Hybrid & Remote Work

Why organisations work with Michael D. Levitt He brings both sides of the table: a senior finance and operations background overseeing budgets above USD 2 billion, plus formal CBT and NLP therapist credentials. Few burnout voices have both. His work is grounded in a documented personal collapse and recovery, the 369 days that produced his book of the same name. It gives executives permission to talk about pressure without performing resilience. He is recognised by Thinkers360 in the Top 100 Global Thought Leaders across Culture, HR, Management, Change Management, and Health and Wellness, with Top 20 standing on Culture. He writes regularly for CEOWORLD Magazine and Thrive Global, so the frameworks audiences hear on stage are road-tested in print with senior business readers. He frames burnout as an operating risk, not a wellbeing topic, which lands with CHROs, CFOs, and operators who need a business case before they fund a culture intervention. Biography highlights Founder and Chief Burnout Officer, Breakfast Leadership Network (San Diego and Toronto). Host, Breakfast Leadership Show, recognised by Thinkers360 as a Top 20 Global Thought Leadership podcast. Author of Burnout Proof, 369 Days: How To Survive A Year of Worst-Case Scenarios, and Pre-Emptive Strike Leadership. Opinion columnist at CEOWORLD Magazine; contributor at Thrive Global. Certified NLP and CBT therapist. Former CFO and CIO with budget responsibility across healthcare and corporate sectors exceeding USD 2 billion. Biography Burnout shows up on the P and L before it shows up in an engagement survey. It surfaces as turnover, missed targets, sick days, quiet quitting, and the slow disengagement of senior people who used to carry the room. Levitt’s work starts from that operating reality. His own story is the through-line. Across 369 days during the financial crisis he had a heart attack, lost his job, had his car repossessed, and lost his home. He wrote 369 Days about that period, and Burnout Proof about what he learned afterwards. Both books frame burnout as a cascade rather than a single event, which is how most leaders actually experience it. The credentials matter because they bracket the work. On one side, a finance and operations career as a CFO and CIO with oversight of budgets over USD 2 billion, including healthcare leadership roles. On the other, formal training as a CBT and NLP therapist. The Breakfast Leadership Network sits between those two, advising organisations on culture, retention, and burnout prevention. The recognition is consistent. Thinkers360 places him in the Top 100 Global Thought Leaders on Culture, HR, Management, Change Management, and Health and Wellness, with Top 20 status on Culture. He hosts the Breakfast Leadership Show, named a Top 20 Global Thought Leadership podcast, and writes regularly for CEOWORLD Magazine and Thrive Global on the same set of questions a buyer is wrestling with: how to keep people, how to spot the signals early, and how to build a workplace that does not quietly cost you your best operators. Key speaking topics Burnout prevention and recovery Workplace culture and retention Employee wellbeing as an operating discipline Boundaries and remote work performance Leadership under sustained pressure Talent retention and the cost of attrition Ideal for CHROs and people leaders looking to reduce voluntary attrition and stabilise culture during sustained change. CEOs and COOs who want a credible business framing of burnout rather than a wellness add-on. Healthcare, financial services, and professional services audiences where pressure is structural and the cost of senior departures is high. Leadership teams introducing or relaunching hybrid and remote operating models. Audience outcomes A clear read on the early operating signals of burnout, before they become resignations. Specific tactics for building boundaries into how teams work, not just how individuals cope. A retention argument senior leaders can take into a budget conversation. Permission and language for executives to discuss pressure honestly without it reading as weakness. A practical model for connecting culture, wellbeing, and performance in the same operating cadence.

