Executive Development

Why organisations work with Oleg Konovalov He has codified vision as a working leadership skill in The Vision Code (Wiley, 2021), drawing on primary interviews with senior visionary leaders rather than abstracted theory. He was named #1 Global Leading Coach at the Marshall Goldsmith Thinkers50 Awards, a credible signal of standing among working executive coaches. His Visionary Leadership Framework gives boards and executive committees a shared vocabulary for diagnosing where a vision is failing, before it shows up in numbers. He works on the C-suite side of the desk: the brief is usually about getting senior teams aligned and credible to their own organisations, not motivational set pieces. His earlier books on organisational anatomy and corporate culture mean he can connect a vision conversation to the structural and cultural conditions that allow it to land. Biography highlights Doctoral degree, Durham University Business School. Author of The Vision Code (Wiley, 2021), with foreword by Marshall Goldsmith. Author of LEADEROLOGY, Corporate Superpower, Organisational Anatomy, Hidden Russia, and The Fisherman’s Path to Leadership. Named #1 Global Leading Coach, Marshall Goldsmith Thinkers50 Awards. Shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Distinguished Award in Leadership, 2021. Listed in Global Gurus Top 30 in Leadership; Forbes contributor. Biography Most corporate visions do not survive contact with the operating year. They sit on a wall, get quoted in townhalls, and quietly disconnect from the decisions executives actually make. Oleg Konovalov’s work begins from that disconnect, and treats vision as a measurable leadership skill rather than a communications artefact. The Vision Code, published by Wiley in 2021 with a foreword by Marshall Goldsmith, set out his Visionary Leadership Framework. The book is built on primary interviews with senior leaders across industries, including Garry Ridge of WD-40 and the branding strategist Martin Lindstrom, and it argues that vision can be diagnosed, taught, and executed with the same rigour as any other senior capability. His earlier books, including LEADEROLOGY, Organisational Anatomy, and Corporate Superpower, sit alongside that work and connect the vision conversation to organisational design and culture. He holds a doctorate from Durham University Business School and writes regularly for Forbes. The recognition reflects working credibility with senior leaders rather than a media profile alone. He was named #1 Global Leading Coach at the Marshall Goldsmith Thinkers50 Awards, shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Distinguished Award in Leadership, and listed in the Global Gurus Top 30 in Leadership. Key speaking topics Visionary leadership Vision execution and strategy alignment Corporate culture in the digital era Leadership in disruption Organisational diagnosis Executive coaching and C-suite development Ideal for CEOs and executive committees setting or resetting strategic direction Board chairs and non-executive directors assessing senior leadership capability CHROs and chief learning officers designing senior leadership development Founders and scale-up leaders translating ambition into an operating vision Audience outcomes A working definition of vision that can be tested against the organisation’s current direction A diagnostic for where a stated vision is failing inside the leadership team A clearer view of how culture, structure, and vision interact in execution Practical questions senior leaders can take into their next strategy or board conversation

Why organisations work with Nigel Risner He gives senior leaders a working language for personality difference inside their own teams, the Zoo Keeper model of Lions, Monkeys, Elephants, and Dolphins, that they can use in the next leadership meeting. He is one of six UK holders of the Professional Speaking Award of Excellence (PSAE) from the Professional Speakers Association, a peer-judged credential that signals platform craft of a different order from a typical motivational keynote. He is the only speaker named Speaker of the Year by all four major CEO peer-advisory networks in Europe (Vistage, The Academy for Chief Executives, TEC, and Footdown), which is the closest thing the CEO peer-group market has to a buying signal. His material is built from running a brokerage as one of the UK’s youngest CEOs and rebuilding after the late-1980s financial crash, so the leadership content is grounded in operating experience, not theory. He works at any audience size, from a 12-person CEO peer group to conference rooms of several thousand, with the same delivery discipline. Biography highlights Author of “The Impact Code: Live the Life You Deserve” (Capstone) and its follow-up “The Impact Code at Work”. Author of “It’s a Zoo Around Here: The new rules for better communication”, the source text of his Zoo Keeper personality framework. Author of “You Had Me at Hello: The new rules for better networking”. One of six UK speakers awarded the PSAE (Professional Speaking Award of Excellence) by the Professional Speakers Association. Speaker of the Year for Vistage, The Academy for Chief Executives, The Executive Committee, and Footdown. Client work spans BT, BSkyB, Pfizer, GSK, Siemens, HSBC, Pepsi, British Airways, Marks and Spencer, and Royal Bank of Scotland. Biography Most leadership problems inside large organisations look strategic and turn out to be communicative. A capable executive briefs a team, the team agrees in the room, and three weeks later the work has not moved. The diagnosis is usually that the leader spoke in their own dominant style and assumed the rest of the room would translate. Nigel Risner has built a twenty-year speaking career around fixing exactly that gap. His Zoo Keeper framework, drawn from his book “It’s a Zoo Around Here: The new rules for better communication”, gives leaders a fast, memorable way to read the personalities in front of them: Lions who want results, Monkeys who want energy, Elephants who want detail, Dolphins who want harmony. The point is operational. A leader who can flex into all four registers gets decisions made in the meeting rather than relitigated by email afterwards. The credential layer is unusual for a motivational speaker. Risner holds the PSAE from the Professional Speakers Association, a peer-judged award held by only six UK speakers, and is the only speaker in Europe to have been named Speaker of the Year by Vistage, The Academy for Chief Executives, The Executive Committee, and Footdown. Those four bodies are the gatekeepers for CEO peer-advisory work in Europe, which is why his material reads as built for boards and executive teams rather than for general audiences. His later books, “The Impact Code: Live the Life You Deserve” and “The Impact Code at Work”, widen the same argument into executive presence and personal credibility. The throughline is consistent. Senior leaders are paid for the impact they have on other people in a room, and that impact is a learnable craft, not an inherited trait. Key speaking topics Leadership communication and executive presence Personality and behavioural styles in teams Building high-trust senior teams Influence and personal impact for senior leaders Leading through change and disruption Networking and first-impression effectiveness Motivation and peak performance for executive groups Ideal for CEO peer-advisory groups (Vistage, Academy for Chief Executives, YPO style forums) where the audience is operating leaders Senior leadership offsites where the brief is “we are not communicating well as a team” Sales and client-facing leadership conferences focused on influence and presence Newly promoted senior leaders in formal executive development programmes Audience outcomes A practical model for identifying the four dominant personality styles in their own team and adjusting how they brief, sell, and decide A clearer read on which behaviours are reducing their personal impact at senior level Specific habits for opening meetings, opening conversations, and opening relationships in the first ten seconds Renewed appetite for leading the team rather than working around it A shared vocabulary the leadership team can carry into the next 90 days of meetings

