Inclusive Leadership speakers

Why organisations work with Stef Sword-Williams She gives quiet, high-performing employees a working method for being seen, which directly affects retention and promotion equity rather than abstract confidence. Her material is built from eight years inside advertising, so self-promotion is taught as a brand and storytelling discipline, not a motivational frame. F*ck Being Humble has trained workforces at Apple, Google, Unilever, Nike, Adidas, Microsoft, the BBC, NatWest, L’Oreal, Aviva, and Amazon, giving her a wide read on where internal visibility fails. The book F*ck Being Humble: Why Self-Promotion Isn’t a Dirty Word has sold over 10,000 copies and gives her a defined point of view that audiences can follow into workshops and team practice. Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, useful as signal for senior buyers screening a younger speaker against a leadership-level audience. Biography highlights Founder of F*ck Being Humble, a global training consultancy working with Apple, Google, Unilever, Nike, Adidas, Microsoft, the BBC, NatWest, L’Oreal, Aviva, and Amazon. Author of F*ck Being Humble: Why Self-Promotion Isn’t a Dirty Word, published by Quadrille and reported to have sold over 10,000 copies. TEDx speaker, with a talk titled “F*ck being humble!” delivered at TEDxAreni. Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe honouree. Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), recognising the social impact of her work. Featured in Vogue, BBC World News, the Financial Times, and The Times, and a regular speaker at industry events including Advertising Week. Biography The people who get promoted are not always the people doing the best work. Inside large organisations, visibility shapes who progresses and who plateaus, and most employees have never been taught how to make their contribution legible to the people deciding their next role. Stef Sword-Williams spent close to eight years in advertising telling stories for global brands before noticing how rarely the same craft was applied to individual careers. She founded F*ck Being Humble in 2018 to close that gap, and in 2020 published the book of the same name with Quadrille, setting out a method for self-promotion that treats it as professional skill rather than personality trait. The work has scaled into a training practice used by Apple, Google, Unilever, Nike, Adidas, Microsoft, the BBC, NatWest, L’Oreal, Aviva, and Amazon. She has been recognised as a Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe honouree and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, with media coverage across Vogue, BBC World News, the Financial Times, and The Times. Her TEDxAreni talk, “F*ck being humble!”, is the short form of the same argument. Organisations that want to keep their best people, close promotion gaps, and grow a stronger internal pipeline cannot rely on quiet competence to surface itself. Sword-Williams gives them a vocabulary and a practice for fixing that. Key speaking topics Self-promotion as a workplace skill Personal branding inside organisations Imposter syndrome and confidence at work Pitching, presenting, and making ideas heard Negotiation and asking for more Networking and internal visibility Feedback culture Storytelling for individuals in a brand-driven world Ideal for CHROs, CPOs, and L&D leaders working on retention, promotion equity, and internal mobility. DEI and ERG leads designing programming for women, early-career talent, and underrepresented groups in promotion pipelines. Heads of Talent and managers running high-potential and emerging-leader cohorts. Conference programmers building tracks on workplace confidence, personal brand, or future skills. Audience outcomes A practical method for talking about their own work without sounding self-serving or scripted. A clear view of where internal visibility breaks down and which behaviours close that gap. Language for handling feedback, negotiation, and self-advocacy conversations with managers. Permission and pattern for ambitious self-presentation in cultures that default to humility. Tools managers can use to surface quieter talent and rebalance who gets seen.

Why organisations work with Stephen Frost He has run inclusion at a scale almost no other practitioner can claim, leading diversity and inclusion across the 200,000-strong workforce of the London 2012 Olympics and afterwards heading the function at KPMG. He treats inclusion as a system to be engineered into hiring, promotion and decision-making, not a values campaign, an approach laid out in The Inclusion Imperative and Building an Inclusive Organization. His teaching positions at Harvard Business School, Sciences Po and Singapore Management University give boards confidence that the methodology stands up to academic scrutiny as well as commercial pressure. He brings a record of building inclusion infrastructure that outlives him, including Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index, now used by most leading UK employers. He is one of a small number of DEI voices able to hold the line on substance while a political backlash makes many DEI conversations harder to have at board level. Biography highlights Head of Diversity and Inclusion for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Former Head of Diversity and Inclusion at KPMG. Founder and CEO of Included, a global diversity and inclusion consultancy. Teaches Inclusive Leadership at Harvard Business School, Singapore Management University and Sciences Po. Author of The Inclusion Imperative, Inclusive Talent Management and Building an Inclusive Organization; editor of The Key to Inclusion. All published by Kogan Page. Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum (2011); recipient of the 2010 Peter Robertson Award for Equality and Diversity Champions. Biography The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games employed close to 200,000 people. Running diversity and inclusion across that operation was not a values exercise. It was a delivery problem under intense political and media scrutiny, and Stephen Frost was the person who owned it. The workforce that resulted was 46 per cent female, 40 per cent from minority ethnic backgrounds and 9 per cent with a disability, on numbers that few corporates have come close to since. After the Games, he was hired by KPMG as Head of Diversity and Inclusion, where he set the firm’s targets on gender, ethnicity, social mobility and sexual orientation. He went on to found Included, a global consultancy that now advises governments, multinationals, media organisations and universities. Earlier in his career he had built much of the modern UK D&I infrastructure at Stonewall, including the Workplace Equality Index now used as a benchmark across most leading employers. The argument in his four Kogan Page books is consistent. Inclusion is a decision-making system, not a culture campaign. The Inclusion Imperative draws on the Olympic work to set out how it can be embedded into procurement, recruitment, leadership and operations. Building an Inclusive Organization, co-authored with Raafi-Karim Alidina, extends the case into the cognitive and behavioural mechanics of how inclusion succeeds or fails inside a firm. That body of work is reinforced by teaching positions at Harvard Business School, Singapore Management University and Sciences Po, and by his selection as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. For boards under pressure on inclusion at the same time as they are under pressure on cost, regulation and political risk, the value of Frost’s perspective is that it treats inclusion as an operating capability that can be measured, defended and improved. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership Embedding inclusion into organisational strategy The business case for diversity and inclusion Inclusive talent management and hiring Culture change and behaviour design Cognitive load and decision-making in diverse teams Building an inclusive organisation at scale Ideal for CHROs and Chief Diversity Officers under pressure to show measurable outcomes from inclusion investment. Boards and executive committees navigating DEI in politically contested or regulatory-heavy environments. Talent, recruitment and leadership development leads redesigning processes around inclusion. Senior leadership teams in firms scaling internationally across multiple cultural and legal contexts. Audience outcomes A working definition of inclusion as a decision-making discipline, not a values statement. Specific levers leaders can pull inside recruitment, promotion and team design to improve inclusion outcomes. A clearer language for defending inclusion work to sceptical boards and shareholders. Examples drawn from enterprise-scale deployments at the London Olympics, KPMG and Included’s client base. A grounded view of where inclusion programmes commonly fail and how to design them to last.

