Executive Development

Why organisations work with Gorick Ng He turns two recurring HR problems, the disengagement of capable early-career hires and the quiet stagnation of mid-career professionals in pyramid-structured firms, into a single teachable framework drawn from 500-plus structured interviews and used by Harvard Business School with every MBA cohort. His work bridges three conversations that most organisations run separately: new-hire onboarding, frontline manager development, and DEI for first-generation and underrepresented professionals. One body of content, three internal audiences. The Unspoken Rules sits on the Thinkers50 Best New Management Books list for 2022 and is published by Harvard Business Review Press, which gives the content institutional credibility that motivational early-career speakers cannot match. He speaks the language of large professional-services and corporate buyers because he has been on the buy-side of it: Boston Consulting Group, Credit Suisse, and Harvard Business School’s Managing the Future of Work research project. Sessions are designed as practical training, not inspiration. Manager toolkits, ERG curricula, and onboarding modules can be built directly off the talk. Biography highlights Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Unspoken Rules: Secrets to Starting Your Career Off Right (Harvard Business Review Press). Named to Thinkers50’s 30 Thinkers to Watch in 2022; book selected for Thinkers50’s Best New Management Books of 2022. Career adviser at Harvard College and faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley. Former management consultant at Boston Consulting Group and investment banker at Credit Suisse. Researcher with the Managing the Future of Work project at Harvard Business School. Featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fast Company, Fortune, CNBC, and The Today Show. Biography The reason capable graduates plateau in their first two years is rarely the reason their managers give. It is almost never effort or intelligence. It is the gap between what new hires were told work would reward and what their organisations actually reward, a gap that is invisible to the people who already know the rules and punishing to those who do not. The Unspoken Rules, published by Harvard Business Review Press and built on more than five hundred structured interviews, names that gap and gives organisations a vocabulary for closing it. Gorick Ng wrote the book that Harvard Business School now hands to every MBA, and he teaches the same material to undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley. As a career adviser at Harvard College, he works directly with first-generation and low-income students, the population on whom the cost of unspoken rules is highest. The work moved from classroom to corporate quickly. Aon, BNP Paribas, GE, Google, IBM, Invesco, Kirkland and Ellis, and Charles River Associates have used the content in manager training, new-hire onboarding, and DEI programming. UC Berkeley, StartSe, and Singularity University have commissioned him on adjacent themes including innovation and how authors and founders build audiences in the AI search era. His authority comes from sitting on both sides of the question. Before academia he was a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group and an investment banker at Credit Suisse, and a researcher with Harvard Business School’s Managing the Future of Work project. He has watched professional-services organisations make the same recurring mistakes with early-career talent, and his frameworks are written for the specific tensions those organisations face, not for a general audience. Thinkers50 named The Unspoken Rules one of the ten best new management books of 2022 and named Gorick to its 30 Thinkers to Watch list the same year. The work has since been covered in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fast Company, Fortune, CNBC, and The Today Show. The recognition matters less than the practical point underneath it: very few speakers treat early-career navigation, manager onboarding, and first-generation inclusion as one connected problem with one connected research base, and that is what large employers buy him for. Key speaking topics Early-career talent attraction and retention Manager development for frontline and people-leader cohorts Inclusive management of first-generation and underrepresented professionals Onboarding and the school-to-work transition Employee Resource Group programming and DEI training content Ownership and performance behaviours in early-career roles The future of work and early-career expectations Ideal for CHROs, heads of talent, and learning and development leads designing onboarding or manager training at scale. Heads of DEI and ERG sponsors building substantive programming for first-generation and underrepresented professionals. Professional-services and corporate firms with large early-career intakes (consulting, banking, law, accounting, technology). Talent leaders addressing mid-career stagnation among senior associates, senior managers, and VPs in firms where the path to the top narrows sharply. University and graduate-school audiences at convocation, orientation, and career-readiness events. Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary across managers and new hires for the behaviours that quietly determine early-career progression. Specific manager actions that reduce avoidable attrition in the first two years, drawn from named patterns in the research. A practical lens for ERG and DEI work that translates inclusion into observable workplace behaviours, not slogans. Onboarding content that addresses what first-generation and underrepresented hires need to hear that their peers already know. Confidence among early-career employees that career progression is learnable, not a matter of background.