Why organisations work with Monty Halls A first-hand account of leadership built in two domains where mistakes are not theoretical: Royal Marines command and multi-year expedition leadership across four global circumnavigations. Leaderbox, the training system he founded in 2016, gives clients a structured method drawn from military, elite sport and business practice rather than a one-off keynote moment. Three decades of working with teams under physical and psychological load, translated into language a corporate audience can use the next morning. Credibility on the substance of resilience that does not rely on rhetoric: the Bish Medal from the Scientific Exploration Society, an Honorary Doctor of Science from Plymouth University, presidency of the Galapagos Conservation Trust. An ability to hold an audience for an after-dinner or conference slot through specific story material, including the 2002 Mahabalipuram expedition and BBC Two “Great Escape” series, without sliding into generic adventure rhetoric. Biography highlights Former Royal Marines officer; served with the British Military Assistance and Training Team in South Africa during the early-1990s peace process. First Class Honours in Marine Biology, University of Plymouth, 1999. Honorary Doctor of Science, Plymouth University, 2010. Bish Medal, Scientific Exploration Society, 2003, for the expedition to the sunken temple complex at Mahabalipuram. Presenter of the BBC Two “Great Escape” trilogy (Applecross, North Uist, Connemara, 2009 to 2011) and the BBC Two series “Great Barrier Reef” (2012). Author of titles including “Monty Halls’ Great Escape: Beachcomber Cottage”, “The Fisherman’s Apprentice”, “Escaping Hitler” and “My Family and the Galapagos”. President of the Galapagos Conservation Trust since 2015. Patron of the Shark Trust and of Help for Heroes. Founder of Leaderbox, 2016. Biography Most leadership content describes how teams should behave on a good day. The harder material is what happens to a unit when it is cold, tired, behind schedule and short on information. Halls has spent a working life in environments where that is the operating condition, first as a Royal Marines officer, then as an expedition leader. After leaving the Marines he completed a First Class Honours degree in Marine Biology at the University of Plymouth and led the 2002 Scientific Exploration Society expedition to the sunken temples of Mahabalipuram in Tamil Nadu, work for which the Society awarded him the Bish Medal. He went on to four circumnavigations of the globe filming wildlife and adventure content for the BBC, Channel 4, National Geographic and Discovery, anchored by the BBC Two “Great Escape” series and the 2012 BBC Two production “Great Barrier Reef”. The corporate practice grew out of that. Halls founded Leaderbox in 2016 as a structured training system drawing on Royal Marines doctrine, elite sport and business practice, and now delivers leadership and team-building work to clients including Google, Visa and Virgin. His subject is the behaviour of teams under pressure, the conditions that create high-performing culture, and the discipline of self-leadership when a leader is as fatigued as the people they are responsible for. He is President of the Galapagos Conservation Trust, a patron of the Shark Trust and of Help for Heroes, and the author of nine books across exploration, marine biology and modern history, including “Escaping Hitler”, a study of the courage of Allied servicemen on the wartime escape lines through occupied Europe. Key speaking topics Leadership under pressure Team culture and high-performance environments Self-leadership and composure Resilience and decision-making in adverse conditions Expedition leadership lessons for corporate teams Marine conservation and the Galapagos Lessons from Royal Marines selection and training Ideal for CEOs, COOs and executive teams stress-testing how their leadership behaviour holds up under sustained operational pressure HR directors and L&D leads designing leadership development that goes beyond classroom theory Sales and operational leadership teams building high-trust, high-tempo culture Conference, leadership offsite and after-dinner audiences where credibility on resilience and team behaviour is the brief Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for what high-performing teams actually do differently when conditions deteriorate A clearer view of self-leadership as a daily discipline rather than a one-off response to crisis Specific, transferable lessons from Royal Marines training and expedition command that translate directly into commercial team settings Story material drawn from named expeditions and operational moments that audiences can carry into their own leadership conversations

Why organisations work with Miha Pogacnik His Macro Violin concept is cited by C. Otto Scharmer in Theory U and across MIT Sloan’s leadership writing. Senior teams engage with an arts-based framework that already has standing in serious management thought. He has worked inside the leadership floors of IBM, Microsoft, Bosch, Nike, Shell, Novartis and Porsche. The frame of reference is decades of access to people running companies that compete on judgment. His Resonance Platform method, taught at IEDC-Bled and in client sessions, moves a leadership group from positional debate into composed creative dialogue around the actual decision on the table. He has taught at Harvard, INSEAD, IMD, IESE Barcelona, CEIBS Shanghai and THNK Amsterdam, alongside his appointment at IEDC-Bled. The work is taken seriously inside management academia and in client rooms. Biography highlights Adjunct Professor of Arts and Leadership at IEDC-Bled School of Management; has taught at Harvard, INSEAD, IMD, IESE Barcelona, CEIBS Shanghai and THNK Amsterdam Macro Violin concept attributed to him is cited by C. Otto Scharmer in Theory U and across the MIT Sloan body of work on systemic leadership Founder of IDRIART (Institute for Development of Intercultural Relations through the Arts); originated the Chartres Festival d’Eté in 1981 Ambassador of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia Has worked with leadership teams at IBM, Microsoft, Nike, Shell, Novartis, Bosch, Coca-Cola and Porsche Speaker at the World Economic Forum (Davos and China), European Forum Alpbach and UN agencies; TEDx talk “A Creative Detour to Unleash Human Potential” Biography Most senior teams have absorbed every available framework for leadership. None of those frameworks change how they listen, or how they bring a room of expert voices into a coherent decision. The capacity that matters at the top is closer to conducting an orchestra than to running an analysis. That is the territory Miha Pogacnik has worked in for four decades. As Adjunct Professor of Arts and Leadership