Leadership speakers

Why organisations work with Jef Staes He gives leaders a working language for the conflict at the heart of innovation: the Red Monkey model treats the awkward, radical idea as the asset, and the cultural reflex to suppress it as the real problem to solve. His 2D to 3D framework names the specific shift companies are stuck in, from organisations built on standardised competence to ones that run on passion and continuous learning. He has lived both sides of the argument. Two decades inside Siemens and GTE ATEA as software designer, training manager and Corporate Learning Officer, then twenty more building the Red Monkey Company around what he learned was missing. His work is grounded in the academic mainstream of Belgian management education, with visiting lectureships at Vlerick, UAMS and EHSAL, but his delivery is built for general audiences, including four TEDx stages. He addresses culture and innovation as one problem, not two. Most speakers pick a side; Staes argues you cannot fix one without rewiring the other. Biography highlights Author of the Red Monkey trilogy: “I was a sheep”, “My manager is a hero”, and “My organisation is a jungle”. Founder of Red Monkey Company, where he develops the Red Monkey Story and the Engine of Innovation Mindset with client organisations. Former Corporate Learning Officer at Siemens Belgium; earlier career as software designer at GTE ATEA in Belgium and the USA. Visiting lecturer at Vlerick Business School, the University of Antwerp Management School (UAMS), and EHSAL. TEDx speaker on multiple occasions, including TEDxUtrecht with “Behave, brake for red monkeys”. Recurring keynote at OEB Global (Online Educa Berlin), including the Spotlight Stage session “Red Monkey Disruption”. Biography Most organisations are not built to change. They are built to standardise, to repeat, to filter out the awkward. That is the tension Jef Staes has spent four decades inside, first as a software designer at GTE ATEA, then as a training manager and Corporate Learning Officer at Siemens Belgium, and now as the founder of Red Monkey Company. His central argument is that innovation does not fail because organisations lack ideas. It fails because the cultural reflex of any mature company is to reject the radical idea and the person who carries it. The Red Monkey is his name for both. The work, then, is not to generate more ideas, but to redesign the conditions under which a Red Monkey can survive long enough to be tested. Around that core sit two sharper frames. The 2D to 3D shift describes how companies move from running on standardised competence to running on passion-fed expertise. The Power Defect names the structural mismatch between formal authority and actual capability in an information-rich economy. Together they give leaders a vocabulary for problems they usually only feel. Staes writes in metaphor on purpose. The trilogy (“I was a sheep”, “My manager is a hero”, “My organisation is a jungle”) is built for the operator, not the academic, and his TEDx and OEB Global stages reach the same audience. The argument lands because it is unsentimental about how organisations really behave when something new walks in. Key speaking topics Innovation culture and the management of disruptive ideas The 2D to 3D organisational shift The Red Monkey conflict model Learning organisations in the information age Leadership in environments resistant to change Talent, passion and the limits of standardised competence Ideal for Boards and executive teams whose innovation programmes consistently stall after launch CHROs and Chief Learning Officers redesigning learning and talent systems for a knowledge economy Transformation leads and innovation directors trying to protect radical ideas inside conservative cultures Leadership conferences in technology, manufacturing, financial services and the public sector Audience outcomes A working model for why their best ideas keep dying inside their own organisation Language to describe the conflict between standardised competence and passion-driven expertise A clear position on what 3D leadership demands of managers, and where most stop short Recognition of the Power Defect inside their own structure and where it is costing them speed A reframing of resistance to change as an organisational design problem, not a people problem

Why organisations work with Jeff de Kleijn Two decades inside HP and Canon across Asia Pacific and Europe, including running HP’s Large Format Printing business for APJ, gives him operating credibility with senior leaders who have lived through global restructures. Works fluently across Western systems thinking and Chinese strategic philosophy, useful for European and US executive teams navigating Asia exposure without simplifying it. Frames leadership as an operating system question, where decision rights, rhythm and supervisory clarity are the variables, not personality or style. Brings a working executive’s vantage point through his current role leading Dilaco, so the room hears a peer, not a retired commentator. Biography highlights Former General Manager, Large Format Printing Division, HP Asia Pacific and Japan. Senior executive roles at Canon across Europe and Asia. Chief Executive of Dilaco Group since 2019. Founder of Cortlandt Gulch, his leadership advisory and writing platform. Forthcoming book, Postmodern Leadership: Navigating Crises and Complexity in the Information Era. Trained in theatre and improvisation at the Bruges Conservatory of Music & Arts; works in English, Dutch and Chinese. Biography Most large organisations are still wired to push decisions up and instructions down. That structure is breaking against the speed and interdependence of the systems leaders now operate in. Jeff de Kleijn’s work begins from that mismatch, and from the specific question of how senior teams behave once they accept it. His authority on the subject is operational, not theoretical. He spent two decades in senior roles at HP and Canon, including running HP’s Large Format Printing business across Asia Pacific and Japan, before taking over Dilaco, a Belgian IT services group, in 2019. The throughline is leading commercial organisations through restructure, geographic complexity and technology shifts while the formal authority structure was always slightly behind events. He writes and advises through Cortlandt Gulch, and is finishing a book, Postmodern Leadership: Navigating Crises and Complexity in the Information Era, that sets out his core argument. Power inside large organisations has already moved from position to network connectivity. The leaders who are getting traction are the ones rebuilding their operating rhythm, supervisory cadence and decision rights around that fact, rather than working harder inside the old chart. What he brings to a room is the combination of a sitting executive’s vocabulary, exposure to both European and Asian operating cultures, and a stage discipline shaped by training in theatre at the Bruges Conservatory. Senior audiences leave with a sharper view of where their own authority architecture is misfiring, and a vocabulary for fixing it. Key speaking topics Networked and decentralised leadership Decision rights and supervisory clarity in complex organisations Leadership operating models under systemic uncertainty AI as an institutional, not technological, force Eastern and Western strategic thought in executive practice Restructuring and post-transformation leadership Ideal for Boards and executive committees redesigning how authority and decision rights operate post-restructure CEOs and group MDs of multi-region businesses with significant Asia exposure Private equity portfolio leadership teams under pressure to operate with fewer layers Transformation and strategy leads working on the leadership operating model, not just structure Audience outcomes A clearer read on where their current authority structure is the bottleneck, not the workload Specific language for separating control, coordination and supervision as distinct leadership tasks A working frame for combining Western strategic analysis with Chinese strategic thinking in real decisions A more honest internal conversation about what their organisation actually needs from its top team