Why organisations work with Karen Eber She has run culture and learning inside two of the largest professional environments in the world, GE and Deloitte, so her storytelling work is built around how decisions actually get made in a 90,000-person organisation. Her Perfect Story method is grounded in neuroscience, including how attention, empathy, and trust are formed in the brain during a story, giving leaders a defensible reason to invest in communication craft beyond presentation polish. She works fluently across storytelling for leadership, storytelling for change, and storytelling with data, which means a single engagement can serve a town hall, a board update, and a sales conversation. Her book carries genuine third-party validation: Axiom Business Book Award Silver Medal, International Book Awards winner, and Next Big Ideas Club selection, signalling editorial quality rather than self-published reach. Biography highlights Author of The Perfect Story: How to Tell Stories that Inform, Influence, and Inspire, HarperCollins Leadership / Harper Horizon. TED speaker: “How your brain responds to stories, and why they’re crucial for leaders”. Former Head of Culture and Head of Leadership Development at General Electric. Former Chief Learning Officer / Head of Leadership Development at Deloitte. Guest lecturer at London Business School, MIT, and Stanford. Featured in Fast Company, Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur, NPR, CNBC, Quartz, and Business Insider. Biography Most internal communication inside large organisations is information transfer in slide form. Strategy is announced, change is rolled out, performance is reported, and almost none of it changes how a manager behaves on a Tuesday morning. Karen Eber’s work begins from that problem. She spent two decades inside the kind of environment where this matters most. At General Electric she led Culture and Leadership Development across a global workforce. At Deloitte she ran leadership development for the firm. Those roles required her to land complex messages, on diverse audiences, in cultures that were already crowded with corporate noise. Her book The Perfect Story sets out a practical neuroscience-based method for how leaders find, shape, and deliver stories that hold attention and shift behaviour. It has been recognised with an Axiom Business Book Award Silver Medal, an International Book Awards win, and a Next Big Ideas Club “Must-Read” selection. Her TED talk on the neuroscience of leadership storytelling extended the argument to a public audience. What buyers tend to remember from her sessions is that the craft is teachable. She separates storytelling from charisma, breaks down the brain mechanics of attention and trust, and gives senior people specific tools they can use the same week, whether the audience is a board, a sales team, or a hundred frontline managers reading a town hall transcript on a phone. Key speaking topics Storytelling for leadership and influence Storytelling with data Culture change and communication Executive presence and communication craft Neuroscience of attention, trust, and persuasion Employee engagement and internal communication Ideal for CHROs, Chief Learning Officers, and Heads of Leadership Development designing executive communication and culture programmes. Chief Communications Officers and internal communication leaders responsible for change narratives and town hall content. Sales and marketing leadership teams who need to convert data into narrative buyers act on. Senior leadership teams preparing for major strategy, restructure, or integration announcements. Audience outcomes A working neuroscience-based model for how stories hold attention and create trust. Specific techniques for turning data and strategy slides into narratives that move an audience. A clearer separation between what is rhetoric, what is communication craft, and what is leadership behaviour. Tools senior leaders can apply immediately to town halls, board updates, and customer conversations.

Why organisations work with Scott Tillema Practitioner authority that is genuinely operational. The negotiation craft was learned in live SWAT incidents in the Chicago area, not modelled in a classroom. That changes how a sceptical executive room receives the material. A single, transferable framework. The Four Pillars (Understanding, Timing, Delivery, Respect) gives an executive team a shared vocabulary they can use in the next M&A negotiation, regulator call, or internal escalation, not just remember from the talk. A proven public artefact. The TEDxNaperville talk “The Secrets of Hostage Negotiators” has passed one million views, which means most participants arrive primed and engaged rather than cold. Cross-sector translation. The same material has been delivered to Microsoft, Citi, Vimeo, Bosch, YPO chapters across three continents, and audiences at SHRM and PMI conferences, which gives a buyer evidence that the content lands outside its origin context. A teaching credential at IMD. Five guest appearances on IMD Business School’s Advanced High Performance Leadership programme means the material has been pressure-tested in front of senior leaders inside one of Europe’s top executive education environments, not only on the keynote circuit. Biography highlights Twenty-plus years in law enforcement, retired SWAT hostage negotiator, Chicago area FBI-trained crisis negotiator Graduate degree in psychology and bachelor’s degree in behavioral science Negotiation training at Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation and at IMD Business School Five-time guest speaker on IMD Business School’s Advanced High Performance Leadership programme TEDxNaperville speaker, “The Secrets of Hostage Negotiators”, over one million views Founder of Negotiation Excellence, LLC; clients include Microsoft, Citi, Vimeo, Bosch, the FBI, Harvard University and YPO chapters Biography Most negotiation training in corporate settings is built on case studies. Scott Tillema’s is built on incidents where someone’s life depended on the next sentence. Twenty years as a SWAT hostage negotiator in the Chicago area, FBI-trained, and the work shows up in the room as composure rather than theory. The academic foundation is real as well. A graduate degree in psychology, an undergraduate degree in behavioral science, and negotiation training at both Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation and IMD Business School. The combination is what allows the operational material to be taught, not just demonstrated. Leaders leave with a framework they can use, not an anecdote they can retell. The framework is the Four Pillars: Understanding, Timing, Delivery, Respect. It was first laid out for a wider audience in the TEDxNaperville talk “The Secrets of Hostage Negotiators”, which has now passed one million views. The same model now anchors the executive sessions he runs through Negotiation Excellence, LLC for Microsoft, Citi, Vimeo, Bosch, YPO chapters across three continents, and audiences at SHRM and PMI conferences. It is also the basis on which IMD invited him back five times to its Advanced High Performance Leadership programme. What a senior team typically takes from a session is not a lecture on persuasion. It is a more disciplined posture in the conversations that actually decide things, the regulator call, the M&A walk-through, the internal escalation, the workforce announcement that has to land cleanly the first time. Key speaking topics High-stakes communication Crisis negotiation and de-escalation Influence without authority Conflict resolution Trust building Leading difficult conversations Decision-making under pressure Ideal for CEOs, COOs and senior leadership teams preparing for board, regulator, or workforce conversations where the first sentence sets the outcome HR, people and ER leaders managing escalations, restructure conversations, or formal grievance processes Sales, business development and commercial leaders running enterprise negotiations Crisis, security and legal teams who need their senior leaders fluent in de-escalation, not just trained in process Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the Four Pillars (Understanding, Timing, Delivery, Respect) that a leadership team can use in their own conversations the following week A more disciplined sense of when to slow a conversation down and when to move Practical de-escalation techniques drawn from live crisis negotiation, not workshop simulations Greater confidence in conversations where authority alone will not produce the outcome

