Leadership

Why organisations work with Dan Hunt He has built the performance engine, not just coached inside one. The GB women’s endurance programme he took over in 2005 went from uncompetitive to delivering Olympic medals in under three years. His career is a rare controlled experiment in whether performance infrastructure transfers. He has run it in track cycling, professional road cycling at Team Sky, Premier League academy football, Olympic snow sports, and now GB Surfing. Q Division, the innovation unit he set up at British Ski and Snowboard, is a concrete example of how a small, properly scoped R and D function finds gains a larger organisation would miss. He speaks with specific case material from environments where the scoreboard is public and unforgiving, which is closer to the conditions a senior leadership team actually operates in than most sport-to-business framing allows. Biography highlights Led the turnaround of the Great Britain women’s endurance cycling programme from 2005, contributing to Olympic medals at Beijing 2008. Coached the GB men’s team pursuit to Olympic gold at London 2012. Appointed Sports Director at Team Sky for the 2013 season, during the period of consecutive Tour de France wins. Head of Elite Performance at the Premier League, working on academy performance systems. Performance Director at British Ski and Snowboard across alpine, freestyle, snowboard, cross-country, ski jumping, speed skiing and telemark; founded Q Division, the federation’s innovation unit. Executive Performance Director of GB Surfing from 2023. Biography Most organisations can point to a period of good results. Far fewer can explain why those results held, or why they did not. The distinction matters because the job of a senior leader is rarely to produce a single peak. It is to build the thing that produces peaks repeatedly. That is the problem Hunt has spent his career on. In 2005 he took over a Great Britain women’s endurance cycling programme that was not competitive, and inside three years it was delivering Olympic medals. He then switched to the men’s team pursuit and the group won gold at London 2012. The common thread across both was not a single charismatic intervention. It was an explicit, transferable system for how talent, coaching, data and decision rights fit together. Team Sky appointed him Sports Director for the 2013 season, a period that coincided with consecutive Tour de France wins. He went on to run elite performance at the Premier League, working on academy-stage talent systems, and then joined British Ski and Snowboard as Performance Director. There he built Q Division, a small innovation unit focused on the kind of marginal gains that a federation structure usually cannot produce on its own. In 2023 he took on the Executive Performance Director role at GB Surfing, now building the same architecture in a sport with almost no existing elite infrastructure in Britain. What makes Hunt useful in a boardroom is not a stock set of sport analogies. It is that he has rebuilt performance systems in five very different contexts, and can be specific about what travels, what does not, and why senior teams routinely misread the difference. Key speaking topics High-performance systems design Leadership under competitive pressure Talent pathways and academy development Culture change in medal-winning environments Marginal gains and performance innovation units Coaching teams through succession and reinvention Transfer of elite-sport practice to business leadership Ideal for CEO and board offsites framing a multi-year performance or culture reset CHROs and talent leads rebuilding pathways, academies, or internal development systems Leadership teams under acute competitive pressure where results are public Transformation leads accountable for sustained, not one-off, performance uplift Audience outcomes A sharper distinction between one-off results and a system that produces them repeatedly Specific case material from five elite programmes, not generic sport-to-business analogy A clearer view of how small innovation units earn their keep inside a larger organisation A working mental model for the handover points where high-performance cultures most often break

Why organisations work with Julian Fisher He brings a working practitioner’s account of how influence is actually built, from twenty years inside diplomatic, military and commercial intelligence operations, not a second-hand interpretation of the field. His nine HUMINT skills and six “Spy-Style” archetypes give leadership teams a shared vocabulary for the parts of executive work that usually go unnamed: reading rooms, recruiting allies, eliciting information without interrogating. He has done the corporate translation already, running security intelligence for HSBC and leading Aegis Defence Services’ Africa practice, so the material lands as commercial practice rather than war story. His book with Headline (Hachette UK) and his lead-trainer role on Channel 4’s Spies give him a public reference point that clients and audiences recognise before he walks into the room. Biography highlights Author, Think Like a Spy: Master the Art of Influence and Build Life-Changing Alliances, Headline (Hachette UK), 2024. Lead trainer, Channel 4 series Spies, 2017. Founder, Africa Integrity Services Ltd, a private intelligence boutique covering the African continent. Former Head of Africa, Aegis Defence Services. Former Head of Security Intelligence, HSBC. Former British Diplomatic Service, with operational postings in East and Southern Africa; PPE, Oxford University. Biography Influence is the part of senior leadership that rarely gets taught directly. Boards and executives are expected to win allies, read intentions and extract honest information from people whose interests do not align with theirs, without the structure of a formal hierarchy to fall back on. The intelligence world has spent decades studying exactly this problem, under conditions where getting it wrong has consequences. That is the body of practice Julian Fisher draws on. He served in a specialist branch of the British Diplomatic Service, with postings in East and Southern Africa, before running operations for Aegis Defence Services as its Head of Africa and leading security intelligence for HSBC. He later founded Africa Integrity Services, a boutique that builds human-source intelligence networks across the continent for corporate and government clients. His 2024 book with Headline, Think Like a Spy: Master the Art of Influence and Build Life-Changing Alliances, sets out the nine skills of Human Intelligence in a form designed for civilian use. The argument is that espionage at its core is relationship work: recruiting, persuading, eliciting, holding trust under strain. Fisher worked through the same material publicly as the lead trainer on Channel 4’s Spies in 2017, putting sixteen members of the public through the recruitment and assessment process. For corporate audiences he reframes that practice as a leadership discipline. Reading a room, identifying the right ally before a vote, asking the question that surfaces the real objection, holding composure in a negotiation where the other side has information you do not, these are the moments his frameworks address, and the moments that decide most senior outcomes. Key speaking topics Influence and persuasion in senior leadership Human intelligence (HUMINT) tradecraft for business Alliance-building and stakeholder negotiation Geopolitical and security risk for boards Elicitation, questioning and reading people Africa-focused political and commercial risk Resilience and decision-making under uncertainty Ideal for C-suite leadership teams and boards working on negotiation, influence and stakeholder strategy Sales, business development and partnerships leaders building long-cycle relationships Heads of security, risk and compliance briefing executive teams on geopolitical exposure Senior leadership programmes covering executive presence, persuasion and judgement under pressure Audience outcomes A practitioner’s vocabulary for the parts of leadership that usually go unsaid: recruitment, elicitation, alliance-building. The nine HUMINT skills as a working framework, not as theory, with examples drawn from real operations. The six “Spy-Style” archetypes as a tool for matching influence approach to counterpart. A sharper sense of how to ask questions, listen and hold composure when interests are not aligned. A first-hand read on how intelligence services think about risk, trust and information, applied to the boardroom.

