Leadership

Why organisations work with Ruth Buscombe She has run live race strategy from the pit wall at Ferrari, Haas and Sauber, so the material is operating practice from elite competition, not a borrowed sports metaphor. She led the strategy function during Sauber’s sixth-place Constructors’ finish in 2022, the team’s best result in a decade against far better-resourced rivals, a credible reference point for performance under budget constraint. Her Cambridge engineering background (first-class honours, FIA-supervised thesis on the Drag Reduction System) means technical and analytical audiences extend her credit fast. She is one of a very small number of women to have held senior race strategy responsibility in Formula 1, which gives her STEM and inclusion content lived authority rather than allyship framing. As an F1 TV analyst, she explains decisions to a live general audience every race weekend, so she is unusually fluent at translating specialist judgement into language a board can act on. Biography highlights First-class honours in Aerospace and Aerothermal Engineering, University of Cambridge, with a master’s thesis on the Drag Reduction System conducted with the FIA. Race strategist at Scuderia Ferrari (2013 to 2015), based at Maranello, supporting drivers including Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen. Strategy engineer at Haas F1 during the team’s debut Formula 1 season. Head of Race Strategy at Sauber/Alfa Romeo, leading the strategy function through the team’s sixth-place Constructors’ finish in 2022. On-air strategy analyst and presenter for F1 TV. Ambassador since 2016 for Dare to be Different, now the FIA Girls on Track initiative. Biography The pit wall is one of the few working environments where leaders make consequential calls in public, on a clock, with information that is partial and changing. Ruth Buscombe has spent her career on that wall. As a race strategist at Ferrari, then Haas, then as Head of Race Strategy at Sauber, she has owned decisions where the cost of getting it wrong is measured in championship points within the same hour. Her credibility starts with the technical foundation. A first-class honours engineering degree from Cambridge, with a master’s thesis on the Drag Reduction System conducted with the FIA, gave her the analytical grounding to be taken seriously inside Maranello at twenty-two. She joined Scuderia Ferrari in 2012, was promoted to race strategist within a year, and worked through Sebastian Vettel’s first Ferrari victory before moving to Haas for the team’s debut season. The defining body of work came at Sauber. Running the strategy function for a midfield team against rivals with far larger budgets, she led the call sheet through the team’s sixth-place Constructors’ Championship finish in 2022, its best result in a decade. That is the substance she brings to corporate audiences: how to design decision protocols that hold up when conditions change mid-race, how to allocate scarce attention under live pressure, how to disagree productively inside a senior team in the seconds before a call has to be made. She is also one of the very few women to have held senior race strategy responsibility in Formula 1, and has been an ambassador for Dare to be Different, now the FIA Girls on Track initiative, since 2016. As an F1 TV analyst she now explains the same decision logic to a live audience every race weekend, which is why her keynote lands with general management audiences as cleanly as it does with engineers. Key speaking topics Real-time decision-making under pressure High-performance team operating models Race strategy and competitive advantage under constraint Data-led judgement in elite sport Women in motorsport and STEM Engineering leadership Ideal for C-suite and senior leadership teams running high-stakes operating decisions on short cycles Strategy, operations and risk leaders responsible for live decision protocols Engineering and technical organisations where analytical credibility is the price of entry Diversity, inclusion and STEM programmes seeking a credible operator rather than an advocate Audience outcomes A clearer mental model for how elite teams separate the call from the data behind it A working sense of how decision rights, role clarity and rehearsal change behaviour under live pressure Specific examples of how a smaller, smarter team can outperform a better-resourced rival Confidence to make and defend a call when information is incomplete and time has run out A credible, non-tokenistic reference for women considering senior technical careers

Why organisations work with David Atkins Twenty-two years commanding New York State Police operations across Westchester County, including a Ground Zero deployment and incident command at the 2020 US Open at Winged Foot, give him direct authority on decision-making when the stakes are real New York State Trooper of the Year (2003) and New York State Investigator of the Year (2007) are named credentials from a credible body, not bureau adjectives The “One Decision Away” framework gives audiences a structured Assess, Address, Act sequence they can apply the next morning, not a story without a takeaway He pairs command experience with a documented commercial track record, having built a 1,400-person direct sales organisation into the top 0.5% of his company, which lets him speak credibly to sales floors as well as leadership rooms Biography highlights Retired Captain, New York State Police, 22 years of service Commanded all NYSP operations for Westchester County, overseeing reported 400,000 to 500,000 annual 911 calls New York State Trooper of the Year, 2003 New York State Investigator of the Year, 2007 Ground Zero first responder, 11 September 2001 Incident Commander, 2020 USGA US Open at Winged Foot Golf Club Author, “The Leveled Up Life: The No Excuse Blueprint to Live Up to Your Fullest Potential” Biography Most leadership content about pressure is written by people who have read about it. Atkins commanded New York State Police operations for Westchester County for more than two decades, with reported call volumes of close to half a million 911 incidents a year. The decisions were live, the consequences immediate, and the audience for those decisions was the public. That operational record sits behind his keynote work. He was a Ground Zero first responder on 11 September 2001, ran undercover units against organised crime and trafficking, and served as Incident Commander for the 2020 US Open at Winged Foot Golf Club. He was named New York State Trooper of the Year in 2003 and New York State Investigator