Innovation & Disruption speakers

Why organisations work with Randi Zuckerberg She created Facebook Live – a verifiable, specific product decision made inside one of the most consequential platform companies in history – giving her first-hand insight into how media formats shape audience behaviour at scale that no advisory role can replicate. Pick Three (2018) provides a named, counter-intuitive framework with a specific thesis: sustainable performance – individual and organisational – comes from deliberate daily prioritisation across five competing demands, not from attempting balance across all of them simultaneously. Her knowledge of how Facebook made its foundational decisions on elections, political partnerships, and live video predates the broader public and regulatory reckoning with platform power by nearly a decade – and comes from inside the decisions, not from observing them. Her active angel investment portfolio – 53% female founders, 30% diverse founders – means her perspective on digital entrepreneurship and media ventures is commercially current, not retrospective. Multiple Tony Award wins as a Broadway co-producer alongside a technology career demonstrates a consistent and applied understanding of commercial storytelling across very different formats and audience types – directly relevant to organisations trying to build brand authority rather than brand noise. Biography highlights One of the first ten employees at Facebook (2005–2011); Director of Market Development and Spokesperson Creator of Facebook Live, now used by more than two billion people globally Emmy nomination, 2011, for the pioneering integration of television and social media in U.S. midterm election coverage Founder and CEO, Zuckerberg Media (est. 2011); clients include the United Nations, Condé Nast, Clinton Global Initiative, and Cirque du Soleil New York Times bestselling author: Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives (HarperCollins, 2013) and Pick Three: You Can Have It All (Just Not Every Day) (2018) Multiple Tony Award-winning Broadway co-producer, including Hadestown (Best Musical, 2019); also Drama Desk Award and Kidscreen Award Host, Randi Zuckerberg Means Business, SiriusXM; board member, Life360 BA in Psychology, Harvard University Biography Facebook Live was built by a team of fewer than ten people making decisions about media format, political partnerships, and audience engagement that nobody had made before. Randi Zuckerberg led that work. The choices her team made – about what live video could do for commercial storytelling, for political communication, for media partnerships – shaped how organisations and audiences interact in real time to this day. After leaving Facebook in 2011, she founded Zuckerberg Media, producing content and advisory work for organisations including the United Nations, Condé Nast, Cirque du Soleil, and the Clinton Global Initiative. The question her firm consistently addresses is strategic rather than technical: how does an organisation translate digital presence into an audience it actually owns, rather than one it rents from a platform? Her 2018 book Pick Three formalised a framework she had developed through practice. The argument is specific and deliberately counter-intuitive: sustainable performance – individual or organisational – does not come from balance across five competing demands (Work, Sleep, Family, Fitness, Friends). It comes from deliberate daily prioritisation of three. That specificity is what makes the framework usable in executive development conversations, rather than aspirational. Her Tony Award wins as Broadway co-producer, her weekly SiriusXM programme, and an angel investment portfolio with a deliberate diversity mandate are not incidental to her commercial thinking. They reflect the same underlying argument – that strategic storytelling, deployed with intent and discipline across different formats, builds audiences that advertising cannot replicate. Key speaking topics Digital media strategy and platform intelligence Entrepreneurship and venture building Commercial storytelling and brand media The creator economy and audience ownership Technology and society: the platform era in retrospect Productivity and prioritisation: the Pick Three framework Women in technology and entrepreneurship Ideal for CMOs, brand directors, and communications executives navigating digital media strategy and audience ownership Entrepreneurial leadership communities, founder networks, and innovation-focused executive programmes Executive teams building media presence as a commercial strategy rather than a communications function CHROs and leadership development leads running programmes on performance, prioritisation, and sustainable leadership Audience outcomes A clearer distinction between digital activity and digital strategy, grounded in how platform companies actually make decisions about media and audience Practical application of the Pick Three framework for daily prioritisation – applicable to individual performance, team leadership, and organisational resource allocation First-hand perspective on how media partnerships, content formats, and platform intelligence were developed inside Facebook during its most formative years A more operationally grounded view of the creator economy: what «owning your audience» actually requires versus what platforms provide Greater confidence in making active, deliberate trade-offs between competing strategic priorities rather than attempting to progress all of them simultaneously

Why organisations work with Rasmus Ankersen He has actually built the model he talks about. As chairman of FC Midtjylland, the club won three Danish Superliga titles using a data-led recruitment and set-piece method that was later studied across European football. His book The Gold Mine Effect is grounded in seven months of field research inside the world’s most productive talent ecosystems, from Brazilian football academies to Ethiopian distance running, not a desk study of secondary literature. Through Sport Republic, he runs a multi-club investment platform now controlling Southampton FC and Goztepe SK, so the lens on capital allocation, scouting markets and downside management is operational, not theoretical. He gives boards a vocabulary for the awkward conversation about success: how organisations stop learning the moment results turn positive, and what to do about it before the next cycle. Biography highlights Co-founder and CEO of Sport Republic, owner of Southampton FC and majority owner of Goztepe SK. Co-director of football at Brentford FC, 2015 to 2020, the platform that produced Premier League promotion in 2021. Chairman of FC Midtjylland during a period that included Danish Superliga titles in 2015, 2018 and 2020. Author of The Gold Mine Effect (Icon Books, 2012) and Hunger in Paradise (2016). TEDxManchester speaker on football analytics applied to organisational decision-making. Has delivered keynotes for LEGO, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Boston Consulting Group, Roche, AstraZeneca, Coca-Cola and Cisco. Biography Brentford were a mid-table Championship club when Matthew Benham, Rasmus Ankersen and a small analytics team set out to build a Premier League squad