Leadership

Why organisations work with David Smith His 7 Principles framework is grounded in a specific, documented corporate turnaround – Asda’s recovery from near-bankruptcy to the UK’s No.1 Sunday Times Best Place to Work – giving boards a case study with traceable outcomes rather than a theoretical model. His book “Culture Trumps Strategy” gives leadership teams a direct, contestable argument: that most organisations are investing disproportionately in strategy and structure while the cultural conditions that determine execution go unmanaged. His book “Bad Bosses,” drawn from interviews with more than 200 CEOs and senior executives, documents the specific leadership behaviours that most consistently destroy engagement – giving HR directors and transformation leads a diagnostic, not a philosophy. He spent a decade on the Executive Board of a 170,000-person, £15bn-turnover business, which means his credibility holds in a boardroom conversation, not just an HR function. As a Companion of the CIPD – the body’s highest membership grade – and former Chairman of the Board of the Institute for Employment Studies, he can position people practice as a serious performance variable rather than a support function. Biography highlights People and IT Director at Asda (2000-2009); Executive Board member for 10 years, responsible for a workforce of 170,000 across a £15bn-turnover business Asda named No.1 Best Place to Work in The Sunday Times Best Companies survey during his tenure; Asda’s People Team also won the Personnel Today Rebus HR Award for Best HR Strategy in Line with Business Author of four books: “Asda Magic: The 7 Principles of Building a High-Performance Culture” (2012), “Culture Trumps Strategy” (2016), “Performance Management for the 21st Century” (2018), and “Bad Bosses” (2019) Companion of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development – the highest membership grade in the UK’s principal HR professional body Former Chairman of the Board, Institute for Employment Studies; former Commissioner, Equal Opportunities Commission; former Vice President of the CIPD for Organisation and Development Recipient of the Sam Walton Award for driving Excellence in People Policies MBA, Henley Management College; BA Business, Sheffield Hallam University Biography Most large organisations treat culture as a byproduct of leadership behaviour – something that forms over time, rather than something that is actively built. David Smith’s 15 years at Asda, where the people-led turnaround from near-bankruptcy to the UK’s No.1 Best Place to Work took roughly a decade and a half, produced a different conclusion: that culture is an engineered system, and that the principles governing it are specific and reproducible. His first book, “Asda Magic: The 7 Principles of Building a High-Performance Culture” (2012), translated that experience into a practical framework. Its argument – that employee engagement is the product of specific managed behaviours, not general sentiment – gave HR directors and CEOs a diagnostic tool rather than an aspiration. “Culture Trumps Strategy” (2016) extended the thesis: that organisations consistently over-invest in strategy and structure while underinvesting in the cultural conditions that determine whether strategy executes. Two further books addressed adjacent dysfunction. “Performance Management for the 21st Century” (2018) made the case against annual review-based systems, arguing that only regular performance coaching – not periodic appraisal – actually changes behaviour at scale. “Bad Bosses” (2019) drew on interviews with more than 200 CEOs and executives to document the leadership pitfalls that consistently destroy engagement from inside an organisation. A Companion of the CIPD and former Chairman of the Board of the Institute for Employment Studies, Smith bridges executive credibility and evidence-based people practice. His audiences include CHROs, chief executives, and transformation programme leads asking why significant investment in organisational change is not translating into measurable performance. Key speaking topics High-performance culture and employee engagement Performance management and performance coaching Culture transformation and change leadership Leadership in tough times The relationship between culture and commercial performance Communication as an organisational performance lever Managing and retaining talent in a high-performance environment Ideal for CHROs and HR directors leading culture or engagement programmes CEOs and executive teams mid-transformation seeking a cultural diagnostic Board-level and C-suite leadership development programmes Senior leaders in large, complex, or multi-site organisations Audience outcomes A specific, practical framework for diagnosing the cultural gap between stated values and daily managed reality A clearer understanding of why performance management systems fail – and what a coaching-based alternative requires Named leadership behaviours that most predictably drive disengagement – and the organisational cost of tolerating them A case study with traceable outcomes that makes the business case for culture investment to a commercially focused audience Practical language for communicating culture and engagement priorities to boards and executive teams

Why organisations work with Brandon Williams He brings a Human Factors academic record alongside the cockpit story. Fifteen years teaching the discipline at university level means his frameworks are the ones aviation safety regulators use, translated for boards and operating teams. His Just Culture model gives leaders a usable answer to the question of how to hold people accountable without destroying the candour that surfaces problems early. Most safety and conduct programmes fail on exactly this trade-off. His structured debrief practice converts incidents and near misses into organisational learning at a pace most corporate retros cannot match. It is the operating ritual fighter squadrons use to improve every cycle. His audience is the leadership team that has run out of patience with motivational speakers and wants the actual mechanism: clear intent, situational awareness, mutual support, decision-making under uncertainty. He has tested these frameworks with operating leadership at Deloitte, Northwell Health, Baptist Health, Global Atlantic Financial and Hertz, not only on conference stages. Biography highlights US Air Force Academy graduate and decorated Lieutenant Colonel, United States Air Force. F-15E fighter pilot with hundreds of combat hours over Iraq and Afghanistan. Captain at a major US commercial airline and serving US Air Force Safety Officer. Adjunct professor of Human Factors at university level for approximately 15 years. CEO and Founder of Lead-Tac, a leadership development firm. Client engagements include