Why organisations work with Ömer Atiker Three decades of running digital agencies, not advising on them. He has founded, scaled, and sold internet ventures since 1996, which gives his keynote content the texture of an operator rather than a commentator. Author of four German-language reference books on digital transformation, including titles with Wiley and Campus, used inside companies as practical handbooks rather than thought-leadership accessories. Works in German, English, and Dutch at conference register, which makes him a credible booking for DACH-headquartered firms with international leadership audiences. Client list spans regulated industrials (BASF, Bayer, Merck, Fresenius), platform technology (Amazon, Google, Adobe), and consumer-facing operators (Singapore Airlines, Mitsubishi), so the examples on stage match the room. Sits at the intersection of digital marketing, AI deployment, and change leadership, which is the precise zone where most enterprise transformation programmes get stuck. Biography highlights Industrial engineer from the University of Karlsruhe (now KIT), with a master’s thesis on human-machine interaction. Founded ArtWork, one of the first internet agencies in the Netherlands, in 1996. Founder and CEO of Click Effect, a Freiburg-based digital marketing and transformation consultancy, since 2006. Author of four books on digital transformation, published by Wiley, Campus, and GABAL between 2017 and 2020. Worked alongside Frithjof Bergmann, the originator of the New Work concept, during a sabbatical period. Keynote clients include BASF, Bayer, Merck, Fresenius, Amazon, Google, Adobe, Singapore Airlines, Mitsubishi, and John Deere. Biography Digital transformation has never been short of strategy. The bottleneck sits further down the operating stack, in the daily handover between leadership intent, technology choices, and the people who have to do the work differently on Monday. Atiker has spent thirty years inside that handover. He studied industrial engineering at the University of Karlsruhe and wrote his master’s thesis on human-machine interaction. In 1996 he founded ArtWork, one of the first internet agencies in the Netherlands, and sold it after the dotcom cycle. In 2006 he founded Click Effect in Freiburg, the digital marketing and transformation consultancy he still runs. Between agencies he took a sabbatical and worked with Frithjof Bergmann, the philosopher who originated the New Work concept. That period sits behind the leadership and culture material in his keynotes, which treats digital change as a problem of human adoption first and technology second. His four books, published by Wiley, Campus, and GABAL between 2017 and 2020, function as practical playbooks for German-speaking enterprises rather than airport thought-leadership. The client list reads as a cross-section of the European industrial and platform economy: BASF, Bayer, Merck, Fresenius, Singapore Airlines, Amazon, Google, Adobe, John Deere, Mitsubishi. He works in German, English, and Dutch, which makes him a natural fit for DACH-headquartered companies running international leadership programmes around AI and digital execution. Key speaking topics Digital transformation execution AI in the enterprise Digital and remote leadership Customer centricity and digital marketing Corporate culture and digital adoption Innovation under operating constraints Personal development in the digital age Ideal for DACH-headquartered enterprises running multi-year digital and AI transformation programmes CDOs, CMOs, and transformation leads responsible for moving from pilot to operational deployment Industrial and life-sciences boards translating digital strategy into customer-facing change Senior leadership offsites where the audience needs an operator’s view, not a consultant’s frame Audience outcomes A practitioner’s reading of where their own transformation programme is most likely to stall Concrete examples of digital and AI deployment from regulated industrials and platform companies A clearer separation between technology decisions and the leadership behaviour those decisions require Language and reference points senior leaders can use with their own organisations after the session

Why organisations work with Catherine Hunt She has sat in the editor’s chair at the BBC’s flagship evening news, deciding what leads, what gets cut, and how a story is framed for millions of viewers. Few communications advisors have made those calls in real time. Her training is editorial, not presentational. She works on what a leader is actually saying and in what order, before any work on delivery, which is where most media coaching starts. She has worked across local press, national newspapers, the Press Association, and BBC television, which means she knows how the same story moves and mutates across formats. She runs CHC Media as a working consultancy, so her advice draws on current client engagements rather than archived BBC experience. Biography highlights Editor of the BBC Six O’Clock News, the corporation’s main early-evening television bulletin. Edited live BBC coverage of major domestic and international news events. Reporter for the Press Association and the Daily Mail before joining the BBC. Began in regional journalism at the Evening Argus in Brighton. Founder of CHC Media, a communications consultancy advising private and public sector clients. Author of the psychological thriller “Someone Out There,” set in Brighton. Biography The work of editing a national news bulletin is the work of deciding what matters in the next thirty minutes. Catherine Hunt did that for the BBC Six O’Clock News, one of the UK’s most-watched television programmes, choosing which stories led, which were cut for time, and how complex events were translated for a general audience. That seat carries an editorial discipline that very few communications professionals have ever held. Hunt came to the BBC after a career in print. She started at the Evening Argus in Brighton, then reported for the Press Association and the Daily Mail before moving into broadcast as a producer. Across those roles, she learned how the same fact reads differently in a wire copy line, a tabloid lead, and a televised top story. That cross-format fluency now sits underneath her