Leadership speakers

Why organisations work with Jaap de Hoop Scheffer Five years running NATO through Afghanistan, the 2008 Bucharest summit, Russia-Georgia, and the alliance’s 60th-anniversary reset. Few living speakers can describe transatlantic decision-making from the chair. Direct line of sight into the machinery that shapes risk for multinationals: defence spending, sanctions architecture, Article 5, enlargement politics, EU-US friction. Dutch Foreign Minister during the Iraq War and OSCE Chair in 2003. He has operated at the national capital level and the multilateral level on the same files. Chaired the Netherlands’ Advisory Council on International Affairs for seven years, meaning his read on policy is current, not retrospective. Holds the Pieter Kooijmans Chair at Leiden and sits with the Trilateral Commission, Friends of Europe, and the European Leadership Network. The analysis is anchored in live institutional conversation, not memoir. Biography highlights 11th Secretary General of NATO, 2004 to 2009, and Chair of the North Atlantic Council. Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, 2002 to 2003, and OSCE Chairman-in-Office during the Dutch chairmanship. Leader of the Christian Democratic Appeal, 1997 to 2001; Member of the House of Representatives, 1986 to 2002. Pieter Kooijmans Chair for Peace, Law and Security, Leiden University, from 2009; Distinguished Fellow, Leiden University College The Hague. Chair of the Advisory Council on International Affairs (AIV), 2014 to 2021; Minister of State of the Netherlands from 2018. Non-executive Director, Air France-KLM, 2011 to 2020; Trustee, Friends of Europe; European Group of the Trilateral Commission. Biography NATO took on the lead security role in Afghanistan in October 2006 under a Secretary General who had started the job two years earlier with a fractured alliance and a disputed war in Iraq still on the table. That was de Hoop Scheffer’s first decisive test at the head of the North Atlantic Council, and it set the pattern for how he ran the alliance through Bucharest, the Russia-Georgia war, and the 60th-anniversary summit. Before NATO he was Dutch Foreign Minister under Jan Peter Balkenende and Chairman-in-Office of the OSCE in the Netherlands’ 2003 chairmanship. That sequence, national capital to multilateral chair to alliance lead, is what gives his reading of geopolitics its weight: he has operated at each level on the same files, and made calls at each level that had consequences for the others. The post-NATO work has kept him inside the policy conversation rather than above it. He holds the Pieter Kooijmans Chair for Peace, Law and Security at Leiden University, chaired the Advisory Council on International Affairs for the Dutch government from 2014 to 2021, and sits with the Trilateral Commission’s European Group, Friends of Europe, and the European Leadership Network. He served as a non-executive director at Air France-KLM for nearly a decade, which is where the geopolitical view meets the board agenda in practice. What boards get is a former alliance chief who can map a specific decision, a specific summit, a specific red line, onto the risk exposure a company is carrying today. In 2018 he was granted the honorary title of Minister of State, a recognition reserved in the Netherlands for senior former officials whose judgement the state continues to draw on. Key speaking topics Transatlantic security and the future of NATO European defence, enlargement, and the Russia question Geopolitical risk for multinational business Afghanistan, intervention, and the lessons for alliances Multilateral diplomacy and the G7/OSCE system EU-US relations and the Indo-Pacific pivot Ideal for Boards and audit committees pricing geopolitical and sanctions exposure into strategy CEOs and executive teams in defence, aerospace, energy, and critical infrastructure Government affairs, political risk, and corporate security leaders Investor and shareholder forums needing a senior read on alliance and policy direction Audience outcomes A sharper map of where transatlantic security policy is heading and what moves it A direct account of how NATO decisions are made, from someone who made them Concrete read on Russia, Ukraine, enlargement, and the European defence build-out Named risks and inflection points a board can carry into its next strategy review Confidence in distinguishing signal from noise in a daily news cycle dominated by geopolitics

Why organisations work with Jacob Morgan His “Vulnerable Leader Equation” offers a specific, research-backed counter-argument to the dominant leadership vulnerability narrative – making the case that vulnerability without competence actively undermines trust, not builds it. Boards and CHROs get a framework they can act on, not a platitude. The research underpinning The Future Leader (140 CEO interviews, 14,000-person LinkedIn survey) gives senior audiences data that reflects their own peer group back at them – a rare source of authority in a crowded leadership development market. His founder role at Future of Work Leaders – a by-invitation CHRO community including members from Johnson & Johnson, Dow, and Lego – means his frameworks are stress-tested against the most senior people leaders in the world, not just conference rooms. The Future Leader won the CMI Management Book of the Year 2021, providing external, peer-validated credibility beyond self-reported authority. Organisations navigating the tension between AI adoption and human leadership capability get a framework that treats the two as interdependent – not competing priorities – grounded in his three-environment model of employee experience (culture, technology, physical workspace). Biography highlights Bestselling author of six books published by Wiley and McGraw-Hill, covering collaboration, the future of work, employee experience, leadership, and vulnerability The Future Leader (Wiley, 2020) – winner of the CMI Management Book of the Year 2021 Research base includes 140+ CEO interviews and a LinkedIn-partnered survey of nearly 14,000 employees for The Future Leader; 100+ CEO interviews and a DDI-partnered survey of 14,000 employees for Leading With Vulnerability Founder of Future of Work Leaders, a by-invitation global CHRO community with members from Johnson & Johnson, Dow, Lego, Northrop Grumman, and Neiman Marcus Contributed to and cited in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, NPR, and CNN Host of Great Leadership With Jacob Morgan; featured guest on the Harvard Business School Managing the Future of Work podcast Biography Jacob Morgan has spent more than a decade asking a question most organisations avoid: why do capable leaders so consistently fail to produce the organisations they intend? His answer, built across six books and primary research involving hundreds of CEOs and tens of thousands of employees, is both precise and uncomfortable – the model of leadership most executives were trained in was designed for a world that no longer exists. His most cited framework, the Vulnerable Leader Equation, makes a specific argument: vulnerability in isolation is not a leadership quality, it is a liability. The research underpinning Leading With Vulnerability (Wiley, 2024) – drawn from over 100 CEO interviews