Leadership speakers

Why organisations work with Jeremy Schwartz He has sat in the chief executive seat at The Body Shop and as interim joint CEO at Pandora, so the advice on transformation comes from someone who has signed off the trade-offs, not described them. He led the launch of “Enrich Not Exploit” at The Body Shop, a sustainability commitment with hard 2020 targets across ingredients, packaging, suppliers and stores, and oversaw the business through the 1bn euro sale to Natura. He proposed the consumer concept behind Coca-Cola Zero during his time as Marketing and Innovation Director for Coca-Cola Europe, giving him credibility on commercial brand creation as well as ethical repositioning. His current mandates as Practice Chairman at Kantar and advisor to McKinsey’s Business Transformation Practice keep him close to live programmes inside large consumer and retail organisations. Few speakers can argue the commercial case for sustainability from inside the P&L of a global beauty business and the boardroom of a listed jewellery company. Biography highlights CEO of The Body Shop, 2013-2017; led the “Enrich Not Exploit” sustainability strategy and the 1bn euro divestment from L’Oreal to Natura. Chief Operating Officer and interim joint CEO of Pandora A/S. Managing Director, L’Oreal UK; Marketing and Innovation Director, Coca-Cola Europe; Brand Director, Sainsbury’s; CMO, News International. Practice Chairman, Kantar Sustainable Transformation Practice; Senior Advisor, McKinsey Business Transformation Practice. Founder and host of the “Saving Tomorrow’s Planet” podcast. Founding trustee, Against Malaria Foundation. Biography The hardest job in a consumer business right now is holding two clocks at once. The quarterly clock that the market reads, and the multi-year clock that sustainability commitments, digital re-platforming and supply chain redesign actually run on. Schwartz has run a business under both. As CEO of The Body Shop from 2013 to 2017, he led the launch of “Enrich Not Exploit”, a sustainability commitment with measurable 2020 targets on ingredients, packaging, fair trade sourcing and habitat protection. Over the same period he steered the business back to growth and through the 1bn euro sale from L’Oreal to Natura. Before that he was Managing Director of L’Oreal UK, Marketing and Innovation Director for Coca-Cola in Europe (where he proposed the consumer concept behind Coca-Cola Zero), Brand Director at Sainsbury’s, and CMO at News International. He later served as Chief Operating Officer and interim joint CEO of Pandora. His advisory work now sits inside the practices that buy-side leaders actually use. He is Practice Chairman of Kantar’s Sustainable Transformation Practice and Senior Advisor to McKinsey’s Business Transformation Practice. That keeps the speaking material close to live transformation programmes rather than retrospective case studies. He hosts the “Saving Tomorrow’s Planet” podcast, interviewing leaders who are reducing emissions inside operating businesses, and is a founding trustee of the Against Malaria Foundation. The through-line across all of this is the same argument he makes to boards: sustainability and commercial growth are not parallel agendas to be balanced, they are the same agenda once the operating model is set up to carry both. Key speaking topics Consumer brand transformation Sustainability and commercial growth Retail leadership CEO and executive team performance Marketing and innovation in consumer businesses Purpose and culture in transformation Digital transformation in retail Ideal for CEOs and executive committees in consumer, retail and FMCG businesses balancing growth targets with sustainability commitments. CMOs and brand leaders rebuilding propositions around purpose without losing commercial discipline. Boards and chairs evaluating ESG and transformation programmes with real P&L implications. Senior leadership teams inside transformation, sustainability or digital programmes that need an outside CEO voice. Audience outcomes A working argument for why sustainability and commercial growth belong in the same operating plan, drawn from a CEO who has run it. Specific examples from The Body Shop, Pandora, L’Oreal and Coca-Cola of how brand, marketing and sustainability decisions look from inside the P&L. A clearer view of where consumer transformations stall and what senior leaders can do about it before they reach the operating teams. Practical reference points for boards on how to set sustainability targets that survive contact with quarterly performance.

