Innovation & Disruption

Why organisations work with Kevin Olusola He performs the argument rather than narrating it. The “Foundation +1” idea (start with one simple element, add one layer at a time) is built live on stage through cello and beatbox, so the audience sees the method before they hear the framing. Three Grammys with Pentatonix and a Sony recording contract give him a credibility profile most innovation speakers cannot match, particularly with audiences sceptical of corporate creativity content. His route into music sits next to a Yale East Asian Studies degree and extended fellowship time in Beijing, which gives the cross-cultural innovation material genuine personal weight rather than a borrowed example. Opened TED2014 in Vancouver and was hand-picked by Quincy Jones for the 2012 Montreux Jazz Festival, alongside Bobby McFerrin and Chick Corea. He has worked at the level of stage where corporate audiences notice. Biography highlights Three-time Grammy winner with Pentatonix: Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella (2015 and 2016) and Best Country Duo/Group Performance (2017 with Dolly Parton). Won NBC’s The Sing-Off season three with Pentatonix, leading to a Sony Music Entertainment contract. Opened TED2014 in Vancouver with a celloboxing performance. Selected by Quincy Jones to represent him at the 2012 Montreux Jazz Festival, on a programme with Bobby McFerrin and Chick Corea. Yale University, East Asian Studies, with pre-med coursework. Spent extended fellowship time in Beijing and became fluent in Mandarin. Pioneered celloboxing, the simultaneous playing of cello and beatboxing; his viral 2011 video of Mark Summer’s “Julie-O” led directly to his Pentatonix recruitment. Biography The first time most audiences see Olusola on stage they are watching a method, not a performance. A single scale on the cello, a single percussive sound, then another, then another, until a Daft Punk medley or a Pharrell track is built in front of them out of parts that were obviously small a minute ago. He calls the underlying idea “Foundation +1”, and it is the spine of his corporate keynote work. The performance credentials sit behind the method. Pentatonix have won three Grammys, signed with Sony Music Entertainment after winning NBC’s The Sing-Off in 2011, and built one of the largest a cappella audiences on YouTube. Olusola opened TED2014 in Vancouver and was selected by Quincy Jones to represent him at the 2012 Montreux Jazz Festival, on a programme with Bobby McFerrin and Chick Corea. The cross-cultural material runs in parallel. Olusola read East Asian Studies at Yale with pre-med coursework, and spent extended fellowship time in Beijing where he became fluent in Mandarin. The idea of “celloboxing” itself came from a teacher in China, who asked him whether he had ever considered playing cello and beatboxing at the same time. The biographical detail is doing real work in the keynote: it gives a specific story for how stepping into an unrelated domain produced an original artistic form. For senior teams, Olusola is closer to a performing keynote than to a conventional management speaker. The intellectual content is light, the demonstration is heavy, and the value sits in how an audience leaves thinking about creative method and ambition. He suits openings, closings, and offsite moments where the brief is to shift the room rather than to teach a framework. Key speaking topics Creativity as a working method Cross-disciplinary innovation Ambitious goal-setting and execution Cross-cultural perspective and collaboration Team dynamics in creative work Performance keynote and corporate entertainment Ideal for Annual kick-off and conference opening or closing slots Leadership offsites focused on creativity, innovation, or culture Awards dinners and high-profile client events Internal events where a sceptical senior audience needs a non-standard creative input Audience outcomes A shared, memorable reference point for breaking ambitious goals into a starting move A concrete example of how cross-disciplinary thinking produces original output A genuine performance moment that anchors the rest of the agenda A reframing of creativity as practice rather than personality

Why organisations work with Jim McKelvey He built the only company on record to beat Amazon in a head-to-head product fight, and turned that experience into a transferable framework leadership teams can apply to their own categories. He sits at the rare intersection of operator and macroeconomic policymaker, currently chairing the board of the St. Louis Fed while still building companies; few speakers can move credibly between Square’s product decisions and the rate environment shaping them. His Innovation Stack thesis gives strategy teams a sharper diagnostic than the standard moat conversation: not what protects your business today, but how many interlocking decisions a rival would need to replicate to dislodge you. He brings a public, named example of how to think about workforce reinvention through LaunchCode, which has placed more than 4,000 non-traditional candidates into technology roles at Mastercard, Boeing and others. Biography highlights Co-founder of Square (now Block, Inc.), launched with Jack Dorsey in 2009; original card reader held in the Museum of Modern Art permanent collection. Author of The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time, Portfolio/Penguin, 2020. Chair of the board of directors, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, designated 2022 and redesignated 2023; Class C Independent Director since 2017. Founder of LaunchCode, a non-profit that has placed over 4,000 people into technology careers across 500-plus hiring partners. Founder and CEO of Invisibly, rebuilding the economics between publishers, readers and data. McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis named in his honour in 2019 following a $15 million gift. Biography Amazon launched a payments product designed to kill Square. It