Future of Work speakers

Why organisations work with Patrick Kramer Few European voices speak from inside the technology they describe. Kramer carries multiple working implants and has implanted chips publicly on stage, which gives boards a concrete reference point for a debate that usually stays theoretical. Founder and CEO of Digiwell, one of Europe’s most visible commercial biohacking platforms, and founding member of VivoKey Technologies alongside Amal Graafstra. That puts him at the operating end of subdermal identity, not on the commentary side. Twenty years in IT and consulting, including IBM, gives him fluency in enterprise digital transformation language. The cyborg material lands in vocabulary boards already use. Sustained press presence in WIRED, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and PCWorld on under-the-skin technology, which signals he can carry a serious conversation with both technical and general audiences. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Digiwell – Upgrading Humans, founded 2014, Hamburg. Founding member, VivoKey Technologies, a subdermal identity and authentication platform. Twenty-plus years in international IT and consulting, including IBM. TEDxBucharest speaker, “Super-humans: interconnected cyborgs.” Featured in WIRED, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Computerworld, PCWorld, and Red Bull Media. Professional member of the German Speakers Association and the Global Speakers Federation. Biography Most enterprise debates about human augmentation never leave the slide deck. Patrick Kramer carries the technology under his skin and runs a company that fits it to other people. Through Digiwell, the Hamburg-based platform he founded in 2014, he has built one of Europe’s most visible commercial operations in subdermal NFC and RFID implants used for access, payment, identity, and medical data. The work sits at the edge of mainstream digital transformation, but it grew out of it. Twenty years in international IT and consulting, including a long period at IBM, gave him the enterprise vocabulary that most biohacking voices lack. As a founding member of VivoKey Technologies, the cryptographic identity platform launched with Amal Graafstra, he is also embedded in the engineering side of the field rather than only its public-facing narrative. His TEDxBucharest talk, “Super-humans: interconnected cyborgs,” set out the argument that has since been picked up by WIRED, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and PCWorld. Technology that started on the desk, then on the wrist, is now moving under the skin, and the implications for security, HR, healthcare, and product design are practical rather than speculative. For senior audiences, the value is in the translation. Kramer takes a category that boards tend to dismiss as fringe and connects it back to questions they already own: identity, authentication, employee health data, and the long arc of digital transformation as it stops being external to the human body. Key speaking topics Human augmentation and biohacking Subdermal identity and authentication Digital transformation and the Internet of Things Future of human-machine integration Longevity and performance enhancement Smart cities and connected environments Ethics of under-the-skin technology Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting digital identity, security, and authentication strategy CIOs, CTOs, and CDOs running enterprise digital transformation programmes HR and benefits leaders evaluating health, wellbeing, and workforce technology Innovation, R&D, and product teams in healthcare, financial services, and consumer technology Audience outcomes A working mental model for where biohacking and human augmentation fit inside an enterprise digital transformation roadmap A concrete view of subdermal identity and what it changes for authentication, payments, and access control Sharper vocabulary for the ethical, legal, and HR questions that arise when technology moves from the device to the body Specific examples from Digiwell and VivoKey of what is already operational, separated from what is still speculative

Why organisations work with Paul Redmond He brings a five-generation diagnostic, not a Millennials-versus-Boomers cliche, that gives HR and commercial leaders a working language for friction they can already feel. His employability research, built across senior roles at the University of Liverpool, lets him speak credibly to graduate-recruitment, early-careers, and talent-pipeline audiences other generational speakers cannot. His Zombie Jobs thesis, anchored in his 2019 TED Talk and 2024 Trotman book on the AI age, gives leadership audiences a sharp, named frame for which roles AI hollows out and which it does not. He moves comfortably between commercial keynotes and broadcast work, including BBC and ITV current affairs, which translates into a polished platform presence for high-stakes events. Biography highlights Director of Student Experience and Enhancement, University of Liverpool, with continuing lecturing responsibilities. Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (2010), awarded for writing and research. Author of The Graduate Jobs Formula, Talking about my Generation, A Parent’s Guide to Graduate Jobs, and The Graduate’s Guide to Future-Proofing Your Career (Trotman, 2024). TED speaker: Zombie Careers: Will You Lose Your Job to AI? (2019). Regular contributor to BBC and ITV current affairs; collaborator on the BBC and Tiger Aspect documentary Who Gets the Best Jobs? Speaks across financial services, technology, healthcare, and travel, with named clients including Google, Hargreaves Lansdown, Janus Henderson, Royal London, the NHS, and ABTA. Biography Five working generations now sit inside the same organisation. Each one learned to work under a different economy, a different communication norm, and a different settlement with the employer. The friction this produces shows up in engagement scores, retention numbers, and customer outcomes. Redmond’s work names that friction and gives leaders a way to act on it. His vantage is