Leadership

Why organisations work with Yogi Roth Co-authorship with Pete Carroll of Win Forever, a New York Times bestseller, gives him direct authority on the “Always Compete” philosophy now used widely in sport and corporate culture programmes. Two decades inside elite football locker rooms, first as a USC quarterbacks coach, then as a Big Ten, Pac-12, ESPN and Fox analyst, gives him a first-hand evidence base most culture speakers do not have. He brings a filmmaker’s command of narrative into the room. As producer and narrator of The Drive on the Pac-12 Networks since 2013, he has spent his career studying what actually makes high-performing cultures cohere on camera. Track record speaking for Nike, World Surf League, Capital One, Dignity Health and JCPenney, alongside major college athletic programmes, means he reads both commercial audiences and team-led organisations without recalibration. Biography highlights Co-author with Pete Carroll of Win Forever: Live, Work, and Play Like a Champion, which reached number seven on the New York Times bestseller list. Los Angeles Emmy winner in 2020 for Fight On: A Jackson Family, produced for the Pac-12 Networks. College football analyst across the Big Ten Network, Pac-12 Networks, Fox, ESPN and NFL Network, joining Big Ten Network in 2024. USC football quarterbacks coach under Pete Carroll, 2005 to 2009, following a playing career as a wide receiver at the University of Pittsburgh. Master’s degree in Communication Management from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, graduating magna cum laude. Elite 11 quarterback coach and host since 2009; producer and narrator of the documentary series The Drive on Pac-12 Networks since 2013. Biography Pete Carroll’s Win Forever philosophy did not stay inside USC’s football programme. The book that codified it, co-written with Yogi Roth in 2010, reached number seven on the New York Times bestseller list and has since travelled through corporate culture programmes, athletic departments and leadership offsites. Roth is the storyteller who shaped how that philosophy reads on the page and how its central idea, “Always Compete,” lands in a room. His route to that work was unusual. He walked on as a wide receiver at the University of Pittsburgh, earned a full athletic scholarship, then moved into coaching at USC under Carroll from 2005 to 2009. He studied alongside that work, completing a master’s in Communication Management at the USC Annenberg School. Coaching gave him the inside view of how an elite competitive culture actually behaves. Annenberg gave him the craft to translate it. The translation has been a 20-year career across broadcast and film. He has been an on-air college football analyst for the Big Ten Network, Pac-12 Networks, Fox, ESPN and NFL Network, and has produced and narrated The Drive since 2013, the long-running documentary series on the Pac-12 Networks. In 2020 he won a Los Angeles Emmy for Fight On: A Jackson Family. He also coaches and hosts the Elite 11, the country’s premier high school quarterback competition. That body of work is the substance behind his keynote practice. He has spoken for Nike, World Surf League, Capital One, Dignity Health and JCPenney, applying the same idea: organisations perform when leaders make what matters specific, repeat it relentlessly, and reward the behaviours that show people are competing for it together. The Latin root of compete, he points out, is “to strive together.” Most culture programmes forget that part. Key speaking topics Culture and the “Always Compete” philosophy Storytelling as a leadership tool High-performance team dynamics Personal brand and authentic communication Coaching and feedback in competitive cultures Purpose, clarity and discipline in winning organisations Ideal for Sales leaders and commercial teams running culture or kickoff events HR and people leaders building engagement programmes around purpose and team behaviour Athletic departments, sports organisations and performance-led businesses Marketing leaders and brand teams working on internal storytelling and identity Audience outcomes A working definition of what their team is actually competing for, beyond the stated mission Specific stories they can carry back into their own teams to make values concrete A clearer sense of where culture is real in their organisation and where it is decoration Renewed conviction that the behaviours leaders model in small moments are what shape a winning culture

Why organisations work with Jodie Taylor Taylor won the Golden Boot at 31, after a serious knee injury had disrupted her career in her mid-20s. The story is sustained performance through real adversity – not a single peak moment – which is what makes the resilience argument land with competitive organisations. A career spanning 17 clubs across six countries – from NWSL franchises to Lyon’s UEFA Champions League-winning squad – means direct exposure to how elite performance cultures actually differ. She brings comparative insight into what drives delivery under pressure, not a single exportable model. She is now Arsenal Women’s Technical Director – the first person to hold the role at the club – which means her thinking about the conditions for elite performance is being tested in a live organisational