undercut on price, leaned on its scale, and inside a year quietly withdrew. That contest is the substrate of Jim McKelvey’s argument: when a category is genuinely new, single innovations do not protect you. Stacks of them do. The Innovation Stack, published by Portfolio in 2020, formalises what McKelvey lived through as Square’s co-founder. The thesis is that companies which expand markets, rather than capture them, are built from chains of decisions where each new solution forces the next. Competitors who copy one element fail because the system, not the feature, is the moat. It is the working theory boards reach for when they want a sharper alternative to the conventional advantage conversation. McKelvey’s authority on this question is not solely literary. He chairs the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, a Class C Independent Director seat held since 2017 and the chair role designated for 2022 and 2023, which gives him a continuous view of the macro environment in which capital and category decisions are made. He also founded LaunchCode, which has placed more than 4,000 people into engineering jobs at firms including Mastercard and Boeing by treating the talent gap as a system problem, not a training one. His current company, Invisibly, is an attempt to rebuild the economic contract between publishers, readers and the platforms that mediate them. Like Square in 2009, it is a wager on a category that does not yet exist in the form it needs to. That is the work McKelvey is recognisably good at, and the work he can teach leadership teams to see in their own organisations. Key speaking topics The Innovation Stack as a strategy framework Category creation versus category capture Defending against larger incumbents Entrepreneurship at scale Workforce reinvention and technology talent Payments, fintech and the economics of money Boards, capital and the macro environment Ideal for CEOs and executive committees rethinking competitive moat Strategy and corporate development leaders evaluating new categories Founders and scale-up leadership teams beyond product-market fit Boards and innovation committees revisiting growth assumptions Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the Innovation Stack and how to map their own organisation’s stack A specific lens for assessing whether a current advantage is replicable or systemic Sharper questions to bring to category bets, M&A targets, and adjacency moves An operator’s account of beating a larger incumbent without matching its resources A clearer view of how monetary and capital conditions shape commercial strategy

Why organisations work with Mark van Rijmenam He gives boards a named decision framework, WAVE (Watch, Adapt, Verify, Empower), drawn from his book Now What?, now built into an operating diagnostic that scores a leadership team’s AI readiness against its own industry and regulatory context. The framework translates futurist material into something a planning cycle can actually use. His research base spans AI, blockchain and the metaverse across six books, so the technology view is not a single-trend pitch but a structured map of how these layers interact for an operating business. Salesforce named him one of 16 human voices shaping the future of AI, which gives buyers an external credibility marker beyond bureau ranking. He has built and run technology platforms himself, Datafloq and Futurwise, and has turned the WAVE framework into the Intelligence Age Scorecard, so the perspective is informed by building the tools, not only commenting on them. Format range is unusually wide for a futurist: he delivered the first TEDx talk in virtual reality and a TEDx in Athens via digital twin, and runs sessions in person, virtually and as holographic delivery when the brief calls for it. Biography highlights PhD in Management, University of Technology Sydney Author of six books, including Step into the Metaverse (Wiley) and Now What? How to Ride the Tsunami of Change Founder of Datafloq and of Futurwise, an AI-powered insights platform Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) and Global Speaking Fellow Recognised by Salesforce as one of 16 human voices shaping the future of AI Delivered the first TEDx Talk in virtual reality (2020) and a TEDx talk in Athens via digital twin (2023) Biography The hardest question for a board right now is not whether AI matters. It is what to commit to, when most of the technology in front of them will be obsolete in eighteen months. Van Rijmenam works on that question. His latest book, Now What? How to Ride the Tsunami of Change, sets out the WAVE framework: Watch, Adapt, Verify, Empower. The framework is built to be used by an executive team in a planning cycle, not admired from a stage. The credibility behind that work is structural. A PhD in management from the University of Technology Sydney sits alongside six published books that span big data, blockchain, the metaverse and now generative AI. Step into the Metaverse was published by Wiley in 2022. Future Visions, written in five days as an experiment in human-AI co-authorship with ChatGPT, came the following year. The body of work treats each technology layer as part of a connected operating reality, not as standalone trends. He builds the tools he talks about. Datafloq curates emerging-technology intelligence for executives. Futurwise is an AI-powered learning environment he founded to give organisations a structured way to track signal across technology, regulation and culture. He has since turned WAVE into the Intelligence Age Scorecard, a diagnostic that scores a leadership team’s AI readiness, surfaces the gap between what the C-suite believes and what management experiences, and returns a 90-day action plan. Salesforce named him one of 16 human voices shaping the future of AI, and the Global Speakers Federation has admitted him as a Global Speaking Fellow, a designation held by fewer than fifty people worldwide. The format choices reinforce the argument. He