unusual. As Director of Student Experience and Enhancement at the University of Liverpool, he has spent years inside the machinery that produces the next generation of the workforce, and in continuous research conversation with the employers buying that talent. That has made his commentary on Gen Z and the post-Covid graduate market a regular fixture on BBC and ITV current affairs, and a reference point for HR and early-careers teams across UK plc. The future-of-work strand runs alongside it. His TED Talk Zombie Careers, published in 2019, set out the roles most exposed to AI and robotics, and the cognitive and human skills that survive automation. The Graduate’s Guide to Future-Proofing Your Career, published by Trotman in 2024, extends that argument into a working guide for the AI age. The thesis lands because it is grounded in named research, not in tech-keynote futurism. His books include The Graduate Jobs Formula, Talking about my Generation, A Parent’s Guide to Graduate Jobs, and Making it Happen. In 2010 he was awarded a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts for his writing and research. Key speaking topics The multigenerational workplace Gen Z and the post-Covid workforce The future of work and AI exposure Graduate recruitment and early-careers strategy Selling and marketing across generations Wellbeing and the staff-customer link Employability and career resilience Ideal for CHROs, heads of talent, and early-careers leads designing pipelines around Gen Z and a five-generation workforce. Commercial and marketing leaders building proposition and channel strategy across generational customer segments. Executive teams stress-testing which roles AI will hollow out and which human capabilities to invest in. Boards and leadership conferences in financial services, technology, healthcare, and professional services. Audience outcomes A working language for the five generations now in the workforce and the specific friction points each pair produces. A named view of which roles are most exposed to AI and robotics, and which capabilities buyers and employers should be investing in. Practical engagement and retention moves calibrated to Gen Z and post-Covid graduate expectations. A sharper read on how generational difference shows up on the customer side, in buying behaviour and channel preference.

Why organisations work with Peter Siljerud Engineering training combined with twenty years in trend analysis and futures work. His AI commentary runs deeper than headline level into how machine learning and neural networks behave, and what that means for deployment risk. Author of AI för offentlig sektor (Liber, 2023, foreword by Professor Fredrik Heintz of Linköping University), with case studies of Bolagsverket, Riksarkivet, and Hallands sjukhus. One of the few futurists with substantive applied work on public-sector AI. Co-author of Supertrends (ProSales Institute, English edition 2020), a framework of fifty structural shifts in commercial strategy. The book is built for sales and marketing leaders running real planning cycles. Long-running client work with Nordea, ICA, the Church of Sweden, LRF, SPP, and Teracom. The LRF programme reached 12,000 people across a two-year external-analysis curriculum. Biography highlights CEO and founder of Futurewise, a Stockholm-based trend research firm operating since 2008 Author of four books: 100 trender (2011), Bryt normerna (2015), Supertrenderna (2018), and AI för offentlig sektor (Liber, 2023) Two books nominated for Marketing Book of the Year by Sveriges Marknadsförbund (Swedish Marketing Federation) Named one of Sweden’s most creative people by media group IDG in 2012 Former future strategist at Kairos Future and world analyst at Intel Clients include Nordea, ICA, the Church of Sweden, LRF, SPP, and Teracom Biography Sweden’s public-sector AI investment sits at around three percent of national AI spending. The figure is small enough to embarrass policymakers and large enough to matter. Peter Siljerud’s 2023 book AI för offentlig sektor (Liber, foreword by Professor Fredrik Heintz of Linköping University) is the practical response: case studies of Bolagsverket, Riksarkivet, and Hallands sjukhus, written for the leadership teams making the actual deployment decisions. That instinct, work backwards from organisational reality, has shaped twenty years of his practice. He trained as a civil engineer before moving into futures work as a strategist at Kairos Future and a world analyst at Intel. Futurewise, the firm he founded in 2008, helps leadership teams turn external-analysis signals into specific budget and capability calls. The earlier books trace the same arc. 100 trender (2011) was nominated for Sweden’s Marketing Book of the Year and mapped structural shifts hitting Swedish business. Bryt normerna (2015) attacked the assumption that the working day and the employment contract are settled categories. Supertrenderna (2018), co-authored with Henrik Larsson-Broman and Markus Ejenäs of the ProSales Institute, distilled fifty shifts in commercial strategy into operating advice for sales and marketing leaders. What separates him from the broader futurist circuit is the engineering instinct. The talks press past signal identification into what the audience should do next quarter. AI is treated as a specific technology with specific behavioural patterns that leadership teams need to understand at working level. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and generative AI Strategic foresight and trend analysis Future of work Future of sales and marketing AI in the public sector Consumer behaviour and retail trends Ideal for C-suite and senior leadership teams in Nordic and European businesses making AI investment decisions Public-sector leadership in regions, municipalities, and central agencies working out where AI investment pays back Heads of marketing, sales, and customer experience facing structural change in how customers buy Boards and executive committees in mature industries (real estate, retail, financial services) where trend response is overdue Audience outcomes A clear-eyed view of AI development that goes past press-cycle headlines A short list of trends worth genuine board attention this cycle, separated from the noise Specific case studies from Nordic public and private sector AI deployments, including Bolagsverket and Hallands sjukhus A method for translating external signals into capital and capability decisions Ideas they can put into a board paper inside a fortnight