context, not drawn solely from memory of a playing career that ended years ago. As the first Englishwoman to score a hat-trick in a major international tournament, she carries a specific, named, verifiable performance record. That kind of credential anchors credibility differently than a career overview. A UEFA A coaching licence and an in-progress Masters in Sports Directorship mean her framework for translating athletic performance into organisational learning has structured analytical rigour behind it – a distinction that matters in leadership conversations where storytelling alone doesn’t carry the room. Biography highlights UEFA Women’s EURO 2017 Golden Boot winner – five goals in four appearances, including the first hat-trick by an Englishwoman in a major international tournament 51 England senior caps and 19 international goals; represented England at the 2015 and 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cups (England won bronze in 2015) UEFA Women’s Champions League winner with Lyon (2019-20); FA Cup winner with Birmingham City (2012) Vauxhall England Player of the Year 2017; Oregon State University Athletics Hall of Fame inductee (2020) Career spanning 17 clubs across six countries – England, USA, Canada, Australia, Sweden, and France Appointed Arsenal Women’s Technical Director (January 2026) – the first person to hold the role at the club Biography At UEFA Women’s EURO 2017, Jodie Taylor scored five goals in four appearances, took the Golden Boot, and became the first Englishwoman to score a hat-trick in a major international tournament. She was 31, and had already spent more than a decade moving between clubs across six countries. That breadth matters. Seventeen clubs in England, the United States, Canada, Australia, Sweden, and France is direct exposure to how elite performance cultures are built, maintained, and dismantled in genuinely different environments. Alongside the Golden Boot, Taylor won the FA Cup with Birmingham City and the UEFA Women’s Champions League with Lyon, earned 51 England caps, and was named Vauxhall England Player of the Year. She did all of it while navigating a serious knee injury and the structural uncertainties of a women’s game that was still building its professional infrastructure. What is less common is the transition she has made since retiring from professional football in 2023. Appointed Arsenal Women’s Technical Director in January 2026 – the first person to hold that role at the club – Taylor now works directly on the organisational conditions that enable elite performance: the structures, cultures, and systems that translate individual talent into consistent team output. She holds a UEFA A coaching licence and is completing a Masters in Sports Directorship. The result is a perspective that sits at the intersection of frontline competitive experience and structured organisational thinking. Taylor has seen high-performance culture from the inside of 17 different teams and is now building it from the outside. That combination is rare, and it is precisely what makes her valuable in leadership conversations about performance, resilience, and what teams actually need to deliver when the stakes are highest. Key speaking topics Performance under pressure High-performance team culture Resilience and sustained performance Leadership in competitive environments Building and maintaining team trust Mindset and focus in high-stakes situations Navigating setbacks and career adversity Ideal for Senior leadership teams and C-suite audiences focused on performance culture and competitive resilience CHROs and People leaders building or transforming high-performance team environments Women’s leadership networks and inclusion programmes Sales, commercial, and performance-driven teams in competitive industries Audience outcomes A concrete, evidence-based account of what the conditions for sustained high performance actually look like – drawn from elite competition across multiple cultures and environments Clearer thinking about the gap between individual talent and collective team delivery, and what leaders can do to close it before pressure arrives Practical reflection on how trust, culture, and individual mindset interact in high-stakes moments A sharper vocabulary for leadership conversations about resilience, performance, and team culture Perspective from a practitioner who has both competed at the highest level and is now building organisational performance structures inside a major professional club