delivered the first TEDx Talk in virtual reality in 2020, and a TEDx in Athens in 2023 through a digital twin. For a buyer, the relevant signal is not the novelty. It is that the speaker is using the technologies he is asking leadership teams to make decisions about. Key speaking topics Generative AI and enterprise deployment Strategic foresight and scenario planning Decision architecture under exponential change The metaverse and immersive business models Blockchain and distributed-ledger applications AI ethics and governance Future of work and human-machine collaboration Ideal for Boards and executive committees setting AI and emerging-technology strategy Strategy, innovation and transformation leaders moving from pilots to operational deployment CTO, CIO and Chief Digital Officer audiences Leadership offsites and planning cycles where a structured foresight method is needed Audience outcomes A working decision architecture (WAVE) that an executive team can apply to its own AI and technology bets, with the option of a structured readiness diagnostic that benchmarks the team against its industry A structured map of how AI, blockchain and immersive technologies interact across the operating model A clearer view of where to commit capital now and where to keep optionality A read on where leadership perception and operational reality diverge on AI, including early preparedness for AGI-level systems Specific examples of organisations that have moved from technology pilots into operational advantage

Why organisations work with Peter Crolla He has helped build two Formula 1 teams from scratch. He joined Haas in 2015 as the team’s 14th employee and joined Cadillac in 2025 to prepare its 2026 debut. Few F1 practitioners have stood up a competitive operation from zero more than once. His content is grounded in operational mechanics. Audiences leave with how the pit wall actually works, how a 1.8-second pit stop with 22 staff and 36 tasks is choreographed, and how compliance with FIA scrutineering is built into every weekend. Formula 1 sits where exacting regulation meets competitive margins of milliseconds. Leaders in pharmaceuticals, financial services, aviation, and energy find the comparison directly applicable to their own environments. He can explain how F1 reduced driver fatalities from over 40 between 1950 and 1994 to one in the three decades since. The shift came from a system in which safety stopped being a source of competitive advantage and was shared across rival teams. Two decades across British Touring Cars, F3, McLaren, Haas, and Cadillac give him grounded comparative views on which high-performance practices transfer between organisations and which collapse outside their original context. Biography highlights Race Team Manager at the Cadillac F1 Team, preparing the operation for its 2026 Formula 1 debut. Team Manager at Haas F1 Team for eight seasons, joining as the 14th employee in 2015 ahead of the team’s 2016 debut. Previously Team Leader at McLaren Racing, working alongside World Champions Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso. Oversaw Haas’s maiden Formula 1 pole position at the 2022 Brazilian Grand Prix. Helped Haas secure FIA Three-Star Environmental Accreditation ahead of the 2023 season. Awarded the Teamwork Award at the 2013 MIA Business Excellence Awards during his time at Team Dynamics in the British Touring Car Championship. Biography In Formula 1, a pit stop now takes 1.8 seconds. Twenty-two people complete thirty-six tasks while the car is stationary. One missed cue and a podium becomes a points-paying afternoon. That kind of choreography is what Peter Crolla has spent his career producing. He joined the Haas F1 Team in 2015 as its fourteenth employee, before the team had been on a grid, and stayed for eight seasons as Team Manager. In 2025 he left to take the same role at the Cadillac F1 Team, where he is preparing the operation for its 2026 debut. Doing this work twice in a decade puts him in a small group of practitioners who have stood up a competitive Formula 1 team from a standing start. F1 teams of 1800 staff coordinate around twenty-four non-negotiable race weekend deadlines a year, under one of the most exacting regulatory regimes in commercial sport. Crolla speaks about how that machine actually runs. He explains the daily tension between psychological safety and personal accountability, and how F1 turned over forty driver fatalities between 1950 and 1994 into one in the three decades since. The change came from stopping competitive teams from hoarding what they learned about safety. Key speaking topics High-performance team operations Leadership in regulated, high-pressure environments Operational excellence under non-negotiable deadlines Safety culture and risk transformation Building organisations from a standing start Continuous improvement and marginal gains Sustainability in elite motorsport Ideal for COOs and operations directors in regulated sectors such as financial services, pharmaceuticals, aviation, and energy, where compliance and competitive performance have to be solved together. Founders, transformation leads, and executive teams building or rebuilding an organisation from a standing start. Senior risk and safety leaders looking at how F1’s cultural transformation was actually achieved over three decades. HR and people leaders focused on psychological safety and accountability in technical or engineering-led organisations. Audience outcomes The choreography of a 1.8-second pit stop across 22 staff, including where it most often breaks down. The specific practices that keep psychological safety and personal accountability in balance inside an F1 operation. How F1’s safety record went from over forty driver fatalities in its first four decades to one in its last three, including the specific decision to stop competing on safety. A clear separation between high-performance practices that transfer between industries and those that depend on the specifics of F1.

