Executive Development speakers

Why organisations work with Oliver Kahn He is the only goalkeeper in history to be named best player of a FIFA World Cup, a credential that earns immediate attention from any audience and frames the conversation around individual performance under maximum visibility. He has held leadership roles on both sides of the touchline: 49 times captain of the German national team and CEO of FC Bayern Munich AG between 2021 and 2023, giving him a working vocabulary for boardrooms as well as dressing rooms. His MBA from Privatuniversitaet Schloss Seeburg, with a thesis on strategic management in professional football, gives him an analytical frame for talks that goes beyond anecdote. He speaks with first-hand authority on the technical content of composure, recovery from public failure, and what it costs to sustain elite standards across a 14-year run at one club. Biography highlights 86 caps for Germany; 49 as captain. 2002 FIFA World Cup Golden Ball winner, the only goalkeeper to receive the award. Eight Bundesliga titles and the 2000–01 UEFA Champions League with FC Bayern Munich. Four UEFA Best European Goalkeeper awards and three IFFHS World’s Best Goalkeeper awards. CEO of FC Bayern Munich AG from July 2021 to May 2023. MBA, Privatuniversitaet Schloss Seeburg (2012); ZDF football analyst since 2008; author of “Ich. Erfolg kommt von innen.” (riva Verlag, 2008). Biography Pressure is what separates the people who win things from the people who almost do. The 2001 UEFA Champions League final went to a penalty shoot-out against Valencia. Bayern Munich’s goalkeeper saved three of them, was named man of the match, and added a Champions League winner’s medal to a set that already included a UEFA Cup, a German title, and the captaincy of the national side. Twelve months later, Oliver Kahn became the only goalkeeper in the history of the FIFA World Cup to be named the tournament’s best player. Germany lost the final to Brazil and he made a costly error on the opening goal, playing through a torn ligament. The Golden Ball was awarded after that match, alongside the Lev Yashin Award for best goalkeeper. The two together describe how his peers and the international press read his career: the most demanding individual position in the sport, played at the highest level for two decades. The numbers from the club career are unusual even in elite football. Eight Bundesliga titles, six DFB-Pokal wins, four consecutive UEFA Best European Goalkeeper awards from 1999 to 2002, three IFFHS World’s Best Goalkeeper honours, two German Footballer of the Year trophies. Kahn played 557 Bundesliga matches for Bayern, the most by any goalkeeper in the league’s history. The second career is what makes him unusual on a corporate stage. He took an MBA at Privatuniversitaet Schloss Seeburg in 2012 with a thesis on strategic management in professional football, worked as a ZDF analyst across multiple international tournaments, and served as CEO of FC Bayern Munich AG from July 2021 until May 2023. His book “Ich. Erfolg kommt von innen.” was published by riva Verlag in 2008 and remains the published source for his thinking on the inner conditions of sustained performance. Key speaking topics Composure and self-leadership under pressure High-performance culture in elite teams Accountability at the individual position Recovery from public failure Leadership transitions from operator to executive Mental preparation and the psychology of winning Ideal for Executive leadership teams and boards setting the tone on accountability and standards Sales organisations and front-line revenue teams operating under monthly and quarterly visibility Senior leaders moving from operating roles into executive seats Annual leadership conferences and corporate kick-offs anchored on performance and resilience Audience outcomes A clearer working definition of composure as a trained capability, not a temperament Specific reference points from elite sport for how teams sustain standards across years, not seasons A direct account of what high-pressure decision-making feels like at the position where every error is visible Language for talking about accountability inside a team without it becoming punitive A sharper view of the difference between individual excellence and team performance, from someone who held both responsibilities

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

Why organisations work with Oscar van Weerdenburg He brings a published, evidence-based diagnostic. The Intercultural Readiness Check, co-developed with Ursula Brinkmann and built on a dataset of roughly 30,000 international respondents, lets leaders move from impression to assessment. He is part of the Trompenaars lineage. His work began with Fons Trompenaars at the University of Amsterdam in 1992, and his frameworks sit inside the Trompenaars Hampden-Turner network rather than alongside it. His M&A and integration track record is operational. He has been brought into post-deal integration work at major European and global firms to handle the cultural friction that derails synergy targets. He teaches inside INSEAD Executive Education and has lectured at Michigan Business School and Rotterdam School of Management, so the same content runs in front of senior leaders before it reaches their teams. His delivery is Anglo-Dutch in register: direct, often dryly funny, low on jargon. Buyers report sessions that are usable on Monday morning, not just well-received in the room. Biography highlights Co-author, Intercultural Readiness: Four Competences for Working Across Cultures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), with Ursula Brinkmann. Co-founder and Managing Director, Intercultural Business Improvement (IBI), founded 1996. Co-creator of the Intercultural Readiness Check, drawn from a 15-year research programme of roughly 30,000 respondents. Visiting professor, INSEAD Executive Education; former lecturer at Michigan Business School and Rotterdam School of Management. Long-standing partner in the Trompenaars Hampden-Turner network, with collaboration with Fons Trompenaars dating to 1992. Lecturer of the Year 2008, Chalmers Professional Education. Biography Most cross-border failures inside multinationals