Executive Development speakers

Why organisations work with Rashmi Airan She has lived the failure she now teaches against. A Columbia-trained lawyer who went to federal prison for fraud tied to the housing crisis is a different category of voice on judgement under pressure than a consultant or compliance trainer. Her Clarity Loop gives leadership teams a four-question, sixty-second discipline they can actually run inside a real decision, not a values poster they nod at and forget. She names the specific mechanisms that erode judgement, rationalisation, normalisation, silence, group pressure, and urgency, from the inside, because they are the ones that took down her own career. Her work connects judgement, resilience, and mental health, which makes her relevant to leaders under sustained strain rather than only to the compliance function. Biography highlights Columbia Law School graduate, with honours; undergraduate degree from UNC-Chapel Hill; former Wall Street investment banker. Served six months in federal prison for fraud tied to the US housing crisis, after a conspiracy conviction as a closing attorney. Creator of the Clarity Loop, a four-question decision framework, and the RISE Through It® process for recovering judgement after setback. Author of ALL RISE: A Lawyer’s Evolution from Prison to Purpose, endorsed by Marshall Goldsmith. TEDx speaker, Against the Slippery Slope (TEDxGreenville), on ethical blind spots and decision-making under pressure. Has delivered keynotes for leaders at Deloitte, Coca-Cola, Merck, Comcast, Cardinal Health, and Medtronic. Media appearances on ABC, PBS, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal; board director, Overtown Youth Center and Alonzo Mourning Foundation. Biography Most damaging decisions in business are not made by reckless people. They are made by capable, experienced leaders under pressure, one reasonable-seeming compromise at a time. Rashmi Airan knows the pattern from the inside. A Columbia Law School graduate and former Wall Street investment banker, she built a successful legal career before a conspiracy conviction tied to the housing crisis sent her to federal prison. That collapse became the subject of her work rather than a footnote to it. For more than a decade she has studied how speed, incentives, and the stories leaders tell themselves quietly bend judgement, and how to interrupt that drift before it hardens into damage. Her central idea is that integrity needs infrastructure: strong values are necessary but not sufficient under real pressure. The practical answer she teaches is the Clarity Loop, a four-question pause that takes about sixty seconds and forces a leader to name the pressure, examine their incentives, find the blind spot, and check the decision before acting. Her longer RISE Through It® process, Reframe, Identify, Surrender, Evolve, addresses the harder climb back after a setback. She has brought both to leadership teams at Deloitte, Coca-Cola, Merck, Comcast, Cardinal Health, and Medtronic. She is the author of ALL RISE: A Lawyer’s Evolution from Prison to Purpose, and her story has been covered by ABC, PBS, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. She serves on the board of the Overtown Youth Center and the Alonzo Mourning Foundation and is an ambassador for The Key Clubhouse, work rooted in mental health and second-chance opportunity, the ground she had to rebuild on herself. Key speaking topics Decision-making under pressure Values-based leadership Resilience after professional setback Decision drift and the conditions for ethical lapse Behavioural science and judgement Mental health and senior leadership Risk awareness for boards and executive teams Ideal for Boards, general counsel, and compliance leadership setting the ethical operating standard for the organisation. Partner groups in law, accounting, banking, and professional services where individual judgement carries firm-wide risk. Senior leadership development programmes inside Fortune-scale companies focused on decision quality and resilience. Women’s leadership forums and emerging-leader cohorts where authority, voice, and self-knowledge are central. Audience outcomes A four-question method, the Clarity Loop, they can run inside a real decision before they act. The vocabulary to name decision drift as it happens in their teams, rather than after the damage. A more honest account of how pressure, incentives, and culture combine to bend capable people’s judgement. Permission to treat mental health, fear, and self-doubt as leadership issues rather than private weakness. A first-person reference point that leaders carry back into their own teams when the pressure starts to rise.

