Executive Development

Why organisations work with Brian McBride He has actually done the job a board is usually asking about: scaled Amazon UK as CEO, then chaired ASOS and Trainline through listed-company growth. His view on digital disruption is operator-grade, not commentator-grade, grounded in P&L decisions inside a pure-play digital business. He has governed at national scale as President of the CBI and as Lead Non-Executive on the UK Ministry of Defence Board, which gives him a rare read on the business-state interface. He speaks the language of chairs, non-executives, and regulators fluently, because those are the roles he still holds. He is credible with both traditional boards and digital-native leadership teams, and comfortable translating between them. Biography highlights CEO of Amazon.co.uk, 2006-2011 Chairman of ASOS plc, 2012-2018 Current Chair of Trainline plc President of the Confederation of British Industry, 2022-2024 Lead Non-Executive Director, UK Ministry of Defence Board, 2020-2025 Independent non-Executive, KPMG UK Public Interest Committee Honorary Doctorate, University of Glasgow; Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Biography Amazon UK was still a challenger in the British market when Brian McBride took over as CEO in 2006. By the time he left in 2011, it had become the default reference point for what digital retail looked like in the UK, and the benchmark every high-street incumbent was measured against. That experience sits underneath almost everything he has done since. After Amazon he moved into chairing listed digital businesses. He chaired ASOS plc from 2012 to 2018 through its expansion as a global online fashion retailer, and he currently chairs Trainline plc, the UK-listed online rail and coach platform. Chairing digital-first companies at public-market scale is a narrow skill, and his track record in it is unusually deep. His governance reach runs well beyond any single company. He served as President of the CBI from 2022 to 2024, a period that included the most serious institutional crisis in the organisation’s recent history, and as Lead Non-Executive Director on the UK Ministry of Defence Board from 2020 to 2025. He is now an Independent non-Executive on KPMG UK’s Public Interest Committee and a senior adviser at Scottish Equity Partners. Earlier in his career he ran Dell’s UK and Northern Europe business and was Managing Director of T-Mobile UK, where he led the UK launch of 3G. Glasgow University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2024 for services to business and philanthropy, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh elected him a Fellow in 2025. Key speaking topics Digital business leadership at scale E-commerce strategy and platform competition Board governance in listed digital companies Transformation inside traditional businesses Public and private sector leadership The UK business and policy environment Ideal for Chairs, CEOs and board directors of listed companies facing digital-era competition Executive teams inside traditional businesses running a transformation programme Senior leaders in public sector and government-adjacent institutions working with private sector partners CBI-level industry bodies, banks, professional services firms and large retailers Audience outcomes A working view of how a pure-play digital business actually makes decisions, from someone who ran one A sharper sense of what effective board governance looks like when the business model is still changing A clearer read on where leadership styles break down in the shift from traditional to digital-native operating models A grounded perspective on the UK business environment from a former CBI President Practical reference points from Amazon, ASOS and Trainline rather than abstract case studies

Why organisations work with Bill Fischer Primary-source access to Haier’s rendanheyi model, one of the most studied organisational experiments of the last two decades, with direct consulting engagement rather than secondary commentary. A working framework for turning a commodity business into a platform of autonomous micro-enterprises, grounded in Reinventing Giants and a decade of fieldwork inside Chinese and Western incumbents. Co-direction of IMD’s Driving Strategic Innovation programme with MIT Sloan gives him a live executive audience and a tested pedagogy, not only a book. A Thinkers50 Hall of Fame induction and a former CEIBS presidency signal range: he reads Chinese industrial strategy and Western corporate transformation from the inside of both. Two decades of work on creative teams, from Virtuoso Teams to The Idea Hunter, give him a practitioner language for how ideas actually get found and executed inside organisations. Biography highlights Professor Emeritus of Innovation Management at IMD, Lausanne. Inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, 2019. Former President of China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), Shanghai, 1997-1999; recipient of Shanghai’s Silver Magnolia award. Co-founder and co-director of IMD’s Driving Strategic Innovation programme with MIT Sloan. Author of Reinventing Giants (Wiley, 2013), The Idea Hunter (Wiley, 2011), and Virtuoso Teams (FT/Prentice Hall, 2005). Forbes columnist, “The Ideas Business”; management innovation consultant to Haier Group. Biography Haier was a near-bankrupt Qingdao refrigerator maker when Fischer first studied it. Three decades later it is the world’s largest home appliance group and the most watched organisational experiment in global management, run as a platform of thousands of autonomous micro-enterprises. Fischer’s book Reinventing Giants documented how that happened, and he has advised the company on its rendanheyi model since. That work sits inside a longer argument. Fischer’s research treats innovation as a social problem, not a creativity problem. Virtuoso Teams looked at how small groups of strong talents produce original work under pressure. The Idea Hunter showed that good ideas are mostly found, not invented, and that the hunt is a disciplined practice. Reinventing Giants pushed the question up one level, to the architecture of the firm itself. His institutional track record reinforces the range. He held an endowed chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for more than two decades, led CEIBS in Shanghai at the point when it became China’s first serious global business school, and has been on the IMD faculty in Lausanne since 1990. With MIT Sloan he co-directs Driving Strategic Innovation, one of the longer-running senior executive programmes on the subject. For buyers, that means a speaker who can move from the CEO question, how do we stop strangling new businesses inside the old one, to the concrete organisational moves that Haier and a small number of other firms have actually made. Key speaking topics Business model innovation in mature incumbents Haier and the rendanheyi platform model Organisational design for innovation Creative teams and talent Corporate transformation in China Leadership of innovation programmes Ecosystems and micro-enterprise structures Ideal for CEOs and boards of large incumbents under pressure to generate new businesses from the core. Chief Strategy, Chief Innovation and Chief Transformation officers redesigning operating models. Senior leadership teams at industrial and consumer-goods firms competing against Chinese platform companies. Executive development audiences on innovation, strategy, and organisational design. Audience outcomes A clear read of what Haier actually did, beyond the slogans, and what parts travel to other firms. Sharper vocabulary for diagnosing why new ideas die inside the existing structure. A working model of the firm as a platform of micro-enterprises, with the trade-offs named. A practitioner frame for finding, developing and scaling ideas through small strong teams. Perspective on Chinese management practice from someone who has taught and led inside it.

