Executive Development

Why organisations work with Dame Heather Rabbatts She co-founded TIME’S UP UK in 2018 and played a founding role in establishing CIISA, the Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority – a track record of translating accountability advocacy into operational governance infrastructure rather than policy recommendations. As the first woman on The Football Association board in its more than 150-year history, she has direct experience of governance cultures structurally resistant to inclusion – and of the specific mechanisms through which that resistance operates and where it can be broken. Non-executive experience across Associated British Foods, M&C Saatchi, and Bloomsbury Publishing, alongside earlier roles at the Bank of England, the BBC, and Crossrail, gives her a governance perspective formed across very different ownership structures and operating environments. Her legal training as a barrister and her track record as a public-sector CEO who led the turnaround of the London Borough of Lambeth give her a precise understanding of what accountability looks like when it is working – and when it is not. Her experience stepping up from non-executive to executive chair of a listed company during a period of CEO succession and commercial pressure is a live credential on what active board oversight requires in practice. Biography highlights Barrister qualified in 1981; educated at the London School of Economics Chief Executive of the London Borough of Lambeth; youngest local authority chief executive in the UK at time of appointment First woman appointed to the board of The Football Association in its history (2011); resigned from FIFA’s anti-discrimination taskforce on principle following Sepp Blatter’s re-election (2015) BBC Governor (1999-2001); Managing Director of 4Learning, Channel 4’s education arm; former Chair of Shed Media, overseeing its sale to Time Warner Executive Chair, M&C Saatchi; Senior Independent Director, Associated British Foods; Non-Executive Director, Bloomsbury Publishing; former non-executive roles include the Bank of England, Crossrail, and the Royal Opera House Co-founder and Chair, TIME’S UP UK (since 2018); founding Chair, Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority (CIISA); Chair, Soho Theatre; DBE awarded in 2016 New Year Honours for services to football and equality Biography Boards rarely lack formal structures – what they frequently lack is the culture, diversity, and accountability practice to make those structures function as designed. Dame Heather Rabbatts has spent three decades working at exactly that intersection. Her career spans barrister practice, the CEO role at the London Borough of Lambeth, and non-executive directorships across sport, media, and listed companies. Her 2011 appointment as the first woman on The Football Association board placed her inside one of the most structurally resistant governance environments in British sport. She used the role publicly – criticising the composition of the FA’s commission on diversity, and resigning from FIFA’s anti-discrimination taskforce in 2015 following Sepp Blatter’s re-election. Her broader media career included serving as BBC Governor and Managing Director of Channel 4’s education business, 4Learning, and subsequently chairing Shed Media through its sale to Time Warner. She serves as Executive Chair of M&C Saatchi, Senior Independent Director at Associated British Foods, and Non-Executive Director at Bloomsbury Publishing. She co-founded TIME’S UP UK in 2018 alongside Barbara Broccoli. Together they played a founding role in establishing CIISA, the Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority, which provides an operational framework for handling misconduct across film and television. The unifying thread across her career – council chambers, listed company boards, football administration, and film production – is a single practical question. What does genuine accountability at board level actually require? Her answer is grounded in experience of governance under real pressure, not governance in theory. Key speaking topics Board governance and accountability Inclusion in corporate leadership Governance in sport and football administration Culture change in creative industries Ethical oversight and organisational standards Non-executive leadership and board composition Public sector leadership and institutional reform Ideal for Boards and non-executive directors navigating governance reform, composition review, or accountability challenges CHROs and Chief People Officers building the case for inclusion at board and senior leadership level Sport governing bodies and rights holders managing governance and inclusion reform Senior leadership teams in media, creative, or public institutions undergoing culture change Audience outcomes A clearer understanding of where formal governance structures typically fail to produce actual accountability – and what intervention at board level usually requires Insight into inclusion as a governance discipline, drawn from direct experience of institutional resistance and cultural change in high-profile organisations Practical perspective on how organisations can move from policy-level commitments on DEI to embedded board-level practice Clearer framing of the non-executive role in holding executive teams to account on culture, ethics, and standards An understanding of how industry standards bodies can translate advocacy into operational governance infrastructure, illustrated by the development of CIISA