Why organisations work with Rasmus Hougaard He runs one of the largest applied research programmes on senior leadership behaviour, with data on more than 75,000 leaders in over 100 countries through Potential Project, which gives his content a defensibility most leadership speakers cannot match. Three Harvard Business Review Press books form a single argument, mindfulness, compassion, and AI-augmented leadership, which means a client can build a multi-year leadership curriculum around one coherent thesis rather than a single talk. His “compassionate leadership” framework gives executives a usable language for difficult conversations, restructures, and performance decisions, which is exactly the territory where senior people most often damage their credibility. Potential Project has long-running operating relationships with Microsoft, Accenture, IKEA, Cisco, Nike, Roche, and others, so the content has been pressure-tested inside large complex organisations, not just on the conference circuit. Thinkers50 shortlisting for the Leadership Award places him in the small set of leadership thinkers whose work is taken seriously by senior HR and people-development functions globally. Biography highlights Founder and Managing Director of Potential Project, a global leadership development and research firm working with Microsoft, Accenture, IKEA, Cisco, Nike, Roche, Google, and Sony among others. Co-author of three Harvard Business Review Press books: “The Mind of the Leader”, “Compassionate Leadership”, and “More Human: How the Power of AI Can Transform the Way You Lead”. Shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Leadership Award and named by Thinkers50 among the most important emerging leadership thinkers. Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, and Business Insider. Research base of more than 75,000 leaders across 100+ countries underpins his frameworks and talks. Has delivered more than 1,500 keynotes and workshops to senior leadership audiences globally. Biography Most leadership development goes wrong at the same point. It treats the hard part of leadership, the decision that will upset someone, the conversation the leader has been avoiding, the moment of public pressure, as a communications problem. Potential Project, the firm Rasmus Hougaard founded and runs as Managing Director, has spent more than a decade arguing that it is an inner-discipline problem, and producing the research to show it. The argument runs through three Harvard Business Review Press books written with Jacqueline Carter. “The Mind of the Leader” drew on data from around 35,000 senior leaders to identify the mental qualities that distinguish those whose organisations actually follow them. “Compassionate Leadership” reframed the executive’s most uncomfortable moments, performance conversations, redundancies, restructure announcements, as a question of how to be honest without becoming cold. “More Human”, published by HBR Press in 2025, takes the same lens to AI and asks what leaders should do more of, not less, as machines take on more of the work. Potential Project’s client list, Microsoft, Accenture, IKEA, Cisco, Nike, Roche, Google, Sony, and others, gives the work an operating substance that pure-academic leadership thinkers rarely match. The firm’s research spans more than 75,000 leaders across 100 countries. Thinkers50 has shortlisted him for its Leadership Award and listed him among the most important emerging leadership thinkers globally, and he contributes regularly to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, and Business Insider. For a senior people function under pressure to make leadership development do real work in a fatigued organisation, the value is in the through-line. One firm, one body of evidence, one argument about what serious leadership requires in 2026, and a deep enough catalogue to anchor a multi-year programme rather than a single keynote. Key speaking topics Compassionate leadership and difficult conversations AI-augmented leadership Mindful leadership and executive composure Senior leadership development at scale Leading hybrid and distributed teams Culture and trust inside large organisations Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers redesigning senior leadership programmes Executive committees facing restructure, redundancy, or post-acquisition integration Boards and CEOs sponsoring AI rollouts where leadership behaviour, not technology, is the bottleneck Heads of leadership development and learning at global enterprises Audience outcomes A defensible model for handling the conversations leaders most often avoid Concrete practices for sustaining composure and judgement under sustained pressure A clearer view of where AI should and should not replace human leadership work Language to describe what “good leadership” actually looks like in their organisation, grounded in research rather than slogans Reference points from a peer set of global enterprises that have implemented the work

Why organisations work with René Carayol His SPIKE framework (Strengths Positively Identified Kick-Start Excellence) gives leadership teams a diagnostic for identifying the two or three individual strengths that drive high performance, rather than a generic conversation about development areas. It changes how teams are built, not just how leaders think. His case for inclusive leadership is grounded in firsthand board experience, including appointment as a Non-Executive Director of the Inland Revenue in 2001, at a time when no diversity representation existed at that level in UK public institutions. The argument carries a credibility that cannot be borrowed from research alone. Coaching and advisory engagements with senior leaders across business and government: clients and counterparts include Ralph Hamers (former CEO, ING and UBS), Sir Richard Branson, and Sir Tony Blair His “Everybody In, Nobody Out” framing positions inclusion as a performance architecture rather than an HR compliance function, directly relevant to organisations where DEI has stalled because it has not been connected to business outcomes. His executive and governance track from Marks & Spencer, PepsiCo, and IPC Media to Inland Revenue board and Computacenter plc, means his observations on leadership culture are drawn from the inside of institutions, not from coaching their periphery. His academic teaching (Cass Business School, MSc in Management) and media fluency (BBC, Channel 4, Sky News) mean he can move between rigorous argument and compelling narrative in a single session. His events consistently produce behavioural commitments rather than inspiration that dissipates. Biography highlights Decade-long career at Marks & Spencer (Senior IT Manager); IT Systems Director, PepsiCo; CIO then Managing Director of IPC Electric, IPC Magazines, driving Europe’s largest MBO at £860m, culminating in the sale to AOL Time Warner Non-Executive Director, Inland Revenue (appointed 2001); current Independent Non-Executive Director, Computacenter plc (FTSE-listed), sitting on Audit, Nomination and Remuneration Committees Executive Vice President for ESG, Medallia; member of the Global Executive Leadership Team Visiting Professor, Cass Business School; lectured on MSc in Management programme MBE (2004), services to the business community; undergraduate degree, London School of Economics; Honorary Doctorate, University of Roehampton Author, SPIKE: What Are You Great At?; co-author, Corporate Voodoo (third edition) and My Voodoo Broadcaster and commentator: BBC Two, Channel 4, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 5 Live, Sky News; former Sunday Telegraph Business Reporter columnist Biography Most leadership cultures are built around a small number of star performers at the top. SPIKE, René Carayol’s published strengths framework, challenges that model directly. The argument comes from someone who has led, governed, and coached at the highest levels of British and international business. Carayol spent a decade at Marks & Spencer in senior IT roles, then moved to PepsiCo as IT Systems Director before joining IPC Magazines as CIO. He rose to Managing Director of IPC Electric, the internet business at the centre of Europe’s largest MBO, a £860 million transaction that ended with the sale to AOL Time Warner. He went on to serve as Non-Executive Director of the Inland Revenue through its merger into HMRC, and currently sits on the board of FTSE-listed Computacenter plc. SPIKE (Strengths Positively Identified Kick-Start Excellence) is the framework that emerged from this experience. Its core argument: every person carries at least one genuine strength, and organisations that build around those strengths consistently outperform those that manage around weaknesses. For Carayol, this is inseparable from the business case for inclusive leadership. His mantra, “Everybody In, Nobody Out,” frames inclusion as a performance imperative, a position he holds with authority as one of the first Black men to serve at board level in a major UK institution. As Visiting Professor at Cass Business School and a regular voice on BBC Radio 4, Sky News, and Channel 4, his thinking reaches well beyond the conference circuit. His books, SPIKE: What Are You Great At? and the co-authored Corporate Voodoo, now in its third edition, extend his frameworks to leadership teams at scale. He was awarded an MBE in 2004 for services to the business community. Key speaking topics Strengths-based leadership Inclusive leadership and culture Leadership and business transformation Collaborative leadership Corporate culture and performance Executive coaching and personal effectiveness Diversity, equity and inclusion Ideal for Senior leadership teams and C-suite executives in FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 organisations navigating culture change or post-merger integration CHROs and Chief People Officers building inclusive, high-performance leadership cultures Board directors and non-executive directors focused on governance, leadership accountability, and succession Transformation leads and executive development programmes where the shift from management to leadership is the central challenge Audience outcomes A working understanding of the SPIKE framework and how to apply it to individual development, team design, and succession planning A reframed case for inclusive leadership as a performance architecture, not a compliance exercise – with the language to make that argument inside their own organisations Practical distinctions between management and leadership behaviours, grounded in frontline C-suite and board experience Insight drawn from Carayol’s direct coaching relationships with named CEOs and institution heads; World Bank, Barclays, ING, Generali, rather than theoretical constructs Clarity on how culture and leadership interact in practice, and what leaders can do immediately to change the pattern

Why organisations work with René Meulensteen He spent six years inside the Ferguson dressing room during one of the most studied winning runs in modern sport, and can describe how standards, feedback, and selection were actually managed day to day. He developed and ran the individual technical and finishing programme that Cristiano Ronaldo credits for the shift from winger to record goalscorer, a working example of how senior performers are coached, not managed. His book “United, Sir Alex and Me”, with a foreword by Ferguson, gives him a documented and endorsed account of the methodology behind a sustained elite culture. As Assistant National Team Coach to the Australia Socceroos, he has carried the same operating model into a different country, league, and squad and reached the World Cup knockout stage with it. Biography highlights First Team Coach at Manchester United from 2007 to 2013 under Sir Alex Ferguson. Three Premier League titles, one UEFA Champions League and one FIFA Club World Cup during his First Team Coach tenure. Twelve years at Manchester United in total, beginning in 2001 as Youth Technical Skills Development Coach. Author of “United, Sir Alex and Me: My Life in Football” (2023), foreword by Sir Alex Ferguson. Assistant National Team Coach to the Australia Socceroos, contributing to qualification and Round of 16 progression at the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Former Head Coach of Fulham FC in the English Premier League. Biography Manchester United won three Premier League titles, a Champions League and a FIFA Club World Cup in the years René Meulensteen spent as First Team Coach under Sir Alex Ferguson. The interesting question is not what was won. It is how a squad of senior internationals kept raising standards once they had already won everything. Meulensteen joined the club in 2001 as a youth technical skills development coach, working with academy players on the kind of detail that usually disappears once a player turns professional. By 2007 he was working with the first team, running individual development sessions with players including Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Rio Ferdinand and Ryan Giggs. The Ronaldo finishing programme, run during a suspension early in the 2007-08 season, is one of the few publicly documented cases of an elite forward being rebuilt as a goalscorer by deliberate coaching design. After Ferguson’s retirement in 2013, Meulensteen took head coach roles at Anzhi Makhachkala and Fulham FC in the Premier League, then moved into international football. Since 2018 he has been Assistant National Team Coach to the Australia Socceroos under Graham Arnold, including the squad’s progression to the knockout stage of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. His book “United, Sir