Why organisations work with Tanya Oxtoby She has built winning environments at both ends of the resource spectrum: Bristol City Women, operating on the WSL’s smallest budget, and Chelsea Women under Emma Hayes, the most dominant club side in English football. She has held a UEFA Pro Licence in a sport where fewer than a handful of women in the British and Irish game hold that qualification, and she has used it inside national-team rebuild conditions at Northern Ireland. She speaks directly about leading squad transitions; under her at Northern Ireland the average age of the squad dropped from 27 to 23, nine players debuted, and the world ranking improved while results remained mixed. That is the texture of real change leadership rather than the slide version. She brings a working perspective on inclusion as performance practice, drawing on her own indigenous Australian background and her record of developing female coaches and players inside the elite game. Biography highlights Manager, Newcastle United Women, appointed November 2025 on a contract to June 2029. Former manager, Northern Ireland senior women’s national team, 2023 to 2025. Former assistant coach, Chelsea FC Women, under Emma Hayes; two FA Women’s Super League titles and three Women’s FA Cups during her two seasons. Former manager, Bristol City Women, July 2018 to early 2022; record WSL points tally and a sixth place finish in her first season, with two Manager of the Month awards. UEFA Pro Licence holder. Former professional centre-back for Perth Glory, Western Waves and Doncaster Rovers Belles; captained Western Australia and Perth Glory. Biography Bristol City Women had the lowest budget in the Women’s Super League when Tanya Oxtoby took over in July 2018. By the end of her first season they had a record points tally, a sixth place finish in the WSL, and she had collected two Manager of the Month awards. That is the work that defines her as a leader: building standards inside teams that are not supposed to win at the level they end up competing at. The Chelsea years sharpened the credential. Two seasons as assistant to Emma Hayes, two FA Women’s Super League titles, three Women’s FA Cups. She joined the staff in 2021 and left in 2023 for the senior international job with Northern Ireland, a four-year project to reset a national team that had qualified for its first major tournament under the previous regime. Northern Ireland was the harder leadership test. She handed nine players their senior debuts, dropped the average squad age from 27 to 23, and improved the country’s world ranking, while results on the pitch stayed inconsistent. The squad reset was the point. In November 2025 she left to take the manager’s job at Newcastle United Women, on a contract running until 2029, in a recruitment process led by Director of Women’s Football Grace Williams. Oxtoby is one of a small group of women in the British and Irish game who holds a UEFA Pro Licence. She speaks publicly about her indigenous Australian heritage and the absence of visible role models from that background during her playing career at Perth Glory and Doncaster Rovers Belles. That gives her work on inclusion a specificity that most sports-speaker treatments of the subject lack. Key speaking topics Leadership under resource constraint Building winning cultures inside elite teams Squad and team renewal Performance leadership in high-pressure environments Inclusion and representation in elite sport Coaching at the top of professional football Ideal for CHROs and senior people leaders managing teams through restructure or budget pressure Operating leaders and divisional heads inside organisations rebuilding underperforming units Women’s leadership networks and senior development programmes Executive teams looking for an outside performance perspective on sustained pressure and public scrutiny Audience outcomes A sharper read on what raising standards actually looks like inside a team that is outspent or under-resourced A working framework for thinking about squad and team renewal without losing the people you keep A specific account of how a leader holds standards while results are inconsistent An honest perspective on inclusion as performance work rather than corporate signalling

Why organisations work with Cy Wakeman She quantifies the cost of workplace drama in hours and dollars, giving HR and operations leaders a financial case for cultural change that executive committees actually fund. Her Reality-Based Leadership method directly contradicts the dominant engagement-survey playbook, which makes her useful to organisations whose engagement scores rise while performance does not. Four books, including the New York Times bestseller The Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace, give her a coherent body of work that scales beyond the keynote into manager training, coaching, and certification. She has been ranked the world’s #1 leadership guru on the Global Gurus list for three consecutive years and is a 2024 inductee into the National Speakers Association Hall of Fame, placing her in the top tier of professional platform speakers globally. Her client roster spans Google, Meta, Pfizer, NASA, Bank of America, NBCUniversal, and major US health systems, which gives her language credibility across both highly regulated and high-growth environments. Biography highlights Founder of Reality-Based Leadership, an executive coaching and culture consultancy operating since 2001. Author of Reality-Based Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2010), New York Times bestseller The Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace (2013), No Ego (2017), and Life’s Messy, Live Happy (2022). Ranked #1 on the Global Gurus Top 30 Leadership Professionals list in 2021, 2022, and 2023. Certified Speaking Professional and 2024 inductee into the National Speakers Association Hall of Fame via the Council of Peers Award of Excellence. Regular contributor to Forbes, Success, Huffington Post, and Thrive Global; featured in The New York Times, Business Insider, and