at IEDC-Bled School of Management, he uses musical performance to develop the listening and composed judgment that leadership at the top requires. His Resonance Platform method, taught in sessions with leadership teams at IBM, Microsoft, Bosch, Nike, Shell and Porsche, walks executives through the structural intelligence of a Bach fugue or a Brahms violin concerto and back to the decision on their desk. His distinctive intellectual contribution is the Macro Violin: the principle that a leader, like a violinist inside Chartres Cathedral, cannot perform on instrument alone but has to play the whole space. C. Otto Scharmer cites the concept in Theory U and across the MIT Sloan body of work on systemic leadership. That principle now sits at the centre of how arts-based leadership is taught at IEDC-Bled. The work has roots in something larger than corporate audiences. Pogacnik founded IDRIART in the early 1980s and went on to direct more than 200 intercultural festivals in crisis regions, including the Adriatic during the breakup of Yugoslavia and Central Europe in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He serves as Ambassador of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia. The first IDRIART festival ran at Chartres Cathedral in 1981, the same setting in which Pogacnik first identified the Macro Violin principle, and where the entire body of work begins. Key speaking topics Arts-based leadership development Listening as a leadership discipline Creativity and innovation through musical structure Cultural intelligence in international business Organisational learning through artistic practice The Resonance Platform method for senior teams The Macro Violin and ensemble leadership Ideal for CHROs and Chief Learning Officers designing executive development programmes CEOs and Chief Strategy Officers convening senior teams for board offsites or strategic dialogue Business school deans and EMBA directors integrating arts and humanities into leadership education Conference programmers leading flagship events on creativity and leadership Audience outcomes A demonstration of how musical structure reveals complex team dynamics, with a Bach fugue or Brahms violin concerto used as the diagnostic Live application of the Resonance Platform method to the strategic question the leadership team brings into the room A working vocabulary for leadership drawn from musical performance: composition, ensemble, listening from the periphery, and the macro violin The shift from treating the conductor as a metaphor to treating conducting as a working model of leadership

Why organisations work with Michael Raynor He has built a quantitative case, across more than 25,000 companies and forty-five years of data, for what actually separates exceptional performers from the rest. Boards get an evidence base, not an opinion. His Strategy Paradox framework gives leadership teams a way to commit hard to a chosen direction while building real options against the futures that strategy could not foresee. He is one of the few strategy thinkers to have co-authored disruption theory’s primary sequel with Clayton Christensen and to have stress-tested it experimentally with Intel’s new venture group and MBA cohorts. The work is field-validated, not theoretical. Two decades of Deloitte client work in telecoms, pharma, medical devices, energy and media means the frameworks land in operational language, not academic abstraction. Biography highlights Author of The Strategy Paradox, named one of BusinessWeek’s 10 Best Business Books of 2007 and a strategy+business top-five strategy pick. Co-author with Clayton M. Christensen of The Innovator’s Solution, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. Co-author with Mumtaz Ahmed of The Three Rules: How Exceptional Companies Think, based on a five-year study of more than 25,000 US-listed companies. Sole author of The Innovator’s Manifesto: Deliberate Disruption for Transformational Growth, applying disruption theory to controlled experiments at Intel and across MBA programmes including Harvard. Doctorate from Harvard Business School, recognised with the Dively Award for research excellence; MBA with distinction from Ivey Business School. Associate Professor (Strategy) at Ivey Business School; long-tenured Deloitte advisor, including fifteen years as a Managing Director. Biography Most strategy is built on forecasts that turn out to be wrong. The interesting question is not whether forecasts will fail, but what a leadership team should do about that fact when it has to commit capital, talent and reputation to a single direction. This is the territory Michael Raynor has worked for over three decades, in research, in the boardroom and in print. Raynor’s first major contribution was The Strategy Paradox, which argued that the same commitments that produce extraordinary success also produce catastrophic failure, and that managing strategic risk requires building real options into the corporate structure itself. The book was named one of BusinessWeek’s 10 Best Business Books of 2007 and a strategy+business top-five strategy pick. With Clayton Christensen he co-authored The Innovator’s Solution, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller and the principal sequel to The Innovator’s Dilemma. The work that followed put the frameworks under empirical pressure. The Innovator’s Manifesto reported controlled experiments at Intel’s New Business Initiatives group and replications with 300+ MBA students at Harvard and elsewhere, showing measurable improvement in predictive accuracy when disruption theory was applied as a decision rule. The Three Rules, written with Mumtaz Ahmed, analysed more than 25,000 US-listed companies from 1966 to 2010 and identified 344 exceptional performers, distilling their behaviour to two priorities: better before cheaper, revenue before cost. This is what brings Raynor into board conversations. He arrives with a doctorate from Harvard Business School (Dively Award for research excellence), an MBA with distinction from Ivey, more than two decades of Deloitte client work across pharma, telecoms, medical devices, energy and media, and a current Associate Professorship in Strategy at Ivey. The frameworks are tested, the language is direct, and the argument is consistently the same: serious organisations need a defensible answer to the question of how they will commit, and to what. Key speaking topics Corporate strategy under uncertainty Strategic commitment and real options Disruptive innovation and growth Drivers of sustained superior corporate performance Innovation portfolio decisions Strategy execution at the board level Ideal for Boards and CEOs setting multi-year strategic direction in industries where forecasts are unreliable Chief Strategy Officers and corporate development leaders sizing innovation portfolios and capital commitments Executive leadership teams in pharma, telecoms, energy, medical devices and media wrestling with disruption risk Audience outcomes A direct argument for why strategic commitment is the source of risk, not its solution, and what that implies for the next planning cycle. The Better-before-Cheaper, Revenue-before-Cost decision rule as a working benchmark for everyday operating choices. A structured way to separate strategic uncertainty from operational uncertainty, and to push each to the right level of the organisation. An empirically grounded view of what 344 exceptional companies did differently over four decades, and how to test their behaviour against the audience’s own.