Why organisations work with Beau Lotto His central argument is scientific, not motivational: the brain did not evolve to see the world accurately, it evolved to survive, which means every leader’s judgment is shaped by assumptions they cannot see. That insight reframes the innovation problem from a strategic failure to a perceptual one. Lab of Misfits designs Experiential Experiments: structured immersive experiences that demonstrably shift how audiences perceive in real time, not merely inform them about perception. An audience leaves having experienced a change in how they see, not having heard a case for why change is necessary. His awe research, conducted with Cirque du Soleil and published in peer-reviewed form, is a named organisational experiment demonstrating that specific emotional states measurably alter perception and behaviour, giving executives evidence-based ground for culture and creativity investment. The Blackawton Bees project, which produced the first peer-reviewed scientific paper authored by primary school children, published in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters, is proof that his participative science method changes how non-experts engage with uncertainty and discovery. Over 70 peer-reviewed articles give hard scientific grounding to conclusions that most innovation and leadership speakers make from anecdote or case study alone. Biography highlights PhD in Cellular and Molecular Developmental Neuroscience, University of Edinburgh Medical School; BSc in anatomy and physiology, UC Berkeley; postdoctoral fellow at Duke University Lecturer then Reader at University College London; currently Visiting Scholar at New York University Founder of Lab of Misfits (2001), described across multiple independent sources as the world’s first neuro-design studio; clients include Cirque du Soleil, Microsoft, and L’Oréal Author of Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently (Hachette Books, 2017); co-author of Why We See What We Do with Duke neuroscientist Dale Purves Three mainstage TED talks; combined online viewership of over 1.6 million Led the Blackawton Bees project, which produced the first peer-reviewed scientific paper authored by primary school children (Royal Society’s Biology Letters, 2010) Featured in BBC Horizon; Lab of Misfits held a two-year public residency at London’s Science Museum (2010–2012) Biography When the brain processes information, it does not reflect the world. It predicts it. That is the central finding of Beau Lotto’s 25 years of research into human perception, and it has a direct organisational consequence: the assumptions leaders cannot see are the ones most reliably shaping their decisions. Lotto earned his PhD in Cellular and Molecular Developmental Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh, completed postdoctoral work at Duke University under neuroscientist Dale Purves, and went on to become a Reader at University College London. His research, spanning more than 70 peer-reviewed articles, examines how the brain constructs reality at the cellular, computational, and perceptual levels, with the aim of understanding how biologically-inspired systems adapt to uncertainty. That research became the basis for Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently (Hachette Books, 2017), which argues that the next significant innovation, in business as in science, is not a new technology but a new way of seeing. To put the thesis into practice, Lotto founded Lab of Misfits, the world’s first neuro-design studio, which has designed Experiential Experiments for organisations including Cirque du Soleil, Microsoft, and L’Oréal, and conducted peer-reviewed awe research with Cirque du Soleil that demonstrated measurable psychological and behavioural effects from specific experiential conditions. His three mainstage TED talks and a two-year residency at London’s Science Museum, where his Lottolab studio ran live public experiments in perception, establish a rare combination: a working scientist who has spent decades translating rigorous neuroscience into experiences that change how both individual leaders and large audiences actually perceive. For organisations serious about adaptation, that distinction matters. Key speaking topics Neuroscience of perception and decision-making Leading and adapting under uncertainty Perceptual constraints on innovation The science of awe and its organisational applications Assumptions, context, and behavioural change Experiential science and participative learning Creativity and the ecology of innovation Ideal for C-suite and senior leadership teams navigating significant strategic or cultural change Transformation and innovation leads looking for evidence-based frameworks rather than motivational framing CHROs and learning and development leaders building cultures of curiosity and adaptability Boards and strategy forums grappling with decision-making quality under conditions of complexity Audience outcomes A neuroscientific understanding of why assumptions – not a lack of information – are the primary constraint on leadership judgement and organisational change Direct, first-person experience of how perception can be altered, not just an explanation of why it matters A reframed understanding of uncertainty: why it is a precondition for discovery and adaptation, not simply a risk to be managed Concrete vocabulary for discussing perceptual bias and assumption in team and leadership contexts Awareness of how experiential design and structured questioning can expand the range of what an organisation is able to see

Why organisations work with Arsène Wenger He is the only senior practitioner in any field who built and led a team through an entire unbeaten top-flight league season – a 38-game case study in what sustained, system-level performance actually requires, fully documented and independently verifiable. His most instructive period for organisations is arguably not the Invincibles season but the decade that followed: leading under financial constraint, serial talent loss, and rivals with structurally larger budgets, while still maintaining Champions League qualification and winning trophies. This is the pressure most organisations recognise. His framework for leadership – distinguishing clearly between the structural long-term work of the manager and the motivational short-term work of the coach, and insisting both must operate simultaneously – gives senior leaders a concrete architecture for their own role, not a motivational analogy. Cross-cultural management experience across France, Japan, and England, combined with an economics degree from the University of Strasbourg, means his account of how performance systems are built is structural and comparative, not anecdotal. His current role at FIFA – overseeing global coaching standards, the IFAB rules-making body, and technical analysis of international tournaments – extends his perspective from club performance to institutional design and global governance, a dimension no other speaker in this market shares. Biography highlights Managed Arsenal for 22 years (1996-2018) – the longest tenure in the club’s history and in the history of the Premier League; won 3 Premier League titles and a then-record 7 