Deloitte, Hertz, Northwell Health, Baptist Health, Global Atlantic Financial, National Association of Federally-Insured Credit Unions. Biography Aviation worked out how to make high-stakes teams perform reliably under conditions of uncertainty long before the corporate world had a vocabulary for it. The cockpit runs on Human Factors, Just Culture, structured debrief and disciplined situational awareness. Brandon Williams spent two decades inside that system as an F-15E fighter pilot, decorated Lieutenant Colonel and US Air Force Safety Officer, then another fifteen years teaching the underlying discipline as a university adjunct. The work he does with senior leadership teams is the translation layer. Lead-Tac, the firm he founded, takes the operating mechanics of the cockpit, clear intent, mutual support, debrief, accountability without blame, and rebuilds them for boards, operating teams and frontline leaders carrying the weight of a complex business. His Just Culture framework addresses the most common failure mode in corporate accountability. Punish the error and the next one stays hidden. Excuse the error and standards collapse. He shows leaders the structured middle path that aviation has used to drive incident rates down for forty years, and how to install the equivalent in a commercial operating environment. His client list, Deloitte, Northwell Health, Baptist Health, Global Atlantic Financial, Hertz, the National Association of Federally-Insured Credit Unions, runs through sectors where decision quality under pressure is the constraint on performance. That is the room he is built for. Key speaking topics Leadership under uncertainty and complexity Human Factors in high-performing teams Just Culture and psychological safety Decision-making under pressure Structured debrief and operating-rhythm learning High-reliability organisations Situational awareness for senior teams Safety leadership and accountability Ideal for C-suite and operating leadership in regulated, high-consequence sectors (healthcare, financial services, energy, industrial). Chief Safety Officers, Heads of Operational Risk and quality leadership building a Just Culture programme. Sales and commercial leadership teams operating under volatile market conditions. Boards seeking a working model for accountability that protects candour. Audience outcomes A working definition of Just Culture and a clear test for whether their organisation has one. The Human Factors lens on why competent teams still make predictable errors under load. A structured debrief method usable inside their own operating rhythm from the following Monday. Language for situational awareness, mutual support and clear intent that gives senior teams a shared vocabulary under pressure. A direct read on the difference between aviation-grade reliability practice and the safety theatre most corporate programmes default to.

Why organisations work with Stefaan van Hooydonk His Global Curiosity Institute has developed individual and organisational diagnostic tools deployed across 16 multinational companies. This means organisations can baseline their curiosity culture before investing in it – a rigour that most L&D and culture interventions do not offer. His core argument is specific and verifiable: 90% of the leaders in his research say investing in curiosity is important for innovation; 50% simultaneously believe innovation distracts from operational focus. That contradiction is not an attitude problem – it is a structural design problem, and he has a method for resolving it. His six Fortune 200 CLO appointments – including Cognizant, where he led learning for more than 300,000 associates globally – mean his diagnostic model was stress-tested against the same conformity pressures he now advises organisations to overcome. Curiosity: The Secret Ingredient for Success in Personal and Professional Growth (Capstone, 2025) provides a durable, publishable framework that sustains the conversation in organisations well beyond a single event. Having lived and worked in nine countries across Europe and Asia, his account of how cultures differ in their relationship to curiosity and conformity is grounded in direct, cross-cultural professional experience – not comparative research conducted at a distance. Biography highlights Founder, Global Curiosity Institute; developer of individual and organisational curiosity diagnostic tools, applied in 16 multinational companies across a 500-person study Former Chief Learning Officer at Cognizant (L&D responsibility for 300,000+ associates), Royal Philips, Nokia, Saudi Aramco, Agfa Healthcare, and Flipkart Set up and led the executive education arm of the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai Author of The Workplace Curiosity Manifesto (2022) and Curiosity: The Secret Ingredient for Success in Personal and Professional Growth (Capstone, 2025) Executive MBA, Rutgers University; master’s degrees in Economics and Chinese; postgraduate study in Cross-Cultural Management (France); certified executive coach Has lived and worked in nine countries across Europe and Asia Biography The idea that organisations want curious employees rarely survives contact with the way most organisations are actually designed. As companies scale, they reward consistency, structure incentives around delivery, and create management cultures in which asking the wrong question carries professional risk. Stefaan van Hooydonk spent more than two decades inside that structural tension – as Chief Learning Officer at six Fortune 200 companies including Cognizant, Royal Philips, Nokia, Saudi Aramco, Agfa Healthcare, and Flipkart. What distinguishes his perspective is the precision of his diagnosis. Working through the Global Curiosity Institute, van Hooydonk developed two empirical tools: an individual curiosity profile measuring three dimensions of inquisitiveness – toward the world, toward others, and toward oneself – and a nine-dimension organisational diagnostic assessing conditions from psychological safety and manager behaviour to failure acceptance and vision clarity. These instruments have been applied across 16 multinationals and studied across 500 professionals. The research revealed a core tension: 90% of leaders surveyed said investing in curiosity supports innovation, yet 50% simultaneously said innovation distracts from operational efficiency. This is not a values gap. It is a structural contradiction embedded in how most organisations function. His two books – The Workplace Curiosity Manifesto (2022) and Curiosity: The Secret Ingredient for Success in Personal and Professional Growth (Capstone, 2025) – develop the argument in full. The central thesis: curiosity is not a personality trait but a learnable, measurable capability that atrophies in environments that reward conformity. At Cognizant, his final