advisory work. Through her consultancy CHC Media, Hunt advises private and public sector clients on the same questions she handled in the gallery: what is the story, who is it for, and what is the cleanest way to land it. The practical content is editorial first, presentational second. Leaders work on the structure and ordering of what they want to say before anything is done about how they say it. Her work suits the senior client who has to communicate something difficult and knows that the words will be recorded, clipped, and replayed. She wrote a psychological thriller in 2015, “Someone Out There,” set in Brighton, which she covered as a young reporter, which sits alongside her advisory practice as evidence of a lifetime spent on how stories are built. Key speaking topics Media interviews and high-stakes communication Newsroom decision-making and editorial judgement Message structure and prioritisation for senior leaders Crisis communications and breaking-news coverage Storytelling for public and private sector audiences The journalist’s view of corporate communications Ideal for Executive teams preparing for media interviews, regulator hearings, or analyst calls Communications and public affairs leads building internal media-skills programmes Boards and senior leaders rehearsing crisis statements and town halls Conference organisers needing an experienced moderator or panel chair with a journalist’s instinct Audience outcomes A clearer view of how a national newsroom would treat their story, and what that means for what to say first A sharper sense of which message belongs at the top of a statement, and which sits below the line Practical instincts for handling difficult interviews, hostile questions, and breaking news pressure Confidence in editing their own communications down to what actually matters

Why organisations work with Eddie Obeng He has spent thirty years on a single, consequential argument: that the management playbook built for a slower world now actively harms organisations trying to move at current speed. Boards get a framework, not a pep talk. His project typology (Painting by Numbers, Quest, Film, Foggy Project) gives leadership teams a language for matching management style to the kind of uncertainty a project actually contains, instead of defaulting to one method for every initiative. He built and runs QUBE, one of the earliest avatar-based virtual campuses, used to teach and coach distributed executive teams. He is speaking about distributed leadership from inside a working example, not from theory. The 2011 Sir Monty Finniston Award from the Association for Project Management recognises a lifetime contribution to how organisations deliver complex work, which is the substance underneath his keynotes. He is genuinely provocative in a room. The Financial Times called him “an agent provocateur” for a reason; he is comfortable telling a senior audience that what they are doing will not work. Biography highlights Founder and Executive Director of Pentacle (The Virtual Business School), established 1994. Professor at Henley Business School’s School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation; previously Executive Director at Ashridge Business School. 2011 Sir Monty Finniston Award for lifetime achievement, Association for Project Management. Author of All Change! The Project Leader’s Secret Handbook (Financial Times Pearson), Perfect Projects, Making Re-Engineering Happen and New Rules for the New World. TED Global 2012 speaker, “Smart failure for a fast-changing world”. Creator of QUBE, a virtual learning and collaboration environment covered by The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. Biography The gap between how quickly the world changes and how quickly organisations learn has been widening for three decades. Eddie Obeng has built a career arguing that this gap, more than any single technology or disruption, is the defining problem of modern management. He calls the condition the “New World After Midnight”. Pentacle, the business school he founded in 1994, was an early attempt to answer the problem practically. Its teaching is built around immediate application rather than case-study reflection, and it runs on QUBE, an avatar-based virtual campus Pentacle developed in 2010 that The Wall Street Journal described in its coverage of virtual workplaces and The Economist flagged as a future digital place to work. Running it means he has been leading distributed teams for longer than most of the organisations he advises. The intellectual spine of his work sits in project management, where he is credited with the four-type model (Painting by Numbers, Quest, Film, Foggy Project) that reframes delivery around how much is known at the start rather than how big the budget is. The Association for Project Management gave him its Sir Monty Finniston Award for lifetime achievement in 2011. His books, beginning with All Change! The Project Leader’s Secret Handbook in 1995, translate that model for practising leaders. He also holds a chair at Henley Business School’s School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and has sat on the UK Design Council board. In front of an audience he is sharp and direct; the Financial Times has used the words “leading revolutionary” and “agent provocateur”, which is closer to the experience of being in the room than the usual speaker billing. Key speaking topics Leading organisations in a fast-changing environment Project leadership and delivery under uncertainty Distributed and virtual team leadership Innovation and smart failure Organisational change and transformation The future of work and digital collaboration Ideal for Boards and executive committees confronting a change agenda that their current operating model cannot support Transformation, strategy and innovation leaders responsible for delivery across distributed teams Project and programme leadership communities inside large, complex organisations Partner meetings and leadership offsites where the brief is to unsettle assumptions, not confirm them Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for the types of change a leadership team is actually managing, rather than treating every initiative as the same problem A sharper view of why current planning and governance rituals slow organisations down in fast-moving conditions Permission and structure for “smart failure” as a deliberate mechanism for learning, not a slogan A working sense of what leading a distributed team looks like when it is built from scratch, not retrofitted onto office norms A harder question to take back into the next executive meeting