of the Year in 2007. After retiring from law enforcement, Atkins built a 1,400-person international direct sales organisation through Beachbody, reaching the top 0.5% of the company by earnings. The commercial track record matters because it shows the same decision-making pattern applied outside a command environment, which is why sales and revenue audiences book him alongside leadership programmes. His book, “The Leveled Up Life: The No Excuse Blueprint to Live Up to Your Fullest Potential”, sets out the “One Decision Away” framework he uses on stage: Assess the single decision creating maximum momentum, Address the obstacle, Act with public commitment. The framework is the through-line buyers can point to when they need a keynote that leaves a structured takeaway rather than an emotional one. Key speaking topics Decision-making under pressure Resilience and stress management Leadership in high-stakes environments Sales performance and direct selling discipline Personal accountability and the “One Decision Away” framework First responder leadership lessons Ideal for Sales kick-offs and revenue conferences looking for credibility on personal performance Leadership programmes for line managers and frontline supervisors who carry decision risk First responder, healthcare and public safety audiences HR, talent and SHRM-style audiences focused on resilience and engagement Audience outcomes A named decision-making sequence (Assess, Address, Act) audiences can take into the next working week Concrete examples of command-level decision-making from policing, 9/11 response and major event security A reframed view of what counts as an “excuse” inside their own teams Practical language for talking about composure and accountability without slipping into wellness clichés

Why organisations work with Darren Edwards He has led injured-veteran teams across four genuine world-first or world-record expeditions, including the 1,400 km Land’s End to John O’Groats kayak and the seven-continent World Marathon Challenge in a wheelchair. The leadership content is drawn from operations, not theory. He talks about the South Pole expedition that did not finish as openly as the ones that did, which gives senior teams a rare working example of how to make a collective stop call without losing the team. His book Strength Through Adversity, an Amazon UK bestseller, sets out the adaptive mindset framework he uses with leadership teams, giving audiences a single referenceable text after a session. He founded Adaptive Expeditions, so the work is institutional rather than personal narrative, and translates into language about team capability, not individual triumph. Biography highlights Author of Strength Through Adversity, Amazon UK bestseller, published February 2023. First wheelchair user to complete the World Marathon Challenge: seven marathons, seven continents, seven days. Led the first team to kayak 1,400 km from Land’s End to John O’Groats with injured-veteran crew. Member of the first adaptive team to cross Vatnajokull, Europe’s largest ice cap. Founder of Adaptive Expeditions. Former Army Reservist and qualified teacher. Biography A ledge gave way in North Wales in 2016. Darren Edwards fell more than 100 feet, broke his back in two places, and severed his spinal cord. He woke up paralysed from the chest down. He had been a mountaineer, an Army Reservist, and a trained teacher. None of those identities survived intact. What followed is the working material of his keynote. Inside three years he was leading a team of injured veterans on the first kayak crossing of Britain from Land’s End to John O’Groats, 1,400 kilometres through some of the country’s most exposed sea. He went on to row the English Channel, cross the Vatnajokull ice cap with the first adaptive team to do it, and in 2023 became the first wheelchair user to finish the World Marathon Challenge: seven marathons, seven continents, seven days. The expeditions are not the proof point. The proof point is what he did with them. He built Adaptive Expeditions as an organisation, wrote Strength Through Adversity in 2023, and has spent the years since refining what he calls the adaptive mindset: a working set of disciplines for leading teams through sustained uncertainty. How composure is built before it is needed. How recovery is led rather than waited out. How a team makes the call to stop. In December 2025 his Redefining Impossible team cut a 222 km sit-ski attempt on the South Pole short after a week on the ice. He talks about that decision with the same clarity as the records. For organisations under sustained pressure, that is the value. Edwards has lived the gap between the plan and what actually happens, and he can describe it in operational terms. Key speaking topics The adaptive mindset for leadership teams Leading through sustained uncertainty Team leadership across injured and mixed-ability crews Composure and decision-making under pressure Recovery as a leadership discipline Resilience after catastrophic disruption Ideal for Executive leadership teams preparing for or recovering from major disruption Senior operational leaders responsible for sustained-pressure environments Programmes for high-potential leaders building decision-making range Veteran transition, healthcare leadership, and emergency-services audiences Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for talking about composure and recovery as leadership capabilities, not personality traits A clear example of how a senior team makes a collective stop decision without losing trust The adaptive mindset framework, drawn from his book, that audiences can take into team conversations after the session An honest account of the gap between the plan and the operation, useful for risk and contingency thinking