Why organisations work with Matthew Gitsham Two decades of research focused on what CEOs of named multinationals actually do on sustainability, not what they say in annual reports. Direct experience advising the UN Global Compact, Business in the Community and corporates including Unilever, IBM, HSBC, GSK, De Beers, Cemex and Pearson on sustainable development strategy. Thinkers50 Radar recognition and the Aspen Institute Rising Star award give boards external validation when commissioning content on a contested topic. His Rio+20 report “Leadership in a Rapidly Changing World” shaped how the UN framed corporate leadership on sustainable development, evidence that his frameworks travel beyond the classroom. Research on corporate modern slavery leadership, conducted with the Ethical Trading Initiative, gives him operating substance on supply chain ESG that most academic voices lack. Biography highlights Professor of Business and Sustainability, Hult Ashridge Executive Education. Director of the Ashridge Centre for Business and Sustainability. Thinkers50 Radar, Class of 2021. Cited as “global expert on CEOs and sustainability.” Aspen Institute and Academy of Business in Society European Faculty Pioneer Award, Rising Star category. Hult International Business School Researcher of the Year, 2016 to 2017. Lead author of “Leadership in a Rapidly Changing World,” referenced at the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development. Biography Most ESG conversations stop at the disclosure framework. The harder question, which Gitsham has spent twenty years researching, is what CEOs of Unilever, IBM, HSBC, GSK and similar companies actually do with sustainability once it leaves the sustainability report. His work tracks the decisions boards take on capital allocation, supplier governance and public policy advocacy when sustainability stops being narrative and starts being operating substance. That research base is what earned him Thinkers50 Radar recognition in 2021, with Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove naming him a “global expert on CEOs and sustainability.” His Rising Star award from the Aspen Institute and the Academy of Business in Society European Faculty Pioneer Awards reflects the same point. He is not a commentator on sustainability. He is one of the few academics with sustained, named access to CEOs of large multinationals on the subject. At Hult Ashridge, he directs the Centre for Business and Sustainability and teaches across the MBA and executive education programmes. His report “Leadership in a Rapidly Changing World” was used to inform debate at the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development. Current research partnerships include Business Fights Poverty on corporate SDG embedding and the Ethical Trading Initiative on corporate leadership on modern slavery, giving him an operating view of supply chain ESG that bridges academia and practice. His work appears in The Economist, Financial Times and Harvard Business Review. His corporate clients span Tesco, Bayer, Rolls Royce, Swarovski, Marks & Spencer and Pearson, alongside the UK Senior Civil Service. The throughline across all of it is the same question: how do leaders of large organisations make defensible sustainability decisions when the stakes are now financial, political and reputational at once. Key speaking topics Corporate sustainability and ESG strategy CEO leadership on sustainable development The UN Sustainable Development Goals and corporate practice Modern slavery and supply chain governance Business and public policy advocacy Climate action in commercial strategy Executive development for sustainability Ideal for Boards and executive committees translating sustainability commitments into capital allocation and operating decisions Chief Sustainability Officers, CFOs and General Counsels handling ESG scrutiny and regulatory exposure Senior teams in companies with exposed supply chains are addressing modern slavery and human rights Corporate affairs and public policy leaders shaping CEO advocacy on climate, SDGs and sustainable development Audience outcomes A clearer view of what CEOs of large multinationals do differently when sustainability moves from narrative to operating substance. Named research evidence on corporate SDG embedding, modern slavery leadership and CEO public policy advocacy. A defensible framing for board conversations on ESG that withstands investor, regulatory and political scrutiny. Practical reference points from Unilever, IBM, HSBC and other named corporates, not generic sustainability case studies.

Why organisations work with Nicholas Janni His Leader as Healer framework provides a named, structured diagnosis – the dominant “leader-as-executor” model produces measurable fragmentation in organisations – and a practical developmental map for what replaces it, validated by a major book award and embedded in IMD executive programmes. His background as a RADA-trained theatre director is the methodological foundation of his work, not a biographical detail – it is why his approach to embodied leadership presence and performance under pressure has a rigour that purely cognitive or academic development lacks. He bridges executive education at one of the world’s leading business schools (IMD) and direct coaching with senior leadership teams, reaching the level of intellectual rigour and applied practice that board-level audiences require. He addresses the specific failure mode that formal leadership development typically cannot: the gap between a leader’s strategic intelligence and their actual capacity to create trust, genuine engagement and high performance in a room. Biography highlights Author of Leader as Healer (LID Publishing, 2022), winner of Business Book of the Year and Leadership Book of the Year at the Business Book Awards 2023, selected from over 300 nominated titles Visiting Professor of Leadership at IMD Business School, Lausanne; previously Associate Fellow at Oxford Said Business School (2010-15); continues to teach regularly at Oxford Said Former theatre director who taught acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), London Co-founded Olivier Mythodrama (2001), an arts-based leadership development consultancy; founded CORE PRESENCE (2013); co-founded Matrix Development (2023) Previous Visiting Fellow at Cranfield School of Management Clients have included Rolls-Royce, Swiss Re, Intel, Microsoft, FedEx and senior UK government figures including Permanent Secretaries Biography Leadership competence and leadership presence are not the same thing. Organisations invest heavily in the former – analytical capability, strategic clarity, execution discipline – and then discover that the latter is what determines whether a team actually performs. This gap is the problem Nicholas Janni has spent his career addressing. His book Leader as Healer (LID Publishing) was named Business Book of the Year at the Business Book Awards 2023. It makes a specific argument: the dominant “leader-as-executor” model, built around rational analysis and transactional relationships, produces fragmentation rather than coherence. The antidote is not softer management but a more complete form of leadership – one that integrates “being” with “doing”, emotional intelligence with analytical rigour, presence with performance. As Visiting Professor of Leadership at IMD Business School, Janni works with senior executives inside