Why organisations work with Jeremy Snape He has run the experiment in public. As performance coach to Shane Warne’s Rajasthan Royals, he built the dressing-room culture that won the inaugural IPL title against far better-resourced franchises. His work sits at the join between two credentials most consultants only have one of: an England international playing career and a master’s in sport psychology, applied across Premier League football, England Rugby and South African cricket. The “Inside the Mind of Champions” podcast gives him a continuously refreshed evidence base. Guests include Sir Alex Ferguson, Pep Guardiola, Eddie Jones and Rahul Dravid, and the material feeds directly into his executive sessions. Through Sporting Edge, he has spent two decades translating sport psychology into corporate practice rather than telling sporting war stories with a thin business gloss on top. Biography highlights Former England international cricketer, 10 ODIs and one T20I, with a Man of the Match award on ODI debut against Zimbabwe. County career at Northamptonshire, Gloucestershire and Leicestershire; captained Leicestershire and lifted the Twenty20 Cup in 2004. Master’s degree in sport psychology, taken during the latter stage of his playing career. Performance coach to the Rajasthan Royals during their IPL title-winning campaign under Shane Warne, with subsequent roles at Delhi Daredevils, England Rugby, Premier League football clubs and the South African national cricket team. Founder and Managing Director of Sporting Edge, the performance consultancy he established in 2005. Non-Executive Director of the League Managers Association since 2013, supporting leadership development for football managers at St George’s Park. Host of the “Inside the Mind of Champions” podcast, with guests including Sir Alex Ferguson, Pep Guardiola, Eddie Jones, Rahul Dravid and Shane Warne. Biography The Rajasthan Royals were the cheapest-bought, lowest-rated franchise in the inaugural Indian Premier League. They won it. The performance coach embedded with that team, working alongside Shane Warne to build a culture out of nothing in a few weeks, was Jeremy Snape. That project is the cleanest illustration of what he does. Snape played 10 One Day Internationals for England and captained Leicestershire to the Twenty20 Cup, and during the back end of his playing career he took a master’s in sport psychology. The combination is unusual: a working international athlete who became a credentialed performance specialist, rather than an academic with a fan’s interest in sport. Since founding Sporting Edge in 2005, he has taken those methods into corporate work, alongside continued roles in elite sport, including Delhi Daredevils, England Rugby, Premier League football and South African cricket. In 2013 he joined the League Managers Association as a Non-Executive Director, helping design the leadership programmes that football managers take at St George’s Park. His “Inside the Mind of Champions” podcast keeps the research live. Conversations with Sir Alex Ferguson, Pep Guardiola, Eddie Jones, Rahul Dravid and Shane Warne are not entertainment for him; they are the working material that feeds the frameworks he takes into boardrooms on team trust, composure under scrutiny and the unglamorous standards that separate first place from fourth. Key speaking topics High-performance culture Leadership under pressure Team trust and standards Mindset and mental resilience Performance psychology for business Talent development and succession Ideal for CEOs and executive teams entering a sustained period of pressure, scrutiny or transition Senior leadership offsites focused on team standards, trust and decision-making in stretch conditions Sales, trading and client-facing leadership groups whose performance hinges on composure under public-facing risk HR and L&D leads designing leadership development programmes for high-stakes commercial roles Audience outcomes A specific read on how elite sport builds composure and how that translates into executive decision-making under scrutiny. Concrete language for what high-performing team standards actually look like day to day, beyond the values poster on the wall. A clearer view of where individual mindset ends and where team culture has to take over. Methods for sustaining performance after a setback, drawn from named figures in elite sport who have done it publicly.

Why organisations work with Jesse Israel He has run mass meditations for arena-sized audiences, including stops on Oprah Winfrey’s 2020 Vision tour with WW. Few speakers can hold the attention of 15,000 people in silence; he can, and that capability translates directly into all-hands and conference settings. His Amplified Quiet Framework gives leaders a usable structure for cutting through external, mental and physical noise, rather than a generic “mindfulness 101” overview. He bridges cultural credibility and corporate utility: Audible distribution, collaborations with Deepak Chopra, and a roster of corporate clients including Google, American Express, Aetna, Ford and Charles Schwab. He came to meditation from inside a high-pressure commercial career (Cantora Records, MGMT), which gives him a language senior teams accept: performance, focus, recovery, output. Biography highlights Founder of The Big Quiet, a mass meditation movement that has run sold-out arena gatherings and global virtual events. Personally invited by Oprah Winfrey to keynote her 2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus arena tour with WW. Co-host of virtual mass meditation broadcasts with Deepak Chopra. Five-time Audible bestseller through a worldwide distribution deal with Audible Originals under The Big Quiet imprint. Co-founded Cantora Records at NYU in 2005, the independent label that signed MGMT and released Time to Pretend. Corporate keynote clients include Google, American Express, Aetna, Ford and Charles Schwab; work covered in The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Forbes, The New York Times and AdWeek. Biography The hardest thing to deliver inside a high-performing organisation right now is not information. It is attention. Workforces are saturated with input, and the cost shows up as burnout, shallow thinking and meetings that leave teams more depleted than aligned. Jesse Israel built a career around fixing exactly that. He founded The Big Quiet, a mass meditation movement that has filled arenas with thousands of people sitting in silence together, and