without Premier League money. The same logic was applied at FC Midtjylland in Denmark. Both clubs went on to win, repeatedly, against opponents with bigger budgets and longer histories. That track record is the foundation of Ankersen’s argument to corporate audiences. The bias to overvalue established names and undervalue evidence is not a football problem. It is a recruiting problem, a capital allocation problem, and a strategy problem. His book The Gold Mine Effect, published in 2012 after seven months living inside elite training environments from Kenya to Brazil, makes the case that performance hotbeds are produced, not discovered. His second book, Hunger in Paradise, takes the harder question. Why do successful organisations stop learning. He frames complacency as the silent failure mode of a winning strategy, and argues that the work of leadership is to keep the system honest after the results turn good. The thesis has resonated with senior teams at LEGO, Google, BCG, Roche and others who have brought him in. Today he runs Sport Republic, the investment vehicle that acquired Southampton FC in 2022 and now operates a multi-club model across England, Turkey and Belgium. The day job means his frameworks are tested in real time, against real capital, in one of the most ruthless performance markets there is. Key speaking topics High-performance culture Talent identification and development Data-driven decision-making Avoiding complacency in successful organisations Performance environments and ecosystems Lessons from elite sport for business Leadership and decision-making under pressure Ideal for CEOs and executive teams in scaled organisations entering a new performance cycle CHROs and talent leaders rebuilding recruitment and assessment models Strategy and corporate development leaders responsible for capital allocation and M&A Boards examining why a winning strategy is starting to plateau Audience outcomes A sharper view of where the organisation is overpaying for proven names and underinvesting in evidence. A working definition of complacency that can be diagnosed in the business, not just lamented. Concrete examples of how data and judgement combine in high-stakes decisions, drawn from Brentford, Midtjylland and Southampton. A reframing of what a “performance environment” is, and why most attempts to import one fail.

Why organisations work with Ray Kurzweil A documented forecasting record stretching from 1990’s The Age of Intelligent Machines through to The Singularity Is Nearer in 2024, allowing leaders to test their own planning assumptions against predictions that have already been scored against reality. Foundational practitioner credibility: Kurzweil invented the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the Kurzweil 250 synthesiser, and the first commercially viable large-vocabulary speech recognition. He is a technologist who built the technology he describes. Thirteen years at Google leading work on natural language understanding, ending in 2025, give audiences direct insight into how today’s frontier AI labs actually think about machine intelligence. The Law of Accelerating Returns is the most cited framework for why technology trajectories defeat linear planning, giving boards a structured way to argue about long-range bets. Currently Chief AI Officer at Beyond Imagination, the humanoid robotics company he co-founded in 2018, which puts him inside the operating problems of deploying AI into physical industrial environments rather than at a remove from them. Biography highlights Recipient of the 1999 U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the highest U.S. honour in technology, awarded by President Clinton. 2001 Lemelson-MIT Prize ($500,000) and inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002. Author of The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), The Singularity Is Near (2005), How to Create a Mind (2012), and The Singularity Is Nearer (2024). Co-founder of Singularity University at NASA Ames Research Center; co-founder and Chief AI Officer of Beyond Imagination, valued at $500 million in its 2025 Series B. Director of Engineering, then Principal Researcher and AI Visionary at Google from 2012 to 2025, focused on natural language understanding. Named to the Time 100 AI list (2024); holds 21 honorary doctorates and a Technical Grammy Award. Biography By 2009, computers were supposed to be in our pockets, recognising speech well enough to take dictation and reading text aloud to blind users. They were. The predictions came from a 1999 book that struck many of its original readers as fanciful. The inventor who wrote it had already built the first three of those technologies himself. That inventor is Ray Kurzweil. His Law of Accelerating Returns, articulated in that 1999 book and elaborated in The Singularity Is Near in 2005, holds that information technologies progress along smooth exponential curves. As one paradigm exhausts itself, capital and talent flow toward whatever comes next, and the underlying curve continues. The authority comes from rare breadth. Kurzweil invented omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the Kurzweil 250 synthesiser, and the first commercial large-vocabulary speech recognition. President Clinton awarded him the 1999 National Medal of Technology. He spent thirteen years at Google leading work on natural language understanding, ending in 2025 as Principal Researcher and AI Visionary. The 2024 sequel The Singularity Is Nearer revisited those predictions in light of the AI advances of the preceding decade and concluded that human-level AI by 2029 still held. Since 2025 he has served as Chief AI Officer at Beyond Imagination, the humanoid robotics company he co-founded, which raised $100 million in Series B funding at a $500 million valuation that year. The work places him inside the operational reality of deploying AI into physical industrial environments. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and the path to AGI The Law of Accelerating Returns and exponential technology Long-range AI and computing forecasts Human-machine convergence and brain-computer integration Biotechnology, longevity, and the merging of biology with computation Innovation cycles and the economics of technological disruption Ideal for CEOs, CTOs, and chief strategy officers planning multi-year technology investments Boards and executive committees stress-testing long-range corporate plans Innovation, R&D, and AI leadership teams inside large enterprises Industry conferences on AI, future of technology, healthcare innovation, and technology strategy Audience outcomes An empirical map of how computing power, gene sequencing speed, and AI capability have actually doubled over recent decades, against which to test internal forecasting assumptions. Concrete forecast dates for human-level AI, brain-computer integration, and the Singularity, with the reasoning behind each. A view of which earlier Kurzweil predictions have been validated by the current AI moment and which remain open. Sharper instincts for spotting linear extrapolations sitting inside long-range corporate plans. A common reference point for boards and leadership teams arguing about long-range technology investment.