Alex and Me”, co-written with Wayne Barton and with a foreword by Ferguson, sets out the working methodology behind that period: how standards were set, how individuals were stretched, how a culture was held together across generations of senior players. That is the material organisations engage him to translate. Key speaking topics Building and sustaining a winning culture Coaching senior performers through individual development Leadership transition and succession in elite environments Standards, feedback and accountability inside high performance teams Translating elite sport methodology into executive teams Team cohesion across generations and personalities Ideal for Executive teams and boards seeking to maintain performance after a founder, CEO or long-tenured leader transitions out Sales leadership, partner groups and senior performer cohorts where individual development is the unlock Talent and people leaders responsible for high performance culture, succession and leadership pipeline Leadership offsites and conferences focused on team cohesion and sustained excellence Audience outcomes A working understanding of how Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United actually operated day to day, told from inside the coaching staff A concrete model of how senior performers are developed individually, drawn from the Ronaldo finishing programme Specific language for the standards, feedback and accountability practices that hold an elite culture together A clearer view of the leadership behaviours that survive a change at the top, and the ones that do not

Why organisations work with Riccardo Agostini Eight national and international titles across single-seater and GT racing, including three consecutive Italian GT Sprint championships and the Lamborghini Super Trofeo World Final. The credibility is documented, not narrated. A working understanding of how a small, specialised team performs under repeated time pressure. Pit crew, race engineer, and driver decisions land in the same second, and Agostini speaks to how that coordination is built and held. Instructor experience at Centro Internazionale Guida Sicura, the Italian advanced driving school. He coaches as well as competes, which translates into a session that can teach, not only inspire. Italian and English delivery for European corporate audiences without translation overhead. Biography highlights Three-time Italian GT Sprint champion (2019, 2020, 2021) and 2021 Italian GT Endurance champion. 2017 Lamborghini Super Trofeo North America champion and Lamborghini Super Trofeo World Final winner. 2015 Porsche Carrera Cup Italia champion; 2012 Italian Formula Three champion (European and Italian series). Tested a Ferrari Formula One car in November 2012 as the Italian F3 rookie prize. Current factory-supported driver competing for Richard Mille AF Corse in the 2025 European Le Mans Series and the 2025 24 Hours of Le Mans. Development driver and instructor at Centro Internazionale Guida Sicura, founded by former F1 driver Andrea De Adamich. Biography A GT car at racing speed sends information to the driver faster than most people can read a single line of text. The driver acts on it, the engineer on the pit wall reads telemetry from the same lap, and the crew prepares the stop. Three roles, one decision, repeated for two hours. That is the working environment Agostini has competed in since 2015. His titles span four manufacturer programmes. Porsche Carrera Cup Italia in 2015. Lamborghini Super Trofeo North America and the Super Trofeo World Final in 2017. Italian GT Sprint with Audi Sport Italia in 2019, 2020, and 2021, alongside the Italian GT Endurance title in 2021. He now races a Ferrari 296 GT3 for Richard Mille AF Corse in the European Le Mans Series and the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The relevance to leadership audiences sits in two places. The first is composure: how a driver handles a bad lap, a strategy call that goes against him, or a mechanical failure with thirty minutes still to run. The second is coordination: how a driver, engineer, and crew of specialists make a sequence of decisions in compressed time without re-litigating each one. Both translate cleanly to senior teams operating in markets where the response window has shrunk. Agostini also coaches. As an instructor at Centro Internazionale Guida Sicura, the high-performance driving school founded by former F1 driver Andrea De Adamich, he develops younger drivers and corporate clients. That teaching role is what differentiates him from a circuit-only speaker. He has practised the translation from the cockpit to the classroom, which is the part that most motorsport profiles describe but few have actually done. Key speaking topics Performance under pressure Team coordination in compressed decision windows Recovery from mistakes and setbacks Coaching and talent development Discipline and preparation as competitive advantage Resilience through career uncertainty Cross-cultural team leadership in international motorsport Ideal for Sales and commercial leadership teams operating in high-frequency decision environments Operations and manufacturing leaders building cross-functional team coordination Talent and L&D directors designing high-performance coaching programmes Corporate hospitality programmes for automotive, engineering, and luxury brand audiences Audience outcomes A working model for how composure is built and held, drawn from cockpit experience rather than theory Specific examples of how driver, engineer, and crew compress decisions into seconds without losing alignment A view of how mistakes are processed inside a race weekend so that the next session is not compromised A coach’s perspective on developing younger team members under demanding conditions

Why organisations work with Rich Diviney He brings a published, named framework, the 25 Attributes, drawn from designing and running selection for one of the most demanding assessment processes in the world. Senior teams leave with a vocabulary for talent decisions that does not collapse under pressure. He separates skills from attributes in a way that changes how boards and executive teams think about hiring, succession, and team composition. Skills tell you what someone has done; attributes tell you how they will behave when the script breaks. He has translated SEAL selection science into operating practice for Google, McKinsey, American Airlines, the San Francisco 49ers, McLaren, Adobe, Ernst & Young, Zoom, Bank of America, Lexus, and Deloitte. The frameworks have been stress-tested in commercial environments, not just military ones. His second book, Masters of Uncertainty (Amplify, 2025), gives leaders a method for performing through chaos rather than recovering from it. The argument moves the conversation from resilience as recovery to composure as