Why organisations work with Gabriela Hersham Ten years of operating data on what actually draws people back into shared space, drawn from running Huckletree hubs across London, Manchester and Dublin rather than theory. A working view on curating communities by sector, including Web3, fintech, AI and govtech, tested inside the UK’s first Web3-themed co-working hub at Oxford Street. A concrete record of inclusive entrepreneurship practice through Fairer Funding Now and the Huckletree Alpha accelerator, running pro-bono for under-represented founders since 2017. A founder’s view on scaling a physical network to roughly 300,000 sq ft while holding cultural standards, useful for any leader reconciling real-estate spend with employee experience. Speaking experience that spans TEDx stages, industry podcasts and corporate conferences, with a style that senior audiences read as operator rather than consultant. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Huckletree, launched in 2014 and grown to eight hubs across London, Manchester and Dublin. Operates roughly 300,000 sq ft of curated workspace serving around 4,000 members across Web3, fintech, AI, govtech and sustainable innovation. Launched Huckletree Oxford Street, positioned as the UK’s first Web3 and metaverse-themed co-working hub. Founded Fairer Funding Now, a campaign for greater inclusivity in startup investment, and runs Huckletree Alpha, a pro-bono accelerator for under-represented founders since 2017. TEDx speaker on the Future of Work; named one of Tide Bank’s Top 20 female entrepreneurs to watch in 2020. Contributor bylines at The Next Web and Creative Review; interviewed by HuffPost Trailblazing Women, Culture Trip and the Propertyshe podcast. Biography Huckletree opened its first space in Clerkenwell in 2014 after Gabriela Hersham returned to London convinced the city was missing the community model she had seen take hold in New York. Ten years on, the business runs eight hubs across London, Manchester and Dublin, about 300,000 sq ft of space, and a membership base of roughly 4,000 founders and operators. What distinguishes the company from a generic flexible-office provider is the curation. Each hub is built around a sector thesis: Web3 and the metaverse at Oxford Street, fintech and AI elsewhere in the portfolio, with members recruited against that thesis rather than sold desks on a first-come basis. That choice turns the workspace into a distribution channel for deals, hires and partnerships, which is why corporate partners buy into specific hubs rather than generic square footage. Inclusive entrepreneurship sits alongside the commercial model rather than running as a side project. Fairer Funding Now campaigns for change in how capital reaches under-represented founders. Huckletree Alpha, the pro-bono accelerator running since 2017, is the practical counterpart, giving cohort members space, mentoring and access without taking equity. For corporate audiences the value is the operating detail behind those choices. A TEDx talk on the future of work, repeat podcast appearances on property and founder platforms, and contributor bylines at The Next Web and Creative Review have made Hersham a recognisable voice on what brings people back into shared space. The argument she makes to boards and HR leaders is concrete: offices only earn their cost when they are designed as communities with a specific purpose, and diversity in hiring and funding is part of how that purpose holds together. Key speaking topics Future of work and the hybrid workplace Workplace design and community curation Women in entrepreneurship Inclusive funding and diverse founder pipelines Scaling a founder-led business Web3, fintech and emerging-sector ecosystems Ideal for CHROs and people leaders rebuilding office strategy and employee experience Real-estate and workplace directors balancing cost with culture Corporate innovation and venture teams engaging with early-stage ecosystems Networks and events on women in business and diverse entrepreneurship Audience outcomes A sharper read on why employees return to some offices and avoid others, grounded in operating data from a curated network. Concrete examples of how sector-themed workplace communities produce commercial value rather than just reduce cost. A practical view on embedding inclusive funding and hiring practices into the way a company runs, not as a separate programme. An operator’s perspective on scaling a physical and cultural network without losing what made it work in the first place.

Why organisations work with Erica Dhawan She owns two named, published frameworks, Connectional Intelligence and Digital Body Language, each with its own book, research base, and Fortune 500 application record. Few collaboration speakers operate from a body of work this specific. Her Digital Body Language thesis gives leaders a vocabulary for what was previously a vague complaint about hybrid communication. Buyers describe it as the language their people had been missing. Thinkers50 recognition and a Wall Street Journal bestseller give her credibility with boards and executive committees that are sceptical of soft-skill keynotes. The work has been pressure-tested across unusually wide terrain: World Economic Forum, US Army, Coca-Cola, FedEx, Goldman Sachs, Walmart, Cisco. The frameworks travel across sector, hierarchy, and culture. Biography highlights Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance. Co-author of Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence with Saj-nicole Joni. Named to Thinkers50; shortlisted for the Thinkers50 RADAR award for emerging management thinkers. Founder and CEO of Cotential, advising global organisations on 21st-century collaboration. TED speaker; talk on connection across distance has surpassed 2 million views. Contributor to Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and the Wall Street Journal. Education: Wharton (BS), MIT Sloan (MBA), Harvard Kennedy School (MPA). Biography Most hybrid organisations are not short of communication. They are drowning in it. Slack threads, video calls, emoji reactions and read receipts now carry the signals that body language used