Innovation & Disruption

Why organisations work with Marcel Corstjens His research in MIT Sloan Management Review demonstrated that the largest FMCG companies (i.e. those spending over a billion dollars annually on R&D) see no appreciable sales return from that investment; only marketing spend correlates with revenue. This directly challenges how most consumer goods leadership teams allocate their growth budgets. The Mindspace and Shelfspace framework from Store Wars gives manufacturers and retailers a shared, precise language for the power dynamics that determine who controls the end consumer: still the most widely adopted conceptual map of that relationship, translated into five languages. His Harvard Business Review research showed that retail internationalisation does not reliably improve revenue or profit margins, and that home market strength is the primary driver of commercial performance: a finding that reshapes how boards evaluate international expansion decisions. His “Newtonian versus Lorenzian” innovation typology distinguishing companies that invest heavily in broad R&D from those that make small, targeted bets, gives commercial leaders a practical diagnostic for where innovation spending is being wasted at scale. He has consulted directly for Unilever, Heineken, Novartis, Roche, PepsiCo, and Cadbury Schweppes, giving him practical fluency across both FMCG and pharmaceutical commercial strategy that few academics can match. Biography highlights Emeritus Professor of Marketing and the Unilever Chaired Professor of Marketing, Emeritus, at INSEAD; visiting professor at Cornell and Stanford universities PhD, University of California, Berkeley; doctoral dissertation awarded first prize by the American Marketing Association Author of Store Wars: The Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace (J. Wiley & Sons, 1995; second edition 1999; translated into French, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, and Spanish) Co-author of “Retail Doesn’t Cross Borders” (Harvard Business Review, 2012) and “The Promise of Targeted Innovation” (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2019) Research published in Marketing Science, Management Science, Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Marketing Research; featured in The Economist Creator and director of the INSEAD Storewars senior executive programme for the consumer goods industries Biography The commercial relationship between consumer goods manufacturers and retailers is contested, high-stakes, and widely misread. Marcel Corstjens, Unilever Chaired Professor of Marketing Emeritus at INSEAD, has spent four decades researching where that contest is actually won and lost, and his findings consistently challenge what companies believe about their own growth strategies. His book Store Wars: The Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, co-authored with Judith Corstjens and published by J. Wiley & Sons, introduced the Mindspace and Shelfspace framework: the idea that the strategic contest between manufacturers and retailers is a battle for control of two distinct assets, these being the consumer’s mental availability and the product’s physical presence in store. Translated into five languages and taught through the INSEAD Storewars senior executive programme he created and directed, the framework became the most widely adopted analytical tool for understanding manufacturer-retailer power dynamics in FMCG. His research has repeatedly overturned the conventional logic of large consumer goods companies. Work published in MIT Sloan Management Review with Gregory Carpenter of Kellogg and Tushmit Hasan of UT Austin showed that the biggest FMCG brands (i.e. those investing more than a billion dollars annually in R&D) see no measurable sales return from that outlay. Research published in Harvard Business Review with Rajiv Lal of Harvard Business School demonstrated that retail internationalisation does not reliably improve revenue or profit margins; home market performance is the primary driver. Both findings run counter to assumptions embedded in how most FMCG leadership teams set strategy. Corstjens holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where his doctoral dissertation received first prize from the American Marketing Association. He has been a visiting professor at Cornell and Stanford, and has consulted for Unilever, Heineken, Novartis, Roche, PepsiCo, and Cadbury Schweppes, among others. His research has appeared in Marketing Science, Management Science, Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Marketing Research, and has been featured in The Economist. Key speaking topics Manufacturer-Retailer Power Dynamics Marketing Strategy in FMCG Innovation Investment and Commercial Return Brand Strategy and Private Label Competition Retail Internationalisation and Global Growth Marketing Resource Allocation Marketing Strategy in the Pharmaceutical Industry Ideal for Chief Marketing Officers and commercial strategy leaders in consumer goods companies Senior executive teams in FMCG and pharmaceutical businesses facing stalled revenue growth Retail leadership teams navigating the competitive dynamics of private label and supplier relationships Executive education programmes for senior FMCG, retail, or pharmaceutical audiences Audience outcomes A clear analytical framework under both Mindspace and Shelfspace for diagnosing where control of the manufacturer-retailer relationship is being lost and what to do about it Evidence-based reappraisal of whether current R&D and innovation investment is actually driving revenue, or consuming capital without commercial return Practical criteria for assessing whether a retail internationalisation strategy is likely to deliver or destroy shareholder value Sharper understanding of how private label competition is reshaping the power balance between retailers and brand manufacturers, and what manufacturers can do to respond A working distinction between “Newtonian” and “Lorenzian” approaches to innovation investment, and which is appropriate at which scale

Why organisations work with Marc Randolph He did not study the Netflix founding from the outside – he ran it. The decisions, the wrong turns, and the business model that eventually disrupted an entire industry are first-hand material, not case-study reconstruction. His central argument challenges a reflex most leadership teams share: that the quality of an idea determines whether it deserves to be pursued. His counter – that testing discipline matters more than idea quality – is specific, actionable, and uncomfortable in the right way. The Netflix founding includes the Blockbuster meeting, where Netflix was offered for $50 million and turned down. That episode alone reframes how organisations should think about incumbent advantage, competitive threat, and the cost of certainty. “That Will Never Work” is not a memoir dressed as business advice. It is a structured argument about how good companies are actually built – through iteration, testing, and the willingness to be wrong in public, not in a boardroom. He runs an active mentorship programme with working founders, which means his frameworks are tested against current entrepreneurial reality – not fixed in the past. Biography highlights Co-founder and first CEO of Netflix, which he helped build from a dismissed DVD-by-mail startup into the foundation of the platform that redefined global entertainment Author of “That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea” (Little, Brown and Company, 2019) Serial entrepreneur with