and a DDI-partnered survey of 14,000 employees – shows that leaders who combine openness about their gaps with clear, competence-driven responses to those gaps outperform peers on trust, engagement, and team performance. It is a direct challenge to the feel-good vulnerability conversation, and it is grounded in data. The Future Leader (Wiley, 2020), winner of the CMI Management Book of the Year 2021, applied the same research discipline to the broader question of what leading through disruption actually requires. Based on interviews with over 140 CEOs at organisations including Unilever, Mastercard, and KPMG – paired with a LinkedIn-partnered survey of nearly 14,000 employees – it identified four specific mindsets and five specific skills that define readiness for leadership in uncertain conditions. Morgan is also the founder of Future of Work Leaders, a by-invitation CHRO community whose members include Johnson & Johnson, Dow, and Lego. His work has been featured in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, and MIT Sloan Management Review. He hosts the Great Leadership With Jacob Morgan podcast and has been a featured guest on the Harvard Business School Managing the Future of Work series. Key speaking topics Future-ready leadership Vulnerability and trust in organisations Employee experience strategy Leadership in the age of AI Future of work Organisational culture and performance Executive development and people strategy Ideal for CHROs and CPOs navigating the gap between leadership investment and employee outcomes Senior leadership teams preparing for AI-driven workforce transformation Boards and executive committees reviewing leadership capability and succession HR and people functions building future-ready culture frameworks Audience outcomes A named framework – the Vulnerable Leader Equation – for understanding when and how vulnerability strengthens rather than undermines leadership authority The four mindsets and five skills that Morgan’s CEO research identified as defining future-ready leaders, with practical application at individual and team level A clearer model for diagnosing where employee experience is breaking down across culture, technology, and physical environment Research-grounded perspective on how AI is reshaping the leadership role – and what human capability this places at a premium Practical tools for assessing the gap between how leaders perceive their impact and how their people experience it

Why organisations work with Jacqueline Carter Four named books from Harvard Business Review Press and Palgrave (One Second Ahead, The Mind of the Leader, Compassionate Leadership, More Human) that give a board or executive team a shared language for the human side of leadership. One of the few people answering “how do I lead people in the age of AI?” from a leadership-science lens rather than a technology one. Her 2025 book More Human treats people and AI as complementary forces, and shows leaders where to deploy the technology and where the decision has to stay human. A research base built from interviews with more than a hundred CEOs and 360-degree surveys of leaders worldwide, conducted through Potential Project. Her arguments come with evidence, not anecdote. A framework, “wise compassion”, that gives leaders a usable answer to the empathy-versus-results tension most senior teams are stuck on. Twenty years of consulting at Deloitte and Potential Project with named clients including Cisco, Disney, Accenture, IKEA, and Royal Bank of Canada, so she speaks to executives in the language of operational reality, not theory. Biography highlights Senior Partner and North America Director, Potential Project. Co-author, More Human: How the Power of AI Can Transform the Way You Lead (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025). Co-author, Compassionate Leadership (HBR Press, 2022) and The Mind of the Leader (HBR Press, 2018). Co-author, One Second Ahead (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). MSc in Organizational Behaviour; former leader in Deloitte Consulting’s Change Leadership practice. Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company, and Business Insider. Biography The most senior leaders in large organisations are being asked to do contradictory things at once: cut hard, care visibly, deploy AI fast, and keep the workforce engaged through the disruption it causes. Most leadership advice picks one side of that tension and ignores the other. Jacqueline Carter’s work, built over two decades at Potential Project and Deloitte before that, is about holding both. Her four books with Harvard Business Review Press and Palgrave map the same argument across different terrain. The Mind of the Leader (2018) sets out the foundation: mindfulness, selflessness, and compassion as practical leadership disciplines. Compassionate Leadership (2022) names the operating problem most senior leaders run into when they try to lead with empathy, namely that empathy alone makes them indecisive, and proposes “wise compassion” as the working alternative. More Human (2025) turns the same lens on AI, arguing that the technology amplifies whichever leadership instinct is already there. The research base is unusual for a leadership speaker. Potential Project’s work draws on interviews with more than a hundred CEOs and 360-degree surveys of leaders and employees across industries. That gives Carter the evidence to make specific claims about what produces trust, candour, and performance in senior teams, rather than the generic motivational frame most leadership keynotes default to. She writes regularly for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company, and Business Insider, and has worked with executive teams at Cisco, Disney, Accenture, IKEA, Kimberly-Clark, and Royal Bank of Canada. The thread running through all of it is a single argument senior buyers will recognise immediately: the human qualities most leaders treat as soft are the ones that actually scale under pressure. Key speaking topics Compassionate leadership and the empathy-versus-results tension Human leadership in the age of AI Leading through change, restructure, and uncertainty Self-leadership and resilience for senior executives Hybrid and virtual team leadership Difficult conversations and leadership candour Mindfulness and attention as leadership disciplines Ideal for CEOs and executive committees rebuilding leadership culture after restructure or rapid growth. CHROs and CLOs designing senior leadership development programmes. Boards and senior teams working out how to deploy AI without losing the workforce. Partner groups and senior leaders in professional services managing client and team pressure simultaneously. Audience outcomes A working definition of “wise compassion” that senior leaders can use the next day in difficult conversations. A clearer view of where their own leadership defaults toward avoidance, false toughness, or performative care. A practical frame for using AI to extend leadership capacity rather than substitute for it. Specific language for the trade-offs between speed, candour, and care that most executive teams struggle to name. A research-backed counter to the assumption that human-centred leadership is incompatible with hard performance.