Why organisations work with Susan Cain A single, defensible thesis. Quiet sold over four million copies, spent multiple years on the New York Times bestseller list and translated into 40 languages, which gives a senior audience a shared reference point before she walks on stage. Operational, not theoretical. Through the Quiet Leadership Institute she has delivered corporate programmes at GE, LinkedIn, Procter & Gamble, NASA and the Dutch Air Force, and partnered with Steelcase to redesign office space around introvert-friendly workflows. Reframes inclusion in language that lands with sceptical executives. Personality bias is a talent and productivity argument, not a values argument, which makes the conversation possible in rooms where DEI has become contested. Cultural reach that pulls audiences in. The TED2012 talk has been viewed more than 30 million times and named by Bill Gates as a personal favourite, and Bittersweet was an Oprah’s Book Club pick in 2023. Biography highlights Honours graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School; former Wall Street negotiations attorney Author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, #1 New York Times bestseller, four million copies sold, 40 languages Author of Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, #1 New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club selection TED2012 talk “The Power of Introverts” viewed over 30 million times; named by Bill Gates as a favourite TED talk Co-founder of Quiet Revolution and the Quiet Leadership Institute, with corporate programmes at GE, LinkedIn, Procter & Gamble, NASA and the Dutch Air Force Recipient of Harvard Law School’s Celebration Award for thought leadership and the Toastmasters International Golden Gavel Award Biography A third to half of the workforce is introverted, yet most companies are built as though everyone in the room is an extrovert. Hiring rewards the candidate who presents best in an interview. Meetings reward whoever speaks first. Open-plan offices reward visibility over depth of thought. The cumulative cost in lost ideas, attrition and shallow decision-making is significant, and rarely measured. That is the operational problem Quiet named in 2012. The book has sold over four million copies, sat on the New York Times bestseller list for years and been translated into 40 languages, which is why senior leaders tend to arrive at the keynote already inside the argument. The accompanying TED2012 talk has been viewed more than 30 million times and was named by Bill Gates as one of his favourites. The work since then has been practical. Through the Quiet Leadership Institute, founded with former West Point professor Mike Erwin, Cain has run corporate development programmes for organisations including GE, LinkedIn, Procter & Gamble, NASA and the Dutch Air Force. With Steelcase, she co-designed the Quiet Spaces office concept, a direct intervention into the open-plan trend. Her second book, Bittersweet, debuted at #1 on the New York Times nonfiction list and was selected for Oprah’s Book Club in 2023, broadening the conversation into how organisations handle emotion, longing and creativity at work. Her Princeton and Harvard Law training, and her earlier career as a Wall Street negotiator, show up in the way she argues. The case is a talent and productivity case before it is a values case, which is what makes it land in rooms where leaders are tired of the usual inclusion language. Key speaking topics The hidden strengths of introverted leaders Personality bias in hiring, meetings and promotion Workspace and office design for cognitive performance Talent strategy across the introvert and extrovert spectrum Creativity, deep work and the conditions for original thinking Inclusion framed as a productivity argument Emotion, longing and meaning at work (drawing on Bittersweet) Ideal for CHROs, talent leaders and heads of organisational development rethinking how they hire, promote and retain CEOs and senior executives whose workforce skews toward knowledge work, research, engineering or design Heads of workplace strategy and real estate teams designing the next generation of office space Learning and leadership development teams building inclusive leadership curricula that move beyond conventional DEI framing Audience outcomes A concrete vocabulary for the personality bias built into common hiring, meeting and performance practices Specific design choices to test, in meetings, workspaces and team rituals, to surface ideas from quieter staff A reframed argument for inclusion that survives executive scrutiny on commercial grounds A clearer view of where deep work and solitude belong in the operating model of a knowledge organisation

Why organisations work with Susie Wolff She is the only executive who has both experienced structural exclusion at the top of global motorsport as a competitor and then returned to redesign those structures, giving her an argument that runs deeper than advocacy. F1 Academy under her leadership secured the backing of all ten Formula 1 teams, partnerships with Charlotte Tilbury, American Express, TAG Heuer and The LEGO Group, and grew to become the second-most followed motorsport series after Formula 1 – these are not diversity metrics, they are commercial outcomes. Her work addresses a specific organisational failure that most DEI programmes miss: talent exclusion is not primarily a selection problem, it is a pipeline and development problem. She has built the operational case study. Her track record spans the full leadership arc – elite competitor, team principal, CEO, series director – giving her credibility in conversations about performance culture, high-pressure decision-making, and building organisations that win under scrutiny. Driven, her memoir, was an instant Sunday Times bestseller on UK publication by Hodder & Stoughton, and was released in the US by Henry Holt in April 2026 with a Booklist Starred Review and Lewis Hamilton endorsement, extending her reach beyond motorsport audiences into mainstream leadership conversations. Biography highlights Managing Director, F1 Academy (Formula 1’s all-female development series), appointed March 2023; reports directly to Formula 1 CEO Stefano Domenicali First woman to participate in a Formula One race weekend since 1992 – four FP1 sessions with the Williams F1 team, 2014–2015 Seven seasons in