corporate appointment, van Hooydonk oversaw learning and development for more than 300,000 associates across a global workforce. That scale makes the question of how environments either enable or suppress curiosity concrete in a way that purely academic research cannot replicate. Having lived and worked in nine countries across Europe and Asia, van Hooydonk brings an account of curiosity as a culturally shaped organisational condition – one that looks different in a Finnish engineering firm, an Indian e-commerce company, and a Gulf energy business, but is subject to the same structural suppressants in all of them. Key speaking topics Workplace curiosity as an organisational capability Intentional curiosity and learning culture design Curiosity-driven leadership Organisational curiosity diagnostics and measurement Building learning organisations Curiosity and innovation at scale Corporate learning strategy Ideal for CHROs and CLOs driving learning culture or capability transformation Senior HR and L&D leaders designing or evaluating learning ecosystems Leadership teams in large organisations where learning agility and adaptability are strategic priorities Boards and senior executives examining organisational resilience and the cultural conditions that support it Audience outcomes A clear, evidence-based account of why large organisations structurally suppress curiosity – and why standard L&D investment does not resolve it Familiarity with a three-part curiosity model (world, others, self) as a practical design language for leadership and team development Understanding of the nine organisational dimensions that enable or limit curiosity, drawn from research across 16 multinational companies A set of specific, actionable moves – applicable to managers, HR teams, and executives – for building conditions where intentional curiosity is measurable and sustained A framework for distinguishing curiosity as a capability from curiosity as a cultural aspiration – and for making the former real

Why organisations work with Toby Moody Eighteen years as the voice of MotoGP on Eurosport, now leading the international TV feed and BT Sport’s 4K coverage, gives him a vocabulary for high-stakes live performance most speakers only describe second-hand. Eight Dakar Rally campaigns as lead international feed commentator, on site across three continents, mean his material on operating under fatigue, equipment failure and shifting conditions comes from inside the bivouac. Hands-on team experience as Media Manager for Prodrive’s Bahrain Raid Xtreme World Rally Raid team and consultant to KTM’s board for the Red Bull KTM MotoGP programme, not just an outside view of motorsport. Cross-code authority across MotoGP, the British Touring Car Championship, FIA World Endurance, the X Games and Red Bull Global RallyCross lets him tailor the same themes for engineering, logistics and sponsorship audiences. A trusted hospitality host for Audi Sport at Le Mans, Porsche Motorsport press conferences and Goodwood Festival of Speed, with the moderation and emcee craft to carry a corporate room as well as a paddock. Biography highlights Lead commentator on MotoGP for the international TV feed and on BT Sport’s MotoGP 4K coverage. Eighteen years as Eurosport’s MotoGP voice, with Julian Ryder as commentary partner for fourteen of those years. Eight-time lead international feed commentator on the Dakar Rally, on site. Lead ITV4 commentator for the British Touring Car Championship and British Superbike Championship. FIA World Endurance Championship and Le Mans 24 Hours commentary; X Games motorsports commentator for ESPN; Red Bull Global RallyCross lead commentator for NBC and Red Bull TV. Trackside commentator at the Goodwood Festival of Speed and Revival; Audi Sport presenter at the Le Mans 24-hour arena; Media Manager for Prodrive’s Bahrain Raid Xtreme Dakar team, 2022-2024. Biography The MotoGP race weekend runs to a brutal schedule. Free practice, qualifying, warm-up, race, with riders, engineers and broadcasters all working off the same timing screens. Someone has to make sense of it live, in English, for a global audience that will notice every mistake. For most of the modern MotoGP era, that voice has been Toby Moody’s. Moody began commentating at Shelsley Walsh hill climb at 18, after working as a mechanic at Benetton F1 and Prodrive in school holidays. A contact at Prodrive led to a MotoGP commentary slot in Spain that became eighteen years as the lead voice for Eurosport, with Julian Ryder as partner for fourteen of them. He now leads commentary on the MotoGP international TV feed and on BT Sport’s 4K coverage. The breadth around that core matters. Eight Dakar Rally campaigns as lead international feed commentator, on site across Africa, South America and Saudi Arabia. FIA World Endurance Championship and Le Mans commentary. ITV4 lead on the British Touring Car and British Superbike championships. X Games motorsports commentary for ESPN, and Red Bull Global RallyCross for NBC. Trackside roles at the Goodwood Festival of Speed and Revival. The point for corporate audiences is range: live performance pressure tested across very different sports, formats and cultures. He has also worked inside the teams, not only the broadcast booth. Canon Williams F1 PR in the early 1990s. Two British Rally titles with Nissan as PR. Media Manager for Prodrive’s Bahrain Raid Xtreme team in the World Rally Raid Championship from 2022 to 2024, working with Sebastien Loeb. Consultant to KTM’s board for the Red Bull KTM MotoGP team. That dual track, broadcast and team operations, is what gives his corporate material specificity that pure presenters do not have. Key speaking topics Live broadcasting and composure under pressure MotoGP, Dakar Rally and Le Mans paddock storytelling Team performance and decision-making in elite motorsport Motorsport sponsorship, hospitality and brand activation Conference moderation, emcee and after-dinner hosting Cross-code motorsport: bikes, cars, endurance and rally raid Ideal for Corporate hospitality and client events at MotoGP rounds, Le Mans, the Dakar Rally and Goodwood Sales kick-offs and annual conferences looking for a named motorsport voice to host or headline Engineering, operations and supply chain leadership audiences drawn to precision-under-pressure themes Automotive, motorcycle and motorsport sponsor activations needing an industry-trusted moderator Audience outcomes A practitioner’s view of how factory race teams prepare for events they cannot fully predict. Stories from inside the MotoGP paddock and the Dakar bivouac that make performance under pressure tangible. A clearer sense of how a single voice and a clear running order hold a long, volatile live event together. Material that lands with motorsport enthusiasts in the room and colleagues who have never watched a race.