Why organisations work with Jacques Villeneuve He is one of only two drivers in history, alongside Mario Andretti, to have won the Formula One World Championship, the CART IndyCar title, and the Indianapolis 500, which gives him a claim to performance at the highest level that almost no other speaker can match. His rookie Formula One records from 1996 (pole on debut in Australia, four wins, 11 podiums, 78 points) still stand, offering leadership audiences a concrete example of arriving inside an elite team and performing from day one. He brings an insider’s reading of how Formula One organisations align hundreds of engineers, mechanics, and commercial staff around a weekend deadline, useful for leaders managing complex global operations. A decade of analyst work for Sky Sport Italia and broader F1 broadcasting means he is fluent on camera and comfortable translating elite sport into plain language for corporate audiences. He speaks from direct experience of reinvention across disciplines, from CART to F1 to sportscars at Le Mans to NASCAR at Daytona, which grounds conversations about adapting when the rules of your industry change. Biography highlights 1997 Formula One World Drivers’ Champion with Williams, Canada’s first F1 world champion. 1995 Indianapolis 500 winner and 1995 CART IndyCar Series champion with Team Green. 1996 Formula One debut season with Williams: pole in his first race, four victories, 11 podiums, runner-up in the championship. Second overall at the 2008 24 Hours of Le Mans with the Peugeot 908 HDi FAP alongside Marc Gene and Nicolas Minassian. Competed in the 2022 Daytona 500 with Team Hezeberg, finishing 22nd. F1 analyst for Sky Sport Italia since 2013 and confirmed on the Sky Sports F1 broadcast team for 2026. Biography Very few drivers have ever held the three races that define the sport. Fewer still have held them the way Jacques Villeneuve did, inside three seasons, on two continents, before turning 27. The 1995 Indianapolis 500, the 1995 CART championship, and the 1997 Formula One World Championship sit together on a record that only Mario Andretti also owns. His arrival in Formula One in 1996 is the part that tends to interest leadership audiences. Williams put him in the car, he put it on pole in Melbourne, and he ended the year with four wins, 11 podiums, and a set of rookie records that have not been beaten since. The following season he won the title in a championship-deciding race at Jerez against Michael Schumacher. After Williams, Villeneuve spent five seasons helping build the British American Racing team from a start-up into a Formula One constructor, then went on to contest the 24 Hours of Le Mans for Peugeot, finishing second in 2008, and later qualified for the 2022 Daytona 500 at the age of 50. The common thread is a driver who kept stepping into unfamiliar machinery and making it work. He now speaks, writes, and broadcasts about the sport, including a long-running analyst role with Sky Sport Italia since 2013 and a confirmed seat on the Sky Sports F1 team for 2026. For corporate audiences, he is useful on the same question that sits behind every race weekend: how leaders and teams hold their standard when the conditions keep changing and the margin for error is measured in tenths. Key speaking topics High-performance culture in elite teams Decision-making under pressure Composure and focus in competitive environments Leadership inside Formula One organisations Safety, risk, and calculated aggression Reinvention across disciplines and formats Teamwork in deadline-driven operations Ideal for Executive leadership teams preparing for high-stakes decision cycles Sales kick-offs and commercial leadership conferences focused on competitive edge Client events hosted by brands with motorsport, engineering, or performance heritage Operations and engineering leadership audiences interested in elite-team execution Audience outcomes A first-person account of how world-class drivers and teams prepare for moments where hesitation is the failure mode. A view from inside Formula One on how large technical organisations align around a weekend deadline they cannot move. Language leaders can take back to their own teams about composure, standards, and the difference between aggression and recklessness. A sharper sense of what sustained high performance actually costs, across a career rather than a single season.