Why organisations work with Jeff DeGraff He brings a tested intellectual frame, the Competing Values Framework, that gives executives a shared language for the trade-offs they already feel but cannot resolve. His Innovatrium has built innovation programmes inside more than half the Fortune 500, including Google, Apple, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, NASA and Microsoft, so the methods are stress-tested in real operating conditions. The work crosses sectors that rarely share a stage: commercial, military (US Air Force, NATO, Singapore Armed Forces), academic and mission-driven, which sharpens his diagnosis of what is structural and what is industry-specific. He treats innovation as a system of competing roles (Artist, Engineer, Athlete, Sage), so leaders leave with a way to staff and sequence change, not a motivational pep talk. The Ross School base and the Certified Professional Innovator programme give buyers a credible academic anchor when they need to sell the engagement internally. Biography highlights Clinical Professor of Management and Organizations, University of Michigan Ross School of Business, since 1990. Co-creator of the Competing Values Framework, with Robert Quinn, Kim Cameron and John Rohrbaugh. Founder of the Innovatrium Institute for Innovation, working with Fortune 500 firms, NASA and allied military commands. Author of The Art of Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2025), The Creative Mindset, The Innovation Code, Leading Innovation and Competing Values Leadership. Host of the PBS programme Innovation You and contributor to Michigan Public’s The Next Idea. Former Vice President of Communications and New Ventures at Domino’s Pizza during the period the company scaled from a regional chain to a global brand. Biography Innovation inside large organisations rarely fails for lack of ideas. It fails because the same organisation rewards efficiency, control and reliability while asking a small group to break those very rules. That tension is the subject Jeff DeGraff has spent his career mapping, first as a co-creator of the Competing Values Framework alongside Robert Quinn, Kim Cameron and John Rohrbaugh, and then as the architect of a more applied body of work on innovation as a system. The academic anchor is the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, where he has been Clinical Professor of Management and Organizations since 1990. The applied side is the Innovatrium, the institute he founded to put the theory into contact with operating reality. Through Innovatrium and direct consulting, his methods have been used inside more than half the Fortune 500, including Google, Apple, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, Microsoft and NASA, and inside the US Air Force, NATO and the Singapore Armed Forces. His three most recent books, The Innovation Code (2017), The Creative Mindset (2020) and The Art of Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2025), form a single argument. Innovation is not a personality trait, it is a discipline of holding competing values long enough to produce something new. The Innovation Code translates that into roles and team design. The Creative Mindset breaks creative work into six trainable skills. The Art of Change reframes paradox itself as the engine of transformation. The career arc explains the bias toward application. He earned his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985 and went directly into industry as Vice President of Communications and New Ventures at Domino’s Pizza, where the nickname “Dean of Innovation” stuck. The work since has kept the same shape: a serious framework, tested against organisations that cannot afford abstractions. Key speaking topics Innovation strategy and operating models Competing Values Framework in practice Creative leadership and team design Organisational change and transformation Culture and capability for sustained innovation Cross-sector innovation: commercial, public, military Paradox and decision-making under competing priorities Ideal for CEOs and executive teams under pressure to deliver core performance and a credible innovation agenda at the same time Chief Innovation Officers, CSOs and heads of strategy designing or rebuilding innovation operating models CHROs and learning leaders building creative capability across senior cohorts Public-sector, defence and mission-driven leadership groups that need a private-sector grade innovation method Audience outcomes A shared language for the competing demands inside the business and a way to talk about them without picking sides A working model for staffing innovation teams across distinct creative roles rather than relying on a few “creative” individuals A practical sequence for turning paradoxes (efficiency versus experimentation, control versus autonomy) into design decisions Confidence that innovation can be built as a repeatable system, not a personality-driven exception Examples drawn from companies, NASA and military commands that translate cleanly back to the audience’s own context

Why organisations work with Jeff Grout Operator-grade leadership content. He ran Robert Half UK as Managing Director through a period in which the business grew from 12 staff to over 360, which gives his account of leadership and recruitment a grounding that most speakers on the same topic cannot offer. Inside access to an elite sporting campaign. As business manager to Sir Clive Woodward from 2002 to 2006, he saw England’s 2003 Rugby World Cup preparation and performance culture from the inside, which translates into specific examples rather than generic sporting analogies. One of the senior interviewers on the UK circuit. His public interview work includes Lord Sugar, Sir Richard Branson, Sir Dave Brailsford, Charles Handy, Sir Terence Conran, Sir Steve Redgrave, Dame Stella Rimington and Greg Dyke, and he is regularly booked as conference chair where a board-level audience needs a senior host. Eight books on leadership, performance and recruitment, including What Do Leaders Really Do? (Capstone, 2007) and The Adventure Capitalists. The work is published, not just performed on the stage. A repeat client list that includes Amazon, BT, British Airways, HSBC, Barclays, LinkedIn, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Harrods and UK Sport. Biography highlights Former UK Managing Director of Robert Half International, the world’s largest specialist recruitment consultancy. Built the UK business from two offices and 12 staff to £65 million turnover, 19 offices and over 360 staff during a 21-year tenure. Business Manager to Sir Clive Woodward from 2002 to 2006, spanning England’s 2003 Rugby World Cup victory and the 2005 British & Irish Lions