Why organisations work with Robin Horsfall Inside account of Operation Nimrod, the 1980 Iranian Embassy hostage rescue, from a member of the assault team. Few speakers can describe high-stakes coordinated action with this level of first-hand authority. Permission to talk about fear at senior level. Horsfall’s book Fighting Scared is built around the argument that competence and fear coexist, which lands differently in a room of executives than standard resilience material. A career arc that puts setback at the centre rather than the margin. Boy soldier, SAS operator, bodyguard, karate school founder, broken neck, cancer survivor, mature undergraduate at Surrey. Useful for audiences in restructure, post-shock recovery or repeated reinvention. Live military analysis credibility. His ongoing commentary on the Russia-Ukraine war has built a substantial public following and is grounded in operational experience, not punditry. A direct, unsentimental voice. He is not a corporate keynote in uniform. He pushes back, takes questions hard, and gives a room something to argue about on the way home. Biography highlights Joined the British Army at 15; full member of the Parachute Regiment from 1974, with three operational tours of Northern Ireland. Badged to B Squadron, 22 SAS in May 1979; part of the assault team on the Iranian Embassy in London on 5 May 1980 that rescued 19 hostages. Author of Fighting Scared: My Life in the SAS (Cassell Military, 2002) and the trilogy The Words of the Wise Old Paratrooper. Author of Slava Ukraini. Who Dares Shares! (2023), an observational diary of the first 18 months of the Russia-Ukraine war. Featured in the BAFTA-winning documentary SAS Embassy Siege. BA (Hons) English Literature and Creative Writing, University of Surrey, 2:1, as a mature undergraduate. 6th Dan Shukokai karate; founder of London Shukokai Karate (1994) and London Karate Limited (1999). Biography The Iranian Embassy in Princes Gate was held for six days in 1980 before the SAS went in. Robin Horsfall was 23, badged to B Squadron the year before, and part of the assault team that ended the siege in roughly seventeen minutes and freed 19 hostages. That single operation is one of the most studied hostage rescues in modern policing and special forces history, and it gives his work with leadership audiences an evidence base most speakers in the resilience category do not have. Before Princes Gate he had already done three tours of Northern Ireland with the Parachute Regiment, having joined the army at 15. After it he served further tours, qualified as an emergency medical technician and as a sniper, and left the regular army in 1984. The next decade put him through territory most corporate audiences only hear about: close protection work in the Middle East, contract soldiering, building and running a medical reception centre in Guyana, founding a karate school in London that he ran for almost two decades. His book Fighting Scared (Cassell Military, 2002) is the spine of the keynote. The thesis is not that elite soldiers are unafraid. It is that fear, properly handled, is part of the discipline. He brings the same argument to senior teams facing restructure, public scrutiny, or decisions they cannot delay. Audiences hear how operators are actually trained to absorb shock, recover and act, and what that means for the way executives prepare themselves and the people around them. The later chapters of his story are also part of why he resonates with serious leadership audiences. He broke his neck in 2012, took a 2:1 in English Literature at Surrey as a mature undergraduate, survived bladder cancer in 2018, and built a large public following through his daily analysis of the Russia-Ukraine war. The career is unusual. The throughline, composure under pressure and a refusal to let setback define the next decision, is what executive audiences end up taking with them. Key speaking topics Decision-making under pressure Composure and self-leadership in crisis Resilience after physical and personal setback Lessons from elite military teams for high-performance cultures Fear, courage and the realities of operational performance Recovery, reinvention and lifelong learning Russia-Ukraine war and the lived experience of conflict Ideal for Senior leadership offsites focused on composure, crisis decision-making and team performance Executive development programmes for newly senior leaders being tested under live pressure Sales, operations and frontline leadership conferences where performance under stress is the theme Veterans, public service and security sector audiences engaging with leadership and recovery Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for fear, preparation and recovery that senior leaders can use with their own teams A clearer view of how elite teams actually train for the first minutes of a crisis, and what transfers into corporate decision-making A reset on what resilience means when separated from wellness industry framing Specific reference points from Operation Nimrod and post-military reinvention that audiences can carry into their own context

Why organisations work with Wesley K. Clark Operational command at the highest level of NATO, including the Kosovo air campaign, gives him a direct read on how modern conflict, escalation, and alliance decision-making actually work. Two decades of advisory work across oil, gas, power, batteries, and finance through Wesley K. Clark and Associates and Energy Security Partners, so the geopolitics connects to capital and supply. A book-length argument, Don’t Wait for the Next War, on linking U.S. energy strength, fiscal capacity, and security strategy, which gives boards a coherent framework rather than a news commentary. Standing as a Senior Fellow at UCLA’s Burkle Center and a director of the Atlantic Council, both of which signal a serious institutional reading of foreign policy rather than punditry. Track record in front of senior audiences as a CNN military analyst and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, so the room treats him as a principal, not a presenter. Biography highlights Supreme Allied Commander Europe, NATO, 1997 to 2000; commanded Operation Allied Force in Kosovo. Valedictorian of the West Point class of 1966; Rhodes Scholar in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford. Author of four books, including Waging Modern War, Winning Modern War, A Time to Lead, and Don’t Wait for the Next War. Presidential Medal of Freedom; Defense Distinguished Service Medal (five awards); Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart; Commander of the French Legion of Honor. Senior Fellow at UCLA’s Burkle Center for International Relations; director, Atlantic Council. Chairman of Wesley K. Clark and Associates and Energy Security Partners; advisor or board member to more than 90 companies across energy, finance, and security. Biography