a deliberate, trainable capability. Biography highlights Retired Navy SEAL commander with more than 20 years of service and 13+ overseas deployments, 11 to Iraq and Afghanistan. Officer in charge of selection, assessment, and training for a specialized SEAL command. Led the creation of the SEALs’ “Mind Gym” for cognitive performance training in high-stress environments. Author of The Attributes: 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance (Random House, 2021), a bestselling book. Author of Masters of Uncertainty: The Navy SEAL Way to Turn Stress into Success for You and Your Team (Amplify Publishing, 2025). Featured in McKinsey’s “Author Talks” series; founder and CEO of The Attributes Inc. Biography Selection is where most organisations get talent decisions wrong. The candidates with the cleanest resumes wash out under stress; the ones who looked unremarkable on paper hold the team together when the plan falls apart. Rich Diviney spent the back half of his Navy career running the selection, assessment, and training pipeline for a specialized SEAL command, watching that pattern repeat at the top of one of the most demanding evaluation systems in the world. The framework he built from that work is now in two books and a consulting practice. The Attributes: 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance (Random House, 2021) names the innate traits, things like adaptability, cunning, narcissism, courage, that predict performance when skills run out. Masters of Uncertainty (Amplify, 2025) extends the argument into a method for staying composed and decisive when conditions are chaotic. Both treat performance as something you can engineer in advance through how you select and develop people, not something you hope shows up on the day. The substance has translated. Since leaving the Navy in 2017, Diviney has worked with Google, McKinsey, American Airlines, the San Francisco 49ers, McLaren, Adobe, Ernst & Young, Zoom, Bank of America, Lexus, and Deloitte. He was featured in McKinsey’s “Author Talks” series on the thesis that attributes, not skills, decide whether someone makes the cut. The pattern across his clients is consistent: they are organisations whose top teams operate at the edge of their capacity and need a sharper way to choose, build, and lead the people who get sent in first. What makes him useful in a boardroom is not the SEAL biography. It is that he has a tested vocabulary for the part of leadership most frameworks gloss over: how human beings actually behave when certainty disappears. Key speaking topics The Attributes framework for individual and team performance Selection, assessment, and team composition Performing under uncertainty and stress High-performing team dynamics Trust as an operating discipline Leadership in elite and high-pressure environments Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and executive teams responsible for performance through volatile conditions. CHROs and talent leaders rethinking selection, succession, and team composition. Boards and senior leadership offsites focused on resilience, composure, and decision-making under pressure. High-stakes operating teams in financial services, professional services, sport, aviation, and defence-adjacent industries. Audience outcomes A working distinction between skills and attributes that changes how leaders evaluate talent. A vocabulary of 25 named attributes leaders can use immediately in selection, succession, and team-building conversations. A method for staying composed and decisive in conditions where the plan has stopped working. A clearer view of what trust actually consists of inside a high-performing team, and how to build it deliberately. A reframe of resilience: from recovery after shock to performance through it.

Why organisations work with Richard Gerver He has a verifiable case study that most leadership speakers do not. Grange Primary School moved from near-failure to a nationally referenced model of learning under his leadership, recognised by the National Teaching Awards in 2005. His books are read by operating audiences, not just educators. Change: Learn to Love It, Learn to Lead It and Simple Thinking are published by Penguin and Wiley/Capstone, respectively, and held shelf positions in business charts. LinkedIn Learning commissioned him to build Smart Thinking and Developing Mental Toughness for a global business audience. The courses have reached learners at scale across multiple languages. He worked closely with Sir Ken Robinson on human potential and creativity, and is cited in Robinson’s The Element. That intellectual lineage gives his leadership works a depth most motivational speakers cannot claim. He has been named UK Business Speaker of the Year on more than one occasion, including a confirmed 2011 win cited in his University of Derby honorary doctorate commendation. Biography highlights Headteacher of Grange Primary School, Derbyshire, where he developed the “Grangeton” model and led a documented institutional turnaround. National Teaching Awards Head Teacher of the Year, 2005. Honorary Doctor of Education, University of Derby, 2016. Author of Creating Tomorrow’s Schools Today (Bloomsbury Education), Change: Learn to Love It, Learn to Lead It (Penguin) and Simple Thinking (Wiley/Capstone). LinkedIn Learning instructor: Smart Thinking and Developing Mental Toughness. Foreword by Sir Ken Robinson on his first book; later cited in Robinson’s The Element. Biography Grange Primary School was on the verge of failure when Richard Gerver took it over. Within two years, the school was being studied as a national model, with a curriculum built around a pupil-run virtual town called Grangeton. The work earned him the National Teaching Awards Head Teacher of the Year in 2005 and shaped the rest of his career. He has spent the two decades since translating that experience for business audiences. Change: Learn to Love It, Learn to Lead It, published by Penguin, argues that leaders fail at change because they manage it as a project rather than a behaviour. Simple Thinking, published by Wiley/Capstone, attacks the bureaucratic clutter that senior teams build around their own decisions. Both books found shelf space in mainstream business sections, not just education. His thinking sits in the lineage of Sir Ken Robinson, who wrote the foreword to his first book and cited him in The Element. He has worked with UNESCO, the British Council, Skanska and the Welsh Government, and was commissioned by LinkedIn Learning to build two courses, Smart Thinking and Developing Mental Toughness, that have reached a global business audience. The University of Derby awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Education in 2016, citing his ability to humanise complex organisational issues through a leadership philosophy built on communication, empowerment