multiple companies founded across direct marketing, software, and technology Former senior marketing executive at Borland International and Macromedia Guest on NPR’s “How I Built This” and other leading entrepreneurship platforms Active mentor to early-stage founders through a structured programme he runs directly Biography Netflix was not an overnight success. In its early years it was dismissed by almost everyone – including, famously, the executives at Blockbuster, who were offered the company for $50 million and said no. Marc Randolph was in that room. He co-founded Netflix in 1997 and served as its first CEO, navigating the business from an idea most people thought would never work to the foundation of what became one of the most disruptive companies in modern business history. His book, “That Will Never Work,” published by Little, Brown in 2019, does not simply recount that journey. It makes a specific argument: that entrepreneurial success has less to do with the quality of an idea than with the discipline of testing it. Most organisations spend considerable energy debating whether an idea is good enough to act on. Randolph’s contention is that the debate itself is the problem – that deciding in advance kills more valuable ideas than the market ever would. That argument is not abstract. It comes from years of direct experience – not only co-founding Netflix, but building and failing at other companies before it, and mentoring hundreds of founders since. Randolph runs an active programme for early-stage entrepreneurs, which means his frameworks are under continuous pressure from people trying to apply them in real conditions today. For organisations wrestling with innovation culture, the fear of failure, or the gap between strategy and action, Randolph offers something most speakers in this space cannot: a first-hand account of what it actually took, and a framework built from that experience rather than written about it. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and the discipline of idea-testing Business model innovation and iteration Innovation culture in established organisations Risk, failure, and commercial decision-making Leadership in early-stage and high-growth companies The Netflix founding – strategy, competition, and disruption Mentorship and building founder capability Ideal for CEOs and senior leadership teams building or renewing innovation culture Chief Strategy Officers and heads of new ventures or corporate innovation labs Entrepreneurship conferences and startup ecosystem events Leadership development programmes focused on commercial risk-taking and decision-making under uncertainty Audience outcomes A reframe of how ideas should be evaluated – replacing debate with testable hypotheses Practical language for separating idea quality from execution discipline A clearer understanding of what distinguishes organisations that build new things from those that discuss them Direct exposure to the decision-making logic behind one of the most studied company-founding stories in modern business A more honest framework for thinking about failure as evidence rather than verdict

Why organisations work with Marc Koska He built the commercial case for a life-saving innovation from first principles; price parity, existing tooling, no retraining required, so that institutional resistance had no rational hiding place. Few innovators have that level of strategic discipline documented at scale. His 2008 India campaign reached 508 million people and triggered a government mandate within months. That is a documented playbook for moving from public awareness to policy change at national scale, directly applicable to any organisation trying to shift entrenched behaviour. He holds The Economist Innovation Award for Social and Economic Innovation, a Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur of the Year designation, and an OBE; the kind of external validation that makes a business case credible in front of conservative institutional and government audiences. His ApiJect work, backed by US Department of Defense and HHS funding for pandemic response infrastructure, demonstrates how the same innovation principles apply to supply chain resilience and emergency preparedness. Unlike most entrepreneurship narratives, his story has a documented endpoint: a 2015 WHO global policy mandate requiring auto-disable syringes across the therapeutic sector, 30 years after the K1 was first conceived. Biography highlights Inventor of the K1 auto-disable syringe: locks after a single use, licensed to 14 global manufacturers, credited with saving over 10 million lives OBE awarded 2006 for contribution to global healthcare The Economist Innovation Award for Social and Economic Innovation; Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2015, World Economic Forum network Ashoka Fellow 2017; honorary doctorates from the University of Sussex and Brighton University Founder of Star Syringe (1996) and The SafePoint Trust, the UK registered charity whose advocacy helped drive the 2015 WHO global injection safety mandate Speaker at TED, Google Zeitgeist, Intelligence Squared, and the World Economic Forum Biography The K1 syringe was engineered to be as cheap as the one it replaced, to run on the same factory tooling, and to lock after a single use. Marc Koska designed it that way deliberately, because he understood that a safer product priced as a premium would never reach the patients who needed it most. Koska founded Star Syringe in 1996 to license the technology, and The SafePoint Trust as a registered UK charity to run commercial and advocacy strategies in parallel. His 2008 India campaign, press conferences in 14 cities, television, radio, and cinema, reached 508 million people and led the Indian Health Ministry to mandate auto-disable syringes across government hospitals. The WHO followed with a global injection safety mandate in 2015. The Economist recognised his work with its Innovation Award for Social and Economic Innovation. The Schwab Foundation named him Social Entrepreneur of the Year in 2015, integrating him into the World Economic Forum network. An OBE for services to global healthcare, an Ashoka Fellowship, and honorary doctorates from the University of Sussex and Brighton University reflect the breadth of institutions that have validated his contribution. His TED talks and appearances at Google Zeitgeist have brought the commercial logic of his approach to audiences well beyond the health sector. His more recent work through ApiJect, a blow-fill-seal prefilled injector developed with US Department of Defense and HHS backing for pandemic response, applies the same principle to national supply chain resilience: remove the systemic barriers that allow an inferior standard to persist. For leadership teams thinking about scaling innovation through complex regulatory environments, his three-decade arc from design brief to global standard is among the most instructive available. Key speaking topics Scaling innovation from invention to global adoption Navigating policy, procurement, and regulatory barriers Social entrepreneurship and mission-driven commercial design Stakeholder mobilisation and behaviour change at scale Public health risk and injection safety Pandemic preparedness and supply chain resilience Ideal for Senior leadership teams and boards navigating innovation adoption in regulated or institutionally resistant industries CEOs and commercial directors seeking a case study in displacing entrenched incumbents with a commercially competitive alternative Public health, pharmaceutical, and medical device executives responsible for global supply chain and safety standards Conference audiences focused on social entrepreneurship, purpose-driven business, and systemic change Audience outcomes A framework for identifying where institutional inertia – rather than product quality – is blocking innovation adoption Practical understanding of how to design innovations for price parity and manufacturing compatibility from the outset Insight into how multi-stakeholder campaigns can translate public awareness into government policy change A case study in running commercial and advocacy strategies in parallel without mission drift A concrete example of what it takes to move a proven innovation from proof of concept to a WHO-mandated global standard

