Leadership

Why organisations work with Nadine Chammas A working background in theatre direction, stage performance and hypnotherapy, applied to the workplace behaviours that leadership programmes usually skip: voice, presence, composure on the floor. Creator of the trademarked TLD Method, delivered as a book, certified course and retreat, which gives clients a defined system rather than a one-off keynote. Two decades operating across the GCC, with audiences in Arabic and English, and a track record of running corporate sessions on emotional intelligence, conflict resolution and executive presence. Author of The Stage is Yours, an Amazon bestseller that frames professional and personal communication through a theatre-director lens. A profile that travels in regional media: weekly counselling sessions on Al Arabiya, and a music output that gives her unusual cultural reach for a corporate trainer. Biography highlights Founder of The Life Director consultancy and creator of the TLD Method, delivered through book, certification course and retreat. BA in Fine Arts and Theatre Studies, Lebanese University. Master Practitioner of NLP and Timeline Therapy; certified by the American Board of Hypnotherapy; certified stage hypnotist trained in Las Vegas. Founded Scenez Group Production Company (Dubai, 2000) and Scenez Drama and Arts Academy. Author of The Stage is Yours (Amazon bestseller); subsequent title The Life Director: Presence over Performance. Weekly counselling segments on Al Arabiya; 11 released songs, with two pandemic-era Arabic releases passing 1.2 million YouTube views combined. Biography Presence is a workplace skill, and most professionals are never taught it. Senior leaders are expected to hold a room, settle a difficult conversation, and stay composed under scrutiny, but the training they receive treats those behaviours as personality, not craft. Theatre treats them as craft, and that is where Nadine Chammas comes from. Trained at Lebanese University in Fine Arts and Theatre Studies, she built her early career in Dubai through Scenez Group Production Company and Scenez Drama and Arts Academy, running productions across the region and teaching performance to children and adults. Alongside the theatre work she trained as a Master Practitioner of NLP and Timeline Therapy, completed certification with the American Board of Hypnotherapy, and qualified as a stage hypnotist in Las Vegas. The combination is unusual: stagecraft and behavioural method, applied to how people show up at work. The Life Director is the consultancy that consolidates that work. Her TLD Method is delivered as a book, a certified practitioner course and a retreat, and is positioned for individuals, corporate audiences and educational institutions. The corporate framing is direct: communication and leadership, emotional intelligence and resilience, conflict resolution and team behaviour, executive presence, decision-making under pressure. The Stage is Yours, her Amazon bestseller, sets out the underlying argument that a working life can be approached the same way a director approaches a production. She operates across the GCC and the US, in Arabic and English, with regional media reach through weekly Al Arabiya counselling segments and a music career that runs in parallel to the corporate work. The composite makes her suited to audiences where personal credibility, communication and cultural fluency are part of the brief, not separate from it. Key speaking topics Executive presence and personal branding Communication and influence Emotional intelligence and resilience Conflict resolution and team behaviour Storytelling for leaders Women in leadership Workplace culture and engagement Ideal for HR and L&D leaders commissioning communication, presence and behavioural skills programmes. Corporate audiences across the GCC where Arabic-English fluency and regional cultural read are part of the brief. Women’s leadership networks and conferences. Professional services and client-facing teams whose work depends on how they show up in the room. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for executive presence drawn from theatre and behavioural method, not personality traits. Specific techniques for voice, composure and physical presence under pressure. A clearer sense of how to use storytelling to make a message land with a corporate audience. An honest read on the behaviours that cost senior professionals credibility, and what to do about them.