and impact. He has been named UK Business Speaker of the Year on more than one occasion. Key speaking topics Human leadership and behaviour change Organisational transformation Resilience and mental toughness Curiosity, creativity and innovation Future skills and human potential Change management Executive development Ideal for CEOs and executive teams are asking why a recent transformation programme has stalled CHROs and L&D directors rebuilding leadership development for a fatigued workforce Senior leaders preparing a workforce for restructure, integration, or operating-model change Boards looking for an outside voice on the human side of strategic execution Audience outcomes A sharper view of why most change programmes fail at the leader’s own behaviour, not at the strategy Specific tools for stripping complexity out of decisions and communication Confidence that resilience and mental toughness can be built deliberately, with examples from sport and education A reframing of curiosity as an organisational capability, not a personal trait Renewed clarity on what senior leaders should personally commit to during a period of change

Why organisations work with Rita Clifton A board-level voice on brand, not an agency one. As Deputy Chairman of the John Lewis Partnership and former NED at Nationwide, ASOS, Bupa, and Dixons, she speaks about brand from inside the governance conversation, not across the table from it. Two decades shaping the modern discipline of brand valuation as London CEO then Chairman of Interbrand, the firm that established the methodology most large companies still use to put a number on brand equity. Author of the standard reference text Brands and Branding for The Economist, used as a teaching text on MBA programmes, alongside The Future of Brands and Love Your Imposter. Credible on sustainability and brand purpose as Chair of Forum for the Future, which separates her from brand voices who treat purpose as messaging rather than as a commercial commitment to test. Visiting Fellow at Oxford’s Said Business School on corporate reputation, with media reach across BBC, Sky, and the FT that signals authority to an external audience as well as an internal one. Biography highlights Deputy Chairman, John Lewis Partnership (from February 2021); Chair of the Nominations Committee. Chair, Forum for the Future, the international sustainability non-profit founded by Jonathon Porritt and Sara Parkin. Former London CEO and Chairman of Interbrand (1997 to 2012); previously Vice Chairman and Strategy Director at Saatchi & Saatchi. Visiting Fellow, Said Business School, University of Oxford, specialising in corporate reputation. Author of Brands and Branding (The Economist), The Future of Brands, and Love Your Imposter (Kogan Page, 2020), shortlisted at the Business Book Awards. CBE, 2014 New Year Honours, for services to the creative industries. Biography Brand is still treated, in most boardrooms, as something the marketing function owns. It sits beneath strategy in the agenda, gets the smallest share of capital, and is measured by activity rather than by enterprise value. Rita Clifton’s argument, built across thirty years at Saatchi & Saatchi, Interbrand, and BrandCap, is that this is the wrong organisational logic. Brand is what holds a company’s pricing power, customer trust, and talent magnetism in place, and in most large businesses it is the largest intangible asset on the balance sheet. She has tested the argument from both sides. As London CEO and then Chairman of Interbrand from 1997 to 2012, she helped shape the brand valuation methodology that boards now use to compare brand equity to other forms of intangible capital. As Deputy Chairman of the John Lewis Partnership, alongside earlier non-executive roles at Nationwide Building Society, ASOS, Bupa, Dixons, and Ascential, she has been the person on the other side of the table, asking executive teams what their brand investment is actually buying. Her writing makes the argument durable. Brands and Branding, published by The Economist, is a standard MBA reference. Love Your Imposter, published by Kogan Page in 2020, was shortlisted at the Business Book Awards and reframes the inner experience of senior leadership through the same lens of identity and authenticity she applies to brands. The sustainability work runs in parallel and reinforces the commercial case. As Chair of Forum for the Future and a Trustee at Green Alliance, she sits inside the policy conversation on net zero and corporate purpose. That gives her something most brand voices lack: a defensible position on whether a company’s stated purpose is actually being capitalised, or is just rhetoric on a website. Key speaking topics Brand as enterprise value and board agenda item Corporate reputation under digital and AI disruption Brand purpose, sustainability, and credibility Non-executive leadership and governance Personal brand and authenticity for senior leaders Marketing and brand strategy in consumer-facing businesses Diversity in the boardroom Ideal for Boards, chairs, and NEDs reviewing brand as a strategic asset rather than a marketing budget line CMOs, CCOs, and CSOs aligning brand, sustainability, and corporate reputation CEO and ExCo offsites in consumer, retail, financial services, and partnership-model businesses Senior leadership programmes addressing personal brand, identity, and presence at the top Audience outcomes A sharper definition of what brand is doing inside their own organisation’s P&L and balance sheet A board-level vocabulary for brand investment that connects to capital allocation, not campaign spend A more honest read on whether stated purpose is commercially credible to customers, employees, and investors A practical view of personal authority for senior leaders facing scrutiny they did not have earlier in their careers