Why organisations work with Steven MacGregor He has built a single, named methodology, the Sustaining Executive Performance programme, and tested it on more than 20,000 executives in person across markets ranging from Peru to Qatar. The Chief Wellbeing Officer platform gives senior teams an operating model for sustaining leadership performance under pressure, delivered inside Google, Salesforce, Uber, Accenture, Santander, and Oracle. He founded the General Counsel Wellbeing Network, a global peer network for senior in-house counsel partnered with Pinsent Masons and shortlisted for Mental Health & Wellbeing Initiative of the Year at the Legal 500 ESG Awards 2026, evidence the platform holds up in one of the highest-pressure leadership populations. A decade-long trilogy, Sustaining Executive Performance (Pearson, 2015), Chief Wellbeing Officer (LID, 2018), and The Daily Reset (2024), gives him a coherent body of work that connects performance science, organisational design, and behavioural change. He sits inside McKinsey’s People and Organizational Performance practice as a Senior Advisor, so the work is calibrated to how serious operating companies actually run. Biography highlights Founder, Chief Wellbeing Officer (CWO) leadership development platform, delivered to executive teams at Google, Salesforce, Uber, Accenture, Santander, and Oracle Founder, General Counsel Wellbeing Network, a global peer network for senior in-house counsel with chapters across the UK, Spain, Ireland, and the Middle East Founder and CEO, Leadership Academy of Barcelona (LAB) Senior Advisor, People and Organizational Performance practice, McKinsey & Company Honorary Professor of Health and Wellbeing, Glasgow School of Art Faculty experience at IESE, IE Business School, IMD (Lausanne and Singapore), and CEIBS (Shanghai and Jakarta) Author of Sustaining Executive Performance (Pearson, 2015), Chief Wellbeing Officer (LID, 2018, with Rory Simpson), and The Daily Reset (2024) Biography Most senior leaders today are running a workload their predecessors would not recognise. Decision volume has compounded, recovery time has collapsed, and the pressure is no longer episodic. The harder question is what organisations actually invest in to make that sustainable. That is the line of work Steven MacGregor has spent two decades building, first inside business schools, then through the Leadership Academy of Barcelona, and now through the Chief Wellbeing Officer platform and as a Senior Advisor inside McKinsey’s People and Organizational Performance practice. The Sustaining Executive Performance programme started as an applied research project drawing on elite sport, including time with FC Barcelona’s athletics team, and elements of human-centred design. It has since been delivered to more than 20,000 executives in person, from Peru to Qatar. Today the Chief Wellbeing Officer platform sits on top of that foundation, and is delivered inside executive teams at Google, Salesforce, Uber, Accenture, Santander, and Oracle, with teaching at IESE, IE, IMD, CEIBS, and the Glasgow School of Art. The decade-long trilogy gives the work its intellectual spine. Sustaining Executive Performance (Pearson, 2015) set out the evidence-based link between wellbeing and decision-making, clarity, and long-term execution. Chief Wellbeing Officer (LID, 2018), written with former Telefónica Chief Learning Officer Rory Simpson, formalised the argument that wellbeing needs an owner at the top table, with metrics, budget, and authority. The Daily Reset (2024) translates behavioural science and habit formation into the everyday practices that make performance stick. The General Counsel Wellbeing Network, which MacGregor founded in 2024, is where the platform meets one of the most pressured leadership populations in business. It now operates across the UK, Spain, Ireland, and the Middle East, with a partnership with Pinsent Masons and a Legal 500 ESG Awards 2026 shortlisting for Mental Health & Wellbeing Initiative of the Year. His training is unusual for the field: a doctorate in engineering design management with research periods at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, and an Honorary Professorship at the Glasgow School of Art. That background shapes the work. The focus is less on motivation and more on the design of work itself, which is what makes the material useful to senior teams trying to convert wellbeing language into operating change. Key speaking topics Sustainable leadership performance under pressure Executive resilience, clarity, and recovery Workplace wellbeing as an operating discipline The Chief Wellbeing Officer platform Personal energy and recovery for senior leaders Health, performance, and the design of work Behaviour change inside corporate environments Ideal for CHROs, Chief People Officers, and Chief Wellbeing Officers building enterprise-wide leadership performance and wellbeing strategies Executive committees and boards reviewing burnout, attrition, and human-capital risk General Counsel, Chief Legal Officers, and senior in-house counsel managing performance under chronic load Partner groups in professional services and law firms managing performance under chronic load Audience outcomes A working definition of what wellbeing means as a leadership performance discipline, not a benefit category The Sustaining Executive Performance framework as a concrete tool for senior leaders to apply to themselves and their teams A view on where the Chief Wellbeing Officer function sits in an operating model, with named accountabilities Practical habit-formation tools drawn from elite sport, behavioural science, and design that senior leaders can adopt in their own week

Why organisations work with Terence Mauri He gives leadership teams a defined decision framework, DARE (Data, Agility, Risk, Evolution), drawn from his Wiley and Thinkers50 book, that turns “respond to disruption” from a slogan into a working method. His vantage point sits across operating roles, not commentary alone: founder of Hack Future Lab, Entrepreneur Mentor in Residence at MIT, visiting professor at IE Business School. Senior audiences can tell the difference. The content is built for the AI era without becoming a technology lecture. The argument is about how executives think, choose, and govern when technology cycles are shorter than planning cycles. He writes for a senior business readership through a monthly Inc.com column, “Future Proof,” which means the room hears arguments that have already been pressure-tested in print. Biography highlights Founder of Hack Future Lab, a global management think tank focused on leadership, AI, and disruption. Author of The Upside of Disruption (Wiley, in partnership with Thinkers50, 2024), centred on his DARE framework. Earlier books include The Leader’s Mindset and The 3D Leader. Entrepreneur Mentor in Residence at MIT and visiting professor at IE Business School. Inc.com columnist, author of the “Future Proof” column. Described by Thinkers50 as “an influential and outspoken thinker on the future of leadership.” Biography The hardest part of leading through disruption is not recognising that the environment has changed. It is changing the way a senior team decides while the business still has to deliver this quarter. That gap, between awareness and operating practice, is the question Terence Mauri has spent his work addressing. His most recent book, The Upside of Disruption, was