Why organisations work with Michelle Moore Her conscious leadership course on LinkedIn Learning has reached more than 25,000 learners, giving her a teaching method that has been tested at scale before it reaches a client’s leadership team. She has sat on a national regulatory commission (the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket) whose findings forced the ECB into a public reckoning, which means she speaks about inclusion from the inside of governance, not from the outside. Her book Real Wins, published by Hachette and shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year, gives leaders a vocabulary for connecting identity, resilience, and performance without reducing any of the three to a slogan. She works across business, sport, government, and education, with named clients including the Premier League, UNICEF, the University of Cambridge, and BAFTA, so her examples translate across sectors instead of staying locked inside one. Biography highlights Author of Real Wins: Race, Leadership and How to Redefine Success (Nicholas Brealey, Hachette UK), shortlisted for the Chartered Management Institute Book of the Year and the Business Book Awards. LinkedIn Learning instructor on Conscious Leadership, 25,000+ learners. Former commissioner, Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket, whose 2023 report led to the ECB’s public apology. Trustee, SportsAid; member, Sport England Talent Inclusion Advisory Board; advisor, Women’s Sport Trust. Senior honorary associate lecturer, University of Worcester; former instructor, The Guardian Masterclasses. Winner of the 2016 PRECIOUS Award for Outstanding Woman in Sport and a national Changemaker award. Biography Conscious leadership is often misread as a softer register of the same management language. In Moore’s hands it is a working discipline: how leaders relate to themselves, how they hold values under pressure, and how they make decisions that survive scrutiny. Her LinkedIn Learning course on the subject has reached more than 25,000 learners, which is a rare evidence base for any one speaker’s framework. The credibility behind the framework comes from where Moore has used it. She served as a commissioner on the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket, the body whose 2023 report compelled the England and Wales Cricket Board to issue an unreserved apology over racism, sexism, and class exclusion in the English game. She holds board roles with SportsAid, Sport England’s Talent Inclusion Advisory Board, and the Women’s Sport Trust. Real Wins, published by Nicholas Brealey at Hachette UK, was shortlisted for the Chartered Management Institute Book of the Year and the Business Book Awards. The book argues that resilience, identity, and performance are linked, and that leaders who try to separate them tend to manage all three badly. The same argument shapes her keynotes for the Premier League, UNICEF, the University of Cambridge, and BAFTA. What makes her useful to a boardroom is the combination of governance-grade experience and a teaching practice that has been pressure-tested at scale. She talks about inclusion as something senior leaders do under cost, not something they declare without one. Key speaking topics Conscious leadership Values-based and inclusive leadership Executive presence and credibility Resilience under sustained pressure Identity, performance, and self-leadership Inclusion as a leadership capability Changemaking in regulated and high-scrutiny environments Ideal for CEOs, CHROs, and senior leadership teams navigating inclusion as a governance question rather than a communications one Boards and executive committees in sport, media, and regulated industries facing public scrutiny on culture and equity Leadership development programmes for newly senior leaders building presence, values clarity, and resilience ERG sponsors, transformation leads, and inclusion councils that want a speaker with governance credibility, not bureau polish Audience outcomes A working definition of conscious leadership that leaders can apply to their own decisions, not an abstract model Language for connecting identity, resilience, and performance in ways that hold up in performance reviews and board conversations A clearer view of where inclusion becomes a leadership behaviour and where it stops being one Reference points drawn from elite sport governance, regulatory work, and corporate leadership development that tr

Why organisations work with Nicolas Krauze He has run the live experiment that most executives only theorise about: leading rooms of 60 to 100 specialists, in real time, with no second take, across more than 20 years of professional practice. Conducting the National Philharmonic of Ukraine and the Orchestre de Chambre Nouvelle Europe gives him a credible vantage on what holds a team together when conditions are unstable, including the period leading into and through the war in Ukraine. He has worked with named soloists at the top of the global classical scene, including Renaud Capucon and Alexandre Kantorow, which gives executives a working answer to managing high-status individual talent inside a collective performance. The Sciences Po background means his corporate conferences are framed for senior commercial audiences, not as a music appreciation event. Clients including KPMG France, Groupe Chargeurs and Bluelink have hosted him with their global leadership groups. He works in French and English with equal precision, useful for European and multinational audiences who want a senior keynote that holds the room in either language. Biography highlights Principal Guest Conductor, National Philharmonic of Ukraine, 2018 to 2022, the first foreigner to hold the role. Musical and Artistic Director, Orchestre de Chambre Nouvelle Europe, with more than 400 concerts leading the ensemble. Graduate of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory with five first prizes, and of the Moscow Gnessin Institute. Conducting studies under Zsolt Nagy and Christoph Eschenbach. Has conducted the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, Wiener Concert-Verein, Arena di Verona Symphony, Athens State Symphony, and Lviv State Philharmonic, among others. Degree from Sciences Po Paris; works as a corporate speaker in French and English. Biography A symphony orchestra is one of the few professional environments where 80 people have to make a single coordinated decision every second, without speaking, in front of a paying audience. Nicolas Krauze has run that environment for two decades. The leadership question he addresses for organisations comes out of that practice directly: how do you get expert individuals to subordinate their judgement to a shared interpretation without losing what makes them expert in the first place. His conducting career covers the full institutional range. He is Musical and Artistic Director of the Orchestre de Chambre Nouvelle Europe in Paris, where he has led more than 400 concerts. From 2018 to 2022 