Why organisations work with James Poulter Operator credibility. He built and sold a voice AI company (Vixen Labs to House 337, 2023) before becoming a speaker. The frameworks come from running the work, not commenting on it. A named implementation model. The AI Nervous System framework, published in AI @ Work (Bloomsbury, 2026), gives leadership teams a structure for embedding AI across functions rather than treating it as a tools procurement question. Inside view of how a global brand actually adopts emerging tech. As Head of Emerging Platforms at LEGO, he led LEGO Life and the GIPHY partnership at consumer scale, so the case material is concrete. Comfortable with the ethics conversation without losing the commercial argument. He has advised the Church of England Digital Board alongside corporate clients, which signals range when the AI question shifts from productivity to governance. Biography highlights Founder and former CEO of Vixen Labs, acquired by House 337 in December 2023. Founder of ThreePoint Labs; Head of AI at Dunham & Company, Dallas. Former Head of Emerging Platforms, The LEGO Group, leading LEGO Life and the LEGO GIPHY channel. Author of AI @ Work: Rewire your team and yourself for the AI Revolution (Bloomsbury, August 2026). Advisor to the Church of England Digital Board; board roles with Christian Aid and Raiser. Client and advisory work cited with Amazon, Verizon, Bosch and Universal Music. Biography The hard part of corporate AI is rarely the model. It is what happens once a leadership team agrees to use one. Procurement, legal, brand, product, and people functions each have a stake, and most organisations have no shared structure for resolving the trade-offs between them. This is the territory James Poulter has worked in for the past decade. At The LEGO Group, as Head of Emerging Platforms, he led LEGO Life and managed the brand’s GIPHY partnership, learning at consumer scale how a heritage business absorbs new technology without breaking its existing one. He then founded Vixen Labs, a UK voice and conversational AI consultancy, scaled it through the pandemic, and sold it to House 337 in December 2023. His current work sits inside that operator lineage. Through ThreePoint Labs and as Head of AI at Dallas-based Dunham & Company, he advises leadership teams on how to move from isolated AI pilots to a coherent operating capability. His forthcoming book, AI @ Work: Rewire your team and yourself for the AI Revolution (Bloomsbury, August 2026), sets out the AI Nervous System framework, a model for connecting model choice, team design, ethics, and decision rights across the business. The client list spans Amazon, Verizon, Bosch and Universal Music, alongside advisory work with the Church of England Digital Board. The range matters: Poulter is comfortable when the conversation is about productivity gains, and equally comfortable when it shifts to governance, values, and what an organisation should refuse to automate. Key speaking topics AI implementation across the enterprise The AI Nervous System framework Conversational and voice AI in commercial strategy AI ethics and responsible deployment Innovation culture inside established organisations The future of work in an AI-native business Emerging platforms and consumer technology adoption Ideal for CEOs and executive teams sponsoring an enterprise AI agenda CTOs, CIOs and Chief AI Officers moving from pilots to operating capability CHROs and people leaders redesigning teams around AI capability Boards and advisory groups grappling with AI ethics and governance Audience outcomes A structured way to assess where their organisation actually is on AI adoption, rather than where the vendor deck claims it is A working vocabulary for the AI Nervous System framework and how its components map to real decisions Worked examples from LEGO, Vixen Labs and named enterprise clients, not generic case studies A clearer position on the ethics calls leadership has to own rather than delegate to a working group

Why organisations work with Jeff Havens A defined thesis on generational workplaces, set out in his Pearson FT Press book “Us vs. Them,” that there are not four or five generations at work and that most generational training reinforces the problem it claims to solve. A keynote portfolio that covers four distinct organisational tensions, change (“Conquering Tomorrow”), leadership (“Unleash Your Inner Tyrant”), innovation (“Uncrapify Your Future”) and generations (“Us vs. Them”), each anchored in a published book or a defined argument. Built and runs Levity University, a microlearning platform of more than 400 courses serving over half a million learners a year, so the keynote sits on top of an operating training business, not just a speaking practice. A working comedian’s structure applied to a serious management argument, which is why CNBC and Fox Business book him as a recurring guest and why named clients including Ford, General Electric, JP Morgan, McDonald’s and Berkshire Hathaway use him at conferences where attention fatigue is the main risk. Biography highlights Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Vanderbilt University. Author of “Us vs. Them” (Pearson FT Press), “Unleash Your Inner Tyrant!” and “Uncrapify Your Life!” Founder of The Jeff Havens Company and Levity University, with 400+ microlearning courses and 500,000+ annual learners. Recurring guest on Fox Business (including The Willis Report) and CNBC. Published in The Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, Fast Company and BusinessWeek. Delivered over 1,000 keynotes to organisations including General Electric, Ford, US Bank, McDonald’s, JP Morgan, Honeywell, Berkshire Hathaway and Caesars. Biography Generational training is one of the most-bought and least-effective categories of corporate learning. Most of it asks employees to memorise the supposed traits of Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z, then sends them back to the same teams with the same friction. The conflict is real. The frame is wrong. That is the argument behind “Us vs. Them,” published by Pearson FT Press, in which Jeff Havens makes the case that there are not four or five distinct generations in the workplace, and that the visible conflict is better explained by age and life stage than by birth cohort. The book sits alongside “Unleash Your Inner Tyrant!” on leadership behaviour and “Uncrapify Your Life!” on innovation, three published positions on three of the most-requested categories in corporate keynotes. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Vanderbilt and a former high school English teacher, Havens works at the intersection of stand-up comedy and management argument. The result is a presentation craft that holds a senior audience for a full hour. CNBC and Fox Business book him as a recurring guest for the same reason. His client list, General Electric, Ford, US Bank, McDonald’s, JP Morgan, Honeywell, Berkshire Hathaway, Caesars, is a list of organisations that buy attention as a scarce resource at their conferences. Beyond the keynote, he runs Levity University, a microlearning platform with over 400 courses and more than 500,000 annual learners. That operating business gives the speaking work a depth that pure-platform speakers rarely match: he is a practitioner who tests his content against a paying audience every week. Key speaking topics Generational dynamics in the workplace Leadership behaviour and management failure modes Innovation as an everyday discipline Change management and resistance Customer experience Corporate culture and communication Ideal for HR and L&D leaders running generational, culture or engagement programmes at scale Senior leadership conferences where attention fatigue across a long agenda is the main risk to the message CEO and divisional offsites looking to anchor a change, innovation or culture theme with a memorable plenary Industry association conferences (SHRM, ATD, MPI and equivalents) where mixed-seniority audiences need a single keynote that lands across the room Audience outcomes A working argument for why standard four-generations training does not reduce workplace friction, and what to do instead A clear language for naming leadership behaviours that quietly damage teams, drawn from “Unleash Your Inner Tyrant” A practical view of innovation as a habit available to every employee, not a function reserved for an R&D group A more confident stance for managers asked to lead change against fatigue and resistance A shared reference point, and shared humour, that a leadership team can take back into the room the next morning