published by Wiley in 2024 in partnership with Thinkers50. It introduces the DARE framework, Data, Agility, Risk, Evolution, as a way of organising executive decisions when conditions will not stabilise. Earlier books, The Leader’s Mindset and The 3D Leader, traced the same thread through the language of mindset and leadership behaviour. The institutional ground underneath the work matters. Mauri founded Hack Future Lab as a global management think tank, and holds active posts as Entrepreneur Mentor in Residence at MIT and visiting professor at IE Business School. He writes the “Future Proof” column for Inc.com, which is where many of the arguments arrive in public before they appear in a keynote. Thinkers50, the management ranking authority, has called him “an influential and outspoken thinker on the future of leadership.” For a senior team weighing whether to put a speaker in front of their own leadership, the practical question is sharper: he gives them a structured way to talk about decisions in conditions of uncertainty, drawn from a published framework rather than a slide deck. Key speaking topics Leadership in the age of AI Decision-making under uncertainty Future readiness and organisational agility Disruption as a strategic input, not a threat Executive mindset and unlearning Innovation and growth in fast-changing markets Ideal for CEOs and executive committees setting strategy in conditions where AI and market shifts have shortened planning horizons. CHROs and chief learning officers redesigning leadership development for senior cohorts. Boards and transformation leads asking how the organisation should make decisions, not just which technology to adopt. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for how senior leaders make decisions when the operating context is actively changing. The DARE framework as a structure for diagnosing where the leadership team is strong and where it is exposed. A sharper read on the difference between adopting AI and leading through the AI era. A set of named behaviours, around unlearning, calculated risk, and trust, that senior teams can return to after the keynote.

Why organisations work with Dakota Meyer A rare first-person authority on decision-making under life-or-death pressure, drawn from a six-hour firefight that saved 36 lives and earned the nations highest military honour. A working framework for accountability and personal responsibility, built over more than a decade of speaking to corporate, military, and first-responder audiences and codified in two bestselling books. Named, sustained commitment to veteran workforce integration through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundations Hiring Our Heroes program and Toyota, with measurable output including the Personal Branding Resume Engine. Active operational credibility: re-enlisted into the Marine Corps Reserve in 2025 and completed the Basic Reconnaissance Course in 2026, one of the few public speakers still performing at that standard. A voice that holds mixed rooms: senior corporate leadership, frontline operators, veterans, and first responders hear the same message and leave with the same frame. Biography highlights Medal of Honor recipient, awarded by President Barack Obama at the White House on September 15, 2011. First living U.S. Marine to receive the Medal of Honor since 1973. New York Times bestselling co-author of Into the Fire with Bing West (Random House, 2012) and The Way Forward with Robert ONeill (Dey Street Books, 2022). Host of the weekly podcast Youre Human w/ Dakota Meyer, a call-in show on accountability, mental health, and resilience. Brand ambassador since 2012 for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundations Hiring Our Heroes program, partnered with Toyota on veteran employment. Re-enlisted into the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve in April 2025 and completed the Basic Reconnaissance Course in April 2026. Biography On September 8, 2009, a patrol moving into the village of Ganjgal in Kunar Province was ambushed by more than fifty fighters. Corporal Dakota Meyer drove into the kill zone five times over six hours to pull out the wounded and the dead. That action, and the decisions inside it, saved 36 American and Afghan lives and earned him the Medal of Honor. What makes the work useful to organisations is not the story. It is what Meyer has done with it since. He has spent more than a decade turning the lessons of that fight into a clear argument about accountability: that leadership is the habit of owning the next decision when the plan has failed, and that culture is built in the seconds before anyone is watching. The argument is evidenced across two New York Times bestsellers, Into the Fire with Bing West and The Way Forward with fellow Navy veteran Robert ONeill, and through his weekly podcast Youre Human w/ Dakota Meyer. Since 2012 he has served as a brand ambassador for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundations Hiring Our Heroes program, partnering with Toyota on the Personal Branding Resume Engine and a sustained national effort on veteran workforce integration. He re-enlisted into the Marine Corps Reserve in April 2025, fifteen years after discharge, and in April 2026 became the only active Medal of Honor recipient to complete the Basic Reconnaissance Course. Few speakers on leadership under pressure are still doing the work themselves at that standard. Key speaking topics Leadership under pressure Accountability and personal responsibility Resilience and recovery from setback Decision-making in high-consequence environments Military-to-civilian transition and veteran workforce integration Purpose-driven culture Team trust and performance under stress Ideal for Senior leadership teams and executive offsites confronting a period of pressure or change CHROs and workforce leaders building veteran hiring, reintegration, or inclusion programmes All-staff conferences where culture, accountability, and resilience are the organising theme First-responder, defence, and safety-critical organisations building decision discipline under load Audience outcomes A usable definition of accountability, separated from blame, that a leader can apply to the next meeting. A sharper read on how teams actually perform when the plan fails, and what the leader is responsible for in that moment. A direct account of the cost of avoidance, from someone who has paid it, that reframes how audiences talk about hard decisions. Practical language for connecting personal responsibility to organisational culture without sliding into slogan.