he was personally invited by Oprah Winfrey to keynote each stop of her 2020 Vision arena tour with WW, where he led roughly 15,000 people through guided meditations per show. His Amplified Quiet Framework is the version of that work designed for leadership teams. It treats stillness as a performance practice: a way of quieting external noise, mental noise and physical noise so that judgement, presence and recovery can return. Through a worldwide deal with Audible, five of his Big Quiet originals have become Audible top 10 bestsellers, and he has co-hosted global meditations with Deepak Chopra. What makes him different from most wellbeing speakers is the route in. He co-founded Cantora Records out of an NYU dorm room in 2005, signing MGMT and helping launch their breakout release Time to Pretend. He built and ran that label for nine years before turning to meditation, and corporate clients including Google, American Express, Aetna, Ford and Charles Schwab now book him to bring that same operator’s lens to wellbeing inside their organisations. Key speaking topics Mindfulness and meditation in the workplace Mental performance and resilience under pressure Leadership presence and attention Burnout, stress and recovery Designing large-scale shared experiences Career reinvention and personal change Ideal for CHROs and heads of wellbeing designing the next iteration of their mental health and resilience strategy Leadership teams and senior offsites looking for a high-credibility wellbeing intervention rather than a clinical one All-company conferences and town halls where a calm, focused collective moment is part of the design Sales and high-performance teams under sustained pressure to perform through uncertainty Audience outcomes A working framework for quieting external, mental and physical noise that leaders can apply the same week A direct experience of guided meditation at scale, often the first time senior audiences have tried it in a work setting Sharper language for talking about attention, focus and recovery as performance issues, not soft topics Practical entry points for embedding short stillness practices into team routines, offsites and large gatherings

Why organisations work with Jessica Ennis-Hill Her experience of performing as the public face of a home Olympics – carrying national expectation while managing injury recovery and a multi-discipline competition – gives leaders a concrete, pressure-tested model of composure under scrutiny that no training programme replicates. As founder of Jennis, she has applied elite athletic methodology to a commercial problem – closing the gender data gap in sport and exercise science – giving her credibility in conversations about evidence-based decision-making and innovation, not just personal achievement. Her perspective on women’s health and female performance, backed by clinical collaboration with physiologist Dr Emma Ross and a funded femtech business, adds substance to DEI and wellbeing conversations that goes well beyond lived experience. She has maintained a high-profile public platform post-retirement – BBC lead analyst across four Olympic cycles, Times columnist, podcast host – which means audiences arrive with recognition and trust already established. Her career narrative – career-threatening injury before Beijing 2008, gold in London 2012, return from maternity leave to World Championship gold in 2015 – gives her a specific, sequenced story about recovery and reinvention that senior leaders find directly applicable to organisational context. Biography highlights Olympic heptathlon gold medallist, London 2012; silver medallist, Rio 2016; three-time World Heptathlon Champion; European Champion; World Indoor Pentathlon Champion Appointed DBE in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to athletics BBC Sports Personality of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award, 2017 – second woman and first British woman to receive the award Founder of Jennis, a femtech platform using CycleMapping technology developed with women’s health physiologist Dr Emma Ross; raised £1M in pre-seed funding, 2021 Regular BBC athletics analyst: Olympic Games 2020 and 2024, World Athletics Championships 2019, 2022 and 2023, Commonwealth Games 2018 and 2022 Columnist for The Times; host of Gold Minds podcast (High Performance network); author of autobiography Unbelievable Psychology graduate, University of Sheffield Named in Forbes 30 Most Influential Under 30s in Europe, 2016 Biography Jessica Ennis-Hill won Olympic heptathlon gold at London 2012 as the publicly designated face of the Games – carrying a level of expectation that few athletes at any level have been asked to manage. That she delivered one of the most complete performances in the event’s history, having missed the Beijing Games entirely through injury four years earlier, is the foundation of everything she brings to a business audience. The comeback from a career-threatening stress fracture, the return from maternity leave to win the World Championship in Beijing in 2015, and the silver medal in Rio in 2016 give her career a specific structure – repeated reinvention under constraint – that organisations find more useful than a single triumph. The discipline behind those performances: meticulous preparation, managing uncertainty, performing at the moment that matters, is the substance of her speaking work. Post-retirement, she has built a second career with genuine intellectual weight. As founder of Jennis, she identified a specific commercial and scientific gap – most sport and exercise research is conducted on male subjects, leaving women without evidence-based training guidance – and built a femtech business to address it, in clinical partnership with physiologist Dr Emma Ross and backed by institutional investment. That work sits inside a broader argument about female performance and health that she has developed as a BBC analyst, Times columnist, and podcast host. For organisations, she represents something specific: a high-performer who has tested the connection between preparation, recovery, and execution across multiple high-stakes moments, and who has since applied that understanding to build a credible entrepreneurial venture. That combination – elite athletic credential plus founder experience plus sustained media presence – is what separates her from the broader field of sports motivational speakers. Key speaking topics Peak performance under pressure Resilience and recovery from