Inclusive Leadership

Why organisations work with Magie Cook A nine-figure exit built from $800 in starting capital. Buyers get a speaker whose entrepreneurial credibility is documented in a real Campbell’s Soup transaction, not a curated personal-brand narrative. The 3R Framework (Resourceful, Resilient, Relentless) gives audiences a portable model for decision-making under pressure, drawn from the same operating discipline that scaled her business across 38 states. A bilingual Latina founder voice that lands with U.S. and Latin American workforces without the cultural flatness of imported keynote material. Credentials buyers recognise: SBA Young Entrepreneur of the Year, induction into the NAWBO Hall of Fame, and an honorary LL.D. from the University of Charleston. A philanthropic chapter, including the rescue of 31 children from cartel exploitation in Mexico, that gives her resilience material weight most speakers in the category cannot match. Biography highlights Founder and former CEO of Maggie’s All-Natural Fresh Salsas & Dips, distributed across 38 U.S. states through Whole Foods, Walmart and Sam’s Club. Sold Maggie’s Salsa with Garden Fresh to Campbell’s Soup in 2015 for $231 million. U.S. Small Business Administration Young Entrepreneur of the Year, 2009. Inducted into the National Association of Women Business Owners Hall of Fame and invited onto the NAWBO Board of Directors in 2022. Author of “Mindful Success: How To Use Your Mind To Transform Your Life,” endorsed by Jack Canfield. Honorary Doctorate of Laws, University of Charleston, 2022; Athletics Hall of Fame inductee, 2015. Biography The first order from Whole Foods came after ninety rejections. The starting capital was $800, handed to a homeless university graduate by a stranger at a salsa contest. Within four years, Maggie’s All-Natural Fresh Salsas & Dips was on shelves in 38 states across Whole Foods, Walmart and Sam’s Club. In 2015 the business sold with Garden Fresh to Campbell’s Soup for $231 million. That trajectory is the substance behind Cook’s keynote work. The 3R Framework she uses with corporate audiences (Resourceful, Resilient, Relentless) is not a packaged model written for the stage. It is the operating discipline that took the company from $12,000 in annual revenue to $1.9 million in a single year after the Whole Foods listing, and ultimately to a nine-figure exit. She has codified it in “Mindful Success,” her book endorsed by Jack Canfield, and translates it for Fortune 500 leadership teams looking for a credible voice on building under constraint. The credentials sit alongside the operating record. The U.S. Small Business Administration named her Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2009. The University of Charleston, where she arrived from a Mexican orphanage on a basketball scholarship, inducted her into its Athletics Hall of Fame and later awarded an honorary Doctorate of Laws. In 2022 she was inducted into the NAWBO Hall of Fame and joined its Board of Directors. What buyers tend to remember is the second chapter. After the Campbell’s exit, Cook returned to the orphanage where she grew up, served as US Program Director for its parent organisation, and helped coordinate the rescue of 31 children from cartel exploitation. That is what gives her resilience content its weight: a founder who built a national brand, exited it cleanly, and went back to the place that shaped her with the proceeds. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and scale-up leadership Resilience and high-performance mindset Purpose-driven leadership Diversity, equity and inclusion Mental conditioning and personal transformation Women in business and Latina leadership Corporate culture and employee engagement Ideal for Sales and commercial leadership conferences looking for a founder voice on building through rejection. CHROs and people leaders running engagement, DEI or culture-change programmes that need lived authority rather than theoretical framing. Leadership offsites where the senior team needs an external operator perspective on resilience and decision-making under constraint. Hispanic and Latina employee resource groups, women-in-business networks and bilingual audiences across the U.S. and Latin America. Audience outcomes A working version of the 3R Framework (Resourceful, Resilient, Relentless) that leaders can apply to their own commercial decisions. A clearer read on how constraint and rejection get converted into operating advantage in a real scale-up. Specific mental-conditioning techniques the speaker used personally to keep building through homelessness, ninety rejections and capital constraints. A practical sense of what changes inside a leader when they stop treating adversity as a setback and start treating it as input. Renewed commitment in the room, especially among under-represented and bilingual employee groups, to act on ambitions they had quietly written off.