SHRM. Clients include Google, Meta, Pfizer, NASA, NBCUniversal, Bank of America, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford Health Care. Biography Most organisations treat engagement as the answer to cultural underperformance. Wakeman’s research argues the opposite. Engagement without accountability produces entitlement, and the cost shows up as emotional waste: gossip, venting, resistance, and rehearsed grievance that her work estimates at roughly two and a half hours per employee per day. That framing is the spine of Reality-Based Leadership, the consultancy she founded in 2001 and the title of her 2010 Jossey-Bass book. The follow-up, The Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace, reached the New York Times bestseller list in 2013. No Ego in 2017 sharpened the argument: leaders should stop arguing with reality on behalf of their teams and start coaching people to work within it. Her client roster covers the full span where this argument lands hardest. Google, Meta, and NBCUniversal on the high-growth side. Pfizer, NASA, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford Health Care on the regulated and mission-driven side. The work tends to follow a familiar pattern: senior teams that have invested heavily in culture programmes, with strong engagement scores and stubbornly weak performance, retention, or change-readiness. Recognition has tracked the substance. The Global Gurus list ranked her #1 leadership professional in 2021, 2022, and 2023. In 2024 the National Speakers Association inducted her into its Hall of Fame through the Council of Peers Award of Excellence, a designation held by fewer than 300 speakers worldwide. Key speaking topics Reality-Based Leadership Workplace drama and emotional waste Accountability cultures Employee engagement that produces results Change readiness No-ego leadership Ideal for CHROs and heads of culture working on the gap between engagement scores and performance. Senior operating leaders dealing with change fatigue and low accountability in their teams. Healthcare, financial services, and regulated-sector executives managing retention and frontline morale at scale. Manager populations being trained out of conflict-avoidance and into direct, accountable conversations. Audience outcomes A concrete language for naming and pricing the cost of workplace drama in their own teams. Practical tools to redirect employee energy from grievance into contribution. A working distinction between engagement and accountability, and why most cultural investment confuses the two. A coaching approach for managers facing resistance to change without escalating conflict. Permission to stop arguing with reality on behalf of their teams and start leading inside it.

Why organisations work with Jamie Kern Lima A founder track record at a scale almost no speaker in the entrepreneurship category can match: a category-creating consumer brand sold to L’Oreal for $1.2 billion, after Sephora said no for six years and QVC said no for three. First female CEO of a brand in L’Oreal’s history, with direct operating experience inside a $30 billion strategic acquirer post-acquisition, not just pre-exit. Two New York Times bestselling books, “Believe IT” and “Worthy”, giving sales teams and leadership audiences a tested framework on rejection and self-worth that the speaker has already road-tested with millions of readers. Host of the Gracie Award-winning Jamie Kern Lima Show, with first-time podcast interviews from figures including Meghan Markle and Michelle Obama, which gives the platform reach and the speaker a sharpened interviewer’s instinct for what actually moves an audience. A Columbia MBA and Columbia Business School board member who chooses to lead with the founder story, not the credential stack. The buyer gets the substance underneath the inspiration. Biography highlights Founder and former CEO of IT Cosmetics; sold to L’Oreal in 2016 for $1.2 billion. First female CEO of a brand in L’Oreal’s 100+ year history. Two-time New York Times bestselling author: “Believe IT” (Simon & Schuster, 2021) and “Worthy” (Hay House, 2024). Host of “The Jamie Kern Lima Show”, winner of the 2025 Gracie Award for Best Podcast, Lifestyle. Guest Shark, ABC’s Shark Tank, Season 16. MBA, Columbia Business School; member of the Columbia Business School Board of Overseers. Listed on Forbes’ America’s Richest Self-Made Women. Biography IT Cosmetics was turned down by Sephora for six years and by QVC for three before Jamie Kern Lima got either retailer on the phone. By 2016 the company was the largest luxury makeup brand in America, and L’Oreal paid $1.2 billion to acquire it. She became the first female CEO of a brand in the group’s history. The founding story is unusual because the product positioning was unusual. IT Cosmetics was built around real skin: rosacea, hyperpigmentation, post-chemotherapy skin, customers QVC’s buyers were not used to seeing on camera. Kern Lima insisted on putting them there. That decision, more than any single marketing tactic, is what separated the brand from the prestige beauty pack and made it acquirable at scale. Post-exit, she has built a second platform with similar discipline. “Believe IT” and “Worthy” are both New York Times bestsellers; “The Jamie Kern Lima Show” won