Times Best Politics and Current Affairs Books of the Year and steps further back, to ten moments that reshaped post-war Britain. On stage, Richards is unusual among British political commentators. He has built Rock ‘n’ Roll Politics into a touring one-man show and podcast that ran for ten consecutive years at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The performance discipline travels: he chairs senior dinners and conferences with a journalist’s command of evidence and a stand-up’s command of a room. For corporate audiences, the value is translation. Cabinet government is an unusually rich case study in executive constraint, succession, advisory teams that work and do not, and the limits of personal authority under public scrutiny. Richards moves between Westminster and the boardroom without losing the specificity that makes the analysis useful. Key speaking topics UK political leadership and prime ministerial power The executive under public scrutiny Outsider movements and political disruption Post-war turning points and political change in Britain Number 10 advisory teams and decision-making Media, message and political communication Ideal for Boards and executive committees seeking analytical commentary on UK political risk and leadership transitions CEOs, chairs and advisers studying succession, executive isolation and decision-making under scrutiny Public affairs, policy and government relations leaders Senior dinners, partner conferences and chaired panels where credibility and command of a room matter equally Audience outcomes A clearer reading of how UK political power actually flows around Number 10, and what that means for forecasting policy direction A leadership case framework drawn from real prime ministerial successes and failures, applicable to corporate succession and executive transitions A sharper sense of why outsider politics keeps disrupting the centre, and how organisations should price that risk A view of post-war turning points that puts current volatility into longer-cycle perspective

Why organisations work with Skip Bowman The Safe2Great model is the only publicly available integrated framework that treats psychological safety and growth mindset as a single system – giving organisations one coherent diagnostic language that connects leadership behaviour, team dynamics, and organisational culture without requiring them to hold multiple competing frameworks simultaneously. The Growth Mindset Leadership 360 converts leadership culture into quantified, benchmarked data – replacing the subjective impressions that dominate most culture assessments with comparative insight on where specific leaders are enabling or blocking growth, measured against a global dataset. His research found that more than 60% of leaders assess their own impact inaccurately relative to how their teams experience them – a specific, repeatable finding that reframes the conversation with senior leadership teams from aspiration to accountability. The Safe2Great model names and maps three distinct protective mindsets – controlling-competitive, complying-complacent, and critical-skeptical – that remain invisible in standard leadership frameworks, enabling organisations to identify the specific cultural blockers at play rather than working against a generic leadership gap. Both the book and the assessment tools are designed for practitioner deployment through a formal accreditation programme, meaning organisations can embed the methodology independently – Bowman’s work scales beyond the keynote. Biography highlights Author of Safe to Great: The New Psychology of Leadership (Figure 1 Publishing, 2023) Creator of the Safe2Great model and suite of four proprietary diagnostic tools including the Growth Mindset Leadership 360 – available in over ten languages Founder and CEO of Global Mindset, leadership and organisational development consultancy based in Denmark MA in Psychology and Languages (Copenhagen); MA in Organisational Psychology (Denmark); trained in cross-cultural management, group dynamics, and coaching Over 25 years of applied consulting with global organisations including Danfoss, Siemens, Nestlé, Ericsson, VELUX, and Merck Bilingual in English and Danish; consulting engagements across Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East Biography Skip Bowman starts from a finding that most leadership programmes prefer to avoid: the majority of leaders believe they behave very differently from how their teams actually experience them. His Safe2Great research, conducted across more than 500 leadership teams, found that over 60% of leaders inaccurately assessed their own impact. That data point is the foundation of everything he does. His 2023 book, Safe to Great: The New Psychology of Leadership (Figure 1 Publishing), sets out the argument in full. The central claim is that psychological safety is not a cultural aspiration that organisations approach through values statements and team workshops – it is a direct output of specific, identifiable leadership behaviours. The Safe2Great model maps those behaviours against three protective mindsets – controlling-competitive, complying-complacent, and critical-sceptical – and connects them to a suite of validated diagnostic tools that make the invisible visible. The Growth Mindset Leadership 360 is the operational core of this system. It benchmarks leaders against a global dataset, measuring the behaviours that enable or obstruct growth-oriented team dynamics. Combined with the Great Teams Assessment and Culture for Growth Survey, the result is an assessment architecture that links individual leadership behaviour to team experience to organisational culture in a single, connected