Why organisations work with Jacquie Davis Direct operational authority on decisions made under live threat, including hostage rescue work in Pakistan and Iraq, that no academic or consultant voice can claim. Four years as personal protection officer to JK Rowling at the height of Harry Potter publicity, with a wider client list including Nicole Kidman, the Beckhams, and Middle Eastern royalty, which gives her credibility with audiences used to operating in a public eye. A reference point that few keynote speakers can offer: a Netflix feature film, Close (2019), built around her professional life, on which she served as the operational consultant. A perspective on team performance and trust forged inside small units where a wrong call has physical consequences, rather than abstracted from a leadership framework. An unusually credible voice on women operating at the senior end of a male-dominated profession, drawn from her own working life rather than a research project. Biography highlights Author of The Circuit, first published by Penguin and reprinted in 2020, an autobiographical account of her work from Metropolitan Police service to international close protection. Personal bodyguard to JK Rowling for four years during the peak of the Harry Potter phenomenon. The protagonist of the 2019 Netflix film Close, directed by Vicky Jewson and starring Noomi Rapace, is based on her career. Operational record includes hostage rescue work freeing a British woman held in Pakistan, and rescuing men held by Uday Hussein in Iraq. Trained in counter-surveillance, firearms, restraint tactics, bomb search, defensive driving, and hostage survival. Consults for television and film production companies and appears regularly as a security commentator on UK and US broadcast media. Biography Penguin published The Circuit in 1998 and reprinted it in 2020. The memoir is an operational account of close protection work, from a 1970s start in the Metropolitan Police through hostage rescues abroad and protection of named celebrity principals, by one of the few female operators to write the story down. Her career began in the Metropolitan Police in the 1970s and moved into close protection at a point when the field had almost no women in it. Over the following three decades she protected JK Rowling for four years at the peak of Harry Potter publicity, worked principals including Nicole Kidman, Diana Ross, and the Beckhams, and conducted hostage rescue operations in Pakistan and Iraq. The reason a boardroom listens is not the celebrity client list. It is that Davis has had to make consequential decisions, fast, in environments where information was partial and the cost of error was physical. She speaks about how composure is built, how small teams hold together when conditions deteriorate, and what trust actually looks like when it is being tested in real time. In 2019 Netflix released Close, a feature film directed by Vicky Jewson and starring Noomi Rapace, with a protagonist based on Davis’s working life and with Davis herself consulting on the production. The result is a speaker who arrives with operational evidence, a published account of the work, and a cultural artefact that anchors the story for an audience. Key speaking topics Decision-making under extreme pressure Risk assessment and crisis planning Small-team performance in hostile environments Leadership composure and self-management Women in male-dominated professions Personal and organisational security awareness Ideal for Boards and executive committees building crisis decision-making capability Security, risk, and resilience leadership functions Women’s leadership programmes and senior development audiences Conferences with a substantive focus on personal and organisational composure under threat Audience outcomes A working sense of how field operators reach decisions when information is incomplete and consequences are immediate A more practical reference point for what crisis planning and small-team trust look like outside the training-room version A concrete account of how women operate at the senior end of a profession that resisted them, useful for leadership programmes that handle that subject substantively A reset on what risk awareness means in personal and organisational settings, drawn from operational experience rather than checklists

Why organisations work with Jade Simmons A mainstage moment that combines a Steinway, live performance and a structured keynote, rather than a podium talk. Few speakers can carry that format credibly at scale. A classical performance pedigree that holds up under scrutiny: Sphinx Medal of Excellence, performances at the White House and the US Supreme Court, repertoire from Rachmaninoff to contemporary crossover work. Author of an Amazon bestseller, Audacious Prayers for World Changers, and host of American Public Media’s Decomposed, a podcast named to best-of lists by Time, Esquire, BBC America and IndieWire. A track record headlining for Dell, NBCUniversal, Raytheon, Pfizer, Intuit QuickBooks, Nationwide, Hershey’s and Royal Bank of Canada at sales kick-offs, leadership summits and culture events. Biography highlights Recipient of the Sphinx Organization’s Medal of Excellence, with the ceremony hosted at the US Supreme Court by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Concert performances at the White House, Ravinia, Chicago Sinfonietta at Symphony Hall, New York’s Town Hall and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Host of Decomposed on American Public Media, recognised by Time, Esquire, BBC America and IndieWire. Author of Audacious Prayers for World Changers (Amazon bestseller, English and Spanish editions) and Purpose the Remix. CEO and founder of Jade Media Global; ran as an independent candidate for US President in 2020. Northwestern University undergraduate; Master’s as a Provost Fellow at Rice University; first runner-up at Miss America 2000. Biography Corporate audiences sit through more keynotes in a year than most of them care to count. The hardest brief a programme committee inherits