Why organisations work with Nick Clegg He has sat on both sides of the table that defines tech policy: as the head of global affairs at Meta facing regulators, and as a head-of-government negotiator setting policy for a G7 economy. His 2025 book How to Save the Internet lays out a specific argument about how democracies, Silicon Valley and authoritarian states are pulling the internet apart, and what a workable settlement would look like. Boards get the thesis and the evidence behind it. He can map how Brussels, Washington and Beijing actually behave on AI and platform rules from direct experience of all three, not from secondary commentary. His coalition government experience gives him a working language for decision-making when no single party controls the outcome, which is the practical condition most boards now face on tech policy. Biography highlights Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 2010 to 2015, in Britain’s first post-war coalition government. Leader of the Liberal Democrats, 2007 to 2015; Member of Parliament for Sheffield Hallam, 2005 to 2017. President for Global Affairs at Meta Platforms, 2018 to January 2025, leading the company’s policy and regulatory engagement worldwide. Author of How to Save the Internet (Bodley Head/Penguin, 2025), Politics: Between the Extremes (2016), How to Stop Brexit (2017), and The Responsibilities of Democracy (2019, with Sir John Major). Member of the European Parliament for the East Midlands, 1999 to 2004; earlier career at the European Commission. Knighted in 2018; recipient of the Financial Times David Thomas Prize, 1993. Biography The most consequential rules now shaping AI, data and the global internet are being written by a small number of governments that no longer agree with each other. Nick Clegg has worked at the centre of that argument from both sides. As Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2015, he helped run a coalition government through the eurozone crisis. As President of Global Affairs at Meta from 2018 to early 2025, he led the company’s policy engagement with the US, EU, UK, India and beyond. Few people have moved between those two seats. The combination matters because tech policy is no longer a niche regulatory file. It is a board-level question of capital allocation, market access and operational risk. Clegg’s value to a senior audience is that he understands how the political logic of Brussels, the commercial logic of Silicon Valley and the strategic logic of Washington and Beijing actually collide. His 2025 book How to Save the Internet, published by The Bodley Head, sets out the argument in full. He proposes a “digital democracies alliance” to prevent the global internet fragmenting into incompatible national systems, and he is candid about where Big Tech, including his former employer, has misread the public mood. Earlier books, including Politics: Between the Extremes and The Responsibilities of Democracy with Sir John Major, focus on coalition, compromise and democratic resilience under stress. The throughline is governance under conditions where no one is fully in charge. That is the working environment for any senior leader trying to plan around AI rules, content liability, data flows and the geopolitics of semiconductors. Clegg has been in the room when those decisions were taken, on both sides of the regulator and the platform. Key speaking topics AI policy and regulation across the US, EU and UK The geopolitics of the global internet Big Tech, content moderation and platform governance Coalition government and political decision-making under uncertainty Democratic resilience in the age of social media and AI UK and EU relations after Brexit Trust, public discourse and the future of democratic institutions Ideal for Boards and executive teams of companies materially exposed to AI, data, content or platform regulation General Counsel, Chief Policy Officers and Heads of Government Affairs in multinationals CEO and CTO audiences planning AI deployment under divergent regulatory regimes Senior public sector and policy audiences working on tech, digital and AI strategy Audience outcomes A clearer read of where AI and platform regulation is heading in the EU, US and UK over the next planning cycle A working framework for how Silicon Valley, Washington, Brussels and Beijing each think about the internet, and where their positions are converging or diverging An informed view of the argument in How to Save the Internet, including the case for a digital democracies alliance A grounded sense of how senior decisions get made inside coalition governments and inside large global platforms, from someone who has done both

Why organisations work with Tim Kröger Two Whitbread Round the World podiums (1993/94 second, 1997/98 third) and a Mumm 36 World Championship give him direct, named experience of multi-week competitive performance, not generic adventure narrative. Author of Ich bin wir, das Crew-Konzept (Delius Klasing, 2013), a published thesis on how international crews are built and held together, which he uses as the spine of his corporate sessions. Two America’s Cup challenger campaigns (Le Defi Areva and Shosholoza) give him operating experience inside multinational, multilingual professional teams under heavy sponsor and media scrutiny. Holds a working coaching role with the German Sailing Association on the Olympic Mixed Offshore discipline, so the material is current, not retired-athlete reminiscence. Awarded the Silbernes Lorbeerblatt in 1983 alongside the German Admiral’s Cup team, anchoring credibility at national level rather than only within sailing circles. Biography highlights Whitbread Round the World Race: second place 1993/94 aboard Intrum Justitia, third place 1997/98 aboard Swedish Match. Admiral’s Cup winner with the German team, 1983; recipient of the Silbernes Lorbeerblatt the same year. Mumm 36 World Champion, 1995, aboard Corum. America’s