Why organisations work with Sir Gareth Southgate His England management tenure is the subject of a published case study at Harvard Business School – one of the few occasions in sport where a coaching approach has been formally codified as an executive leadership model. He rebuilt a national team culture from a position of public failure and sustained performance across four consecutive major tournaments. That track record gives his thinking on culture change and sustained delivery a foundation most leadership authors lack. Dear England: Lessons in Leadership (Sunday Times instant bestseller, 2025) sets out the specific reasoning behind his decisions under pressure – on accountability, psychological safety, selection, and standing behind unpopular choices – in a form directly applicable to organisational leadership. He led through personal, very public failure – the Euro ’96 penalty miss that defined a decade of his public identity – and through two consecutive tournament final defeats. His account of resilience starts from having lived the worst-case scenario, not from having studied it. During intense national debates on race, identity, and protest, he articulated a values position publicly and held a diverse squad together through that pressure. Organisations navigating social or political tension inside teams get a practitioner account of what that demands in practice. Biography highlights England men’s senior manager 2016-2024; 102 matches, 61 wins – more major tournament games won than any other England manager in history Only the second England manager to reach a major tournament final, after Sir Alf Ramsey in 1966; reached consecutive European Championship finals in 2021 and 2024 Knighted in the King’s New Year Honours 2025; previously appointed OBE in 2019 Visiting lecturer at Harvard Business School; his England tenure is the subject of a published HBS leadership case study Author of Dear England: Lessons in Leadership (Cornerstone, 2025) – an instant Sunday Times bestseller; delivered the 2025 BBC Richard Dimbleby Lecture on BBC One, joining Bill Gates, Christine Lagarde, and the Prince of Wales as past speakers in the series Two-time BBC Sports Personality of the Year Coach Award (2018 and 2021); playing career spanning over 500 appearances for Crystal Palace, Aston Villa, and Middlesbrough, with 57 England caps Biography When Gareth Southgate took charge of England in 2016, the national team had just been knocked out of the Euros by Iceland. Public confidence was at a low. Over eight years and four major tournaments, he rebuilt the team’s culture entirely. The result was consecutive European Championship finals and a record for the most major tournament games won by any England manager. His approach is now the subject of a case study taught at Harvard Business School. The method was deliberate cultural architecture rather than tactical adjustment. Southgate prioritised psychological safety, shared values, and a team identity that held under pressure. His open letter to England fans during COVID-19 inspired the award-winning West End play Dear England. It demonstrated how he treated transparency and personal vulnerability as leadership tools, not liabilities. Southgate delivered the 2025 BBC Richard Dimbleby Lecture on BBC One, joining Bill Gates, Christine Lagarde, and the Prince of Wales as previous speakers in the series. Dear England: Lessons in Leadership became an instant Sunday Times bestseller; the Guardian described it as articulating a moral vision that went beyond the reach of contemporary British politics. He was knighted in the King’s New Year Honours 2025 for services to association football. The fractured starting point, intense public accountability, and need to build individual and collective performance simultaneously – these are not challenges unique to sport. His insights are drawn from eight consecutive years at the sharp end of that problem, not from theory. Key speaking topics Leadership under sustained public scrutiny Culture transformation and team identity Values-based accountability Resilience and performance through failure Psychological safety and trust in high-stakes teams Inclusive leadership and diversity of thought Decision-making in high-pressure environments Ideal for Senior leadership teams and C-suite executives navigating cultural or strategic transformation CHROs and people leaders working on team culture, inclusion, and performance under pressure Board-level and executive leadership development programmes Organisations in high-scrutiny sectors – financial services, public institutions, large consumer-facing businesses – where leadership decisions carry public accountability Audience outcomes A concrete model for building values-led culture that outlasts individual results cycles First-hand perspective on decision-making under public pressure: how values, not tactics, determine outcomes over time Practical insight into what psychological safety looks like in a high-accountability, high-visibility environment A framework for holding team identity together through failure, scrutiny, and competing stakeholder demands An honest account of how personal and public setback can become the foundation of leadership credibility rather than a liability