Why organisations work with Mark Barton The instinct to know when a speaker is avoiding the question comes from 10,000+ live interviews with central bankers, finance ministers, and CEOs. That is not something a professional facilitator acquires through facilitation training. A moderator who anchored Bloomberg Television’s coverage of six US elections, six UK general elections, the global financial crisis, and Brexit can challenge an economist or minister with authority rather than deference. For executives facing media scrutiny, Barton is among a very small group of coaches who can genuinely recreate the pressure of a live news anchor interrogation: because he spent 23 years on that side of the camera. He has chaired forums for Amundi, Societe Generale, TIME, the Doha Forum, and The FII Institute; organisations that expect substantive interrogation of the room’s most senior participants, not event management. As one of the five journalists who built Bloomberg Television’s European operations from the ground up in 1995, he brings an institutional relationship with the world of global finance and markets that most conference professionals simply do not have. Biography highlights One of five founding journalists, Bloomberg Television’s European operations, London, 1995 23-year Bloomberg TV anchor; hosted Countdown, First Word On Money, European Market Report, Bloomberg Markets, and The European Close Covered six UK general elections, six US elections, the global financial crisis, and Brexit across Bloomberg’s flagship prime-time programming Radio broadcaster: Daybreak Europe (Bloomberg Radio); financial bulletins on NPR, LBC Radio, Jazz FM, and Riviera Radio Conference host at the World Media Awards and The AIBs; moderator at the Horasis Global Meeting and Zurich Global Risk Management Summit Post-Bloomberg clients include Amundi, Societe Generale, TIME, the Doha Forum, and The FII Institute University of London, history Biography Bloomberg Television launched its European operations in London in 1995 with five journalists. Mark Barton was one of them. Over the next 23 years, he anchored the channel’s flagship programming: Countdown, European Market Report, Bloomberg Markets, The European Close. Those two decades built the editorial instincts and financial market depth that define his work today. His coverage record is specific. Six UK general elections. Six US elections. The global financial crisis. Brexit. More than 10,000 live interviews with world leaders, finance ministers, central bankers, and chief executives, including Bill Gates, Jean-Claude Trichet, and Shimon Peres. The experience of managing live, unscripted conversations with the world’s most guarded public figures is not one that transfers through conventional facilitation training. Beyond television, Barton presented Daybreak Europe on Bloomberg Radio and delivered financial market bulletins on NPR, LBC Radio, Jazz FM, and Riviera Radio. He also trained dozens of Bloomberg journalists in on-air communication: work that forms the basis of the media coaching he now delivers to business leaders preparing for public scrutiny. Since leaving Bloomberg in 2018, he has moderated for organisations including Amundi, Societe Generale, TIME, the Doha Forum, and The FII Institute. At the 2019 Horasis Global Meeting, he chaired a plenary on global governance featuring the former Prime Ministers of Romania and Belgium and the former President of Slovenia. The consistent thread: rooms that require a moderator with the credibility to hold their most senior participants to account. Key speaking topics Global financial markets and economic trends Geopolitical risk and international affairs Conference hosting and high-stakes panel moderation Executive media and communications coaching Live broadcast journalism and interviewing Business and financial crisis coverage Presentation skills under pressure Ideal for Boards and senior leadership teams commissioning high-profile forums on global economic risk, geopolitics, or financial markets Conference producers and event directors requiring a moderator with genuine domain authority, not just facilitation skills Chief Communications Officers and communications teams preparing executives for live media exposure C-suite leaders undergoing media training ahead of investor events, public testimony, or broadcast interviews Audience outcomes A moderated panel or forum with the editorial discipline and intellectual challenge of a live news broadcast Executives with a clearer understanding of how to communicate complex positions under real media pressure – not simulated conditions A more productive leadership dialogue: one that surfaces genuine disagreement rather than managing it toward pre-approved consensus Practical techniques for live interview performance, grounded in the experience of 10,000+ actual broadcast interviews Increased confidence in high-stakes public settings, drawn from observing how the world’s most scrutinised figures handle live questioning

Why organisations work with Marcus Buckingham He is the source, not a secondary interpreter, of the strengths-based management research that now sits inside most large engagement and performance programmes. His HBR cover story with Ashley Goodall, “The Feedback Fallacy,” was named by HBR as one of the most influential articles of its first century, and gives executives a defensible reason to dismantle conventional review cycles. He brings a working evidence base from the ADP Research Institute, which gives boards a global, current dataset on engagement and team performance rather than another set of opinions. First, Break All the Rules is one of the most widely read management books in circulation; senior audiences arrive already familiar with the argument, which lets a session move quickly from premise to application. Few speakers can stand on a body of work that has reshaped how Cisco, Deloitte and other large employers redesigned performance management; Buckingham is one of them. Biography highlights Co-author of First, Break All the Rules (1999) and Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001), foundational texts of strengths-based management and the basis for the StrengthsFinder assessment. Head of People and Performance Research at the ADP Research Institute. Co-author with Ashley Goodall of Nine Lies About Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019), named best management book of 2019 by Strategy+Business. HBR cover authorship includes “Reinventing Performance Management” (April 2015) and “The Feedback Fallacy” (March/April 2019), the latter selected by HBR as one of the most influential articles of its first hundred years. Author of Love + Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022), a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Thinkers50 ranked thinker, peaking at #8 in 2011 and shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Leadership Award the same year. Cambridge University, MA in Social and Political Sciences. Biography The orthodoxy of corporate performance management is built on premises that the evidence does not support. Marcus Buckingham’s research at Gallup, and later at the ADP Research Institute, has spent more than three decades testing those premises against what the highest-performing teams actually do. His finding, in short form, is that performance is local, individual and rooted in what people do best, not in what an annual review tells them to fix. That argument first reached scale through First, Break All the Rules, co-written with Curt