is the opening or closing slot at a large convening, where the room needs to lift, not settle. A piano on stage and a performer who can also hold a leadership argument is one of the few formats that reliably moves a thousand people from neutral attention to engagement. Simmons built that format from the classical concert hall. She holds the Sphinx Organization’s Medal of Excellence, awarded in a ceremony at the US Supreme Court hosted by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Her concert resume includes the White House, Ravinia, the Chicago Sinfonietta at Symphony Hall and New York’s Town Hall. She trained at Northwestern and Rice, where she held a Provost Fellowship. The keynote work extends the performance into a structured message about purpose, reinvention and what she calls “Maverick Behavior.” She has headlined for Dell, NBCUniversal, Raytheon, Pfizer, Intuit QuickBooks, Nationwide, Hershey’s and Royal Bank of Canada. Her book Audacious Prayers for World Changers is an Amazon bestseller in English and Spanish, and her American Public Media podcast Decomposed has been named to best-of lists by Time, Esquire, BBC America and IndieWire. She also runs Jade Media Global, the company that produces her live experiences and content. Buyers commission her when the brief is to make a single moment in a long agenda the one people remember. Key speaking topics Purpose and reinvention Leadership and self-leadership Creativity and personal innovation Performance and mainstage entertainment Diversity and inclusion as a culture lever Personal branding and creative identity Resilience and breakthrough Ideal for CEO town halls, sales kick-offs and annual leadership conferences that need a mainstage opener or closer Chief People Officers and culture leads programming purpose, inclusion or engagement events Awards nights, customer summits and recognition events where the room needs to feel something specific Industries booking marquee music-led keynotes (financial services, pharma, tech, professional services) Audience outcomes A shared mainstage moment the room references for the rest of the agenda A direct, personal message on purpose, reinvention and creative courage A live concert performance that sits inside, not alongside, the keynote argument Practical language for leaders to talk about reinvention with their own teams

Why organisations work with Jake Havron He treats influence as a learnable skill with named components (motivators, decision methods, body language, congruence), not a personality trait, which gives sales and leadership teams something they can actually practise. He has trained inside revenue-heavy environments rather than seminar rooms, including real estate organisations reporting $300M to $1.6B in annual sales and the HVAC contractor audience at ACCA 2024. His material is built for entrepreneurial and mastermind audiences, GoBundance, MentorBox, 180 Elevate, where the bar for application is high and theory does not survive the room. The framework targets the gap between effort and persuasion that most sales managers describe but cannot name: why two reps with identical scripts close at different rates. Biography highlights Founder of Dream Life Mastery Company and co-founder of FORDIFY, a personal branding agency whose clients include Life Time Fitness. Keynote speaker at the ACCA 2024 conference, addressing roughly 1,000 HVAC contractors on leading with influence. Trainer for GoBundance, MentorBox, 787 Coffee Co. and 180 Elevate Nonprofit. Has worked with real estate sales organisations reporting between $300M and $1.6B in annual revenue. Co-leads the ITfactor Mentorship Program with speaker Emily Ford. Background as a registered nurse before moving into business strategy and speaking. Biography Most sales and leadership development still treats influence as a soft skill, something either you have or you do not. Havron’s argument is the opposite. Influence has structure. People shift their decisions for identifiable reasons, and a salesperson or leader who cannot name those reasons is guessing in the room. His “4 Pillars of Influence” framework, motivators, decision methods, body language and congruence, is built around that claim. Each pillar names a variable a practitioner can read in a live conversation and adjust. It is a working model for people whose income depends on whether the person across the table moves. The audiences he trains tend to be commercially exposed: real estate teams in the $300M to $1.6B revenue range, mastermind communities like GoBundance, and trade audiences such as the ACCA 2024 contractor conference. He also co-founded FORDIFY, a personal branding agency that has worked with brands including Life Time Fitness, and runs the ITfactor Mentorship Program with Emily Ford. Havron’s path into the work is unusual. He was a registered nurse before building Dream Life Mastery Company and moving full-time into strategy and keynote work. The clinical background shows up in how he teaches: behaviour first, theory second, and a bias toward what a person can actually do differently on Monday morning. Key speaking topics Influence in sales Influence in leadership Self-leadership and personal effectiveness Sales team performance Communication and persuasion Entrepreneurial leadership Ideal for Sales leaders and high-performing sales teams in revenue-driven sectors Entrepreneur and founder communities, mastermind groups, and scale-up leadership audiences Franchise and channel-partner audiences where influence sits at the centre of the commercial model Front-line managers stepping into senior leadership roles for the first time Audience outcomes A named, four-part vocabulary for influence that teams can apply in live sales and leadership conversations. The ability to read motivators and decision methods in a counterpart, not just deliver a script. A separation between influence and pressure tactics, and a working sense of why the second tends to backfire. Specific adjustments leaders can make in body language and congruence when the room is not moving with them.