setback Leading through reinvention and uncertainty Women’s health and the gender data gap in performance science Preparation, process, and high-stakes execution Entrepreneurship and building from elite expertise Mindset and mental performance Ideal for Senior leadership teams and executive conferences seeking a performance mindset frame grounded in real-world pressure CHROs and people leadership forums addressing female talent, wellbeing, and the conditions that enable sustained high performance Organisations navigating periods of change or recovery who need a credible, non-generic narrative around reinvention Boards and C-suite audiences where public recognition and media credibility matter alongside substantive content Audience outcomes A concrete, sequenced model of how elite performers build resilience – not as a trait but as a practiced discipline – that teams can apply to their own context Greater clarity on the specific role preparation and process play in sustaining performance under public scrutiny, with direct organisational parallels An evidence-based perspective on women’s health and performance science that gives HR and people leaders new language and framing for wellbeing conversations Sharper thinking on what recovery from setback actually requires, drawn from a career defined by structured comebacks rather than uninterrupted success A founder’s account of translating elite expertise into commercial impact – relevant to innovation, entrepreneurship, and growth conversations

Why organisations work with Jim Dowdall He has run safety on productions where a missed call ends a career or a life, and he can describe how those calls are made without the language losing its edge in a corporate room. He chaired the British Stunt Register, the body that governs professional stunt work in the UK, which gives him authority on how a regulated, safety-critical industry sets and enforces standards. His credit list includes Saving Private Ryan, multiple James Bond films, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and a decade as stunt coordinator for Top Gear and The Grand Tour, so the case studies are recognisable to a non-specialist audience. He combines a Parachute Regiment background, an armourer’s technical training, and a coordinator’s governance role, which gives the talk three angles on the same problem rather than a single career arc. Biography highlights Former chair of the British Stunt Register; long-standing member. Stunt coordinator and performer on more than 200 film and television titles, including Saving Private Ryan, Skyfall, Tomorrow Never Dies, Die Another Day, The World Is Not Enough, Octopussy, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Star Wars IV and V, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Stunt coordinator for Top Gear and The Grand Tour. Co-author of “Man on Fire: The Life and Other Accidents of Jim Dowdall, Stuntman” (Graham Scott, 2019), foreword by James May. Author of “Brassey’s Military Small Arms of the World” (1973), written during his early career as a film armourer. Member of BAFTA; invited to speak at Academy film seminars. Former soldier, Parachute Regiment. Biography A film set built around an explosion, a fall, or a high-speed crash is one of the most tightly governed working environments in any commercial industry. The standards are written down, the risk is priced, and the chain of command is unambiguous. Jim Dowdall has operated at the centre of that system for more than four decades. His credits run from Octopussy and The Spy Who Loved Me through Saving Private Ryan, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the Star Wars original trilogy, and on to Skyfall, Die Another Day, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. He spent ten years as stunt coordinator for Top Gear and The Grand Tour. He has doubled Harrison Ford, Roger Moore, Pierce Brosnan, and Timothy Dalton. The institutional weight matters as much as the credit list. Dowdall is a former chair of the British Stunt Register, the body that licenses and governs UK stunt work, and a member of BAFTA. His co-authored memoir “Man on Fire”, with a foreword by James May, sets out how high-consequence sequences are actually planned, briefed, and run, including the unglamorous detail that separates a controlled set-piece from an injury report. For a leadership audience, the value is not the anecdote. It is the structure underneath it: how a competent team agrees what an acceptable risk looks like, how it walks back from one that has been priced wrongly, and how a coordinator holds discipline when budget, talent, and time pressure all push the other way. Key speaking topics Risk management in high-consequence environments Decision-making under pressure Team coordination on complex productions Safety culture and operational discipline Leadership lessons from the film industry Performance in safety-critical settings Ideal for Operations, safety, and risk leaders in regulated or safety-critical industries Senior leadership teams looking at how their organisation handles high-stakes decisions Project, programme, and transformation leads running complex, time-pressured delivery Conferences and offsites where a credible outside-in voice on risk is wanted Audience outcomes A clearer picture of how a regulated, safety-critical industry sets and enforces standards in practice. A working model for how senior coordinators price risk, brief teams, and make stop-or-go calls under pressure. Recognisable case studies from films and television that translate cleanly into board-level questions about risk and accountability. Sharper instinct for the warning signs that precede a serious incident, drawn from a 40-year operational record.