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

Why organisations work with Charlie Whyman A working B2B marketing operating model. The OTTER Framework gives commercial teams a five-step planning structure that ties objectives to tools, training, expectations and review, used inside her consultancy and her current managing director role. Operator credibility, not consultant theory. She runs a specialised aviation services business as managing director of TGIS Aviation, so her commercial advice lands as something already being applied at the top of a P&L. A point of view on customer curiosity as a commercial discipline. Her podcast, The Curiosity Key, and her speaker work argue that better questioning of customers is the input that most B2B marketing teams skip and most commercial strategies depend on. A direct route into the experience of women leading in male-dominated commercial sectors. She has built her career across automotive, mining, shipping and aviation, and speaks credibly to organisations trying to move that conversation past slogans. Biography highlights Managing Director, TGIS Aviation Ltd, appointed 2024 Founder, Curious B2B Marketing, 2017 Creator of the OTTER Framework, a five-step B2B marketing planning system Host, The Curiosity Key podcast Founder, Palmavera, an award-winning Sardinian olive oil business, 2006 Keynote speaker, BHBIA Annual Conference 2025 Biography Most B2B marketing functions are full of activity and short of insight. Campaigns get built before customer questions get asked. That gap is what Whyman has spent the last decade attacking, first through her consultancy Curious B2B Marketing and now through the OTTER Framework, a five-step planning structure that forces objectives, tools, training, expectations and review into one commercial conversation. She is unusual in pairing that practitioner work with an operating role. In 2024 she was appointed Managing Director of TGIS Aviation, a UK firm specialising in airworthiness management for aircraft and engine owners. The appointment came from inside the client base, after she ran the growth strategy as a consultant. It puts her on the board of a niche commercial business while she continues to teach and speak. Her career sits across sectors most marketers avoid: automotive, mining, shipping and aviation. She founded an award-winning Sardinian olive oil business in 2006, weathered redundancy twice, and built Curious B2B Marketing in 2017. She hosts The Curiosity Key podcast, where the recurring argument is that intentional curiosity about customers is the cheapest, most under-used commercial input available to B2B leaders. For organisations, the value is direct. She is a serving managing director with a structured method, a clear position on what marketing is for, and the lived experience of a woman leading in industries that do not naturally make space for her. She talks to commercial teams as one of them, and to leadership audiences as someone who has just come from the P&L. Key speaking topics B2B marketing strategy and operating systems Customer curiosity as a commercial discipline Sales and marketing alignment for commercial leaders Courage and action in career and commercial decisions Women leading in male-dominated industries Growth strategy in specialist B2B firms Ideal for CMOs, marketing directors and B2B commercial leaders CEOs and managing directors of specialist or technical SMEs Sales and marketing leadership teams under pressure to prove pipeline impact Industry conferences in engineering, manufacturing, life sciences and aviation Audience outcomes A clear test for whether a current marketing plan is built on customer insight or assumption The OTTER Framework as a working structure for B2B marketing planning A sharper position on how curiosity, questioning and customer research feed commercial strategy Practical language for talking about courage and action when career or commercial decisions stall A perspective on visibility and influence for women operating in male-dominated commercial environments

Why organisations work with Janie Frampton She has lived the problem leaders are trying to solve. As the second woman to referee in men’s professional football in England, she knows exactly how institutions react to someone who does not fit their template, and what it takes to stay. FIFA chose her as one of eight Women Referee Instructors worldwide, a credential that signals international standing in a governance body that rarely hands that status to outsiders. She moves credibly between elite sport, government counter-extremism work, and community programmes for under-represented young people. Few speakers in the inclusion space carry that range of institutional experience. She founded two organisations that deliver, not advocate: Ref Support UK for officials under pressure, and Team You for young people in socially deprived communities. The OBE and Deputy Lieutenancy of Dorset are not decorative. Both were awarded for the same body of work she speaks about, which gives audiences an uncommon alignment between platform and proof. Biography highlights OBE for