he was Principal Guest Conductor of the National Philharmonic of Ukraine, the first foreigner to hold the position. He has conducted orchestras including the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, the Wiener Concert-Verein, the Arena di Verona Symphony and the Athens State Symphony, and has worked with soloists at the level of Renaud Capucon and Alexandre Kantorow. He trained at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, where he earned five first prizes, and at the Moscow Gnessin Institute, under conductors including Zsolt Nagy and Christoph Eschenbach. He also holds a degree from Sciences Po Paris, which shapes how he frames his work for executive audiences. His corporate conferences, delivered since 2018 in French and English, have been booked by KPMG France, Groupe Chargeurs and Bluelink, among others. What he gives executives is not a metaphor exercise. The conductor’s job is to set the interpretation, hold the tempo, signal the entries, manage individual ego inside a collective sound, and recover when something goes wrong in front of an audience. Those are the same problems a chief executive faces in a senior team. Krauze translates the craft, not the imagery. Key speaking topics Leadership and management Team cohesion and collective performance Motivation inside high-expertise groups Diversity of talent inside a single shared outcome Trust, delegation and dialogue at senior level Performance under live conditions Ideal for Executive committees and senior leadership teams who want to sharpen how they actually work together HR and L&D leaders running offsites focused on team cohesion or collective performance CEO and chair-level audiences at client events where the brief calls for a memorable keynote with senior substance Multinational audiences requiring a speaker who works at executive level in French and English Audience outcomes A working model of what trust, tempo and clear signalling look like inside a high-performing team A sharper sense of how a leader manages high-status individual talent without losing collective coherence Specific reference points from professional conducting that executives can carry back into their own meetings and decision rhythms A keynote experience that is unusual enough to be remembered and discussed inside the organisation afterwards

Why organisations work with Anelia Uzunova A corporate operator’s read on wellbeing. She has run point for a CEO at Galderma and managed global innovation projects at Novartis, so the inner-leadership conversation lands as an executive discipline rather than a soft-skills add-on. Founder of the wellbeing community at the World Economic Forum, which gives her a credible vantage point on how peer organisations are actually structuring this work, not just how they describe it on their careers page. A structured method, the RISE Inner Leadership framework, that gives leadership teams something concrete to take back to their day-to-day, rather than a workshop afterglow. A bilingual, cross-cultural speaker with working experience across Switzerland, the US, and the UK, well suited to executive audiences in pharma, healthcare, and globally distributed corporate teams. INSEAD-trained executive coach who lectures on Leading for Wellbeing to its MBA audience, which translates into content that survives a sceptical senior room. Biography highlights Chief of Staff to the CEO, Galderma Global Leadership Fellow, World Economic Forum; founder of the WEF wellbeing community Former global digital innovation project lead at Novartis, Switzerland MBA and executive coaching certification, INSEAD Executive Masters in Global Leadership, World Economic Forum programme Lecturer to INSEAD MBA audiences on Leading for Wellbeing Biography Pharma is a useful test case for the limits of conventional wellbeing programmes. The work is high-stakes, the regulatory load is heavy, and the senior teams running global functions tend to be senior precisely because they absorb pressure for everyone else. That is the environment Anelia Uzunova has worked inside for most of her career, first at Novartis in Switzerland and then as Chief of Staff to the CEO of Galderma. Her shift from operating roles to coaching and speaking was not a reinvention away from corporate life. It was a decision to teach explicitly what she saw working at the top of complex organisations. The Global Leadership Fellows Programme at the World Economic Forum gave her a comparative view across industries; founding the WEF’s wellbeing community gave her a structured one. Both inform a body of work focused on the inner state of the leader as an operational variable. The teachable form of that work is the RISE Inner Leadership framework, organised around four stages: Root, Ignite, Surrender, Embody. It is used with executive audiences and with the INSEAD MBA cohort she lectures to on Leading for Wellbeing. The framing is not therapeutic. It is closer to executive coaching with a clear curriculum, designed for senior leaders who have already tried the surface interventions and want something that holds up under pressure. Her credentials sit across INSEAD, the World Economic Forum, and a fifteen-year corporate track record in pharma and healthcare. The reason this matters for serious organisations is straightforward: when wellbeing is treated as an HR programme, it stays peripheral. When it is treated as a leadership capability, it changes how people work. Uzunova argues, and demonstrates, that the second framing is the one that pays back. Key speaking topics Inner leadership and executive composure Wellbeing as a leadership capability Personal transformation and reinvention for senior leaders Leading through change and uncertainty Purpose and alignment in executive careers Mindful leadership for high-pressure industries Women in senior leadership Ideal for CHROs and Chief People Officers building wellbeing into the leadership agenda rather than the benefits stack C-suite and senior leadership offsites in pharma, healthcare, and other high-pressure regulated industries Executive development programmes and high-potential cohorts Women’s leadership and senior talent forums Audience outcomes A working definition of inner leadership that an executive team can use, not a wellness vocabulary The four-stage RISE framework as a reference structure for how senior leaders manage their own state A sharper view of how composure, alignment, and presence affect team performance and retention Practical anchors for executives navigating role transitions, restructure, or extended pressure A frame for treating wellbeing as a leadership discipline that boards and CEOs can sponsor with confidence