Why organisations work with Rebecca Minkoff Two decades of operating the same brand through three retail eras: department store, direct-to-consumer digital, and the post-pandemic rebuild. Few founder speakers have run their own brand long enough to talk credibly about all three. A working playbook for founder reinvention. After losing 70% of revenue in 2020, Minkoff repositioned the business; she can speak to the operational decisions that recovery actually required. Convening power with other women founders. Through the Female Founder Collective and the Superwomen podcast, she has interviewed and worked alongside operators like Katie Couric, Bozoma St. John and Jessica Alba, and brings that network into the room. A published thesis on founder behaviour. “Fearless” (HarperCollins Leadership, 2021) sets out the specific rules she used to build and rebuild the brand, giving audiences a single argument to react to rather than a career retrospective. Biography highlights Founder and Co-Creative Director of Rebecca Minkoff, established 2005, distributed across 900+ stores worldwide and own retail in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Korea. Founder of the Female Founder Collective (2018), a network of 9,000+ women-led businesses providing education, mentorship and strategic resources. Author of “Fearless: The New Rules for Unlocking Creativity, Courage, and Success” (HarperCollins Leadership, 2021). Host of the “Superwomen with Rebecca Minkoff” podcast, with guests including Katie Couric, Bozoma St. John and Jessica Alba. Recipient of the Accessories Council Breakthrough Designer Award (2011). Active member of the CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America). Biography The Morning After Bag was designed in 2005 by a 24-year-old who had moved to New York at 18 to work in fashion. Twenty years later, that handbag is still in production, the brand carries Rebecca Minkoff’s name across 900 stores, and the founder has had to rebuild her own company more than once to keep it there. That second part is where she becomes useful to organisations. Minkoff has run the Rebecca Minkoff brand through the collapse of department store retail, the rise of direct-to-consumer digital, and a pandemic that erased 70% of her business in a single year. The business she now operates is structurally different from the one she founded, and she has had to make every one of those changes herself. In 2018, she founded the Female Founder Collective, now a 9,000-member network for women-led businesses, and launched the Superwomen podcast, where she has interviewed founders and operators including Katie Couric, Bozoma St. John and Jessica Alba. In 2021 she published “Fearless” with HarperCollins Leadership, a book that sets out the specific operating rules she used to build the brand and stay in business. The Accessories Council named her Breakthrough Designer in 2011. She is an active CFDA member. The more interesting credential, for a senior buyer, is that she has run the same name-on-the-door consumer brand for two decades, which is not a position many founders reach. Key speaking topics Founder reinvention after market shock Building and scaling a consumer brand Direct-to-consumer and digital retail Women in entrepreneurship and access to capital Brand longevity over multiple retail eras Networks and mentorship for women founders Risk-taking and rule-breaking in brand building Ideal for Founders, CEOs and senior commercial leaders at consumer brands navigating channel disruption or category decline. Heads of DTC, brand and customer for retail and consumer-goods companies rebuilding after demand shocks. Corporate networks and ERGs for women in leadership, particularly those focused on entrepreneurship and progression to founder roles. Investor, accelerator and venture-platform audiences working with women-led portfolios. Audience outcomes A specific operator account of how a consumer brand survives twenty years of retail change, told by the person whose name is on the building. A concrete view of what founders actually do after a 70% revenue loss, beyond the post-mortem narrative. A picture of how networks like the Female Founder Collective change the funding and mentorship arithmetic for women-led businesses. The argument from “Fearless” in the founder’s own words, including which of the rules held under pressure and which did not.

Why organisations work with Riaz Shah He has run reskilling at a scale almost no academic or consultant has matched: more than 400,000 employees and 24 million hours of learning a year inside EY. He built the EY Tech MBA, one of the first corporate degree programmes to put technology fluency at the centre of professional services training, and can speak about what it took to make it work. His authority on the future of work rests on operating responsibility, not research alone. He has been the executive on the hook for the budget, the platform choices and the outcomes. He chairs One Degree Academy, a free school for children in an underserved part of London now ranked among the world’s top ten in the Overcoming Adversity category of the World’s Best School Prizes. His argument that learning design matters at scale is supported by results, not theory. His OBE for Services to Education, awarded by HM King Charles III in 2023, signals that the credibility is recognised beyond the corporate audience. Biography highlights Professor of Practice for Innovation & Leadership, Hult International Business School. 27 years as a partner at EY, including Global Learning Leader, Managing Partner of London Assurance and Chief Operations Officer for EMEIA Markets. Architect of the EY Tech MBA, deployed across a workforce of more than 400,000 professionals. OBE for Services to Education, 2023. Founder and Chair of One Degree Academy, a Top 10 finalist for the World’s Best School Prize in the Overcoming Adversity category. Non-executive director, Genius Group (appointed July 2024). Biography Most large organisations have an AI strategy. Very few have a learning strategy capable of delivering it. That gap, between what a workforce is being asked to do next year and what it knows how to do today, is the specific problem Riaz Shah has spent the last decade inside. At EY, as Global Learning Leader, he carried operating responsibility for how more than 400,000 professionals were equipped for a market reshaped by automation, AI and digital platforms. His team delivered more than 24 million hours of learning a year and built the EY Tech MBA, a full corporate degree programme that put technology fluency at the centre of a professional services career. He had previously been Managing Partner of London Assurance and Chief Operations Officer for EMEIA Markets, so the work was anchored in commercial reality, not in the learning department’s preferences. He now teaches at Hult International Business School as Professor of Practice for Innovation & Leadership, where his sessions with senior executives concentrate on global megatrends, digital disruption and how organisations rebuild capability fast enough to keep up. He also chairs One Degree Academy, a state-funded free school for children aged 4 to 18 in an underserved part of London. The school is a Top 10 finalist in the Overcoming Adversity category of the World’s Best School Prizes, and is the practical expression of his argument that learning design, done seriously, scales. In 2023, King Charles III awarded him the OBE for Services to Education. He sits on the board of Genius Group, a Nasdaq-listed education business, and is a member of YPO. Key speaking topics AI and the future of work Reskilling and workforce transformation at scale Corporate learning as a strategic capability Innovation and growth mindset inside large organisations Generational shifts in the workplace Demographics and changing consumer attitudes Leadership in conditions of digital disruption Ideal for CHROs and Chief Learning Officers commissioning a workforce transformation tied to AI and automation. CEOs and executive committees of large services and knowledge businesses where the talent base is the product. Boards reviewing the capability assumptions inside a digital or AI strategy. Senior leadership conferences where the brief is to make the case for serious, not cosmetic, reskilling. Audience outcomes A sharper view of where the gap between AI ambition and workforce capability is biggest, and which gaps matter most commercially. A clearer picture of what corporate learning has to look like to keep pace with technology, drawn from running it at EY scale. An honest read on what worked and what did not in building the EY Tech MBA, with the operational detail intact. A more confident sense of how to talk to a workforce about AI without losing trust.