are not strategic. They are cultural. Synergy targets in M&A slip, global rollouts stall, and senior hires struggle because the assumptions people carry about hierarchy, conflict, and time were never made visible. That is the territory Oscar van Weerdenburg has worked in for more than three decades. He began this work in 1992 with Fons Trompenaars at the University of Amsterdam, the partnership that became the foundation of modern intercultural management consulting. In 1996 he co-founded Intercultural Business Improvement with the psychologist Ursula Brinkmann. Together they built the Intercultural Readiness Check, a diagnostic drawn from a fifteen-year research programme of roughly thirty thousand respondents across four continents and published as Intercultural Readiness: Four Competences for Working Across Cultures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). The IRC is what separates his practice from consulting impressionism. It gives leaders a measurable read on four competences that predict whether their teams can actually work across cultures, and it sits inside the Trompenaars Hampden-Turner network rather than competing with it. He teaches the underlying material on INSEAD Executive Education programmes and has lectured at Michigan Business School and Rotterdam School of Management, with a client list that includes Shell, HSBC, Qantas, BASF, PepsiCo and Goldman Sachs. What buyers tend to value is the operational edge. He has been brought into post-merger integrations and global team builds where cultural friction was already costing money, and he leaves leaders with vocabulary and a diagnostic, not abstractions. Chalmers Professional Education named him Lecturer of the Year in 2008 for the same reason: the room walks out with something usable. Key speaking topics Cultural intelligence as a measurable capability Leading multicultural and global teams Cultural integration in mergers and acquisitions International negotiation Strategic dilemmas in global business Cross-cultural leadership development The Intercultural Readiness Check as a leadership diagnostic Ideal for CHROs and global L&D leads building intercultural capability across regions M&A integration leads and post-deal sponsors handling cultural fit and synergy execution Global team leaders, country heads, and matrixed senior managers with cross-border accountability Executive education and leadership programme directors at multinationals Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the cultural assumptions that drive most cross-border friction Familiarity with the four intercultural competences measured by the IRC and how to apply them A clearer read on where their own team or deal is most exposed to cultural breakdown Practical moves for international negotiation, integration, and global team design they can use the following week

Why organisations work with Otmar Szafnauer He has run a Formula 1 constructor through administration and out the other side with the workforce intact, a credential almost no other operational leader on the speaking circuit can claim. He led the same team across three brand identities, Force India, Racing Point and Aston Martin, which gives him direct experience of the gap between a rebrand on paper and a rebrand in the engineering hall. His technical grounding, an engineering degree paired with operational roles at Ford, BAR, Honda and Force India, means board audiences get specifics on how decisions actually move through a complex organisation, not motivational abstractions. He has worked under three very different ownership cultures, from Vijay Mallya at Force India to Lawrence Stroll at Racing Point and Renault Group at Alpine, and can speak credibly about leading inside contested governance structures. Biography highlights Team Principal and CEO, Racing Point F1 and Aston Martin F1, 2018 to January 2022. Team Principal, BWT Alpine F1 Team, February 2022 to July 2023. Senior leadership at Force India from October 2009, including the team’s 2016 and 2017 fourth-place Constructors’ Championship finishes. Former Vice President, Honda Racing Developments, after entering F1 as Operations Director at British American Racing in 1998. Founder and Chairman, Soft Pauer, publisher of the official Formula 1 Timing iPhone app launched in 2009. BSc Electrical Engineering, Wayne State University; master’s in Business and Finance, University of Detroit Mercy. Biography Force India was placed in administration in mid-2018 after Vijay Mallya’s financial collapse. The garage was full of staff who had been approached by other teams, and a technical director the rivals very much wanted. The team came out of that summer with most of its people still in their seats. Otmar Szafnauer was the operational leader who kept them there. That period is the centre of his value to a serious audience. Across more than a decade running the same Silverstone constructor under three brands, Force India, Racing Point and finally Aston Martin, he saw what holds a high-performance organisation together when ownership, identity and strategy all change at once. The answer turned out to be unglamorous: honesty in front of the workforce, continuity of technical leadership, and a refusal to let the rebrand outrun the operating reality. His route into that role was deliberate. An electrical engineering degree from Wayne State, an MBA in finance from Detroit Mercy, then Ford, then Formula 1 from 1998 onwards, including a Vice President role at Honda Racing Developments. The result is a leader who can speak to engineers and to a board, and who treats culture as something built on calendar-blocked decisions about hiring, accountability and recognition rather than slogans. His later move to Alpine, where he served as Team Principal from 2022 until July 2023, gives the picture its second half. Running an OEM-owned team under Renault Group meant operating inside a corporate governance structure, with all of the political weight that implies. Few operators have led both an independent privateer and a manufacturer-owned team at the same level, and the contrast is the substance of what he can say to leaders managing similar shifts of their own. Key speaking topics High-performance team leadership