Why organisations work with Mark Noon He has built leadership benches inside two of the most accountability-driven environments in American working life: the U.S. Air Force medical system and Studer Group’s healthcare client base. Senior teams get someone who has run the work, not described it. His signature framework, Set Up To Step In, gives organisations a concrete method for preparing successors before the seat opens, drawn from his book Set Up: Timeless Leadership Skills for Your Success. He has coached and presented inside more than 300 organisations across 43 states and several countries, which means the playbook has been pressure-tested across hospital systems, military units, and civilian operating environments. He treats employee engagement as a discipline rather than a sentiment, anchored in structured one-on-one rounding practices that frontline managers can repeat weekly. He pairs Studer Group’s service excellence lineage with first-hand command experience, a combination that lands credibly with clinical leaders who are sceptical of theory imported from outside healthcare. Biography highlights Retired U.S. Air Force Major after roughly 20 years of service, including 12 years as a commissioned officer and clinical lab director. Career path moved from enlisted laboratory technician to officer with immediate appointment to a lab management role. Served across nine assignments in seven U.S. states and a tour of duty in the Middle East. Spent approximately eight years as a coach with Studer Group, working with healthcare systems on operational and service excellence. Currently a Professional Speaker, Executive Coach and Developer of Leaders with LeadershipTen. Author of Set Up: Timeless Leadership Skills for Your Success (T.H.E. Studer Group, 2018). Biography The hardest moment in any organisation is the one nobody schedules: a seat opens, and the person expected to fill it is not ready. That gap is rarely a hiring problem. It is the cumulative result of small leadership habits that were never made routine. Mark Noon spent 20 years inside the U.S. Air Force watching that pattern up close, then nearly a decade at Studer Group helping healthcare leaders fix it. He retired as a Major after 12 years as a commissioned officer and clinical lab director, with assignments across seven states and a tour in the Middle East. The path from enlisted lab technician to officer running a lab gave him a working theory of leadership grounded in operational reality rather than abstraction. That theory became Set Up: Timeless Leadership Skills for Your Success, published by T.H.E. Studer Group in 2018. The book and its companion keynote, Set Up To Step In, treat succession as a daily discipline, not an annual planning exercise. Leaders are not chosen, they are prepared, through repeatable habits that show up in how meetings are run, how feedback is given, and how one-on-one rounding is conducted with the people closest to the work. His client work now runs through LeadershipTen, where he coaches and speaks inside hospital systems, military units, and operationally demanding civilian organisations. The footprint covers more than 300 organisations across 43 states and several countries, which gives senior teams something useful: a coach who has seen which engagement and culture practices survive contact with a stretched workforce, and which do not. Key speaking topics Leader development and succession readiness Employee engagement and one-on-one rounding Culture aligned to strategy Healthcare leadership and service excellence Managing up and team reliability Lessons from military command for civilian leaders Ideal for Healthcare CEOs, COOs, and chief nursing officers building leader benches across hospital systems Heads of leadership development and learning leaders responsible for succession and frontline manager capability Senior military and veteran-serving organisations translating command experience into civilian operating practice Operationally complex organisations where frontline leadership turnover threatens service quality Audience outcomes A clear, named set of habits that distinguish leaders who are setting up successors from those who are not A working method for one-on-one rounding that frontline managers can run inside their existing week Language for talking about engagement as an operational discipline, not a survey result A frame for connecting daily leader behaviours to the strategy and culture senior teams have already committed to Confidence that the practices have been tested across military, healthcare, and civilian operating environments

Why organisations work with Thom Mayer He has commanded medical operations during three of the defining crises of the modern era: the Pentagon on 9/11, the 2001 US Capitol anthrax attacks, and the early months of the war in Ukraine. The lessons are not theoretical. As NFLPA Medical Director, he authored the concussion protocols now used across professional football, demonstrating how to rebuild a safety system inside an institution that did not want it rebuilt. His book “Leadership Is Worthless…But Leading Is Priceless” is built on eleven principles drawn directly from those crises, including the distinction between holding the title and doing the work. He won the 2018 James D. Mills Award, ACEP’s highest honour, and has been recognised three times with the College’s “Over-the-Top” award. The clinical community considers him a peer, not a celebrity. He runs a working executive role at LogixHealth alongside his speaking calendar, which keeps the case studies current rather than retrospective. Biography highlights Medical Director, NFL Players Association, appointed by Gene Upshaw in 2002 Command Physician, Pentagon Rescue Operation, 11 September 2001 Founder, BestPractices, Inc.; Executive Vice President of Leadership, LogixHealth Clinical Professor of Emergency Medicine, George Washington University; Senior Lecturing Fellow, Duke University School of Medicine Author, “Leadership Is Worthless…But Leading Is Priceless” (Berrett-Koehler, 2023); co-author of “Battling Healthcare Burnout” and “Hardwiring Flow” 2018 James D. Mills Outstanding Contribution to Emergency Medicine Award (ACEP’s highest honour); USA Today “100 Most Important People in the NFL”; Pro Football Hall of Fame nominee for sports medicine safety reform Biography The Pentagon was struck at 09:37 on 11 September 2001. By the time the rescue operation was running, Mayer was the command physician on site, coordinating medical assets across federal, military, and civilian teams that had never trained together. Three weeks later, with anthrax-laced letters circulating through the US Capitol, his BestPractices physicians at Inova