Coffman in 1999 and built on Gallup’s global manager interviews. Now, Discover Your Strengths followed in 2001 with Donald O. Clifton and introduced the StrengthsFinder assessment. Together they reframed the conversation in HR from competency gaps to talent deployment. The work has continued to land where senior leaders are paying attention. “Reinventing Performance Management,” his 2015 HBR cover with Ashley Goodall, documented Deloitte’s redesign of its review system. “The Feedback Fallacy,” their 2019 cover, was later named by HBR as one of the most influential articles of its first century. Their book Nine Lies About Work was named best management book of the year by Strategy+Business. Buckingham now heads people and performance research at ADP, with access to one of the larger live datasets on engagement and team behaviour anywhere in business. His most recent book, Love + Work, published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2022, extends the strengths argument into the question of how individuals build careers around the activities that genuinely energise them. The work in front of leaders today is the same work that produced StrengthsFinder: identify what each person does best, then organise around it. Key speaking topics Strengths-based leadership Performance management redesign Employee engagement and team effectiveness Future of work and workforce research Talent strategy and career design Manager development Ideal for CHROs and senior people leaders rebuilding performance management or engagement frameworks Executive teams whose growth strategy depends on retaining and deploying skilled talent Boards reviewing the evidence base behind their human capital reporting Leadership development audiences inside large, multi-location workforces Audience outcomes A clear account of which assumptions inside conventional performance management the data actually supports, and which it does not. Specific design principles, drawn from Gallup and ADP research, for how teams should be measured and led. A working definition of strengths that is operational at the level of an individual conversation, not just a slogan. An evidence-based case for replacing annual feedback rituals with a different cadence of attention from managers.

Why organisations work with Luis Maria Huete He brings a named, structured methodology, Clienting, that gives a management team a shared language for customer segmentation, business model alignment, and service mix economics. It is the rare customer-strategy framework with both an academic anchor and four decades of board-room application. He has facilitated senior offsites in more than 800 companies across 70 countries, including Banco Santander, BBVA, Telefonica, Coca-Cola, Repsol, and ISS. The work is execution-focused: redesigning structure, coordination mechanisms, and the operating model behind a strategy. His doctoral work on commercial banking service strategy was named best dissertation of 1988 by the Decision Sciences Institute. The same analytical discipline shows up in the way he treats customer profitability as an operating problem, not a marketing one. He has taught inside Harvard Business School’s Achieving Breakthrough Service and Advanced Management programmes, alongside his chair at IESE. The combined platform gives senior audiences confidence that the frameworks have been pressure-tested in serious academic and corporate settings. He works fluently in English and Spanish, with board-level experience across Europe, Latin America, and Asia. For multinational teams that need a single voice on customer strategy across regions, that range is genuinely scarce. Biography highlights Professor of Operations, Information and Technology at IESE Business School, on faculty since 1982. DBA, Boston University. Fulbright Scholar. Doctoral thesis on commercial banking service strategy awarded best dissertation of 1988 by the Decision Sciences Institute. Author of thirteen management books, including Clienting, Service Management, Leading for the Common Good (2015), 50 Leaders Who Made History (2017), and Leadership and Governance (2025). Faculty contributor to Harvard Business School’s Achieving Breakthrough Service and Advanced Management executive programmes. Regular contributor to Harvard Deusto Business Review and Expansion. Chairs the Advisory Board of Makro and the Instituto de Capital Humano. Board member of Altia, the Instituto Gobernanza y Sociedad, and the International Academy of Management. Biography Customer profitability is an operating problem before it is a marketing one. Most companies cannot say, with any precision, which of their customers earn the margin that funds the rest of the business, or how the service model would need to change if they could. That is the question Huete has spent four decades putting in front of senior teams. His framework, Clienting, gives a management committee a structured way to work that question. It moves through segmentation, business model alignment, service mix, implementation, and performance measurement, treating customer strategy as a coordinated set of operating decisions rather than a brand exercise. The methodology is documented across thirteen books and tested inside the executive programmes of IESE Business School and Harvard Business School, where Huete has taught Achieving Breakthrough Service and Advanced Management. The academic anchor is serious. His doctoral thesis on commercial banking service strategy was named best dissertation of 1988 by the Decision Sciences Institute, and he holds a chair at IESE he has occupied since 1982. Alongside that, he has facilitated senior offsites in more than 800 companies across 70 countries, including Banco Santander, BBVA, Telefonica, Coca-Cola, Repsol, and ISS. He chairs the Advisory Board of Makro and the Instituto de Capital Humano, and writes regularly for Harvard Deusto Business Review and Expansion. What a senior team gets is a working vocabulary for customer strategy and a facilitator who has watched several hundred management committees try to install it. The conversation he runs is rarely about ideas. It is about what to stop doing, which customers to organise around, and how to align the operating model to the answer. Key speaking topics Clienting and customer strategy Service management and service economics Strategy execution and operating model design Corporate culture and senior-team alignment Leadership and governance Family business transitions Customer loyalty and profitability Ideal for CEOs, CCOs and CMOs reviewing customer segmentation and the underlying service economics. Boards and ExCos running a strategy refresh or post-merger operating model redesign. Senior leadership offsites that need a structured outside facilitator on customer strategy and execution. Family business owners and boards navigating governance and succession alongside commercial repositioning. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for Clienting, segmentation, service mix, and the link from customer loyalty to operating margin. A sharper read on which customer segments the organisation is actually built to serve profitably, and which it is not. A structured view of the gap between stated strategy and operating execution, and where coordination mechanisms break down. Specific examples drawn from senior offsites with European and Latin American multinationals on how the management committee owns customer strategy. A reference set of books and frameworks the team can use after the session to continue the work internally.