Why organisations work with Peter Vogel He holds the Debiopharm Chair for Family Philanthropy at IMD, one of the only dedicated academic chairs in Europe focused on how wealthy families turn giving into strategy rather than reputation management. His two reference books, Family Philanthropy Navigator and Family Office Navigator, function as operating manuals for principals and advisors, and the philanthropy title won the Axiom Business Book Awards silver medal. He directs the IMD Global Family Business Center, which gives him a live view across hundreds of enterprising families and their governance, succession, and investment decisions. He is also an operator: founder and non-executive Chairman of Delta Venture Partners, which means founder and family-office audiences hear practitioner judgement, not only academic frameworks. Family Capital ranked him among the Top 100 Family Influencers globally, and Poets&Quants named him to its Best 40 Under 40 business school professors list. Biography highlights Professor of Family Business and Entrepreneurship, IMD Business School, Lausanne. Debiopharm Chair for Family Philanthropy and Director, IMD Global Family Business Center. Co-author of Family Philanthropy Navigator (Axiom Business Book Awards Silver Medal) and Family Office Navigator. Author of Generation Jobless? (Palgrave Macmillan) on the youth employment crisis. Founder and non-executive Chairman, Delta Venture Partners AG; Associate Partner, Cambridge Family Enterprise Group. Inducted into the Family Business Hall of Fame (2024); Poets&Quants Best 40 Under 40 business school professors (2022). Biography Most family businesses do not survive the second generation, and most family offices are built reactively, after a liquidity event, with little design behind them. The work that decides whether enterprising families compound capital or destroy it happens in governance, succession, and philanthropy, areas treated as private until they go wrong in public. Peter Vogel’s research and teaching at IMD sit precisely there. At IMD Business School in Lausanne, he holds the Debiopharm Chair for Family Philanthropy and directs the Global Family Business Center, which works with principals, next-generation owners, and their advisors across continents. The chair, funded by the Debiopharm Group, is one of very few dedicated academic posts in Europe focused on how families convert wealth into strategic giving rather than reputational signalling. His two reference books, Family Philanthropy Navigator and Family Office Navigator, are used by family principals and their advisors as practical operating guides. The philanthropy title won the Axiom Business Book Awards silver medal. Before the family-enterprise work, he wrote Generation Jobless? (Palgrave Macmillan), a global analysis of youth unemployment built on interviews with policymakers, employers, and young entrepreneurs. He is also a practitioner. He founded and chairs Delta Venture Partners, an early-stage investment firm, and is an Associate Partner of the Cambridge Family Enterprise Group. Family Capital has named him to its Top 100 Family Influencers list; Poets&Quants placed him among its Best 40 Under 40 business school professors; and in 2024 he was inducted into the Family Business Hall of Fame. Key speaking topics Family business governance and succession Family office design and operating models Strategic philanthropy for enterprising families Next-generation ownership and leadership Entrepreneurship inside family enterprises Multi-generational wealth and capital allocation Ideal for Principals and next-generation members of family-owned businesses and family offices Advisors to enterprising families: private banks, wealth managers, multi-family offices, legal and tax counsel Boards of family-controlled companies considering succession, governance reform, or philanthropic strategy Foundation trustees and philanthropy leaders inside enterprising families Audience outcomes A clearer view of what separates family enterprises that survive transitions from those that fragment A vocabulary for the three connected systems in an enterprising family: the operating business, the family office, and the philanthropy Practical reference points for governance design, ownership succession, and next-generation engagement A sharper sense of where philanthropy belongs in family strategy and where it does not

Why organisations work with Petra Velzeboer A clinical practitioner, not a wellbeing personality. She holds an MSc in Psychodynamics of Human Development from Birkbeck and works as a qualified psychotherapist, which gives her recommendations weight with sceptical executive audiences. She runs the consultancy she speaks from. PVL serves named corporate clients including PwC, Novartis, Accenture, Herbert Smith Freehills, Monzo, and Channel 4, so the case material in the room is current, not anecdotal. A first-person account of recovery from a high-control religious group and addiction, used to draw direct, uncomfortable parallels with corporate cultures that suppress dissent. This is the argument of her book Begin With You, published by Kogan Page. Comfortable across formats. Keynote, masterclass, panel chair, and leadership programme design, which suits clients building a multi-touch internal wellbeing strategy rather than a one-off event. Her TEDx talks and the Adversity to Advantage podcast give organisations a recognisable external voice to anchor internal campaigns around. Biography highlights CEO and founder of PVL, a mental health consultancy working with large employers including PwC, Novartis, Accenture, Herbert Smith Freehills, Monzo, and Channel 4. Author of Begin With You: Invest in