services to equality in football, awarded in the 2024 New Year’s Honours. Deputy Lieutenant of Dorset. Second woman to referee in men’s professional football in England; qualified as a referee in December 1991. FIFA Referee Instructor from 2005 to 2015, working as Technical Instructor, Observer and Match Delegate across multiple World Cup cycles. Former FA Regional Referee Manager and National Manager for Education and Training of Referees. Vice President of the International Federation for Sports Officials; Patron of Muslim Women’s Network UK; Ambassador for Women in Football; co-founder of Ref Support UK and Team You. Biography Football was not built for women when Janie Frampton qualified as a referee in December 1991. The Football Association did not formally recognise the women’s game until 1994. She became the second woman to officiate in men’s professional football in England by working inside a system that had not designed a place for her, and then refused to leave it. From that starting point she moved into the infrastructure of the game. Between 2001 and 2012 she worked as an FA Regional Referee Manager and later as National Manager for Education and Training of Referees. FIFA appointed her as a Referee Instructor in 2005, and for the next decade she travelled as Technical Instructor, Observer and Match Delegate across World Cup cycles. She is one of only eight women globally to hold FIFA instructor status. The work outside the whistle is the part organisations buy. She co-founded Ref Support UK, the first charity in England focused on the welfare and development of football officials, and Team You, a social enterprise running leadership and life-skills programmes for young people in under-represented communities. She is Vice President of the International Federation for Sports Officials, Patron of Muslim Women’s Network UK, and an Ambassador for Women in Football. The 2024 OBE was awarded specifically for long-standing service to equality in football, locally and nationally. She was appointed Deputy Lieutenant of Dorset the same year. Audiences get someone whose inclusion work has been recognised by the institutions she was once excluded from, told in the voice of a referee: direct, unhedged, and used to making decisions people will argue with. Key speaking topics Gender equality in male-dominated institutions Inclusive leadership and culture change Resilience and decision-making under pressure Supporting under-represented talent in sport and business Governance and integrity in elite performance environments Mental health and the welfare of officials Values-based leadership Ideal for CHROs and DEI leads confronting the gap between inclusion policy and day-to-day culture. Boards and executive teams in sport, governing bodies and federations. Leadership programmes for women moving into senior roles in male-dominated sectors. Organisations working with young people, education bodies, and community outreach functions. Audience outcomes A clearer view of what structural inclusion looks like inside institutions that were not designed for it. Specific tactics for staying, deciding and leading when you are the first or only one in the room. A frank account of how elite sport handles pressure, welfare and accountability, translatable to corporate performance cultures. Direct examples of building organisations, Ref Support UK and Team You, that deliver measurable outcomes for the people they serve.

Why organisations work with Rene Godefroy He brings a named, ownable philosophy. The “Village Hero” frame gives leaders a vocabulary for belonging that survives the keynote and shows up in daily behaviour. His client roster is unusually concentrated in frontline, customer-facing organisations. Coca-Cola, Aflac, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Marriott, Hyatt, the U.S. Army. He speaks to the people who actually carry the brand. The resilience material is grounded in a specific lived narrative, not borrowed research. That gives the message authority with audiences who have heard the standard motivational circuit. He writes and speaks for retention and morale outcomes, not abstract inspiration. The brief he answers best is the one that mentions turnover, change fatigue, or a workforce that has stopped believing the slogans. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Village Hero, Inc., Atlanta. Author of Kick Your Excuses Goodbye: No Condition Is Permanent. Keynote work for Coca-Cola, AT&T, Aflac, Verizon Wireless, Marriott Hotels, Hyatt Hotels, and the U.S. Army. Speaker at the National Association for Pupil Transportation and the Michigan Assisted Living Association annual conference. Recognised by the City of Smyrna, Georgia with a dedicated “Rene Godefroy Day”; granted a key to the city by Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Runs humanitarian work supporting orphanages and health clinics in Haiti, partly funded by program fees. Biography Most workplace culture problems are not really about culture. They are about belonging. People decide to stay, contribute and look out for one another long before any engagement