FA Cups Architect of the 2003-04 Arsenal “Invincibles” – the only team to complete an unbeaten top-flight English league season in the modern era (38 matches) Previously managed AS Monaco (Ligue 1 title 1988; Coupe de France 1991) and Nagoya Grampus Eight, Japan (Emperor’s Cup; J-League Manager of the Year, 1995) Three-time Premier League Manager of the Season (1997-98, 2001-02, 2003-04) FIFA Chief of Global Football Development (appointed 2019); chairs the FIFA Technical Study Group and oversees IFAB and global coaching education Awarded the Légion d’honneur (2002) and an Honorary OBE (2003); inducted into the English Football Hall of Fame (2006) Autobiography My Life in Red and White (Orion, 2020) – Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller; the second football manager ever to reach No. 1 overall Economics degree, University of Strasbourg; fluent in six languages Biography The 2003-04 Arsenal season – 38 Premier League matches, zero defeats – remains the only unbeaten campaign in English football’s modern era. What made it possible was not an exceptional squad alone, but a system: nutritional standards that transformed player fitness, analytical scouting methods, and a culture whose values were defined by players and coaching staff together at the start of each season. Arsène Wenger’s career was cross-cultural long before that was a leadership virtue. He won the French league title with AS Monaco in 1988, then moved deliberately to Japan – taking Nagoya Grampus Eight to the Emperor’s Cup and the J-League Manager of the Year award in 1995. Managing across France, Japan, and England gave him a comparative framework for what in performance systems is universal, and what depends on context. At Arsenal, the decade after the Invincibles season is often more instructive for organisations than the unbeaten campaign itself. Wenger sustained Champions League qualification and FA Cup success while operating under severe financial constraint and losing key talent to better-funded rivals – conditions organisations recognise more readily than an anomalous trophy season. His autobiography, My Life in Red and White (Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller, 2020), and public appearances – including at the Bank of America Global Investor Summit and the Gartner IT Symposium – return consistently to a single structural argument: effective leadership requires the manager’s long-term, institutional work and the coach’s short-term, motivational work to operate simultaneously, not in sequence. Since 2019, Wenger has served as FIFA’s Chief of Global Football Development, overseeing global coaching education, the IFAB rules-making panel, and technical analysis of international tournaments. He holds an economics degree from the University of Strasbourg, France’s Légion d’honneur, an Honorary OBE, and a place in the English Football Hall of Fame. His perspective on competitive sustainability is drawn from specific, verifiable decisions made under extreme and sustained pressure – which is precisely what distinguishes it. Key speaking topics Sustained high performance and competitive advantage Talent identification, development, and succession systems Organisational culture and values-based leadership Long-term strategy under short-term performance pressure Cross-cultural team management Performance science and the modernisation of professional sport Global football governance and institutional development Ideal for C-suite and board-level leaders accountable for long-term competitive positioning CHROs and people directors designing talent development and succession pipelines Senior leadership conferences in financial services, professional services, and sport Transformation leaders managing performance culture through periods of resource constraint or competitive disruption Audience outcomes A clear, applicable distinction between managing (structural, long-term) and coaching (motivational, short-term) – and why both must run in parallel rather than sequence A concrete, verified case study in what sustained competitive advantage looks like in practice: the talent, culture, and decision-making systems behind it Practical perspectives on leading through constraint and transition – not just peak success – drawn from a decade of performing under significant competitive disadvantage An understanding of how cross-cultural experience informs more resilient, adaptive performance systems A framework for building culture from the inside: how shared values, standards, and accountability are established, maintained, and renewed across successive generations of people

Why organisations work with Archie Norman He ran the Asda turnaround from 1991 and sold the business to Walmart in 1999 at eight times the starting share price, a reference point that still defines UK retail recovery. He has chaired three FTSE-scale boards in very different states of repair: Asda, ITV and Marks & Spencer. Few speakers can discuss board, CEO and shareholder dynamics from all three seats. He sits at the intersection of commercial leadership and public policy, having served as Conservative MP for Tunbridge Wells, Chief Executive of the Conservative Party, and Lead Non-Executive at BEIS. He co-founded Policy Exchange in 2001, a think tank that shaped UK economic and public service reform, which gives his commentary on business and government real weight. The Institute for Turnaround awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010 for practitioner work on corporate recovery, not for commentary on it. Biography highlights Chairman of Marks & Spencer since September 2017. Chairman of ITV plc from 2010 to 2016. Chief Executive then Chairman of Asda from 1991 to 1999, sold to Walmart in July 1999. Co-founder of the Policy Exchange think tank with Francis Maude in 2001. Lead Non-Executive Board Member at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, 2016 to 2020. Conservative MP for Tunbridge Wells 1997-2005; Chief Executive of the Conservative Party 1998-1999. Institute for Turnaround Lifetime Achievement Award, 2010. Biography Asda was close to collapse when Archie Norman arrived as Chief Executive in 1991. Over the following eight years, he and Allan Leighton rebuilt the operating model, the culture and the commercial pitch. The business was sold to Walmart in 1999 at eight times the starting share price, and the story is still used as a practitioner case at Harvard Business School. What distinguishes his perspective is the seat he has held since. Chairman of ITV from 2010 to 2016 through a hard pivot in the broadcast market. Chairman of Marks & Spencer since 2017, running a multi-year reset of stores, supply chain and digital. Three listed boards, three different forms of inertia, one consistent operating philosophy about how change actually happens inside a large company. The public policy side matters commercially. He was Conservative MP for Tunbridge Wells, Chief Executive of the Conservative Party under William Hague, and Lead Non-Executive at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy from 2016 to 2020. He co-founded the Policy Exchange think tank with Francis Maude in 2001. That background shapes how he reads the interaction between regulators, ministers