Fairfax became the first in the country to successfully diagnose and treat inhalational anthrax. The pattern holds across his career. Gene Upshaw appointed him Medical Director of the NFL Players Association on the day Korey Stringer died of heat stroke in 2002, asking him to build a safety function the league did not yet have. Mayer wrote the original NFL Concussion Guidelines, which reshaped diagnosis and management of head injuries in professional football and, through that, across global contact sport. USA Today later named him among the 100 most important people in the NFL. His clinical and academic standing sits behind all of it. He holds the 2018 James D. Mills Award, ACEP’s highest honour for contribution to emergency medicine, alongside Clinical Professor and Senior Lecturing Fellow appointments at George Washington University and Duke University School of Medicine. He has served on Department of Defense Science Board Task Forces covering bioterrorism, homeland security, and weapons of mass destruction. His 2023 book “Leadership Is Worthless…But Leading Is Priceless” frames the argument that runs through the speaking work: eleven principles drawn from the Pentagon, the NFL, the anthrax crisis, and a mobile emergency mission into Ukraine in 2022. The thesis is that titles and frameworks do not survive contact with a real crisis, but a small set of disciplines does. Boards and executive teams hire him because the source material is not borrowed. Key speaking topics Crisis leadership and command decision-making Servant leadership in high-stakes environments Burnout and resilience for clinical and corporate teams Building safety culture inside resistant institutions Operational flow and frontline performance Innovation and trust under pressure Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and executive committees preparing for crisis response, business continuity, or major change Healthcare leadership: CMOs, CNOs, hospital executives, clinical directors Boards reviewing safety, risk, or duty-of-care frameworks Senior leadership development programmes that need a credible voice on decision-making under pressure Audience outcomes A set of leadership principles tested in conditions most executives will never face, made transferable to commercial settings A clearer model of the difference between holding a leadership role and performing the work of leading Specific decision-making heuristics for moments when information is incomplete and the cost of waiting is high A practical view of how safety culture is rebuilt inside organisations that resist the work

Why organisations work with Dr Ted James His concurrent roles – co-directing a Harvard Medical School executive programme and leading enterprise transformation across an 8-hospital health system – mean the frameworks he delivers are being tested in live operational conditions, not drawn from retrospective case studies. He holds a Master of Science in Healthcare Management from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health alongside a surgical oncology career, which means he translates between clinical and executive registers without simplifying either. His advisory work with biotech and medical device companies, including a fractional CMO role at Perimeter Medical Imaging AI guiding FDA strategy for AI-enabled surgical technology, gives him a vendor-facing perspective that most health system speakers cannot offer. He built an NIH-funded research portfolio while simultaneously holding senior clinical governance roles at a Harvard-affiliated academic medical centre. His Harvard Global Health Care Leaders Program draws participants from more than 200 countries, which means his analysis of healthcare leadership is genuinely comparative rather than US-centric. Biography highlights System Physician Executive, Endeavor Health Cancer Institute, leading clinical strategy and care transformation across an 8-hospital integrated health system Co-Director, Global Health Care Leaders Program, Harvard Medical School Executive Education which draws participants from more than 200 countries Faculty, Harvard Medical School; former Associate Professor of Surgery Former Chief of Breast Surgical Oncology, Vice Chair of Academic Affairs in Surgery, and Medical Director of the Breast Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Fractional Chief Medical Officer, Perimeter Medical Imaging AI, guiding medical and regulatory strategy for AI-enabled breast cancer surgery technology Master of Science in Healthcare Management, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Co-author, The OAS CAHPS Compendium: A Guidebook for Improving Patient Experience and Outcomes Across the Ambulatory Surgery Continuum Biography Ted James spent the first part of his executive career doing something most physician leaders are never asked to do at the same time: running a nationally accredited multidisciplinary breast programme, leading academic affairs for a surgery department, and building an NIH-funded research portfolio – all within a Harvard-affiliated academic health system. That compression of roles at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is the biographical fact most relevant to why health organisations bring him in. He has worked the intersection of clinical governance, academic leadership, and service-line management from the inside. He is now System Physician Executive for the Endeavor Health Cancer Institute, responsible for clinical strategy and enterprise-wide care transformation across eight hospitals. Alongside that operational role, he co-directs the Global Health Care Leaders Program at Harvard Medical School: a flagship executive education programme with a global participant base spanning more than 200 countries. His Harvard-based work focuses on the mechanics of how healthcare leaders design care models, adopt digital health technology, and lead transformation in systems that resist it. His commercial advisory work adds a third register. As fractional Chief Medical Officer at Perimeter Medical Imaging AI, he is helping advance AI-enabled surgical imaging technology toward FDA approval; work that gives him first-hand knowledge of how healthcare technology moves from clinical concept to operational deployment. It is a vantage point most hospital executives simply do not have. His co-authored book, The OAS CAHPS Compendium, anchors the academic dimension of his work in something measurable: patient experience and outcomes in ambulatory surgery. The through-line across all three roles is the same question: how do you build organisations in which clinical excellence and operational performance reinforce each other rather than compete? Key speaking topics Healthcare transformation