some of the world’s most demanding executive education programmes. His methodology draws on 30 years of research into peak performance and human potential. It began in his first career as a theatre director: he taught acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and directed his own company, developing a rigorous, practical understanding of presence and performance that he has since applied directly to executive leadership. The practical result is a distinctive approach to developing leaders – one that expands perceptual bandwidth, emotional coherence and depth of presence alongside strategic capability. He co-founded Olivier Mythodrama, a pioneering arts-based leadership consultancy, before building CORE PRESENCE and, most recently, co-founding Matrix Development, a practice dedicated to transformational executive coaching and coach training. Key speaking topics Leadership presence and embodied performance The Leader as Healer framework Transformational leadership and inner development Emotional intelligence and regulation in leadership Peak performance and the integration of being and doing Mindfulness and presence practices for executive audiences Building high-performance team cultures Creativity and the conditions for innovation Ideal for C-suite executives and senior leadership teams seeking to develop the inner dimensions of leadership performance CHROs and executive development leads designing high-level leadership programmes Business school executive education programmes and corporate leadership academies Organisations navigating sustained complexity where the quality of leadership presence is a performance-critical factor Audience outcomes A clear understanding of the “leader-as-executor” versus “leader-as-healer” distinction, and what it means practically for their own leadership approach Practical techniques for developing presence, deep listening and emotional coherence in high-stakes leadership contexts A framework for distinguishing between “doing” and “being” as leadership modes, and how integrating both drives sustained performance Greater self-awareness of how personal perceptual and emotional patterns affect team culture, trust and decision quality Specific practices drawn from Janni’s work that can be applied independently after the session

Why organisations work with Nick Tasler He gives leaders a working decision framework, not a change-management vocabulary, drawn from four books on decision science (The Impulse Factor, Domino, Why Quitters Win, Ricochet) and tested with senior teams at Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, 3M, and Accenture. He treats change as a behavioural problem, the choices people make under pressure, and equips senior teams to shift those choices rather than wait for cultural transformation to deliver them. His ideas come pre-stress-tested through Harvard Business Review and Psychology Today, where he writes for an audience of senior managers. Buyers get content that has already been edited for working leaders, not academic peers. He runs Decision Pulse, a consultancy and assessment platform, so the keynote connects to a diagnostic and a follow-on workshop format rather than ending at the stage. His delivery is plain-spoken and practical. Audiences leave with named decisions to make on Monday, not a model to admire. Biography highlights Organizational psychologist and founder of Decision Pulse, advising senior leaders on decision-making and change. Author of four books on decision science: The Impulse Factor, Domino, Why Quitters Win, and Ricochet. Leadership columnist for Harvard Business Review; contributor to Psychology Today and Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Former Director of Research and Development at TalentSmart, the source of his first book, The Impulse Factor. Keynote work with Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, Target, 3M, Accenture, Wells Fargo, Dell Technologies, Royal Bank of Canada, the Wharton School, and Yale University. Delivered keynote at KPMG’s 29th Annual Accounting and Financial Reporting Symposium. Biography Change programmes fail at the level of individual decisions, not strategy decks. People in the middle of a transition revert to old habits the moment ambiguity rises. Tasler’s work targets exactly that point, the moment a manager decides whether to commit, defer, or quietly opt out. His four books, The Impulse Factor, Domino, Why Quitters Win, and Ricochet, build a single argument: leaders and teams who learn to make sharper decisions under uncertainty grow faster than those who wait for clarity. The frameworks are practical and tested with senior leaders at Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, 3M, Accenture, and Target, among others. The credentials behind the work are operational rather than purely academic. Tasler began his career at Accenture, then ran research and development at TalentSmart, the consultancy that produced The Impulse Factor. He writes regularly for Harvard Business Review and Psychology Today, where he translates decision science for working managers. He has lectured at the Wharton School and Yale. What distinguishes him in a crowded change-and-leadership field is the diagnostic posture. Decision Pulse, the consultancy he founded, offers an assessment platform and a workshop format alongside the keynote. The result is a body of work that gives buyers a structured route from stage content to behavioural change inside the team, with named decisions attached. Key speaking topics Decision-making under uncertainty Leading organisational change Strategic behaviour and execution Resilience and adaptive leadership Team performance through change Behavioural science for leaders Ideal for CEOs and senior leadership teams entering or mid-way through a major transition. CHROs and chief transformation officers responsible for change adoption across the organisation. Senior leadership development programmes for high-potential and newly senior managers. Industry conferences for leaders facing sustained uncertainty in their sector. Audience outcomes A working decision framework leaders can apply to specific change initiatives in their own organisation. A clearer sense of where personal and team behaviour blocks execution, drawn from Decision Pulse-style diagnostic language. Named, repeatable practices for moving teams from deliberation to action under uncertainty. A behavioural reading of resilience and adaptation, grounded in the research behind Ricochet.