methodology. The tools are available in over ten languages and come with a formal practitioner accreditation programme. Bowman grew up in Perth, Australia, and has spent the majority of the last 25 years in Europe – working in Switzerland, England, France, and Denmark and consulting across Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. He holds an MA in Psychology and Languages from Copenhagen and an MA in Organisational Psychology from Denmark, with additional training in cross-cultural management, group dynamics, and coaching. His consulting client history includes Danfoss, Siemens, Nestlé, Ericsson, VELUX, and Merck. Key speaking topics Psychological safety and leadership behaviour Growth mindset in leadership and organisational culture The Safe2Great model and leadership diagnostics Transforming organisational culture Leading change and transformation Cross-cultural and global leadership Leadership development and behavioural change Ideal for Senior leadership teams and executive committees navigating transformation or cultural change CHROs and people directors responsible for leadership development strategy and investment decisions L&D and organisational development leads in multinational or cross-border organisations Boards evaluating the relationship between leadership behaviour and organisational performance Audience outcomes A clear, working model for understanding how leadership behaviour directly creates or dismantles psychological safety in teams – beyond the concept, into measurable practice Ability to identify the three protective mindsets that most commonly obstruct cultural change, and to recognise them in their own leadership environment A shared organisational language connecting leadership assessment, team dynamics, and culture in a single coherent framework Practical understanding of what a diagnostic-led approach to leadership development looks like, and why design matters more than content in producing lasting behavioural change The research basis for understanding why leadership development programmes frequently fail to change the behaviours they are designed to change

Why organisations work with Simon Walker Operational leadership credibility, not metaphor. Walker took Toshiba Wave Warrior to second place in the BT Global Challenge as the fleet’s youngest skipper, then ran the company that organised the race. Boards hear leadership lessons drawn from a record, not an anecdote. Twenty years of practice inside corporate leadership development through his own firms, talentsmoothie and my360plus, including 360-degree feedback systems used inside live executive programmes. Academic anchoring at Henley Business School and Southampton Business School as a Visiting Executive Development Fellow, which gives the work a research spine that withstands scrutiny from heads of L&D and CHROs. A coherent point of view on generational dynamics, grounded in his co-authored “Generation Y: what they want from work” research, that helps leadership teams stop treating generational friction as an HR irritation and start treating it as a leadership question. Range across formats. Walker is commissioned for keynote, masterclass, mentoring and senior-team facilitation, which suits buyers who need the same voice across a multi-touch leadership programme rather than a one-off platform speech. Biography highlights Skipper of Toshiba Wave Warrior, BT Global Challenge 1996/97, second place, youngest skipper in the fleet. Former CEO of Challenge Business, organiser of the 2000/01 and 2004/05 Global Challenge round-the-world yacht races. Co-founder of talentsmoothie, a leadership and people development consultancy. Co-founder of my360plus, an online 360-degree feedback and executive coaching platform. Visiting Executive Development Fellow, Henley Business School and Southampton Business School. Co-author, “Generation Y: what they want from work.” Featured in Fast Company’s “Who’s Fast 2001” leadership profile. Biography Most leadership lessons come from books. A smaller number come from a documented record under conditions that punish poor judgement. The 1996/97 BT Global Challenge sent fourteen identical yachts the wrong way around the world against the prevailing winds, and a 28-year-old skipper named Simon Walker brought Toshiba Wave Warrior home in second place, the youngest in the fleet. Fast Company later profiled him under the line, “I can only compete through my crew.” That insight, that a leader competes through other people, has shaped the rest of his career. After the race he ran Challenge Business, organising the 2000/01 and 2004/05 Global Challenges, then turned full-time to corporate leadership development. He co-founded talentsmoothie, a research-based consultancy, and my360plus, an online 360-degree feedback and coaching platform now used inside executive programmes. His academic anchoring sits at Henley Business School and Southampton Business School, where he is a Visiting Executive Development Fellow. The work covers leadership behaviour under pressure, the practical mechanics of executive development, and the generational shifts reshaping how teams form and commit, ground he covered first in the co-authored report “Generation Y: what they want from work.” What buyers tend to remember after a session is the specificity. The detail of how a crew breaks down on the seventh gale of a Southern Ocean leg maps closely onto how a leadership team breaks down in the third quarter of a difficult restructure. The diagnostic is the same. Walker’s value to a senior audience is that he has run both kinds of crew and can talk about each in the language of the other. Key speaking topics Leadership under sustained pressure Executive