the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters (DTM) with Mercedes-Benz, 2006-2012 Team Principal then CEO, Venturi Formula E team, 2018-2022; took the team from the back of the grid to Formula E Vice-World Champions and oversaw its sale to Maserati on departure Founder, Dare To Be Different initiative (2016); merged with FIA Girls on Track (2019) Author, Driven (Hodder & Stoughton / Henry Holt) – instant Sunday Times bestseller; executive producer of Netflix docuseries F1: The Academy (2025) MBE (2017) for services to women in sport; Honorary Fellowship, University of Edinburgh (2013); CNBC Changemaker (2026) Biography Motorsport has long had a pipeline problem, not of talent, but of access. The structures that determined who made it to the top were built for a specific kind of competitor, and they were rarely questioned. Susie Wolff sat inside that system for over two decades: as a driver who pushed further into Formula One than any woman had in a generation, and then as the executive who went back to rebuild it. Her driving career ran from karting to the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters with Mercedes-Benz, then to Williams F1, where she became the first woman to participate in a Formula One race weekend since 1992 across four practice sessions in 2014 and 2015. When she retired from driving, she turned to the leadership side of the sport: first as Team Principal, then CEO, of the Venturi Formula E team. Over four seasons she took the team from the back of the grid to a Formula E Vice-World Championship finish, then oversaw its sale to Maserati before joining F1 Academy in March 2023. At F1 Academy, Wolff has built something that did not exist before: a commercially viable, Formula 1-integrated development series for female talent, which now carries the liveries of all ten F1 teams, holds partnerships with brands including Charlotte Tilbury, American Express, TAG Heuer and The LEGO Group, and has grown to become the second-most followed motorsport series after Formula 1. She executive produced the 2025 Netflix docuseries F1: The Academy alongside Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine. Her memoir Driven was an instant Sunday Times bestseller on UK publication by Hodder & Stoughton, and was released in the US by Henry Holt in April 2026 to a Booklist Starred Review. What Wolff offers corporate audiences is not a motivational narrative with a motorsport backdrop. It is a specific and replicable argument: that inclusive talent pipelines are not built by changing who you select, but by redesigning the conditions in which talent is identified and developed. She has built that case inside one of the world’s most commercially demanding sports, and has the results to prove it. Key speaking topics Inclusive talent pipeline design Leadership and performance under competitive pressure Organisational culture change in structurally resistant industries Executive leadership in high-performance sport Building commercial frameworks for underrepresented talent Resilience and ambition in elite environments Diversity as a strategic performance lever Ideal for C-suite and senior leadership teams working on talent strategy, diversity, or cultural transformation CHROs and People directors designing inclusive talent development programmes Leadership and strategy teams in automotive, engineering, technology, and financial services Sports business, sponsorship, and commercial leadership audiences Audience outcomes A clear framework for distinguishing between diversity as selection (reactive) and diversity as pipeline design (structural) with a real-world organisational example Understanding of how to build commercial buy-in for inclusion initiatives, grounded in F1 Academy’s partnership and broadcast growth Insight into high-performance decision-making and the leadership qualities required to build organisations under public scrutiny A more specific vocabulary for talking about talent exclusion as a performance problem rather than a compliance issue First-hand perspective on what resilience, ambition, and goal-setting look like at the elite level, and how these translate into organisational contexts

Why organisations work with Swarzy Macaly A working broadcaster with a current BBC Radio 1Xtra Weekend Breakfast slot, which gives her live editorial reflexes that most corporate moderators do not have. Track record on the largest UK live-TV moments, including the London New Year’s Day Parade in 2022 and 2024, and panel hosting at COP26 and the BBC Climate Creative Forum. A founder credential that supports the editorial content. Too Much Source, her annual exhibition for Black British creatives, has run since 2017 with the Barbican and Roundhouse. Substantive moderation history with Unilever, Ofcom, GroupM, ITV, Nike, TikTok and DAZN, so brand and regulator audiences are familiar territory. Recognition from named bodies: Best Presenter at the UK Entertainment Awards 2021 and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s 2020 Next Generation Trailblazers list. Biography highlights Presenter, BBC Radio 1Xtra Weekend Breakfast, Saturdays 7-10 am. Founder, Too Much Source, an annual exhibition celebrating Black British creatives, established in 2017. Trustee, My Life My Say, the youth-led democratic participation charity. Best Presenter, UK Entertainment Awards 2021. Named to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s Next Generation Trailblazers list for Black History Month 2020. Panel host at COP26 and the BBC Climate Creative Forum; live-TV host of the London New Year’s Day Parade in 2022 and 2024. Biography Most corporate inclusion conversations fail on stage long before they fail in policy. The voice in the room is usually too polished, too cautious, or too far from the audience to land. Swarzy Macaly is one of the few broadcasters in the UK who can run that conversation in front of a live brand audience and keep it honest. Her main work is at the BBC. She presents the Weekend Breakfast Show on Radio 1Xtra and contributes across BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 5 Live and BBC Sounds, including the Daily Service and Sunday Worship strands. She came into broadcasting through a national presenter competition at KISS FM in 2016, then moved into the BBC and onto live television, hosting the London New Year’s Day Parade in 2022 and 2024. The editorial spine