Why organisations work with Les Hewitt A coaching method that has been deployed inside more than 300 companies, including Wells Fargo, RBC, FedEx, RE/MAX and the Million Dollar Round Table, with a focus on sales-led and franchise organisations rather than abstract leadership theory. Co-authorship of The Power of Focus with Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, a book that has sold more than 825,000 copies in North America and given Hewitt a recognisable thesis his audiences have often already encountered. Three decades of building and running The Power of Focus coaching program, including more than 900 delivered workshops, so the content is operating practice and not a recycled keynote. A clear diagnostic for why senior teams underperform: unclear future targets, leaders not protecting their top objectives, weak internal communication, and habits that quietly cost productivity. Built specifically for sales leaders, owner-operators and franchise networks, audiences that are usually underserved by leadership-development speakers pitched at corporate HQ. Biography highlights Co-author with Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen of The Power of Focus, an international bestseller translated into more than 20 languages. Founder of The Power of Focus Coaching Program, used by more than 300 companies across North America, the UK, Ireland, Australia, the Gulf, Singapore and Russia. Named clients include Wells Fargo, Royal Bank of Canada, FedEx, Cameron Inc., Nexen Energy, RE/MAX, Royal LePage, Investors Group and the Million Dollar Round Table. Author of further titles in the series, including The Power of Focus for Women, The Power of Faithful Focus and The Power of Focus for College Students. Built and ran Achievers Canada, the seminar business that delivered more than 450 leadership and sales programs before evolving into the current coaching practice. Originally from Belfast; rose to top salesperson in an international network marketing company before moving into coaching and authorship. Biography Most senior teams are not failing on strategy. They are failing on follow-through. Targets get diluted by competing demands, the highest-value work slips down the calendar, and the habits that quietly govern productivity go unexamined. Hewitt has spent more than thirty years building a coaching practice around that gap. The Power of Focus, the book he co-authored with Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, was the first articulation of his method outside the workshop room. It became a long-running international bestseller, has been translated into more than twenty languages, and seeded the coaching program that now carries the same name. The book gave him a public thesis. The coaching business gave him the operating evidence behind it. That coaching business has been deployed inside more than 300 organisations, including Wells Fargo, Royal Bank of Canada, FedEx, RE/MAX, Royal LePage, Cameron Inc. and the Million Dollar Round Table. The work concentrates on a specific cohort: sales-led and franchise organisations where individual leader habits and team focus translate directly into commercial results. More than 900 workshops have been delivered, so the material is tested under load. Hewitt’s distinctive value is the combination of a recognisable book and a long working catalogue of what actually changes inside companies when leaders narrow their targets and protect their top priorities. Audiences leave with concrete habits and language to install on Monday, not a framework to file away. Key speaking topics Focus and follow-through for senior leaders Goal clarity and execution discipline Productivity habits in sales-led organisations Leadership effectiveness and self-management High-performance team behaviour Ideal for CEOs and owner-operators of mid-market and growth-stage businesses Sales leaders, franchise principals and broker networks Senior leadership teams running annual planning and offsite resets Member organisations such as MDRT, RE/MAX, Royal LePage and similar producer networks Audience outcomes A clearer set of personal and team targets, written down and prioritised before they leave the room. Specific habits to protect the highest-value hours of the working week. A common language for accountability that the team can keep using after the event. Practical tactics drawn from sales and entrepreneurial environments rather than abstract leadership theory.