and boards, which is useful for any chair or CEO managing that perimeter. Youngest partner ever at McKinsey at 28, group finance director at Kingfisher at 32, and recipient of the Institute for Turnaround’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. The point of the sequence is not the speed of it. It is that by the time he arrives in a boardroom to discuss a stalled transformation, he has seen the same patterns from the inside at every scale a UK board is likely to be operating at. Key speaking topics Corporate turnaround and organisational recovery Board and chair leadership Retail strategy and transformation Culture change inside listed companies Business and government Executive leadership under pressure Ideal for Chairs, CEOs and senior independent directors navigating a turnaround or strategic reset. Retail and consumer sector leadership teams. Boards and executive committees managing cultural resistance to change. Senior leaders in regulated industries where government relations shape commercial outcomes. Audience outcomes A concrete view of what the first 100 days of a serious turnaround actually look like at board and operating level. A sharper read on where cultural inertia sits inside a listed business and how to move it. A practitioner perspective on how chair, CEO and shareholder dynamics succeed or fail in a crisis. A clearer picture of how the business-government perimeter is managed in practice, from both sides.

Why organisations work with Sir AP McCoy Twenty consecutive Champion Jockey titles give him a specific, unmatched claim on the question every leadership team asks: how do you avoid complacency when you are already winning. He speaks from a sport where the downside is injury, not a missed quarter, which makes his account of risk, recovery and getting back on the horse substantive rather than rhetorical. The 2010 Grand National win on Don’t Push It, at his fifteenth attempt, is a concrete case study in long-horizon goal discipline that audiences remember and cite. His current work as ITV Racing pundit, Times columnist and President of the Injured Jockeys Fund means he is a current public figure, not a retired athlete telling old stories. Biography highlights 4,358 career winners, a record for a National Hunt jockey. Champion Jockey in the United Kingdom twenty seasons in a row, from 1995/96 to 2014/15. 2010 BBC Sports Personality of the Year, the first jockey to win the award. OBE in 2010, Knighthood in the 2016 New Year Honours for services to horse racing. Winner of the Grand National, Cheltenham Gold Cup, Champion Hurdle, Queen Mother Champion Chase and King George VI Chase. President of the Injured Jockeys Fund, ITV Racing pundit and author of the autobiography Winner: My Racing Life. Biography Twenty consecutive Champion Jockey titles is not a record that rewards talent alone. It rewards a decision, taken every morning for two decades, to ride through injuries, weight constraints and pain that would retire most athletes inside a year. That is the ground from which Sir AP McCoy speaks to organisations. The numerical case is straightforward. 4,358 winners, a British season record of 289 wins in 2001/02, and 1,040 weeks at the top of his sport, longer than any other athlete in any discipline. The harder case is the one boardrooms actually need: how a performer keeps renewing the motivation to win when the trophy is already on the shelf. The Grand National answers part of that question. McCoy had won the Cheltenham Gold Cup, the Champion Hurdle, the Queen Mother Champion Chase and the King George VI Chase before Aintree finally relented. The 2010 win on Don’t Push It, at his fifteenth attempt, made him the first jockey to take the main BBC Sports Personality of the Year award, with 41.98% of the public vote. The discipline behind that result, not the result itself, is what translates. Post-retirement he is a working broadcaster rather than a retired athlete. He is a pundit on ITV Racing, a columnist for The Times and President of the Injured Jockeys Fund, the charity that looks after the riders who are not as lucky as he was. His autobiography Winner: My Racing Life was published by Orion in 2015. The Knighthood followed in the 2016 New Year Honours. Key speaking topics Sustained elite performance Resilience and recovery from setback Goal discipline over long horizons Leadership under physical and mental pressure Motivation after success Lessons from National Hunt racing for business High-performance mindset Ideal for Senior leadership teams facing the complacency risk that follows sustained success Sales and commercial organisations where year-on-year renewal of performance is the central challenge Financial and professional services firms hosting flagship client or partner events Board and executive offsites where a concrete, non-theoretical account of resilience is useful Audience outcomes A specific account of what it takes to stay hungry once winning has already been achieved A memorable case study in long-horizon goal discipline through the fifteen-year pursuit of the Grand National Direct insight from the rider’s own words on how to absorb setback, injury and public failure without losing the next race A measured, credible view on when to stop competing and how to rebuild a second career

Why organisations work with Sir Andrew Strauss He led England to the world Test No. 1 ranking in 2011, a position the team had not held for three decades, and can speak specifically to what it takes to move a group from mid-table to the top of its field. He has sat on both sides of the performance question: as the captain inside the team, and later as Director of Cricket at the ECB responsible for the system that selects, develops and accounts for that team. His 2022 ECB High Performance Review, convened with Sir Dave Brailsford and Rob Key after the 4-0 Ashes defeat, is a named case study in structural reform of an underperforming elite system. He founded the Ruth Strauss Foundation in 2019 and can speak from experience to leading people and commitments through personal crisis without collapsing the standards he asks of others. Biography highlights 100 Test matches for England, 7,037 runs at an average above 40, 21 Test centuries. England captain in 50 Tests; Ashes winner in 2009 and 2010-11, and architect of England’s rise to world No. 1 in 2011. Director of Cricket, England and Wales Cricket Board, 2015-2018. Chair of the ECB High Performance Review, 2022, with Sir Dave Brailsford and Rob Key on the panel. Knight Bachelor, 2019 Resignation Honours, for services to sport and charity. OBE, 2011. Founder and chair of the Ruth Strauss Foundation, established 2019. Author of Driving Ambition: My Autobiography (Hodder). Biography England were ranked the best Test side in the world in August 2011, for the first time in thirty years. The captain who took them there, over a four-year rebuild, had replaced an injured Michael Vaughan on debut seven years earlier and opened with a century at Lord’s. The gap between those two facts is where the substance of Strauss’s leadership argument sits. The captaincy is the obvious credential: 50 Tests in charge, the 2009 Ashes at home, the 4-0 series win in Australia in 2010-11, the first there in twenty-four