survey captures it, and they decide on the basis of small, daily signals from the people above them. That is the territory the “Village Hero” philosophy sits in. The frame comes from a specific origin. Godefroy grew up in a rural Haitian village, arrived in the United States as a young man with almost nothing, and worked through janitorial and service jobs before building a speaking practice. The argument he draws from that life is not biographical theatre. It is a working theory of how belonging is built one act at a time, and how leaders carry disproportionate responsibility for those acts inside an organisation. That theory has been tested against a particular kind of audience. His client list, Coca-Cola, AT&T, Aflac, Verizon Wireless, Marriott, Hyatt, the U.S. Army, is heavy on frontline and customer-facing workforces, where morale, retention and belief in the mission show up directly in operational performance. Kick Your Excuses Goodbye: No Condition Is Permanent extends the same material into individual accountability for change, particularly under pressure and constraint. He is most useful to organisations that have already tried the values posters and the engagement task force, and are now asking a more honest question. What behaviour, repeated daily by managers, would actually rebuild the social contract here. The Village Hero framework gives them a starting answer, and the City of Smyrna, Georgia, which declared a “Rene Godefroy Day” in his honour, gives a small civic indicator of the impression that practice has left. Key speaking topics Resilience and change leadership Workplace culture and belonging Employee engagement and morale Team performance under pressure Frontline leadership Purpose-driven leadership Personal accountability and mindset Ideal for HR, people and culture leaders rebuilding engagement and retention in frontline-heavy workforces Operations and customer experience leaders in retail, hospitality, telecoms, insurance, and logistics Sales kick-offs and dealer or franchisee networks that need a morale reset, not a tactics talk Defence, public sector and uniformed services audiences with high-pressure operating conditions Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for belonging that managers can use the next day, anchored in the “Village Hero” frame A direct, personal challenge to the stories teams tell themselves about change and constraint Concrete behaviours that lift morale and retention without waiting for a new culture programme A renewed sense of purpose for workforces fatigued by repeated restructuring and uncertainty

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

Why organisations work with Nicole DuBois A practising CHRO of a 600-person child welfare nonprofit, not a former operator. The HR strategy advice is current, not retrospective. A first-person account of an MS diagnosis, divorce and reinvention published as Unparalyzed, brought into corporate rooms by someone whose day job is running people strategy. Repeated recognition as a Top 100 HR Professional by OnConferences across multiple years, alongside membership of Chief and the OnCon Senior Council. A specific point of view on what authentic leadership costs women in senior roles, anchored in her own decision to publish under her real name after using a pseudonym. Useful to organisations whose own internal HR conversations on illness, caregiving and identity have outgrown the standard wellbeing vendor script. Biography highlights Chief Human Resources Officer, Graham Windham (NYC), responsible for HR strategy across talent, learning, compensation, benefits, employee relations and engagement for around 600 employees. Author of Unparalyzed: Beating an Invisible Pre-Midlife Crisis, originally published as Danielle M. Bryan and later reclaimed under her own name. Named a Top 100 HR Professional in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2025. Connector Award, New Jersey Human Resources Council (2024); Joint Legislative Commendation, State of New Jersey. Bachelor’s in Psychology and Urban Studies from Fordham, Master’s in Mental Health Counselling from NYU, Executive Education for Nonprofit Professionals at Columbia Business School. Member of Chief and the OnCon Senior Council. Biography Most organisations now talk openly about wellbeing, inclusion and authentic leadership. Fewer have senior people who can speak about those subjects in the first person without breaking the corporate register. Nicole DuBois sits in that smaller group. Her day job is running people strategy at Graham Windham, a New York child welfare nonprofit with around 600 employees. As Chief Human Resources Officer she leads talent, learning, compensation, benefits, employee relations and engagement, and she has done so since 2006. The work is operational and current, not a retired executive’s view of how HR used to function. The second layer is her memoir, Unparalyzed: Beating an Invisible Pre-Midlife Crisis. It tracks an MS diagnosis, a divorce after seventeen years of marriage, and a deliberate reinvention. The book was first published under a pseudonym at her publisher’s