tour. Graduate of the London School of Economics. Co-author of eight business books, including What Do Leaders Really Do? (Capstone, 2007), The Adventure Capitalists (Kogan Page), Mind Games, Recruiting Excellence and What You Need to Know About Leadership. Public interviewer of senior figures including Lord Sugar, Sir Richard Branson, Charles Handy, Sir Dave Brailsford, Sir Terence Conran, Sir Steve Redgrave, Dame Stella Rimington, Sir Stuart Rose and Greg Dyke. Collaborated with the BBC to produce an interview training video, and has delivered leadership and executive skills workshops for clients including BT, HSBC, British Airways, Virgin, Harrods, Amazon, LinkedIn, Deloitte and Ernst & Young. Biography Plenty has been written about what makes a good leader. Much less has been written about what leaders do on the day a quarter misses, or on the morning after a senior resignation. The working reality of leadership is where most senior teams need help, and where generic advice tends to fail. That working reality is the ground Jeff Grout has operated on for most of his career. He spent 21 years inside Robert Half International, the world’s largest specialist recruitment consultancy, eventually running its UK business as Managing Director until 2000. Under his leadership, the operation grew from two offices and 12 staff to a £65 million business with 19 offices and more than 360 staff. That is the grounding behind his current work with senior teams on leadership, recruitment and high-performance culture. From 2002 to 2006, he was business manager to Sir Clive Woodward, through the years surrounding England’s 2003 Rugby World Cup victory and the 2005 British & Irish Lions tour. That sustained access to an elite sporting campaign at its peak gives his work on high-performance culture a different weight. He saw the detail of how a winning environment is built and defended, up close and over time, not as a single anecdote deployed for colour. For senior buyers, he is typically booked either as a keynote speaker on leadership and high performance, or as the conference chair and interviewer who can hold a board-level room. His written work spans eight books, including What Do Leaders Really Do? and The Adventure Capitalists. His interview subjects have included Lord Sugar, Sir Richard Branson, Charles Handy, Sir Dave Brailsford, Sir Terence Conran, Dame Stella Rimington and Greg Dyke. Key speaking topics Leadership in practice Building high-performance teams Peak performance lessons from elite sport Leading change Recruitment, retention and talent strategy Executive interviewing and conference chairing The characteristics of success Ideal for Senior leadership teams who want a practical, operator-grounded account of leadership rather than an academic framework CHROs, talent directors and senior HR leaders focused on recruitment, retention and high-performance team design Conference organisers who need a senior chair or public interviewer for a board-level audience Sales leadership and high-performance culture off-sites Audience outcomes A sharper vocabulary for describing what effective leaders actually do day to day Specific examples, drawn from elite business and sporting environments, of how high-performance teams get built and held together under pressure New questions to ask about recruitment and retention, from an operator who ran a 360-person business A more confident view of the behaviours that separate consistent performers from occasional ones

Why organisations work with Jeff Salzenstein He brings a verified elite-performance credential into the executive room. ATP top 100, two NCAA team titles at Stanford, and a return to the top 100 at age 30 after two career-threatening injuries. The recovery story is not metaphor; it is the source material for the framework. The Own Your Zone of Excellence methodology is structured, not motivational. Four named pillars (rapid stress reduction, mindset shifts, emotional regulation, rest and recovery) that map onto the specific nervous-system and recovery decisions a senior leader can make inside a week. He is booked by organisations whose leaders are visibly under load: Duck Creek Technologies, U.S. Radiology Specialists, Weil Gotshal & Manges, Vistage chairs. The repeat work in private practice, healthcare, and legal services indicates the framework holds up in high-intensity professional settings. He runs Tennis Evolution, a coaching business with a 85,000-subscriber YouTube channel. He has built and scaled a teaching product, which is rare among speakers whose credibility rests on a past career. Biography highlights Former ATP top 100 singles player; career-high world No. 100 reached in June 2004, the oldest American to first crack the top 100 at that age. Two-time Stanford All-American, NCAA team champion 1995 and 1996, played No. 1 singles, team captain, coached by Dick Gould. Tennis Week magazine Rookie of the Year, 1997. Competed in the main draw of all four Grand Slams. Inducted into the Colorado Tennis Hall of Fame, 2005. Founder of Tennis Evolution, an online coaching platform with a YouTube channel exceeding 85,000 subscribers. Contributing author of “The Ultimate Success Guide” with Brian Tracy. Biography Most executive wellbeing programmes are designed for the workforce and ignore the layer under the most pressure. The leadership team gets a slide on resilience and a meditation app. The mechanics of how senior leaders actually regulate stress, recover, and stay sharp through compressed cycles rarely make it into the conversation. Salzenstein’s work starts where that conversation gives up. The credential is unusually concrete. He played No. 1 singles for Stanford under Dick Gould, captained back-to-back NCAA team championships in 1995 and 1996, and reached world No. 100 on the ATP tour. He then broke into the top 100 a second time, at 30, after two career-threatening injuries. Tennis Week named him Rookie of the Year in 1997. The Colorado Tennis Hall of Fame inducted him in 2005. The Own Your Zone of Excellence framework grew out of that arc and out of a family mental health and addiction crisis that ended his playing career. It is built around four operational pillars: rapid stress reduction, mindset shifts, emotional regulation, and rest and recovery. The content is closer to applied performance science than to motivational speaking, and it is structured so leaders can use it inside an ordinary working week. Organisations that book him tend to be in high-intensity professional settings where the executive layer is visibly under load. Duck Creek Technologies, U.S. Radiology Specialists, Weil Gotshal & Manges, Lightspeed Systems, The Mortgage Collaborative, and Vistage chairs have used him as keynote or coach. He also runs Tennis Evolution, an online coaching business with a YouTube channel of more than 85,000 subscribers, which makes him one of the few speakers in the performance space who has built and sustained a teaching product alongside his keynote work. Key speaking topics Executive resilience and burnout prevention Stress regulation and nervous system recovery Peak performance under pressure Mental and emotional health for senior leaders Mindset and focus for high-performing teams Sales team performance and pressure Culture and engagement for executive teams Ideal for CEOs and executive leadership teams running high-intensity cycles, particularly in professional services, healthcare, technology, and financial services CHROs and chief people officers building wellbeing programmes that include the senior layer, not just the broader workforce Sales leaders and revenue teams operating under sustained quota pressure Vistage chairs, peer-advisory groups, and leadership offsites focused on personal performance and recovery Audience outcomes A concrete set of practices for rapid stress reduction and nervous system regulation that senior leaders can use during the working day A vocabulary for talking about executive burnout and recovery inside the leadership team Specific techniques for reframing pressure moments without losing edge or focus A clearer sense of what rest and recovery look like at the executive level, beyond holiday and headspace apps