Why organisations work with Magnus Lindkvist He built the academic discipline he speaks from. In 2008 he created the world’s first accredited course in trendspotting and future thinking at the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship, which gives the work an unusually serious intellectual base for the futurist category. His books are a connected argument, not a back catalogue. Everything We Know Is Wrong, The Attack of the Unexpected, and When the Future Begins together form a thesis on why most forecasting fails and how leaders can think about long horizons more honestly. He treats unexpected events as a strategic category, not a footnote. Boards used to thinking in trends get a sharper framework for the shocks that trends cannot predict. He has spent three decades inside the meeting rooms of Fortune 500 boards, ministries, and global institutions, which means the material is calibrated for senior audiences rather than conference floors. The delivery is a deliberate performance. He calls it intellectual acupuncture, and senior buyers consistently book him for sessions where the brief is to change how a leadership team thinks, not to brief them on a topic. Biography highlights Founder of Pattern Recognition, a Stockholm-based trendspotting consultancy established in 2005. Created the world’s first academically accredited course in trendspotting and future thinking at the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship in 2008. Author of Everything We Know Is Wrong! The Trendspotter’s Handbook, The Attack of the Unexpected, and When the Future Begins: A Guide to Long-Term Thinking, published by LID Publishing. Author of Minifesto (2016), Creative Friction (2021, with Jan Gradvall), and The Reset Book: How to Bounce Back from a Crisis (2023). MSc in Business and Economics, Stockholm School of Economics; degree in film production, UCLA. Over 1,000 keynotes delivered to corporate, institutional, and government audiences across roughly three decades. Biography Most forecasting fails for the same reason. It extrapolates the present and underweights everything that arrives from outside the model. Magnus Lindkvist has spent three decades building a more honest discipline around that problem, and a body of work that takes long-term thinking seriously as a leadership skill. The intellectual base is unusual for the futurist category. In 2008 he created the world’s first accredited course in trendspotting and future thinking, at the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship, after founding his consultancy Pattern Recognition in 2005. The trio of books that anchors his speaking work, Everything We Know Is Wrong, The Attack of the Unexpected, and When the Future Begins, runs as a connected argument: trends matter, the events that break them matter more, and organisations need a different mental architecture for the long horizon. His later books extend the same instinct in new directions. Minifesto argues for the strategic power of small ideas inside organisations dominated by grand narratives. Creative Friction, written with Swedish music journalist Jan Gradvall, draws on popular culture to examine what actually produces creative work. The Reset Book, published in 2023, addresses how individuals and organisations recover from crisis with more rigour than the resilience genre usually allows. The delivery is the second reason senior buyers commission him. He treats a keynote as a performance designed to shift a room’s assumptions, which is why boards, ministries, and global firms tend to use him at moments when the leadership team needs to think differently, not simply hear an update on the future. Key speaking topics Long-term thinking and strategic foresight Trendspotting and turning points in industries The strategic role of unexpected events Creativity and the conditions for original work Reset and recovery after crisis Innovation under uncertainty The future of technology and society Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting multi-year strategy under high uncertainty CSOs, heads of strategy, and corporate development leaders responsible for long-range planning Innovation, R&D, and foresight leads inside large incumbents Leadership offsites where the brief is to change how the team thinks, not to deliver an update Audience outcomes A sharper sense of where current forecasting habits are likely to mislead a leadership team A practical vocabulary for distinguishing trends, turning points, and genuinely unexpected events A more honest framework for long-term thinking, drawn from his book When the Future Begins A renewed view of creativity and small ideas as strategic assets, not cultural ornaments Renewed appetite inside the room for thinking about the next decade, not the next quarter

Why organisations work with Lyndon Evans He ran one of the most complex engineering programmes in human history. The LHC took fourteen years, twenty member states and roughly nine billion Swiss francs to build, and it produced the 2012 Higgs boson discovery. The lessons translate. He has lived through the kind of public setback most leaders only theorise about. The 2008 quench accident delayed the LHC’s first physics run by more than a year; how he managed the recovery is the case study, not a slide. He is recognised by the engineering profession, not only the physics community. The IEEE Simon Ramo Medal was awarded for systems engineering leadership, which makes him unusually credible with senior technical and operations audiences. He carries the institutional credentials buyers test against: CBE, Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the American Physical Society, Breakthrough Prize laureate. The credentials are useful because the underlying work is real. Biography highlights Project leader of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, 1994 to 2008 Director of the Linear Collider Collaboration from 2012, coordinating ILC and CLIC programmes 2012 Special Fundamental Physics Prize (Breakthrough Prize) for leadership of the LHC CBE, 2001 New Year Honours Fellow of the Royal Society (2010), Fellow of the American Physical Society (1991), Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales IEEE Simon Ramo Medal (2014) for systems engineering leadership of the LHC Biography The Large Hadron Collider was approved in 1994 and produced its first proton collisions in 2010. The fourteen-year gap is the story. Twenty member states, several thousand physicists and engineers, more than a hundred countries contributing components, and a budget of roughly nine billion Swiss francs had to be held together through funding rounds, design changes and a 2008 magnet quench that delayed the first physics run by more than a year. Lyndon Evans was the project leader who held it. That kind of work earns a different category of recognition. The 2012 Special Fundamental Physics Prize cited his leadership role in the discovery of the Higgs boson. The IEEE Simon Ramo Medal, awarded two years later, cited his systems engineering leadership specifically. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was appointed CBE in 2001. Since 2012 Evans has directed the Linear Collider Collaboration, the international body coordinating the next generation of particle colliders. The programmes he is now shaping, the International Linear Collider and the Compact Linear Collider, operate on similar timescales and similar coalitions to the LHC. The institutional questions are the same: how to keep a long-horizon scientific commitment alive through political cycles shorter than its delivery window. For corporate audiences the material is not particle physics. It is the management of complexity at a scale most organisations will not encounter, presented by someone who did the job rather than studied it. A Welsh chemist who switched to physics because he found it easier, Evans speaks plainly about coalitions, recovery from public failure, and the discipline of running programmes whose value will not be visible for a generation. Key speaking topics Leadership of large complex programmes Project recovery after public failure International scientific collaboration Engineering at the edge of feasibility Long-horizon delivery under political cycles Science, discovery and public trust Ideal for Boards and executive teams sponsoring multi-year capital or infrastructure programmes Chief operating officers and programme directors running cross-border delivery at scale Engineering and technology leadership audiences in regulated or research-intensive sectors Conferences on innovation, science and the long view of strategic investment Audience outcomes A working sense of what it takes to hold a long-horizon programme together when funding, politics and engineering all move on shorter cycles A specific account of how the LHC team handled the 2008 quench and what credibility recovery actually involved Language for talking about systems engineering and coalition management that translates from physics to business A grounded view of how scientific discovery is produced, useful for leaders sponsoring R&D, deep tech or moonshot programmes

Why organisations work with Luke Johnson He has built, bought and sold more well-known British consumer brands than almost any other operator of his generation, including PizzaExpress, Strada, The Ivy, Giraffe, Patisserie Valerie and Gail’s, which gives any commercial audience an unusually direct reference point. He runs his own private equity firm, Risk Capital Partners, and continues to chair operating businesses, so the perspective is current investor and chairman, not retired founder. He has written a weekly national-press column on entrepreneurship for more than twenty years across the Financial Times, The Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph, which means audiences get arguments that have been tested in print, not improvised on stage. He is willing to talk publicly about the collapse of Patisserie Valerie, the fraud that triggered it, and what a chairman missed, which is rare candour from a figure still active in private equity. His chairmanship of Channel 4, the Royal Society of Arts and the Institute of Cancer Research gives him a board-level vocabulary that translates well for non-executives, charity trustees and public sector audiences. Biography highlights Chairman of PizzaExpress from 1993 to 1999, growing the chain from 12 to over 150 restaurants and the share price from 40p to over 900p. Founder and chairman of Risk Capital Partners, a London private equity firm operating since 2001. Chairman of Channel 4 Television Corporation, 2004 to 2010. Founder of Signature Restaurants (The Ivy, Le Caprice, J. Sheekey, Belgo) and the Strada chain; investor in Giraffe, Gail’s, Brighton Pier Group and Patisserie Holdings. Author of “Start It Up: Why Running Your Own Business Is Easier Than You Think” (Penguin, 2011) and weekly columnist for the Financial Times (2007 to 2015) and The Sunday Times (2015 to 2021). Co-founder and chairman of the Centre for Entrepreneurs; former chairman of the Royal Society of Arts, StartUp Britain and the Institute of Cancer Research; honorary degrees from Heriot-Watt, Bath, UWE and the University of West London. Biography PizzaExpress had twelve restaurants and a 40p share price when Luke Johnson and Hugh Osmond took control in 1993. By the time Johnson left as chairman in 1999, the chain had passed 150 sites and the share price had cleared 900p. That single deal still anchors his commercial reputation, but it sits inside a longer pattern. He founded Signature Restaurants, which owned The Ivy, J. Sheekey, Le Caprice and Belgo. He built Strada from scratch to thirty sites. Risk Capital Partners, the private equity firm he has run since 2001, has backed Giraffe, Gail’s, Brighton Pier Group, Patisserie Holdings and a long list of mid-market operators. The picture is not uniformly positive, and that is part of why senior audiences listen. Patisserie Holdings, where he was chairman and largest shareholder, collapsed in October 2018 after the discovery of significant accounting fraud. He has written and spoken about the experience in detail, including what a non-executive chair can and cannot see from the board. Alongside the deals, Johnson has built an unusually durable second career as a writer. He wrote weekly for the Sunday Telegraph from 1998, for the Financial Times from 2007, and for The Sunday Times until 2021. The work covers founders, capital, markets, management and failure, and it is consistently specific. His 2011 book “Start It Up”, published by Penguin, sets out the operator’s view of starting and running a small business without the usual founder mythology. Public roles round out the picture. He chaired Channel 4 Television for six years, the Royal Society of Arts for three, the Institute of Cancer Research for eight, and co-founded the Centre for Entrepreneurs to make the case for British founders in public policy. Four British universities, Heriot-Watt, Bath, the University of the West of England and the University of West London, have awarded him honorary degrees on the strength of that combined record. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and the realities of starting a business Private equity and growth-stage investment Consumer, hospitality and retail strategy Scale-up leadership and board governance Lessons from corporate failure and fraud The economics of small and medium-sized business Chairmanship of listed and charitable organisations Ideal for Founders, CEOs and senior teams in consumer, hospitality, retail and service businesses Private equity, venture and growth-stage investor audiences Boards and non-executive directors of listed and private companies Industry conferences and member organisations focused on entrepreneurship and SME growth Audience outcomes A franker view of why scale-ups stall than most growth literature offers, drawn from named deals on both sides of the outcome. A working understanding of how private equity actually evaluates and backs consumer businesses, from a practitioner who still writes the cheques. A clearer sense of what a board chair owes a company under stress, informed by the Patisserie Valerie collapse and other live cases. Concrete prompts for founders on capital, hiring, controls and exit, anchored in three decades of operator experience.