The Kosovo air campaign in 1999 was the first sustained combat operation NATO had ever fought as an alliance. The commander running it was Wesley Clark, then the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, and the experience of holding nineteen governments together through 78 days of war became the spine of his subsequent thinking on conflict, alliance management, and political risk. His training was not narrowly military. Clark graduated as valedictorian of the West Point class of 1966, took a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford for Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and went on to a 38-year career that included Vietnam combat, U.S. Southern Command, and authorship of the U.S. National Military Strategy. He retired as a four-star general with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and honorary knighthoods from Britain and the Netherlands. The work since uniform has been almost entirely about how strategy, capital, and security fit together. Through Wesley K. Clark and Associates and Energy Security Partners, he has advised more than 90 companies across oil, gas, power, batteries, and finance. His book Don’t Wait for the Next War argues that American energy capacity, fiscal discipline, and global posture have to be planned as a single system, not three separate debates. That is the perspective he brings into a boardroom. Not running commentary on the day’s headlines, but a coherent reading of how energy supply, alliance behaviour, and great-power competition translate into decisions a senior leadership team has to make about exposure, capital, and timing. Key speaking topics Geopolitical risk and great-power competition NATO, alliance dynamics, and the rules-based order Energy security and the strategic role of energy supply U.S. foreign policy and national security strategy Leadership and decision-making under operational pressure Conflict, escalation, and modern warfare Ideal for Boards and executive committees pricing geopolitical and sanctions exposure CSOs, heads of strategy, and corporate development teams reassessing global footprint Energy, defence, financial services, and infrastructure leadership audiences Government affairs and risk leaders briefing boards on alliance and policy shifts Audience outcomes A clearer view of how NATO, U.S., and allied decision-making actually moves in a crisis A working read on how energy supply and capital allocation interact with security policy A sharper sense of which geopolitical risks are durable and which are noise Direct exposure to what command-level decision-making under pressure looks like

Why organisations work with Mike Lee Direct credibility transfer from elite sport. Fifteen years coaching NBA MVPs Stephen Curry and Joel Embiid, plus Malcolm Brogdon, gives audiences a vocabulary for high performance that lands harder than any management framework. A useable account of mental health from the inside. Lee built his methodology while working through severe anxiety, depression and antidepressant withdrawal, which lets him talk about wellbeing without the abstraction that usually surrounds it in corporate settings. A specific argument about belonging. The book New Rules For The Future Of Leadership makes engagement, talent and belonging culture a single connected problem, useful for CHROs trying to defend headcount and engagement budgets in the same conversation. An unusually low-friction speaker for the brief. Bureau testimonials repeatedly call out preparation and adaptability, which matters when the room is a board offsite rather than a conference plenary. Biography highlights Founder, MindShift Labs, a performance and leadership consultancy. Author, New Rules For The Future Of Leadership (Heartmind Media, 2023). Fifteen years coaching elite basketball, including NBA MVPs Stephen Curry and Joel Embiid and Rookie of the Year Malcolm Brogdon. Host of The MindShift Lab podcast, with guests including Mo Gawdat (formerly Google X) and Cy Wakeman. Keynote and workshop client list: Google, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Deloitte, IBM, Cisco, American Family Insurance, BMO Harris, ALPLA, and SHRM. Biography Elite athletes have always operated under conditions that resemble what senior corporate leaders now face every day: high stakes, public scrutiny, narrow margins between winning and losing, and almost no recovery time. The transfer of how that world handles performance is more useful to organisations than another framework borrowed from management literature. Lee spent fifteen years inside that world. He built an international basketball training business from a college apartment and ended up working with NBA MVPs Stephen Curry and Joel Embiid, and Rookie of the Year Malcolm Brogdon, among others. While the business grew, he was also working through severe anxiety, depression and the withdrawal from antidepressant medication. The combination of elite-performance coaching and a personal route through mental health is what shaped the methodology he now brings to corporate audiences. That methodology is set out in New Rules For The Future Of Leadership (Heartmind Media, 2023). The book argues that engagement, the contest for talent and the felt experience of belonging are the same operating problem, and that leaders need both the composure of a mindful practitioner and the mindset of an elite athlete to address it. It draws on neuroscience, sports psychology and his own first-person experience. Lee now runs MindShift Labs and works with companies including Google, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Deloitte, IBM, Cisco, American Family Insurance, BMO Harris, and ALPLA, alongside professional bodies such as SHRM. His podcast, The MindShift Lab, ran twenty-nine episodes between 2021 and 2022 with guests including Mo Gawdat, formerly Chief Business Officer at Google X. Key speaking topics High-performance leadership Engagement and belonging culture Mindfulness and presence at work Mental health and burnout Resilience under uncertainty Peak performance psychology Talent and retention Ideal for CHROs and people leaders carrying engagement, retention and culture targets. Senior leadership offsites where performance and wellbeing need to be addressed in the same room. Sales, client-facing and high-pressure commercial teams. Talent and learning leads designing leadership development at the manager and director tier. Audience outcomes A practical view of how elite athletes manage focus, recovery and pressure, applied to corporate conditions. A clearer line between belonging culture and the commercial cost of attrition. Specific mindfulness and presence techniques leaders can use before a high-stakes conversation, not as a wellbeing perk. A more honest internal language for mental health that senior leaders can use without sounding either performative or clinical.