Why organisations work with Jeffrey Pfeffer His research quantifies what most HR functions treat as intangible: the measurable physical health cost of management decisions on job insecurity, autonomy, and workload – giving boards and CHROs a data-backed case for structural change rather than wellness programmes. “Leadership BS” provides executives with a named, argued critique of why leadership development investment typically fails – and a framework for what evidence-based practice looks like instead, which is directly usable in programme redesign conversations. His Stanford elective “Paths to Power” distils decades of research on how organisational power actually operates – not how it should – giving senior leaders an accurate map of the dynamics shaping their own institutions. He is one of the few management academics whose work has been covered seriously in both peer-reviewed journals and mainstream business media, making his arguments accessible to boards and executive committees without losing analytical credibility. His willingness to argue positions that contradict the consulting and coaching industry – on leadership myths, on power, on workplace harm – makes him a genuinely disruptive voice in executive conversations where polished consensus is the norm. Biography highlights Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior, Stanford Graduate School of Business – one of the institution’s longest-serving faculty members in that department Author of approximately 15 books including “Dying for a Paycheck” (HarperBusiness, 2018), “Leadership BS” (HarperBusiness, 2015), and “Power: Why Some People Have It – and Others Don’t” (HarperBusiness, 2010) Co-author with Robert Sutton of “Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense” (Harvard Business School Press, 2006) – a foundational text in evidence-based management Creator and long-running instructor of the Stanford MBA elective “Paths to Power” Published in and extensively covered by Harvard Business Review across multiple decades Recognised on the Thinkers50 ranking of global management thinkers Biography Jeffrey Pfeffer has spent five decades at Stanford asking an uncomfortable question: if organisations invest heavily in leadership development, why do workplaces keep producing the same failures? His answer, built across roughly 15 books and more than 150 academic articles, is that most management practice is not grounded in evidence – it is grounded in optimism, ideology, and the preferences of an industry that profits from selling aspiration. His 2015 book “Leadership BS” made this argument directly and with data. The leadership development industry, Pfeffer argued, systematically teaches qualities – humility, authenticity, servant leadership – that do not predict outcomes in real organisations, while ignoring what the evidence actually shows about how power and authority work. “Power: Why Some People Have It – and Others Don’t” offered the corrective: a clear-eyed, research-based account of how influence is built and exercised, drawn from his long-running Stanford MBA elective “Paths to Power.” “Dying for a Paycheck,” published in 2018, extended the argument into territory most organisations find harder to discuss. Pfeffer documented, with epidemiological and workplace data, that management decisions on job insecurity, autonomy, long hours, and benefits have direct, measurable effects on employee health – making the workplace, he argued, the fifth leading cause of death in the United States. The implication for senior leaders is significant: workforce wellbeing is not a culture initiative, it is a consequence of operational and strategic choices made at the top. As Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford GSB, Pfeffer brings this body of work directly into executive conversations. His value is not a programme or a model – it is a sustained, evidence-based argument that organisations routinely make avoidable, costly mistakes about people, and a clear account of what taking the evidence seriously would require. Key speaking topics Evidence-based management and leadership practice Organisational power and influence The economics of workplace health and employee wellbeing Leadership development – what works and what does not Workplace conditions and workforce performance Decision-making under organisational pressure Strategy execution and the role of power dynamics Ideal for CHROs and CPOs reviewing the design and ROI of leadership development programmes CEOs and boards seeking an evidence-based challenge to prevailing management assumptions Transformation leads and organisational development functions designing large-scale change Executive education programme directors at business schools and corporate universities Audience outcomes A grounded, data-backed critique of standard leadership development assumptions – with specific alternative approaches A clearer understanding of how power and influence actually operate in organisations, distinct from how formal authority is structured Practical framing for the business case linking management decisions to workforce health and productivity outcomes Sharper questions to apply to existing people strategy, programme design, and organisational structure A working vocabulary for distinguishing evidence-based management practice from received wisdom

Why organisations work with Jennifer Hyman She has run the full arc of a venture-backed consumer subscription business, from a Harvard Business School idea in 2008 to a $1.7 billion IPO in 2021, and can speak to each stage with named decisions rather than highlight-reel anecdotes. She led Rent the Runway through a near-existential 2020, when its core demand collapsed overnight, and reset the cost base, capital structure and product. Boards under pressure want that recovery story from the operator who lived it. She sits on the board of The Estee Lauder Companies and advises Goldman Sachs through the Launch With GS council, giving her a working view of how large incumbents think about disruption from the inside. She is one of only 30 women to have taken a US company public and the first to do so with an all-female CEO, COO and CFO line-up. That credential travels well in conversations about leadership pipeline and capital access. She speaks from the operator seat on how AI is changing what a customer relationship actually is, drawing on Rent the Runway’s own use of data and personalisation rather than abstract framing. Biography highlights Co-founder and CEO of Rent the Runway since 2009; Chair of the Board. Took Rent the Runway public in October 2021, raising $357 million. Board Director, The Estee Lauder Companies. Audit Committee and Nominating and ESG Committee. Founding member of the NYSE Board Advisory Council. Adviser to Goldman