development and 360-degree feedback Future of work and the changing employment contract Generational diversity in senior teams Team dynamics and crew leadership Technology and the behavioural shift inside organisations Talent attraction and retention Ideal for CEOs, CHROs and heads of leadership development designing senior leadership programmes Boards and executive teams entering or recovering from a sustained period of change Talent and L&D leaders rethinking executive development for a multigenerational workforce Senior leadership offsites where the brief is composure, judgement and crew dynamics rather than a single topic Audience outcomes A clearer read on how leadership behaviour shifts when pressure becomes sustained rather than episodic A sharper diagnostic for where a senior team is likely to break down before it does A practical view of how 360-degree feedback and structured executive development translate into changed behaviour A more grounded conversation about generational expectations inside the leadership pipeline Reference points and language that senior leaders can use back at work, drawn from a documented offshore command record rather than abstraction

Why organisations work with Ronan Harrington He has built and tested the Resilient Performance Method directly with Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG, so the model arrives in the room already pressure-tested by the firms that advise on the same problems. His foresight background at the UK Foreign Office gives leaders a credible reading of why the operating environment has changed, before he gets to what to do about it personally and as a team. He is a guest teacher on the KPMG C-Suite Leadership Programme, which makes him a familiar choice for executive development teams looking for a speaker who works alongside their existing leadership curriculum. His chronic illness and political burnout story is verifiable and used as evidence, not as theatre, which lets the resilience argument land with senior audiences who are usually allergic to motivational content. Buyers report a practical takeaway: leaders leave with a small set of decisions about how they spend energy, attention and team time, rather than a generic call to look after themselves. Biography highlights Former Futurist to the UK Foreign Office, authoring a long-range outlook on the world of 2030 and advising senior officials on geopolitical risk. Creator of the Resilient Performance Method, developed with Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG. Guest teacher on the KPMG C-Suite Leadership Programme and at Oxford University. Founder of Alter Ego, a global network of progressive leaders. Former strategic lead at RethinkX, leading narrative work on the “Rethinking Humanity” report. LinkedIn Top Voice on Public Speaking and Top 5 Best Storyteller at the 2023 Speaker Awards. Biography Most resilience content sounds the same once a senior audience has heard it twice. Harrington is interesting because his track record is in foresight, not in sport psychology, and the model he teaches was built with the firms that advise the same boards he now speaks to. He worked as a Futurist at the UK Foreign Office, advising on geopolitical risk and authoring a long-range outlook on the world of 2030. The brief gave him a structural view of why the operating environment has shifted from cyclical pressure to permanent volatility, which is the frame he now brings to executive audiences. The Resilient Performance Method was developed with Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG, and Harrington is a guest teacher on the KPMG C-Suite Leadership Programme. The method covers how senior leaders allocate energy, attention and team capacity through restructure, AI rollouts and prolonged uncertainty. It is taught as practice, not as inspiration. The personal story is load-bearing rather than decorative. After a period operating at national political level he was diagnosed with a lifetime chronic pain condition, and seven years of managing that condition is what gives his content on energy, recovery and pace its specificity. Clients including L’Oreal, Siemens Energy, Sky, Aviva, IHG, TUI, Sage, Kimberly-Clark, A&O Shearman, DLA Piper, the UK Treasury and Oxford University use him as the speaker who makes the resilience conversation operational at executive level. Key speaking topics Resilient high performance under sustained pressure Leadership through restructuring and prolonged uncertainty Burnout prevention in senior teams Human-first leadership in the AI transition Psychological safety and candour at executive level Energy and attention management for leaders Mental health and recovery for senior professionals Ideal for C-suite and senior leadership offsites where the agenda is performance, not wellbeing as a side topic. Partner and director audiences in professional services facing prolonged client and restructuring pressure. Heads of executive development and leadership programmes building resilience modules into senior curricula. Transformation and change leads running multi-year AI or restructuring programmes that are fatiguing leadership populations. Audience outcomes A working definition of resilient performance that goes beyond personal wellbeing into team-level decisions. A specific read on which signals of burnout to act on early in a senior population. Practical decisions about how leaders allocate energy, attention and team time during sustained pressure. A reframe of human capability under AI-driven change, focused on judgement, candour and recovery rather than tooling. A vocabulary leadership teams can carry into their own meetings about pace, candour and what they will stop doing.