Why organisations work with Lars Sudmann He brings Fortune 500 operating weight to leadership work. A former P&G CFO and Business Unit Strategy Leader speaks to executive committees in their own language. His self-leadership framework, drawn from his TEDx talk that has crossed 1.9 million views, gives senior leaders a usable model for the personal habits that determine whether strategy actually lands. The Spaghetti Principle, the thesis of his book on innovation, gives organisations a structured way to run more experiments without losing strategic discipline. He is a 6-time Belgian and 2-time European Champion of Public Speaking. Executive presence and communication craft are not a sideline; they are a discipline he can teach. As Council Director at The Conference Board, he convenes CFOs and strategy leaders across Europe and the Gulf, so the room he walks into is one he already understands. Biography highlights Former CFO Belgium and Business Unit Strategy Leader at Procter & Gamble. Principal of Sudmann & Company, advising Fortune 500 leadership teams on strategy execution and change. Council Director at The Conference Board (Strategy & Transformation, Finance Transformation, Gulf councils). Lecturer on leadership and innovation at RWTH Aachen, Braunschweig University, and Lüneburg University. Author of “Innovation that Sticks: Reach Success as a Leader in your Field with the Spaghetti Principle”. Multiple TEDx talks on self-leadership and innovation, with combined viewership in the millions. 6-time Belgian and 2-time European Champion of Public Speaking. Featured in BBC, Fast Company, Inc., The Washington Post, and Manager Magazin. Biography Most leadership content treats execution as a structural problem. Sudmann treats it as a personal one. His TEDx talk on self-leadership, now past 1.9 million views, argues that the daily behaviour of senior leaders is what determines whether strategy moves through the organisation or stalls in the slide deck. The argument carries weight because of the chair he sat in. Sudmann was CFO Belgium at Procter & Gamble and led business unit strategy inside the same group. He has run the numbers, owned the plan, and watched what actually happens when a leadership team is asked to change while still hitting the quarter. That experience now shapes Sudmann & Company, his consulting and training practice, and his role as Council Director at The Conference Board, where he convenes strategy and finance leaders across Europe and the Gulf. He lectures on innovation and leadership at RWTH Aachen, Braunschweig, and Lüneburg, and his book “Innovation that Sticks” sets out the Spaghetti Principle: a disciplined way to run small experiments and keep only what holds. The communication craft is its own credential. Six Belgian and two European public speaking titles mean a Sudmann keynote is not a polished version of corporate decks. It is built to land, with senior audiences, on the first hearing. Key speaking topics Self-leadership and executive habits Strategy execution under pressure Change leadership in complex organisations Innovation discipline and the Spaghetti Principle High-performance leadership teams Executive communication and presentation craft Ideal for Executive committees and senior leadership teams entering a major strategic shift. CFOs, strategy leaders, and transformation leads accountable for execution. Boards and leadership development programmes seeking a credible voice on self-leadership and high-performance behaviour. Conferences with audiences of senior corporate leaders across finance, strategy, and operations. Audience outcomes A working model of self-leadership that senior leaders can apply on Monday morning. A sharper read on why their current strategy is or is not moving through the organisation. The Spaghetti Principle as a method for running more disciplined innovation experiments. Concrete language and structure for executive communication, drawn from competitive speaking craft. A vocabulary for leadership behaviour their team can adopt collectively, not just individually.

Why organisations work with Kjell A. Nordstrom The «Karaoke Capitalism» framework names a specific competitive failure – the institutional imitation produced by benchmarking and best practice – that most strategy teams recognise but lack precise language to challenge or dismantle. His «multi-urban corporation» thesis, developed in Urban Express, gives multinationals a practical alternative to national market segmentation: a model for deciding where to compete based on urban density, talent pools, and city-level economic power rather than country borders. His argument that urbanisation and the feminisation of skilled workforces are structural economic forces – not social policy questions – translates demographic change into a direct input for strategic planning and talent decisions. Three decades of advisory work with large multinationals and the UK government, grounded in academic research into the internationalisation of firms, means his structural arguments have been pressure-tested against real strategic decisions at board level. Funky Business, translated into 33 languages and ranked among the greatest business books ever published, demonstrates that his frameworks have been tested and adopted in every major market – giving leadership teams confidence the thinking travels beyond any single regional or cultural context. Biography highlights PhD in International Business, Stockholm School of Economics (1991); former Assistant Professor at the Institute of International Business (IIB), same institution Co-author of Funky Business: Talent Makes Capital Dance, translated into 33 languages and ranked 16th greatest business book of all time; co-author of Karaoke Capitalism and Funky Business Forever with Jonas Ridderstrale Co-author of Urban Express and Momentum with Per Schlingmann; sole author of The Monkey and the Money: A History of Capitalism (Bokförlaget Stolpe, 2023) Ranked #9 in the Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers (2005); featured in multiple subsequent editions of the ranking Advisory and consulting work with large multinational corporations and the UK government Media appearances across CNN, CNBC, Fortune, Fast Company, Time Magazine, and the Financial Times; keynote presentations delivered in over 100 countries Biography The rules of competitive strategy seemed settled for most of the twentieth century. Identify a national market. Deploy capital and scale. Benchmark against rivals. Kjell A. Nordstrom, a Swedish economist with a PhD from the Stockholm School of Economics, has spent three decades building the case that those rules are losing their purchase – and that the structural forces displacing them are more powerful than most boards have yet absorbed. His 2000 book Funky Business, co-authored with Jonas Ridderstrale, argued that talent, not capital, had become the decisive competitive input. The book became an international bestseller in 33 languages and was ranked among the 16 greatest business books ever published. The follow-up, Karaoke Capitalism (2003), named a specific organisational failure: benchmarking and