and system leadership Physician and clinical leadership development Organisational culture in complex health systems Digital health strategy and technology adoption Cancer care innovation and oncology strategy Patient experience and quality improvement Clinician resilience and workforce performance Ideal for Hospital and health system CEOs, CMOs, and boards navigating transformation programmes Physician and clinical leaders developing executive capability Biotech, medical device, and digital health organisations seeking clinical strategic credibility Academic medical centre leadership teams managing the tension between research, education, and care delivery Audience outcomes A diagnostic framework for identifying where clinical culture is enabling or blocking organisational change Practical tools for developing physician leaders within complex, resource-constrained systems Clarity on evaluating and deploying digital health and AI-enabled technology against real clinical workflows An understanding of how academic, operational, and innovation goals can be aligned within a single leadership approach Approaches for addressing clinician burnout while maintaining performance standards

Why organisations work with Chad Foster He pairs a personal resilience story with a Fortune 500 sales record, which means he lands with revenue leaders, not only HR and culture audiences. The Blind Ambition Framework gives sales and operating leaders a structured five-step model rather than an inspirational set piece, and it has been delivered to 175,000+ attendees across six continents. He is credible on technology and commercial execution because he built the first CRM software for visually impaired users, a project Oracle had judged impossible. His Harvard Business School leadership credential, the first awarded to a blind executive, gives buyers cover when programming a resilience speaker for senior commercial audiences. Named client list includes Google, Salesforce, IBM, Microsoft, GE, Caterpillar and Nestle Purina, which signals comfort with the standards of large enterprise commercial events. Biography highlights First blind executive to graduate Harvard Business School’s leadership program. Author of Blind Ambition: How to Go from Victim to Visionary, HarperCollins Leadership, 2021. Creator of the Blind Ambition Framework, a five-step methodology applied across sales, leadership and culture programmes. Fortune 500 finance and sales executive credited with directing strategies tied to $45 billion in technology contracts. Built the first CRM software for visually impaired users. Keynote clients include Google, Salesforce, IBM, Microsoft, GE, Caterpillar, Nestle Purina and Amgen. Biography Resilience as a commercial topic has a credibility problem. Most speakers in the category sit on the personal side of the stage, helpful for a culture day, harder to programme into a sales kickoff or a senior leadership offsite. Chad Foster sits on the other side of that line. Foster lost his eyesight at twenty-one and went on to become the first blind executive to graduate from Harvard Business School’s leadership program. He then spent his career inside Fortune 500 technology companies, directing financial and sales strategies tied to $45 billion in contracts and building the first CRM software designed for visually impaired users, a project Oracle had said was not feasible. His book, Blind Ambition: How to Go from Victim to Visionary, was published by HarperCollins Leadership in 2021 and sets out the Blind Ambition Framework, a five-step methodology now used inside Google, Salesforce, IBM, Microsoft, GE, Caterpillar and Nestle Purina. He has delivered it more than 200 times to over 175,000 attendees across six continents. The reason buyers programme him into senior commercial settings is that the framework is presented as an operating discipline for performance under pressure, not a story about overcoming adversity. The personal account is the proof. The argument is about how leaders sustain judgement and revenue when the conditions stay hard for longer than the playbook assumes. Key speaking topics Resilience as a commercial leadership capability Performance under sustained pressure Sales leadership and revenue under disruption Mindset and decision-making for senior teams Inclusion and diversity as competitive advantage Change leadership and culture under strain Ideal for Sales kickoffs and CRO-led revenue events Senior leadership offsites and executive development programmes Culture, inclusion and people leadership conferences with a commercial audience Technology and financial services firms running multi-year transformation Audience outcomes A structured five-step framework for sustaining performance through disruption. A clearer language for resilience that travels into a sales and commercial setting. Specific tools for reframing setbacks into operating decisions. Renewed conviction at senior level on the link between mindset and revenue performance.

Why organisations work with Chris Dyer He ran the experiment before he taught it. PeopleG2 was a fully remote business through five Inc. 5000 listings and fifteen “best place to work” cycles, which means his culture and remote-work models come from operating evidence, not consulting observation. His “7 Pillars” (Transparency, Positivity, Measurement, Acknowledgement, Uniqueness, Listening, Mistakes) give an executive team a shared diagnostic vocabulary for culture, replacing the usual mix of values posters and engagement-survey theatre. He works at the intersection of culture and remote design, where most speakers pick a side. Buyers wrestling with hybrid productivity, distributed leadership, and connection in dispersed teams get one voice on both questions. Inc. Magazine named him the #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture, and his client roster includes NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Intuit, IKEA, and Southwest Airlines, which signals he holds a senior room across regulated, industrial, tech, and consumer settings. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of PeopleG2, a fully remote background-screening company, five-time Inc. 5000 honoree. Author of The Power of Company Culture (Kogan Page) and co-author of Remote Work (Kogan Page). Named #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture by Inc. Magazine; ranked #5 on the LeadersHum Power List. Listed among Global Gurus Top 30 Organizational Culture Professionals. Forbes Business Council member, Fast Company Executive Board member, and contributor to Inc.com. Keynote clients include NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Intuit, IKEA, and Southwest Airlines. Biography Most companies treat culture as something HR runs and leaders endorse. PeopleG2 was built the other way around. Chris Dyer ran the firm as a fully remote operation while it landed on the Inc. 5000 list five times and was repeatedly named a best place to work, which made culture a daily operating decision rather than an annual initiative. That experience produced a specific framework. The Power of Company Culture, published by Kogan Page, sets out seven pillars: Transparency, Positivity, Measurement, Acknowledgement, Uniqueness, Listening, and Mistakes. The book’s argument is operational. Each pillar maps to behaviours leaders can audit, and the cases used to test it sit inside companies like General Motors, Southwest Airlines, and VaynerMedia. His second book, Remote Work, also with Kogan Page, addresses the harder follow-on question: how do you keep a culture intact when your workforce is distributed. Inc. Magazine subsequently named Dyer the #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture, and his keynote work has placed him in front of leadership teams at NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Intuit, IKEA, and Southwest Airlines. What buyers tend to take from Dyer is permission to stop treating culture as soft. He gives senior teams a vocabulary, a diagnostic, and a set of operator decisions, grounded in a business he built and ran rather than a model he assembled from interviews. Key speaking topics Company culture as an operating system The 7 Pillars framework Remote and hybrid workforce design Employee engagement and retention Leadership in distributed organisations Future of work and AI integration in the workplace Burnout and recession-period leadership Ideal for CHROs and heads of People rebuilding engagement and retention strategy CEOs and executive teams setting the direction on hybrid or fully remote operating models Culture and transformation leads inside organisations carrying out post-restructure rebuilds Leadership development functions designing programmes for distributed managers Audience outcomes A shared diagnostic for which cultural levers in their organisation are actually moving performance A practical view of how to run a distributed or hybrid workforce without losing cohesion An operator’s account of how engagement, retention, and productivity reinforce each other when the right pillars are in place Concrete tactics from a CEO who tested them inside a five-time Inc. 5000 company

Why organisations work with Kristel Bauer A medical practitioner’s lens on workplace wellbeing. Her clinical background in integrative psychiatry means audiences hear evidence-based content on stress, sleep, and mental health, not motivational generalities. A published thesis on work-life harmony. Work-Life Tango (John Murray Business, 2024) replaces the binary of balance with a more usable operating model for hybrid teams. Credibility with both wellbeing leads and commercial leadership. Bauer translates clinical evidence into language that resonates with operations and people functions in the same room. Track record across regulated and Fortune 500 environments, including AbbVie, Bank of America, bp, General Mills, Home Depot, Santander, TIAA, and the U.S. Census Bureau. Media reach that extends authority beyond the keynote. Forbes, Entrepreneur, NBC News Daily, ABC News Live, and the Live Greatly podcast give clients a speaker whose ideas circulate well after the event. Biography highlights Author of Work-Life Tango: Finding Happiness, Harmony and Peak Performance Wherever You Work (John Murray Business, 2024) Integrative Medicine Fellow and former Physician Assistant with clinical experience in integrative psychiatry Creator and host of the Live Greatly Podcast, ranked in the top tier of self-improvement category globally Contributing writer for Entrepreneur; named a Forbes Top 10 Social Media Influencer 2026 Top Impact Speaker, Real Leaders Broadcast features on NBC News Daily, ABC News Live, FOX Weather, ABC 7 Chicago, WGN Daytime Chicago TEDx speaker: “Redefining Work-Life Balance in a COVID-19 World” Corporate clients include AbbVie, Bank of America, bp, Cognizant, General Mills, Home Depot, Northwestern University, Santander, TIAA, U.S. Census Bureau Biography Workplace wellbeing has become an operating cost line that few organisations know how to manage. Engagement scores stay flat, mental health claims rise, and the hybrid debate consumes leadership attention. The clinical evidence on what actually moves the dial sits outside most HR functions. Kristel Bauer brings that evidence into the room. She practised as a Physician Assistant with clinical experience in integrative psychiatry and completed an Integrative Medicine Fellowship before founding Live Greatly in 2019 to focus full time on workplace wellbeing and performance. Her book, Work-Life Tango: Finding Happiness, Harmony and Peak Performance Wherever You Work, was published by John Murray Business in November 2024. The thesis replaces the static idea of balance with a more dynamic operating model: harmony as something teams design for, not something individuals struggle to achieve. The Live Greatly podcast has carried that argument into a wider audience, with conversations across leadership, behavioural science, and performance. Bauer has presented for AbbVie, Bank of America, bp, Cognizant, General Mills, Home Depot, Santander, TIAA, and the U.S. Census Bureau, among others. She is a contributing writer for Entrepreneur, a Forbes Top 10 Social Media Influencer, a 2026 Top Impact Speaker by Real Leaders, and a TEDx speaker. Key speaking topics Workplace wellbeing as an operational discipline Mental health and stress at work Peak performance and high-performance habits Work-life harmony in hybrid and distributed teams Burnout prevention and recovery Leadership and emotional intelligence Employee engagement and culture Ideal for CHROs, heads of people, and wellbeing leads commissioning credible mental health content Learning and development functions building manager capability around stress and performance Leadership offsites where wellbeing needs clinical grounding, not motivational framing Sales kick-offs and all-hands events that need a high-energy, evidence-led performance keynote Audience outcomes A clinically grounded model for distinguishing healthy pressure from harmful stress at work A practical operating definition of work-life harmony that managers can apply with their teams Specific habit-level interventions for sustained performance under sustained load Language for talking about mental health at work that lands with commercial as well as people leaders Confidence to treat workplace wellbeing as a measurable strategic lever, not a perks question