years. The less-told part is what happened after the playing career ended. Strauss returned to the England and Wales Cricket Board in 2015 as Director of Cricket, where he was responsible not for one dressing room but for the pipeline, culture and selection architecture behind the national side. That dual perspective, captain inside the system and later the executive above it, sharpened after the 2021-22 Ashes collapse. Strauss chaired the ECB’s High Performance Review, working with Sir Dave Brailsford and Rob Key, and produced recommendations for the structure of domestic cricket intended to reset England’s standing across all three formats. It is a recent, named piece of work on the harder problem leaders actually face: reforming an institution that is failing on its most public measure. The private context matters too. Strauss founded the Ruth Strauss Foundation in 2019 in memory of his wife, who died of a non-smoking lung cancer, and has built it into a significant charity for bereavement support and rare-cancer research. It is the part of the story that gives the leadership material its weight in the room. Key speaking topics Leadership under sustained pressure Building and rebuilding high-performance team culture Captaincy, accountability and honest feedback Reforming underperforming institutions Decision-making in elite sport Resilience through personal crisis The transition from practitioner to system leader Ideal for CEOs and executive committees managing a performance turnaround or a credibility rebuild Senior leadership offsites focused on team culture, selection and accountability Sales and commercial leadership audiences that operate under repeated public scorecards Boards and HR directors working on succession, captaincy, and leadership development Audience outcomes A working model for how a captain or senior leader holds standards when results are against them. Specific examples from the 2009 and 2010-11 Ashes rebuilds of how team culture was reset. A view from inside the ECB High Performance Review on what reforming an elite system actually requires. Language for talking honestly about pressure, scrutiny and personal loss in a leadership context. A sharper question set for their own team: who owns standards, who gives honest feedback, and who decides when the group is failing.

Why organisations work with Álex Rovira His central argument – that lasting success is created through deliberate preparation, not reactive management – reframes how senior leaders understand the relationship between their own behaviour and organizational performance. It is a leadership accountability argument backed by one of the most widely distributed Spanish-language business books ever published. La buena suerte, co-authored with Fernando Trías de Bes and translated into 42 languages, gives leadership teams a shared conceptual framework for building proactive cultures – one that has already been tested, challenged, and sustained across millions of readers in dozens of countries before it arrives in a corporate setting. His thinking draws on humanist philosophy and classical mythology as well as management practice, giving boards and executive teams a different register for conversations about organizational values, purpose, and identity – one that moves beyond standard competency frameworks and performance metrics. His Escuela de Transformación Vital y Liderazgo, through which more than 70,000 people have engaged with his frameworks, means his arguments are continuously tested against large, diverse audiences – not fixed at the time of publication. Three decades of organizational consulting on cultural change, talent, innovation, and market development provides the applied foundation that keeps his frameworks grounded in the realities of organizational life, not just leadership theory. Biography highlights Business Sciences degree and MBA from ESADE Business School, Barcelona Co-author with Fernando Trías de Bes of La buena suerte (Good Luck), published in English by Jossey-Bass/Wiley; translated into 42 languages, with more than 3 million copies sold in the first two years of publication Author of more than 15 books including La brújula interior (The Inner Compass) and Los 7 poderes (The Seven Powers); total body of work approaching 10 million copies sold across more than 40 languages Founder of the Escuela de Transformación Vital y Liderazgo, with more than 70,000 enrolled students LinkedIn Top Voice; combined following of more than 800,000 across Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube Over 30 years of organizational consulting covering cultural change, talent development, innovation, and market analysis Biography Álex Rovira built his reputation on a deceptively simple argument: that good luck is not random, it is the result of conditions deliberately prepared in advance. That argument, articulated in La buena suerte – co-authored with Fernando Trías de Bes and published in 42 languages – became one of the most widely distributed business books in Spanish publishing history, with more than 3 million copies sold within two years of publication. For organizations, the implication is structural: cultures either develop the habits, values, and practices that generate sustained advantage, or they default to reactive management and wait. Rovira holds a degree in Business Sciences and an MBA from ESADE. He spent more than three decades working as an organizational consultant on cultural change, talent development, innovation, and client-behaviour research with companies across multiple sectors. That applied foundation grounds a body of work – now approaching 10 million copies sold across more than 15 books, including La brújula interior (The Inner Compass) and Los 7 poderes (The Seven Powers) – in the kind of organizational reality that leadership audiences recognize immediately. His thinking draws on an unusual combination of sources: humanist philosophy, classical mythology, and leadership psychology, brought to bear on questions of organizational purpose, cultural alignment, and self-leadership. Where conventional leadership development tends toward competency models and behavioral frameworks, Rovira works at the level of meaning and orientation – helping leaders examine the foundational beliefs that shape culture long before they appear in performance data. Through his Escuela de Transformación Vital y Liderazgo, more than 70,000 people have engaged with his frameworks for self-leadership, organizational culture, and values-based decision-making. That continuing pedagogical practice keeps his thinking in active contact with the challenges organizations are actually facing – and makes him an unusual combination of internationally published author and working educator. Key speaking topics Leadership psychology and self-leadership Creating conditions for sustained organizational advantage Values-based leadership and organizational purpose Cultural transformation and constructive organizational culture Resilience, antifragility, and leading through uncertainty Humanist leadership and ethical organizational management Narrative, myth, and meaning in leadership thinking Ideal for Senior leadership teams and C-suite executives navigating cultural