Why organisations work with Kevin Lane Keller He authored the framework most senior marketers were trained on. The Customer-Based Brand Equity model, his 1993 Journal of Marketing paper, is the reference point that brand equity conversations still anchor to. He co-authors the standard MBA marketing textbook. Marketing Management with Philip Kotler is in its 16th edition and sits on the syllabus of most top business schools, which means his vocabulary is already shared by the room. He has advised brand strategy at Accenture, American Express, Disney, Ford, Intel, Nike, P&G, Samsung, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and Google, so the case material is current rather than historical. He treats the tension between short-term performance marketing and long-term brand building as a capital allocation question, not a creative one, which lands with CFOs and CEOs as well as CMOs. He brings the academic credibility of 135+ peer-reviewed papers and a Tuck professorship without retreating into theory; the work has been pressure-tested in expert witness testimony for Amazon, Meta, Mercedes-Benz, and the NFL. Biography highlights E. B. Osborn Professor of Marketing, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College. Author of Strategic Brand Management, 5th edition, co-authored with Vanitha Swaminathan, widely referred to as the “bible of branding.” Co-author with Philip Kotler and Alex Chernev of Marketing Management, 16th edition. Originator of the Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE) model, 1993 Journal of Marketing. Former Executive Director of the Marketing Science Institute, 2013 to 2015. Previously held tenured marketing posts at Stanford Graduate School of Business, UC Berkeley, and UNC Chapel Hill. Biography The argument over what brand investment is actually for has moved from the marketing function to the boardroom. Finance leaders want a defensible link between brand spend and enterprise value. Marketing leaders are negotiating between short-term performance metrics and the longer arc of customer preference. Keller’s work is the framework most of those conversations are still built on. His 1993 Journal of Marketing paper introduced the Customer-Based Brand Equity model, which redefined brand value as what customers know, feel, and recognise about a brand rather than as a balance-sheet residual. The CBBE pyramid remains a standard reference for measuring brand strength inside organisations like Accenture, American Express, Disney, Nike, P&G, and Samsung, all of which have drawn on his counsel. He co-authors Marketing Management with Philip Kotler and Alex Chernev, now in its 16th edition, and Strategic Brand Management with Vanitha Swaminathan, now in its 5th. Both textbooks are core curriculum at most top business schools, which means most CMOs in the room were trained inside his vocabulary. He has held tenured positions at Stanford, Berkeley, and UNC before Tuck, and served as Executive Director of the Marketing Science Institute. Keller’s current work focuses on how brands hold their position when AI reshapes media buying, customer experience, and pricing simultaneously. He addresses the tension senior teams face directly: how to keep building the brand asset when every dashboard rewards the campaign. Key speaking topics Customer-based brand equity Building global power brands Brand strategy and brand architecture Integrated marketing communications The economics of brand investment AI and the future of brand management Marketing strategy at the CEO and CFO level Ideal for CMOs and brand leaders defending brand investment to boards and finance functions CEOs and CFOs evaluating how brand contributes to enterprise value Marketing leadership offsites and senior marketing development programmes Global brand and category teams in consumer, technology, and financial services Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary, grounded in the CBBE framework, for discussing brand value across marketing, finance, and the executive team A clearer view of how short-term performance activity and long-term brand building reinforce or undermine each other Diagnostic tools for assessing where a brand is strong, vulnerable, or under-leveraged in current category dynamics A current perspective on what AI changes, and does not change, for brand strategy Case context from senior brand decisions inside Nike, Disney, P&G, Samsung, Google, and others

Why organisations work with Rashmi Airan She has lived the failure she now teaches against. A Columbia-trained lawyer who served six months in federal prison for bank fraud is a different category of voice on ethics from a consultant or compliance specialist. Her RISE Through It and Dharma Leadership frameworks give leadership teams a structured language for the moments when pressure starts to distort judgement, not generic values posters. She speaks to boards, law firms, and Fortune 100 leadership teams with first-person authority on the cultural conditions that produce ethical drift, including ambition, fear, and the silent encouragement of senior peers. Her work bridges ethics, resilience, and mental health, which makes her useful to organisations dealing with leaders under sustained pressure rather than only to compliance functions. Biography highlights Columbia Law School graduate, with honours, and former Wall Street investment banker. Served six months in federal prison for bank fraud tied to the US housing crisis. TEDx speaker on ethical blind spots and decision-making under pressure. Creator of two named frameworks used in corporate leadership programmes: RISE Through It and Dharma Leadership. Board director, Overtown Youth Center and Alonzo Mourning Foundation; Ambassador for The Key Clubhouse. Cited media appearances on ABC, PBS, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Biography Most ethical failures in business are not committed by bad people. They are committed by competent, ambitious leaders inside cultures that quietly reward the wrong things. Rashmi Airan knows this because she was one of them. A Columbia Law School graduate and former Wall Street investment banker, she built a successful US legal practice before being convicted of bank fraud during the housing crisis and serving six months in federal prison. That experience is now the foundation of her professional work, not a footnote to it. She has spent more than a decade studying the conditions under which good judgement breaks down, and translating that into something senior leaders can actually use. Her RISE Through It process and Dharma Leadership framework give executives a structured way to recognise the early signals of ethical drift inside their own decisions and teams. She speaks to boards, law firms, professional services partnerships and Fortune 100 leadership groups, often to audiences who assume this kind of thing happens to other people. Her contribution is to dismantle that assumption with specifics. She names the pressures, the rationalisations, and the cultural cues that precede a serious lapse, drawn from her own collapse and from years of working inside organisations on culture, compliance and resilience. Beyond keynotes, she serves on the board of the Overtown Youth Center and the Alonzo Mourning Foundation, and acts as an Ambassador for The Key Clubhouse, work focused on mental health and second-chance opportunity. Her published writing and TEDx appearances have made her a credible voice for organisations that want ethics treated as a leadership capability rather than a training module. Key speaking topics Ethical decision-making under pressure Values-based leadership Resilience after professional setback Culture and the conditions for ethical drift Mental health and senior leadership Women, voice and authority in leadership Risk awareness for boards and executive teams Ideal for Boards, general counsel and compliance leadership setting the ethical operating standard for the organisation. Partner groups in law, accounting, banking and professional services where individual judgement carries firm-wide risk. Senior leadership development programmes inside Fortune-scale companies focused on values-based leadership and resilience. Women’s leadership forums and emerging-leader cohorts where authority, voice and self-knowledge are central. Audience outcomes A clearer language for the early signs of ethical drift inside teams and individual decisions. A more honest account of how pressure, ambition and culture combine to produce serious lapses in otherwise capable leaders. A practical framework, RISE Through It, for recovering judgement and decision quality after setback or sustained strain. Permission to discuss mental health, fear and self-doubt as leadership issues rather than personal weaknesses. A first-person reference point that leaders carry back into their own teams when the pressure starts to rise.