Why organisations work with Nicholas Webb He has filed and won more than 40 US patents in healthcare, consumer, and industrial technologies. The advice on innovation comes from someone who has run the full cycle from invention to commercial product, not from a researcher reporting on it. The Innovation Mandate and What Customers Crave are used inside operating companies as design references for innovation programmes and customer experience strategy, not as airport reading. Global Gurus has named him a Top 30 customer service authority for multiple consecutive years, a credential held alongside a working consulting practice with boards of multibillion-dollar companies through LeaderLogic. His healthcare work is unusually concrete for a speaker in this space: a documentary, The Healthcare Cure, that won the Sedona International Film Festival’s Audience Choice Award, plus recent AI patent filings in patient monitoring. He builds keynotes around a specific commercial problem the buyer names, rather than a fixed deck. Useful when a board wants a session calibrated to an actual strategic decision, not a generic future-of overview. Biography highlights More than 40 US patents granted, spanning healthcare devices, consumer products, and industrial technologies, including one of the world’s smallest medical implants for ocular surface disease. Author of What Customers Crave, The Innovation Mandate, What Customers Hate, Happy Work, Lucid Leadership, and The Healthcare Mandate. CEO of LeaderLogic LLC, advising boards of multibillion-dollar companies on innovation and customer strategy. Named to Global Gurus’ Top 30 Customer Service authorities list for multiple consecutive years. Director of The Healthcare Cure, a documentary on US healthcare reform that won the Audience Choice Award at the Sedona International Film Festival in 2021. Former Chief Innovation Officer and adjunct professor at a leading US medical school, awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters for contributions to healthcare. Biography A patent is a useful filter. It is one of the few credentials in this field that requires a working invention, a defensible claim, and the discipline to take an idea through to a commercial product. Nicholas Webb has more than 40 of them, across healthcare devices, consumer goods, and industrial technologies, including one of the world’s smallest medical implants for ocular surface disease and an early wearable. That track record sits behind everything he says about innovation. He runs LeaderLogic LLC, a consulting practice that works with boards of multibillion-dollar companies on innovation strategy and customer experience. His books, including The Innovation Mandate, What Customers Crave, What Customers Hate, and Lucid Leadership, function as design references for those engagements rather than standalone trade titles. Global Gurus has placed him among the world’s top 30 customer service authorities for multiple consecutive years. The healthcare work runs in parallel and gives the rest of his thinking a useful test bed. He directed The Healthcare Cure, a documentary on the structural failures of US healthcare that won the Audience Choice Award at the Sedona International Film Festival in 2021, and continues to file AI patents in patient monitoring and mood-state analysis. Healthcare is where his views on innovation, customer experience, and AI are stress-tested in a high-stakes operating environment. For SA clients the practical value is this: a speaker who can sit with a board, take in a specific commercial question, and respond with a session built around the inventor’s logic of constraints, hypotheses, prototypes, and evidence. The output is not inspiration. It is a clearer view of where innovation pays and where customer experience is quietly costing the business growth. Key speaking topics Innovation as a managed commercial discipline Customer experience and the growth agenda AI in operating strategy Healthcare transformation and patient experience Leadership clarity under hyper-complexity Workforce engagement and talent retention Board-level innovation governance Ideal for Boards and executive committees reviewing innovation strategy or customer experience performance CEOs, CCOs, and CMOs accountable for growth in mature or commoditised categories Healthcare executives and provider networks navigating clinical, workforce, and AI transformation simultaneously Chief Innovation Officers and strategy leads building an internal innovation operating model Audience outcomes A clearer view of where current innovation activity is producing returns and where it is absorbing resource without compounding effect A practical model for customer experience design grounded in identifying what specific customer types love and hate, rather than aggregate satisfaction scores A board-level reading of AI as an operating discipline, with examples from healthcare and consumer technology A working definition of leadership clarity that holds up under complexity, drawn from Lucid Leadership Language and structure to take innovation conversations out of culture talk and into commercial governance

Why organisations work with Chip Conley He turned a single boutique hotel into a 50-property group as CEO of Joie de Vivre, then mentored Brian Chesky through Airbnb’s hospitality build-out. Few speakers can speak from inside both an independent operator and a category-defining platform. His Modern Elder thesis gives leadership teams a usable language for intergenerational collaboration at a moment when most companies are still treating age as a liability rather than a capability. He applied Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to corporate strategy in his book Peak and his 2010 TED talk, and the framework still reads as one of the more durable arguments for measuring culture, employee engagement, and customer experience as connected variables. The Modern Elder Academy he founded in 2018 is the only midlife wisdom school running at scale, with over 2,000 alumni and a second campus, which gives him real operating data on how mid-career professionals reset, retrain, and re-enter organisations. He is a New York Times bestselling author and three-time TED speaker, with books published across two decades that track the same throughline: human meaning as the underlying engine of commercial performance. Biography highlights Founder and former CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, which he built from a single property in 1987 into a portfolio of around 50 boutique hotels. Former Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy at Airbnb, mentor to CEO Brian Chesky during the company’s expansion to hosts in 191 countries. Founder and Executive Chairman of Modern Elder Academy, with campuses in Baja California Sur and Santa Fe and more than 2,000 alumni. Three-time TED speaker, including “Measuring what makes life worthwhile” (2010) and