the 2025 Gracie Award for Best Podcast in the lifestyle category, on the back of first-ever podcast interviews with Meghan Markle and a multi-part series with Oprah Winfrey. She is on the board of overseers at Columbia Business School, where she earned her MBA in 2004. For a corporate audience, the relevant content is concrete. How a category-creating consumer brand survives years of rejection from the gatekeepers it depends on. How founder-led marketing competes with conglomerate marketing budgets. What changes inside the business the day a $30 billion strategic acquirer owns it. What stays the same. Key speaking topics Founder-led brand building and category creation Selling to and operating inside a strategic acquirer Authenticity as a marketing operating principle Rejection as a sales and growth discipline Direct retail, on-camera selling and QVC scale-up Resilience and self-worth for senior leaders Women’s entrepreneurship at scale Ideal for Sales kick-offs, especially in consumer, retail, beauty, and direct-to-consumer categories CMOs and brand teams reframing what “authentic” marketing means in practice Founder and scale-up audiences inside corporate venture, accelerator, and women’s leadership programmes Annual conferences seeking a headline keynote with mainstream cultural reach Audience outcomes A working playbook on building demand for a consumer brand the trade buyers have already rejected A clearer framework for how founder-led companies should think about brand voice after acquisition Specific tactics on handling rejection as a recurring operational event, not a one-off setback A renewed willingness, particularly among senior women, to put their own conviction back at the centre of commercial decisions

Why organisations work with Tony Perzow Twenty years on the operator side of the table, buying and selling closeouts to Walmart, Amazon, and Costco, before becoming a trainer. The frame is procurement and sales floor, not classroom. Former negotiation trainer at the Karrass Organization and former VP of negotiation training at Strategic Pricing Associates, giving him a structured pedagogical lineage in the most established commercial negotiation methodologies. His “Heart of the Deal” system is built around what happens to skilled negotiators when pressure rewires their judgement, not around tactic lists. Sessions are simulation-led. Teams negotiate, then get critiqued on the specific unconscious moves that cost margin, rather than walking out with a slide deck. Trained more than 20,000 commercial professionals, with a client roster spanning Apple, Red Bull, Rolls Royce, Pfizer, Panasonic, and Daimler Trucks. Biography highlights Former negotiation trainer at the Karrass Organization and former Vice President of negotiation training at Strategic Pricing Associates. Trained more than 20,000 sales, procurement, and commercial leadership professionals. Past corporate audiences include Apple, Red Bull, Rolls Royce, Pfizer, Panasonic, Daimler Trucks, and Starz Network. Built a procurement and sales operator background negotiating closeouts with Walmart, Amazon, and Costco. Creator of the “Heart of the Deal” methodology, structured around decision-making under pressure rather than tactic playbooks. Working on a book titled “You Suck at Negotiating, But You Don’t Have to with a Mindful Negotiation Practice.” Biography Negotiation training has a credibility problem. Most of it is built on tactic lists that hold up in role play and fall apart the moment a real buyer pushes back. Tony Perzow’s work starts where that gap opens: the behavioural moment where a skilled negotiator, under pressure, makes a decision they would not have made on paper. That framing comes from a career on the operator side of the table. Before training, Perzow spent close to two decades as a procurement specialist and sales lead, buying and selling closeouts with Walmart, Amazon, and Costco. The pedagogy came later, first as a trainer at the Karrass Organization, then as Vice President of negotiation training at Strategic Pricing Associates, two of the longest-running commercial negotiation institutions in the United States. His methodology, “Heart of the Deal,” is structured around pressure-triggered decisions rather than tactical repertoire. The training uses simulations followed by critique of the specific unconscious choices that leave margin on the table. The audience is sales, procurement, and commercial leadership; the deliverable is behaviour change in the room where contracts close, not a framework to read on a flight home. More than 20,000 commercial professionals have been through his programmes, with corporate audiences including Apple, Red Bull, Rolls Royce, Pfizer, Panasonic, and Daimler Trucks. His forthcoming book, “You Suck at Negotiating, But You Don’t Have to with a Mindful Negotiation Practice,” extends the same argument: that the failure mode in negotiation is rarely ignorance and almost always the negotiator’s own state under pressure. Key speaking topics High-stakes negotiation Sales negotiation and deal-making Procurement and price negotiation Behavioural decision-making under pressure Commercial leadership and revenue strategy Persuasive communication in client relationships Ideal for Chief revenue officers, sales leaders, and commercial directors briefing teams ahead of major deal cycles Heads of procurement and supply chain managing high-value supplier contracts Account management and key account teams in industries with concentrated buyers Sales kick-offs, commercial leadership offsites, and procurement summits Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the behavioural moves that compress margin in live negotiations The ability to diagnose, in their own deals, where pressure is driving suboptimal concessions A planning discipline that shifts power before the negotiation begins, not during it Techniques for managing hardball tactics without escalating or capitulating A framework for value creation in deals that would otherwise be priced as zero-sum