Why organisations work with Tabitha Goldstaub She chaired the UK Government’s AI Council for five years – a formal, operational appointment made by two Secretaries of State – which means she understands AI governance from the inside of the policy process, not from commentary on it. Her book How to Talk to Robots (HarperCollins, 2020) made a specific and publicly documented argument: that AI systems inherit the biases of those who build them, and that who governs AI is a governance question, not a diversity exercise. The argument travels directly into boardroom and leadership settings. As co-founder and Festival Director of CogX – which grew to 6,500 delegates and over 370 speakers at its peak – she has an unusually accurate read on how organisations across sectors are actually navigating AI adoption, rather than how they say they are. She sits on the board of Luminate, the international organisation focused on ensuring Big Tech and AI platforms respect human rights – giving her live insight into how civil society and regulators are evaluating the conduct of AI companies. Biography highlights Former Chair, UK Government’s AI Council (2018–2023); appointed AI Business Champion by the Secretary of State for DCMS MBE in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to the artificial intelligence sector Author of How to Talk to Robots (HarperCollins, 2020); reviewed in the Financial Times Co-founder and Festival Director of CogX, which grew to 6,500 delegates and 370+ speakers Co-founder of Rightster (now Brave Bison), which floated for £20.4 million in 2013 Amy Johnson Inspiration Award, Women’s Engineering Society, 2018 Named in Computer Weekly’s Most Influential Women in Technology (2023) and London Evening Standard Progress 1000 Board member, Luminate; Non-Executive Director, Innovate Cambridge Biography Boards are being asked to sign off on significant AI investment while carrying little of the institutional knowledge needed to govern it responsibly. Tabitha Goldstaub MBE chaired the UK Government’s AI Council from 2018 to 2023 – the expert body that advised government on national AI strategy, responsible adoption, and societal impact. That appointment, made by two Secretaries of State, put her at the operational centre of the UK’s AI policy architecture at the moment it was being built. Her book How to Talk to Robots (HarperCollins, 2020), reviewed in the Financial Times, made a specific argument: that AI systems inherit the biases of those who design and govern them, and that widening who holds those roles is not a diversity initiative but a governance imperative. The Women’s Engineering Society gave her its Amy Johnson Inspiration Award in 2018 for advancing that case through her public roles. As co-founder and Festival Director of CogX, she built one of Europe’s largest annual AI leadership summits – growing it from 1,500 delegates at its founding in 2017 to over 6,500 in 2018, with more than 370 speakers on programme. That scale gave her a consistently clear view of where organisations across sectors are actually struggling with AI adoption, as distinct from the positions they present publicly. She now serves on the board of Luminate – the international organisation working to ensure that Big Tech and AI platforms respect human rights – and as Non-Executive Director of Innovate Cambridge. Named in Computer Weekly’s Most Influential Women in Technology in 2023, she is one of the few speakers in this space who has operated across government policy, commercial technology, and civil society governance at the same time. Key speaking topics AI governance and organisational accountability Responsible AI and ethics in practice AI policy and the regulatory landscape AI bias, inclusion, and structural risk Leadership decision-making in the age of AI Building AI literacy at board and executive level Technology entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystems Ideal for Boards and audit or risk committees developing AI governance frameworks C-suite and senior leadership teams setting or reviewing AI strategy Public sector and regulated industry leaders navigating emerging AI policy Technology and digital transformation leads in organisations deploying AI at scale Audience outcomes A clearer framework for understanding what responsible AI adoption requires at leadership and governance level Greater confidence discussing AI accountability with technical teams, regulators, and boards Practical understanding of the policy and regulatory environment shaping AI deployment in the UK and Europe Sharper awareness of where AI bias risks arise and what governance mechanisms are available to address them Context for evaluating AI proposals, investments, or vendor relationships with more informed scrutiny

Why organisations work with Brian Keating His argument about incentive systems is not borrowed from management theory. He conceived a Nobel-contending experiment, experienced a public retraction, served as a Nobel nominator, and co-founded the Simons Observatory: a $100M project involving 380+ scientists across 40+ institutions. The authority is operational. Losing the Nobel Prize (W.W. Norton, 2018) makes a specific structural case that endorsers including Brian Greene and reviewers in Nature, Science, and Scientific American have engaged with seriously: the systems organisations use to reward individuals actively prevent the inclusive, rigorous, collaborative work that produces real discovery. Into the Impossible (2021) draws from first-person conversations with 11 Nobel laureates to identify the specific mental habits (disciplined curiosity, tolerance for failure, sustained collaboration), that distinguish people who achieve genuine breakthroughs from those who optimise for recognition. He gives boards and senior leaders a precise structural vocabulary for why innovation programmes underperform: not insufficient ambition or budget, but reward architecture that was never designed for collaborative, long-horizon work. As co-director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination at UC San Diego, he bridges frontier scientific thinking and the broader question of how organisations cultivate the conditions for original thought. Biography highlights Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics, Center for Astrophysics & Space Sciences, University of California San Diego Principal Investigator and co-founder, Simons Observatory – a four-telescope array in Chile’s Atacama Desert involving 380+ scientists and engineers from 40+ institutions, with approximately $100M in funding raised Inventor of the BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) telescope; co-leads the POLARBEAR2 and Simons Array experiments Author of Losing the Nobel Prize (W.W. Norton, 2018), reviewed in Nature, Science, and Scientific American, and endorsed by theoretical physicist Brian Greene Author of Into the Impossible (2021) and Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner (2025), drawing on first-person interviews with Nobel laureates across physics, economics, and beyond U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers; Fellow of the American Physical