Why organisations work with Laura Gassner Otting She names a problem CHROs and talent leaders see every quarter but rarely have language for: the high-performer who hits the number, then quietly checks out. Wonderhell gives that pattern a vocabulary leadership teams can act on. She writes from operator experience, not theory. She built and sold a national executive search firm, served as a Clinton White House appointee on the launch of AmeriCorps, and has advised leaders across corporate, political, and nonprofit settings. Her work travels across audience seniority. The same framework speaks to high-potential talent in early career, to senior leaders rethinking what success means at the next stage, and to founders running into the wall their own ambition built. She brings genuine media reach. Wonderhell debuted at #2 on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list, Limitless debuted at #2 on the Washington Post list, and she is a regular contributor to Good Morning America, Harvard Business Review, and Oprah Daily. Biography highlights Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Wonderhell (Ideapress, 2023) and author of Limitless (2019), which debuted at #2 on the Washington Post bestseller list. Presidential appointee in the Clinton White House, working on the launch of AmeriCorps. Founder and former CEO of the Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group, a national executive search firm she sold in 2015. TEDxCambridge speaker, “Stop Asking ‘How Can I Help?'”, with millions of views to date. Contributor and featured expert across Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company, Good Morning America, the Today Show, and Oprah Daily. ABC News on-air contributor on careers, leadership, and ambition. Biography Most organisations track the moment a top performer joins. Few track the moment they hit their stretch goal and start to drift. That gap, the space between visible achievement and invisible disengagement, is the territory Laura Gassner Otting works in. Her bestselling book Wonderhell, a Wall Street Journal bestseller published by Ideapress in 2023, gave language to a pattern senior leaders had seen for years without being able to describe. Success, for ambitious people, is not a finish line. It is a doorway into a harder version of the same question: what now, and was it worth it. Her earlier book Limitless, which debuted at #2 on the Washington Post list in 2019, framed the upstream problem of how high performers define success in the first place. The argument has weight because it sits on top of a real career. She left law school to join a southern governor’s presidential campaign and ended up as a presidential appointee in Bill Clinton’s White House, working on the launch of AmeriCorps. She later founded and ran the Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group, a national executive search firm, which she sold in 2015. Her TEDxCambridge talk, “Stop Asking ‘How Can I Help?'”, has been viewed millions of times. She is an ABC News contributor and writes regularly for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company, and Oprah Daily. Inside organisations, her work shows up where talent strategy, executive development, and culture intersect, especially with the people any business can least afford to lose: the ones who already won, and are now quietly wondering what they are running toward. Key speaking topics High-performer retention and engagement The psychology of ambition and success Leadership development for emerging and senior leaders Career decision-making and purpose alignment Culture and talent strategy in mission-driven organisations Confidence and voice in leadership Sales performance through meaningful client connection Ideal for CHROs, CPOs, and talent leaders trying to retain high performers past their first big win High-potential leadership programmes and executive development cohorts Sales kickoffs and revenue leadership offsites focused on motivation and meaning Mission-driven organisations and nonprofit boards rethinking purpose and engagement Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for the discomfort that follows achievement, so teams can talk about it before people quietly leave. A sharper personal definition of success that holds up against external metrics and pressure. Practical decision-making cues for when to push, when to pause, and when to redefine the goal. Renewed clarity for senior leaders on what their highest performers actually need from them next.

Why organisations work with Thomas Barta He turned the largest dataset on marketing leadership effectiveness, more than 67,000 360-degree assessments, into a specific set of behaviours that separate high-impact CMOs from the rest. His McGraw-Hill book with Patrick Barwise of London Business School, The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader, gives senior marketers a research-grounded playbook rather than another opinion piece on the role. As leadership dean of the CMO Fellowship run by McKinsey and The Marketing Academy, he works each year with a small cohort of CMOs being prepared for CEO roles, which gives him a current view of where the function is going. His McKinsey work training over a thousand internal leaders on driving change without authority translates directly to the central problem CMOs face: delivering growth across functions they do not control. Biography highlights Former partner, McKinsey & Company; advised more than two dozen Fortune 500 organisations across 14 industries and 45 countries. Co-author with Patrick Barwise of The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader (McGraw-Hill). CEO, Marketing Leadership Institute; founder of the Marketing Leadership Masterclass. Leadership dean, CMO Fellowship, run by The Marketing Academy with McKinsey. Honorary Fellow of The Marketing Society. Contributor to Forbes, Marketing Week, Nikkei and the Adobe blog; speaker at events for Adobe, Google, IBM, SAP, Oracle, Amazon and the Financial Times. Biography Marketing officers carry the customer agenda but rarely own the levers that drive growth. Thomas Barta’s research, built on more than 67,000 360-degree assessments of marketing and non-marketing leaders, set out to identify what actually separates the CMOs who shift their company’s trajectory from those who do not. The work, conducted with Patrick Barwise of London Business School, became The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader, published by McGraw-Hill. His authority on the subject is grounded in two decades of advisory work. As a partner at McKinsey, Barta led growth transformations across 14 industries in 45 countries, working with more than two dozen Fortune 500 organisations. He was also dean of the firm’s highest-rated internal programme, where he trained over a thousand McKinsey leaders on a single problem: how to drive change in organisations where you have responsibility without formal authority. That problem is the same one most CMOs face every quarter. He runs the Marketing Leadership Institute and, with The Marketing Academy and McKinsey, serves as long-standing leadership dean of the CMO Fellowship, an annual cohort of marketers being prepared for CEO roles. He is an Honorary Fellow of The Marketing Society and writes for Forbes, Marketing Week and Nikkei. Barta’s training is unusual for the field. An MBA in marketing from London Business School sits alongside a Master’s in Organisational Psychology from INSEAD, which is why his keynotes read less as marketing seminars and more as work on senior influence, board credibility and the behavioural mechanics of leading commercial change. Key speaking topics Marketing leadership and CMO effectiveness Driving change without formal authority Customer-led growth The behavioural shift from marketer to marketing leader Influence at the executive table Building commercial credibility for the marketing function Ideal for CMOs, CGOs and senior marketing leaders preparing for board-level roles CEOs who want the marketing function to set, not chase, the growth agenda Marketing leadership programmes and CMO development cohorts Customer, brand and growth leadership offsites at large organisations Audience outcomes A clear picture of the twelve behaviours research links to high-impact marketing leadership. A practical model for influencing peers and superiors when the lever you need sits outside your function. A sharper read on how senior marketers earn commercial credibility with CFOs and CEOs. A framework for translating customer insight into decisions the rest of the C-suite will fund.