Why organisations work with Rich Karlgaard Four decades of close-range observation of Silicon Valley business models, written from the editorial chair of Forbes, give him a fluent read on how technology cycles change the rules of competition. The Soft Edge sets out a specific argument that durable advantage comes from trust, intelligence, teams, taste and story, not from strategy and execution alone, and gives boards a vocabulary for the cultural side of growth. Late Bloomers challenges the early-achievement orthodoxy in corporate hiring and promotion, useful for leaders rethinking talent pipelines, succession and the cost of writing off mid-career performers. Team Genius, co-authored with Michael S. Malone, draws on research into team size, composition and dynamics, giving operating leaders a structured way to think about how high-performing groups are actually built. Karlgaard moderates and panels at scale at events such as the Milken Institute Global Conference and the ASU+GSV Summit, comfortable in front of CEO and investor audiences and able to push beyond a prepared script. Biography highlights Editor-at-large and futurist, Forbes Media; publisher of Forbes magazine, 1998 to 2018. Author of Late Bloomers (Currency, 2019), The Soft Edge (Jossey-Bass, 2014), Team Genius (HarperBusiness, 2015, with Michael S. Malone) and Life 2.0 (2004). Long-running Forbes columnist, “Innovation Rules” (formerly “Digital Rules”); regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal opinion pages and panellist on Forbes on FOX. Co-founder of the Churchill Club, Silicon Valley’s largest public business and technology forum, and of Upside magazine and Forbes ASAP. Northern California winner, Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year, 1997. Featured on NPR for Late Bloomers and a regular speaker at the Milken Institute Global Conference and the ASU+GSV Summit. Biography The companies that compound advantage over decades tend to look ordinary up close. They are not always the fastest or the most aggressive. What they share is a set of cultural conditions, trust, taste, intelligence about their own people, that competitors cannot easily copy. That is the argument running through Rich Karlgaard’s work at Forbes and in his books. Karlgaard has watched Silicon Valley from the editorial chair of a major business title for more than two decades. He was publisher of Forbes from 1998 to 2018 and is now editor-at-large and futurist for Forbes Media. He co-founded Upside magazine, Forbes ASAP, and the Churchill Club, the largest business and technology forum in Silicon Valley, work that earned him the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for Northern California in 1997. His books map a single problem from different angles. The Soft Edge (Jossey-Bass, 2014) argues that strategy and execution are necessary but not sufficient, and that durable competitive advantage now sits in five cultural variables led by trust. Team Genius, co-written with Michael S. Malone, applies that lens to team design, drawing on research into how size, composition and conflict actually drive performance. Late Bloomers (Currency, 2019) takes the argument into talent strategy, challenging the SAT-and-startup-founder logic that writes off the people who do their best work at forty, fifty or sixty. For a board or executive audience, Karlgaard’s value is in being a serious commercial voice for the unfashionable side of growth. He does not dispute the importance of speed or technology, he lives inside both, but he treats culture, trust and patient talent development as commercial inputs with measurable returns, not as soft virtues. That framing tends to land with senior leaders who have run the playbook of relentless execution and seen the limits. Key speaking topics Innovation and the future of business Culture as competitive advantage High-performing teams Talent, late bloomers and the corporate path Silicon Valley, technology cycles and disruption Leadership in the age of smart machines Ideal for CEO, board and senior leadership audiences setting innovation and growth strategy CHROs and talent leaders rethinking hiring, promotion and succession beyond early-career markers Investor and CFO audiences who want a fluent read on Silicon Valley business models from a long-standing editorial vantage Conference programmes that need a credible moderator or panellist for executive and investor sessions Audience outcomes A working argument for why durable advantage now sits in cultural and human variables, not just strategy and execution A sharper view of how high-performing teams are actually built, drawn from the research behind Team Genius A direct challenge to the early-achievement bias in corporate hiring, promotion and succession, with named examples A current read on which technology cycles and Silicon Valley operating models matter for the next planning horizon

Why organisations work with Rich Mulholland He runs a working AI agency, Too Many Robots, alongside a presentation business, so the advice on staying relevant in an AI-saturated market comes from someone deploying the tools, not commenting on them. Legacide gives him a precise argument that flips the standard innovation conversation: the constraint is not new ideas, it is the old behaviour that keeps surviving every restructure. Here Be Dragons codifies “storyselling” as a discipline for commercial teams, useful for sales leaders trying to move buyers without resorting to feature lists or discounting. Missing Link has shaped the presentation craft of corporate leaders across South Africa and beyond for over two decades, which means he speaks to senior executives about communication as someone who has trained the room rather than just spoken in it. Biography highlights Founder of Missing Link, described by multiple sources as South Africa’s largest presentation and communication training firm. Founder of Too Many Robots, an AI agency advising clients on practical AI deployment. Co-founder of 21Tanks, a problem-identification consultancy positioned as South Africa’s first perspective lab. Author of four books: Legacide, Boredom Slayer, Here Be Dragons, and Relentless Relevance. Guest lecturer at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business and the Gordon Institute of Business Science. TEDx speaker at TEDxJohannesburg and TEDxCapeTown; has delivered keynotes in 50 countries across six continents. Biography Innovation programmes rarely fail at the idea stage. They fail at the legacy stage, where the existing way of doing things absorbs the new initiative and digests it back into business as usual. This is the territory Rich Mulholland has spent two decades working in, first through Missing Link, the South African presentation and communication firm he founded, and then through the writing that made Legacide a reference point for executives trying to understand why their change programmes keep stalling. His thesis is direct. Innovation does not happen when an organisation starts doing something new. It happens when it stops doing something old. That