to. Few leaders have a real method for reading them, and the cost shows up in slower decisions, weaker trust and quiet disengagement. Erica Dhawan built a framework for exactly that problem. Her book Digital Body Language, a Wall Street Journal bestseller, decodes the cues that replace tone, posture and eye contact when teams work across distance, generation and channel. It gives executives a working vocabulary for what until recently was a vague complaint about hybrid culture. Her earlier book with Saj-nicole Joni, Get Big Things Done, introduced the idea of Connectional Intelligence: the practical capability to combine networks, knowledge and ambition into outsized organisational outcomes. Both bodies of work share a single intellectual claim, that the way people connect is now the highest-leverage variable in performance. Thinkers50 has recognised her on this thesis, and her writing appears regularly in Harvard Business Review and Fast Company. The work has been stress-tested in unusually varied rooms. She has briefed the World Economic Forum, the US Army, and global teams at Coca-Cola, FedEx, Goldman Sachs, Walmart and Cisco. Her TED Talk on connection across distance has been watched more than two million times, an unusual reach for a topic that most speakers struggle to make concrete. Key speaking topics Digital body language and hybrid communication Connectional Intelligence and cross-silo collaboration High-performing teams in the age of AI Trust and engagement across distributed workforces Multigenerational and cross-cultural communication Leadership communication for hybrid organisations Sales and client communication across digital channels Ideal for CHROs and heads of culture redesigning hybrid operating models. Executive teams responsible for cross-functional or cross-geography collaboration. Sales leaders managing client relationships across digital and hybrid channels. Learning and leadership development heads building communication capability at scale. Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for the digital cues that drive trust and misunderstanding inside hybrid teams. Specific tools for cutting ambiguity from email, chat and video communication. A clearer read on where hybrid working is costing the organisation in speed, decision quality and engagement. Practical methods for building Connectional Intelligence across silos, generations and cultures. A sharper understanding of how AI tools change, but do not replace, the work of human collaboration.

Why organisations work with John Weeks He treats culture as a leadership problem, not an HR programme. The work focuses on what executives say and do in the room, not on values posters or engagement scores. His ethnographic training gives him a method most leadership speakers do not have. He reads organisations the way an anthropologist reads a community, then translates what he sees into specific behavioural choices senior leaders can make. He co-directs IMD’s High Performance Leadership programme, the institution’s flagship six-day senior leadership course, which means his material is tested every year against the questions actual CEOs and senior executives bring to Lausanne. His book Unpopular Culture, a study of why a British bank could not change despite years of trying, gives him a sharp argument about why most culture-change efforts fail and what a serious one looks like. He is fluent in the executive’s other reality, the board. Service on the LEO Pharma board means he speaks from inside the governance and accountability structures his audiences operate within. Biography highlights Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IMD Business School since 2007. Co-director of IMD’s High Performance Leadership programme, the school’s flagship senior leadership course. Author of Unpopular Culture: The Ritual of Complaint in a British Bank, University of Chicago Press, reviewed in the Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, BBC Radio 4, and the American Journal of Sociology. Contributor to Harvard Business Review, with articles including “Designing the Hybrid Office” and “Who Moved My Cubes?”, and to the Academy of Management Review and Organization Studies. Eleven years on the faculty of INSEAD before IMD, with three nominations for “Best Teacher”. Former member of the Board of Directors of LEO Pharma. PhD in Management, MIT Sloan; MPhil in Management, Oxford; BA in Computer Science, UC Berkeley. Biography Culture, on the working definition Weeks uses with senior leaders, is what people say and do when they think their bosses are not looking. That sentence does most of the work. It moves the conversation away from values statements and engagement scores and onto the behaviours senior executives actually model, often without noticing. His route into the question is unusual. A computer science degree from Berkeley, an MPhil at Oxford, a PhD at MIT Sloan, and then training as an organizational ethnographer, the discipline of watching what people in a workplace really do rather than what they say they do. That method is the spine of Unpopular Culture, his University of Chicago Press book about a British bank where everyone complained about the culture, no one liked the way things were done, and yet nothing fundamentally changed. The Financial Times, The Economist, BBC Radio 4, and the American Journal of Sociology all engaged with it; the argument has shaped how he reads every organisation since. At IMD, where he has been Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior since 2007, he co-directs the High Performance Leadership programme, the school’s flagship six-day course for senior leaders. Eleven years at INSEAD preceded that, including three nominations for the institution’s Best Teacher award. His Harvard Business Review work on hybrid offices and on the design of physical workspace sits alongside more academic publications in the Academy of Management Review and Organization Studies. Service on the LEO Pharma board gives him the other half of the executive’s view, the side that sees governance, accountability, and the consequences of culture rather than only its rhetoric. The result is a speaker