Cup challenger campaigns with Le Defi Areva (France) and Shosholoza (South Africa). Author of Ich bin wir, das Crew-Konzept (Delius Klasing, 2013) and Abgerechnet wird im Ziel (2001). Trainer for the Mixed Offshore Olympic discipline with the German Sailing Association; Race Crew Manager in J Class yacht programmes. Biography The Whitbread Round the World Race runs nine months. A crew sails roughly 32,000 nautical miles, much of it in the Southern Ocean. Tim Kröger has finished it twice on the podium: second on Intrum Justitia in 1993/94 under Lawrie Smith, third on Swedish Match in 1997/98 as watch captain. That is the operating environment his corporate work draws from. In 1993 he became the first German to make professional offshore sailing his primary career. The decade after produced a Mumm 36 world title aboard Corum in 1995 and two America’s Cup challenger campaigns: the French Le Defi Areva syndicate from 2001 to 2003, and the South African Shosholoza programme from 2005 to 2007. Both involved running the operational seam between sailors, shore crew, designers and sponsors. His book Ich bin wir, das Crew-Konzept, published by Delius Klasing in 2013, sets out how a crew is actually built and held together: who decides, how watches hand over, how mistakes are handled while the boat is still moving. The argument carries because the crews he describes are named ones he sailed in, not composite illustrations. He continues to work as a trainer for the German Sailing Association in the Mixed Offshore Olympic discipline and as Race Crew Manager in J Class yacht programmes. The Admiral’s Cup win in 1983 brought him the Silbernes Lorbeerblatt, Germany’s highest sporting honour, awarded by the Federal President. Key speaking topics High-performance team dynamics Leadership under sustained pressure Decision-making in offshore racing Communication across multinational crews Accountability inside small expert teams Resilience and recovery on long campaigns Building and managing elite crews Ideal for Executive teams and ExCos preparing for sustained operational pressure (transformations, integrations, restructures) Leadership offsites where the brief is team behaviour, not strategy content Sales and operations conferences seeking a credible narrative anchor with serious substance behind it After-dinner and incentive audiences in DACH and international corporate settings Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for how elite crews hold decision quality when conditions deteriorate Specific techniques for handover, watch discipline and post-error recovery, drawn from named campaigns A clearer view of what accountability looks like in practice inside small expert teams A reframed sense of what sustained pressure does to communication, and what disciplined crews do about it

Why organisations work with Benedikt Böhm A working CEO, not a retired one. He runs an international outdoor brand and continues to ski 8,000-metre peaks, so the leadership material is current and tested, not memoir. A documented record in the most unforgiving operating environment in sport. Speed ascents of Muztagata, Gasherbrum II and Manaslu without oxygen are public, verifiable proof points for the arguments he makes about preparation, role clarity and team recovery. A peer-reviewed intellectual platform. His Routledge book with ESSEC professor Stefan Gröschl frames the work as leadership scholarship, which gives the content credibility with HR, executive development and L&D buyers who screen out motivational content. A live test case for sustainability as commercial strategy. The DYNAFIT lifetime guarantee and the Helping Band WWF partnership are operating decisions, not communications. Survivor and rescuer in the 2012 Manaslu avalanche. The account of decision-making in and after that event is one of the few first-hand executive narratives of catastrophic shock and sustained recovery. Biography highlights International Managing Director of DYNAFIT, the ski-touring brand he led from insolvency in 2003 to global category leadership. Co-author with Professor Stefan Gröschl of ESSEC Business School of “From the Death Zone to the Boardroom” (Routledge, 2019). Speed records on Muztagata (7,546m, 2005) and Gasherbrum II (8,035m, 2006) with Sebastian Haag; speed ascent and ski descent of Manaslu (8,163m, 2012) without supplemental oxygen. WWF Foundation ambassador for the Himalaya region and snow leopards. Founder of Helping Band, a wristband initiative committing approximately 60,000 euros per year to WWF. Former member of the German national ski mountaineering team. Biography DYNAFIT was effectively insolvent when Benedikt Böhm joined its marketing team in 2003. Two decades later the brand is the international category leader in ski touring, with a lifetime product guarantee and an institutional partnership with WWF that he built personally. The arc is unusual because it has been run in parallel with an active expedition career at 8,000 metres. That second career is the source of his leadership material. Speed ascents of Muztagata, Gasherbrum II and Manaslu without supplemental oxygen require a precision of role allocation, recovery management and judgement under hypoxia that ordinary corporate planning does not test for. Böhm has spent twenty years moving between the two settings, and the comparison is what makes the work substantive. His 2019 book with ESSEC professor Stefan Gröschl, “From the Death Zone to the Boardroom,” published by Routledge, is the formal statement of that work. The book sits deliberately outside the usual business-and-management canon, drawing on research into fear, pain, suffering and failure to argue that conventional models of executive resilience are too clean to describe how senior leaders actually behave under sustained pressure. The 2012 Manaslu avalanche, which killed eleven climbers and which Böhm and his climbing partner survived and helped rescue from, anchors much of the recovery and decision-making content. It is the rare case where the speaker has lived the catastrophic-shock material he discusses, and continued, after a deliberate pause, to operate at the same altitude and at the head of the same company. Key speaking topics Leadership and decision-making under extreme uncertainty Resilience and