best practice had trained entire industries to imitate rather than differentiate, producing what the authors called a karaoke economy of second-rate cover versions. Both books remain in active circulation in serious management conversations. His subsequent work extended the analytical frame outward. Urban Express (2014), co-authored with Per Schlingmann, argued that multinationals are becoming multi-urban corporations. Cities, not nations, are the primary economic units of the coming decades, and an educated, urban, female workforce is the dominant skilled labour pool of the near future. Momentum (2023) examined how pandemic, geopolitical rupture, and climate pressure are accelerating this structural shift and what it demands from the next generation of leaders. Ranked #9 in the Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers (2005), and a regular presence in Fortune, the Financial Times, and on CNN, Nordstrom has advised large multinationals and the UK government on strategy and globalisation. His value in a boardroom conversation is specific: not scenario planning or trend forecasting, but structural argument about which forces are deterministic, and which are merely plausible. Key speaking topics Globalisation and competitive strategy Urbanisation and the rise of the multi-urban corporation The karaoke economy: imitation as competitive liability Talent as the primary driver of competitive advantage Demographic change as structural economic force The long-run trajectory of capitalism Crisis, geopolitical rupture, and strategic response Ideal for Executive and board-level strategy sessions at multinational organisations Government and public policy leaders navigating structural economic transformation Strategy, corporate development, and planning functions reviewing long-term competitive positioning International leadership forums and global business summits Audience outcomes A structural framework for identifying which macro forces are actually reshaping competition in their sector Language for naming and challenging institutional imitation within their own organisation A working understanding of the multi-urban corporation thesis and its implications for market entry and talent strategy Clearer thinking on how urbanisation and demographic change translate into actionable strategic planning inputs A longer-range perspective on the current moment in capitalism’s evolution and what it demands from senior leadership

Why organisations work with Kevin Roberts He led Saatchi and Saatchi globally for seventeen years, so brand and creative conversations land with the authority of someone who ran the network, not observed it. Lovemarks is one of the few brand frameworks from the 2000s still cited in marketing rooms; Advertising Age named it an Idea of the Decade in 2009. His operator track record covers Mary Quant, Gillette, Procter and Gamble, Pepsi-Cola and Lion Nathan, which gives commercial teams a counterpart who has run P&Ls, not only advised on them. 64 Shots gives leadership audiences a structured, opinionated playbook for operating in volatile markets, written from inside a creative business rather than a business school. Biography highlights CEO Worldwide of Saatchi and Saatchi from 1997 to 2014; Chairman until 2016. CEO of Pepsi-Cola Middle East at 32, then President and CEO of Pepsi-Cola Canada. Chief Operating Officer and Director at Lion Nathan, the Australasian brewer, from 1989 to 1996. Author of Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands, published in 18 languages, and 64 Shots: Leadership in a Crazy World. Honorary Professor of Creative Leadership at Lancaster University, with parallel honorary chairs at the University of Auckland Business School and the University of Victoria in Canada. Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to business and the community. Biography Lovemarks reframed a question marketers had been answering badly for years. Instead of measuring respect and recognition, Kevin Roberts argued that the brands that survive are the ones customers actively love, and that emotion, not rational benefit, is the real driver of long-term commercial value. The book travelled into 18 languages and became one of the few brand frameworks from the period still in active use. The argument carries weight because of where it came from. Roberts spent seventeen years as CEO Worldwide of Saatchi and Saatchi, after running Pepsi-Cola in the Middle East and Canada, and serving as Chief Operating Officer at Lion Nathan. He has sat on the operator side of brand decisions at scale, including categories where price is brutal and differentiation is mostly emotional. 64 Shots: Leadership in a Crazy World extended the work into leadership. The book is a set of sixty-four short, opinionated entries on running creative businesses in volatile conditions, drawn from his own career and the leaders he has worked with. It gives commercial audiences a way to talk about culture, decision-making and creative risk without the abstraction that usually surrounds those topics. Roberts now runs Red Rose Consulting and chairs My Food Bag and The Herdy Company. He holds honorary chairs in creative leadership and innovation at Lancaster University, the University of Auckland Business School and the University of Victoria in Canada, and is a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to business. Key speaking topics Brand strategy and emotional brand equity Creative leadership in commercial organisations Marketing transformation and customer loyalty High-performance culture Leadership in volatile markets Innovation inside legacy businesses Ideal for CMOs and brand leaders rebuilding loyalty in commoditised categories CEOs and boards of consumer-facing businesses where brand is the main commercial moat Marketing, creative and customer experience leadership teams Sales and growth conferences in retail, FMCG, media and advertising Audience outcomes A working definition of what separates a brand customers respect from one they actively love, and why the second is worth more Language for talking about emotion as a commercial asset rather than a soft variable A clearer view of how creative organisations make decisions under pressure, drawn from inside one of the world’s largest networks Practical positions on culture, risk and leadership taken from 64 Shots that audiences can argue with rather than nod at