Why organisations work with Jim Hagemann Snabe He has chaired transformation programmes at Siemens AG and A.P. Møller-Mærsk simultaneously – two of Europe’s most scrutinized industrial reinventions. That makes him a peer reference for boards, not a consultant’s interpretation of what transformation requires. The Dreams and Details framework is a published, practitioner-tested model for holding ambitious organizational direction and disciplined operational execution at the same time. Named Leadership Book of the Year by Lederne, Denmark’s largest leadership organization, it gives leadership teams a common language that survives the boardroom. His decision-making at Maersk included committing the world’s largest container shipping company to a net-zero target from a position of board conviction, not regulatory compliance. For boards navigating ESG commitments under shareholder and market pressure, that precedent is directly relevant. While Co-CEO of SAP, he and Bill McDermott ranked #2 on Glassdoor’s global CEO list with a 99% employee approval rating – while doubling the company’s value. His case that transformation and organizational trust are compatible is backed by a verifiable outcome, not a principle. He holds board-level technology exposure (SAP, C3.ai) and industrial governance leadership (Siemens, Maersk, Allianz) within the same career. Few active board chairs can speak across both sides of the digital transformation argument with equal authority. Biography highlights Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Siemens AG since 2018; Supervisory Board member since 2013 Co-CEO of SAP AG (2010-2014) alongside Bill McDermott; SAP doubled its market value during their tenure Former Chairman of the Board of Directors, A.P. Møller-Mærsk (2017-2022) Member of the World Economic Forum Board of Trustees since 2014; regular contributor to WEF Agenda on AI, digital transformation, and decarbonization Recipient of the Academy of International Business International Executive of the Year Award (2019) Adjunct Professor at Copenhagen Business School (since 2016); teaches leadership, responsible business, and change management Co-author of three books: Dreams and Details (named Leadership Book of the Year, Lederne), Tech for Life (WEF Book Club selection, 2020), and Reinvention from the Boardroom Biography Most organizations find that past success becomes the biggest obstacle to future relevance. Optimizing what already works crowds out the investment and attention needed to build what must come next. Jim Hagemann Snabe, Chairman of Siemens AG and former Co-CEO of SAP, has navigated that tension at the top of some of Europe’s most consequential enterprises for three decades. His co-authored leadership model, Dreams and Details, argues that organizational reinvention requires two things held simultaneously. The first is an inspiring direction – an organizational dream that sets ambition without prescribing a fixed path – that empowers people to find the best route. The second is the operational capability to reach it. Named Leadership Book of the Year by Lederne, Denmark’s largest professional leadership organization, the framework is now embedded in executive programmes run by the Idonea academy and used by major European corporations. As board chairman of A.P. Møller-Mærsk from 2017 to 2022, he was a central figure in the company’s commitment to net-zero shipping – a decision made from governance conviction before regulatory timelines made it obligatory. At Siemens, he chairs a supervisory board responsible for a business spanning energy infrastructure, manufacturing, and healthcare, with revenues exceeding €78 billion. This combination – industrial, logistics, and technology governance, held from direct fiduciary responsibility – is rare among active board chairs. His three co-authored books – Dreams and Details, Tech for Life, and Reinvention from the Boardroom – trace a consistent argument: governance structures must evolve alongside the businesses they oversee. Tech for Life was selected as a World Economic Forum Book Club title in 2020. As a WEF Board of Trustees member and Adjunct Professor at Copenhagen Business School, his ongoing work on AI and decarbonization connects directly with the organizations navigating both. Key speaking topics Corporate governance and board-level reinvention Leadership frameworks for organizational transformation Digital transformation at industrial scale Decarbonization as a strategic leadership challenge Responsible AI and technology governance Stakeholder capitalism and the purpose of business Ideal for Supervisory board members and board directors facing digital or sustainability transformation mandates CEOs and executive leadership teams of large industrial, energy, or technology enterprises Chief Strategy Officers and transformation leads designing reinvention programmes for complex organizations Global leadership and governance forums convening board-level audiences on industrial transformation Audience outcomes A named framework – Dreams and Details – for approaching organizational reinvention without dismantling current performance, applicable at both board and executive level Board-level perspective on how governance structures can actively enable transformation rather than constrain it Practical framing of decarbonization and digital change as strategic leadership priorities rather than compliance exercises Insight into how parallel transformation mandates – technology and sustainability – can be sequenced and governed simultaneously at board level Greater clarity on the difference between managing against a plan and leading toward an inspiring organizational direction that unlocks human potential

Why organisations work with Jim Harris Direct strategic counsel on enterprise AI deployment from a consultant who advises CEOs at IBM, SAP, Walmart, American Express and the UK Cabinet Office on the same decisions A peer-validated authority signal: named 2024 Speaker of the Year by TEC Canada, the Canadian arm of Vistage, an audience of operating chief executives who book speakers for utility, not entertainment An evidence base built across industries undergoing structural disruption, from autonomous vehicles and insurance to retail, financial services and energy, applied to the specific competitive context of the client A clear analytic frame separating product innovation (where most executive attention sits) from business model, process and customer experience innovation (where most of the value sits) Biography highlights #1 international bestseller Blindsided!, published in 80 countries and selected by Soundview Executive Summaries as a best business book of the year TEC Canada Speaker of the Year, February 2024, recognising AI keynotes to chief executives Closing keynote speaker, World Future Society conference Consulting and keynote client roster including Walmart, IBM, SAP, American Express, Barclays, Munich Re, Swiss Re, Zurich Insurance and the UK Cabinet Office Trained personally by former US Vice President Al Gore to deliver An Inconvenient Truth BA in English and Politics, Queen’s University; former representative of the Covey Leadership Center teaching The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People