Your Mental Wellbeing and Satisfaction at Work (Kogan Page). Finalist, 2024 International Book Awards (Business: Motivational), and finalist, Goody Business Book Award 2024 (Self-Help: Personal Transformation). TEDx speaker. Talks include “Three Ways to Live the Life You Want” and “Reframing Diagnosis and the Road to Recovery.” Qualified psychotherapist with an MSc in Psychodynamics of Human Development, Birkbeck, University of London. Host of the podcast Adversity to Advantage. Biography Most corporate wellbeing programmes are organised around the wrong question. They ask how to support people who are already exhausted, when the harder question is what in the operating culture is exhausting them. Petra Velzeboer built PVL around that distinction. The consultancy works with large employers, including PwC, Novartis, Accenture, Herbert Smith Freehills, Monzo, and Channel 4, advising on the cultural conditions that determine whether a wellbeing strategy lands or quietly fails. Her credibility rests on two unusual lines at once. She is a qualified psychotherapist with an MSc in Psychodynamics of Human Development from Birkbeck, University of London, which keeps the clinical content honest. She also lived through a recovery story that gives her an unusual angle on organisational culture, having grown up inside the Children of God, a high-control religious group, and worked her way back through addiction and depression. Her book Begin With You: Invest in Your Mental Wellbeing and Satisfaction at Work was published by Kogan Page and was a finalist for the 2024 International Book Awards in Business: Motivational. The argument she makes to senior teams is direct. Cultures that punish dissent, reward overwork, and treat vulnerability as weakness produce predictable mental health outcomes, and no amount of mindfulness app subscription will offset them. Her TEDx talks and the Adversity to Advantage podcast extend that case to a wider audience, which is useful when an internal programme needs an external anchor. She is most useful inside boards, executive offsites, and leadership cohorts where the wellbeing conversation has stalled at the level of perks and posters. Her work pushes it back to the design choices that leaders actually control: how teams are structured, how performance is measured, and what behaviour the culture quietly rewards. Key speaking topics Workplace mental health strategy Organisational culture and toxic behaviours Resilience and recovery from adversity Leadership and vulnerability Burnout prevention Future of work and employee wellbeing Digital wellbeing and focus Ideal for CHROs, Chief People Officers, and heads of wellbeing are redesigning a stalled mental health programme. Executive teams and boards are examining the cultural drivers of attrition and burnout. Leadership development cohorts are being trained to manage hybrid, high-pressure, change-fatigued teams. Internal Mental Health Awareness Week, ERG, or culture-change events that need a credible external voice. Audience outcomes A clearer view of which cultural behaviours, not which benefits, drive mental health outcomes inside their own organisation. Practical language for talking about mental health at work without slipping into either clinical jargon or corporate platitude. A reframing of resilience as an organisational design problem, not a personal deficiency. Specific prompts leaders can use with their teams the following week, drawn from clinical practice and Velzeboer’s consulting work.

Why organisations work with Philipp Kristian He treats trust as an operating variable in digital and AI transformation, not a soft cultural theme, and equips leaders with language to discuss it at board level. His thesis predates the current AI debate. The Trust Economy was published in 2017 and has since been translated into German by Springer Gabler, giving his framework a longer track record than most current AI-trust voices. He brings an Asia-anchored view of technology adoption, drawing on a decade of work with Fortune 500s in Singapore and across JAPAC, which most Western-based speakers in this space cannot offer. He has lectured inside INSEAD Executive Education, CEDEP, Singapore Management University, and Civil Service College Singapore, so executive audiences encounter material that has been pressure-tested with senior cohorts. Biography highlights Author of The Trust Economy (Marshall Cavendish, 2017) and RESET: Rethinking Our World And Creating A Different Future (World Scientific, 2021). German edition of The Trust Economy published by Springer Gabler in 2018. Faculty and lecturer engagements at INSEAD Executive Education, CEDEP, Singapore Management University, and Civil Service College Singapore. World Economic Forum Global Shaper, Kairos Society Fellow, and Leader of Tomorrow at the St Gallen Symposium. TEDx speaker, with keynote audiences including Meta, BCG, EY, Munich Re, Standard Chartered, Salesforce, LVMH, Microsoft, Deloitte, P&G, and Zillow. Based in Singapore, with a decade of innovation work across Asia for Fortune 500 corporations and high-growth scale-ups. Biography Trust is the part of digital transformation that the engineering plan does not solve. AI rollouts stall, data products fail to land, and customer adoption flattens for reasons that sit outside the technology stack. Philipp Kristian has spent more than a decade arguing that this is the real bottleneck, and that organisations need a strategy for it. His 2017 book The Trust Economy, published by Marshall Cavendish and later translated into German by Springer Gabler, set out an early framework for how digital businesses earn and lose trust at scale. RESET, published by World Scientific in 2021, extends the argument into the post-pandemic shift in how people relate to institutions, technology, and each other. The work has been refined inside executive classrooms. He has held faculty and lecturer engagements at INSEAD Executive Education, CEDEP, Singapore Management University, and the Civil Service College in Singapore, where the material is taught to senior public and private sector cohorts. The