Why organisations work with Otmar Szafnauer He has run a Formula 1 constructor through administration and out the other side with the workforce intact, a credential almost no other operational leader on the speaking circuit can claim. He led the same team across three brand identities, Force India, Racing Point and Aston Martin, which gives him direct experience of the gap between a rebrand on paper and a rebrand in the engineering hall. His technical grounding, an engineering degree paired with operational roles at Ford, BAR, Honda and Force India, means board audiences get specifics on how decisions actually move through a complex organisation, not motivational abstractions. He has worked under three very different ownership cultures, from Vijay Mallya at Force India to Lawrence Stroll at Racing Point and Renault Group at Alpine, and can speak credibly about leading inside contested governance structures. Biography highlights Team Principal and CEO, Racing Point F1 and Aston Martin F1, 2018 to January 2022. Team Principal, BWT Alpine F1 Team, February 2022 to July 2023. Senior leadership at Force India from October 2009, including the team’s 2016 and 2017 fourth-place Constructors’ Championship finishes. Former Vice President, Honda Racing Developments, after entering F1 as Operations Director at British American Racing in 1998. Founder and Chairman, Soft Pauer, publisher of the official Formula 1 Timing iPhone app launched in 2009. BSc Electrical Engineering, Wayne State University; master’s in Business and Finance, University of Detroit Mercy. Biography Force India was placed in administration in mid-2018 after Vijay Mallya’s financial collapse. The garage was full of staff who had been approached by other teams, and a technical director the rivals very much wanted. The team came out of that summer with most of its people still in their seats. Otmar Szafnauer was the operational leader who kept them there. That period is the centre of his value to a serious audience. Across more than a decade running the same Silverstone constructor under three brands, Force India, Racing Point and finally Aston Martin, he saw what holds a high-performance organisation together when ownership, identity and strategy all change at once. The answer turned out to be unglamorous: honesty in front of the workforce, continuity of technical leadership, and a refusal to let the rebrand outrun the operating reality. His route into that role was deliberate. An electrical engineering degree from Wayne State, an MBA in finance from Detroit Mercy, then Ford, then Formula 1 from 1998 onwards, including a Vice President role at Honda Racing Developments. The result is a leader who can speak to engineers and to a board, and who treats culture as something built on calendar-blocked decisions about hiring, accountability and recognition rather than slogans. His later move to Alpine, where he served as Team Principal from 2022 until July 2023, gives the picture its second half. Running an OEM-owned team under Renault Group meant operating inside a corporate governance structure, with all of the political weight that implies. Few operators have led both an independent privateer and a manufacturer-owned team at the same level, and the contrast is the substance of what he can say to leaders managing similar shifts of their own. Key speaking topics High-performance team leadership Leadership through restructure and ownership change Culture, accountability and psychological safety in elite environments Operational decision-making under time and resource pressure Lessons from three decades inside Formula 1 leadership Building and retaining technical talent in competitive markets Ideal for Boards and executive teams navigating ownership change, M&A integration or a corporate rebrand CHROs and people leaders responsible for retaining critical talent through periods of uncertainty Senior operators in technical and engineering-led organisations Leadership development audiences focused on composure and decision quality under pressure Audience outcomes A working sense of what leadership actually does for a workforce when ownership and strategy are in flux Specific examples of how culture, retention and accountability hold up in genuinely high-stakes environments A practical view of the difference between a rebrand on paper and a rebrand inside the operating organisation Confidence that the lessons translate, drawn from a domain where the consequences of poor decisions are visible every fortnight

Why organisations work with Bradley Scanes Five seasons inside the Red Bull Racing operation during four consecutive Verstappen world titles, with direct ownership of preparation, recovery, sleep, nutrition, and rehabilitation. The reference point is operational, not anecdotal. A career that crosses Olympic gymnastics, Olympic basketball, Premier League football medical leadership, and motorsport, which means his framing of high performance is not tied to one sport’s culture. Clinical foundations through the NHS plus two postgraduate physiotherapy degrees, which gives him a physiological grounding most performance speakers in this category do not have. Active current practice with endurance racing teams at Le Mans and Daytona and with Ironman World Champion Lucy Charles-Barclay, so the examples are current, not retrospective. Biography highlights Five-year tenure as Human Performance Consultant and Physiotherapist at Red Bull Racing, working directly with Max Verstappen, 2019 to 2024 Four-year Olympic cycle as performance coach with British Gymnastics, including work with Max Whitlock Four years with Team GB Olympic Basketball Former Head of Medical at Southend United FC; clinical foundation in the NHS BSc Sport and Exercise Science (Loughborough); MSc Physiotherapy; MSc Advanced Musculoskeletal Physiotherapy and Research (distinction) Founder and Director of Elite Formula PT; creator of the Complete Sports Practitioner mentorship programme and the Formula 1 Series Course Biography Formula 1 has the shortest feedback loop in elite performance. Decisions made on Thursday show up in a stopwatch on Sunday, and the operating environment inside a top team is built around removing every variable that could cost a tenth of a second. For five seasons, that environment was Bradley Scanes’ workplace. As Human Performance Consultant and Physiotherapist at Red Bull Racing from 2019 to 2024, he was responsible for Max Verstappen’s physical preparation, recovery, sleep, nutrition, and rehabilitation across the four world championship campaigns that defined the team’s modern era. The work sat inside an organisation of more than 1,800 staff where a pit stop is measured in tenths and a tyre temperature is a strategic input. The route in was unusual. Loughborough sport science, then a Masters in physiotherapy, then a second