Why organisations work with Roger Federer He brings a counterintuitive statistical framework that reframes how leaders think about failure: in winning nearly 80% of career matches, he won only 54% of points – a figure that challenges any organisation confusing short-term setbacks with structural decline. His argument that “effortless is a myth” gives boards and executive teams a rigorous, credible case against talent mythology – and for the disciplines of preparation that happen before performance becomes visible. He is one of the few athlete speakers whose post-competition record strengthens rather than dilutes his authority: co-founding TEAM8, co-creating the Laver Cup as a sanctioned ATP property, and reaching Forbes billionaire status in 2025 gives him standing in commercial and entrepreneurial conversations that purely competitive athletes cannot match. The Roger Federer Foundation – reaching over 3.1 million children and more than 59,000 teachers across six African nations and Switzerland – demonstrates that his stated commitment to purpose and long-term impact is operational, not rhetorical. Five Laureus World Sportsman of the Year awards across 14 years, not clustered at a career peak, make the case for sustained excellence in a way a single extraordinary season cannot. Biography highlights 20 Grand Slam men’s singles titles; 310 weeks ranked ATP world No. 1, including 237 consecutive weeks – both Open Era records Eight-time Wimbledon singles champion – the Open Era record Five-time Laureus World Sportsman of the Year (2005–2008, 2018); also won the Laureus Comeback of the Year award in 2018 Co-founder of TEAM8 sports and entertainment agency (2013) and co-creator of the Laver Cup, now a sanctioned ATP Tour event Founder and President of the Roger Federer Foundation: over 3.1 million children and 59,000+ teachers reached across six African countries and Switzerland since 2003 Honorary doctorate and commencement speaker, Dartmouth College, 2024 Named to Forbes World Billionaires list (2025); one of a small number of athletes ever to reach that threshold Arthur Ashe Humanitarian of the Year Award (2006 and 2013); UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Biography Roger Federer held the world No. 1 ATP ranking for 310 weeks, won 20 Grand Slam singles titles across 24 years of professional competition, and remains the most successful men’s singles player in Wimbledon’s Open Era. Those are the competitive facts. The more useful question for organisations is not what he achieved but how he maintained it – across generations of rivals, repeated major injuries, and a career long enough to have been written off and recovered from multiple times. At his 2024 Dartmouth commencement address – where he received an honorary doctorate – Federer offered a precise answer to that question. In winning nearly 80% of career matches, he won only 54% of the points played. The insight he draws from that data is direct: high performance is not about avoiding failure, it is about learning not to compound it. The mental discipline he calls “it’s only a point” is both a competitive practice and an organisational philosophy – one with clear application to how leadership teams manage quarterly reversals, strategic miscalculations, and the pressure of sustained expectation. His post-competition record extends that credibility into commercial and institutional territory. In 2013, Federer co-founded TEAM8 with agent Tony Godsick – a boutique sports and entertainment company that also created the Laver Cup, now a sanctioned ATP Tour event. His Roger Federer Foundation, which he founded in 2003 at the age of 22, has reached over 3.1 million children and trained more than 59,000 teachers across six African nations and Switzerland. In 2025, Forbes recognised him as a billionaire – one of the smallest group of athletes in history to reach that threshold. For senior leadership audiences, what Federer offers is structural rather than motivational: three documented frameworks, a statistical foundation for how he thought about failure, and a body of work – competitive, entrepreneurial, philanthropic – broad enough to make the argument that sustained excellence is a design choice, not an accident of talent. Key speaking topics Sustained high performance and career longevity Resilience and recovery under competitive pressure The psychology of preparation and deliberate practice Failure as a structural component of peak performance Purpose, legacy, and leadership beyond the primary mission Athlete-led entrepreneurship and institutional building Philanthropic strategy and long-term impact at scale Ideal for Senior leadership teams and C-suite audiences seeking a substantive framework for sustained organisational performance, not motivational content CHROs and talent directors building high-performance cultures over extended time horizons Chief executives navigating competitive reversal, strategic reset, or the pressure of multi-year performance expectations Global corporate events requiring a speaker of rare international standing who can anchor a serious conversation about excellence, resilience, and purpose Audience outcomes A reframed understanding of resilience as designed-in preparation, not post-failure recovery The “54% of points” framework for separating short-term setbacks from long-term performance trajectory – applicable to individuals, teams, and organisations Specific, named principles for sustaining excellence across decades rather than individual seasons or peaks A credible case study in building purpose-driven institutions alongside – and after – a career at the highest competitive level Perspective on the transition from individual elite performance to entrepreneurial and institutional leadership