Why organisations work with Costas Andriopoulos He has built one of the most cited academic foundations for organisational ambidexterity, the discipline of running exploitation and exploration in parallel, and translates it into language a leadership team can act on rather than admire. His 2009 Organization Science paper with Marianne Lewis is on most senior reading lists in the field, which gives the boardroom conversation a defensible reference point when innovation budgets come under pressure. “Purposeful Curiosity” gives leaders a working method for the awkward middle of an innovation cycle, where the question is not whether to explore but how to keep the inquiry productive when results are slow. As founder of Bayes X, he runs a live research programme on disruption with corporate partners, so the case material he brings to a session is current rather than historical. He has acted as thematic advisor on the Amundi (Lyxor) MSCI Disruptive Technology ETF, giving him a working view of how capital markets currently price the very disruption that operating leaders are trying to manage. Biography highlights Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Bayes Business School, City, University of London Associate Dean for MBA Programmes, Bayes Business School Founder and Director, Bayes X, the school’s Research Centre for Innovation and Disruption Director, Avyssos Advisors Ltd., innovation management consultancy Author, “Purposeful Curiosity” (Yellow Kite/Hachette, 2022), endorsed by Adam Grant Co-author, “Managing Change, Creativity and Innovation” (5th edition, Sage, 2024) Research published in Organization Science, Human Relations, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Long Range Planning, and California Management Review Thematic advisor to the Amundi (Lyxor) MSCI Disruptive Technology ETF Biography The hardest problem inside an established firm is not whether to innovate. It is how to keep the innovation agenda alive against the gravitational pull of the existing business. Costas Andriopoulos has spent two decades building the academic and practical answer to that question. His 2009 paper with Marianne Lewis in Organization Science set out how ambidextrous firms hold exploitation and exploration in productive tension rather than collapsing one into the other. The work has become a reference point for how senior teams discuss the paradox of running today’s business while building tomorrow’s. He has continued that line of research through articles in Human Relations, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Long Range Planning and California Management Review. At Bayes Business School he holds the chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, serves as Associate Dean for MBA Programmes, and founded the Bayes X Centre for Innovation and Disruption. Through Avyssos Advisors he works with founders and corporate leadership teams; through the Amundi (Lyxor) MSCI Disruptive Technology ETF advisory work he sees the same disruption priced by capital markets. “Purposeful Curiosity,” published by Yellow Kite in 2022 and endorsed by Adam Grant, took that research base to a wider audience. Its argument is operational rather than inspirational: curiosity becomes useful only when it is structured, directed, and protected against the day-to-day demands that crowd it out. That is the brief he brings into a leadership room. Key speaking topics Organisational ambidexterity Disruptive innovation in established firms Purposeful curiosity as a leadership discipline Innovation portfolio management Entrepreneurial mindset inside corporates Leading creative teams The paradox of exploitation and exploration Ideal for CEOs and executive committees holding both a profitability and a growth mandate Chief Innovation Officers and heads of R&D under board pressure to show returns from exploration CHROs and learning leaders building leadership development programmes that include innovation capability Founders and senior leadership teams of scale-ups moving from a single product to a portfolio Audience outcomes A clear vocabulary for the paradox of running today’s business while building the next one A defensible reference framework, drawn from peer-reviewed research, for protecting the exploration agenda inside an established firm A working method for converting individual curiosity into a managed organisational practice Examples of how ambidextrous firms structure decisions, incentives and team design to hold both modes at once

Why organisations work with David Marquet The framework comes from an operational turnaround inside a high-consequence command environment. The crew of a nuclear submarine cannot afford the kind of leadership failure a corporate team can absorb, and the system Marquet built was tested against that standard. Intent-Based Leadership replaces the request for permission with a statement of intent, which is a specific behavioural change a leadership team can implement on Monday morning. It is a working method, not a philosophy. “Turn the Ship Around!” became a reference text inside US Navy submarine command, technology firms, manufacturers and healthcare systems. Adoption across that range of industries is rare for a leadership book. “Leadership is Language” gives senior leaders specific verbal moves to dismantle the industrial-age meeting culture that still produces compliant teams and over-burdened decision-makers. Stephen R. Covey studied Santa Fe directly and called it the most empowering organisation he had encountered. The endorsement carries weight because Covey rarely attached his name to operational case studies of this kind. Biography highlights Commanded USS Santa Fe (SSN-763) from 1999 to 2001, taking it from the lowest-rated submarine in the fleet to the highest in retention and operational evaluations. 1981 graduate of the US Naval Academy, top of class; 28 years of service in the US submarine force. Author of “Turn the Ship Around!” (Penguin Portfolio, 2013), foreword by Stephen R. Covey, called by Fortune “the best how-to manual anywhere for managers on delegating, training, and driving flawless execution.” Author of “Leadership is Language” (Penguin Portfolio, 2020), setting out six leadership plays for dismantling industrial-age meeting culture. Founder of Intent-Based Leadership International, the consulting firm operationalising the framework inside corporate, healthcare and government organisations. Named to Inc. Magazine’s Top 100 Leadership Speakers. Biography The USS Santa Fe was the lowest-rated nuclear submarine in the US fleet when David Marquet took command in 1999. Within two years it had the highest retention and operational evaluations in the force. Over the following decade, a disproportionate number of its officers were selected for submarine command of their own. The shift began with a single moment. Marquet gave an order that could not be executed on his class of submarine, and the watch officer relayed it anyway. When