Why organisations work with Lars Sudmann He brings Fortune 500 operating weight to leadership work. A former P&G CFO and Business Unit Strategy Leader speaks to executive committees in their own language. His self-leadership framework, drawn from his TEDx talk that has crossed 1.9 million views, gives senior leaders a usable model for the personal habits that determine whether strategy actually lands. The Spaghetti Principle, the thesis of his book on innovation, gives organisations a structured way to run more experiments without losing strategic discipline. He is a 6-time Belgian and 2-time European Champion of Public Speaking. Executive presence and communication craft are not a sideline; they are a discipline he can teach. As Council Director at The Conference Board, he convenes CFOs and strategy leaders across Europe and the Gulf, so the room he walks into is one he already understands. Biography highlights Former CFO Belgium and Business Unit Strategy Leader at Procter & Gamble. Principal of Sudmann & Company, advising Fortune 500 leadership teams on strategy execution and change. Council Director at The Conference Board (Strategy & Transformation, Finance Transformation, Gulf councils). Lecturer on leadership and innovation at RWTH Aachen, Braunschweig University, and Lüneburg University. Author of “Innovation that Sticks: Reach Success as a Leader in your Field with the Spaghetti Principle”. Multiple TEDx talks on self-leadership and innovation, with combined viewership in the millions. 6-time Belgian and 2-time European Champion of Public Speaking. Featured in BBC, Fast Company, Inc., The Washington Post, and Manager Magazin. Biography Most leadership content treats execution as a structural problem. Sudmann treats it as a personal one. His TEDx talk on self-leadership, now past 1.9 million views, argues that the daily behaviour of senior leaders is what determines whether strategy moves through the organisation or stalls in the slide deck. The argument carries weight because of the chair he sat in. Sudmann was CFO Belgium at Procter & Gamble and led business unit strategy inside the same group. He has run the numbers, owned the plan, and watched what actually happens when a leadership team is asked to change while still hitting the quarter. That experience now shapes Sudmann & Company, his consulting and training practice, and his role as Council Director at The Conference Board, where he convenes strategy and finance leaders across Europe and the Gulf. He lectures on innovation and leadership at RWTH Aachen, Braunschweig, and Lüneburg, and his book “Innovation that Sticks” sets out the Spaghetti Principle: a disciplined way to run small experiments and keep only what holds. The communication craft is its own credential. Six Belgian and two European public speaking titles mean a Sudmann keynote is not a polished version of corporate decks. It is built to land, with senior audiences, on the first hearing. Key speaking topics Self-leadership and executive habits Strategy execution under pressure Change leadership in complex organisations Innovation discipline and the Spaghetti Principle High-performance leadership teams Executive communication and presentation craft Ideal for Executive committees and senior leadership teams entering a major strategic shift. CFOs, strategy leaders, and transformation leads accountable for execution. Boards and leadership development programmes seeking a credible voice on self-leadership and high-performance behaviour. Conferences with audiences of senior corporate leaders across finance, strategy, and operations. Audience outcomes A working model of self-leadership that senior leaders can apply on Monday morning. A sharper read on why their current strategy is or is not moving through the organisation. The Spaghetti Principle as a method for running more disciplined innovation experiments. Concrete language and structure for executive communication, drawn from competitive speaking craft. A vocabulary for leadership behaviour their team can adopt collectively, not just individually.

Why organisations work with Justin King A first-hand, decade-long account of running a FTSE 100 retailer through competitive attack, recession and the shift to online, with named results: 36 consecutive quarters of like-for-like growth, tripled underlying profit, and an 85 per cent total shareholder return by the time he stepped down. The “Making Sainsbury’s Great Again” playbook talked through by the CEO who wrote it, with concrete decisions on price, fresh food, colleague engagement and the Paralympic sponsorship that reset the brand. An active cross-portfolio operating perspective from the Chair seats at Allwyn Entertainment, Dexters and Itsu Grocery, plus the recent OVO Energy chairmanship through the sector’s difficult patch, so the material is current rather than retrospective. A credible record on purpose-led commercial leadership, evidenced through Sainsbury’s Comic Relief partnership of £1 for every £10 donated, the first dedicated Paralympic sponsorship of London 2012, and Made by Sport, the charity he founded in 2019 that raised over £6m for community organisations before transferring to Sported. A leadership framework, the ten Cs, that has been pressure-tested against a real CEO seat rather than developed in a classroom, and is delivered with the candour of someone who has had to defend results to a board. Biography highlights CEO of J Sainsbury plc, 2004 to 2014, ten years that took the business from third place and falling sales to 36 consecutive quarters of like-for-like growth and an 85 per cent total shareholder return. Chair of Allwyn Entertainment and Dexters; Non-Executive Chair of Itsu Grocery; recent Chair of OVO Energy. Non-Executive Director of Marks and Spencer plc, January 2019 to September 2025; member of the PwC Public Interest Body, 2015 to 2022. Vice Chairman and Senior Adviser at Terra Firma Capital Partners, 2015 to 2021; interim Chairman of the Manor Racing F1 team during its 2014-2015 restructuring. Member of the London Organising Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games and its audit committee, with Sainsbury’s the first dedicated Paralympic sponsor of London 2012. Founder of Made by Sport, 2019 to 2023, raising over £6m for community sport organisations. CBE for services to the retail industry, 2011 Birthday Honours; Honorary DBA, University of Bath, 2009; Most Admired Business Leader, Management Today; Britain’s Most Impressive Businessman, IPSOS-MORI Captains of Industry Report. Biography Sainsbury’s was the third-place supermarket with falling sales when Justin King took the CEO seat in March 2004. The City viewed the appointment as the company’s last chance to remain independent. Within six months he had launched “Making Sainsbury’s Great Again”, a recovery plan built on fresh food, colleague engagement and a re-priced shelf. The plan’s headline target, a £2.5 billion sales uplift, was hit three months early. Over his ten years as CEO, the business delivered 36 consecutive quarters of like-for-like growth, tripled underlying profit from £252m to £756m, and returned 85 per cent to shareholders. The brand was rebuilt