sits alongside that hosting career. She founded Too Much Source in 2017, an annual exhibition for Black British creatives that has run with the Barbican and Roundhouse. She is a trustee of My Life My Say, the youth-led democratic participation charity, where she has interviewed Sir Keir Starmer, Sadiq Khan and John Podesta on its Question Time series. Her panel work at COP26 and the BBC Climate Creative Forum extends the same instinct into climate. Brands and institutions book her for the same reason. Unilever, Ofcom, GroupM, ITV, Nike, TikTok and DAZN have used her as a moderator on internal and public events where the conversation could easily go wrong. The work earned her Best Presenter at the UK Entertainment Awards in 2021 and a place on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s 2020 Next Generation Trailblazers list. Key speaking topics Inclusion and representation in UK media Social mobility and access to the creative industries Womanhood and intersectional identity Climate communication for general audiences Faith, community and public life Panel moderation and conference hosting Ideal for Brand, marketing and ER leaders running employee, partner or consumer events where inclusion content has to be credible. Communications and policy teams at regulators and broadcasters convening external panels on representation, access or climate. Conference programmers and chairs need a host who can chair contested topics without flattening them. Foundations, charities and youth-focused organisations are running flagship public conversations with senior political guests. Audience outcomes A live conversation that holds editorial weight, with named guests, real disagreements, and no PR varnish. Sharper framing of inclusion and social mobility messaging that audiences under 40 actually believe. Confident chairing across sensitive subjects: race, faith, climate, gender, and generational difference. A high-craft moderator who can shift register between corporate, broadcast and youth audiences in the same event.

Why organisations work with Tanya Menon A research voice on inclusion that starts with network structure, hiring data, and decision bias rather than identity language, useful for leadership teams that need substance under a contested topic. Tenured academic credibility: Stanford PhD, Fisher College professorship, Associate Editor at Management Science, a decade teaching Power and Influence at Chicago Booth. Co-author of Stop Spending, Start Managing (Harvard Business Review Press), which names five specific organisational traps including expertise lock-in and conflict avoidance, applied directly to senior team behaviour. A TED Talk with 1.8 million-plus views that translates weak-tie network research into a behaviour senior leaders and their teams can immediately recognise in themselves. Equally fluent on team performance, persuasion, and hiring, which makes her a credible single speaker across an HR or culture programme rather than one topic in a series. Biography highlights Professor of Management and Human Resources, Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University. PhD, Stanford Graduate School of Business; BA, Harvard University. Associate Editor, Management Science. Co-author, Stop Spending, Start Managing: Strategies to Transform Wasteful Habits, Harvard Business Review Press. TED Talk listed among TED.com’s most popular of 2018, with over 1.8 million views. Faculty for over a decade at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, teaching Power and Influence. Research cited in The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Guardian, The Times of London, Chicago Tribune, and Boston Globe. Biography Most senior teams know who they talk to every day. Far fewer can name who they have stopped talking to, and what that has cost the organisation. Tanya Menon’s research starts in that gap. Her work at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business, supported by a Stanford PhD and a decade teaching at Chicago Booth, focuses on how relationships at work shape decisions, hiring, and innovation. Her TED Talk, “The secret to great opportunities? The person you haven’t met yet,” reframes networking as a structural problem rather than a personal one. Drawing on Mark Granovetter’s classic work on weak ties, she shows why the routines that feel efficient inside an organisation quietly narrow the people, ideas, and candidates a leader ever encounters. Over 1.8 million people have watched it. With Leigh Thompson of Kellogg, she wrote Stop Spending, Start Managing for Harvard Business Review Press. The book identifies five concrete traps, including the Expertise Trap, the Winner’s Trap, and the Agreement Trap, that explain why competent teams burn time and money on the wrong problems. It is built for leaders who run real teams, not for a general management audience. She has been an Associate Editor at Management Science, and her research has been cited by The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Guardian, The Times of London, the Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Globe. The through-line is a usable diagnostic vocabulary for the parts of organisational life that look like soft skills until they start producing hard losses. Key speaking topics Networks and weak ties at work Inclusion through hiring and network design Team decision-making and productive conflict Power, persuasion, and influence Innovation and pattern-breaking Wasteful organisational habits and managerial traps AI and human decision-making in hiring Ideal for CHROs and Heads of Talent rethinking hiring pipelines and selection bias. Heads of DEI and culture leaders looking for a research-led, non-ideological frame for inclusion. Senior leadership teams under pressure to improve cross-functional collaboration. Learning and development leads designing executive programmes on influence, networks, and team performance. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the network and hiring habits that quietly limit inclusion and innovation. Five named organisational traps senior teams can test their own behaviour against. A research-grounded view of weak ties as a hiring, learning, and idea-generation lever. Specific tactics for breaking routine social patterns inside large organisations. A more defensible inclusion narrative grounded in network structure and decision data.