Why organisations work with Robin Sieger Natural Born Winners has sold internationally in dozens of countries and around twenty languages and remains in print twenty-five years after first publication, giving senior audiences a recognised body of work rather than a one-off keynote. His material on success as a learnable design, drawn in part from his own cancer recovery in his late twenties, lands with leadership audiences who are tired of generic resilience talks and want something with a real story behind it. Decades of repeat work with Microsoft, IBM, HSBC, Coca-Cola, Ford, Vodafone and Unilever means he understands a corporate room and pitches to the actual pressures of senior commercial life, not a public-speaking circuit version of them. Fellowship of the Professional Speaking Association in the UK and a main-platform slot at the National Speakers Association Convention in the United States place him among a small group of speakers recognised by their own profession on both sides of the Atlantic. Biography highlights Author of Natural Born Winners (Random House), an international bestseller in dozens of countries, with a 25th Anniversary edition published in 2024. Author of further books on mindset and performance, including You Can Change Your Life Any Time You Want, 42 Days to Wealth Health and Happiness, Silent Mind Golf, Silent Mind Putting and Golf Under Pressure. Natural Born Winners adapted into a No. 1-rated television series for Scottish Television. Fellow of the Professional Speaking Association, one of the first three UK speakers to be awarded the fellowship. 2006: first European speaker invited to present on the main platform of the National Speakers Association Convention in the United States. Long-standing speaker for Microsoft, IBM, Coca-Cola, Nokia, HSBC, Virgin, Ford, Merrill Lynch, BBC, Vodafone, Unilever, General Motors and McDonald’s. Biography A cancer diagnosis at twenty-nine forced a question most leadership writers approach from the outside. The experience pushed Robin Sieger out of a career in television comedy and into a long inquiry into why some people recover their footing under extreme pressure and others do not. The book that followed, Natural Born Winners, was published by Random House in 1999 and has stayed in print and in translation for a quarter of a century. He built Sieger International around that thesis, working with senior teams at Microsoft, IBM, Coca-Cola, HSBC, Ford, Vodafone and Unilever on the psychology of performance and self-leadership. The framing is practical rather than therapeutic: how leaders think under load, what they do with setback, and how they hold composure when the conditions are not favourable. Alongside the corporate work, Sieger has written further books on mindset and on the mental side of golf with Tony Jacklin and David Leadbetter, and was made a Fellow of the Professional Speaking Association as one of the first three UK recipients. In 2006, he became the first European speaker invited to the main platform of the National Speakers Association Convention in the United States. What boards and senior teams take from him is a credible voice on resilience that is not a wellbeing talk. The case is that performance under pressure is a learnable discipline, evidenced by his own recovery and a long client list of organisations who have brought him back to repeat the conversation with new cohorts of leaders. Key speaking topics Psychology of peak performance Resilience and recovery under pressure Self-leadership and personal effectiveness Mindset and behaviour change Motivation in periods of change and uncertainty Creating a success culture inside teams Mental performance in sport and business Ideal for Senior leadership offsites where the agenda is composure, decision-making and personal performance under sustained pressure. Sales and commercial conferences looking to lift performance without resorting to generic motivational content. Programmes for high-potential leaders moving into roles where the variable is no longer skill but how they handle setback. After-dinner and main-stage slots at corporate annual conferences where the audience expects a recognised author with a serious back catalogue. Audience outcomes A clearer account of why some people and teams recover faster from setback than others, grounded in lived experience rather than slogans. Language and frames from Natural Born Winners that senior leaders can use with their own teams the following week. A more honest reading of where motivation comes from in mature commercial organisations, beyond incentive design. A sharper sense of what self-leadership actually looks like in practice for people running pressured roles. A reset on how the audience thinks about their own response to pressure, not as a wellbeing issue but as a performance variable.