World Economic Forum named him a Global Shaper; the Kairos Society named him a Fellow; the St Gallen Symposium named him a Leader of Tomorrow. Based in Singapore, he brings a non-Western reading of how trust travels through markets, regulators, and customer bases that most boards no longer treat as peripheral. Keynote audiences include Meta, BCG, EY, Munich Re, Standard Chartered, Salesforce, LVMH, Microsoft, Deloitte, and Zillow. Key speaking topics Trust in AI and data systems Digital transformation and adoption Customer experience in digital businesses Future of work and human-technology collaboration Leadership in the digital economy Brand trust and reputation under technological change Ideal for Boards and executive committees overseeing AI, data, and digital transformation programmes CIO, CTO, CDO, and Chief Trust Officer functions working through adoption and governance questions CMO and customer experience leaders rebuilding brand credibility in digital channels Financial services, professional services, and regulated industries facing trust and reputation pressure from AI deployment Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for discussing trust as an operating asset in digital and AI strategy at board level A reading of why AI and data initiatives lose momentum at the adoption stage, with the levers leaders can use to keep them moving An Asia-anchored perspective on how trust is built and broken across regulators, customers, and employees in fast-digitising markets Specific examples drawn from a decade of innovation work with Fortune 500 corporations and scale-ups in Singapore and across JAPAC

Why organisations work with Piers Linney He is running an AI-agent business while he speaks about one. Implement AI has rolled out managed digital workforces inside more than 120 UK companies, so the deployment patterns he describes are ones he is shipping. His finance and policy lens is unusual for an AI speaker. Former Non-Executive Director of the British Business Bank during the GBP 90 billion Covid loan programmes, with prior careers in M&A at Credit Suisse and venture capital. He has been on both sides of the cap table. Co-CEO of Outsourcery through AIM listing and administration, then Dragon on BBC Two’s Dragons’ Den, then investor and co-founder again. He is a credible voice on diversity and social mobility without using the word as a slogan. MBE 2026, European Diversity Champion 2024, founding trustee of the Powerlist Foundation. He works on stage in the register a senior buyer needs: operator, not analyst. Mainstage keynotes at Tech Show London, AI and Big Data World, DTX, ICAEW and Elite Business Live. Biography highlights Co-founder and Executive Chairman, Implement AI, winner of AI Startup of the Year (London), UK Startup Awards 2025. Investor on BBC Two’s Dragons’ Den, series 11 and 12, and subject of Channel 4’s The Secret Millionaire. Former Non-Executive Director, British Business Bank, appointed 2017. MBE, King’s New Year Honours 2026, for services to small business, entrepreneurship, banking, diversity and social mobility. Chairman and co-founder, Atherton Bikes, additive-manufactured mountain bikes used to win the 2023 UCI Downhill World Championships. Former Co-CEO of Outsourcery (AIM-listed cloud and communications business) and former Trustee of Nesta. Biography Implement AI now runs managed digital workforces inside more than 120 UK businesses, from manufacturers to marketing agencies. It is the latest company built by Piers Linney, who co-founded it in 2023 with Dr Aalok Shukla and serves as Executive Chairman. The work sits at the practical edge of the AI conversation: not whether to use it, but how to get agents into the operating model and measure what they return. That operator stance is reinforced by an unusually wide finance and policy track record. Linney trained as a solicitor at SJ Berwin, moved into M&A investment banking at Credit Suisse, then ran the buyout that became Outsourcery, taking the cloud and communications business onto AIM in 2013 in a GBP 13 million flotation. He was later appointed Non-Executive Director of the British Business Bank, where he sat through the design of the UK government’s Covid SME loan programmes. Audiences know him from Dragons’ Den, where he invested as a Dragon for series 11 and 12, and from Channel 4’s The Secret Millionaire. He chairs Atherton Bikes, the additive-manufactured mountain bike maker whose frames carried Atherton siblings to UCI Downhill World Championship titles in 2023. He sits on Sky’s Diversity Advisory Council and was a founding trustee of the Powerlist Foundation. The MBE in the 2026 New Year Honours captured the through-line: small business, entrepreneurship, banking, diversity and social mobility. For boards trying to convert AI ambition into deployed capability, the value he brings is the rare combination of someone who has built and sold a tech business, sat on the board of a development bank, picked winners on national television, and is now shipping an AI-agent platform. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and the digital workforce AI agent deployment and operating model redesign Entrepreneurship and scaling technology businesses Future of work and workforce transformation Access to capital and SME financing Diversity, social mobility and inclusion in business Ideal for Boards and executive committees moving from AI pilots to deployed agent capability. CEOs, COOs and transformation leads redesigning operations around digital workers. Entrepreneur and scale-up audiences, including investor networks and chamber of commerce events. CHROs and learning leaders preparing workforces for AI-augmented roles. Audience outcomes A working picture of what an AI-agent operating model looks like, with concrete examples from live deployments. Sharper questions for vendors, internal teams and investors about where AI does and does not pay back. A perspective on the capital environment shaping technology investment, drawn from a former development-bank director. Confidence in framing AI as an operating decision, not an IT project.