Why organisations work with Tim Campbell A founder’s view of what early-stage capital, mentoring and access actually do for people who do not start with networks, drawn from supporting more than 750 start-ups through the Bright Ideas Trust A senior commercial perspective on inclusion that connects diversity to talent acquisition and business outcomes, informed by his strategic adviser work in global recruitment Public recognition that opens doors at executive and audience level: MBE for Services to Enterprise Culture, two decades of broadcast presence on The Apprentice, and a seat on the Windrush Commemoration Committee A practitioner’s read on what makes a small business survive its first three years, codified in his co-authored book with Paul Humphries published by Headline Biography highlights Winner of the first series of BBC’s The Apprentice in 2005, hired by Sir Alan Sugar as Project Director of Amstrad’s Health and Beauty division Co-founder of the Bright Ideas Trust, which raised over GBP 3m and supported more than 750 start-ups from disadvantaged backgrounds Appointed MBE in 2012 for Services to Enterprise Culture Co-author of “What’s Your Bright Idea? The Journey to Starting Your Own Business” (Headline, 2010) Member of the UK Government’s Windrush Commemoration Committee Returned to The Apprentice as Lord Sugar’s permanent advisor from Series 18 onwards Biography The Apprentice in 2005 was the first time most British viewers had watched a hiring decision broadcast as entertainment. Tim Campbell, a senior planner at London Underground, won the series and took the GBP 100,000 job at Amstrad as Project Director of a new Health and Beauty division. The interesting work began two years later. In 2007 Campbell co-founded the Bright Ideas Trust with Paul Humphries and Richard Morris. The model was specific: equity-style early-stage capital and structured mentoring for 16 to 30 year olds who could not raise money through conventional networks. By the time the trust had matured, it had raised more than GBP 3m and supported over 750 start-ups. The work earned an MBE in 2012 for Services to Enterprise Culture and a co-authored book with Humphries, “What’s Your Bright Idea?”, published by Headline. The second arc of his career moved that founder perspective into large organisations. Campbell has held senior roles in talent acquisition and inclusion strategy, advising on diversity, equity and social mobility inside global recruitment, and sits on the UK Government’s Windrush Commemoration Committee. He returned to The Apprentice as Lord Sugar’s aide and now holds the role permanently from Series 18. The throughline is the gap between organisational claims about entrepreneurial culture and inclusion, and what actually happens to people inside the business and outside it. Campbell has worked both sides of that gap, as a founder building a vehicle for capital flow into underrepresented entrepreneurs, and as a senior adviser inside companies that have to decide whether their inclusion language is reflected in who gets hired, funded and promoted. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and early-stage business Inclusive talent acquisition and social mobility Resilience in a founder’s career Diversity and inclusion as commercial strategy Leadership through change Personal and organisational reinvention Ideal for Boards and executive teams reviewing the commercial logic of their inclusion strategy CHROs and talent leaders rethinking pipelines into underrepresented communities Founders, scale-up leaders and intrapreneurs inside corporate environments Audiences at staff conferences and ERG events seeking a credible voice on enterprise and inclusion Audience outcomes A clearer view of what early-stage entrepreneurial support looks like when it is built around access, not just funding A practical sense of how diversity commitments translate into hiring, promotion and supplier decisions A founder’s perspective on resilience, drawn from a public career and a charity built and run for over a decade A reframing of inclusion as a commercial discipline tied to talent and growth, not a separate values conversation

Why organisations work with Toni Kent She makes social mobility a concrete operating question rather than a values statement, drawing on a decade running major UK partner relationships at Microsoft and a personal history that maps directly onto the barriers her audience is trying to remove. She is one of a small number of UK speakers who can carry both the hosting craft of a large awards night and the substantive keynote inside it, evidenced by twice hosting the UK Social Mobility Awards. Audiences get an unusual combination of stand-up comic timing and corporate fluency, which makes uncomfortable conversations about class, education and access land without defensiveness. The Common Good Network gives her keynote a follow-through mechanism: a directory of UK organisations that the audience can actually route their employee resource groups, CSR teams and emerging-talent programmes towards. Biography highlights Ten years at Microsoft UK, managing several of the company’s largest partner relationships. Founder of The Common Good Network, an interactive directory of UK social mobility organisations. Twice host of the UK Social Mobility Awards (2021, 2023). Author of four books, including Reasons to be Cheerful, Part One. Host of the Challenging University podcast; co-host of KAYBE Talks and The Partnership Path Podcast. Keynote and hosting clients include AWS, KPMG, PwC, Direct Line Group, Baker Hughes, ForHousing, Smart Works Reading and the University of East London. Biography Most large UK employers now have a social mobility position. Far fewer can show what it has changed inside their recruitment funnel, their early-careers programme, or their promotion patterns. The work of turning a stated commitment into an operating change is where Toni Kent has spent the last decade. She came to the question through a decade at Microsoft UK, where she ran several of the company’s largest partner relationships. Before that, a council-estate upbringing in Basingstoke, a father who died when she was fourteen, a family on state benefits, no university route. The combination matters commercially because she can speak with equal fluency to the chief people officer and to the apprentice in the second row. The Common Good Network is the operating layer underneath the keynote: an interactive directory of UK organisations working on socioeconomic barriers, designed to give corporate audiences a route from intention to partnership. Her hosting of the UK Social Mobility Awards in 2021 and 2023 sits in the same body of work, as do her four published books and her podcasts Challenging University, KAYBE Talks and The Partnership Path. The reason organisations book her for the room and not only for the content is that she is also a working stand-up comedian. The craft shows in how she handles a difficult brief: she can name class, access and education without making the audience flinch, and she can host an awards night for two thousand people without losing the thread of why it matters. Key speaking topics Social mobility in the workplace Inclusive hiring and early-careers access Storytelling and authentic personal narrative Imposter syndrome and confidence in corporate environments Mindset and decision-making under change Event hosting and panel moderation Women in technology Ideal for CHROs, heads of DEI and emerging-talent leads who need a credible voice on social mobility as an operating discipline. Employee resource group chairs and ERG sponsors briefing senior leadership on socioeconomic inclusion. Awards programmes, internal recognition events and large all-hands meetings requiring a confident, comic-timed host. Technology, professional services and financial services audiences engaging with inclusion content for the first time. Audience outcomes A working definition of social mobility that distinguishes class-based access from broader DEI categories. A clear sense of where the typical corporate social mobility commitment breaks down between policy and practice. Specific organisational entry points: ERG design, early careers, mentoring, supplier diversity and procurement. A directory of UK partner organisations, via The Common Good Network, to route follow-through activity through. Permission to discuss class openly inside the organisation without defensiveness.