legal advice, and she has since chosen to reclaim it under her own name. That choice is the spine of her keynote on what authentic leadership actually costs women in senior roles. Repeated recognition as a Top 100 HR Professional, the Connector Award from the New Jersey Human Resources Council, and membership of Chief and the OnCon Senior Council place her inside the professional HR community her audiences are typically drawn from. Her education runs from Fordham and NYU through executive nonprofit work at Columbia Business School. The combination gives organisations a speaker who can hold an HR strategy conversation in the morning and a wellbeing keynote in the afternoon without either feeling rehearsed. Key speaking topics Authentic leadership for women in senior roles Employee wellbeing and the corporate response to chronic illness Engagement and retention in mission-driven organisations Multigenerational workforces Non-linear career paths and personal reinvention Coaching, mentoring and sponsorship inside HR-led talent strategies Ideal for CHROs, CPOs and heads of HR shaping wellbeing, engagement and DEI strategies ERG leaders and women’s networks looking for a senior voice on authentic leadership Nonprofit and mission-driven employers managing retention in lean workforces Internal leadership development programmes for high-potential women Audience outcomes A clearer sense of what authentic leadership looks like in practice when the leader is also living through chronic illness, caregiving or major personal change A current CHRO view on what employee wellbeing programmes get right and where they still miss the people they are aimed at Language and confidence to raise invisible health conditions inside leadership conversations A reframing of non-linear careers as a credibility asset rather than a gap to be explained

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

Why organisations work with Kelly Mackin A research instrument leaders can actually use. The Motives Met Human Needs Assessment surfaces the 28 psychological, emotional, and social needs that drive a specific employee, team, or culture, replacing one-size-fits-all engagement scores with personalised data. A direct challenge to universal hierarchy thinking. Mackin’s research argues that Maslow-style and engagement-survey frameworks misrepresent how needs actually distribute across a workforce, and gives leaders a defensible alternative. Award-winning published work. Work Life Well-Lived is a Nonfiction Authors Association Bronze Award winner and an Amazon best-seller in its category, giving senior buyers a citable reference point. Practical depth beyond keynote theatre. Mackin trained as a cognitive behavioural coach and meditation teacher and runs assessments, workshops, and leadership accelerators, so the keynote connects to a delivery system the organisation can run after she leaves. Biography highlights CEO and co-founder, Motives Met, the workplace well-being platform behind her research. Author of Work Life Well-Lived: The Motives Met Pathway to No-B.S. Well-Being at Work (Greenleaf Book Group, 2024). Nonfiction Authors Association Bronze Book Award winner. Creator of the Motives Met Human Needs Assessment, identifying 28 motives that drive thriving at work. BA in Communications, Wittenberg University; certified cognitive behavioural therapy practitioner and meditation teacher. Host of DisruptHR San Diego; featured in Authority Magazine and the Human Capital Innovations webinar series. Biography Most workplace well-being programmes assume that everyone is motivated by the same things in roughly the same order. That assumption shapes every engagement survey, every wellness benefit, every “top reasons people quit” list. It is also wrong. Kelly Mackin’s research at Motives Met identifies 28 distinct psychological, emotional, and social motives, and shows that the ranking varies sharply between individuals, teams, and roles. The work sits inside Motives Met, the platform she co-founded and leads as CEO. Its core instrument, the Human Needs Assessment, surfaces an individual’s top motives and maps them against the conditions a manager or organisation is actually providing. The output is a usable diagnostic for leaders who have run out of patience with engagement scores that do not tell them what to do next. Her 2024 book, Work Life Well-Lived: The Motives Met Pathway to No-B.S. Well-Being at Work, became an Amazon category best-seller and won a Bronze Book Award from the Nonfiction Authors Association. The technical foundation comes from her training as a cognitive behavioural therapy practitioner and meditation teacher, which she pairs with quantitative research methods to keep the framework empirical rather than inspirational. For HR and culture leaders, the relevance is operational. Mackin gives them a vocabulary for the gap between what a workforce reports on a survey and what individual people actually need from their work, and a measurement layer they can act on across hybrid teams, multigenerational workforces, and post-restructure cultures. Key speaking topics Workplace well-being