distinction reframes the senior team’s job from generating ideas to clearing space, and it is the spine that connects his work across innovation, sales, and communication. In Here Be Dragons he applies the same logic to commercial teams, treating storytelling not as a soft skill but as the operating discipline that decides whether a deal moves. The AI dimension is the more recent layer. Through Too Many Robots, the agency he founded to help clients deploy AI tactically rather than rhetorically, Mulholland has been working inside the question that most boards are still asking from the outside: what remains a human advantage when expectation, attention, and execution can all be automated. His answer, set out in the Humanity’s Unfair Advantage keynote, is that relevance is the perpetual play, not a position you achieve once. He is a guest lecturer at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business and at GIBS, has spoken in 50 countries across six continents, and has appeared on TEDx stages including TEDxJohannesburg and TEDxCapeTown. Before any of this he was a touring roadie running lights for Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, and Bon Jovi, which is where the obsession with what makes a room respond actually started. Key speaking topics Relentless relevance and the discipline of staying useful to customers Legacy thinking as the silent constraint on innovation Storyselling and persuasion for commercial teams Humanity’s unfair advantage in an AI-driven market Leadership communication and executive presence Strategy for autonomous and purpose-driven organisations Ideal for Chief commercial officers, chief revenue officers, and sales leadership audiences working on storytelling and buyer persuasion Innovation leads, transformation heads, and strategy teams trying to dismantle legacy behaviour rather than add new initiatives Executive communicators and senior leaders preparing for high-stakes platforms, investor days, and town halls Boards and leadership teams scoping where AI substitutes human work and where human relevance still holds Audience outcomes A working definition of what legacy thinking looks like inside their own organisation, and where it is absorbing innovation effort A sharper framing for sales and commercial narratives that moves beyond feature lists into customer-centred story A clearer view of which parts of their work AI will eat and which parts depend on human relevance A practical standard for what a senior executive presentation should do, drawn from someone who has trained presenters for two decades

Why organisations work with Richard Florida His “three Ts” framework (technology, talent, tolerance) remains the most cited model in talent geography, drawn on by city governments and corporate location strategists worldwide. He named and quantified the creative class, the 40-million-strong workforce whose location and lifestyle decisions now drive regional economic growth. Through the Creative Class Group, he has advised BMW, Audi, Microsoft, Facebook, and Starwood Hotels, alongside city and regional governments worldwide. He co-founded CityLab, now owned by Bloomberg, and contributes regularly to The Atlantic and the Financial Times. His 2017 book The New Urban Crisis examined how the same forces driving creative-economy growth also produce inequality and segregation, giving leaders a more honest account of the trade-offs in talent-led strategies. Biography highlights University Professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and School of Cities, which he helped found Visiting Distinguished Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management Author of The Rise of the Creative Class, winner of the Washington Monthly Political Book Award and a Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea of 2004 Co-founder of CityLab, now owned by Bloomberg Ranked #19 on the Thinkers50 list of the world’s most influential management thinkers in 2017 Founder of the Creative Class Group, advising BMW, Audi, Microsoft, Facebook, and Starwood Hotels Biography Talent used to follow jobs. Florida’s research, beginning with his 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class, demonstrated that the relationship had reversed. The most ambitious workers were now choosing cities first, gravitating to those that combined what he called the three Ts: technology, talent, and tolerance. The Rise of the Creative Class won the Washington Monthly Political Book Award and was named a Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea of 2004. The book quantified a workforce of 40 million Americans whose decisions about where to live were beginning to drive regional economies. It became the foundation for how cities and large employers think about competing for human capital. His 2017 book The New Urban Crisis confronted what creative-economy growth had produced. In cities like New York, San Francisco, and London, the same forces driving wealth creation were also increasing inequality, deepening segregation, and hollowing out the middle class. Florida calls this winner-take-all urbanism. The book gave civic and corporate leaders a sharper account of the trade-offs in talent-led growth. Florida is University Professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and School of Cities, which he helped found. He is also Visiting Distinguished Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management and a Distinguished Fellow at NYU’s Schack Institute of Real Estate. Through the Creative Class Group he has advised BMW, Audi, Microsoft, Facebook, and Starwood Hotels on talent and location strategy. Key speaking topics The creative class and the geography of talent Talent attraction and retention in the post-industrial economy Cities as engines of growth and inequality Real estate and corporate location strategy in the creative economy Innovation and the conditions that produce it The future of work in superstar cities Ideal for Chief Human Resources Officers and heads of talent making decisions about where to recruit, locate, and build culture Real estate developers, REITs, and corporate location strategists City leaders, mayors, and economic development agencies competing for investment and talent Boards and CEOs of large employers reassessing geographic footprint after the shift to hybrid work Audience outcomes Florida’s creative class framework, including who it covers and where the category is now concentrated globally Detailed data on which cities and regions are gaining and losing talent right now A diagnosis of why creative-economy growth also generates inequality and segregation, and what cities are doing in response Specific implications for location and recruitment strategy in their own organisation