Why organisations work with Lisa Feldman Barrett She has reshaped the scientific consensus on emotion. Her theory of constructed emotion is now taught in psychology, neuroscience and affective computing curricula, and it directly contradicts the assumptions baked into most corporate EQ training and emotion-detection AI. She translates first-tier neuroscience for boardrooms without diluting it. Her two trade books, How Emotions Are Made and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, are written for general readers but cite the same primary research she publishes in Science and Nature Neuroscience. Her work has been adopted by audiences that need it to be right, including FBI behavioural analysts, the legal community through her role as Chief Science Officer at the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior, and senior medical faculties at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital. A leader who books her gets a researcher with NIH Pioneer Award and Guggenheim credentials, not a popular-science communicator working from secondary sources. Biography highlights University Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Northeastern University, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Chief Science Officer, Center for Law, Brain & Behavior at Massachusetts General Hospital. Author of How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. TED speaker, with the talk “You Aren’t at the Mercy of Your Emotions” passing 6.5 million views. NIH Director’s Pioneer Award; Guggenheim Fellowship; APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award; APS William James Fellow Award. Past President of the Association for Psychological Science; co-founder of the Society for Affective Science; over 275 peer-reviewed publications. Biography The textbook view of emotion, that anger, fear and joy are hard-wired circuits with universal facial signatures, dominated psychology, psychiatry and product design for most of the last century. It is also wrong. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s laboratory at Northeastern has spent twenty-five years showing that the brain constructs emotion in the moment, drawing on past experience, bodily state and cultural learning. Her theory of constructed emotion has reshaped affective science and is now reaching the institutions that depend on getting emotion right. She advises the FBI on behavioural analysis, serves as Chief Science Officer at the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior, and her work is cited in debates over emotion-detection AI and courtroom evidence. Barrett holds a University Distinguished Professorship at Northeastern, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. She has published more than 275 peer-reviewed papers, sits among the top 0.1 percent most-cited scientists in the world, and has received the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. For senior leaders, the practical payoff is a sharper model of how their own brains, and their people’s, actually work under uncertainty. That model contradicts a great deal of what corporate wellbeing, EQ training and emotion-aware technology currently sell. Key speaking topics The science of emotion in the workplace Brain, prediction and decision-making under uncertainty Stress, allostasis and the body budget The neuroscience of self-regulation for senior leaders Emotion-detection AI and the limits of affective computing Mental health and the construction of experience Communication and influence grounded in brain science Ideal for CEOs, CHROs and senior leadership teams reassessing wellbeing, EQ training and performance management Boards and risk committees evaluating emotion-recognition AI, behavioural surveillance, or affective computing investments Healthcare, legal and security organisations whose decisions hinge on interpreting human behaviour Senior leaders wanting a substantive, science-led perspective on stress, resilience and decision quality Audience outcomes A working understanding of how the brain predicts and constructs emotion, replacing the “universal emotions” model that underpins most corporate EQ content. A clearer view of what emotion-detection technology can and cannot reliably do, useful for evaluating vendors and policy. Practical implications for stress, recovery and senior decision-making, grounded in the brain’s energy regulation rather than pop-psychology. Sharper questions about how performance reviews, hiring assessments and customer research read emotional signals.