Why organisations work with Vivienne Ming Her «Tax on Being Different» framework quantifies – in economic and productivity terms – the cost organisations pay when marginalised workers must expend extra effort just to be assessed as equivalent. This is a measurement argument with commercial implications, not a values one. As Chief Scientist at Gild, she built machine learning models trained on 122 million professionals, making her one of the few people who has directly operationalised predictive AI for talent assessment at scale, outside a purely academic context. She reframes diversity from a compliance question into an optimisation problem: one that can be modelled, measured, and corrected using the same tools organisations already apply to operational decisions. Her research spans workforce, education, and health, giving her an unusually broad evidence base for what actually predicts long-term human capability, and what doesn’t. Published in Nature and Neural Information Processing Systems, and holding academic appointments at UC Berkeley and UCL, her arguments carry institutional credibility that applied consultants and conference speakers typically cannot match. Biography highlights Author of Robot-Proof: When Machines Have All the Answers, Build Better People (Wiley, 2026), which argues that human capital – not AI capability – determines the outcome of human-machine collaboration PhD in Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University; joint postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University and UC Berkeley’s Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience Former Chief Scientist at Gild, where she built ML models trained on 122 million professionals to assess human capability beyond conventional credentials Founder and Executive Chair of Socos Labs, an independent research institute applying AI and neuroscience to workforce, education, and health challenges Research published in Nature, Neural Information Processing Systems, and Neural Computation Ranked #5 on the Financial Times / OUTstanding list of the world’s top LGBT executives (2017); named BBC 100 Women (2017) and Inc. Magazine’s «10 Women to Watch in Tech» Chair, UC Berkeley Neurotech Collider Hub; Honorary Professor, UCL Global Business School for Health; board member, RFK Human Rights Biography Vivienne Ming built her career on a discomforting empirical observation: the hiring signals organisations treat as reliable – degrees, interview performance, institutional pedigree – do not predict what they claim to predict. She tested this at scale. As Chief Scientist at Gild, she developed machine learning models trained on data from 122 million professionals, looking for what actually distinguishes high performers from credentialled ones. The gap was substantial. Most organisations were optimising for proxies, not capability. That finding runs through everything she has done since. At Socos Labs, the research institute she co-founded with her wife Dr. Norma Ming, she has extended the question into education and health, examining what psychological constructs genuinely predict long-term life outcomes, and publishing that research in Nature and Neural Information Processing Systems. The argument is consistent: measurement systems in organisations are systematically broken, and the cost is borne most heavily by those who don’t fit the template. Her book Robot-Proof: When Machines Have All the Answers, Build Better People (Wiley, 2026) extends that argument into AI, making the case that human capital – not model benchmarks – determines whether human-machine collaboration produces anything beyond substitution. Her «Tax on Being Different» framework gives that cost a number. Drawing on large-scale HR data, it quantifies the additional credential burden that women, people of colour, and LGBTQ+ individuals absorb to be evaluated on equivalent terms. This is not a cultural argument. It is a productivity and innovation argument: one that has been delivered to boards and leadership teams at Google, Deloitte, and Salesforce, and presented at the Royal Society. She holds a PhD in Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University, with joint postdoctoral appointments at Stanford and UC Berkeley. She chairs the UC Berkeley Neurotech Collider Hub, holds an honorary professorship at UCL’s Global Business School for Health, and serves on the board of RFK Human Rights. In 2017, she was ranked #5 on the Financial Times / OUTstanding list of the world’s top LGBT executives. Her research and commentary have been featured in the Financial Times, Business Insider, Fast Company, and CNBC. Key speaking topics AI and predictive modelling of human capability The economics of talent assessment and bias Neuroscience of decision-making in organisations Diversity, inclusion, and the productivity cost of difference Human-machine collective intelligence AI applications in education, health, and workforce development Innovation methodology: solving ill-posed problems Ideal for CHROs and talent acquisition leaders reviewing whether their hiring signals are predictive CEOs and boards integrating AI into people decisions and workforce strategy DEI leaders seeking evidence-based, commercially framed arguments for systemic change Technology and innovation functions examining the limits and applications of AI in human contexts Audience outcomes A quantified, data-grounded understanding of what broken talent systems cost organisations in productivity and innovation A concrete reframe of diversity: not a moral obligation but a measurement and optimisation problem Practical questions to apply to their own hiring, promotion, and development processes Clarity on where AI reliably improves human assessment – and where it perpetuates the biases already embedded in the data A new vocabulary for capability that moves beyond credentials and credentials-adjacent signals