Sachs via the Launch With GS Council. Named to TIME 100 Most Influential People (2019); Fortune 40 Under 40; Fast Company Most Creative People in Business; Forbes 12 Most Disruptive Names in Business. BA in social sciences and MBA, Harvard University. Biography Rent the Runway started as a Harvard Business School project in late 2008 and reached public markets in October 2021 as the first US listing led by an all-female CEO, COO and CFO trio. The company raised $357 million and listed at a $1.7 billion valuation. The person who built it from idea to ticker is Jennifer Hyman, co-founder, CEO and Chair of the Board. The interesting period for boards is not the launch. It is what happened after. The pandemic took out Rent the Runway’s core demand, weddings, events, office wear, almost overnight in early 2020. Hyman cut costs, restructured debt, reworked the subscription product, and brought the business through to IPO eighteen months later. She has since had to defend the model against shifting consumer behaviour, capital market repricing of growth, and the entry of larger players into resale and rental. Outside the operator role, Hyman serves on the Board of Directors of The Estee Lauder Companies, on its Audit Committee and Nominating and ESG Committee. She is a founding member of the NYSE Board Advisory Council and sits on the Launch With GS Advisory Council for Goldman Sachs, where the brief is improving capital access for female and diverse founders. She was named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People list in 2019, with the profile written by Diane von Furstenberg. Hyman’s value in a board conversation is the texture of having actually done the things most strategy decks describe. She can speak to category creation, to subscription unit economics under stress, to the use of AI in personalisation and inventory, and to the politics of taking a venture-backed consumer business through a public listing without losing operational grip. Key speaking topics Subscription business model design Category creation in consumer markets Recovery and reset after demand shock AI in consumer personalisation and inventory Capital access for founders and underrepresented operators Founder-CEO journey through IPO Ideal for Boards and executive teams reviewing strategy under model pressure CEO and CFO audiences in consumer, retail, fashion and subscription businesses Investor and capital-markets events focused on founder access to capital Women’s leadership and pipeline programmes at senior levels Audience outcomes A clear-eyed account of what category creation actually costs from someone who has done it A working view of how a venture-backed CEO restructures a business through a demand shock Insight into how AI is being used in subscription consumer businesses today, with named examples from Rent the Runway A senior-operator perspective on the IPO process and post-listing reality Specific arguments for how capital access changes when founder pipelines change

Why organisations work with Jennifer Jordan Her seven tensions framework, built from surveys of more than 1,000 senior executives and published in Harvard Business Review with Michael Wade, gives leadership teams a shared language for the contradictions that actually slow them down. She directs IMD’s Leading Digital Execution and Leadership Essentials programmes, so the work she brings to a boardroom is the same work she runs with executive cohorts every month. Her doctoral training at Yale in social psychology means the advice on power, influence, and ethical lapse rests on peer-reviewed research, not anecdote. She translates academic findings into operational decisions: when to slow a leader down, when to add a shadow board, when a decision should be made by data and when by judgment. Recognised by Poets&Quants on its 2019 Best 40 Under 40 list and the Thinkers50 Radar in the same year, she sits in the small group of leadership researchers whose work senior executives are actively asking for. Biography highlights Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior, IMD Business School, Lausanne. Director of IMD’s Leading Digital Execution and Leadership Essentials programmes. PhD in Psychology, Yale University; postdoctoral fellow at Kellogg School of Management and Tuck School of Business. Co-author with Michael Wade of “Every Leader Needs to Navigate These 7 Tensions,” Harvard Business Review, 2020. Named by Poets&Quants to its 2019 Best 40 Under 40 business school professors list and nominated to the Thinkers50 Radar in the same year. Research published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Psychological Science, Journal of Management, and Business Ethics Quarterly. Biography Most leadership advice still asks executives to pick a side. Be visionary or be operational. Trust the data or trust your gut. Hold authority or share it. The senior leaders Jennifer Jordan studies do not have that luxury, and her research is built around the cost of pretending they do. Jordan is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IMD in Lausanne, where she directs the Leading Digital Execution and Leadership Essentials programmes. Her 2020 Harvard Business Review piece with Michael Wade, drawn from surveys of more than 1,000 senior leaders, set out seven tensions that define the modern executive role, from expert to learner, from controller to architect, from constant to adaptor. The framework is now used inside leadership development at major firms. Trained as a social psychologist at Yale, she works on the harder edge of the leadership question: power, influence, and the conditions under which capable people make ethical mistakes. That research is published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Psychological Science, and the Journal of Management, and it underpins her work on leadership transitions, family business succession, and women on boards. Her recognition is concrete. Poets&Quants placed her on its 2019 Best 40 Under 40 list of business school professors, citing close to 1,500 academic citations of her work. Thinkers50 named her to its Radar list of management thinkers to watch in the same year. With Mahwesh Khan, she has argued in HBR for shadow boards as a structural answer to generational distance at the top of organisations, a recommendation that several large European firms have since adopted. Key speaking topics Leadership in the digital age Power, influence, and ethics Leadership transitions and succession Decision-making under contradiction Women on boards and inclusive leadership Family business leadership Shadow boards and intergenerational governance Ideal for CEOs and executive committees are navigating contradictory strategic demands. CHROs and heads of leadership development are designing senior leader programmes. Board chairs and nominating committees are working on succession and governance. Family business principals and next-generation leaders are preparing to take over. Audience outcomes A direct read on the seven tensions that define senior leadership today, with practical tests for which behaviour each situation calls for. A clearer view of how power changes a leader’s judgement, and the routines that keep that change in check. Sharper questions for succession and leadership transitions, including how shadow boards and reverse mentoring change board-level perspective. A research-grounded account of why digital execution stalls at the top of organisations, and what senior leaders can do about it.