and the science of thriving at work Psychological needs and motivation at work Human-first leadership and management practice Stress, burnout, and work-life harmony Psychological safety and emotional inclusion Culture design for hybrid and multigenerational teams Ideal for CHROs and heads of people redesigning engagement and well-being strategy Culture, DEI, and talent leaders responsible for retention and inclusion outcomes Senior managers and team leaders running large or multigenerational teams Leadership development and L&D heads designing manager capability programmes Audience outcomes A working understanding of the 28 motives framework and how it differs from Maslow and engagement-survey models Specific questions leaders can ask their teams to surface individual motives, not just aggregate sentiment A diagnostic lens on where current well-being and engagement spend is misaligned with actual employee needs Language and structure for conversations on burnout, work-life harmony, and psychological safety A clearer link between well-being investment and performance outcomes leaders can defend internally

Why organisations work with Mimi Nicklin A productised methodology, ALUR (Authenticity, Listening, Understanding, Recognition), that gives line managers something more usable than “be more empathetic” and translates into engagement, psychological safety, and retention conversations. Practitioner credibility from a former CEO of a global advertising agency, so the empathy argument is framed in commercial language CHROs can defend to the CFO. Deep multigenerational fluency, including the HBR IdeaCast on generational differences and a thesis on listening to Millennial and Gen Z employees instead of forcing conformity. Strong Asia-Pacific and MENA market footprint, which is rare for an English-language workplace culture speaker and useful for regional and global rollouts beyond the usual US and UK circuit. Three published books on empathy at work, including Softening the Edge and Empathy at Work, that give internal HR sponsors something concrete to circulate before and after the session. Biography highlights Founder of Empathy Everywhere, a global empathy training and engagement platform. Author of Softening the Edge and Empathy at Work, with a new book, 40 Ways to Connect with People, forthcoming. Featured guest on the Harvard Business Review IdeaCast, “How Empathy Helps Bridge Generational Differences”. Former CEO of a global advertising agency, with 15+ years in marketing and brand strategy across 25 markets. Has trained 18,500+ professionals across Fortune 500 organisations, and shared the stage with figures including Bill Gates, for clients including Emirates, Capgemini, and Daikin. Described across industry listings as the #1 EQ Keynote Speaker (USA) for 2026, and the #1 Workplace Wellbeing Leader in Malaysia. Biography Most empathy conversations in corporate settings die at the values poster. Leaders nod, HR runs a workshop, engagement scores barely move, and managers go back to managing on output. Mimi Nicklin’s work starts from the assumption that the problem is operational, not philosophical: empathy has no traction inside a business until it is broken into behaviours a tired manager can use on a Tuesday afternoon. That is what the ALUR methodology, the framework behind her platform Empathy Everywhere, attempts to do. Authenticity, Listening, Understanding, Recognition. Four practices, taught as habits, that sit underneath the messier work of running multigenerational teams, restoring psychological safety after restructure, and rebuilding engagement when hybrid has flattened the cues people used to read each other by. Her credibility on this is unusual because it is commercial first. She built and ran a global advertising agency before she became a full-time author and speaker, and her writing in Softening the Edge and Empathy at Work argues the business case in numbers a CFO will accept, not in the language of wellbeing alone. Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast brought her on to make the case that generational friction is mostly a listening failure, an argument that has since shaped how a number of her client organisations talk about Gen Z retention. The work sits at the practical end of the people agenda, which is why CHROs, heads of culture, and senior HR leaders book her rather than chief executives. She is the speaker you commission when the engagement survey came back worse than last year, the exit interviews keep using the same words, and someone needs to give the leadership population a usable answer. Key speaking topics Human skills as the competitive edge in the age of AI Listening-led leadership and the ALUR methodology Empathy as a measurable workplace capability Multigenerational engagement and Gen Z retention Psychological safety in restructured and hybrid teams Mental health and wellbeing at work Conflict resolution and difficult conversations Inclusion as an everyday management practice Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers commissioning culture or engagement programmes after a low survey or