his 2023 talk on the midlife chrysalis. New York Times bestselling author of Wisdom@Work: The Making of a Modern Elder and Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age, alongside Peak, Emotional Equations, The Rebel Rules, and Marketing That Matters. Stanford BA and MBA. Named Most Innovative CEO in the Bay Area by San Francisco Business Times and recipient of the hospitality industry’s 2012 Pioneer Award. Biography The conventional career arc treats age as a depreciation curve. Chip Conley has spent two decades arguing the opposite, and building the institutions to prove it. He founded Joie de Vivre Hospitality in San Francisco in 1987, ran it for nearly 24 years, and grew it into one of California’s largest boutique hotel groups, around 50 properties at its peak. The book that came out of that period, Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, applied Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to employee, customer, and investor relationships, and remains the most cited articulation of his commercial argument that human meaning is the engine, not the decoration, of business performance. In 2013, Airbnb’s three founders asked him to become Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy. He mentored Brian Chesky and helped translate a tech platform into a hospitality company operating with hosts in 191 countries. The label he picked up there, “modern elder”, became the seed of his next institution. The Modern Elder Academy, which he founded in 2018, has campuses in Baja California Sur and Santa Fe and has now run more than 2,000 mid-career professionals through structured programmes on transition, longevity, and the social contract between generations at work. His more recent books, Wisdom@Work and Learning to Love Midlife, push that thesis into the corporate agenda directly: age as a category of workforce diversity, midlife as a strategic asset, and the intergenerational team as a more accurate model of how organisations actually learn. The argument is grounded in operating experience, not commentary, which is why boards and executive teams increasingly book him to challenge the assumptions inside their own talent strategy. Key speaking topics The multigenerational workplace and the case for age as workforce diversity Modern Elder leadership and the redesign of mid-career Culture and employee engagement built on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs Disruptive innovation in hospitality and platform businesses Customer experience as a function of internal culture Emotional intelligence in leadership Midlife transition, longevity, and workforce retention Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers redesigning talent strategy across five generations at work CEOs and boards facing attrition of senior expertise and weak intergenerational knowledge transfer Hospitality, travel, and consumer-facing leadership teams rebuilding culture as a commercial asset Executive development and leadership academy programmes focused on mid-career renewal and senior transition Audience outcomes A clearer operating definition of intergenerational collaboration, with concrete language for treating age as a diversity and capability question A reframed view of mid-career and senior employees as a strategic asset rather than a cost line A working model, drawn from Peak and Maslow, for connecting employee meaning, customer experience, and financial performance Specific, named examples from Joie de Vivre, Airbnb, and Modern Elder Academy that translate into practical policy and culture changes A more honest conversation inside the leadership team about ageism, longevity, and what wisdom is actually worth in commercial terms

Why organisations work with Sabrina Faramarzi She has written trend reports for The Future Laboratory, Stylus and Canvas8, three of the most-used forecasting houses in consumer strategy, so brand teams get a forecaster who knows how the foresight industry actually works inside. Her sector range covers travel, beauty, fashion, food and drink, wellbeing, money, tech, retail and media, which means a single speaker can address an audience drawn from several consumer-facing categories without losing specificity. She runs Are We Europe, a cross-border editorial operation, so she brings a pan-European read on culture and audience behaviour rather than a default Anglo-American lens. Her data storytelling practice through Dust in Translation is built for organisations that have research and data assets but cannot make them land with a non-technical audience. Biography highlights Managing Director, Are We Europe, a non-profit pan-European media collective. Founder and Editorial Director, Dust in Translation, a creative data storytelling agency. Co-founder, Feminist Internet, a non-profit advancing internet equality through creative practice. Trend reports written for The Future Laboratory, Stylus and Canvas8. Journalism contributions to The Guardian, Wired, Vice and Vogue Business. BA (Hons) First Class in Trend Prediction and Forecasting, University of East London; MA with Distinction in Journalism, University of the Arts London. Biography Most consumer trend conversations in the boardroom collapse into one of two failure modes. They either treat every TikTok spike as a strategic shift, or they ignore weak signals until a competitor has already built around them. Sabrina Faramarzi works in the gap between those two errors. Her practice is reading consumer and cultural signals well enough to tell a brand team which ones to bet on. She has the technical training for it. A First Class degree in Trend Prediction and Forecasting from the University of East London, an MA with Distinction in Journalism from the University of the Arts London, and a working track record writing trend reports for The Future Laboratory, Stylus and Canvas8. That is the inside of the foresight industry, not a commentator’s view of it. The journalism work runs alongside the forecasting. Bylines in The Guardian, Wired, Vice and Vogue Business cover gender, AI, digital rights and internet culture, and that editorial muscle is what lets her translate research into stories that boards and marketing teams actually use. Through Dust in Translation, her data storytelling agency, she does the same job for organisations sitting on data they cannot make legible. She also runs Are We Europe, a non-profit pan-European media collective, and co-founded Feminist Internet. Both give her something most trend speakers do not have: a structural view of how cultural narratives form and travel across borders, which is the part of trend work that matters most when a category is being reshaped rather than refreshed. Key speaking topics Consumer trend forecasting Data storytelling Internet culture and online communities Futures of consumer-facing industries Gender, AI and digital ethics Cross-border European media and audiences Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and category leads in consumer-facing businesses planning the next 18 to 36 months. Innovation and insights teams looking for an outside read on which signals to commit to. Communications and content leaders who need research and data turned into audience-ready stories. Conferences in travel, hospitality, beauty, fashion, food and drink, retail and media that want a sector-specific futures keynote. Audience outcomes A clearer sense of which consumer signals in their category are durable and which are noise. Working language for telling stories with data so research lands with non-technical audiences. A sharper read on how online communities form, mobilise and shape brand reputation. Sector-specific cues for where to look for the next category shift in travel, beauty, fashion, food, retail or media.