Why organisations work with Richard Gerver He has a verifiable case study that most leadership speakers do not. Grange Primary School moved from near-failure to a nationally referenced model of learning under his leadership, recognised by the National Teaching Awards in 2005. His books are read by operating audiences, not just educators. Change: Learn to Love It, Learn to Lead It and Simple Thinking are published by Penguin and Wiley/Capstone, respectively, and held shelf positions in business charts. LinkedIn Learning commissioned him to build Smart Thinking and Developing Mental Toughness for a global business audience. The courses have reached learners at scale across multiple languages. He worked closely with Sir Ken Robinson on human potential and creativity, and is cited in Robinson’s The Element. That intellectual lineage gives his leadership works a depth most motivational speakers cannot claim. He has been named UK Business Speaker of the Year on more than one occasion, including a confirmed 2011 win cited in his University of Derby honorary doctorate commendation. Biography highlights Headteacher of Grange Primary School, Derbyshire, where he developed the “Grangeton” model and led a documented institutional turnaround. National Teaching Awards Head Teacher of the Year, 2005. Honorary Doctor of Education, University of Derby, 2016. Author of Creating Tomorrow’s Schools Today (Bloomsbury Education), Change: Learn to Love It, Learn to Lead It (Penguin) and Simple Thinking (Wiley/Capstone). LinkedIn Learning instructor: Smart Thinking and Developing Mental Toughness. Foreword by Sir Ken Robinson on his first book; later cited in Robinson’s The Element. Biography Grange Primary School was on the verge of failure when Richard Gerver took it over. Within two years, the school was being studied as a national model, with a curriculum built around a pupil-run virtual town called Grangeton. The work earned him the National Teaching Awards Head Teacher of the Year in 2005 and shaped the rest of his career. He has spent the two decades since translating that experience for business audiences. Change: Learn to Love It, Learn to Lead It, published by Penguin, argues that leaders fail at change because they manage it as a project rather than a behaviour. Simple Thinking, published by Wiley/Capstone, attacks the bureaucratic clutter that senior teams build around their own decisions. Both books found shelf space in mainstream business sections, not just education. His thinking sits in the lineage of Sir Ken Robinson, who wrote the foreword to his first book and cited him in The Element. He has worked with UNESCO, the British Council, Skanska and the Welsh Government, and was commissioned by LinkedIn Learning to build two courses, Smart Thinking and Developing Mental Toughness, that have reached a global business audience. The University of Derby awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Education in 2016, citing his ability to humanise complex organisational issues through a leadership philosophy built on communication, empowerment and impact. He has been named UK Business Speaker of the Year on more than one occasion. Key speaking topics Human leadership and behaviour change Organisational transformation Resilience and mental toughness Curiosity, creativity and innovation Future skills and human potential Change management Executive development Ideal for CEOs and executive teams are asking why a recent transformation programme has stalled CHROs and L&D directors rebuilding leadership development for a fatigued workforce Senior leaders preparing a workforce for restructure, integration, or operating-model change Boards looking for an outside voice on the human side of strategic execution Audience outcomes A sharper view of why most change programmes fail at the leader’s own behaviour, not at the strategy Specific tools for stripping complexity out of decisions and communication Confidence that resilience and mental toughness can be built deliberately, with examples from sport and education A reframing of curiosity as an organisational capability, not a personal trait Renewed clarity on what senior leaders should personally commit to during a period of change

Why organisations work with Richard Noble He is one of the very small number of speakers who has actually held a world record under personal physical risk and built the team, the car and the funding model that made it possible. The Thrust2 record stood for fourteen years. His work on ThrustSSC produced the first and only land vehicle to break the sound barrier, and the lessons he draws are about how a small underfunded team executed something the established motor industry had judged impossible. He is the rare speaker whose case studies are his own. The Bloodhound education programme, the ARV Super2 light aircraft, Farnborough Aircraft and JCB Dieselmax are all ventures he founded or led, and the failures are discussed as openly as the records. He pioneered distributed sponsorship in Britain, with the ThrustSSC supporters club running what his team describes as the country’s first end-to-end electronic trading site. Boards considering crowdfunding, community equity or non-traditional capital get a working precedent. His message is uncomfortable on purpose. He argues that the British funding establishment systematically rejects ambitious engineering, and he uses his own story to challenge audiences who claim to back innovation without backing risk. Biography highlights Drove Thrust2 to 633.468 mph at Black Rock Desert, Nevada, on 4 October 1983, returning the World Land Speed Record to Britain after thirteen years in American hands. Project director of ThrustSSC, which on 15 October 1997 became the first land vehicle to officially break the sound barrier, at 763.035 mph, with RAF pilot Andy Green at the wheel. Founded the Bloodhound SSC project in 2008 and built its associated education programme, which has reached approximately 4,600 UK schools and over two million schoolchildren worldwide. Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE); winner of the 1983 Segrave Trophy; honorary Doctor of Technology from the University of the West of England (2010); honorary degree from the University of Bradford (2018). Author of “Thrust: The Remarkable Story of One Man’s Quest for Speed” (Partridge Press, 1998) and “Take Risk!” (Evro Publishing, 2020), which together document eleven of his record-breaking and aviation projects. Founder of ARV Aircraft (the Super2 light aircraft) and Farnborough Aircraft, and a contributor to the JCB Dieselmax diesel record car that exceeded 350 mph at Bonneville in 2006. Biography Most organisations talk about risk. Very few are built to back the kind of venture where failure is the likely outcome, the budget is gone in three months, and the project has to be rebuilt from a scrapyard sale of the previous prototype. Richard Noble has spent his working life inside that gap. His Thrust2 programme began in the mid-1970s with £175 raised from selling the wreckage of his crashed Thrust1 car for scrap. Eight years later, on 4 October 1983, Thrust2 averaged 633.468 mph at Black Rock Desert and returned the World Land Speed Record to Britain. He was awarded the OBE and the Segrave Trophy that year. The record stood for fourteen years. The follow-on project, ThrustSSC, started with a £40,000 sponsorship from Castrol and a two-year