Why organisations work with Jake Mazulewicz He has run the work, not just studied it. As HPI Lead for a 3,500-person business unit at Dominion Virginia Power, he applied the same frameworks he now teaches to lineworkers, system operators, and executives. His Near Miss Library generated more than 150 voluntary reports inside one utility, the kind of disclosure rate most safety programmes never achieve, and it carries endorsements from both executives and union leadership. His Scan & Focus model and Four Levels of Decision Making are tools field foremen and substation crews actually use, not concepts that work only in a classroom. He speaks the language of pilots, paratroopers, firefighters, and lineworkers because he has worked alongside them. Audiences in technical industries treat him as one of their own, which is rare for a keynote speaker on safety. His book, Seven Practical Steps, gives senior leaders a defensible operating playbook for human reliability that can be cited inside the business after the keynote ends. Biography highlights Ph.D. in Education, University of Virginia Former Human Performance Improvement Lead, Dominion Virginia Power, 3,500+ person business unit Founder and Director, JMA Human Reliability Strategies Author of Seven Practical Steps and the HOP Handbook for Leaders, the latter with 7,000+ hardcopies sold Published in The Sentinel, the magazine of the International Institute of Risk & Safety Management (IIRSM) 250+ client teams across energy, manufacturing, healthcare, and government; named clients include the US Department of Energy, Fermilab, NERC, Chevron, BNSF Railway, and Princeton Plasma Physics Lab Biography The instinct in most safety cultures is to chase zero. Zero incidents, zero errors, zero near misses. The most reliable industries figured out long ago that this target produces the opposite of safety. It produces silence. People stop reporting what they see, the organisation stops learning, and the next failure looks exactly like the last one. Jake Mazulewicz has worked inside that contradiction for his whole career, including a decade in the safety function of a Fortune 500 electric utility. As Human Performance Improvement Lead for a 3,500-person business unit at Dominion Virginia Power, he led the work of analysing more than 300 incidents, ran root cause analyses on transmission-level switching errors, and built a Near Miss Library that drew more than 150 voluntary reports from a workforce that had every reason not to volunteer them. His Ph.D. in Education from the University of Virginia underpins the teaching method, but the credibility is operational. Lineworkers, system operators, and executives all recognised the same person in the room. In 2015 he founded JMA Human Reliability Strategies and has since worked with more than 250 teams across utilities, manufacturing, energy, healthcare, and government. Named clients include the US Department of Energy, Fermilab, NERC, Chevron, BNSF Railway, Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, and Energy Safety Canada. Audiences have logged more than 4,700 reviews across 125 engagements since 2023. Two books codify the method. The HOP Handbook for Leaders has sold over 7,000 hardcopies, and Seven Practical Steps sets out a learning-based posture, psychological safety as a working condition rather than a slogan, and After Action Reviews treated as a craft. His six-step event review approach was published in The Sentinel, the magazine of the International Institute of Risk and Safety Management, in April 2025. What separates him from other safety speakers is biography. He has served as a firefighter, an emergency medical technician, a wilderness search and rescue field team leader, and a military paratrooper. When he tells a technical audience that errors are signals, not character flaws, the room hears it from someone who has had to act on that belief in conditions where being wrong has consequences. Key speaking topics Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) High-reliability team practice in high-hazard industries Psychological safety in technical teams After Action Reviews and event learning Situational awareness and decision-making under pressure Safety culture and human error reduction Just culture and incident investigation Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and operations leaders in utilities, energy, manufacturing, and other high-hazard sectors Heads of HSE, safety directors, and chief safety officers responsible for organisational reliability HR and people leaders responsible for psychological safety and frontline team culture Field operations leadership: plant managers, station managers, fleet leaders, frontline supervisors Audience outcomes A working definition of psychological safety that survives contact with a unionised, technical workforce The Scan & Focus model as a usable situational awareness tool, applied to their own operating context A practical method for running After Action Reviews that produce learning rather than blame The Four Levels of Decision Making framework, mapped from novice to expert in their environment A reframing of error as a system signal, with the operating implications for how leaders respond to incidents

James Averdieck’s Background He built the brand with passion and sold it for £32 million. James is compelling and unique as a keynote speaker, as he delivers the message that at the heart of entrepreneurialism lies the idea, the journey, not the exit strategy, and not the final sale price. The entrepreneur, conveys a strong message about the value of loving your business. Speaking from experience, he shares his innovative ideas about entrepreneurship; simplifying business and using creative agility to make your dreams achievable. He shares the ups and downs of running a business with a raw candour, offering a true insight into the rocky road to success. The combination of James’ credibility and transparency, mean important and real lessons can be learned from his keynote speeches. Charismatic, intelligent and thoughtful, James is an ideal speaker for the business circuit. Born in Yorkshire in 1965, James was educated at Uppingham School before studying Economics at Durham University. Following University, James joined the graduate programme at strategy consultants Arthur D. Little, where he learnt about the key drivers to a successful business, this sparked a fire within him to learn more. James spent 9 years in the Food industry working for Safeway and St Ivel and learnt about Sales and Marketing and running businesses. With St Ivel he moved to Belgium and became a convert to Belgian gastronomy and, as he says, ‘went native on the chocolate front’. It was in Brussels that the seed was sown for his UK chocolate venture. James saw the opportunity of marrying high-quality chocolate patisserie with efficient UK supermarket distribution. Spotting a gap in the market, James saw that consumers wanted artisanal products and there was a backlash forming against mass produced big brands. He wanted to deliver high-quality products using the best raw materials. Gü, the brand, is about chocolate extremism – evoking nostalgic memories and magical smells of baking with chocolate. The brand was embraced with love by the supermarkets, launching first in Sainsburys and Waitrose with the others following apace. James has turned his attentions now to a healthier brand, The Coconut Collective, a non-dairy based brand. As a speaker, James’ knowledge combined with natural story-telling makes him an ideal choice for any audience looking to be inspired. James Averdieck is the man who built and sold Gü! A master entrepreneur who realised his dream, harnessed his strengths and pioneered a leading brand, his bumpy journey means he has invaluable lessons to impart.