Why organisations work with Sean Conway He has lived the extreme version of the problem most leadership teams face: producing output every day, for months, while conditions degrade. The lessons translate because they were earned under measurable load. His 105-Ironmans-in-105-days record is a documented case study in pacing, recovery design and decision-making under fatigue, not a metaphor for one. He is one of a handful of people who hold multiple unsupported world records across disciplines, which gives him standing to speak on consistency over years, not single-event peak performance. Practical content for leaders: how to set targets so ambitious that conventional planning breaks, then build the operating rhythm to hit them anyway. Biography highlights World record: 105 consecutive full-distance Ironman triathlons in 105 days, 2023. World record: longest triathlon, 4,200 miles around the coast of Britain, 2016. World record: fastest unsupported solo cycle crossing of Europe, Portugal to Russia in 24 days, 18 hours, 39 minutes, 2018. First person to swim the length of Britain, 900 miles, 2013. Author of seven books, including Hell and High Water (Penguin Random House). Featured on Rich Roll, BBC, 220 Triathlon and national press for endurance records. Biography The hardest problem in endurance is not the peak day. It is the eighty-fourth day, when the body is broken, the conditions are worse than forecast, and the decision is whether to continue at all. Conway has solved that problem more times than almost anyone alive. In 2023 he completed 105 full-distance Ironmans in 105 days, beating the previous world record by four. The achievement matters less than the operating system behind it: a daily structure of swim, bike, run, eat, sleep, repeat, designed so that performance held when motivation could not. He has applied the same discipline to swimming the length of Britain, cycling unsupported across Europe faster than anyone before him, and circumnavigating Britain by swim, bike and run. His route to this work is unusual. He arrived in the UK from Zimbabwe with limited means, built a corporate photography business, sold it for £1 to fund a first round-the-world cycle, and has worked as a full-time endurance athlete and writer ever since. Seven books, published by Penguin Random House and others, document the practical content of how the records were built. What he gives senior audiences is the engineering of long-haul output: how to set targets that conventional planning would reject, how to design recovery so it produces capacity rather than guilt, and how to make decisions cleanly when the body and the conditions are voting no. Key speaking topics Ultra-endurance performance Resilience under prolonged stress Goal setting beyond conventional limits Recovery and pacing as performance disciplines Decision-making under fatigue Mindset for sustained output High-performance habits Ideal for Leadership teams running multi-year transformation or turnaround programmes Sales, operations and delivery functions facing extended high-output periods Executive offsites focused on resilience, performance and ambition setting Conferences seeking a credible peak-performance keynote with verifiable record-breaking achievements Audience outcomes A working model for sustaining output across long periods, drawn from a documented 105-day case. A sharper view of how recovery and pacing produce performance, rather than restrict it. Concrete techniques for decision-making when fatigue and conditions are working against you. Permission and a method for setting targets the rest of the planning system would reject.

About Trevor Williams Trevor Williams served as Chief Economist at Lloyds Bank for over a decade. Now an author, academic and consultant, he analyses the key trends and policies that shape the economy and markets. From energy and climate to how companies use their data to understand the wider economy, he brings clarity and relevance to an often complex and abstract field. Trevor worked for the civil service whilst studying for his economics PhD, after which he went on to work for over 30 years as an economist in the City, most notably at Lloyds. His professional life has encompassed equity and foreign exchange, forecasting and financial analysis. Today he provides clear insight into how politics, demographics and trade shape economies and economic trends. From earnings and inflation to stock markets and trade deals, Trevor explores what is going on in the economy and what it means to organisations and individuals. Looking at both the global and the local, the long and short term, he explains what the numbers really reveal. With a focus on interpreting the information as it is, not as people might think or wish it was, he considers the effects of disruptions like Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic, and how (and how quickly) economies can recover and what actions influence that recovery. Trevor also studies what risks businesses and government face and how the economy will react. In particular, he looks at the political economics of climate change, including the risks for investors, insurers and the general population that this existential challenge could impose. He examines the economics of energy; the likelihood, causes and potential effects of energy shortages and what decisions and policies have increased the risk of energy reserves running low, as well as the cost to businesses and consumers. Alongside the global market in energy, he looks wider to the globalised economy, the sometimes fragile interdependences, the impact of trade policies and what it all means for prices and growth. As rotating Chair of the Institute of Economic Affairs’ Shadow Monetary Policy Committee Trevor keeps a close eye on Bank of England decisions and direction of travel. He unpicks the impact of interest rates, monetary policy and quantitative easing and translates them into useful intelligence businesses can use to inform strategy. He also reveals how companies can use their own big data sets to reveal insights into the broader economy and their place within it. Trevor runs his own consultancy and is co-founder of FXGuard, a fintech based risk management tool for SMEs to manage foreign exchange risk exposure.Along with his own blog, Trevor writes regularly on financial and market matters, including a regular column in the personal finance magazine Moneyfacts. He is the co-author of Trading Economics, a clear guide to the statistics and indicators that underpin market economics. He is a Professor at St Mary’s University, London and Visiting Professor at the University of Derby.