Why organisations work with Robby Kojetin A first-person account of recovery that holds up to scrutiny: 928 days from operating table to the summit of Everest, with the rebuild documented in two published books, not a single anecdote stretched across an hour. A working framework, Define, Decide, Deliver, that translates expedition discipline into how senior people make calls under pressure rather than freeze or default to old plans. Credibility as the 17th South African to summit Everest, ten Kilimanjaro summits, and a K2 attempt halted by helicopter evacuation at 5,000 metres. The expeditions are real, not décor. A delivery register that suits serious corporate audiences. Past clients include Deloitte, Pfizer, Mastercard, Standard Bank, Nedbank, Liberty, GSK and Wits Business School, across keynote and executive-education formats. Biography highlights 17th South African to summit Mount Everest, 2009. Author of Mind Over Mountain: A Mental and Physical Climb to the Top (Jonathan Ball Publishers, international edition ISBN 9781789561050). Co-author of Parallel Summits: Mastering the Art of Money with financial planner Thys van Zyl. Ten Kilimanjaro summits, five of the Seven Summits, first South African team member to summit Ama Dablam. Keynote and executive-education work for Deloitte, Pfizer, Mastercard, Standard Bank, Nedbank, FNB, GSK, Medtronic, LEGO, Volkswagen SA, Wits Business School and the Gordon Institute of Business Science. Ironman triathlon finisher; team leader on more than one hundred mountaineering expeditions. Biography A simple mistake at an indoor climbing gym in 2006 broke both of Robby Kojetin’s ankles and put a 28-year-old aspiring mountaineer in a wheelchair for the best part of a year. Nine hundred and twenty-eight days after leaving the operating table, he stood on the summit of Mount Everest as the 17th South African to have done so. The interesting part is what happened in between. Kojetin’s keynote work is built on the discipline of that rebuild rather than the drama of the summit. Recovery, in his framing, is not a private mental health story. It is a question of how a leader reassembles the capacity to define what now matters, decide under conditions that have shifted, and deliver without burning out the people around them. The framework he uses with corporate audiences, Define, Decide, Deliver, comes directly from the expedition logic of operating in environments where the original plan no longer applies. The published record matters. Mind Over Mountain: A Mental and Physical Climb to the Top, his account of the accident, the recovery and the climb, was first issued by Jonathan Ball Publishers and later in an international paperback edition. He has since co-authored Parallel Summits: Mastering the Art of Money with financial planner Thys van Zyl, applying the same logic to long-horizon decisions about capital. Two books, one consistent argument: the work that determines outcomes happens before the visible climb begins. Beyond Everest, the expedition CV does heavy lifting in front of senior audiences. Ten Kilimanjaro summits, five of the Seven Summits, an aborted K2 attempt that ended with a helicopter evacuation at five thousand metres, and the first South African team summit of Ama Dablam. Corporate clients including Deloitte, Pfizer, Mastercard, Standard Bank, Nedbank and Wits Business School book him for the keynote, not the climb. Key speaking topics Resilience after shock Self-leadership and composure under pressure Decision-making in disrupted conditions Long-horizon goal setting for senior teams Team accountability on extended efforts Personal recovery and return to performance Ideal for C-suite leadership conferences where the team is in the middle of, or emerging from, a significant disruption. HR, talent and L&D leaders designing senior leadership development around resilience and decision-making. Sales and commercial kick-offs where the room needs a credible reset on persistence and execution discipline. Partner and senior associate audiences in professional services firms (consulting, audit, law) running multi-year client mandates. Audience outcomes A clear sense of what changes in a leader’s decision-making after a setback, and what to do about it. The Define, Decide, Deliver structure applied to a current organisational pressure point, not as a generic motivational message. Language for talking about recovery and composure that senior leaders can actually use with their own teams. A reset on goal-setting horizons that distinguishes between summit thinking and the daily decisions that determine whether the summit is reached.

Why organisations work with Roberto Forzoni Authored the textbook the Football Association embedded into its national coaching curriculum (The Official FA Guide to Psychology for Football, Hodder, 2004). The intellectual model has been tested at scale across FA coach education, not only in private practice. Built the “Team Murray” multidisciplinary support model during his tenure as National Performance Psychologist at the Lawn Tennis Association, 2007 to 2009. The structure has since been adopted by other federations and players as a template. Has done the hands-on work alongside the consultancy. First-team coaching roles under Steve Coppell at Crystal Palace, Brentford and Brighton; performance psychology at West Ham United, Southampton, Charlton and Norwich City. He has been in the dressing room when pressure broke a team and when it did not. Holds an MSc in Sport Sciences (Distinction) from Brunel University and BASES accreditation, with applied training in CBT, motivational interviewing and solution-focused practice. The clinical depth is unusual for a performance speaker. Standing BBC consultant on performance and mindset for more than two decades, with further contributions on Sky and Al Jazeera. The perspective has been publicly tested over time, not assembled for the stage. Biography highlights Lead author of The Official FA Guide to Psychology for Football (Hodder & Stoughton, 2004), embedded by the Football Association into its national coaching curriculum. National Performance Psychologist at the Lawn Tennis Association from 2007 to 2009. Created the “Team Murray” multidisciplinary support model during Andy Murray’s early Grand Slam years. First-team coaching and performance psychology roles across eight Premier League clubs, including West Ham United, Southampton, Brentford, Brighton, Crystal Palace, Charlton Athletic and Norwich City. MSc Sport Sciences (Distinction), Brunel University. BASES-accredited Sport Psychologist, with further training in CBT, motivational interviewing and solution-focused practice. BBC consultant on performance and mindset across BBC TV and BBC Radio for more than two decades, with further contributions on Sky and Al Jazeera. Psychological coach to Olympic and World Championship athletes, including heavyweight Derek Chisora’s preparation for his title fight against Tyson Fury and Olympic sprinter Ashleigh Nelson. Biography The West Ham squad that brought in Roberto Forzoni as performance psychologist was running a 23% win rate. Nine games later, after the team had completed a Premier League double over both Manchester United and Arsenal, the win rate sat at 78%. The intervention was psychological. That kind of recovery has shown up repeatedly across Forzoni’s thirty years inside elite sport. He has held first-team coaching and performance psychology roles at eight Premier League clubs, including West Ham United, Southampton, Brentford and Crystal Palace. He prepared heavyweight Derek Chisora for the title fight against Tyson Fury, and built the “Team Murray” multidisciplinary model during Andy Murray’s early years on the tour. The published work sits in football. Forzoni is the lead author of The Official FA Guide to Psychology for Football, the textbook the Football