Biography Most enterprise AI investment has produced pilot projects, not operating advantage. The boards funding those pilots increasingly want to know which ones will move the P&L, which ones should be killed, and which competitor’s business model will collapse first as generative AI matures. That is the brief Jim Harris is working against when he sits with an executive team. His authority is built on the consulting side of his career, not the publishing side. Walmart, IBM, SAP, American Express, Barclays, GM, Canon, Munich Re, Swiss Re and the UK Cabinet Office have all retained him for strategic work on disruption and innovation. TEC Canada, part of the Vistage peer network of operating CEOs, named him Speaker of the Year in 2024 specifically for his AI keynotes. The award is meaningful because the audience is buying decision-grade content, not motivation. His core analytic argument is simple. Product innovation gets the budget and the headlines, but reimagining the business model, the process stack and the customer experience is where most of the value moves. Blindsided!, a #1 international bestseller distributed in 80 countries and summarised by Soundview to 80,000 executives, traced that pattern across industries. The current generative AI cycle is the most concentrated test of that argument so far. Harris was trained personally by Al Gore to deliver An Inconvenient Truth and has been the closing keynote speaker at the World Future Society conference. He read English and Politics at Queen’s University and spent the early 1990s representing the Covey Leadership Center, teaching The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People before the consulting practice took over. Key speaking topics Generative AI in the enterprise Disruptive innovation across industries Business model and process redesign Digital transformation strategy Leadership through technological disruption Strategic foresight and scenario planning Sustainability and the energy transition Ideal for CEO, COO and board audiences setting AI and digital strategy Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers and Chief Digital Officers responsible for enterprise AI rollout Strategy and transformation leaders working on business model redesign Executive offsites and senior leadership retreats where the brief is to set direction, not workshop tactics Audience outcomes A sharper view of where in the business AI investment is most likely to convert into margin and where it is being wasted Industry-specific examples of how disruption cascades from a single technology shift into adjacent sectors A working distinction between product, process, business-model and customer-experience innovation, applied to live competitive questions A defensible answer to the question a board will ask next: which of our current bets are pilots, and which are operating commitments

Why organisations work with Jim Knight Twenty years inside Hard Rock International leading global training, not a consultant looking in from outside. The frameworks he teaches were stress-tested across cafes, hotels, and casinos in fifty-plus countries. A culture and service argument anchored in the Culture That Rocks series: Culture That Rocks, Leadership That Rocks and Service That Rocks (the latter two Amazon No. 1 bestsellers), and now Engagement That Rocks, the final book in the series. Four books, one consistent thesis, not a topic catalogue. Practical fluency in the operating mechanics of training, onboarding, and frontline development. The work translates for hospitality, retail, franchise, and any business where the customer meets the brand through a junior employee. A delivery style built for energy-driven audiences. Knight’s background as a music teacher and his Hard Rock pedigree mean conference and franchise audiences treat him as a peer, not an academic visitor. Biography highlights Twenty years leading Global Training and Development for Hard Rock International, including Corporate University, e-learning, and leadership transition programmes. Founder and CEO of Knight Speaker, delivering culture, leadership, service, and engagement programmes worldwide. Author of the Culture That Rocks series: Culture That Rocks (third edition), Leadership That Rocks and Service That Rocks (both Amazon No. 1 bestsellers), and Engagement That Rocks, the final book in the series. Contributing member of the Rolling Stone Culture Council since 2020. Multiple Telly Awards for corporate training video, plus Brandon Hall Gold Best in Class for service recovery e-learning. Lifetime member of CHART. Culture That Rocks featured by Entrepreneur Magazine among the books most likely to change how a business is run. Biography Hard Rock built a global brand on the idea that the cafe, the hotel, and the casino should each feel like a live show. Holding that standard across more than fifty countries is not a marketing job. It is a training job. For two decades, Jim Knight ran that training function. That experience sits behind the Culture That Rocks series. The first book argued that culture is the operating system, not the wallpaper, and was named by Entrepreneur Magazine among the books most likely to change how a business is run. Leadership That Rocks and Service That Rocks carried the thesis into how leaders behave and how the customer feels the brand, and both reached Amazon’s No. 1 spot. Engagement That Rocks, the most recent book in the series, closes it on the argument that engaged employees are the mechanism holding all of it together. The work translates particularly well for organisations whose product is delivered by frontline staff at scale: hospitality, retail, franchise systems, healthcare networks, and any consumer brand where a twenty-year-old in a uniform is the face of a billion-dollar logo. Knight speaks to those audiences as someone who has trained that workforce, not theorised about it. Beyond the speaking practice, he contributes to the Rolling Stone Culture Council and supports No Kid Hungry and Cannonball Kids’ Cancer through book and speaking proceeds. Among bureau-circuit culture speakers, the rarity is the operator pedigree. Most started as consultants. Knight started inside the room. Key speaking topics Organisational culture Customer experience and service differentiation Employee engagement and retention Leadership development Team building and frontline talent Hospitality, franchise, and consumer-brand operations Ideal for CHROs, learning and development leaders, and culture leads in consumer-facing organisations Franchise systems and multi-site operators where culture must scale across independent owners Hospitality, retail, and service-brand leadership audiences Conference and annual-meeting audiences looking for a high-energy culture keynote with operating substance Audience outcomes A working definition of culture as an operating system, with the mechanisms that hold it in place at scale Specific moves on hiring, onboarding, and frontline development drawn from Hard Rock’s training playbook A service-design lens for separating a brand experience from competitor parity Language and structure leaders can use to talk about engagement without falling into wellness-industry generalities