around the first dedicated Paralympic sponsorship of London 2012, and the long-standing Comic Relief partnership of £1 for every £10 donated. Sainsbury’s regained second place in UK grocery and he stepped down in 2014 with the longest unbroken growth run of any major UK supermarket CEO of the era. He arrived at Sainsbury’s with three decades in consumer businesses behind him, including senior roles at M&S Food, Asda and Häagen-Dazs UK. After leaving the CEO seat he held the Vice Chairman and Senior Adviser role at Terra Firma Capital Partners from 2015 to 2021, sat on the PwC Public Interest Body from 2015 to 2022, and served as a Non-Executive Director of Marks and Spencer from January 2019 until September 2025. He chaired the Manor Racing F1 team through its 2014-2015 restructuring. He is Chair of Allwyn Entertainment, Chair of Dexters, and Non-Executive Chair of Itsu Grocery, with adviser seats at Snappy Shopper and Rezolve. He chaired OVO Energy through the post-energy-crisis period to August 2025. The purpose thread runs through the record: he founded Made by Sport in 2019, which raised over £6m for community sport organisations before the campaign was handed to Sported in 2023. He was appointed CBE in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to retail, named Most Admired Business Leader by Management Today, and topped the IPSOS-MORI Captains of Industry Report. The University of Bath conferred an Honorary DBA in 2009, and he served on the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Group from 2010 to 2012. Key speaking topics Retail leadership and the long-cycle turnaround Consumer behaviour and brand reinvention Customer and colleague-led growth Purpose-led commercial leadership and responsible business Boardroom decision-making under competitive pressure Sponsorship and purpose, drawn from London 2012 Cross-portfolio non-executive leadership Ideal for FTSE and large-cap consumer business leadership teams managing a multi-year turnaround Retail, hospitality and consumer goods boards weighing strategy against operational execution Chief executives, COOs and store or operations directors in customer-facing sectors Boards and leadership teams looking to embed purpose into commercial performance rather than treat it as a side function Audience outcomes A working view of how a CEO sequences price, range, colleagues and brand through a decade-long recovery rather than a single reset. Specific lessons from London 2012, the Comic Relief partnership and Made by Sport on how purpose can shift commercial performance. A frank account of what holds boards together when results are slow, competitors aggressive and shareholders impatient. A leadership lens, the ten Cs, applied to the audience’s own operating questions during Q&A.

Why organisations work with Kaihan Krippendorff He runs Outthinker, a working peer network of chief strategy, innovation and growth officers from Fortune 500 companies. The research that feeds his keynotes is drawn from sitting CSOs, not desk study. His IDEAS process, Outthinker Playbook, and 9Ps business model framework give strategy teams a structured way to surface non-obvious options. These are taught inside Wharton Executive Education, NYU, and FIU. Proximity, co-authored with Robert Wolcott of Kellogg, is the most developed business-side thesis on what just-in-time production, AI, and on-demand services mean for where value is created. It earned Thinkers50 recognition and a Next Big Idea Club endorsement. He bridges strategy and internal entrepreneurship. Driving Innovation from Within (Columbia Business School Publishing) addresses the operational problem of getting new ideas through a corporate immune system, the issue most CSOs actually wrestle with. Biography highlights Founder of Outthinker, a peer network of chief strategy, innovation, growth and transformation officers from Fortune 500 and large private organisations. Former McKinsey consultant; senior fellow at Wharton; teaching roles at NYU School of Professional Studies and Florida International University. Author of six books including Outthink the Competition, Driving Innovation from Within, and Proximity (co-authored with Robert Wolcott, 2024). Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2019; shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Innovation Award (2019) and Strategy Award (2023). Host of three podcasts: Outthinkers, The Chief Strategy Officer Podcast, and Strategy at Scale Podcast. Contributor to Harvard Business Review and Fast Company. Biography Competitive advantage in most large companies is built on assumptions that quietly stop holding. The Outthinker network was set up to surface those assumptions early. It is a working group of chief strategy, innovation, growth and transformation officers from Fortune 500 and large private companies, convened by Kaihan Krippendorff to pressure-test where their industries are actually moving. Krippendorff trained at McKinsey before founding Outthinker. His doctorate is in economics and business; his engineering degree comes from the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering, with further study at Wharton, Columbia Business School, and London Business School. He is a senior fellow at Wharton Executive Education and teaches at NYU School of Professional Studies and Florida International University. His published work has the same emphasis. Outthink the Competition sets out the strategic patterns disruptors use that incumbents rarely consider. Driving Innovation from Within, published by Columbia Business School Publishing, addresses the harder operational problem of moving an idea through a corporate immune system. Proximity, co-authored with Robert Wolcott of Kellogg, argues that AI, on-demand production, and digital infrastructure are collapsing the distance between supply and demand, and that this shift, rather than any single technology, is what redraws competitive position. He hosts three podcasts aimed at the same audience: Outthinkers, The Chief Strategy Officer Podcast, and Strategy at Scale Podcast. Thinkers50 has ranked him on its Radar list and shortlisted him for both its Innovation and Strategy awards. Key speaking topics Strategy under accelerating disruption Business model innovation Corporate innovation and internal entrepreneurship AI and the proximity economy Outside-in strategic foresight Chief strategy officer practice Growth strategy for Fortune 500 organisations Ideal for CSOs, chief innovation officers, and chief growth officers running strategy refresh cycles Boards and executive teams reassessing competitive position in an industry under structural change Corporate transformation leads building internal innovation pipelines Audience outcomes A clearer view of which assumptions underpinning the current strategy have already expired A working vocabulary, drawn from the Outthinker Playbook and 9Ps, for generating non-obvious strategic options A framework for thinking about AI and on-demand technology as a shift in where value is created, not a productivity tool Sharper questions for the next strategy offsite, informed by what sitting CSOs in the Outthinker network are actually working on