Why organisations work with James Benson-King He has tested resilience claims under conditions that almost no corporate audience has access to: a 32,000km solo ride from Alaska to Argentina, ultra-endurance racing, and a Guinness-ratified ascent from sea level to the world’s highest road in 14 days. His corporate finance background, ten years inside JP Morgan’s Investment Banking Operations, means he translates the physical lessons into the language and pressures senior commercial audiences actually recognise. The childhood cardiac story is genuine, not staged inspiration. It connects directly to his work with Cardiac Risk in the Young and gives the resilience material a clinical and personal foundation that other endurance speakers do not have. He talks about decision-making under exhaustion, not motivation. Audiences leave with material on what to do when the conditions for good thinking have already gone. Biography highlights Former Vice President, Investment Banking Operations, JP Morgan Guinness World Record holder: fastest ascent, Khambhat to Umling La Pass by standard bicycle (June 2025, ratified by WUCA) Completed a 32,000km solo cycle from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to Ushuaia, Argentina, raising funds for Cardiac Risk in the Young Lead figure in “Pedal The Impossible”, a planned solo unsupported cycle to the South Pole Brand partner of GOREWEAR and Restrap; published rider features with both Public profile under “The Biking Viking”, with documentary-style video coverage of his ultra-endurance attempts Biography The hardest part of an ultra-endurance ride is rarely the terrain. It is what happens to judgement after weeks of broken sleep, cold, and physical decline. That is the territory James Benson-King has spent the last several years inside, and the territory that gives his speaking material its weight. A childhood heart condition, with two operations before he turned seventeen, set the original frame. It is also the reason his cycling work is tied to Cardiac Risk in the Young, the charity behind his 32,000km Alaska to Argentina ride beginning in 2022. He cycled from Prudhoe Bay to Ushuaia through fifteen countries, including a 900km stretch ridden on one leg. The corporate context is real and recent. He spent close to a decade at JP Morgan, reaching Vice President in Investment Banking Operations. That background shapes how he speaks to senior commercial audiences: he understands quarterly pressure, operational decision-making, and what resilience language sounds like when it is empty. In June 2025 he set a Guinness World Record for the fastest ascent from Khambhat at sea level to Umling La Pass at 5,800m, completing 2,100km and 17,595m of climbing in 14 days, 4 hours, 25 minutes, ratified by the World Ultra Cycling Association. His current project, Pedal The Impossible, is an attempt to become the first person to cycle solo and unsupported to the South Pole. Key speaking topics Resilience under sustained pressure Decision-making in fatigue and uncertainty Mental health for high performers Goal-setting and execution over multi-year horizons Recovery from physical and personal setbacks Performance under extreme conditions Ideal for Sales and trading leadership teams managing prolonged commercial pressure Operations and transformation leaders running multi-year change programmes HR and wellbeing leads building substantive resilience content for senior populations Off-site keynotes for leadership groups requiring lived rather than theoretical resilience material Audience outcomes A direct account of how decisions degrade under exhaustion, and what to protect first Specific, repeatable practices used by ultra-endurance athletes that translate into commercial settings A frank perspective on mental health from someone who built a career on physical risk A reference point that audiences carry into their own difficult periods, anchored in named events rather than abstractions

Why organisations work with James Clear He brings the operating manual behind one of the most-sold business books of the last decade, with 25 million copies in circulation and a shared vocabulary already present inside most client organisations. His Four Laws of Behavior Change (make it obvious, attractive, easy, satisfying) give teams a concrete framework they can apply to execution, sales behaviour, safety, and performance the week after the keynote. He draws on behavioural science, not motivation theatre, which lands with technical and commercial audiences who have seen too many inspirational speakers. His corporate track record includes named engagements with Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, JP Morgan Chase, and Procter & Gamble, so the work has been stress-tested inside complex organisations, not only on conference stages. His weekly 3-2-1 newsletter reaches over 3 million readers, which means audiences tend to arrive already familiar with his ideas and leave with a direct channel to keep applying them. Biography highlights Author of Atomic Habits, #1 New York Times bestseller, 25 million+ copies sold, translated into more than 60 languages. Atomic Habits has spent over 260 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Writer of the 3-2-1 Thursday newsletter, delivered weekly to over 3 million subscribers. Keynote client list includes Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, AT&T, JP Morgan Chase, Procter & Gamble, and Disney. His frameworks have been adopted inside teams across the NFL, NBA, and MLB. BA in biomechanics, Denison University (2008); inducted into the College Sports Communicators Academic All-America Hall of Fame, 2024. Biography Most strategy fails in the gap between decision and behaviour. Leaders leave the offsite aligned, the deck is immaculate, and six months later the teams are doing what they always did. Atomic Habits sold 25 million copies in part because it addressed that gap with a specific, usable mechanism, not another call to motivation. The mechanism is the Four Laws of Behavior Change: make the desired behaviour obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying, and invert each law to break the behaviours you want to lose. It is a simple vocabulary that scales, which is why it now shows up in internal decks at Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, JP Morgan Chase, and Procter & Gamble, and in locker rooms across the NFL, NBA, and MLB. The same language runs through teams that sit three organisational layers apart. Before the book, Clear spent six years writing at JamesClear.com, testing ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience against his own practice as an entrepreneur, writer, and competitive athlete. The 3-2-1 Thursday newsletter that grew out of that work now reaches more than 3 million readers each week. It is one of the largest paid-media-free newsletters in the world, and it keeps the ideas current, not frozen in 2018 when the book launched. For a senior buyer, the value is specific. Clear does not sell a mindset shift. He sells a framework for closing the execution gap that is portable across functions, clearly authored, and already circulating inside the company before he walks on stage. The audience leaves with something they can use on Monday morning and a shared language the leadership team can hold them to on Friday. Key speaking topics Habit formation and behaviour change Continuous improvement and the compounding of small gains Decision-making under uncertainty Behavioural design in teams and organisations Execution and performance systems Identity-based behaviour and culture Ideal for CHROs and heads of L&D building behaviour change into leadership and performance programmes. CEOs and executive teams running a transformation that requires sustained behaviour change below the leadership layer. Sales and commercial leaders looking to embed consistent customer-facing behaviours across distributed teams. Conference audiences of senior managers responsible for turning strategy into daily operational practice. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for diagnosing why a desired behaviour is not happening, using the Four Laws as a diagnostic grid. A specific method for designing environments and cues so that high-value behaviours become the default, not the exception. A concrete view of how small, consistent improvements compound into outsized organisational results over a one-to-three-year horizon. A framework linking identity and behaviour that senior leaders can use when the challenge is cultural, not procedural. A shared reference point, drawn from a widely read book, that leaders can hold teams to after the event.