transformation or strategic reinvention CHROs and people leaders designing or refreshing leadership development programmes Corporate conference and offsite audiences where a values-based perspective on leadership is needed to complement strategy or performance-oriented content Boards and executive committees exploring purpose, organizational identity, and long-term cultural alignment Audience outcomes A clear, named conceptual framework – rooted in La buena suerte – for understanding how leaders and organizations build the conditions for sustained success rather than reacting to circumstance Practical distinctions between reactive management and deliberate leadership that participants can apply to their own organizational context A different register for leadership conversations about values, purpose, and culture – one that complements, rather than duplicates, standard competency frameworks Renewed clarity on the relationship between individual self-leadership, team culture, and organizational performance Concrete orientations for building proactive, resilient cultures that generate rather than merely respond to change

Why organisations work with Albrecht Enders His Solvable framework – Frame, Explore, Decide – gives leadership teams a replicable method for complex decisions, not a diagnostic template. It addresses the two failure modes his research identifies most consistently: solving the wrong problem, and deciding without adequate stakeholder input. His academic work on discontinuous change, published in Administrative Science Quarterly and the Academy of Management Journal, explains why established firms with strong strategies still get disrupted – and what the firms that adapt successfully did differently. This gives his executive work a research foundation most strategy practitioners cannot draw on. His specific argument – that stakeholder engagement must be embedded throughout a decision process, not appended at the end – is a named, testable position that directly challenges how most senior teams structure their strategy work. He brings both sides of the strategy question: his IMD research and teaching work on how organisations should decide, and his consulting work with organisations including Siemens, Vodafone, Deutsche Bank, Novartis, and Thyssen Krupp on what that looks like under real operating conditions. Biography highlights Professor of Strategy and Innovation at IMD; former Dean of Programs and Innovation Co-author of Solvable: A Simple Solution to Complex Problems (Pearson, 2022), co-authored with Arnaud Chevallier; proposes the Frame, Explore, Decide methodology for complex problem-solving Research published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, and Research Policy Contributor to Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and the Financial Times EFMD Excellence in Practice Gold Award (2014); Academy of Management BPS Division Glueck Best Paper Award (2011 and 2013) Co-director of IMD’s Complex Problem Solving and Transition to Business Leadership programs Former consultant, Boston Consulting Group (Cologne); board member, Agathon AG Biography The decisions that define an organisation’s direction are rarely the ones with clean answers. They involve competing stakeholder priorities, incomplete information, and environments that may not resemble anything the leadership team has navigated before. Albrecht Enders, Professor of Strategy and Innovation at IMD, has spent two decades studying why these decisions go wrong – and building the tools to improve them. His core argument is structural. Most leadership teams separate the act of deciding from the act of engaging the people who will be affected. They analyse, choose, then communicate. Enders’ research shows this sequence is both intellectually and politically costly: involving key stakeholders throughout a decision process produces better choices and creates the sense of fair process that drives implementation. His book Solvable (Pearson, 2022), co-authored with Arnaud Chevallier, translates this into a three-step method – Frame, Explore, Decide – designed to stop executive teams from jumping to solutions before they have properly defined the problem. His academic research, published in Administrative Science Quarterly, the Academy of Management Journal, and Research Policy, focuses on the specific question of how established firms respond to technological discontinuities. This work explains not just that incumbents struggle with disruptive change, but why the structural and behavioural conditions inside large organisations make poor responses predictable – and what distinguishes the firms that adapt. It gives his practitioner work an empirical foundation that strategy consulting alone does not provide. At IMD, Enders co-directs the Complex Problem Solving program and the Transition to Business Leadership program, and served as Dean of Programs and Innovation until 2020. Before joining IMD, he spent three years at the Boston Consulting Group in Cologne, working on strategy development and reorganisation across financial services, energy, and industrial goods. He sits on the board of Swiss precision toolmaker Agathon and is a founding member of the E4S (Enterprise for Society) executive committee, the sustainability initiative launched jointly by IMD, the University of Lausanne, HEC Lausanne, and EPFL. Key speaking topics Strategic decision-making processes Managing discontinuous and technological change Complex problem-solving frameworks Top-team strategy development Incumbent response to disruption Corporate strategy in uncertain environments Stakeholder engagement in strategic decisions Ideal for C-suite and executive leadership teams reviewing or rebuilding their strategy processes Chief Strategy Officers and corporate strategy functions navigating market discontinuities Senior leaders in established industries facing disruption from new technologies or entrants Executive education and leadership development programmes at board and senior management level Audience outcomes A structured understanding of where strategic decision-making processes typically break down – and the specific interventions that address each failure point Familiarity with the Frame, Explore, Decide methodology from Solvable and how to apply it to live organisational problems Insight into the research evidence on why incumbents underperform in discontinuous environments, and which organisational conditions predict better responses A reframed view of stakeholder engagement – not as communication management, but as an integral part of building a better decision Practical tools for structuring strategy conversations with senior teams that produce both better choices and greater commitment to implementation