Why organisations work with Wema Hoover She ran global DEI inside four of the most scrutinised employers in the world: Google, Pfizer, Sanofi and Bristol-Myers Squibb. The advice is shaped by what survives in regulated, multinational environments. She separates the politics of DEI from the operating substance, which lets boards keep the practice going without the labels that now invite litigation and activist pressure. Her work covers the full stack: hiring, promotion, belonging, manager capability, and how leadership teams behave under public scrutiny. Not awareness training. She writes for Fast Company on the structural questions, gender investment, leadership double standards, beyond the DEI backlash, which means buyers get a thinker, not a workshop facilitator. Coqual Hidden Brain Drain Task Force membership signals she works alongside the most serious researchers in this field, not adjacent to them. Biography highlights Former Global Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Google Former Chief Diversity Officer / Global Head of DEI at Pfizer, Sanofi and Bristol-Myers Squibb Published contributor at Fast Company, Inc. and Diversity Magazine Member, Coqual Hidden Brain Drain Task Force Board member, Ten By Three MSc Human Resource Management and Master’s Certificate in Organizational Change Management, The New School; BA Psychology, Rutgers; GPHR certified Biography The DEI conversation has fractured. Court rulings, shareholder activism and political pressure have made the language toxic in some markets, while the underlying organisational questions, who gets hired, who gets promoted, who feels they belong, are now more commercially material than they have been in a decade. Wema Hoover spent the last fifteen years running that practice inside large, regulated, global employers. As Global Head of DEI at Google, and in equivalent senior roles at Pfizer, Sanofi and Bristol-Myers Squibb, she designed and operated inclusion programmes in the kinds of environments where the work has to clear legal, board, regulator and workforce scrutiny. That operator background is what makes her useful now. She is not arguing for DEI as a value; she is showing leadership teams how to keep the operating substance, hiring discipline, manager capability, advancement pipelines, belonging metrics, without the rhetorical scaffolding that has become a liability. Her Fast Company writing and her “Beyond the DEI Backlash” work track the same argument in public. She holds an MSc in Human Resource Management and a Master’s-level Certificate in Organizational Change Management from The New School, a BA in Psychology from Rutgers, and a Global Professional in Human Resources certification. She sits on Coqual’s Hidden Brain Drain Task Force, the working group most senior corporate DEI heads consult on talent equity research. Key speaking topics Inclusion strategy after the DEI backlash Belonging and culture inside global, regulated employers Women’s advancement, sponsorship and the leadership double standard Manager capability for inclusive teams Cross-cultural leadership in multinational workforces Executive coaching for senior leaders navigating cultural change Ideal for CHROs and Chief People Officers managing inclusion programmes through political and legal headwinds Boards and ExCos that need to reset their position on DEI without abandoning the substance Global employers with regulated workforces (pharma, tech, financial services) where inclusion is tied to talent risk Senior leadership development programmes for newly promoted women and underrepresented executives Audience outcomes A clear read on what has changed in the DEI landscape, in the US and globally, and what that means for their own programme design A working distinction between inclusion as compliance theatre and inclusion as operating capability Practical decisions on which existing initiatives to keep, which to retire and which to rename Confidence in how to brief their board on DEI in the current environment without overpromising or retreating A sharper view of where sponsorship and advocacy, not training, actually move the dial on women’s advancement

Why organisations work with Will Young His book To Be a Gay Man provides a specific, argued analysis of how internalised shame develops and compounds; giving organisations something more useful than personal testimony: a framework for understanding why policy alone doesn’t change culture As the first Patron of Shout, the UK’s 24/7 crisis text service, he carries the kind of sustained, institutional commitment to mental health that distinguishes an advocate from a performer talking about their own story His JP Morgan Blue Monday Fireside Chat appearance demonstrates he operates credibly in formal corporate environments, not only in entertainment or charity contexts He is one of very few speakers who can hold the intersection of LGBTQ+ experience, clinical mental health literacy, and mass public recognition in a single conversation, without any of the three undermining the others The Sunday Times bestseller status on two consecutive books signals consistent public authority, not a single media moment Biography highlights Winner of the inaugural series of Pop Idol (2002); debut single the second best-selling UK single of the 21st century; four UK #1 albums; two Brit Awards Sunday Times bestselling author: To Be a Gay Man (Penguin/Ebury Press) and Be Yourself and Happier: The A–Z of Wellbeing Olivier Award-nominated actor; stage credits include Cabaret and Strictly Ballroom; screen credits include Mrs Henderson Presents First Patron of Shout, the UK’s 24/7 mental health text crisis support service Honorary degree, University of Exeter (2023); originally studied Politics at Exeter Corporate speaker engagements include JP Morgan Blue Monday Fireside Chats; Leeds International Festival of Ideas Biography Gay shame is not a niche subject. It describes a mechanism, internalised identity conflict producing low self-worth and destructive behaviour, that shapes the working lives of LGBTQ+ employees long after any formal discrimination has ended. Will Young’s To Be a Gay Man, published by Penguin in 2020 and a Sunday Times bestseller, is the most visible attempt by a British public figure to articulate that mechanism in terms that are both personal and intellectually serious. Young won the first series of Pop Idol in 2002 and built one of the most durable careers in British pop, with four UK number one albums, two Brit Awards, and a debut single that remains the second best-selling UK single of the 21st century. That public history matters to organisations not as decoration but as context: Young spent two decades navigating visibility, media scrutiny, and identity in an industry that rarely handled any of those things well. His second book, Be Yourself and Happier: The A–Z of Wellbeing, extended his work beyond LGBTQ+ experience into broader mental health and personal development. As the first Patron of Shout – the UK’s 24/7 text crisis support service – and a speaker at JP Morgan’s Blue Monday Fireside Chats, he has moved steadily from public profile to