recovery after operational shock Team performance in high-stakes environments Risk management and the discipline of preparation Sustainability as commercial strategy Change leadership and organisational reinvention Personal performance and self-leadership at executive level Ideal for Executive committees and boards rebuilding after restructure, crisis or sustained pressure CHROs and heads of executive development designing leadership programmes with substance under the keynote CEOs and senior commercial leaders wrestling with sustainability as an operating decision rather than a communications line Senior teams preparing for major change, market entry or expedition-style strategic bets Audience outcomes A language for separating preparation, role discipline and recovery as three distinct leadership capabilities rather than one blurred idea of “resilience” A clearer view of how senior teams should behave in the first hours and days after a serious operational shock A working example of a CEO who has run sustainability as a product decision, not as a marketing position A grounded counterweight to motivational adventure content, with named expeditions, named outcomes and a named peer-reviewed text behind the argument

Why organisations work with Mike Brown Twenty years at the top of a brutally competitive professional sport, with 382 appearances for Harlequins and 72 England caps, gives leaders a credible voice on what it takes to keep performing through injury, deselection, and reinvention. Named 2014 Six Nations Player of the Championship, the only England player ever to win the award, alongside 2014 Premiership Player of the Season, evidence of standards held at the very top, not a single peak season. Lived experience of the back end of a career: leaving Harlequins after sixteen years, two seasons at Newcastle, finishing at Leicester, and retiring with the fourth most Premiership appearances of all time. Useful for audiences thinking about late-career identity, transition, and what high standards look like once the spotlight moves. Speaks from within elite team cultures under Eddie Jones, Stuart Lancaster, and Conor O’Shea, not as an outside observer. Biography highlights 72 England caps, 2007 to 2018, three Six Nations titles 382 appearances for Harlequins over sixteen seasons, two Premiership titles, one European Challenge Cup 2014 RBS Six Nations Player of the Championship and 2014 Premiership Rugby Player of the Season Retired at the end of the 2024 to 2025 season, the fourth most Premiership appearances in the league’s history Recurring co-host on RugbyPass Offload, one of the most-listened rugby podcasts Appointed Sporting Director at Esher RFC in December 2025 Biography Few players in the modern professional era have stayed at the top for as long as Mike Brown. Sixteen seasons at Harlequins, 72 caps for England, three Six Nations titles, and a career that ended with the fourth most appearances in the history of Premiership Rugby. The longevity matters because rugby does not allow it by accident. The 2014 Six Nations was the season that defined him. He was named Player of the Championship, the only Englishman ever to win the award, and Premiership Player of the Season in the same year. The recognition came after a decade of work that started with a debut in a record defeat to South Africa and ran through deselection, injury, and the public end of his Harlequins career in 2021. What Brown brings to a corporate audience is not the highlight reel, it is the sustained standard. He played under Eddie Jones, Stuart Lancaster and Conor O’Shea, and has been candid in interviews on RugbyPass Offload about the cost of holding his own performance to that standard for so long. Leaders responsible for tired teams recognise the territory. Since retirement he has moved into rugby media as a regular voice on RugbyPass Offload and into a Sporting Director role at Esher RFC. The second act sharpens the keynote material. He is now talking about high performance from both sides of the line, as the player who lived it and the executive who has to build it again from the ground up. Key speaking topics Sustained high performance Resilience and recovery from setback Team standards and accountability Elite team culture Career transition and reinvention Mental discipline under public pressure Ideal for Senior leadership teams and boards working through sustained pressure or restructure Sales and commercial teams under repeated quarterly performance demands HR and L&D programmes on resilience, standards, and high-performance culture Sports, broadcast, and member-organisation audiences Audience outcomes A clear-eyed account of what it takes to hold elite standards across a twenty-year career, not a single season Lived perspective on managing setback, public scrutiny, and deselection without losing competitive edge A working view of how elite team cultures actually function under high-profile coaches Reference points senior leaders can use when their own teams are fatigued by repeated change

Why organisations work with Andy Goode A name and voice that audiences already know from broadcast rugby coverage, which shortens the trust-building gap between the speaker and the room on the night. Premiership Rugby Hall of Fame status and a five-title Leicester Tigers career give the credibility a rugby audience tests for in the first two minutes of any after-dinner slot. Co-hosts The Rugby Pod with Jim Hamilton and Dan Biggar, so he brings live, current insight into the modern professional game, not nostalgia from a finished career. Comfortable across formats: keynote, after-dinner, awards host, panel moderator, Q&A with current players, which suits sponsors and hospitality programmes that need one person across a full event. When the brief calls for it, he speaks substantively on team performance, recovery from setback and reinvention after sport, drawing on a career that included two retirements, multiple club moves and a post-playing media reinvention. Biography highlights Five English Premiership titles with Leicester Tigers (1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2007). Two Heineken Cup winners’ medals (2001, 2002). 17 England caps between 2005 and 2009, debut against Italy in the Six Nations. 