Why organisations work with Ken Hughes His Blue Dot Consumer framework gives leadership teams a named model for the modern consumer – one who places themselves at the centre of every interaction and expects brands to be instant, personal, and emotionally authentic. It replaces vague customer-centricity language with a concrete diagnostic tool. Taylormaking, his 2025 book, uses Taylor Swift’s 12 studio albums as a structured analytical framework for brand intimacy – demonstrating how emotional loyalty, tribal belonging, and values-led branding operate in practice and what that requires from commercial strategy. A career spanning strategy consulting at Accenture, consumer insight at Nielsen, and 25 years as CEO of Glacier Consulting gives him a rare combination: analytical training in how consumers behave and sustained practical experience of what actually shifts in boardrooms. Named by CX Network among the Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow in 2025 and the Top 50 AI Leaders in CX to Follow in 2026, he brings an externally validated, current perspective on where consumer expectations are heading – not where they have been. His interdisciplinary base – consumer psychology, behavioural economics, digital anthropology, and cyberpsychology – lets him explain brand decisions as outcomes of human behaviour, not just marketing choices. That distinction is particularly valuable in conversations with senior leaders who have grown sceptical of CX as a function. Biography highlights CEO and founder of Glacier Consulting, a consumer insight agency whose clients include Coca-Cola, IKEA, AXA, Unilever, Walmart, Google, Microsoft, and PayPal Former Strategy Consultant at Accenture and Manager of Consumer Insight at Nielsen Part-time lecturer in Consumer Behaviour at University College Cork Author of Taylormaking: A New Era of Modern Branding and Customer Connection (2025), a CX strategy book structured around Taylor Swift’s 12 studio albums TEDx speaker at TEDxUniversityofNicosia; talk has received more than 100,000 online views Named by CX Network among the Top 50 Customer Experience Leaders to Follow in 2025 and Top 50 AI Leaders in CX to Follow in 2026 Biography Customer loyalty has become harder to earn as the expectations of consumers – particularly Gen Z and Gen Alpha – have shifted from satisfaction to emotional belonging. Ken Hughes built Glacier Consulting around one persistent question: why do people buy, and what does that mean for how brands should behave? After earlier careers as a strategy consultant at Accenture and a consumer insight manager at Nielsen, he has spent more than two decades embedding behavioural science into commercial practice. His named concept, the Blue Dot Consumer, gives organisations a specific model for the modern customer – one who treats themselves as the centre of every interaction, expecting brands to be instant, personal, and emotionally intelligent. That framework, rooted in consumer psychology, digital anthropology, and behavioural economics, underpins both his consultancy work and his keynote practice across five continents. His 2025 book, Taylormaking, extends that argument into a structured analysis of brand intimacy, using Taylor Swift’s 12 studio albums as a framework for understanding emotional loyalty, tribal community, and values-led leadership. It is a useful index of how Hughes works: making the mechanisms of consumer psychology legible and commercially actionable for leadership audiences well beyond the CX function. A part-time lecturer in Consumer Behaviour at University College Cork and named by CX Network among the Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow in both 2025 and 2026, Hughes speaks more than 80 times annually. His client roster – spanning Coca-Cola, Unilever, Walmart, Google, Microsoft, and PayPal – reflects both the breadth of sectors in which his behavioural arguments apply and the seniority of the audiences he typically addresses. Key speaking topics Consumer psychology and shopper behaviour Customer experience strategy Brand connection and emotional loyalty Generational consumer shifts – Gen Z and Gen Alpha AI and the future of customer experience Creativity and innovation in commercial culture Ideal for CMOs and marketing leaders focused on building brand loyalty in a competitive, AI-influenced landscape Customer experience leaders navigating the shift from transactional to emotionally driven consumer relationships Senior commercial and retail leaders seeking behavioural insight into how younger consumer cohorts make brand decisions Transformation and innovation leads rethinking how brands earn and sustain connection with modern audiences Audience outcomes A named model – the Blue Dot Consumer – for diagnosing how modern consumers make brand decisions and what they expect from every brand interaction Practical understanding of how emotional loyalty differs from satisfaction, and what organisations must do differently to build it Insight into how Gen Z and Gen Alpha are reshaping brand expectations and what that requires from commercial and marketing strategy Clarity on AI’s role in the future of customer experience – where automation strengthens brand connection and where it risks eroding it A framework, drawn from Taylormaking, for building tribal brand belonging through authenticity, community, and values-led leadership

Why organisations work with Jonathan Reynolds His research framework on omnichannel retail – built over four decades at Oxford through direct partnerships with Tesco, the British Retail Consortium, Eurocommerce, and retail associations in eight countries, gives leadership teams a structural diagnosis of competitive change, rather than a trend description. Navigating the New Retail Landscape (Oxford University Press, 3rd edition 2025) draws on over 40 international case studies to make a specific argument: the retailers that win redesign the enterprise, not just the channel mix. Audiences leave with a reference framework, not just a perspective. Reynolds leads OXIRM, the UK’s only dedicated university research institute for retail management, giving him an institutional vantage point that neither management consultants nor industry analysts can replicate. His research consistently interrogates the “death of the high street” narrative and offers a more rigorous counter-argument: physical retail is not dying, but its strategic logic has changed fundamentally. That distinction matters to boards making long-term investment decisions. As a regular contributor to the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, and Wall Street Journal, he translates peer-reviewed research into language that executive teams and boards can act on directly. Biography highlights Associate Professor in Retail Marketing and Deputy Dean (External Relations), Saïd Business School, University of Oxford Founding member and Academic Director, Oxford Institute of Retail Management (OXIRM), since 1999 Co-author, Navigating the New Retail Landscape: A Guide for Business Leaders (Oxford University Press; 3rd edition, 2025) Deputy Director, ESRC Smart Data Research geographic data service (GeoDS) – joint initiative of Oxford, Liverpool, Edinburgh and UCL Vice-Principal and Governing Body Fellow, Green Templeton College, Oxford Keynote speaker, World Retail Congress Regular media contributor: BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal Visiting Professor, Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, Dartmouth College Biography In 1985, a research commission from Tesco brought Jonathan Reynolds to Oxford to examine how new technology would reshape retail operations. Four decades later, Reynolds is Associate Professor in Retail Marketing and Deputy Dean at Saïd Business School. The structural question that commission raised of how a retail enterprise stays competitive when its environment is being redrawn, has never been