Why organisations work with Ade McCormack His Intelligent Organisation framework gives leadership teams a concrete diagnostic model for identifying the gap between their current design and one capable of sustained adaptiveness in volatile conditions. He draws on evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and anthropology rather than management theory alone, making his arguments for organisational change more durable and harder to dismiss as trend-following or consultancy-derived. His intellectual trajectory, from astrophysics and the European Space Agency to a decade as a Financial Times columnist on digital leadership, gives him credibility at both the technical and executive levels that most leadership speakers do not carry. He authored the E-Skills Manifesto for the European Commission and has advised at policy level on digital workforce readiness, meaning his perspective on talent and transformation extends beyond corporate practice into systemic consequence. His involvement in executive education at the Moller Institute, University of Cambridge and at MIT Sloan means his frameworks have been stress-tested against academic scrutiny and refined for senior leadership audiences, not just configured for conference delivery. Biography highlights Former columnist for the Financial Times on digital leadership for approximately a decade Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management on digital leadership Executive leadership development at the Moller Institute, Churchill College, University of Cambridge Founder of The Intelligent Organisation, a think tank focused on how organisations must evolve to remain viable under permanent disruption Author of six books including Biz 4.0, The E-Skills Manifesto (commissioned by the European Commission), and Beyond Nine to Five Advisor to the European Commission on digital skills and e-skills policy Astrophysics graduate; early career includes software engineering at the European Space Agency Biography When organisations describe their transformation programmes, they usually mean technology deployment: new platforms, new tools, upgraded infrastructure. What they less often examine is whether the management model operating underneath those tools was designed for conditions that no longer apply. This is the central tension in Ade McCormack’s work. Most organisations are optimised for industrial-era stability but the environment they now operate in rewards adaptation. McCormack began his career as a software engineer. Trained in astrophysics, with early work at the European Space Agency, his background shaped his ability to think in systems and across disciplines. His trajectory took him eventually to the Financial Times, where he wrote on digital leadership for close to a decade. He has since worked with senior executives at MIT Sloan and at the Moller Institute, University of Cambridge, bringing the same argument into formal leadership education. His Intelligent Organisation framework sets out a model for the shift from process-driven, efficiency-optimised organisations to what he describes as living organisms; adaptive, distributed, and built to sense and respond rather than plan and execute. He draws on evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and anthropology to build this case, developing concepts such as super-resilience, synthetic certainty, and the cognitive gymnasium. These are not rhetorical devices. They map specific structural and cultural moves that organisations can make to function in conditions where certainty is the exception. As founder of The Intelligent Organisation and author of six books, including the E-Skills Manifesto commissioned by the European Commission, McCormack’s work spans individual performance, organisational design, and policy. For executive audiences, the diagnosis he offers is one most are reluctant to reach on their own: that the management model they have inherited is not underperforming, it was simply never built for the era they are operating in. Key speaking topics Adaptive leadership and post-industrial organisation design The Intelligent Organisation model and super-resilience Digital transformation and the limits of technology deployment Future of work and the human-centric organisation Talent, cognitive performance, and the workforce of tomorrow Leadership in conditions of sustained volatility Organisational agility and living-systems thinking Governance in an increasingly volatile world Ideal for C-suite executives and boards leading large-scale transformation programmes in established organisations CHROs and people leaders rethinking workforce design, talent strategy, and culture in the context of accelerating disruption Transformation programme directors and change leads where incumbent operating models are under structural pressure Senior leadership development cohorts at business schools and executive education programmes Audience outcomes A working vocabulary; super-resilience, cognitive athletes, synthetic certainty, to reframe internal conversations about organisational change and leadership capability A concrete framework (the Intelligent Organisation model) for diagnosing the structural gap between a current operating model and one capable of sustained adaptiveness A reorientation of technology investment decisions: from efficiency gains to adaptiveness enablement Clarity on why conventional strategic planning is inadequate under conditions of permanent volatility, and what a more adaptive posture requires in practice An argument, grounded in biology and human performance science, for why putting people, not process, at the centre of organisational design is a competitive necessity, not a cultural preference

Why organisations work with Keith Ferrazzi He works at the level above leadership development: the operating system of the senior team itself, where most strategy execution actually breaks down. Twenty years of applied research at Ferrazzi Greenlight, including the dataset behind Never Lead Alone, gives him a defensible model of what the top 15 percent of teams do differently. He named and codified co-elevation, a vocabulary CEOs and CHROs already use to describe peer accountability without formal authority. Five New York Times bestsellers, including Never Eat Alone and Never Lead Alone (USA Today bestseller, Forbes Top 10 Business Books of 2024), give him reach and credibility with senior audiences before he walks on stage. His sessions are diagnostic rather than inspirational: leadership teams typically leave with a read on their own performance against the teamship shifts and a starting point for what to change. Biography highlights Founder and chairman of Ferrazzi Greenlight, a research and consulting firm focused on executive team performance and the future of work. Founder of the Radical Innovators Collaborative, a peer network of Fortune 500 CIOs and CHROs working inside live enterprise transformation. Author of five New York Times bestsellers, including Never Eat Alone, Leading Without Authority, Competing in the New World of Work, and Never Lead Alone. Never Lead Alone (HarperCollins, 2024): USA Today bestseller and one of Forbes’ Top 10 Business Books of 2024. Former Chief Marketing Officer of Deloitte and Starwood Hotels and Resorts. Named a Global Leader of Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum. Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, Inc., and the Wall Street Journal. Biography Most senior teams are designed to report, not to collaborate. Members are accountable to the CEO, not to each other, and that asymmetry shows up the moment the organisation tries to move at speed. This is the problem Ferrazzi Greenlight has been studying for two decades, and it is the territory Keith Ferrazzi has made his own. The work began with relationships. Never Eat Alone, published in 2005, became a business classic by treating networking as a discipline of generosity rather than transaction. Three books later, the focus has shifted from individual influence to what happens between peers at the top of an organisation. Leading Without Authority introduced co-elevation as the mechanism. Never Lead Alone, a USA Today bestseller and a Forbes Top 10 Business Book of 2024, sets out ten specific shifts that distinguish the highest-performing teams in his research dataset. The same logic now sits behind the Radical Innovators Collaborative, a peer community Ferrazzi convenes for Fortune 500 CIOs and CHROs working through AI-driven transformation. The credibility behind that work is operational, not academic. Ferrazzi was Chief Marketing Officer of Deloitte and then of Starwood Hotels and Resorts, after Yale and Harvard Business School. He was named a Global Leader of Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum and contributes regularly to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, and the Wall Street Journal. What he brings to a senior audience is not a talk on collaboration in the abstract. It is a diagnostic frame for the team in the room: where peer accountability is real, where it is theatre, and which of the teamship shifts would change the most about how the organisation actually executes. Key speaking topics Executive team performance Teamship and co-elevation Leading without authority Peer-to-peer accountability Future of work and radical adaptability Organisational collaboration across silos AI and the redesign of team operating models Ideal for CEOs and executive committees are rebuilding how the top team works together CHROs and chief people officers leading culture and leadership transformations Boards and senior leadership offsites focused on execution speed Transformation leads inside organisations, breaking down functional silos Audience outcomes A clear read on where their own senior team sits against the teamship shifts that distinguish the top performers in Ferrazzi’s research. Specific behaviours that move accountability from vertical to peer-to-peer without dismantling the reporting line. A working vocabulary of co-elevation that senior teams can use to call out unhelpful patterns in real time. A view of how AI-native ways of working are changing what a high-performing leadership team looks like.

Why organisations work with Michael Watkins He owns the global category of leadership transitions. The First 90 Days is the methodology Fortune 500 HR functions, executive coaches, and onboarding programs build around, with over a million copies in print across more than twenty languages. His 2024 book, The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking, gives senior teams a named, teachable framework for the cognitive work executives are expected to do but rarely trained in: pattern recognition, systems perspective, mental agility, structured problem-solving, visioning, and political savvy. The Thinkers50 Hall of Fame induction in 2023 places him alongside the small group of management thinkers whose work has shaped how large organisations actually develop leaders, not just how they talk about leadership. He has run the playbook inside companies as well as written it. Through Genesis Advisers, the consultancy he co-founded, his frameworks are embedded in transition coaching programs at major multinationals. Buyers get a speaker who has taught the same audience inside IMD, Harvard Business School, and the Kennedy School. The content is built for senior leaders, not adapted down to them. Biography highlights Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change at IMD Business School since 2007. Author of The First 90 Days, named by The Economist as “the onboarding bible” and selected by Amazon editors as one of 100 leadership books to read in a lifetime. Author of The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking (Harper Business, 2024) and Master Your Next Move, the structured companion to The First 90 Days covering eight common executive transition types. Inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2023; previously ranked on the Thinkers50 list in 2019 and 2021. Co-founder and chairman of Genesis Advisers, a leadership-transition consultancy. Former associate professor at Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School; PhD in Decision Sciences from Harvard University. Biography The First 90 Days began as a study of why senior hires fail and grew into the operating manual that most large organisations now use to onboard executives. The Economist called it the onboarding bible. More than a million copies are in print across more than twenty languages, and the framework is embedded in transition coaching at multinationals worldwide. Michael Watkins built the methodology while teaching at Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School, refined it at INSEAD, and has anchored it at IMD since 2007 as Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change. He directs IMD’s First 90 Days open program and co-directs the Transition to Business Leadership executive program. The same body of work runs through Genesis Advisers, the consultancy he co-founded, where the playbook is delivered inside companies rather than written about from outside. In 2024, he extended the work upward with The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking, which names the cognitive disciplines executives are expected to demonstrate at the top of an organisation: pattern recognition, systems perspective, mental agility, structured problem-solving, visioning, and political savvy. The argument is that strategic thinking is not a personality trait but a teachable craft, and most senior teams have never been taught it. The Thinkers50 Hall of Fame inducted him in November 2023, recognising two decades of work that has demonstrably shaped how large organisations develop their leaders rather than how they describe doing so. Key speaking topics Leadership transitions and executive onboarding Strategic thinking for senior leaders Team leadership and top-team effectiveness Organisational change and culture Negotiation and decision-making Career strategy for senior executives Ideal for CHROs, heads of leadership development, and chief learning officers designing transition and onboarding programs. CEOs and executive committees who want their top team trained in strategic thinking as a discipline. Boards and nomination committees preparing successors for enterprise-leadership roles. High-potential leadership cohorts moving into first general-management or P&L roles. Audience outcomes A named methodology, The First 90 Days, that senior leaders can apply to their next transition rather than a set of principles to remember. Six concrete strategic-thinking disciplines that a top team can use as a shared language inside the business. A clearer view of why most senior-hire failures are predictable, and which interventions in the first ninety days actually change the outcome. Direct access to the thinking of a Thinkers50 Hall of Fame inductee whose work is taught inside HBS, INSEAD, and IMD curricula.