Leadership through restructure and ownership change Culture, accountability and psychological safety in elite environments Operational decision-making under time and resource pressure Lessons from three decades inside Formula 1 leadership Building and retaining technical talent in competitive markets Ideal for Boards and executive teams navigating ownership change, M&A integration or a corporate rebrand CHROs and people leaders responsible for retaining critical talent through periods of uncertainty Senior operators in technical and engineering-led organisations Leadership development audiences focused on composure and decision quality under pressure Audience outcomes A working sense of what leadership actually does for a workforce when ownership and strategy are in flux Specific examples of how culture, retention and accountability hold up in genuinely high-stakes environments A practical view of the difference between a rebrand on paper and a rebrand inside the operating organisation Confidence that the lessons translate, drawn from a domain where the consequences of poor decisions are visible every fortnight

Why organisations work with Pamela Barnum Field-tested credibility on trust and deception. Her techniques were developed making hundreds of undercover drug buys and prosecuting the resulting cases, not derived from lab studies. Two operating perspectives in one speaker: the covert practitioner who had to read a room to stay safe, and the federal prosecutor who had to read witnesses to win convictions. Practical decoding tools that transfer directly into negotiations, sales calls, performance conversations, and board meetings. Academic grounding that backs the stories: a Bachelor of Laws and Master of Public Administration from the University of Western Ontario, and graduate work in corporate negotiations. A point of view on trust as a measurable leadership behaviour, not a culture slogan, anchored in the TEDxCollingwood talk “What Drug Dealers Taught Me About Trust.” Biography highlights Twenty-year career in Canadian criminal justice across undercover policing and federal prosecution. Eight years deep undercover in the Drug Enforcement Section, with hundreds of buys at street and multi-six-figure level. Federal prosecuting attorney with the Federal Crown, specialising in drug trafficking cases. Bachelor of Laws and Master of Public Administration, University of Western Ontario. Two TEDx talks, “What Drug Dealers Taught Me About Trust” (TEDxCollingwood) and “How Empathy Empowered an Undercover Cop” (TEDxRyersonU), both hosted on TED.com. Co-host of the CTV series Building Bad, and a featured media contributor on trust and nonverbal communication Keynote work for corporate, association, and law enforcement audiences across the United States, Canada, and Australia. Biography Trust is read in seconds, by people who often cannot articulate what they just saw. For most of Pamela Barnum’s first career, getting that read wrong carried physical risk. Eight years undercover in the Drug Enforcement Section meant building rapport with people whose business depended on detecting outsiders, then walking back into court rooms as a federal prosecutor and reading witnesses for credibility under cross-examination. That dual experience is the spine of her speaking work. She studied law at the University of Western Ontario while still serving as a full-time undercover officer, later adding a Master of Public Administration and graduate study in corporate negotiations. The result is a speaker who can connect a specific nonverbal cue to a specific commercial outcome, not just a story. Her keynote material translates field practice into decisions leaders actually make. How to enter a difficult negotiation without leaking intent. How to deliver a restructuring message that retains belief in the sender. How to spot the signals that a senior hire, supplier, or counterparty is hedging. The TEDxCollingwood talk “What Drug Dealers Taught Me About Trust” condensed the core argument into three working trust hacks now used widely across her corporate audiences. What makes her unusual on the leadership communication circuit is the source material. Trust as practised by undercover operators and prosecutors is observable, repeatable, and tied to consequence. That is what travels into a sales kickoff, an executive offsite, or a board preparation session, and that is what senior leaders take away. Key speaking topics Trust as a leadership behaviour Nonverbal communication and body language Deception detection in business contexts Negotiation under pressure Executive presence and credibility High-stakes communication Sales communication and influence Ideal for Sales leadership and revenue organisations preparing for high-value negotiations Executive development programmes focused on presence, credibility, and difficult conversations HR and culture leaders rebuilding trust after restructure or major change Associations and law enforcement audiences, including licensed professions (fraud, risk, insurance, real estate) seeking accredited continuing-education content Audience outcomes A working method for reading trust signals in real conversations, not in theory Specific nonverbal cues that indicate hedging, deception, or disengagement Sharper preparation for negotiations, performance conversations, and board interactions A clearer sense of how their own body language is being read by others Concrete techniques to project composure and authority under pressure