more pressing. Reynolds is the founding Academic Director of the Oxford Institute of Retail Management, a role he has held since 1999. OXIRM is the UK’s only dedicated university research centre for retail management. Reynolds uses it to run sustained research partnerships with practitioners and policymakers including the British Retail Consortium, Eurocommerce, and retail associations in Estonia, Finland, Greece, Malaysia, New Zealand and the UK, giving his analysis a data foundation that industry commentary rarely achieves. His central argument, developed across three editions of Navigating the New Retail Landscape (OUP, 3rd edition 2025), is that the retailers who survive the current period of disruption are not those who add channels most quickly. Drawing on over 40 international case studies, Reynolds and co-author Alan Treadgold show that success requires redesigning the enterprise: its capabilities, its leadership model, and its understanding of what physical stores are strategically for. The book is now a standard reference for senior retail executives and strategy teams internationally. Reynolds is a keynote speaker at the World Retail Congress and a regular analytical voice for the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal. His research sits inside peer-reviewed journals and inside boardroom conversations simultaneously: a combination that is less common than it should be, and that gives his arguments their particular authority. Key speaking topics Omnichannel and e-commerce strategy Retail business model innovation Technology adoption and digital transformation in retail The strategic role of physical stores Retail entrepreneurship and innovation Retail productivity and workforce capability Retail development, planning and location strategy Consumer data and retail intelligence Ideal for Chief Executive Officers and strategy directors of retail and consumer-facing enterprises Chief Commercial Officers and Chief Marketing Officers navigating channel complexity Real estate and property investors with significant retail exposure Policy teams and government bodies working on town centres, high streets, and retail planning Audience outcomes A clearer framework for distinguishing between channel complexity and genuine competitive strategy An evidence-based analysis of where physical retail creates value and where it no longer does, drawn from 40+ international case studies A more precise understanding of the organisational capabilities and leadership behaviours that separate retail winners from those adding digital layers without structural change Exposure to current Oxford research on consumer data, retail geography, and market evolution that does not typically reach practitioner audiences Language and reference points for board-level conversations about long-term retail investment and transformation

Why organisations work with Jonas Ridderstrale He gives leadership teams a serious framework for the talent-versus-capital question, drawn from “Funky Business,” a title ranked No. 16 in Bloomsbury’s survey of the best business books and translated into more than 30 languages. He is one of a small group of European thinkers who have held a Thinkers50 European Top 5 position across multiple cycles, which gives senior buyers confidence that the underlying ideas have stood up to peer scrutiny. His argument cuts directly at strategic mimicry: why most differentiation programmes fail because organisations copy each other faster than they can build genuine identity, and what to do about it. He brings the academic spine of a Stockholm School of Economics PhD together with sustained advisory work at Ashridge and IE Business School, so the ideas land with both rigour and commercial framing. He is co-owner and chairman of Mgruppen, a Swedish management training company, which keeps his material connected to live executive development practice rather than archived theory. Biography highlights PhD in International Business and MBA, Stockholm School of Economics. Visiting professor at Ashridge Business School (UK) and IE Business School (Spain). Co-author of “Funky Business” (2000), “Karaoke Capitalism” (2004) and “Funky Business Forever” (2007) with Kjell A. Nordstrom. Co-author of “Re-energizing the Corporation” with Mark Wilcox and “Fast/Forward” with Julian Birkinshaw of London Business School. Ranked No. 23 globally and Top 5 in Europe on the 2009 Thinkers50 list, with continued European Top 5 placement in 2011. Italian Nobels Colloquia award for “Leadership in Business and Economic Thinking” (2007). Biography Capital is no longer the binding constraint on most large companies. Talent is, ideas are, and identity is. That shift, set out in “Funky Business” with Kjell A. Nordstrom in 2000, became one of the most widely translated business arguments of the last quarter century, sold over 300,000 copies in the original edition and reached more than 30 languages. The work behind the argument is academic. Ridderstrale completed his MBA and PhD in International Business at Stockholm School of Economics, with a doctoral thesis on global innovation in multinational corporations. He spent his early career at the Centre for Advanced Studies of Leadership there before moving into visiting professor roles at Ashridge in the UK and IE Business School in Spain. The follow-on books extended the thesis rather than restating it. “Karaoke Capitalism” tackled strategic mimicry in copycat markets. “Funky Business Forever” pressed on the human stakes. “Re-energizing the Corporation,” with Mark Wilcox, addressed the question of how leaders convert a different idea into actual organisational change. “Fast/Forward,” with Julian Birkinshaw of London Business School, sharpened the link to execution. The Thinkers50 ranking placed him at No. 23 globally in 2009 and inside the European Top 5 across multiple cycles, alongside the Italian Nobels Colloquia award in 2007. Today he chairs Mgruppen, a Swedish management training company, which keeps the material grounded in the executive development brief rather than the lecture circuit. Key speaking topics Strategy under commoditisation Talent and human capital advantage Innovation and corporate identity Leadership of organisational change Competitive differentiation in copycat markets Building corporate “tribes” and culture The future firm Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting strategy in markets where products and processes have converged. CHROs and Chief Talent Officers reframing the link between people strategy and competitive advantage. Innovation and strategy leads tasked with moving the business off cost-led competition. Leadership development programmes for senior managers in transformation-heavy industries. Audience outcomes A sharper read on why most differentiation efforts default to imitation, and how to break that pattern. Language for the talent-versus-capital question that lands with both finance and HR audiences. A practical view of how identity, culture and “tribe” become commercial assets, not soft factors. Concrete prompts for senior teams on what their organisation looks like when capital advantages run out.