who can sit with a CEO at the level of behaviour and at the level of the board agenda, and connect the two. Key speaking topics Organisational culture and leadership behaviour Self-management for senior leaders Culture change in established organisations High performance leadership Hybrid work and the design of organisational space Ethnographic reading of organisations Ideal for CEOs, executive committees, and senior leadership teams setting or resetting culture CHROs and chief people officers running senior leadership development Boards examining culture, governance, and the gap between stated and lived values Leadership academies and flagship internal programmes for high-potential executives Audience outcomes A direct, working definition of culture that leaders can use the next morning A clear view of how their own daily behaviour creates or undermines the culture they say they want A frame for diagnosing why previous culture-change efforts have stalled A sharper sense of what self-management looks like for people running organisations Specific behavioural choices, drawn from research and from senior executive practice, that move culture more reliably than declarative interventions

Why organisations work with Lynda Gratton A research base CHROs cannot replicate in-house: the Future of Work Research Consortium has run for over a decade with executives from more than 60 companies, generating comparative evidence on what is actually working in hybrid, skills and workforce design. Co-author of The 100-Year Life with economist Andrew Scott, the book that reframed longevity as a workforce and strategy issue and was shortlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year. Practical playbook for hybrid: her HBR cover piece How to Do Hybrid Right and Redesigning Work give leadership teams a four-lens method (jobs, employee preferences, projects, inclusion) rather than a slogan. Policy-grade credibility: co-chair of the WEF Global Future Council on Work, Wages and Job Creation, and adviser to the Japanese Prime Minister’s council on a 100-year-life society. Thinkers50 Hall of Fame member, which signals to a board that the perspective in the room has been independently judged against a global field over more than a decade. Biography highlights Professor of Management Practice in Organisational Behaviour, London Business School. Founder of HSM Advisory and the Future of Work Research Consortium, working with executives from more than 60 companies. Author and co-author of ten books, including The 100-Year Life (with Andrew Scott), Redesigning Work, The Shift, Glow and Hot Spots. Thinkers50 Hall of Fame inductee; long-running presence in the Thinkers50 ranking since 2011. Co-chair, WEF Global Future Council on Work, Wages and Job Creation; former chair of the WEF Council on Leadership. Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Financial Times and The Times. Biography Most large organisations are running 2025 strategies on a workforce model designed for 2015. Roles, careers and contracts assumed predictable lifespans, fixed locations and a clear line between work and the rest of life. None of those assumptions hold, and the cost of pretending they do shows up in attrition, productivity disputes and stalled transformation programmes. This is the territory Lynda Gratton has worked in for more than two decades from London Business School, where she is Professor of Management Practice in Organisational Behaviour. Through HSM Advisory and the Future of Work Research Consortium she founded in 2009, she has built a continuous comparative dataset on how more than sixty global companies are redesigning jobs, hybrid arrangements and skills, and what separates the redesigns that hold from the ones that quietly revert. Her books anchor the argument. The 100-Year Life, written with economist Andrew Scott, became a bestseller in Japan and was shortlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year, reframing longevity as a strategic issue for governments and employers, not a personal finance question. Redesigning Work translates the same rigour into a four-lens method for hybrid: jobs and tasks, employee preferences, projects and workflows, inclusion and fairness. Her Harvard Business Review cover piece How to Do Hybrid Right and her ongoing MIT Sloan Management Review column put that method into the hands of operators. Boards engage her when they need to move past slogan-level answers on hybrid, skills and longevity. Her co-chairmanship of the WEF Global Future Council on Work, Wages and Job Creation, and her advisory work with the Japanese Prime Minister’s office on a 100-year-life society, are evidence that the same frameworks travel from a single CHRO conversation to national policy. Key speaking topics Future of work and hybrid organisational design Redesigning jobs, careers and skills for longer working lives The 100-year life and longevity as a workforce strategy Workforce transformation in large, complex organisations Hybrid work productivity, fairness and inclusion Leadership in the post-pandemic operating model Talent, retention and the changing employee contract Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers leading hybrid, skills and workforce redesigns. CEOs and executive committees stress-testing their operating model against longer careers and tighter talent markets. Boards and remuneration committees confronting longevity, retention and multi-generational workforce questions. Government, public-sector and policy audiences working on labour market and ageing-society agendas. Audience outcomes A clear method for redesigning hybrid work across jobs, employee preferences, projects and inclusion, drawn from her HBR and MIT Sloan research. A sharper read on what longevity does to careers, learning and talent pipelines, grounded in The 100-Year Life evidence base. Comparative benchmarks from the Future of Work Consortium on what more than sixty global companies are doing on hybrid, skills and workforce design. A board-ready language for distinguishing surface adjustments from genuine workforce redesign. Concrete prompts for the next ninety days of CHRO and ExCo workforce decisions.