restructure Heads of L&D rolling out leadership development to senior managers across multigenerational, multi-market teams Heads of DEI, wellbeing, or culture transformation looking for a substantive empathy capability that does not collapse into wellness theatre Regional HR leaders in Asia-Pacific, MENA, and Europe running global culture programmes that need a speaker with cross-market fluency Audience outcomes A practical operating definition of empathy at work, broken into the four ALUR behaviours, that managers can apply the next day Specific tactics for closing the engagement gap between senior leaders and Millennial or Gen Z talent without forcing either side to conform A clearer reading of where psychological safety has eroded inside hybrid and restructured teams, and what restores it A commercial case for empathy that connects to retention, productivity, and customer outcomes, not only wellbeing Confidence that empathy is a teachable management skill, not a personality trait some managers happen to have

Why organisations work with Marverine Cole She has anchored live news under pressure for Sky News, 5 News, ITV and the BBC, and brings that discipline to stage hosting where the running order changes in the moment. Her Mind Media Award for Journalist of the Year, won for the BBC Radio 4 documentary Black Girls Don’t Cry, gives her standing to chair sessions on mental health, race and representation without sounding rehearsed. An honorary doctorate from Birmingham City University and a four-year stint running its undergraduate journalism courses mean she can interview senior leaders and academics on equal footing. As Britain’s first Black female accredited beer sommelier and BBC Good Food columnist, she opens unusual commercial routes for brand and consumer events where culture, lifestyle and gender intersect. Biography highlights Newsreader on ITV1’s Good Morning Britain; previous news anchor roles at Sky News (World News and Business Report), 5 News, BBC Midlands Today and ITV Central News Journalist of the Year, Mind Media Awards 2019, for the BBC Radio 4 documentary Black Girls Don’t Cry Honorary doctorate from Birmingham City University; former Director of Undergraduate Journalism courses, Birmingham School of Media (2018 to 2022) Britain’s first Black female accredited beer sommelier; resident beer columnist for BBC Good Food magazine Co-presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live; presenter on Classic FM; contributor to BBC Radio 1Xtra and BBC 5 Live Contributing essayist to Sir Lenny Henry’s 2021 book Black British Lives Matter; board member of Birmingham Royal Ballet and The Student View Biography Live broadcast craft is a narrow skill, and it sits at the centre of what flagship corporate events still need. Cole has spent more than two decades inside that craft, presenting news for Sky News, 5 News, ITV Central, BBC Midlands Today and now ITV1’s Good Morning Britain. Sky News audiences watched her front a five-hour overnight World News and Business Report bulletin, including coverage of the 2008 Mumbai attacks. The journalism is not a sideline. Her BBC Radio 4 documentary Black Girls Don’t Cry, on the disproportionate mental health pressures facing Black women, won Journalist of the Year at the Mind Media Awards in 2019. She has produced and presented further work for BBC Radio 4 and BBC 1Xtra on female gambling addiction and on women in UK rap, and contributed an essay to Sir Lenny Henry’s Black British Lives Matter in 2021. Birmingham City University, where she trained as a broadcast journalist, brought her back as Director of Undergraduate Journalism courses from 2018 to 2022 and later awarded her an honorary doctorate. That academic spell shows in her interviewing: she frames questions for senior leaders without losing the audience in the room. The off-news work fills out the brief. She is Britain’s first Black female accredited beer sommelier and BBC Good Food magazine’s resident beer columnist, presents on Classic FM, and co-presents Saturday Live on BBC Radio 4 with Reverend Richard Coles. For event organisers, that range translates into a host who can move from a board panel on workplace mental health to a brand showcase to a closing-night cultural conversation without changing register. Key speaking topics Event hosting, moderation and on-stage interviewing Awards ceremony presentation Mental health and Black women’s experience Race, representation and inclusion in media Women in broadcast journalism Consumer culture, lifestyle and the beer industry Birmingham, the Midlands and regional creative industries Ideal for Conference organisers commissioning a senior host for live, multi-track main-stage programmes DEI, wellbeing and ERG leaders running flagship internal events on race, mental health or women in the workplace Brand and consumer marketing teams hosting product launches, awards or media events Cultural and arts organisations seeking a credible chair for public conversations and panels Audience outcomes A live programme that holds energy through agenda changes, technical hitches and difficult guests Sharper, more candid contributions from senior panellists prompted by a journalistically trained interviewer A session on mental health or representation that lands with substance, drawn from her own reported work rather than secondhand framing A consistent on-brand voice across a multi-day event run by a single experienced anchor