Why organisations work with Jim McNeill He has led teams through more than 40 years of expedition work in the polar regions, including two attempts on the Northern Pole of Inaccessibility, one of the few significant places on Earth never reached on foot. That is a depth of operational pressure most leadership speakers cannot draw from. His career runs across four high-stakes domains: environmental science, the British Army, fire and rescue, where he specialised in road traffic collisions and spent ten years as fire officer to the Royal Household, and professional exploration. Each contributes a distinct lens on how teams hold up when stakes rise. Through the Ice Warrior Project he has trained more than 500 people from non-expedition backgrounds to become polar-competent. That methodology travels directly into corporate teams facing unfamiliar terrain. He is the BBC’s go-to safety consultant and expedition leader on flagship productions including Frozen Planet, Human Planet and The Last Explorers. The credibility cuts through with senior audiences. Climate change is not a topic he has read into; it is four decades of continuous observation from inside the Arctic, which gives the climate-frontline conversation a different weight. Biography highlights Founder of the Ice Warrior Project (2001) and the expanded Global Warrior Project (2022), covering ocean, desert, mountain and jungle environments alongside the polar work. Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society since 1992; Member of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. Fifteen years in fire and rescue, specialising in road traffic collisions, including ten years as fire officer to the Royal Household. Two expeditions targeting the Northern Pole of Inaccessibility (2003, 2006), both ending in extreme circumstances that he uses directly in his leadership material. Safety consultant and expedition leader for BBC Frozen Planet, BBC Human Planet, BBC Natural World, Channel 4 Predators in Paradise, and Marvel’s Captain America. Hosted the Icons Interviewed series in conversation with Sir David Attenborough, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Sir Chris Bonington, Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, and Tracy Edwards MBE, at venues including the Royal Geographical Society and the Natural History Museum. Biography The Northern Pole of Inaccessibility is the point in the Arctic Ocean furthest from any coastline. It has never been reached on foot. McNeill has tried twice, in 2003 and 2006, and on both occasions the expedition ended in conditions that test what leadership actually means when there is no fallback. The 2003 attempt was stopped by necrotising fasciitis. The 2006 attempt ended when the sea ice degraded past the point of safe progress. Most of his keynote material starts in places like this. His route into exploration is unusual. He trained as an environmental scientist at the Grassland Research Institute, served in the British Army, worked in marketing communications, and then spent fifteen years in fire and rescue, specialising in road traffic collisions and including ten years as fire officer to the Royal Household. Each of those careers ran on a different model of risk and command, and he draws on all four when working with senior teams. In 2001 he founded the Ice Warrior Project, built around the idea that ordinary people, properly trained, can perform in environments that almost no professional has access to. From bases in Resolute Bay and later Longyearbyen, he has trained over 500 people and led seven flagship expeditions, gathering citizen-science data on Arctic conditions. In 2022 the model expanded into the Global Warrior Project, taking the same methodology into ocean, desert, mountain and jungle work, with a ten-year ocean programme launched in 2023. The BBC, Channel 4 and Marvel have used him as safety consultant and expedition leader on productions including Frozen Planet, Human Planet and Captain America, and he led BBC Scotland’s The Last Explorers across the Drake Passage with Neil Oliver. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and has hosted in-conversation events at the RGS and the Natural History Museum with Attenborough, Fiennes and Bonington. The point is not the credentials. The point is that almost nobody else can speak about leadership under pressure with four decades of continuous evidence to draw on. Key speaking topics Leadership under pressure Risk and decision-making in critical incidents Team performance in extreme environments Climate change from the Arctic frontline Citizen science and purpose-led teams Resilience and survival Expedition leadership Ideal for Boards, executive committees and CEOs working on how their leadership behaves under genuine pressure rather than in workshop conditions. Operations, safety and risk leaders in industries where decision-making degrades when information thins. Senior teams running large change programmes who need a sharper conversation about trust and command in unfamiliar terrain. Leadership development and offsite audiences who have heard the standard speaker line-up and want a different register. Audience outcomes A clearer picture of how command, communication and trust actually behave when conditions move outside the plan. A sharper sense of how risk is read in real time, drawn from incidents where the cost of misreading was severe. A different way to think about preparation: what is rehearsed, what is delegated, what is held by the leader. A direct, evidence-based account of climate change from inside the Arctic, useful for ESG conversations that have grown abstract. A reset on what a team is capable of when it is selected and trained against a real objective rather than a corporate one.