Masters in advanced musculoskeletal physiotherapy with distinction. NHS clinical work. Head of Medical at Southend United FC. Four years with Team GB Olympic Basketball and a full Olympic cycle with British Gymnastics, including campaigns with Max Whitlock. By the time he reached Red Bull, the question of how athletes perform under pressure had been examined from five different sports and two clinical settings. He now runs Elite Formula PT, coaches Ironman World Champion Lucy Charles-Barclay, and works across endurance racing teams competing at Le Mans and Daytona. The training programmes he has written for the next generation of sports practitioners, including the Formula 1 Series Course, are taught from inside that current practice, which is why senior corporate audiences come away with operating language they can actually use the following Monday. Key speaking topics High-performance culture Recovery and sleep as performance variables Team execution under pressure Marginal gains and continuous improvement Safety, risk and learning culture in elite sport Leadership lessons from Formula 1 Composure and decision-making under load Ideal for Executive leadership teams stress-testing how they perform under sustained pressure Operations and transformation leaders looking at cycle time, error rate, and team execution Sales and commercial leadership teams preparing for high-stakes quarters People and talent leaders rebuilding cultures around recovery, focus and sustained output Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for recovery, sleep, and composure as measurable inputs to senior performance A concrete picture of how a top F1 team reduces error and increases cycle precision under time pressure Reference points from Olympic and motorsport environments that translate to corporate execution A sharper sense of how elite teams treat safety, risk and learning culture as performance levers rather than compliance

Why organisations work with Harmeen Mehta She has run digital and AI transformation as an operator inside three of the world’s largest technology and telecoms incumbents (Equinix, BT Group, Bharti Airtel), not as an external advisor. She has built and scaled new digital businesses, including Airtel Payments Bank and Airtel’s cloud and security units, giving her credibility on revenue creation, not only cost out. Her board work at Lloyds Banking Group, including the IT and Cyber Advisory Forum, gives her direct line of sight on how non-executive directors expect technology risk and AI governance to be discussed. Recipient of the 2018 MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award and the TM Forum Global CIO of the Year, both peer-judged on execution. Biography highlights Executive Vice President and Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, Equinix (from April 2025). Former Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, BT Group (March 2021 to September 2024). Former Global CIO and CEO of Cloud and Security Business, Bharti Airtel (seven years). Earlier CIO positions at BBVA, HSBC, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Independent Non-Executive Director, Lloyds Banking Group; Vice-Chair and Board member, TM Forum. 2018 MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award; TM Forum Global CIO of the Year; Women Economic Forum “Woman of the Decade in Innovation and Leadership.” Biography The gap between AI pilot and AI in production is where most enterprise value is currently lost. Boards want commercial outcomes; CIOs are still cleaning up legacy estate. Mehta has spent the last decade operating exactly in that gap, and her career arc is unusual because she has done it across three sectors. At Bharti Airtel, as Global CIO and head of the cloud and security business, she launched Airtel Payments Bank and built standalone cloud and security units serving hundreds of millions of customers. This is operating P&L experience, not advisory work. At BT Group, as the first Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, she ran a Group-wide programme that simplified a complex IT estate, scaled digital channels, and put AI into production across customer operations. Earlier CIO roles at BBVA, HSBC, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch gave her grounding in regulated environments, where governance, cyber risk, and resilience are not afterthoughts. That perspective now feeds her board work at Lloyds Banking Group, where she sits on the IT and Cyber Advisory Forum, and at TM Forum, where she is Vice-Chair and chairs the Appointments and Governance Committee. In April 2025 she joined Equinix as Executive Vice President and Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, reporting to CEO Adaire Fox-Martin. The 2018 MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award and the TM Forum Global CIO of the Year recognise the same thing the boards she serves on do: she is judged on what she ships, not what she proposes. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and operational deployment Digital transformation in complex incumbents Cybersecurity and technology risk at board level Data strategy and the commercial value of data Cloud, platforms, and modern engineering operating models Women in technology and senior STEM leadership Building new digital businesses inside large groups Ideal for Boards and audit, risk, and technology committees commissioning conversations on AI governance and cyber resilience. CEOs, CIOs, CDOs, and transformation leads moving AI from pilot to production. Telecoms, financial services, and digital infrastructure leadership teams confronting legacy estate and platform redesign. Audience outcomes A clearer view of where AI investment converts to commercial value and where it stalls. An operator’s perspective on what good AI governance looks like inside a regulated, board-supervised business. A practical read on how digital channels and platforms produce revenue, not only cost reduction. Sharper questions to ask the executive team about AI, cyber, and data risk.