Why organisations work with Parm Sandhu A first-hand command perspective on incidents the public watched unfold, including the Lee Rigby murder in Greenwich and senior organising responsibility during the London 2012 Olympics. A serving leader’s account of how institutional culture excludes capable people, evidenced by her settled discrimination case against the Metropolitan Police and her memoir Black and Blue. Operational fluency in counter-terrorism, public order, anti-corruption and crisis response, drawn from 30 years across the Met rather than from secondary research. A current education brief as Managing Director of the London Policing College and Associate Lecturer at the University of West London, which keeps her thinking close to how leadership and ethics are actually taught to the next generation. Comfort in front of cameras and senior audiences, built from regular analysis on BBC News, Sky News, ITV News, Channel 4, Channel 5, LBC, Times Radio and Good Morning Britain. Biography highlights Former Chief Superintendent, Metropolitan Police Service; first and only Asian female officer promoted through the ranks to that grade. Borough Commander for Richmond and senior officer with operational responsibilities during the London 2012 Olympics and on duty during the Lee Rigby murder in Greenwich. Author of Black and Blue: One Woman’s Story of Policing and Prejudice, Atlantic Books, co-written with Stuart Prebble. Managing Director, London Policing College; Associate Lecturer, University of West London. Honorary Doctorate of Letters, University of West London, for contribution to public service and police education. Public Sector Award, Asian Women of Achievement Awards. Regular on-air contributor for BBC News, Sky News, ITV News, Channel 4, Channel 5, LBC, Times Radio and Good Morning Britain. Biography The Lee Rigby murder happened on a residential street in Greenwich in 2013. Parm Sandhu was the superintendent on duty. That kind of moment, where command judgement is made quickly and reviewed slowly, sits at the centre of how she thinks about leadership. Thirty years inside the Metropolitan Police gave her the operational range to back it up: counter-terrorism, anti-corruption, public order, and a senior organising role during the London 2012 Olympics. She finished as a Chief Superintendent and Borough Commander for Richmond, the first and only Asian woman in the force’s history to be promoted through the ranks to that grade. She also wrote about what it cost. Black and Blue, published by Atlantic Books with journalist Stuart Prebble, is a serving officer’s account of how institutional culture decides who gets believed and who gets through. Her later discrimination case against the Met, settled confidentially, made the same argument in a different register. Audiences hear both sides of the same career, the command decisions and the cultural ones. Today she runs the London Policing College and lectures at the University of West London, where she holds an honorary Doctorate of Letters for her contribution to public service. The combination of senior operational command, public commentary on BBC News, Sky News, ITV News and LBC, and a settled record on discrimination is rare. It is also why she lands with leadership audiences who are tired of being told that culture and performance are separate problems. Key speaking topics Crisis command and decision-making under public scrutiny Counter-terrorism and major incident leadership Institutional culture and organisational integrity Inclusive leadership in hierarchical institutions Women’s safety and violence against women and girls Resilience and personal recovery from adversity Ethics, accountability and public trust Ideal for Boards and executive committees of institutions where culture, scrutiny and public trust are commercial risks, including financial services, healthcare and regulated public bodies. Senior leadership programmes for police, military, civil service and other hierarchical organisations. CHRO and Chief People Officer audiences working on inclusion outcomes rather than inclusion communications. Conferences on women in leadership and on safeguarding, where a commander-rank perspective is genuinely uncommon. Audience outcomes A clearer sense of what command judgement actually looks like when an incident is live and the public is watching. A practical view of how culture quietly suppresses talent, and what senior leaders can do about it before it reaches a tribunal. A frame for thinking about resilience that is grounded in 30 years of operational policing rather than in self-help language. A direct, named account of how institutional discrimination operates in practice, with implications for any organisation under similar scrutiny.

Why organisations work with Patrick Cordingley He commanded 12,000 troops in the largest British armoured deployment since the Second World War, and can speak to high-stakes decision-making from inside the moment, not as analysis after the fact. His account of that command, In the Eye of the Storm, reached number one on the UK non-fiction bestseller list, giving boards a published, scrutinised record of how he led, not a curated anecdote set. He brings the discipline of military preparation to civilian audiences without translating it into platitudes; the link he draws between rehearsed routine and operational composure is concrete and usable. He carries credibility with senior audiences that few business speakers can match: a DSO for combat leadership, an OBE for sustained public service, and years as a BBC commentator on conflict. Biography highlights Commanded the 7th Armoured Brigade, the Desert Rats, during the 1991 Gulf War. Awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for leadership in combat. Promoted to Major General; held General Officer Commanding Eastern District and General Officer Commanding 2nd Division. Final military posting as Senior British Loan Service Officer to the Sultan of Oman; retired in 2000 after 35 years of service. Author of In the Eye of the Storm: Commanding the Desert Rats in the Gulf War (Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), a number one UK non-fiction bestseller. Appointed OBE in the 2017 Birthday Honours for services to the National Memorial Arboretum; Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Biography The 7th Armoured Brigade was the first British formation deployed to the Gulf in 1990, and the largest British armoured commitment since D-Day. Its commander spent the months before combat solving a problem most senior corporate leaders never face: how to keep 12,000 people performing at the edge of their training, in a desert, against an enemy whose intentions were unclear, with the eyes of the British public on every decision. That commander was Patrick Cordingley. The brigade fought through the ground campaign with low casualties and high tempo, and Cordingley was awarded the DSO. He published In the Eye of the Storm