asked why, the answer was: because you told me to. Marquet stopped giving orders. He built a system in which crew members stated intent (“I intend to surface the boat at 0300”) and the officer’s job was to certify competence and clarity, not to authorise the decision. He calls this Intent-Based Leadership. It is now used inside manufacturers, healthcare systems, technology companies, professional sports teams and government agencies that face the same structural problem: decision-makers too far from the information, and a workforce trained to wait for instruction. Stephen R. Covey spent time aboard Santa Fe and wrote about it in “The 8th Habit”, calling it the most empowering organisation he had observed. His second book, “Leadership is Language”, extends the framework into the meeting room. Marquet argues that industrial-age verbal habits (“Does anyone have any concerns?”, “Sounds good to me”) manufacture compliance and silence dissent at the moment leaders need it most. The six plays in the book give senior teams specific replacement language, tested in environments where the cost of an unchallenged bad decision is operational rather than theoretical. Key speaking topics Intent-Based Leadership Distributed decision-making in high-consequence environments Leadership language and meeting design Psychological safety and high-reliability teams Cultural transformation in command-and-control organisations Leader development and succession at scale Ideal for CEOs and senior operating leaders rebuilding decision rights after a period of centralisation COOs and operations leaders in regulated or high-consequence industries (energy, healthcare, defence, manufacturing) CHROs and chief learning officers designing leadership development programmes that change behaviour, not vocabulary Boards and executive teams reviewing why their organisation is slow to act on information the workforce already has Audience outcomes A working language for replacing requests for permission with statements of intent, usable inside the next leadership meeting. A diagnostic for where in the organisation control, competence and clarity are out of balance. The six plays from “Leadership is Language” as a structured alternative to industrial-age meeting habits. A clearer view of which decisions a senior leader should still own, and which have been hoarded by default. Evidence, drawn from a documented operational turnaround, that distributed authority improves performance under pressure rather than weakening it.

Why organisations work with Nadine Chammas A working background in theatre direction, stage performance and hypnotherapy, applied to the workplace behaviours that leadership programmes usually skip: voice, presence, composure on the floor. Creator of the trademarked TLD Method, delivered as a book, certified course and retreat, which gives clients a defined system rather than a one-off keynote. Two decades operating across the GCC, with audiences in Arabic and English, and a track record of running corporate sessions on emotional intelligence, conflict resolution and executive presence. Author of The Stage is Yours, an Amazon bestseller that frames professional and personal communication through a theatre-director lens. A profile that travels in regional media: weekly counselling sessions on Al Arabiya, and a music output that gives her unusual cultural reach for a corporate trainer. Biography highlights Founder of The Life Director consultancy and creator of the TLD Method, delivered through book, certification course and retreat. BA in Fine Arts and Theatre Studies, Lebanese University. Master Practitioner of NLP and Timeline Therapy; certified by the American Board of Hypnotherapy; certified stage hypnotist trained in Las Vegas. Founded Scenez Group Production Company (Dubai, 2000) and Scenez Drama and Arts Academy. Author of The Stage is Yours (Amazon bestseller); subsequent title The Life Director: Presence over Performance. Weekly counselling segments on Al Arabiya; 11 released songs, with two pandemic-era Arabic releases passing 1.2 million YouTube views combined. Biography Presence is a workplace skill, and most professionals are never taught it. Senior leaders are expected to hold a room, settle a difficult conversation, and stay composed under scrutiny, but the training they receive treats those behaviours as personality, not craft. Theatre treats them as craft, and that is where Nadine Chammas comes from. Trained at Lebanese University in Fine Arts and Theatre Studies, she built her early career in Dubai through Scenez Group Production Company and Scenez Drama and Arts Academy, running productions across the region and teaching performance to children and adults. Alongside the theatre work she trained as a Master Practitioner of NLP and Timeline Therapy, completed certification with the American Board of Hypnotherapy, and qualified as a stage hypnotist in Las Vegas. The combination is unusual: stagecraft and behavioural method, applied to how people show up at work. The Life Director is the consultancy that consolidates that work. Her TLD Method is delivered as a book, a certified practitioner course and a retreat, and is positioned for individuals, corporate audiences and educational institutions. The corporate framing is direct: communication and leadership, emotional intelligence and resilience, conflict resolution and team behaviour, executive presence, decision-making under pressure. The Stage is Yours, her Amazon bestseller, sets out the underlying argument that a working life can be approached the same way a director approaches a production. She operates across the GCC and the US, in Arabic and English, with regional media reach through weekly Al Arabiya counselling segments and a music career that runs in parallel to the corporate work. The composite makes her suited to audiences where personal credibility, communication and cultural fluency are part of the brief, not separate from it. Key speaking topics Executive presence and personal branding Communication and influence Emotional intelligence and resilience Conflict resolution and team behaviour Storytelling for leaders Women in leadership Workplace culture and engagement Ideal for HR and L&D leaders commissioning communication, presence and behavioural skills programmes. Corporate audiences across the GCC where Arabic-English fluency and regional cultural read are part of the brief. Women’s leadership networks and conferences. Professional services and client-facing teams whose work depends on how they show up in the room. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for executive presence drawn from theatre and behavioural method, not personality traits. Specific techniques for voice, composure and physical presence under pressure. A clearer sense of how to use storytelling to make a message land with a corporate audience. An honest read on the behaviours that cost senior professionals credibility, and what to do about them.