institutional engagement. The Olivier Award nomination for Cabaret and an honorary degree from the University of Exeter complete a picture of someone who has built genuine plural credibility – in entertainment, publishing, mental health, and now corporate settings – rather than recycling a single story across formats. Key speaking topics Gay shame and internalised identity Mental health and psychological safety at work LGBTQ+ inclusion beyond policy Authenticity and belonging in organisational culture Public visibility and personal resilience Wellbeing and self-acceptance Media, representation, and cultural change Ideal for CHROs and People Directors leading LGBTQ+ inclusion or mental health strategy DEI leads and LGBTQ+ employee network events seeking substance beyond lived-experience storytelling Leadership and culture conferences where psychological safety and authentic belonging are on the agenda Organisations marking awareness moments (Mental Health Awareness Week, Pride, Blue Monday) who want credibility over celebrity Audience outcomes A working understanding of how internalised shame operates, and why policy change without cultural work leaves the core problem intact Language for discussing gay shame and identity conflict that is grounded, specific, and usable in organisational contexts A more nuanced picture of what LGBTQ+ inclusion looks like in practice, beyond representation metrics Reflection on the relationship between personal authenticity and professional performance Awareness of the practical mental health resources and frameworks Young has developed through his books and Wellbeing Lab platform

Why organisations work with Yuriko Koike She runs the world’s largest metropolitan economy. Few speakers can describe the operating reality of climate, security and fiscal trade-offs at megacity scale from the seat where the decisions are made. She authored the Zero Emission Tokyo Strategy, with mandated solar panels on new detached homes from April 2025 and a target of halved emissions by 2030. Audiences hear how a major capital city is converting net zero language into capital allocation and regulation. As Environment Minister she designed Cool Biz, a behavioural and policy intervention that the Japanese Ministry of the Environment estimated cut 460,000 tons of CO2 in its first year. It is a rare example of a low-cost public policy producing measurable emissions reduction. She brings cabinet-level perspective on Japan’s geopolitical position. Former Minister of Defense, former National Security adviser, fluent Arabic speaker, Project Syndicate columnist on Asia, fiscal policy and the rules-based order since 2010. She is the first woman to govern Tokyo and the first to seek the LDP leadership. Her perspective on women in senior public and corporate roles is grounded in an actual executive career, not advocacy alone. Biography highlights Governor of Tokyo since 2016, re-elected in 2020 and 2024. Minister of the Environment of Japan (2003-2006); Minister of Defense (2007); Special Adviser to the Prime Minister for National Security. Architect of the Cool Biz campaign and the Zero Emission Tokyo Strategy. Asia Society Asia Game Changer Award, 2019. Chair, OECD Champion Mayors for Inclusive Growth Initiative. Project Syndicate columnist since 2010; World Economic Forum Agenda contributor. Biography Tokyo, with a metropolitan population near 14 million and a GDP larger than most G20 economies, is one of the few cities where climate policy, fiscal stress and geopolitical exposure all run through the same office. Yuriko Koike has held that office since 2016, re-elected in 2020 and again in 2024. The decisions she has made there are the substance of her platform. Her policy track record predates the governorship. As Minister of the Environment under Junichiro Koizumi between 2003 and 2006, she launched Cool Biz, a behavioural and dress-code intervention that the Japanese Ministry of the Environment estimated reduced CO2 emissions by 460,000 tons in its first year. As Governor she authored the Zero Emission Tokyo Strategy in December 2019, setting a 2050 net zero target with halved emissions by 2030, and pushed through a mandate that new detached homes in Tokyo install solar panels from April 2025. Few city leaders globally have moved climate ambition into binding metropolitan regulation at this scale. She also brings cabinet-level perspective on geopolitics. She was Japan’s Minister of Defense, served as Special Adviser to the Prime Minister for National Security, ran for the LDP presidency in 2008 as the first woman to seek the leadership of a major Japanese party, and has written for Project Syndicate on Asian security, fiscal policy and the rules-based order since 2010. Before politics she was a Nippon TV anchor and Arabic-speaking foreign correspondent, with a sociology degree from Cairo University. She chairs the OECD Champion Mayors for Inclusive Growth Initiative and was awarded the Asia Society Asia Game Changer Award in 2019. Audiences who book her are typically working on the same problem she works on every day: how to govern an exposed, dense, ageing, ambitious economy when energy, geopolitics and capital are all moving at once. Key speaking topics Climate policy and city-scale decarbonisation Megacity resilience and inclusive urban growth Japan, China and the geopolitics of East Asia Energy transition and capital allocation Women in senior public and corporate leadership Public sector reform and fiscal discipline Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting climate, energy and ESG strategy in Asia or with Asia exposure CFOs, CSOs and policy leads working on long-term capital allocation under climate and geopolitical risk Public-private convenings on urban resilience, infrastructure and inclusive growth Conferences on Japan, the Indo-Pacific and the global rules-based order Audience outcomes A first-hand view of how the world’s largest metropolitan economy is converting net zero policy into binding regulation and capital plans A sharper read on Japan’s economic and security position, and what it implies for organisations operating across East Asia A working example of behavioural climate policy that produced measurable emissions reduction at low fiscal cost A senior practitioner’s perspective on running large public institutions through fiscal pressure, demographic change and geopolitical realignment A direct account of breaking into senior leadership in a country and party where the path was not designed for women