Why organisations work with Katie Linendoll She turns a roomful of non-specialists into an engaged audience for technology content. Two decades on national television, including The TODAY Show, The Rachael Ray Show and CNN, have given her a delivery style built for general audiences, not engineers. She has reported on the field at the level executives actually consume it, from CES and E3 to NASA’s undersea labs, which gives her keynotes the specificity of a journalist rather than the generality of a futurist. She is one of the most experienced corporate tech emcees working today. IBM, Dell, Intel, Mercedes-Benz, Deloitte, GE and Lenovo have used her to host their internal and customer events. Her technical foundation is real, not borrowed. She earned networking certifications before finishing high school and holds a degree in IT New Media from Rochester Institute of Technology, which is what makes her tech segments credible to a technical audience as well as a lay one. Biography highlights Emmy Award winner as associate producer for ESPN’s SportsCenter. Emmy-nominated co-host of A&E’s We Mean Business. Regular technology contributor on The TODAY Show, The Rachael Ray Show, CNN, CBS Early Show, The Weather Channel and CBS Sports Radio. BS in Information Technology, New Media, Rochester Institute of Technology, Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences. Silicon Valley Visionary Award recipient. Has hosted and keynoted for IBM, Dell, Intel, Mercedes-Benz, Deloitte, QuickBooks, GE, Lenovo and SAS. Biography Emerging technology rarely arrives in a form that a general business audience can absorb. The vocabulary is technical, the demos are made for engineers, and the implications for the rest of the organisation get lost between the press release and the boardroom. The work of translating that material into something a non-specialist leadership team can act on is its own discipline. Katie Linendoll has spent over two decades doing exactly that on national television. She is a regular technology contributor on The TODAY Show and The Rachael Ray Show, and has appeared on CNN, CBS Early Show, The Weather Channel and CBS Sports Radio, where she covers AI, mixed reality, consumer devices and the science behind them. She has reported from NASA’s undersea labs and from post-typhoon recovery zones in the Philippines, and is a fixture at CES, E3, Comic-Con and Maker Faire. The technical grounding is real. She earned networking certifications before finishing high school, holds a degree in IT New Media from the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, and started her career as a producer at ESPN, where she won an Emmy for her work on SportsCenter. A&E’s We Mean Business, which she co-hosted, earned her a second Emmy nomination. That combination of broadcaster craft and technical fluency is why companies including IBM, Dell, Intel, Mercedes-Benz, Deloitte, GE and Lenovo book her to host and keynote their events. She is the speaker organisations choose when they want the technology story told sharply to an audience that does not read the trade press. Key speaking topics Emerging consumer and enterprise technology Artificial intelligence and mixed reality for general audiences Innovation and reinvention in established companies Women in technology Technology for social and humanitarian impact Event hosting and emceeing for tech-led conferences Ideal for Corporate conferences and customer summits in technology, financial services and consumer brands looking for a credible host who can carry technical content Internal kick-offs and town halls where leadership wants to set a tone on innovation without resorting to a futurist abstraction Sales and partner events that need an Emmy-level presenter to anchor the programme Diversity, women-in-tech and STEM-focused programmes Audience outcomes A clearer working picture of where AI, mixed reality and adjacent technologies actually stand right now Specific examples of how established companies and public-sector organisations are using emerging tech, with the detail intact A sense of which tech stories matter for their business and which are noise For women-in-tech briefs, a candid account of building a technology career through media, told from inside the industry

Why organisations work with Brett StClair He has run the inside of both sides of the problem: a Google regional product portfolio and the digital stack of a 40,000-person bank across 32 markets. That is rare credibility on the operating reality of AI inside a regulated enterprise. He frames AI adoption as a leadership and workforce problem first, technology problem second, which is what most boards actually need before they spend the next budget cycle on tooling. Through Teraflow.ai he works with enterprise clients on the implementation, not only the strategy. The keynote content is grounded in current delivery, not retrospective case studies. The “Rebel Technologist” thesis gives senior leaders a usable language for identifying and protecting the internal disruptors who actually move transformation programmes. Biography highlights Co-Founder and Chief Connector, Teraflow.ai, an enterprise AI and cloud consultancy. Former Head of Digital Products, Barclays Africa, leading digital modernisation across 32 countries. Former Google executive across mobile, YouTube, AdMob and Cloud for the Africa region. Host of the “Rebel Technologist” podcast on AI adoption and digital leadership. Computer Science, University of Cape Town. MBA, University of South Africa. Featured in BBC, Financial Times, Forbes and regional business press including ITWeb and Business Day. Biography Most enterprise AI conversations stall at the same point. Leaders agree the technology is significant. They cannot agree what to do with it on Monday. The gap between a board’s appetite for AI and an operating model that can actually absorb it is now the central problem in digital transformation, and it is exactly where Brett StClair works. StClair spent his Google years inside the product engine for Africa, with responsibilities across mobile, AdMob, YouTube and Cloud. He left to take on a different kind of problem: rebuilding Barclays Africa as a digital bank, leading product across 32 countries and an organisation