Why organisations work with Brendon Burchard He brings a named, testable framework. The six High Performance Habits (clarity, energy, necessity, productivity, influence, courage) are drawn from his research with the High Performance Institute and its validated High Performance Indicator Assessment. The research scale is unusual in this field. Survey work across more than 30,000 respondents in 190 countries, followed by structured interviews with the top-scoring subjects, gives leaders a source of advice that is not anecdotal. He has built and run the organisations he speaks about. Founder and CEO of GrowthDay, founder of the High Performance Institute, architect of the Certified High Performance Coaching programme operating across 100 countries. His content travels inside companies. Fortune 500 leadership teams and Vistage member groups have used the High Performance Habits material as a shared language for team standards, not a one-off keynote. Three-time New York Times bestselling author with a fourth title, High Performance Habits, selected by Amazon editors as a Top 3 Business and Leadership Book of 2017. Biography highlights Three-time New York Times bestselling author: The Motivation Manifesto, The Millionaire Messenger, and further titles, with High Performance Habits reaching Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. Founder and CEO of GrowthDay, a personal development platform, and founder of the High Performance Institute. Architect of Certified High Performance Coaching, operating across 100 countries with over 150,000 logged coaching sessions per Institute figures. Led the research programme behind High Performance Habits, including survey work across 30,000-plus respondents in 190 countries and more than 100 structured interviews with top-scoring performers. Twice profiled on the cover of Success magazine; named by Success and O, The Oprah Magazine as one of the most influential leaders in personal growth. Earlier career at Accenture before moving into performance research and executive coaching. Biography Most leaders know what to do. The harder question is why capable teams, with the right strategy and the right people, still underperform their potential. Brendon Burchard’s research argues the answer lies in a set of daily habits that sustained high performers practise and that most organisations leave to chance. That research is the backbone of his work. With the High Performance Institute, Burchard surveyed more than 30,000 people in 190 countries using the High Performance Indicator Assessment, then ran structured interviews with the top-scoring subjects. The output is a six-habit model (clarity, energy, necessity, productivity, influence, courage) published in High Performance Habits, selected by Amazon editors as a Top 3 Business and Leadership Book of 2017 and a Wall Street Journal bestseller. He has also built the organisations he talks about. As founder and CEO of GrowthDay and founder of the High Performance Institute, Burchard runs the Certified High Performance Coaching programme, operating in 100 countries with over 150,000 logged sessions according to the Institute’s own figures. Earlier books, including The Motivation Manifesto, The Charge, and The Millionaire Messenger, each reached New York Times or Wall Street Journal bestseller lists, giving him a readership and coaching network few performance researchers can match. For an executive audience, his value is specific. He gives leadership teams a shared vocabulary and a measurable standard for what sustained performance looks like, then ties it to the decisions senior people actually make: where to spend energy, what to cut, and how to hold a team to a clearer standard than comfort allows. Key speaking topics High performance habits Executive and team performance Personal and organisational productivity Leadership development Motivation and behavioural change Coaching culture and performance standards Influence and communication Ideal for CEOs and executive committees setting performance standards for a full leadership team Heads of sales and revenue leaders running large annual kick-offs or incentive events Chief learning officers building a coaching culture or leadership development programme Founder-led businesses scaling from owner-operator mode into managed performance Audience outcomes A shared six-habit model leadership teams can use as a common performance vocabulary A clearer view of which habits correlate with sustained results versus short-term output Specific daily practices senior people can apply to protect energy and clarity during high-load periods Language for holding teams to a higher standard without defaulting to pressure or burnout A research-backed case for treating performance as a set of trainable behaviours, not a trait

Why organisations work with Eliza VanCort A working method for executive presence rooted in Meisner acting technique, not generic confidence coaching. Voice, posture and physicality are treated as trainable instruments, not personality traits. An intersectional lens that takes inclusion past slogans. Her sessions address how mansplaining, interruption, and microaggression actually move through a meeting, and what a leader can do in the moment. A bestselling book, A Woman’s Guide to Claiming Space, that gives delegates a structured framework before and after the room, with named behaviours and language. Mainstream media reach. Appearances on The Drew Barrymore Show, Forbes, Fast Company and CNBC give her work cultural traction outside corporate L&D, which travels with audiences. Co-founder of Think Twice Labs with Alma Derricks, former CMO of Cirque du Soleil, building emotional intelligence and cross-difference communication tools used inside organisations. Biography highlights Author of A Woman’s Guide to Claiming Space: Stand Tall. Raise Your Voice. Be Heard, Berrett-Koehler, May 2021. Cook House Fellow, Cornell University. TEDxRochester speaker, “Women, Power and Revolutionizing Speech”. Founder of The Actor’s Workshop of Ithaca, a Meisner Technique studio. Co-founder of Think Twice Labs with Alma Derricks, former CMO of Cirque du Soleil. Featured in The Drew Barrymore Show, Forbes, Fast Company, CNBC, and Success magazine. Biography Most executive presence work treats authority as a personality trait. Eliza VanCort treats it as a craft. Her starting point is that voice, posture and language are trainable instruments, the same way an actor’s are, and that women and underrepresented leaders are routinely operating those instruments inside rooms that were not built for them. That argument has a specific origin. She founded The Actor’s Workshop of Ithaca, the region’s Meisner Technique studio, and spent years teaching how performers hold a stage. She then applied the same discipline to meeting rooms and boardrooms. A Woman’s Guide to Claiming Space, published by Berrett-Koehler in 2021, sets out the framework: five behaviours that shift how a leader is read, from posture and vocal placement to ending self-sabotage and building cross-difference coalitions. The work has reach beyond corporate L&D. Her TEDxRochester