with Hodder and Stoughton in 1996. The book reached number one on the UK non-fiction bestseller list and remains the primary first-person record of British armoured command in the Gulf. After the Gulf, Cordingley was promoted to Major General. He held General Officer Commanding Eastern District and then 2nd Division, before a final posting as Senior British Loan Service Officer to the Sultan of Oman. He retired in 2000 after 35 years of service and spent eight years chairing a technology company, alongside work as a BBC military commentator on conflict and defence. His public service since has been substantial. He chaired the National Memorial Arboretum Appeal and the Defence and Security Forum, and was appointed OBE in 2017. For senior audiences, what he offers is rare: a credible account of leading a large organisation through a real test, told by someone who has spent the last two decades thinking about what transfers and what does not. Key speaking topics Leadership under operational pressure Decision-making with incomplete information Team performance and trust at scale Preparation, rehearsal, and operational readiness Composure and confidence in senior command Lessons from military command for civilian leaders Ideal for Boards and executive committees facing high-consequence decisions Senior leadership offsites focused on resilience and command under pressure Programmes for newly senior leaders building executive presence After-dinner audiences at corporate and association events seeking serious content rather than entertainment Audience outcomes A clearer sense of what genuine preparation looks like, and how it changes behaviour in the moment of decision. A direct, first-person account of leading a large team through a high-stakes operation, with the reasoning behind specific decisions made transparent. A working distinction between confidence as performance and confidence as the product of rehearsal. A more sober view of how teams hold together when information is incomplete and the cost of error is real.

Why organisations work with Patrick Leddin A co-authored New York Times bestseller with James Patterson, Disrupt Everything and Win, that has been licensed by FranklinCovey as a global corporate training programme. Few keynote speakers have their material adopted as a productised curriculum at that scale. A working research base at Vanderbilt Owen, where he runs the Disruption Project. The frameworks in the keynote (the 5 roles of disruption, the 16 behaviours of successful disruptors) are grounded in field research, not consulting anecdotes. A career that has actually run leadership at every scale he speaks about: a ranger-qualified Army infantry officer, KPMG consultant, FranklinCovey practitioner, and co-founder of an Inc. 5000 firm. Senior audiences recognise the difference. A direct line into the Stephen M.R. Covey and FranklinCovey leadership canon, which is the operating language for L&D functions inside many large enterprises. Biography highlights Associate Professor of the Practice of Business Studies, Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management. Teaches Corporate Strategy, Negotiation, Advanced Marketing, and Crisis Leadership. Co-author with James Patterson of Disrupt Everything and Win: Take Control of Your Future (Little, Brown, 2025), an instant New York Times bestseller. Author of The Five-Week Leadership Challenge, a Wall Street Journal bestseller introduced by Stephen M.R. Covey. Subject-matter source for FranklinCovey’s Disrupt Everything: Innovate for Impact corporate training programme, launched October 2025. Host of the Leadership Lab podcast, with on-record interviews including Stephen M.R. Covey, Patrick Lencioni, Liz Wiseman, Chris Voss, and Marshall Goldsmith. Former U.S. Army airborne infantry ranger-qualified officer, former KPMG Consulting and FranklinCovey practitioner, co-founder of Wedgewood Consulting Group and Leddin Group. Biography Disruption used to be the event a leadership team planned for. It is now the operating condition. The question that follows is harder than the one most leadership development is built to answer: what does a leader actually do, day to day, when the disruption never stops arriving? That question is the subject of Disrupt Everything and Win, the New York Times bestseller Patrick Leddin co-authored with James Patterson. The book grew out of the Disruption Project at Vanderbilt Owen, where Leddin teaches Corporate Strategy and Crisis Leadership. The research produced specific output: five roles people play inside a disruption, sixteen behaviours that distinguish successful disruptors, eight tools leaders can use to convert disruption into progress. FranklinCovey has since licensed the material as a global training programme, Disrupt Everything: Innovate for Impact. The credibility behind that work is operational. Leddin served as a ranger-qualified U.S. Army infantry officer with the 82nd Airborne, ran large client engagements at KPMG Consulting and FranklinCovey, and co-founded Wedgewood Consulting Group, an Inc. 5000 firm that was acquired in 2012. His earlier book, The Five-Week Leadership Challenge, was introduced by Stephen M.R. Covey and reached the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. He hosts the Leadership Lab podcast, where his guests have included Patrick Lencioni, Liz Wiseman, Chris Voss, and Marshall Goldsmith. The argument senior teams come for is concrete. Disruption is not a communication problem to be managed by the executive office. It is a leadership capability that can be specified, taught, and practised at every level of the organisation, and a board that treats it that way will outperform one that does not. Key speaking topics Leadership in disruption Crisis leadership Organisational change and culture Leadership pipeline development Negotiation and influence Corporate strategy under uncertainty Innovation as a leadership behaviour Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and senior leadership teams running through extended restructuring or market repositioning CHROs and chief learning officers building leadership pipelines that have to operate under continuous change Strategy and transformation leaders responsible for cultural readiness alongside operating model change Industry conferences in regulated sectors (financial services, healthcare, energy, government) where leaders manage repeated external shocks Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the roles people play during a disruption, and a way to name which role is missing in their own team The sixteen behaviours that distinguish leaders who use disruption as fuel from those who absorb it as damage A concrete set of tools, drawn from the Vanderbilt research, that leaders can apply to a specific change they are already running A sharper view of the difference between managing crisis and building a leadership culture that expects disruption as a baseline