computational research programme led by aerodynamicist Ron Ayers. Noble gave up the driving seat to concentrate on funding. On 15 October 1997, with RAF Tornado pilot Andy Green at the controls, ThrustSSC ran at 763 mph and became the first land vehicle to officially break the sound barrier. The financing model behind it, including a supporters’ club website his team has described as Britain’s first end-to-end electronic trading site, prefigured a generation of distributed online fundraising. The Bloodhound SSC project, founded in 2008, aimed at 1,000 mph and built one of the largest STEM education programmes in the UK, working with around 4,600 schools. It went into administration in 2018, was sold to Ian Warhurst, and Noble has written about that ending as candidly as he has written about the records. His 2020 book “Take Risk!” tells the same story from the angle that matters most to a corporate audience: the eleven projects, the people and companies who backed him, and the British institutional culture that he argues consistently fails to back ambitious engineering. Key speaking topics High-risk venture leadership Resilience under repeated failure Team formation under extreme pressure Risk-taking and risk culture in business Entrepreneurship and unconventional capital formation British engineering ambition and innovation Leading without institutional backing Ideal for Boards and senior leadership teams setting risk appetite, particularly those wrestling with the gap between stated ambition and actual investment behaviour. Innovation, R&D and engineering leaders responsible for high-uncertainty programmes where conventional ROI cases do not apply. Sales conferences and incentive events where the audience needs a credible, lived account of resilience and persistence rather than a generic motivational story. After-dinner audiences at industry conferences who want a senior speaker with genuine record-breaking authority and a sharp argument about institutional risk aversion. Audience outcomes A concrete sense of how a small underfunded team can deliver something an established industry has judged impossible, drawn from Thrust2 and ThrustSSC rather than abstract case studies. A sharper view of where their own organisation talks about risk-taking but funds and governs as if it does not. Practical reference points for raising capital outside conventional institutional channels, including distributed sponsorship and supporter-funded models. An honest account of failure as part of the same career as the records, including Bloodhound’s collapse, that gives senior teams permission to talk about their own setbacks more openly. A persistent argument they will keep returning to: that ambition without willingness to absorb sustained personal and financial risk produces neither records nor breakthrough commercial outcomes.

Why organisations work with Richard van Hooijdonk He maps the intersection of multiple converging technologies – AI, robotics, quantum computing, biotech, autonomous systems – in a single strategic framework. Most technology speakers go deep on one domain; van Hooijdonk shows how these forces compound, which is where the strategic risk and opportunity actually sits. His material comes from an active research operation. Trendforce.one (Futurezone.ai) runs a permanent international research team, meaning his content reflects current technological trajectories rather than the publication date of a book or the half-life of a conference circuit. He speaks credibly across both commercial and institutional mandates. Clients range from Interpol, the European Commission, and NATO to Google, Deloitte, and Heineken – giving him a grounded view of how the same technology behaves under different regulatory, security, and commercial conditions. His RFID chip implants – used in daily life to open doors and operate his vehicle – are a verifiable, concrete expression of a research philosophy built on direct experience rather than observation. It is unusual, and it is documented. His Dutch-language bestseller De wereld van morgen and his multi-year recognition as the most sought-after futurist in the Netherlands demonstrate a sustained public credibility that extends well beyond the conference stage. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Trendforce.one / Futurezone.ai, a future intelligence agency with a permanent international research team tracking emerging and disruptive technologies Author of De wereld van morgen (The World of Tomorrow), a Dutch bestseller published by Bertram + De Leeuw Uitgevers (2017); author of 2,000+ articles and 60+ books, e-books, and whitepapers Delivered presentations to more than 600,000 attendees across 30+ countries since 2014 Clients include Google, Microsoft, IBM, Gartner, Interpol, NATO, the European Commission, PwC, Deloitte, Heineken, Unilever, and Nike Guest lecturer at Nyenrode University and Erasmus University Regular television contributor on RTL (RTL Late Night, RTL Boulevard, RTLZ) and former host of Mindshift on BNR Nieuwsradio Voted most sought-after trendwatcher and futurist in the Netherlands for multiple consecutive years from 2015 Biography Technology leaders have been warning organisations about AI and automation for years. What has changed is the simultaneity: AI, robotics, quantum computing, and biotech are not a sequence of challenges to address in turn – they are arriving together, and their combined effect on business models is harder to read than any single technology in isolation. Richard van Hooijdonk has built his practice around exactly this problem. His research base is institutional rather than individual. As founder and CEO of Trendforce.one – now operating as Futurezone.ai – he leads a permanent international research team that tracks emerging technologies across sectors, geographies, and regulatory environments. Where many futurists work from published sources and their own networks, van Hooijdonk’s content is generated from ongoing intelligence work. The material he brings to a board conversation reflects the current state of the field. His client base spans both sides of the public-private boundary. Organisations including Interpol, NATO, the European Commission, and Dutch Customs sit alongside Google, Deloitte, Heineken, and Samsung in his client history. That cross-sector exposure matters: the same autonomous system or generative AI application functions differently under a security mandate than under a commercial growth brief, and van Hooijdonk can articulate both. His public platform extends his research reach beyond the executive audience. De wereld van morgen (The World of Tomorrow), a Dutch-language bestseller, brought his frameworks to a wider readership. Regular appearances on RTL television and BNR Nieuwsradio – where he hosted the Mindshift programme – and guest lectureships at Nyenrode University and Erasmus University have established him as a sustained public voice on technological change, not simply a conference circuit presence. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and generative AI Robotics and autonomous systems Quantum computing and frontier technologies Technology-driven sector transformation The organisation of the future Cybercrime, security, and technology-enabled risk The future of work and human-machine collaboration Ideal for Boards and executive leadership teams making technology investment decisions with long strategic horizons Chief Digital Officers, Chief Technology Officers, and Chief Innovation Officers Strategy and innovation functions within large enterprises navigating multi-technology disruption Public sector, government, and law enforcement organisations managing the security and governance implications of emerging technology Audience outcomes A framework for assessing multiple converging technologies simultaneously, rather than evaluating each in isolation Sector-specific perspective on how AI, robotics, and adjacent technologies will alter competitive dynamics in their industry Practical orientation on where to begin with AI adoption – which processes are immediately affected, and how to sequence the transition Awareness of the security and governance risks created by emerging technologies, including AI-enabled crime and deepfakes Strategic clarity on the leadership behaviours and organisational structures required to adapt continuously, not reactively

Why organisations work with Rita McGrath The transient advantage framework directly challenges an assumption most leadership teams still operate on: that the goal of strategy is to build and protect durable competitive positions. McGrath makes the cost of that assumption explicit, and offers a named, practitioner-tested alternative. Discovery-driven planning, co-created with Ian C. MacMillan and introduced through the Harvard Business Review, gives organisations a structured methodology for committing to uncertain growth initiatives: one that Clayton Christensen described as among the most important management tools ever developed. She holds the Thinkers50 #1 Strategy Award (2013) alongside four subsequent Thinkers50 Strategy Awards and a 2025 global ranking of #6, a record of credentials in strategy thinking that is without parallel on the conference circuit. Her Seeing Around Corners framework provides a concrete vocabulary for the specific problem boards face most acutely: detecting the leading indicators of strategic inflection before they become corporate crises. As a regular HBR contributor whose work is cited in the FT, WSJ, and New York Times, her ideas arrive in board rooms before she does: senior audiences already speak her language. Biography highlights Professor of Management and Academic Director in Executive Education, Columbia Business School; leads Leading Strategic Growth and Change executive programme Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award in Strategy (2013); five-time Thinkers50 Strategy Award winner; ranked #6 globally on the Thinkers50 overall list (2025) C.K. Prahalad Award (2022), Strategic Management Society: awarded for scholarly impact on practice; inducted into the Business Excellence Hall of Fame (2022) Author of five books including The End of Competitive Advantage (HBR Press) and Seeing Around Corners (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); Discovery-Driven Growth named to Thinkers50 Management Classics Booklist Co-creator of discovery-driven planning, introduced through the Harvard Business Review (1995); cited by Clayton Christensen as among the most important management and strategy tools ever developed Ph.D., Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania); honours degrees from Barnard College and Columbia School of International and Public Affairs Work covered by the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, CNN Business, and NPR Marketplace; one of HBR’s most frequent contributors Biography Competitive advantage used to be the organising idea behind business strategy. Build it, protect it, sustain it. In markets defined by rapid technology cycles, boundary-free competition, and compressing product lifecycles, that idea has become a liability, and most organisations do not realise it until the decision has already been made for them. Rita Gunther McGrath has spent three decades at Columbia Business School building the alternative. Her framework of transient advantage, set out in The End of Competitive Advantage, argues that the objective of strategy must shift from sustaining positions to developing the organisational capacity to find, exploit, and exit advantages on the organisation’s own terms. Discovery-driven planning provides the operational methodology: a structured process for committing to growth initiatives under uncertainty without betting the business on invalid assumptions. Her intellectual standing in strategy is well-documented. Thinkers50 awarded her the #1 Strategy Award in 2013 and has continued to recognise her work across four subsequent award cycles, ranking her sixth globally in 2025. The Strategic Management Society’s C.K. Prahalad Award (2022) recognised her scholarly impact on practice, a distinction that acknowledges both rigour and application. Clayton Christensen placed her discovery-driven growth tools among the most important management tools ever developed. McGrath directs Columbia’s Leading Strategic Growth and Change executive programme and founded Valize, a platform that operationalises the discovery-driven methodology for organisations at scale. Her advisory work runs into the C-suites of Fortune 1,000 companies: helping boards and senior leadership teams navigate the specific transition her research describes: from the strategy they were trained to run, to one that fits the market they are actually in. Key speaking topics Transient advantage and the limits of competitive positioning Strategic inflection points and early warning signals Discovery-driven planning and growth under uncertainty Business model evolution and renewal Organisational agility in volatile markets Strategic decision-making under ambiguity Innovation as a managed, repeatable discipline Ideal for CEOs, CSOs, and board members wrestling with strategy refresh in disrupted or fast-moving sectors Strategy and corporate development teams whose existing planning frameworks are producing diminishing returns Senior leadership teams in large incumbents facing the transition from mature to declining competitive positions Executive education participants on leadership programmes where strategic thinking is the primary development objective Audience outcomes A clear understanding of why durable competitive advantage is an increasingly dangerous strategic objective, and what to replace it with Practical command of the discovery-driven planning process for evaluating and resourcing uncertain growth initiatives A named framework for identifying strategic inflection points before they become visible to the wider market Language and tools to initiate an honest internal conversation about which parts of the current business model are in decline Sharpened criteria for strategic resource allocation when outcomes cannot be forecast with confidence