talk on women, power and speech has been viewed widely. Appearances on The Drew Barrymore Show, Forbes, Fast Company and CNBC have built a public audience of more than 250,000 followers. Inside organisations, she co-founded Think Twice Labs with Alma Derricks, former CMO of Cirque du Soleil, to translate the same material into emotional intelligence and communication tools teams can use across difference. She is a Cook House Fellow at Cornell University and an advisory board member of Performing Arts for Social Change. The intellectual frame is intersectional: most of her organisational work is about what happens to people with less institutional power when they intersect with structures designed around someone else’s authority. The output is concrete. Delegates leave with named behaviours, specific language and a vocabulary for the dynamics they have been navigating without naming for years. Key speaking topics Executive presence and communication craft Women in leadership and the politics of voice Anti-racist and cross-difference communication Emotional intelligence in senior teams Inclusion under pressure Confidence, posture and physicality for leaders Power dynamics in everyday workplace interaction Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers building executive-presence programmes for senior women Leadership-development leads designing high-potential and sponsorship pathways ERG sponsors and DEI heads commissioning substantive, non-performative inclusion content Senior women’s leadership summits, partner-track development programmes, and emerging-leader cohorts Audience outcomes A vocabulary for the meeting-room behaviours that quietly cost women authority, and language to interrupt them in the moment Specific techniques for voice, posture and physicality drawn from Meisner training, applied to senior business settings A framework from A Woman’s Guide to Claiming Space delegates can carry back into their teams Practical anti-racist and cross-difference communication moves that work inside live conversations, not only in policy documents A clearer reading of how power moves through an organisation’s everyday talk, and where to act on it

Why organisations work with Bill Benjamin He translates brain science into a practical leadership discipline the C-suite can actually use in a Monday meeting, drawing on 25 years as a senior technology leader rather than a research-only background. His Last 8% framework is the rare culture model that measures what gets left unsaid. IHHP research across more than 34,000 professionals shows an average 7.56% holdback in high-pressure moments, and that finding now anchors a September 2025 Harvard Business Review feature. He contributed to Performing Under Pressure, a New York Times and Amazon bestseller published in 65 countries, which gives his sessions a credible research spine rather than borrowed anecdotes. He has tested the material with audiences that have no patience for theory: NASA, U.S. Marines, surgeons, Goldman Sachs, Intel, and the FBI. He teaches accountability and empathy as a single leadership capability, not as opposing values, which gives HR and executive teams a shared language for the behaviours they want at the top. Biography highlights Partner, Institute for Health and Human Potential (IHHP) Contributor to Performing Under Pressure: The Science of Doing Your Best When It Matters Most (Crown Business), a New York Times and Amazon bestseller Co-author with Dr. JP Pawliw-Fry of the forthcoming Last 8% Culture book Research featured in Harvard Business Review, September 2025, “The Secret to Building a High-Performing Team” Degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science, with 25 years of senior leadership experience in technology Has delivered programmes for NASA, U.S. Marines, Goldman Sachs, Intel, Coca-Cola, Mayo Clinic, Amazon, and the FBI Biography The difficult 8% of any leadership conversation is the part people avoid. It is the direct feedback that gets softened, the underperformance left unnamed, the strategic disagreement that never reaches the room. Bill Benjamin has spent two decades showing senior teams why their culture drifts when that 8% is missing, and how to build the nervous-system control that lets leaders hold it. His argument is built on measurement. IHHP research with more than 34,000 professionals finds that people hold back an average of 7.56% of what matters most in high-pressure moments, a gap that sits behind most of the strategic misses senior teams complain about. That finding anchors his September 2025 Harvard Business Review feature and the forthcoming Last 8% Culture book, co-authored with IHHP founder Dr. JP Pawliw-Fry. Bill is a partner at the Institute for Health and Human Potential and a contributor to Performing Under Pressure: The Science of Doing Your Best When It Matters Most, published by Crown Business and translated into 65 territories. His credibility with technical audiences comes from a first career he rarely leads with: degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science, and 25 years as a senior leader in the technology industry. That combination is why the material lands with rooms that tend to resist behavioural content. NASA, U.S. Marines, Goldman Sachs, Intel, the FBI, and surgical teams at the Mayo Clinic have worked with him on the same question: how a leader holds their state, and their judgement, when the pressure is at its highest. Key speaking topics Build a High-Performance Last 8% Culture Leadership under pressure Emotional intelligence for senior leaders Difficult conversations and accountability Building courage and connection in executive teams Ideal for CEOs and senior executive teams rebuilding accountability after a strategic miss CHROs and CPOs redesigning leadership and culture programmes around measurable behaviour change Boards and leadership councils preparing for high-stakes transformations or succession moments Leadership conferences where the audience is senior operators rather than first-time managers Sales leadership teams applying emotional intelligence to high-pressure client and negotiation moments Audience outcomes A direct read on where their own team is holding back, and what that holdback is costing A usable model for the physiological and cognitive shifts that happen under pressure, and how to manage them in real time A shared language for pairing accountability with empathy, so executive teams stop trading one for the other Specific practices for entering the Last 8% of a conversation without the avoidance patterns most senior leaders default to Evidence from IHHP research and HBR coverage that gives HR and the CEO a credible basis for a culture intervention