Why organisations work with Jennifer Vessels The P.E.A.C.E. Framework gives transformation a structured language and methodology: not abstract change theory, but a tested roadmap built from live engagements inside organisations including Adobe, Cisco, and Novartis She brings Silicon Valley operational experience applied globally. Having led transformation programmes across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, she translates insider knowledge of how the world’s most innovation-intensive organisations actually work into practical approaches for complex, multinational businesses She is an active CEO running transformation programmes concurrently with her speaking engagements, meaning her insights reflect current deployments, not retrospective case studies Her work on generational integration, aligning Gen Z talent, AI capability, and experienced human capital, addresses a workforce tension that most change and transformation speakers do not tackle with equivalent specificity Through the Executive Growth Alliance (EGA), she connects audiences to a live community of F100 leaders navigating the same challenges, giving organisations access to a peer learning network beyond the event itself Biography highlights CEO of Next Step, Silicon Valley consulting firm leading business transformation for global enterprises since 2006 Founder, Executive Growth Alliance: a global peer community of Fortune 100 leaders focused on future-of-work and AI adoption Creator of the P.E.A.C.E. Framework (Purpose, Exploration, Action, Collaboration, Empowerment), deployed across organisations including Adobe, Cisco, Google, IKEA, Microsoft, Novartis, and Schneider Electric Awarded “Best Technology Speaker ’24” (IOFM, Diversified Communications) Author of No Clue, No Fear: Navigating Storms of Change; new book Emergence: How Leaders Break Free from Outdated Thinking (Wiley, October 2026) Featured by EFMD, the World Economic Forum, the Institute of Directors, the San Jose Mercury News, and The New York Times MBA, San Jose State University; MS Occupational Psychology, University of London; INSEAD board governance certification Early career: international business development at Tandberg (acquired by Cisco); Director of Global Sales Operations at Tandem Computers Biography Leadership thinking built for the Industrial Age is not built for what organisations are experiencing now. Most change programmes assume that if the strategy is sound and the technology is right, transformation will follow. It does not. The missing variable is almost always how leaders are thinking, and what they are willing to let go of. Jennifer Vessels has spent two decades inside that gap, working as CEO of Next Step across Silicon Valley, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Her client list includes Adobe, Cisco, Google, IKEA, Microsoft, Novartis, and Schneider Electric: organisations navigating business model change, AI adoption, and leadership redesign at scale. From that operational experience, she developed the P.E.A.C.E. Framework: a structured methodology giving leaders a repeatable roadmap through disruptive change rather than a case for why change is necessary. What distinguishes her position is its currency. She is not drawing on past engagements. As an active CEO running transformation programmes alongside her speaking work, the examples she brings to audiences reflect live challenges rather than archived successes. She also founded the Executive Growth Alliance, a community of F100 leaders using collaborative challenge-resolution as a vehicle for building future-readiness collectively. Her book Emergence: How Leaders Break Free from Outdated Thinking (Wiley, October 2026), endorsed by Thinkers50 co-founder Stuart Crainer, extends the framework into a broader argument about the leadership models that are no longer fit for purpose, and what replaces them. Key speaking topics AI Adoption and Human-Centred Integration Change Leadership and Organisational Transformation Future of Work and Generational Integration The P.E.A.C.E. Framework for Leading Through Change Silicon Valley Innovation Applied to Global Business Business Model Redesign in an AI Era Ideal for CEOs and senior leadership teams navigating business model transformation or AI adoption programmes Boards and executive committees seeking a working practitioner’s perspective on AI-era leadership CHROs and people leaders managing generational integration, workforce redesign, and future-of-work strategy Transformation leads and change management functions inside large multinational organisations Audience outcomes A structured, repeatable framework (P.E.A.C.E.) that gives teams shared language for leading through uncertainty, usable Monday morning A clear diagnosis of why AI adoption and transformation programmes stall at the leadership level, with specific approaches to address it Practical tools for integrating generational diversity, particularly Gen Z talent alongside experienced human capital and AI capability A first-hand view of how organisations including Adobe, Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia are integrating people with advanced technology, applied to the audience’s own market A mindset shift from defending what is crumbling to building what is emerging, positioning disruption as a source of competitive advantage

Why organisations work with Jenson Button A first-hand account of winning a world title with a team that did not exist eighteen months earlier, when Honda withdrew and the Brawn GP outfit was rebuilt from the wreckage. The temperament side of elite performance, drawn from 306 Grand Prix starts: how a driver and a team hold their nerve when the result is twenty seconds away and there are no second chances. A current insider voice on Formula 1 strategy and team dynamics, with active roles at Williams Racing and Sky Sports F1 that keep the perspective live, not retrospective. Credibility across disciplines: F1 World Champion, Super GT GT500 champion in Japan, and FIA World Endurance Championship Hypercar driver with Hertz Team JOTA. Biography highlights 2009 FIA Formula 1 World Drivers’ Champion with Brawn GP. 15 Grand Prix victories, 50 podiums, 8 pole positions across 18 F1 seasons with Williams, Renault, BAR, Honda, Brawn GP, and McLaren. MBE for services to motorsport, 2010 New Year Honours. Senior Advisor, Williams Racing, working with the team and its driver academy. Lead pundit and expert analyst on the Sky Sports