Why organisations work with Tim Bradshaw His authority sits in operational tradecraft, not theory. As a Covert Human Intelligence Officer he recruited and ran foreign agents in environments where misjudging a person or a moment carried real consequences. That experience translates directly into how senior leaders read rooms, build trust quickly, and influence outcomes without formal authority. He treats resilience as a leadership system, not an individual virtue. His work focuses on how decision-making structures and cultural signals shape whether teams hold together under sustained pressure, which is the version boards actually need. He has tested his content with operationally serious clients across regulated and high-stakes sectors, including Jaguar Land Rover, Mercedes-Benz, Deloitte, Clyde & Co, Knight Frank, St James’s Place and Netflix. Through Sandstone Communications and the Sandstone Foundation he runs the same material at executive level and in schools, which keeps the language plain and the frameworks usable rather than abstract. Biography highlights Former British Army Intelligence Officer, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst graduate, served as a Covert Human Intelligence Officer. Founder and director of Sandstone Communications, an international leadership and trauma-informed training consultancy. Chief Executive of the Sandstone Foundation, delivering leadership and resilience programmes across corporate, public and education sectors. Author of Because I Can, a practical guide to personal effectiveness under pressure. Keynote client roster includes Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar Land Rover, Netflix, Deloitte, Knight Frank, Clyde & Co, St James’s Place, Fujifilm Europe, Hitachi Solutions, Taylor Wessing and Gateley. Personal endurance record includes Ironman, summit of Everest, summit of the Matterhorn, and seven triathlons in one weekend. Biography Most leadership programmes train people for clarity. The harder problem is the meeting where the information is incomplete, the timeline has collapsed, and the person in charge has to commit anyway. That is the territory Tim Bradshaw works in, and it is where his content earns its weight. His authority comes from operational practice rather than research. As a Covert Human Intelligence Officer in the British Army, a Royal Military Academy Sandhurst graduate, he recruited and handled foreign agents in environments where reading a person wrongly had immediate consequences. The discipline he brings into the room is not motivational. It is practical tradecraft: how to make decisions when the picture refuses to clarify, how to build trust at speed, how to influence outcomes when hierarchy gives you nothing to lean on. Through Sandstone Communications, the consultancy he founded, and the Sandstone Foundation, where he is chief executive, he applies that work to senior teams in regulated and operationally complex businesses. Clients include Jaguar Land Rover, Mercedes-Benz, Deloitte, Clyde & Co, Knight Frank, St James’s Place, Netflix, Fujifilm Europe and Taylor Wessing. His book Because I Can sets out the personal effectiveness framework that underpins the keynotes. What makes his work usable is the refusal to treat resilience as an individual quality. He argues that leadership behaviour, decision structures and cultural signals are what determine whether a team stays effective under sustained pressure. That reframes a topic boards often hear as a wellbeing conversation into a question about how the organisation is actually run. Key speaking topics Decision-making under pressure and uncertainty Influence and trust without formal authority Leadership in high-stakes operational environments Team resilience as a leadership system Crisis management and composure Leading change without creating fragility Ideal for CEOs and executive teams in regulated, safety-critical or operationally complex sectors Senior leadership offsites where decision-making and judgment under pressure are the headline themes Sales, advisory and client-facing teams that depend on rapid trust-building with senior counterparties Risk, security and crisis leadership functions, including CROs, CISOs and continuity leads Audience outcomes A working method for committing to a decision when the information is incomplete A specific way to build trust and influence at speed without relying on title or authority A view of resilience as something leaders engineer into teams, not something they ask of individuals Composure as a teachable behaviour, with the cues senior leaders can use to model it A clearer read on which organisational habits actively erode performance when pressure is sustained