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

Why organisations work with Joe Mull He has a named, defensible framework, Employalty, that reduces engagement to three operating levers (Ideal Job, Meaningful Work, Great Boss) and links each to retention, reputation and revenue. He brings the credibility of running learning and development inside a major US healthcare employer, UPMC Physician Services, so the content lands with operators rather than HR theorists. He is one of fewer than 300 living speakers inducted into the Professional Speakers Hall of Fame, a body of work recognised by his peers in 2025. Publishers Weekly named Employalty a top business book of the year, which gives the keynote an evidence base buyers can quote back to their executive team. He owns the manager-as-multiplier argument with specific, repeatable behaviours, not generic “be a better boss” framing, which is what a CHRO actually needs to commission a change programme around. Biography highlights 2025 inductee, Professional Speakers Hall of Fame (CPAE), National Speakers Association. Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), NSA. Author of Employalty, named a top business book of the year by Publishers Weekly. Author of No More Team Drama and Cure for the Common Leader. Former Head of Learning and Development, Physician Services, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). Host of Boss Better Now, ranked among the top management podcasts globally. Named to Global Gurus’ Top 30 Management Speakers list in 2026. Contributor to and featured in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, and Harvard Business Review. Biography Engagement scores are a lagging measure of something more basic: whether people have a reason to commit. After three years of forced redesign, employees are choosier, quieter and more willing to walk, and the manager layer is where most organisations lose them. That is the territory Joe Mull works in. His Employalty framework, set out in the book Publishers Weekly named a top business book of the year, names three conditions that decide whether an employee commits or coasts: an Ideal Job, Meaningful Work, and a Great Boss. The argument is operational. Each lever maps to a manager behaviour, and each manager behaviour maps to retention, reputation and revenue. Before he was a keynote speaker, Mull ran learning and development for Physician Services at UPMC, one of the largest physician groups in the United States. That history matters. The content was built inside a healthcare employer under real workforce pressure, not derived from survey data, which is why operators tend to leave his sessions with specific things to change on Monday. In 2025 he was inducted into the Professional Speakers Hall of Fame, a recognition fewer than 1% of professional speakers receive. His podcast Boss Better Now sits among the most-listened-to management shows, and his commentary appears in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune and Harvard Business Review. The through-line across all of it is the same wager: that the quality of bosses, not the quality of perks, decides whether a workforce stays. Key speaking topics Employee commitment and retention The manager-employee relationship as a business lever Workplace culture in the post-pandemic labour market Team dynamics and workplace conflict Leadership development for frontline and mid-level managers Workforce trends and the changing social contract of work Ideal for CHROs and senior HR leaders rebuilding retention and engagement strategy Heads of learning and development designing manager capability programmes Healthcare, hospitality, professional services and other high-turnover sectors CEO and executive offsites where culture and people strategy are on the agenda Audience outcomes A shared language for what actually drives commitment at work, anchored in the Employalty framework A clear read on where the manager layer is creating or destroying retention Specific behaviours managers can adopt to lift discretionary effort A sharper view of the trade-offs between engagement spend and manager capability investment Practical tools for addressing team drama, gossip and the conflict patterns that drain culture

Why organisations work with John Bercow He held the Speaker’s Chair through Brexit and the most contested parliamentary period since the Second World War, and can explain why specific rulings landed the way they did. He worked alongside four prime ministers, from Blair-era Labour through Cameron, May, and Johnson, and reads cross-party Westminster dynamics with insider fluency. He authored The Bercow Report on speech, language and communication needs, a government-commissioned review that produced 40 recommendations and triggered £52 million in committed funding, evidence of policy weight beyond the Speaker’s role. He is Professor of Politics at Royal Holloway and a Fellow at Birkbeck, which gives the analysis academic discipline rather than memoir colour. He brings a confident platform voice, willing to take questions head-on, suited to senior internal audiences who want sharp answers, not diplomatic fog. Biography highlights 157th Speaker of the House of Commons, 2009 to 2019, longest-serving Speaker since Edward FitzRoy. Member of Parliament for Buckingham, 1997 to 2019, elected Speaker at the opening of three consecutive Parliaments. Author of Unspeakable: The Autobiography (Sunday Times bestseller) and Tennis Maestros (Biteback Publishing). Author of The Bercow Report on speech, language and communication needs, commissioned by the UK government. Professor of Politics, Royal Holloway, University of London; Fellow, Birkbeck, University of London. Chaired UK Youth Parliament sittings in the Commons Chamber for a decade. Biography The Speaker’s Chair in the House of Commons is one of the most exposed seats in British public life. Between 2009 and 2019, John Bercow occupied it through the financial crisis aftermath, the coalition years, the EU referendum, and the parliamentary deadlock that followed. He served alongside four prime ministers and was elected Speaker at the start of three consecutive Parliaments, a post-war first. His Brexit-era rulings reshaped the relationship between Parliament and government. In March 2019 he invoked a 1604 convention to block a third vote on the same Withdrawal Agreement, ruling the motion could not return unchanged. That September he called the proposed prorogation of Parliament a “constitutional outrage”. Constitutional scholars at Queen Mary and the Constitution Unit have since framed this period as the most significant power shift between executive and legislature since 1642. Before the Chair, Bercow was the MP for Buckingham from 1997. In 2008 he produced The Bercow Report for the Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Department of Health, a 40-recommendation review of speech, language and communication services that prompted £52 million in committed funding and a National Year of Communication. He chaired UK Youth Parliament sittings in the Commons Chamber annually throughout his Speakership. He is now Professor of Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a Fellow of Birkbeck, University of London. His memoir Unspeakable was a Sunday Times bestseller; Tennis Maestros, drawing on a parallel career as a coach and competitive junior, was published by Biteback. Key speaking topics UK parliamentary process and constitutional convention Westminster political risk and policy direction Brexit and its institutional aftermath The Speaker’s role and parliamentary scrutiny Public policy reform and legislative accountability Leadership and decision-making in contested arenas Ideal for Boards and executive teams with material UK regulatory or policy exposure General counsel, public affairs, and government relations leadership Financial services, professional services, and infrastructure sector leadership tracking Westminster Conferences on governance, democracy, and institutional change Audience outcomes A clearer read of how parliamentary procedure shapes UK policy outcomes that hit corporate plans. A first-hand account of the Brexit rulings and what they revealed about institutional power in Britain. Insight into how four prime ministers handled the Commons differently, and what that says about political leadership under pressure. Sharper questions to ask of in-house political risk and public affairs functions. A perspective on managing dissent, conflict, and high-stakes decisions in formal institutional settings.