Why organisations work with James Ketchell His credibility is forensically specific: two verified world firsts – completing what media dubbed the “Ultimate Triathlon” and the first FAI-ratified gyroplane circumnavigation of the globe – give his message about incremental progress a factual foundation that generic resilience content cannot match. The “ten steps at a time” approach he developed on Everest and has applied across five major expeditions gives teams a transferable, named model for breaking complex goals into sustained, manageable action – not a metaphor, but a method he has stress-tested at altitude, at sea, and in the air. His backstory runs in the opposite direction to most adventure speakers: teenage depression, no school qualifications, fired from five jobs, and a motorcycle accident that threatened permanent disability. That starting point makes his message about potential accessible to audiences who do not identify with elite athletic backgrounds. He has spoken at Sandhurst Royal Military Academy, PwC, GSK, eBay, and RBS – organisations that set a high bar for relevance and credibility. His ability to adapt the same core content to military leadership, financial services, and pharma audiences is verified across named client feedback. Biography highlights First and only person to complete the “Ultimate Triathlon”: solo Atlantic row (2010), Everest summit (2011), unsupported 18,000-mile global cycle (2013–14) Guinness World Record holder: first person to circumnavigate the globe in an open-cockpit gyroplane, certified by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (2019) Winner of the Royal Automobile Club’s Segrave Trophy (2020), awarded for outstanding skill, courage and initiative Author of two books: The Ultimate Triathlon (2016, endorsed by Bear Grylls) and It’s All Mental (2021) UK Scouting Ambassador; ambassador for children’s charity Over The Wall Speaking clients include eBay, PwC, GSK, RBS, and Sandhurst Royal Military Academy Biography James Ketchell is the only person to have rowed solo across the Atlantic, summited Everest, and cycled 18,000 miles around the world – a sequence the media named the “Ultimate Triathlon” – and in 2019 became the first person to fly an open-cockpit gyroplane around the globe, a journey of 24,000 nautical miles in 175 days, ratified by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale and recognised by Guinness World Records. The Royal Automobile Club awarded him the Segrave Trophy for the achievement in 2020. None of this was a trajectory anyone predicted. Ketchell left school without qualifications, was fired from five jobs, struggled with depression as a teenager, and in 2008 sustained a motorcycle accident that left him with broken legs, a shattered ankle, and a prognosis of permanent disability. His response to that diagnosis became the architecture of everything that followed: break the goal into the smallest possible steps, prioritise ruthlessly, and keep moving. The principle he articulates most precisely came at 8,000 metres on Everest – the last few hundred metres completed ten steps at a time. That isn’t a metaphor he applies to business; it is a documented method he has used to cross oceans, cycle continents, and fly around the world. His second book, It’s All Mental, makes the case that the obstacles to extraordinary performance are almost never physical. His talks draw on five major expeditions, two mid-ocean rescues, and a recovery from near-permanent disability to give organisations something they rarely get from a speaker: a framework for sustained performance that has been tested at the point of actual failure. The organisations that bring him in – PwC, GSK, eBay, Sandhurst Royal Military Academy, RBS – are not looking for inspiration as an emotion. They are looking for something their teams can use. Ketchell delivers that. Key speaking topics Resilience under extreme pressure Incremental goal-setting and performance Leadership mindset and self-discipline Overcoming adversity and setback Mental toughness and sustained focus Expedition planning and risk management Ideal for Leadership teams and senior executives preparing for significant organisational change or uncertainty CHROs and L&D leads designing resilience and performance programmes Sales, commercial, and operational teams where sustained motivation and goal delivery under pressure is a strategic priority Military, emergency services, and high-stakes professional audiences (Ketchell has a verified track record with Sandhurst) Audience outcomes A named, transferable framework for breaking large or daunting goals into sustained, achievable steps A recalibrated view of setback as structural information rather than failure – drawn from Ketchell’s own documented experience of failed expeditions alongside record-breaking ones Practical language for discussing mental resilience and performance that avoids wellness cliché A reference point for goal prioritisation under resource and time constraints, developed across expeditions where those constraints were life-critical Greater confidence that high performance is method-driven, not talent-dependent