Association embedded into its coach education programme in 2004. The intellectual base draws on an MSc in Sport Sciences (Distinction) from Brunel University, BASES accreditation, and applied training in CBT and solution-focused practice. More than two decades of BBC consultancy on performance and mindset have put the perspective into wide public circulation. What Forzoni brings into a corporate room is a particular reading of senior team behaviour under pressure. The patterns he watches for were diagnosed in dressing rooms and on Centre Court. Composure narrows under scrutiny. Strong personalities stop bringing their best to the group when results turn. For Forzoni, these are coachable problems, drawn from the same evidence base a relegation-threatened Premier League squad would use. Key speaking topics Performance psychology Team dynamics under pressure Composure and emotional regulation in senior leadership Recovery from public setback Mindset and behavioural change in elite environments Wellbeing and sustained performance Ideal for Senior leadership teams under sustained external scrutiny or after a publicly visible setback CEOs and executive committees in restructure, post-merger integration or change cycles, where the constraint has become team behaviour CHROs and L&D directors building team-effectiveness and resilience programmes for senior talent High-stakes client-facing teams in sales, professional services and trading environments Audience outcomes A specific language for the behaviours that hold a team together under pressure and the behaviours that split it apart The techniques used inside Premier League dressing rooms and Grand Slam tennis to regulate nerves and recover after a public setback An honest read of the gap between a leadership team’s stated values and how it actually behaves when results stall Composure approached as a deliberate behaviour leaders can train, with specific drills Forzoni uses inside elite sport The discipline of asking “Did I work as hard as I could today?” as a daily performance check, a question Forzoni draws from elite athletes

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

Why organisations work with Robin Speculand Direct, exclusive access to the inside story of DBS Bank’s transformation from “best bank in Singapore” to repeated “World’s Best Bank” winner, captured through C-suite interviews and translated into a method other organisations can apply. Proprietary implementation assessments and tools, including the Implementation Compass and the Ticking Clock model, that give leadership teams a structured way to diagnose where their strategy is breaking down. Co-author with Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez of the Strategy Implementation Playbook, the most current step-by-step reference work in a field most consultancies still treat as adjacent to strategy. Two and a half decades specialising solely in the implementation problem at Bridges Business Consultancy, with foundational client engagements at Singapore Airlines and a global luxury group, and current work extending the same discipline into AI and digital transformation. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Bridges Business Consultancy Int; co-founder, Strategy Implementation Institute; co-founder, Digital Leadership Specialists. Author of nine books, including World’s Best Bank (Amazon #1 bestseller, over 100,000 copies sold, translated into seven languages) and Excellence in Execution. Co-nominated for the Thinkers50 Ideas into Practice Award (2021) with DBS CEO Piyush Gupta. Educator for Duke CE and IMD; adjunct faculty at Singapore Management University and the National University of Singapore. Speaker at the Global Peter Drucker Forum (2023); featured on BBC, CNBC, Channel News Asia, and Forbes. Author of three Harvard-listed case studies on DBS Bank’s digital transformation. Biography DBS Bank was, for years, an unremarkable regional player. A decade later, it had been named World’s Best Bank by Euromoney, Global Finance, and The Banker in successive years, and Harvard had filed it among the most significant digital transformations of the era. Robin Speculand had direct access to the C-suite throughout. World’s Best Bank: A Strategic Guide to Digital Transformation is the published account of how the change was actually executed, not a retrospective tribute. That access matters because most strategy literature stops at the decision. Speculand founded Bridges Business Consultancy in 2000 specifically because he saw executives talking about strategy with almost no operating language for implementation. Twenty-five years later, the field he helped name has its own institute, of which he is co-founder, and a body of work that includes nine books, six Harvard-listed case studies, and the Strategy Implementation Playbook co-authored with Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez. His 2024 book Implement: Doing it Right in a Digital World extends the same discipline into AI-era transformation. His proprietary tools, the Implementation Compass and the Ticking Clock model, give boards a way to locate where execution is breaking down: governance, pace, capability, behaviour, or measurement. Singapore Airlines was an early client. A global luxury group used the work to anchor its first digital programme. The teaching footprint, Duke CE, IMD, Singapore Management University, NUS, reflects how seriously serious institutions now take implementation as a discrete competence. He was co-nominated with then-DBS CEO Piyush Gupta for the Thinkers50 Ideas into Practice Award in 2021, the practitioner counterpart to the main Thinkers50 ranking. The point is not the recognition. It is what the nomination signals: that the lessons of one of the decade’s most-studied transformations have been codified in a form other organisations can use. Key speaking topics Transformation in an AI-driven world Strategy implementation Digital transformation Execution and operating discipline Lessons from the DBS Bank transformation Leadership in change programmes Organizational Agility Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and chief strategy officers leading enterprise-wide transformation Boards governing multi-year digital or operating-model change Banking and financial services leadership teams benchmarking against DBS Senior teams preparing strategy off-sites where implementation, not formulation, is the constraint Audience outcomes A clear language for diagnosing where their own strategy is breaking down in implementation The DBS playbook is a comparable, not a case study, with the levers their own organisation can pull A structured view of transformation as governance and capability work, not a technology purchase Specific instruments (Implementation Compass, Ticking Clock), leaders can take back into their next strategy review