Why organisations work with Polly LaBarre She co-built, with Gary Hamel, the most concrete body of practice on post-bureaucratic management, drawing on case studies from named companies rather than abstract principles. She wrote the bestselling field guide to original organisations, Mavericks at Work, and has spent two decades adding to that evidence base through Fast Company and HBR. She brings a working operator’s view on what actually frees creative capacity inside large firms, sharpened through running the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize and the MIX Mashup. She lands as a journalist first, which means specific stories about specific companies, not slide-deck frameworks recycled from other speakers in the same topic area. Biography highlights Co-author, Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win, named a Book of the Year by The Economist Co-founder, Management Lab, with Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini Co-founder and editorial director, MIX (Management Innovation eXchange), partnered with HBR and Fortune Founding member and senior editor, Fast Company magazine, for eight years Business and innovation correspondent, CNN, with recurring on-air segments on American Morning and Your Money Contributor to Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune and McKinsey Quarterly Biography Most companies were engineered for a world that no longer exists. They reward consistency, suppress dissent and treat management as a control function. That mismatch, between how organisations are built and what they now need to do, is the problem Polly LaBarre has been studying, writing about and trying to fix for more than two decades. She was a senior editor and founding team member at Fast Company, the magazine that reframed how a generation of leaders thought about work. With William C. Taylor she wrote Mavericks at Work, a New York Times bestseller that The Economist called a Book of the Year and put alongside In Search of Excellence. The book set out, through detailed company case studies, what it actually takes to compete with originality at scale. That work led directly into the Management Lab, which she co-founded with Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, and into the MIX (Management Innovation eXchange), the open platform partnered with Harvard Business Review and Fortune and backed by McKinsey, Red Hat and Gartner. Through the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize and the MIX Mashup, she has spent the past decade pulling together a working catalogue of progressive management practice from companies inside the Fortune 500 and well beyond it. Her background as a journalist shows in how she works on stage. She speaks in named cases, names sources and concrete mechanisms, and her writing in HBR, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and McKinsey Quarterly is the basis for most of what she puts in front of an audience. CNN used her as a business and innovation correspondent for exactly that reason. Key speaking topics Post-bureaucratic management and organisational redesign Resilience and adaptability in large organisations Innovation as a managed discipline Corporate culture and the human edge Talent, autonomy and the future of work Leadership for purpose-driven change Ideal for CEOs, COOs and executive teams confronting the limits of their current operating model CHROs and chief people officers redesigning work and culture for a more capable workforce Heads of innovation, transformation and strategy looking for evidence rather than slogans Boards and leadership offsites wanting a sharp, journalist’s read on what original organisations actually do differently Audience outcomes A clear-eyed picture of why traditional management practices are now a constraint on competitiveness Concrete examples, drawn from named companies, of how organisations have rebuilt for adaptability A working vocabulary for diagnosing where their own management model is leaking energy and initiative A sharper sense of what to change first when the goal is more resilience and originality, not more control

Why organisations work with Rachel Botsman She has built a discrete intellectual territory around trust, with three named frameworks (Trust Leap, Trust Shift, Risk–Trust Lens) that give leadership teams a working vocabulary rather than a motivational concept. She holds the first Trust Fellowship at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, a position created around the subject she defined. Few speakers in this category have a comparable academic anchor. Her thinking on AI is grounded in fifteen years of work on how humans transfer trust to new systems, which is why boards use her to pressure-test AI adoption plans before they reach the workforce. Thinkers50 ranked her among the world’s 30 most influential management thinkers and gave her the 2015 Breakthrough Idea Award, signalling that her ideas have been judged consequential by peers, not only by bureau marketing. She works directly with boards and senior executives as an advisor, so the keynote is the visible part of a deeper practice on culture and governance. Biography highlights Trust Fellow, Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, the first such fellowship at the school. Author of What’s Mine is Yours, Who Can You Trust? and How to Trust & Be Trusted; books translated into 14 languages. Three TED talks with more than 5 million combined views. Named one of the world’s 30 most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50; winner of the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award. Young Global Leader, World Economic Forum. Contributor to and subject of coverage in The New York Times, Financial Times, TIME, Wired, The Guardian and Fast Company; writer of the Rethink newsletter. Biography Most leadership crises are described as strategy problems and turn out to be trust problems. A workforce that has been through three restructures will not run faster because the new operating model is sharper. A board that has lost confidence in a CEO will not be rebuilt by a clearer plan. The active variable is whether people believe enough in the institution, the leadership, and each other to take risks on its behalf. Rachel Botsman has spent two decades turning that observation into a working discipline. As the first Trust Fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, she designed and teaches courses on trust and technology, and advises boards, senior leaders and governments on the same questions in live operating contexts. Her books, including