Society; Buchalter Cosmology Prize; 2022 Legend of Flight, International Air & Space Hall of Fame Host of the Into the Impossible podcast – long-form conversations with Nobel laureates, scientists, and technologists – with more than 200,000 subscribers Biography Organisations that fund innovation but reward speed tend to get neither. The dynamic is structural, not cultural: when recognition flows to individuals who move fast and announce loudly, the slow, rigorous, collaborative work that genuine breakthroughs require becomes a career liability. Brian Keating has spent more than two decades inside that tension. Not observing it from the outside, but navigating it at the frontier of experimental cosmology. Keating is the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California San Diego and Principal Investigator of the Simons Observatory, a four-telescope array in Chile’s Atacama Desert that he co-founded in 2016. The project grew to involve more than 380 scientists and engineers from over 40 institutions, with Keating raising approximately $100 million in funding from the Simons Foundation. Keating teaches undergraduate quantum mechanics at UC San Diego in the same weeks he records long-form conversations with Nobel laureates on the Into the Impossible podcast. Guests have included Roger Penrose, Frank Wilczek, Sara Seager, and Andrei Linde. Active experimental research alongside sustained engagement with the field’s most consequential thinkers is the working basis from which he addresses two questions senior audiences are now asking him directly: what AI does to the scientific method, and what is happening to the research university as a credentialing and funding institution. Managing that collaboration across disciplines, institutions, competitive pressures, and high-stakes scientific uncertainty is the practical foundation on which his speeches rest. That argument appears explicitly in Losing the Nobel Prize (W.W. Norton, 2018). Keating, who conceived the original BICEP telescope and was closely involved in the BICEP2 collaboration whose findings made global headlines before being retracted, uses the experience to make a case that extends well beyond physics: the Nobel Prize, as structured, rewards individual speed and competition while punishing the inclusive, methodical, collaborative work that real discoveries require. Reviewed in Nature, Science, and Scientific American, and endorsed by physicist Brian Greene, the book gives senior audiences a precise structural vocabulary for a problem most organisations recognise but struggle to name. The follow-up volumes, Into the Impossible (2021) and Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner (2025), draw on first-person interviews with Nobel laureates across physics and economics to identify the working habits that distinguish genuine breakthrough thinkers from those who optimise for recognition. Keating is also co-director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination at UC San Diego, a recipient of the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a 2022 Legend of Flight inductee at the International Air & Space Hall of Fame. His podcast, also titled Into the Impossible, has reached more than 200,000 subscribers and has hosted over 11 Nobel Prize winners. Key speaking topics Incentive systems, innovation culture, and the structural conditions for breakthrough Large-scale scientific collaboration and high-stakes research leadership AI and the future of scientific discovery, peer review, and the research workflow The structural future of higher education and the research university Cosmology, the cosmic microwave background, and the science of the early universe The culture of ambition and discovery in high-performance environments Failure, resilience, and the creative habits of exceptional thinkers The future of curiosity-driven research in an era of AI and data Ideal for Chief Innovation Officers, R&D leaders, and boards wrestling with why innovation programmes underdeliver Senior executive teams in science- and technology-intensive industries (pharma, aerospace, deep tech, energy) where collaboration at scale is a strategic challenge University presidents, provosts, and trustee boards addressing the AI-driven restructuring of higher education and the legitimacy questions facing research institutions Foundations, philanthropic funders of science, and policy bodies designing the next generation of research grants, prizes, and incentive structures Audience outcomes A clear structural diagnosis of why incentive systems that reward individual speed and visibility tend to suppress the collaborative, rigorous work that genuine breakthroughs require Practical examples – drawn from one of the most ambitious scientific projects of the past decade – of how large, distributed collaborations can be designed and sustained under uncertainty A set of mental habits and working practices, sourced from conversations with Nobel laureates, that distinguish breakthrough thinkers from those who optimise for recognition A more precise vocabulary for discussing innovation culture with boards and leadership teams – one grounded in evidence, not aspiration Perspective on how organisational ambition can be redirected from visible short-term wins toward the patient, inclusive work that produces durable results

About Clive Tyldesley Clive Tyldesley is a television sports broadcaster. He was ITV’s senior football commentator from 1998 until 2020. In that role, he has led the ITV commentary team at four World Cups and four European Championships, and been lead commentator on 17 UEFA Champions League finals and a commentator on nine FA Cup finals for ITV. He won the prestigious Royal Television Society Sports Commentator of the Year in 1998, 2000, 2002 and 2005, and was voted the Sony Radio Awards’ Sports Broadcaster of the Year in 1983. He currently serves as a commentator for ITV Sport, Amazon Prime, TalkSPORT, CBS/Paramount Plus in USA and Rangers Football Club on their in-house Rangers TV service. In 2021 his first book was published by Headline: the semi-autobiographical ‘Not for me, Clive’. Following requests from his social media followers Clive has also made prints of his famous commentary charts available to purchase online. Tyldesley was born in Radcliffe, Lancashire, and was educated at Bury Grammar School, Kirkham Grammar School and the University of Nottingham. He obtained an honours degree in Industrial Economics, but always wanted to pursue a career in sports commentating. In June 1975, he began his broadcast career straight from university with Radio Trent in Nottingham, where he became their regular Nottingham Forest reporter. In April 1977, he joined Radio City (Liverpool) and remained there for the next 12 years. After succeeding Elton Welsby as City’s sports editor, he covered the successes of Everton and Liverpool through the late 1970s and 1980s. Tyldesley was on-air at the scene of the Heysel disaster in 1985, but did not attend Liverpool’s tragic FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough in 1989. He was heavily involved in City’s coverage of the aftermath of the disaster.