423 senior club appearances and 3,934 points across Leicester Tigers, Saracens, CA Brive, the Sharks, Worcester Warriors, Wasps and Newcastle Falcons. Second-highest points scorer in Premiership Rugby history and former record holder. Inducted into the Premiership Rugby Hall of Fame, June 2021. Co-host of The Rugby Pod with Jim Hamilton and Dan Biggar; rugby pundit and analyst for major UK broadcasters including BT Sport and TalkSport. Biography Few fly-halves have stood in front of a Premiership pack across as many seasons as Andy Goode. He arrived at Leicester Tigers from school in 1998 and was inside the squad through the club’s record run of four straight Premiership titles, then returned for a second spell that produced a fifth title in 2007 and made him the all-time leading points scorer in the league, a record he held until Charlie Hodgson overtook him. The career that followed is what gives the after-dinner material its range. Saracens, then Brive in the French Top 14, a short spell with the Sharks in Super Rugby, then Worcester Warriors, Wasps and Newcastle Falcons. Across 423 senior games he scored 3,934 points and earned 17 England caps between 2005 and 2009. He was inducted into the Premiership Rugby Hall of Fame in 2021. The second career has been built on the same instincts that ran a back line for nearly two decades. Goode reads the game on air the way he ran it on the pitch, which is why The Rugby Pod, co-hosted with Jim Hamilton and Dan Biggar, has become the most-listened-to rugby podcast in the world. He works as a pundit and analyst across major UK broadcasters and is a familiar voice to anyone following the modern professional game. For corporate audiences he is most often booked as a host, after-dinner speaker or awards MC for events where rugby is the hospitality currency. The substance, when the brief asks for it, is the same substance the playing career rested on: a team’s habits under pressure, the discipline of recovery from setback, and what an elite career looks like when the playing chapter ends. Key speaking topics Professional rugby and the modern game Team performance under pressure Career reinvention after elite sport After-dinner speaking and event hosting Awards and ceremony hosting Panel moderation and player Q&A Ideal for Corporate hospitality programmes built around rugby (Six Nations, Premiership Rugby, Rugby World Cup) Sponsor activations and client dinners during the rugby calendar Industry award ceremonies and gala dinners requiring a recognisable sports host Sports clubs, rugby unions and member organisations running fundraising events Audience outcomes A room that warms up quickly because the host already has the audience’s recognition A credible voice on the current state of the professional game, not generic sports anecdotes A storyteller who can hold the centre of a long-format dinner without slipping into stand-up For motivational briefs: a first-person account of resilience, repeated reinvention and elite-sport team culture

Why organisations work with Alex Payne A working operator’s read on the brand-influencer market through The Room, the marketplace business he co-founded in 2017, rather than commentary from outside the category. Ten-plus years presenting live for Sky Sports built the practical communication discipline he teaches to senior leaders: clarity under time pressure, listening on camera, holding a room. A safe pair of hands for high-stakes hosting at scale, with named credits including HSBC, Heineken, the World Rugby Awards and the NSPCC. One of British rugby’s most recognisable broadcast voices, useful for organisations whose audiences sit in or adjacent to that world. Biography highlights Led Sky Sports’ rugby union coverage for more than ten years and hosted the channel’s Rugby Club studio show. Presenter across Sky Sports News and Sky News, with additional credits in tennis and poker coverage. Co-founder of The Room, a marketplace tech business connecting brands and influencers, launched in 2017. Co-host of The Good, The Bad and The Rugby with James Haskell and Mike Tindall, a UK number-one Apple podcast with a 2024 book and live tour. Hosting credits for HSBC, Heineken, Help for Heroes, NSPCC, the World Rugby Awards and the RPA Awards. Biography The brand-influencer market still clears through relationships and gut feel more than through any agreed operating model. That is the gap Alex Payne walked into when he co-founded The Room in 2017, a marketplace tech business built to connect brands and influencers on terms both sides could measure. Before that, and still alongside it, he spent more than a decade as the lead presenter of Sky Sports’ rugby union coverage. He fronted the channel’s Rugby Club studio show and presented across Sky Sports News and Sky News, including tennis and poker assignments. The studio years gave him a working communication discipline that he now teaches to senior leaders. He co-hosts The Good, The Bad and The Rugby with James Haskell and Mike Tindall. The show debuted at number one on Apple Podcasts in the UK and has expanded into live arena tours and a 2024 book. His event-hosting roster includes HSBC, Heineken, Help for Heroes, NSPCC, the World Rugby Awards and the RPA Awards. Payne is most useful to organisations as a host who knows how influence works on the inside. He has built a business in the category, sat behind a camera through ten years of live broadcast, and run rooms for some of the largest sponsoring brands in British sport. Key speaking topics Brand and influencer marketplaces Communication under pressure Media training for senior leaders Sport, sponsorship and audience Live event hosting and moderation Ideal for Marketing and brand leaders rethinking influencer spend Sponsorship and partnership teams in sport, lifestyle and consumer brands Senior leaders preparing for media-facing moments Awards ceremonies, conferences and client events needing a credible host Audience outcomes A clearer view of how the brand-influencer market actually clears, from someone running a marketplace inside it. Practical adjustments to how senior leaders show up on camera and on stage. A working sense of what makes communication land in high-pressure live settings. For hosted events, a steady tempo and named credibility with sport-adjacent audiences.