Why organisations work with Sir Gareth Southgate His England management tenure is the subject of a published case study at Harvard Business School – one of the few occasions in sport where a coaching approach has been formally codified as an executive leadership model. He rebuilt a national team culture from a position of public failure and sustained performance across four consecutive major tournaments. That track record gives his thinking on culture change and sustained delivery a foundation most leadership authors lack. Dear England: Lessons in Leadership (Sunday Times instant bestseller, 2025) sets out the specific reasoning behind his decisions under pressure – on accountability, psychological safety, selection, and standing behind unpopular choices – in a form directly applicable to organisational leadership. He led through personal, very public failure – the Euro ’96 penalty miss that defined a decade of his public identity – and through two consecutive tournament final defeats. His account of resilience starts from having lived the worst-case scenario, not from having studied it. During intense national debates on race, identity, and protest, he articulated a values position publicly and held a diverse squad together through that pressure. Organisations navigating social or political tension inside teams get a practitioner account of what that demands in practice. Biography highlights England men’s senior manager 2016-2024; 102 matches, 61 wins – more major tournament games won than any other England manager in history Only the second England manager to reach a major tournament final, after Sir Alf Ramsey in 1966; reached consecutive European Championship finals in 2021 and 2024 Knighted in the King’s New Year Honours 2025; previously appointed OBE in 2019 Visiting lecturer at Harvard Business School; his England tenure is the subject of a published HBS leadership case study Author of Dear England: Lessons in Leadership (Cornerstone, 2025) – an instant Sunday Times bestseller; delivered the 2025 BBC Richard Dimbleby Lecture on BBC One, joining Bill Gates, Christine Lagarde, and the Prince of Wales as past speakers in the series Two-time BBC Sports Personality of the Year Coach Award (2018 and 2021); playing career spanning over 500 appearances for Crystal Palace, Aston Villa, and Middlesbrough, with 57 England caps Biography When Gareth Southgate took charge of England in 2016, the national team had just been knocked out of the Euros by Iceland. Public confidence was at a low. Over eight years and four major tournaments, he rebuilt the team’s culture entirely. The result was consecutive European Championship finals and a record for the most major tournament games won by any England manager. His approach is now the subject of a case study taught at Harvard Business School. The method was deliberate cultural architecture rather than tactical adjustment. Southgate prioritised psychological safety, shared values, and a team identity that held under pressure. His open letter to England fans during COVID-19 inspired the award-winning West End play Dear England. It demonstrated how he treated transparency and personal vulnerability as leadership tools, not liabilities. Southgate delivered the 2025 BBC Richard Dimbleby Lecture on BBC One, joining Bill Gates, Christine Lagarde, and the Prince of Wales as previous speakers in the series. Dear England: Lessons in Leadership became an instant Sunday Times bestseller; the Guardian described it as articulating a moral vision that went beyond the reach of contemporary British politics. He was knighted in the King’s New Year Honours 2025 for services to association football. The fractured starting point, intense public accountability, and need to build individual and collective performance simultaneously – these are not challenges unique to sport. His insights are drawn from eight consecutive years at the sharp end of that problem, not from theory. Key speaking topics Leadership under sustained public scrutiny Culture transformation and team identity Values-based accountability Resilience and performance through failure Psychological safety and trust in high-stakes teams Inclusive leadership and diversity of thought Decision-making in high-pressure environments Ideal for Senior leadership teams and C-suite executives navigating cultural or strategic transformation CHROs and people leaders working on team culture, inclusion, and performance under pressure Board-level and executive leadership development programmes Organisations in high-scrutiny sectors – financial services, public institutions, large consumer-facing businesses – where leadership decisions carry public accountability Audience outcomes A concrete model for building values-led culture that outlasts individual results cycles First-hand perspective on decision-making under public pressure: how values, not tactics, determine outcomes over time Practical insight into what psychological safety looks like in a high-accountability, high-visibility environment A framework for holding team identity together through failure, scrutiny, and competing stakeholder demands An honest account of how personal and public setback can become the foundation of leadership credibility rather than a liability