Why organisations work with Mike Robbins He treats appreciation, vulnerability, and psychological safety as operational levers, not soft values, and gives leaders a vocabulary their teams can act on the next morning. He has spent twenty years inside the cultures of Google, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, eBay, Gap, Schwab, Airbnb, the NBA, and Pixar. The frame is tested against how high-stakes teams actually behave. His book Bring Your Whole Self to Work and the related TEDxBerkeley talk gave senior leaders a usable language for authenticity that does not collapse into oversharing or performance. He holds the Certified Speaking Professional designation from the National Speakers Association, the top earned credential in his profession, and is one of fewer than ten percent of speakers worldwide to hold it. His perspective sits on an unusual seam: elite-level baseball at Stanford and in the Kansas City Royals system, then two decades of cultural work with serious operating companies. The room recognises the standard he is calling for. Biography highlights Author of five books published by Hay House, including Bring Your Whole Self to Work and We’re All in This Together, translated into fifteen languages. Speaker at TEDxBerkeley, with three TEDx talks that have reached close to 2.3 million views. Featured in the New York Times, on ABC News, and in Harvard Business Review; hosts the weekly We’re All in This Together podcast. Stanford graduate (American Studies, specialisation in race and ethnicity); pitched for Stanford in the College World Series. Drafted by the New York Yankees out of high school; played three professional seasons in the Kansas City Royals minor league system. Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), National Speakers Association. Biography Most teams underperform their talent. Not because the people are wrong, but because the cultural conditions around them, trust, candour, appreciation, the willingness to be honest under pressure, are weaker than the work demands. That gap is the territory Mike Robbins has worked in for twenty-five years, across more than 2,000 programmes in 17 countries. His five books, published by Hay House and translated into fifteen languages, build a coherent argument about how authenticity and appreciation operate as performance variables inside teams. Bring Your Whole Self to Work and We’re All in This Together are the most cited. Both have moved from leadership reading lists into the working language that companies like Google, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, Airbnb, the NBA, and Pixar use to describe their own culture work. The intellectual frame is sharpened by an unusual background. Robbins pitched for Stanford in the College World Series and spent three seasons in the Kansas City Royals minor league system before injuries ended his playing career. He understands what high-performance teams demand of the people inside them, and he understands what fails. That perspective sits alongside a Stanford degree in American Studies with a specialisation in race and ethnicity, and the Certified Speaking Professional designation from the National Speakers Association. His TEDxBerkeley talk on bringing your whole self to work has reached audiences far beyond corporate stages, and his Forbes column extends the same argument into how leaders practise appreciation, navigate change, and create psychological safety without slipping into performance. The throughline is consistent: culture is not climate, it is capability, and the leaders who treat it that way get more from their people. Key speaking topics Team culture and psychological safety Authenticity and vulnerability at work Appreciation as a performance practice Emotional intelligence for leaders Belonging and inclusion inside teams Leading through change and uncertainty Trust and high-performing teams Human connection in an AI-accelerating workplace Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers rebuilding engagement and team culture after restructure or hybrid transition Senior leadership teams who want a shared language for trust, candour, and appreciation Heads of talent and learning designing culture and leadership development programmes Sales, R&D, and operating leaders responsible for the performance of large, distributed teams Audience outcomes A practical model for psychological safety that leaders can apply inside their own teams the same week Specific behaviours that turn appreciation from a soft idea into a measurable team practice A clear distinction between authenticity that builds trust and disclosure that erodes it Tools for engaging conflict directly rather than routing around it A shared team vocabulary for the cultural conditions that high performance actually depends on