Who Can You Trust? and How to Trust & Be Trusted, redefine trust as a confident relationship with the unknown rather than a synonym for assurance or predictability. Her named frameworks give that idea operational form. The Trust Leap explains how people move from familiar to unfamiliar behaviour, which is why it has been useful for organisations deploying AI and automating workflows. The Trust Shift maps how authority has migrated from institutions to individuals and platforms. The Risk–Trust Lens gives senior leaders a way to read where their cultures sit on the spectrum between paralysis and recklessness. Thinkers50 has ranked her among the 30 most influential management thinkers in the world and gave her its Breakthrough Idea Award. The World Economic Forum named her a Young Global Leader. Her three TED talks have been watched more than five million times. The reason her work has carried that distance is that it gives leaders something specific to do on a subject that most speakers can only describe. Key speaking topics Trust as a leadership capability Trust and AI adoption Culture and decision-making under change The Trust Shift from institutions to individuals Designing for trust in new products and systems The future of work and the social contract Authority and accountability in modern organisations Ideal for CEOs, CHROs and chief people officers leading organisations through restructure, integration, or cultural reset. Boards and risk committees evaluating AI deployment, governance, and workforce trust. Transformation, technology and product leaders responsible for adoption of new systems by employees or customers. Executive education and senior leadership programmes building common language around trust, accountability and decision-making. Audience outcomes A working definition of trust that holds up to scrutiny inside a leadership team, not a motivational phrase. A read on where the organisation sits on the risk–trust spectrum and what that implies for current decisions. A clearer view of why specific change programmes, AI rollouts, or cultural initiatives are stalling, and where the trust gap actually lives. Specific language and frameworks (Trust Leap, Trust Shift, Risk–Trust Lens) that travel from the keynote into board and executive conversations. A sharper position on how authority, accountability, and AI intersect inside the organisation over the next two to three years.

Why organisations work with Rahaf Harfoush Her work is anthropological, not predictive. It is grounded in fieldwork, behavioural research, and fifteen years of watching what technology does to the people who use it. That matters when leadership teams have already absorbed every version of the AI hype cycle and want something more durable. Her positions on AI move with the research, because the research is hers. What she takes into a boardroom in 2026 is not what she said in 2024, and the next book she is writing on humane productivity in the age of AI is shaping her current thinking in real time. She works across the full institutional range. The same questions she takes into board conversations on AI strategy show up in her policy work at the UN, her research at Oxford and Cambridge, and her teaching at Sciences Po. That range means she can speak credibly to executives, regulators, and creative teams in the same week. The Decoded Company thesis; that organisations should apply the same analytical rigour to understanding their talent as they apply to understanding their customers, gives CHROs and people strategy teams a precise, data-grounded argument for workforce intelligence. She brings an active body of work. The Decoded Company was a New York Times bestseller, Hustle & Float set the structural argument on productivity and creative work, a fourth book on humane productivity in the age of AI is in progress, and her weekly newsletter and original research mean she arrives at every engagement with new material rather than a fixed deck. Biography highlights Executive Director, Red Thread Institute of Digital Culture; former Associate Director, Technology Pioneer Programme, World Economic Forum, Geneva Member, UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence; member, France’s National Digital Council; served on President Macron’s “Enlightenment in the Digital Age” commission on AI and democracy Visiting Policy Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute; Research Affiliate, Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, University of Cambridge Author of Hustle & Float (2019); co-author of The Decoded Company (New York Times and USA Today bestseller; 2015 Gold Axiom Award for Best Business Technology Book) Named to the Thinkers50 2025 ranking; shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Innovation Award (2021); writing featured in Harvard Business Review, Wired, Financial Times, and Fast Company Faculty at Sciences Po’s School of Management and Innovation, Paris, teaching “Innovation and Emerging Business Models” Biography For the past fifteen years, the same question has run through her work. What happens to human beings when the systems they work and live inside change faster than their ability to absorb the change? That question has taken her into the early Obama campaign, the World Economic Forum, the UN, the Oxford Internet Institute, and the boardrooms of some of the largest companies in the world. The pattern she keeps finding is the same. The technology gets the attention. The behavioural and cultural consequences get ignored until they show up as a problem no one can solve with another tool. Her first book, Yes We Did, documented the digital infrastructure behind the 2008 Obama campaign from inside the war room. Her second, The Decoded Company (co-authored, and a New York Times and USA Today bestseller), argued that organisations apply rigorous analytics to their customers and intuition to their people, and pay for that mismatch in every retention number. Her third, Hustle and Float, made the case that the conflict between productivity culture and creative work is older than any of the tools we blame for it, and cannot be solved by another wellness programme. Her current research focuses on AI’s impact on human cognition and learning. This is the territory where the most urgent questions are being asked, and where the gap between what the technology can do and what organisations actually need is widest. She is writing about it, teaching about it at Sciences Po, advising on it at the UN, and bringing what she finds onto the stage as it develops. She holds research affiliations with the Oxford