Why organisations work with JP Pawliw-Fry He has named and quantified a problem most executive teams recognise but cannot articulate: the 7.56% of what matters most that people withhold in high-pressure moments, drawn from IHHP research with over 34,000 professionals. His Last 8% framework was placed in Harvard Business Review in September 2025, giving senior audiences a model with editorial credibility, not a motivational concept. He combines two registers most speakers do not: empirical research at scale (40,000+ surveyed monthly through IHHP) and direct coaching of Olympic athletes, Fortune 100 executives, and U.S. military leaders. Performing Under Pressure, co-authored with Hendrie Weisinger, sits as a New York Times bestseller and Inc. Magazine Best Business Book of the Year, and has been used inside Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, IBM and HSBC as a shared language for pressure performance. His teaching has been rated among the highest-scoring at Kellogg Executive Education, which means he can hold a room of senior leaders for serious content, not surface delivery. Biography highlights Co-author, Performing Under Pressure: The Science of Doing Your Best When It Matters Most (NYT bestseller, Inc. Magazine Best Business Book of the Year, published in 65 countries). Author, “The Secret to Building a High-Performing Team,” Harvard Business Review, September 2025. Co-founder and President, Institute for Health and Human Potential (IHHP), founded 1996; recognised as a Profit 100 Fastest Growing Company. Highest-rated lecturer at Kellogg School of Management Executive Education, Northwestern University. Advisor and keynote speaker for Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, HSBC, Intel, Coca-Cola, the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marines, NASA, plus NFL and NBA franchises. Host of the Last 8% Morning podcast. Biography The hardest part of any senior conversation is rarely the 92 percent that gets said. It is the final stretch, the feedback held back, the decision deferred, the risk left on the table. IHHP research with more than 34,000 professionals puts the average gap at 7.56 percent of what matters most. Closing that gap is the work that JP Pawliw-Fry has built his career around. As co-founder and president of the Institute for Health and Human Potential, he runs an ongoing research programme that surveys more than 40,000 people each month on how leaders behave under pressure. That data set fed Performing Under Pressure, the New York Times bestseller he co-authored with Hendrie Weisinger, named one of Inc. Magazine’s Best Business Books of the Year and now in print across 65 countries. He is also one of the highest-rated lecturers at Kellogg School of Management’s Executive Education programme. That matters because his audiences are usually executive committees, board offsites, and partner conferences, where the bar is set by what people will repeat in their next 1:1, not by what felt good in the room. The work has moved on. His September 2025 Harvard Business Review article, “The Secret to Building a High-Performing Team,” set out the Last 8% framework: a model for how courageous organisations combine high accountability with high care, and the cultural conditions that let leaders step into hard conversations rather than around them. The same model now sits behind IHHP work with Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, HSBC, the U.S. Navy and Marines, NASA, and NFL and NBA franchises. Key speaking topics The Last 8 Percent: leadership under pressure Performing under pressure High-performing teams and psychological safety Emotional intelligence in senior leadership Courageous conversations and accountability Risk-taking and decision-making in high-stakes moments Ideal for Executive committees and board offsites where avoidance and unspoken disagreement are slowing decisions. CHROs and heads of leadership development designing senior-leader programmes on accountability, feedback culture, and resilience. Sales and commercial leadership conferences focused on high-stakes negotiation and performance under pressure. Partner and managing director audiences in professional services, banking, and law where the cost of an avoided conversation is large and visible. Audience outcomes A named, testable model for the moment performance breaks down under pressure, drawn from research with more than 34,000 leaders. A common language for the 8 percent that goes unsaid, usable inside a leadership team within days. Specific behavioural moves leaders can rehearse for the next high-stakes conversation, decision, or piece of feedback. A clearer read on how their own organisation balances accountability with care, and where that balance is breaking. Renewed permission to take the interpersonal risk most senior leaders know they should be taking.

Why organisations work with Tahl Raz The frameworks Raz presents aren’t drawn from his interpretation of others’ research. Rather, he co-constructed them, working directly with the FBI hostage negotiator, the CEO performance researchers, and the business practitioners behind three of the most widely read business books of the past two decades. The CEO Next Door, which Raz co-authored based on analysis of more than 17,000 CEO and C-suite assessments, gives boards and senior leadership teams a data-validated model for identifying and developing executive talent, not one built on anecdote or convention. Never Split the Difference has sold more than five million copies and been translated into over 40 languages, which reflects genuine market validation of the negotiation system Raz helped shape. It is now embedded in corporate training programmes globally. Never Eat Alone is used as a textbook in MBA programmes worldwide, making Raz a source-level contributor to how the next generation of executives is taught to build professional relationships and organisational influence. His background as an award-winning business journalist gives him an ability to take complex behavioural research and make it immediately actionable in a room – a skill that is structurally different from the researchers and practitioners who generated the underlying work. Biography highlights Co-author of Never Split the Difference with former FBI lead hostage negotiator Chris Voss, New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, 5 million+ copies sold, translated into 40+ languages Co-author of Never Eat Alone with Keith Ferrazzi, New York Times bestseller, adopted as an MBA textbook in business schools worldwide Co-author of The CEO Next Door with Elena Botelho and Kim Powell, New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller; CMI Management Book of the Year 2019; based on analysis of more than 17,000 CEO and C-suite assessments; research published as an HBR cover story Award-winning journalist published in Inc., GQ, Harvard Business Review, and the Jerusalem Post Former CEO of MyGreenLight (online education), Chief Content Officer, and founder and editor-in-chief of Jewcy Media Degree in Philosophy, Vassar College Biography The prevailing models for negotiation and leadership development share a common flaw: they were built on theory, intuition, and case studies drawn from a narrow slice of experience. What changes the conversation is evidence. Evidence from 20 years of hostage negotiation under life-or-death conditions, from a decade of performance data on 17,000 executives, from the social science of how professional relationships actually generate career