Why organisations work with Tim Henman The pressure he performed under was not generic high-stakes pressure. It was sustained, nationally televised, and deeply personal, with British tennis’s entire public narrative resting on each Wimbledon fortnight for nearly a decade. That specific form of high-visibility, high-expectation performance is directly legible to leaders who carry organisational reputation on their results. His record demonstrates competitive consistency rather than isolated peaks: six Grand Slam semi-finals across all four major surfaces, across two distinct periods of competitive form, while sustaining a top-10 ATP ranking across multiple seasons. The argument he makes about sustained performance is grounded in measurable, verifiable results. As an AELTC board member, he speaks from a position few sports speakers occupy; not only as a former competitor, but as an active participant in the governance of one of the world’s most scrutinised sporting institutions, with direct experience of its most consequential decisions. His 2020 captaincy of Great Britain at the inaugural ATP Cup provides specific, recent experience of leading a team of elite, independent individuals in a compressed, high-pressure competition: a format with obvious organisational parallels for senior leaders managing high-performing, high-ego teams. Two decades immersed in Wimbledon – as competitor, board member, and BBC commentator – means he speaks from the inside of a complex sporting and commercial operation across all its dimensions, not from match-day memory alone. Biography highlights Former ATP world No. 4 in men’s singles; British No. 1 continuously from 1999 to 2005 Six Grand Slam semi-finals: four at Wimbledon (1998, 1999, 2001, 2002), plus the French Open and US Open (both 2004) 11 ATP singles titles, including the 2003 Paris Masters (ATP Masters 1000); 4 ATP doubles titles (15 combined) Olympic silver medallist, men’s doubles, 1996 Atlanta Games (with Neil Broad) OBE, 2004 New Year Honours, for services to tennis Board member, All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC), the governing body of Wimbledon BBC Wimbledon commentator and analyst since 2008 Great Britain captain, inaugural ATP Cup, Sydney, 2020 Founder, Tim Henman Foundation (education and health support for disadvantaged young people) Biography For a decade, every British summer began with the same question: would this be Tim Henman’s year? The weight of expectation he carried – sustained, public, and deeply personal – shaped him as a competitor in ways that resonate directly with leaders. As Britain’s world No. 4 and British No. 1 from 1999 to 2005, he performed year after year under conditions few professional athletes encounter and fewer corporate high-performers can imagine. His record spans six Grand Slam semi-finals across all four major surfaces: four at Wimbledon, and semi-final runs at both the French Open and US Open in 2004, the latter confirming a second competitive peak well into his career. His 2003 Paris Masters title, won with consecutive victories over three top-ten players, remains one of British tennis’s landmark single-tournament performances. That consistency, sustained across two distinct periods and multiple surfaces, is the foundation of what he brings to the platform. Since retiring in 2007, Henman has not stepped back from elite sport. He joined the board of the All England Lawn Tennis Club, contributing to institutional decisions, including the management of the 2020 cancellation and the transition to AI-assisted line-calling, from inside Wimbledon’s governance. He captained Great Britain at the inaugural ATP Cup in Sydney in 2020, leading a squad that included Andy Murray. He has been a BBC Wimbledon commentator since 2008, translating elite performance for broad audiences across more than fifteen competitive cycles. The Tim Henman Foundation, which he founded to support disadvantaged young people through education and health, reflects a commitment that stretches well beyond the results sheet. Key speaking topics Performing under pressure Competitive resilience and mental discipline Sustained high performance National representation and public expectation Team dynamics in high-stakes competition Athletic-to-leadership transition Preparation, focus, and decision-making under scrutiny Ideal for Senior leadership and executive conferences where competitive mindset, performance culture, and resilience under pressure are central themes Sales and commercial leadership events where the parallels between elite sport and high-stakes commercial performance are directly applicable Sports industry forums, Wimbledon-adjacent hospitality, and British-market events where his cultural profile adds immediate resonance HR and people leadership audiences exploring what sustained high performance looks like in practice, and how organisations can build environments that produce it Audience outcomes A first-person, evidence-grounded perspective on how elite performers maintain output under sustained, high-visibility pressure – not as a set of techniques, but as a practised, testable discipline Understanding of how competitive consistency is built over time: through preparation, surface adaptation, and the ability to perform across conditions rather than only in ideal circumstances Insight into the specific mental challenges of carrying high expectation: when it fuels performance, and when it becomes a liability Practical reflection on what the shift from individual competitor to team leader requires, drawing on experience as both a Davis Cup player and ATP Cup captain A perspective on elite sport that extends beyond the athlete’s experience into institutional governance, offering audiences a more complete picture of what world-class performance systems actually look like from the inside