Why organisations work with Pete Cohen A named, co-authored framework (STOP 2 THINK) for the specific moment a leader switches from reactive to intentional response, applied directly inside meetings and high-pressure conversations. A coaching track record that crosses elite sport and corporate leadership, including Ronnie O’Sullivan’s 2004 World Snooker title and senior teams at Dell, IBM, Pfizer and Heineken. Twelve years as resident Life Coach on ITV’s GMTV plus a presenter slot on Discovery’s “The Coach”, which means he reads a room and a camera in a way few corporate speakers do. Twenty plus published titles including “Habit Busting” and “Fear Busting”, giving the keynote content a tested behavioural backbone rather than a one-off thesis. A delivery style built for leadership audiences fatigued by abstract wellness content, focused on what to do in the next conversation, not the next quarter. Biography highlights Resident Life Coach on ITV’s GMTV for twelve years. Presenter of “The Coach” on the Discovery Channel. Author of around 20 books including “Habit Busting”, “Fear Busting”, “Shut the Duck Up”, “Life DIY” and “Sort Your Life Out”. Co-developer of the STOP 2 THINK leadership framework with Professor Dr Ray Sylvester. Performance coach to Ronnie O’Sullivan, Sally Gunnell, Ellen MacArthur, Roger Black, the Kent Cricket team and Arsenal Football Club. Keynote speaker for organisations including Dell, IBM, Pfizer, Novartis, Boehringer Ingelheim, Heineken, Boots, Four Seasons Hotels and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Biography Most leadership failures under pressure are not failures of intelligence. They are failures of pause. The leader keeps moving when the situation has changed, and the team carries the consequences for weeks. STOP 2 THINK, the framework Pete Cohen co-developed with Professor Dr Ray Sylvester, treats that pause as a trainable leadership behaviour, not a personality trait. Cohen has spent more than thirty years working at the intersection of psychology, sport and corporate performance. As resident Life Coach on ITV’s GMTV for twelve years and presenter of “The Coach” on the Discovery Channel, he learned to translate behavioural science into language that lands in seconds. The same instinct shapes how he works with executive teams. His sports coaching list includes Ronnie O’Sullivan in the run-up to his 2004 World Snooker title, Olympic hurdler Sally Gunnell, sailor Ellen MacArthur, and sprinter Roger Black. The corporate list is equally direct: Dell, IBM, Pfizer, Novartis, Boehringer Ingelheim, Heineken, Boots, Four Seasons Hotels and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Across both, the brief is the same. People who already perform at a high level need a way to recover composure inside the moment, not after it. The published work, around twenty titles including “Habit Busting” and “Fear Busting”, gives the keynote content its behavioural foundation. The STOP 2 THINK keynote is the operating layer on top: simple tools a leader can apply in the next meeting, not the next offsite. That is what senior teams under restructure, transformation or sustained market pressure tend to be looking for, and what most wellbeing programming does not deliver. Key speaking topics Leadership behaviour under pressure The STOP 2 THINK framework Composure and decision-making in uncertainty Behavioural change and habit formation Performance psychology Resilience for senior teams Mindset for leadership in restructure and change Ideal for CEO, COO and senior leadership teams holding decisions through restructure or market shock CHROs and people directors briefing leadership development at executive level Sales and commercial leaders managing high-pressure performance cycles Boards and partner groups looking for behavioural rather than motivational content Audience outcomes A named behavioural pause point leaders can use in the next meeting, not the next quarter A clearer read on the difference between reactive habit and intentional decision in their own leadership Practical language for coaching their direct reports through pressure moments Evidence-grounded confidence that composure is a trainable behaviour, not a personality trait A simpler internal vocabulary for decision quality under stress

Why organisations work with Peter Anderton His TEDxDerby talk “Great Leadership comes down to only two rules” is used inside MBA programmes and gives senior teams a shared, memorable language for leadership that survives the room. He treats organisations as systems, drawing on his Chartered Engineer background and early career as a manufacturing systems engineer at ICI, which lands credibly with technical directors and operational leadership teams. He has worked inside leadership populations at Jaguar Land Rover, 3M, KPMG, HSBC, Atkins and NHS leadership academies, so the content arrives already tested against complex matrixed organisations. He cuts through the leadership-development noise. Two rules, three secrets of high-performing teams, applied to the specific bottleneck the senior team is currently sitting on. He is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD, which gives the work professional weight with HR and people directors commissioning leadership programmes. Biography highlights Founder of Internal Alignment, a leadership consulting and executive development practice. TEDxDerby speaker, “Great Leadership comes down to only two rules”, used in MBA curricula internationally. Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD). Chartered Engineer; began career as a manufacturing systems engineer at ICI. Named client work includes Jaguar Land Rover, 3M, KPMG, HSBC, Atkins, Huntsman, Equifax and NHS leadership academies. Signature frameworks: “The Two Rules of Leadership” and “CPR: Connection, Purpose, Results” for high-performing teams. Biography The hardest leadership transition is the one nobody schedules. A capable individual gets promoted, then promoted again, until the job is no longer about what they personally deliver but about what their team delivers without them. That shift is where most leadership development quietly fails. It teaches more models when what the leader needs is fewer. This is the territory Peter Anderton has built his work around. As founder of Internal Alignment, he works with directors, MDs and senior teams who have outgrown their own operating habits and need to convert personal capability into team capability. His TEDxDerby talk, “Great Leadership comes down to only two rules”, is now used in MBA programmes internationally and sets out the spine of his thinking: leadership is not about the leader, except in the specific way that it entirely is. His credibility is unusual for the field. Anderton is a Chartered Engineer who started his career as a manufacturing systems engineer at ICI, and he still reads organisations as systems rather than as cultures. That framing travels well into technical and operational businesses such as Jaguar Land Rover, 3M, Atkins and Huntsman, and into financial and professional services including HSBC, KPMG and Equifax. He is also a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD, which anchors the work in the professional standards people directors recognise. What he gives a senior team is compression. Two rules of leadership, three components of a high-performing team in his CPR model: Connection, Purpose, Results. The argument is that most leadership populations do not need more frameworks; they need to act differently on the few that matter. That is the bet his clients are buying when they put him in front of their leadership cohorts. Key speaking topics Leadership fundamentals for senior leaders and directors Leadership in the age of AI and exponential change High-performing teams The leadership transition from doer to enabler Executive development and leadership populations Change leadership and the human side of transformation Difficult conversations and leadership courage Employee engagement through leadership behaviour Ideal for Director, MD and senior leadership populations making the shift from individual contributor to team leader. CHROs, people directors and L&D leaders commissioning flagship leadership programmes. Executive teams in technical, engineering, manufacturing or operationally complex businesses. Senior leadership cohorts inside organisations going through restructure, integration or sustained change. Audience outcomes A shared, memorable language for leadership across a senior cohort, anchored in the Two Rules. A clearer read of where each leader is personally creating the bottleneck their team is working around. Practical handles for handling difficult conversations without the usual avoidance and rework. A working model for high-performing teams using Connection, Purpose, Results. Renewed confidence that leadership effectiveness is a small set of disciplined behaviours, not a longer reading list.

Why organisations work with Peter Fischer Brown He brings an operator’s view of brand strategy. Years inside Orange Business and KPMG mean he reads brand as a P&L and procurement question, not a marketing artefact. He teaches B2B value creation at Esade Business School, so the frameworks he uses in the room have been pressure-tested with MBA and executive cohorts who push back hard. His membership of the Medinge Group gives him a serious intellectual home for “brands with a conscience” arguments, separate from the agency circuit that usually owns the topic. He works in English, German and Spanish across Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, which makes him useful for groups whose brand and culture questions cross those markets. His coaching qualification from Henley and his executive coaching practice mean he can move between keynote framing and small-group leadership work in the same engagement. Biography highlights Founder of FischerBrown, an international brand and corporate strategy consultancy. Former Director of Strategy for Orange Business and Ambassador of Strategic Branding for the Orange Group; former Manager and Consultant at KPMG. Academic Collaborator at Esade Business School, Barcelona, teaching MBA and Executive programmes on B2B value creation and leadership with conscience. Member of the Medinge Group; contributing author on the Slow Food Movement in “Brands with a Conscience” (Medinge Group, 2016). Contributor to the Radix think tank on European centre-ground politics and democratic participation. MA in Modern Languages and Literature and MPhil in International Relations, both University of Cambridge; Professional Certificate in Executive Coaching, Henley Business School. Biography Most “purpose” programmes break the moment they hit procurement, pricing or a difficult supplier decision. The brand line survives in the campaign and disappears in the operating model. Peter Fischer Brown works at exactly that seam, where a values-led brand position has to be defended in B2B negotiations, capital allocation and the everyday behaviour of senior leaders. He spent the formative part of his career inside the operating side of two demanding environments. At KPMG he advised on corporate and marketing strategy. At Orange he was Director of Strategy for the B2B business and Ambassador of Strategic Branding for the wider France Telecom group, running brand and strategy across European, Middle Eastern and Latin American markets. That history is why his brand frameworks read as commercial first and editorial second. Today he runs FischerBrown and teaches at Esade Business School in Barcelona, where his MBA and Executive sessions focus on B2B value creation and on leadership with conscience. The Medinge Group, of which he is a long-standing member, gives him a serious