capital. Tahl Raz has spent his career working at the intersection of that evidence and the people who need to act on it. Raz co-authored Never Split the Difference with Chris Voss, former lead international kidnapping negotiator for the FBI, translating a field-tested system developed in extreme-pressure environments into a framework that business leaders and sales teams now use worldwide. The book has sold more than five million copies and been translated into over 40 languages – a scale of adoption that reflects the practical utility of what the negotiation system actually delivers, not just the appeal of the source material. His work on The CEO Next Door, developed with researchers Elena Botelho and Kim Powell, draws on analysis of more than 17,000 CEO and C-suite assessments to identify the four behaviours that statistically separate executives who reach and sustain top performance from those who plateau. The research – published as a cover article in the May-June 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review – overturns widely held assumptions about pedigree, charisma, and the shape of a successful executive career. The book won CMI Management Book of the Year 2019. Before these collaborations, Raz co-authored Never Eat Alone with Keith Ferrazzi, a study of professional networking and relationship capital that remains in use as an MBA textbook in business programmes globally. His journalism has appeared in Inc., GQ, Harvard Business Review, and the Jerusalem Post. That background – knowing how to extract what is genuinely new in a body of research and make it land for a senior audience – is what distinguishes his platform: he is not interpreting these frameworks from the outside, he helped build them. Key speaking topics Negotiation strategy and behavioural influence Executive leadership behaviours and CEO performance Professional relationship capital and network strategy Storytelling and leadership communication Organisational decision-making under pressure Career development and leadership advancement The future of work and professional influence Ideal for C-suite and senior executive audiences in leadership development or strategic offsites CHROs and talent leaders building executive assessment or succession frameworks Sales leadership and commercial teams focused on high-stakes negotiation Boards and governance teams examining executive performance and leadership pipeline Audience outcomes A working understanding of the negotiation tactics developed in FBI hostage situations and how they apply in commercial and leadership contexts Clarity on the four behaviours; decisiveness, engaging for impact, relentless reliability, bold adaptation which CEO performance data identifies as the genuine predictors of executive success A reframed view of professional networking as a deliberate, structured strategic practice rather than a social variable Practical approaches for improving persuasion, communication, and influence in high-pressure conversations Sharper criteria for evaluating leadership potential – their own or others’ – against evidence rather than convention

Why organisations work with Rohit Bassi Three decades of cross-cultural coaching across 21 countries, with named engagements at Oracle, Honeywell, Canon, the World Bank, HSBC and KPMG. A communication method built around four operating disciplines, courage, clarity, conviction and compassion, that gives leaders a usable structure for difficult conversations rather than a generic communication framework. A Gulf-based perspective on executive presence that translates between Western corporate norms and Middle Eastern, South Asian and Southeast Asian leadership cultures, useful for organisations with distributed senior teams. A combined practitioner record as keynote speaker, sales communication coach and author of Living Through Self Compassion, allowing him to work credibly with both commercial leaders and people leaders in the same organisation. Biography highlights Founder of ROI Talks, the coaching and training practice he established in Dubai. Author of Living Through Self Compassion (2019) and contributing author of Success Mastery alongside Jack Canfield (2018). TEDx speaker and Senior Level Executive Contributor at Brainz Magazine. Member of the National Academy of Best-Selling Authors. Three decades of speaking, coaching and training experience across more than 21 countries. Named client engagements include Oracle, Honeywell, the World Bank, Canon, HSBC, KPMG, Harley-Davidson and Armani Hotels & Resorts. Biography Most leaders are not promoted for how they communicate. They are promoted in spite of it, and only at the senior level does the cost become obvious. Boards lose patience. Sales teams stop closing. Talent quietly leaves. ROI Talks, the practice Rohit Bassi founded in Dubai, was built to address that specific gap. His method is structured around four operating disciplines, courage, clarity, conviction and compassion, drawn from a long study of mindfulness and applied to the conversations leaders actually have. The work covers executive presence, persuasion under pressure, conflict that has become organisational, and the daily communication habits that either build or erode trust over time. He has worked across more than 21 countries with named clients including Oracle, Honeywell, the World Bank, Canon, HSBC and KPMG. His book Living Through Self Compassion sets out the personal story behind the method, a return from depression and self-sabotage to a working philosophy of communication. He is also a contributing author of Success Mastery alongside Jack Canfield and a TEDx speaker. What sets the offer apart is the geography and the register. He coaches senior leaders fluently across Western, Middle Eastern, South Asian and Southeast Asian cultures, and writes regularly as an Executive Contributor for Brainz Magazine. For organisations with distributed leadership teams, that cross-cultural read on executive presence is not common in the category. Key speaking topics Leadership communication and executive presence Persuasion and influence in high-stakes conversations Mindful communication and emotional intelligence Sales communication for senior leaders Conflict, difficult conversations and trust repair Resilience and self-leadership under pressure Public speaking for executives Ideal for CEOs, business unit heads and senior leaders preparing for board, investor or all-hands communication Sales leadership and commercial teams in high-stakes B2B environments Heads of L&D, talent and executive development commissioning leadership communication programmes Senior leadership teams in multinational and Gulf-based organisations with cross-cultural workforces Audience outcomes A clearer language for the four disciplines that drive credibility, courage, clarity, conviction and compassion Specific tools for high-stakes conversations: persuasion, conflict, trust repair and assertive listening A more honest read on where their own communication erodes trust, and what to change first A working approach to composure under pressure that they can apply the next working day