F1 broadcast team. 2018 Super GT GT500 Series Champion (Japan); 2024 FIA World Endurance Championship Hypercar driver with Hertz Team JOTA. Author of “Life to the Limit: My Autobiography” (2017), longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2018. Biography Honda walked away from Formula 1 at the end of 2008. The team Button had been driving for had no engine, no sponsor, and no certainty it would make the grid. By March it had become Brawn GP. By November he was World Champion. The story is well known in the paddock; the lesson, less so. Button won the 2009 title because the discipline he had built across nine seasons of underperforming machinery transferred intact to a car that finally matched him. Across 18 F1 seasons and 306 Grand Prix starts, Button took 15 victories, 50 podiums, and the 2009 World Drivers’ Championship. He raced for Williams, Benetton-Renault, BAR, Honda, Brawn GP, and McLaren, partnering Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso, and Rubens Barrichello. He was awarded an MBE for services to motorsport in 2010. The career did not end with F1. Button won the 2018 Super GT GT500 series in Japan, raced at the 2023 Le Mans 24 Hours with the NASCAR Garage 56 entry, and contested the FIA World Endurance Championship in 2024 with Hertz Team JOTA in a Porsche 963 Hypercar. He is Senior Advisor to Williams Racing, where he works with the team and its driver academy, and a lead expert on Sky Sports F1’s broadcast team. For organisations, the value sits in the practical content of composure under pressure: how a driver makes decisions in tenths of a second with championship implications, how a team holds together when results stop arriving, and how performance is sustained across two decades of repeated reinvention. His autobiography, “Life to the Limit”, set out the same argument in 2017: the title was won as much in the head as in the car. Key speaking topics Performance under pressure Decision-making at speed Team dynamics in elite environments Resilience across long careers Formula 1 strategy and competition Mental preparation and composure Ideal for Leadership teams facing a high-stakes execution moment, product launch, transformation milestone, or competitive deadline. Sales, performance, and operations groups where individual composure compounds into team result. After-dinner audiences at corporate hospitality, championship-night events, and senior leadership offsites. Organisations using motorsport partnerships (sponsors, suppliers, hospitality programmes) to anchor a leadership narrative. Audience outcomes A working account of how a championship-winning driver prepares for and executes under pressure. A close-quarters view of the Brawn GP turnaround as a case in team performance after structural collapse. A current read on Formula 1’s competitive dynamics, drawn from active Williams and Sky Sports roles. A clear connection between the discipline of elite sport and the discipline required to lead a senior team through a difficult cycle.

Why organisations work with Jeremy Blain He has published the operating detail behind distributed leadership, including a five-point organisational blueprint and a 90-day implementation roadmap, so the conversation moves past intent into execution. His OpenHR framework, co-authored with Dr. Rochelle Haynes, gives HR and people leaders a working model for designing a workforce that blends employees, contractors, and open talent without losing coherence. Twenty-five years operating as a CEO and board officer across the UK and Asia, including seven years running an international consultancy from Singapore, mean the boardroom register is native, not learned. Recognition from credible third parties, Gold at the 2024 Global Book Awards for Unleash the Inner CEO and ACQ5 International Gamechanger of the Year 2023, confirms the work has been independently judged on substance. He brings frameworks that travel beyond the keynote, with diagnostic tools and culture-building activities organisations can take into their own leadership development programmes. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Performance Works International, advising boards and executive teams on leadership and digital transformation. Author of The Inner CEO and the second edition Unleash the Inner CEO, both award-winning titles on distributed leadership. Co-author with Dr. Rochelle Haynes of OpenHR: The Human Capital Framework for the Blended Workforce. Fellow of the Institute of Directors, London since 2003; senior board advisor to WDHB and co-founder of the Transformational Leadership Acceleration Institute. Named International Gamechanger of the Year by ACQ5 in 2023. Featured in Forbes, The Times of London, CEO Today, Dialogue by Duke CE, and Business Matters; host of the Rethink Leadership podcast. Biography Distributed leadership has been talked about for two decades. What has been missing is a working model that boards and operating committees can actually run. Jeremy Blain has spent his career building that model, first as a CEO and board officer in the UK and Asia, and now as the founder of Performance Works International. The argument is set out in The Inner CEO and its updated second edition, Unleash the Inner CEO, which won Gold in the Business Leadership category at the 2024 Global Book Awards. The book offers a five-point blueprint for the conditions, structures, and processes that make distributed leadership operational, plus a 90-day roadmap for managers and individual contributors. It is closer to an implementation manual than a thesis. A second strand of the work, OpenHR, co-authored with Dr. Rochelle Haynes, addresses what happens when the workforce itself is no longer a single category. As organisations blend employees, contractors, freelancers, and open talent, traditional human capital systems strain. OpenHR offers a framework, glossary, and templates for designing people strategy across that mix. The credibility behind the frameworks is operational. Seven years running an international consultancy from Singapore. Twenty-five years in corporate learning and human capital. Senior board roles at WDHB and the Intercontinental School of Economics and Applied Sciences. ACQ5 named him International Gamechanger of the Year in 2023, and his commentary appears in Forbes, The Times of London, and Dialogue by Duke CE. Boards work with him because the prescriptions come with the receipts. Key speaking topics Distributed leadership