Internet Institute and Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy. She served on President Macron’s “Enlightenment in the Digital Age” commission and on France’s National Digital Council. Her work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, Wired, the Financial Times, and Fast Company. She was named to the Thinkers50 2025 ranking and shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Innovation Award in 2021. Key speaking topics Digital culture and organisational behaviour Artificial intelligence governance and ethics The future of creative and knowledge work Human-centred AI strategy Innovation and emerging business models Leadership in technological disruption Data intelligence and talent strategy Ideal for C-suite leadership teams who want to think clearly about AI before committing to a strategy they will have to defend in eighteen months CHROs and people leaders facing the talent, learning, and creative-performance consequences of AI adoption Government, regulatory, and policy audiences working on AI governance and digital policy Innovation, foresight, and strategy functions in technology-intensive and creative industries Audience outcomes A working framework for understanding what AI is actually doing to the people in your organization, beyond productivity metrics Language for the cultural and cognitive shifts your leaders are already sensing but have not been able to name A clearer position on AI governance, grounded in research and lived policy experience at the UN and national level A sharper read on the gap between what your technology strategy assumes and what your people are experiencing

Why organisations work with Rashim Mogha Two decades inside the rooms where women’s leadership advancement is decided. Senior roles at Oracle, Amazon Web Services, VMware, Automation Anywhere, and Skillsoft, building teams that supported over $2 billion in business. Few speakers on this topic carry that operational depth. Her work is built on a published, repeatable framework. The #1 Amazon bestseller Fast-Track Your Leadership Career gives HR teams and emerging leaders a specific template covering sponsorship, brand-building, and the unwritten rules of internal promotion. She treats women’s leadership development as a pipeline and retention question, which lands with executives who are accountable for the actual numbers. That framing avoids the trap of positioning DEI as a values exercise sitting outside business outcomes. Her LinkedIn Learning courses have reached over 250,000 professionals globally. That scale gives her a working understanding of which leadership content actually shifts behaviour across geographies and seniority levels. The credentials are named and external. Woman of the Year at the Women in IT Awards Silicon Valley, Top 20 Thought Leader by Thinkers360, Top 100 DEI Leader by Mogul, and induction into the Alameda County Women’s Hall of Fame. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of eWOW (empowered Women of the World), launched in November 2018; podcast audiences in more than 50 countries Author of the #1 Amazon bestseller Fast-Track Your Leadership Career and its companion Guided Journal; reached #1 on Amazon within eleven hours of release LinkedIn Learning instructor with courses including Succeeding as a First-Time Tech Manager, Women Transforming Tech: Finding Sponsors, and Cloud Concepts: Determining Your Cloud Strategy; over 250,000 learners globally Senior leadership roles at Oracle, Amazon Web Services, VMware, Automation Anywhere, and Skillsoft, building teams supporting over $2 billion in business Forbes Business Council member; contributor to Forbes, Association for Talent Development (ATD), and Thrive Global Recognitions include Woman of the Year (Women in IT Awards Silicon Valley), Silicon Valley Woman of Influence, Top 20 Thought Leader (Thinkers360), Top 100 DEI Leader (Mogul), and induction into the Alameda County Women’s Hall of Fame Biography American women hold 52 percent of professional-level jobs. They hold roughly 20 percent of executive leadership positions in US high-tech industries. The gap between those numbers is what Rashim Mogha has worked inside for two decades, first at Oracle, AWS, and VMware, then as founder of eWOW. Her #1 Amazon bestseller Fast-Track Your Leadership Career codified what she learned inside those companies. It treats career advancement as an integrated strategy. Sponsorship and personal brand are framed as concrete corporate moves, drawn from her own promotion path. The book hit number one on Amazon within eleven hours of release. eWOW, which she founded in November 2018, scaled the method beyond a single book. Its podcast reaches audiences in more than fifty countries. Her LinkedIn Learning courses, including Succeeding as a First-Time Tech Manager and Women Transforming Tech: Finding Sponsors, have been taken by more than 250,000 professionals globally. Few speakers on women’s tech leadership combine that operational depth with that audience reach. Her credibility with executive audiences sits in the specifics. Woman of the Year at the Women in IT Awards Silicon Valley. Top 20 Thought Leader by Thinkers360. Forbes Business Council member. Inducted into the Alameda County Women’s Hall of Fame. For organisations focused on the leadership pipeline rather than the talking points, that combination of operational record and external recognition is rare. Key speaking topics Women’s leadership advancement in technology Sponsorship and career advancement strategy Diversity as a talent pipeline question Leadership development for technical professionals Mindful leadership Cloud strategy and digital transformation for business leaders Future of work and corporate learning at scale Ideal for CHROs and Chief People Officers responsible for stronger leadership pipelines for women in technology Heads of DEI and Talent looking to move beyond awareness toward measurable promotion outcomes Women’s networks and ERGs inside technology, financial services, and professional services organisations L&D and learning leaders designing executive development programmes for emerging women leaders Audience outcomes The distinction between mentorship and sponsorship, and the specific moves required to convert one into the other Practical language for asking for promotion and stretch assignments A diagnostic for what is actually stalling a woman’s advancement at her current level Two operational levers HR and senior leaders can pull to shift promotion outcomes inside the next twelve months

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