intellectual home for the latter; his chapter on the Slow Food Movement in the group’s 2016 book “Brands with a Conscience” is a worked example of how a values-led proposition can become a category position. The work that sits outside the brand spine sharpens it. As a Radix contributor he writes on the “radical centre” in European politics; he is a qualified executive coach through Henley; his linguistic and musical training (Cambridge, Trinity College London) feeds the cross-disciplinary keynotes he gives on cosmopolitanism and the art of business. Senior teams book him when they need someone who can argue brand and purpose in the same register as a CFO, and then sit with the leadership team afterwards. Key speaking topics Brand and corporate strategy Brands with a conscience and purpose-led positioning B2B value creation Leadership with conscience Sustainability and the brand promise Cosmopolitanism and cultural identity as competitive advantage The art of business: learning from the creative and performing arts Ideal for CMOs and brand directors in B2B and consumer businesses under pressure to make a purpose claim operational CEOs and strategy leads working through a brand or positioning reset Boards and leadership teams wrestling with ESG and purpose credibility HR and executive development leads commissioning leadership-with-conscience programmes for senior cohorts Audience outcomes A sharper view of where brand sits in the operating model, not only in marketing A vocabulary for discussing purpose in front of a sceptical CFO or procurement audience Specific examples of values-led brands that have held up commercially, and ones that have not A clearer framing of leadership credibility when a business is being asked to behave consistently across markets

Why organisations work with Peter Nelson He has run the same flagship influence programme at Henley Business School for over fifteen years, which means executive cohorts arrive at a method that has been stress-tested across hundreds of senior leaders, not a workshop assembled for the brief. He pioneered the use of professional actors in corporate influence and pitching training, and built the rehearsal-led methodology now common across UK executive education before it was standard practice. His client base spans law firms, asset managers, oil majors, professional services, the European Commission and Army HQ, which gives him a working vocabulary for influence in highly regulated, technically complex and politically sensitive environments. He works at the level of behaviour and live performance, not frameworks: leaders rehearse the actual conversation, board moment or client pitch they will face, with feedback in the room. Biography highlights Executive Fellow, Henley Business School; lead faculty on the “Influence and Impact” programme for over 15 years. Member of the Executive Faculty, Southampton Business School. Works with Cambridge Judge Business School, Warwick Business School and Duke Corporate Education on senior executive development. Pioneered the use of professional actors in business roleplay for influence and pitching training in the 1990s. Client roster includes Man Group, BP, BMW, Motorola, Allen & Overy, Baker & McKenzie, Barclays, Deloitte, ING, McLaren, the NHS, the European Commission and Army HQ. Signature programmes: Influence and Impact, Influencing and Negotiating, Business Pitching, Client Relationship Management, Team Effectiveness. Biography Most executive education on influence stops at the framework. Leaders leave with a model of stakeholder mapping or persuasion archetypes, then walk into a board meeting and revert to slides. The gap between knowing the theory and behaving differently in the room is the practical problem of senior communication, and it is the problem Peter Nelson has spent more than three decades working on. At Henley Business School, where he is an Executive Fellow, Nelson has led the “Influence and Impact” programme for over fifteen years. The same method now runs across Cambridge Judge Business School executive clients, Warwick Business School corporate cohorts, Duke Corporate Education and Southampton Business School, where he sits on the Executive Faculty. Cohorts include senior partners in global law firms, asset managers, professional services boards and policy leaders inside the European Commission and Army HQ. The methodology is distinctive in its mechanics. Nelson brought professional actors into corporate influence and pitching training in the 1990s, before it was standard, so leaders rehearse the actual conversation they will face: the regulator briefing, the new business pitch, the board update, the difficult client renewal. Feedback is delivered live, in the moment, on behaviour rather than theory. The result is a body of practice rather than a body of writing. Clients include Man Group, BP, BMW, Motorola, Allen & Overy, Baker & McKenzie, Barclays, Deloitte, ING and McLaren, and Nelson is most often booked when an organisation has identified that its senior people are technically excellent and commercially under-converting in the moments that matter. Key speaking topics Influence and persuasion at senior levels Executive presence and leadership impact High-stakes business pitching Negotiation skills Senior client relationships Presentation skills for leaders Team effectiveness Ideal for Partners and senior leaders in law, professional services and asset management preparing for client pitches and renewals Executive committees and boards developing presence and senior communication capability Sales, business development and relationship management leaders selling to sophisticated buyers HR and L&D heads commissioning executive development on influence, negotiation and leadership impact Audience outcomes A concrete sense of how senior audiences read presence, and what to change in the next conversation that matters Sharper command of the pitch, the board update and the negotiation set-piece, rehearsed against live feedback rather than discussed in abstract Specific tools for moving from technical credibility to commercial conversion in client-facing moments A working vocabulary for coaching their own teams on influence and impact after the session