Why organisations work with Susan David She is the named originator of Emotional Agility, a peer-reviewed psychological framework that Harvard Business Review designated a Management Idea of the Year and Thinkers50 awarded its Breakthrough Idea Award. Her authority sits at Harvard Medical School and the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, which means leadership teams get clinical psychology, not motivational content dressed as science. She gives senior leaders a usable method for operating under pressure: working with hard emotions as signal rather than noise, and translating values into decisions when stakes are high. Her research base spans more than two decades of work on emotion, resilience and change, and her writing in HBR, the New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal puts her in front of the same readership a board does. She is South African, trained at Yale, and brings a register that travels across global executive audiences without the wellness-industry tone that often blunts this material. Biography highlights Faculty psychologist, Harvard Medical School. Cofounder and co-director, Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliate. CEO, Evidence Based Psychology. Author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Emotional Agility, translated into more than 30 languages. Winner of the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award; named to the Thinkers50 ranking of the world’s most influential management thinkers. TED Talk “The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage” delivered at TEDWomen 2017, with more than 11 million views on TED.com. Biography Most leadership advice asks senior people to stay positive under pressure. The clinical evidence says the opposite. Suppressing difficult emotion narrows judgement, erodes decision quality and corrodes trust over time. That gap, between the slogan and the science, is where Susan David built her work. She is a faculty psychologist at Harvard Medical School and cofounder of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliate. Her framework, Emotional Agility, was named a Management Idea of the Year by Harvard Business Review and won the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award. The book of the same title was a #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller and has been translated into more than 30 languages. The framework treats emotions as data on values, not as performance problems. It gives leaders a way to notice what they are feeling, label it accurately, separate the feeling from the impulse to act on it, and then make a values-based choice. It is a discipline, not a mood, and it scales from individual executive judgement to how cultures handle hard conversations, conflict and change. Her work has reached management readers through HBR, the New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, and a wider audience through her TEDWomen 2017 talk. The audiences that book her are usually executive teams under sustained pressure: leadership groups mid-restructure, partner cohorts in professional services, and senior teams trying to rebuild trust after shock. They leave with a method, not a mood-lift. Key speaking topics Emotional agility Self-leadership under pressure Resilience and change Decision-making under stress Values-based leadership Workplace mental health and wellbeing Culture and emotional honesty at work Ideal for CEOs, C-suite teams and boards leading through restructure, integration or sustained pressure. CHROs and senior people leaders rebuilding engagement and trust after change. Partner groups and senior cohorts in professional services, finance and law. Executive development and high-potential leadership programmes. Audience outcomes A working definition of emotional agility, with the four steps that turn it from idea into practice. A way to read difficult emotions as data on values rather than as problems to suppress. Language to lead hard conversations without retreating into positivity or performance. A method for staying decisive under pressure, including in moments of public scrutiny or internal conflict. A clearer link between personal values and the day-to-day choices a leadership role demands.

Why organisations work with Colin MacLachlan He has been the hostage, the hostage negotiator and the hostage rescuer. Very few people on any speaker roster have operated on all three sides of a crisis, and it shows in how he teaches boards to read one. His account of the 2005 Basra prison incident, including repeated mock executions before British forces broke through the compound walls, gives senior audiences an unvarnished view of composure under conditions no leadership course simulates. As an instructor on Series 1 of Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dares Wins, he has publicly assessed how ordinary civilians perform under Selection-grade pressure, which translates directly into honest diagnostics of corporate teams. He pairs the platform with clinical substance: co-founder of Who Dares Cares, a UK charity supporting Armed Forces and Blue Light personnel with PTSD, so the resilience content is built on years of live casework rather than stage anecdote. Author of The Pilgrim: SAS Who Dares Wins (Pen and Sword), endorsed by Bear Grylls, Chris Ryan, Andy McNab and Damien Lewis, which gives buyers a named, citable body of work to brief their leadership against. Biography highlights 22 SAS operator (Mountain Troop), serving in Northern Ireland, Iraq, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone. Took part in Operation Barras, the 2000 hostage rescue of British soldiers from the West Side Boys in Sierra Leone. Central figure in the Basra prison incident of September 2005, captured by Iraqi police and rescued by British forces. Instructor on Series 1 of Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dares Wins; contributor to Channel 5’s Secrets of the SAS. Author of The Pilgrim: SAS Who Dares Wins (Pen and Sword), endorsed by Bear Grylls, Chris Ryan, Andy McNab and Damien Lewis. Co-founder of Who Dares Cares, a UK charity supporting Armed Forces and Blue Light personnel living with PTSD. Biography Two British SAS soldiers were captured by Iraqi police in Basra on 19 September 2005 and held through a series of mock executions before a Warrior-led assault broke through the compound walls and extracted them. Colin MacLachlan was one of those two men. That single episode shapes how he talks to leadership teams about composure, and why serious audiences listen. The operational record behind it is equally specific. Mountain Troop in 22 SAS, deployments across Northern Ireland, Iraq, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone, and a role in Operation Barras, the 2000 hostage rescue against the West Side Boys. Hostage negotiation, hostage rescue and being taken hostage are three distinct problems. Very few operators have done all three, and that combined perspective is what gives his leadership argument its weight. The public-facing work gives buyers a body of evidence they can brief against. He was an instructor on Series 1 of Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dares Wins, putting civilians through Selection-grade pressure on camera, and a contributor to Channel 5’s Secrets of the SAS. His memoir, The Pilgrim: SAS Who Dares Wins, is published by Pen and Sword and carries cover endorsements from Bear Grylls, Chris Ryan, Andy McNab and Damien Lewis. He also co-founded Who Dares Cares, a UK charity supporting Armed Forces and Blue Light personnel with PTSD. That is what keeps the resilience material honest. When he tells a leadership team how stress shows up inside a person months after the event, the claim is backed by years of clinical casework, not a stage anecdote. Key speaking topics Leadership and decision-making under pressure Crisis response and high-stakes negotiation Team performance in hostile environments Resilience and recovery from acute stress Risk assessment and security awareness Hostage survival and the psychology of captivity Veteran mental health and post-traumatic growth Ideal for Boards and executive committees stress-testing how their leadership team behaves when a crisis is live, not rehearsed. CROs, heads of security and business-continuity leads responsible for people in volatile jurisdictions. CHROs and wellbeing leads building resilience programmes that need clinical credibility, not motivational theatre. Senior leadership offsites where the brief is composure, judgement and team cohesion under sustained pressure. Audience outcomes A concrete vocabulary for making decisions when information is incomplete and the cost of delay is high. A sharper read on how individuals and teams actually behave under acute stress, drawn from Selection-grade assessments and live operations. A working understanding of hostage and crisis negotiation logic that transfers to hostile commercial situations. A more honest view of post-traumatic stress and recovery, useful to anyone responsible for people who have been through a serious event. A memorable, citable set of operational examples that senior audiences take back into their own leadership conversations.