as an operating model Digital and AI transformation for boards and executive teams Human capital strategy for the blended workforce Empowerment and accountability at scale Leadership development across multinational and multi-generational teams Culture and capability for hybrid, AI-enabled organisations Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and executive committees rewiring decision rights and accountability across the organisation CHROs and chief people officers designing for a workforce that combines full-time, contract, and open talent Boards reviewing the leadership and culture preconditions for digital and AI transformation Transformation, change, and leadership development leads building scalable programmes across regions Audience outcomes A clearer view of where authority and accountability are misaligned in their own organisation A practical reference model for distributing leadership without losing strategic coherence A framework for designing human capital strategy across employees, contractors, and open talent Specific diagnostic questions to take into the next executive committee or board agenda Language for confronting the gap between stated leadership values and observed leadership behaviour

Why organisations work with Jeremy Heimans His intellectual authority is built on a named thesis. New Power, co-authored with Henry Timms, was shortlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year, featured as the “Big Idea” in the Harvard Business Review, and accompanied by a TED talk viewed over 1.5 million times. The operating credentials are rare. As co-founder of GetUp!, Avaaz and All Out, and CEO of Purpose, he has built some of the most successful campaigning organisations and social movements of the last two decades, so he reasons about participation from live product experience. His framework, (Product + Purpose) × Participation, gives brand and marketing leaders a concrete equation rather than a worldview, which makes it easier to translate into campaign design and consumer engagement strategy. His recent work on AI participation, autonomous agents and governance scaffolding brings the New Power thesis into the question most executive teams are now actually wrestling with, how to build legitimacy around AI systems that are already in the building. The institutional recognition, Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum, Chair of its Global Agenda Council on Civic Participation, the Ford Foundation’s 75th Anniversary Visionary Award, means he opens doors for the organisations he speaks to as well as the audiences he addresses. Biography highlights Co-founder and CEO of Purpose, a public-benefit corporation building social movements for brands, NGOs and philanthropies Co-founder of GetUp!, Avaaz and All Out Co-author of New Power with Henry Timms (Penguin Random House); FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year shortlist; HBR Big Idea feature TED talk on new power with over 1.5 million views World Economic Forum Young Global Leader; Chair of the WEF Global Agenda Council on Civic Participation; Ford Foundation 75th Anniversary Visionary Award Educated at the University of Sydney and Harvard; earlier career at McKinsey Biography Power has changed shape. The argument that Jeremy Heimans built over two decades of campaigning and writing is that the organisations, brands and leaders who will matter in this century are the ones who understand participation as a structural force, not a communications channel. New Power, his book with Henry Timms, turned that argument into one of the most cited frames in contemporary leadership thinking, shortlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year, featured as the Big Idea in Harvard Business Review, and anchored by a TED talk now viewed over 1.5 million times. The credibility behind the frame is operational. Heimans co-founded GetUp! in Australia in 2005, a political organisation that grew to more members than all of Australia’s political parties combined, and was a co-founder of the global campaigning platforms Avaaz and All Out. His company, Purpose, is the public-benefit corporation he built to carry that expertise into brands, NGOs and philanthropies, helping them design the participation models that command-and-control marketing no longer produces. Academically, he is a McKinsey alumnus with degrees from the University of Sydney and Harvard. Institutionally, he has been recognised as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, chaired its Global Agenda Council on Civic Participation, and received the Ford Foundation’s 75th Anniversary Visionary Award. His framework, (Product + Purpose) × Participation, is the simplest expression of what his advisory work delivers for consumer brands. The current edge of the work is artificial intelligence. Heimans’ thesis on how participation builds legitimacy is increasingly being applied to AI deployment, autonomous agents and the governance scaffolding companies are building for large-scale AI use. For leadership teams trying to work out how to retain brand trust, employee commitment and regulatory standing as AI reshapes their operating model, he is one of the few commentators whose framework was already built for this shift. Key speaking topics New power and the shift from broadcast to participation AI, autonomous agents and the governance of participation Brand building and consumer engagement under (Product + Purpose) × Participation Movement design for organisations, NGOs and advocacy Leadership and influence in hyperconnected systems The future of work and distributed authority Ideal for CEOs, CMOs and communications leaders redesigning brand and stakeholder strategy for a participatory environment Chief AI officers, governance leads and executive committees building legitimacy around AI systems NGO and philanthropy leadership teams scaling movements and civic participation programmes World Economic Forum, public affairs and policy forums where civic and corporate power converge Audience outcomes A working grasp of the New Power frame and how it changes marketing, leadership and governance decisions Concrete examples of brands, movements and platforms that have applied (or failed to apply) new power mechanics A clearer view of how participation can be designed into AI deployment and governance rather than retrofitted Practical models for civic, employee and customer engagement that work with the grain of hyperconnected systems