of around 40,000 people. That experience, working at the seam between a hyperscaler and a regulated bank, sits behind his current work. As Co-Founder and Chief Connector of Teraflow.ai, he leads enterprise engagements on AI and cloud adoption with banks, healthcare organisations and large corporates. His “Rebel Technologist” thesis, carried through his podcast and keynotes, names a recurring pattern inside large firms: the internal disruptors who actually move transformation forward, and the leadership choices that determine whether they survive long enough to ship. His keynote from Google to global banking has been delivered to audiences including Mastercard, Vodafone, Standard Bank, Nedbank, FNB, Deloitte and Accenture, and his work has been referenced in BBC, Financial Times and Forbes coverage of AI and digital change. Key speaking topics Enterprise AI adoption Generative AI in regulated industries Digital transformation at scale DevOps and agile inside large organisations Cloud strategy for enterprises Innovation culture and internal disruptors Leadership in technology change programmes Ideal for CIOs, CDOs and CTOs setting AI and cloud strategy Transformation, innovation and digital leads moving from pilot to production Boards and executive committees in banking, healthcare and large corporates Heads of operations and HR designing workforce capability around AI Audience outcomes A clearer view of where AI investment converts into operating advantage and where it does not. A working language for governance, risk and capability around generative AI in regulated environments. Practical lessons from inside Google and Barclays Africa on what makes large-scale digital change actually land. A sharper sense of how to identify and protect the internal disruptors who carry transformation programmes through their hardest stages.

Why organisations work with Kate Ancketill A ten-year run delivering the trends keynote at the NRF Big Show, the largest retail technology event in the world, makes her the reference voice for what major retailers are about to do next. Twenty-five years inside GDR Creative Intelligence working with P&G, Tesco, Sephora, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Lego and Moet Hennessy, which means her examples are drawn from live client work, not desk research. A three-to-five year forecasting horizon that is short enough to commit budget against, longer than the next quarter, and grounded in case examples rather than abstract futures. 2025 Best AI and Future Technology Speaker at the Speaker Awards, and a BizTech Top 30 IT Influencer listing, which gives buyers an external read on quality before they commission. Biography highlights CEO and founder of GDR Creative Intelligence, a London-based futures and innovation consultancy founded in 1992. Ten consecutive years as trends keynote at the National Retail Federation Big Show in New York. Named clients include P&G, Tesco, Sephora, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Moet Hennessy, Costa Coffee, Lego and the BBC. 2025 Speaker Awards: Best AI and Future Technology Speaker. BizTech Magazine Top 30 IT Influencers, 2024. Regular broadcast and conference commentator on AI, retail, high street decline, and consumer behaviour. Biography The retail and consumer industries are running two clocks. One is quarterly, governed by trading, footfall, and conversion. The other is the three to five year horizon on which AI, automation, and Gen Z consumer behaviour are quietly rewriting the operating model. Boards are being asked to commit capital against the second clock with the analytical habits of the first. Kate Ancketill has spent twenty-five years inside that gap. As CEO and founder of GDR Creative Intelligence, she has worked as the innovation partner to a roster of consumer brands that includes P&G, Tesco, Sephora, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Moet Hennessy, Costa Coffee, Lego and the BBC. The work is granular, weekly tracking of the innovations that are reshaping retail, hospitality, brand and technology, then translated into specific commercial implications for clients planning two and three product cycles out. That practitioner base is what makes her platform work. For ten consecutive years she has delivered the headline trends keynote at the National Retail Federation Big Show in New York, the industry’s most-watched stage for what major retailers are about to commit to. Martin Reardon, NRF’s CMO, attributes the repeat invitation to her audience scores. In 2025 she was named Best AI and Future Technology Speaker at the Speaker Awards, the year after BizTech Magazine listed her among its top thirty IT influencers. Her current work centres on what consumer-facing AI does to customer experience, brand, and the economics of the store. The argument runs against both extremes: AI is not a productivity bolt-on, and it is not an existential threat, it is the substrate on which the next generation of retail and consumer business models will be built. The job for senior leaders is to read the early signal accurately enough to commit capital before the pattern is obvious. Key speaking topics Business futurism on a three to five year horizon Consumer-facing AI in retail and brand The future of customer experience Innovation and disruptive business models in consumer industries Gen Z and Generation Alpha consumer behaviour Sustainability and the future of consumer brands Trends and innovation at the NRF Big Show The future of the high street and physical retail Ideal for Retail, consumer goods and hospitality boards making three-to-five year capital and format decisions CMOs and customer experience leaders rebuilding brand and CX around AI Innovation and strategy leads inside major consumer brands Conferences where the audience is operators, not technologists, but the agenda is technology-driven Audience outcomes A clear read on which retail and consumer innovations are signal and which are noise Specific case examples of how named global brands are already deploying AI in customer-facing roles A working three-to-five year horizon for board and CMO planning, not a ten-year futurology piece A sharper view of Gen Z and Generation Alpha as commercial customers, not as demographic abstractions