Why organisations work with Thomas Kolditz A research base built where it counts. His framework on in extremis leadership draws on more than 175 field interviews conducted during combat operations in Iraq, giving senior teams something more rigorous than borrowed military metaphors. A command record at scale. Twelve years leading the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at West Point, plus a flag officer career, give him a standing few academic speakers can match when addressing CEOs and boards on decision-making under pressure. A measurable model for leader development. As founding director of Rice University’s Doerr Institute, he built a programme recognised in 2019 as the top university leader development effort by the Association of Leadership Educators, with methods documented in Leadership Reckoning. Direct relevance to crisis governance. His work on dodging crisis, leading through tragedy, and building leadership capability in legacy organisations speaks to boards under live operational and reputational stress, not abstract resilience theory. A bridge between military, academic, and corporate audiences. Yale School of Management appointed him to run its Leadership Development Program; Rice trusted him to design theirs from a blank page. Both translate cleanly into how he works with executive teams. Biography highlights Founding Director, Ann and John Doerr Institute for New Leaders, Rice University. Retired Brigadier General, U.S. Army; former head of the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at West Point for twelve years. Former Professor in the Practice of Leadership and Director of the Leadership Development Program, Yale School of Management. Author, In Extremis Leadership: Leading As If Your Life Depended On It, Jossey-Bass, in the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Forum series. Co-author, Leadership Reckoning: Can Higher Education Develop the Leaders We Need?, with Libby Gill and Ryan P. Brown. Warren Bennis Award for Excellence in Leadership; Fellow of the American Psychological Association; U.S. Army Distinguished Service Medal. Biography The leaders most worth studying are not those who perform well in stable conditions. They are the ones whose followers believe their lives, careers, or institutions are genuinely at risk. That observation became the basis for one of the more rigorous bodies of research on extreme leadership, drawn from more than 175 field interviews during combat operations in Iraq and published as In Extremis Leadership. The author of that work spent twelve years running the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at West Point and retired as a Brigadier General. Yale School of Management then appointed him to lead its Leadership Development Program. Rice University asked him to build the Ann and John Doerr Institute for New Leaders from scratch, with the brief of creating the most evidence-based university leader development programme in the world. The Doerr Institute did not stay theoretical. By 2019, the Association of Leadership Educators named it the top university leader development programme in the country, and Global Gurus ranked it fourth in the world. The methodology behind that result is documented in Leadership Reckoning, co-authored with Libby Gill and Ryan P. Brown, which makes the case that most leader development efforts cannot prove they work and shows what a defensible alternative looks like. That combination of fieldwork in lethal environments, command authority, and measurable institution building is why he is invited into boardrooms where the question is not what leadership means in the abstract but what it produces under pressure. Recognition includes the Warren Bennis Award for Excellence in Leadership, fellowship of the American Psychological Association, and the U.S. Army Distinguished Service Medal. Key speaking topics In extremis, leadership and decision-making under threat Crisis leadership and avoiding institutional crisis Leader development as a measurable discipline Composure and judgement at a senior level Innovation leadership inside legacy organisations Building leadership capability across an enterprise Ideal for CEOs, boards, and executive committees facing operational, reputational, or regulatory crisis exposure Chief Human Resources Officers and Chief Learning Officers are responsible for senior leader development Military, public sector, and high-hazard industry leadership audiences University presidents, provosts, and trustees are rebuilding leadership formation on campus Audience outcomes A working model for what changes in leader behaviour when the stakes shift from comfortable to consequential A clearer view of why most leader development programmes cannot demonstrate impact, and what to require instead Specific reference points from combat, aviation, and skydiving environments were translated for commercial decision-making A framework for treating composure, presence, and judgement as trainable senior-leader capabilities Practical guidance on leading through tragedy, restructuring, or reputational shock without losing organisational coherence

Why organisations work with Stephanie Davies A working method that gets cynical adult audiences to engage with behaviour change without the eye-rolling that usually accompanies culture training. A track record on hard conversations, with a programme at HSBC training more than 500 leaders to handle performance and feedback without flinching. A point of view on engagement grounded in published psychology, set out in her book Laughology: Improve Your Life with the Science of Laughter (Crown House). Two decades inside corporate culture work across HSBC, Nespresso, Nando’s, and government, so the content lands as practitioner advice rather than commentary. A delivery style that holds the room. The comedy training is a tool for retention and recall, not a gimmick layered on top of the content. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Laughology, founded 2006. Author of Laughology: Improve Your Life with the Science of Laughter, Crown House Publishing. Master’s-level training in psychology, focused on humour and organisational performance. Designed and delivered performance-conversation training at HSBC for 500+ leaders. Culture and behaviour programmes with Nespresso, Nando’s, Virgin, O2, and UK government departments. Regular columnist for Training Journal; previously an award-winning stand-up comedian. Biography Most culture programmes lose the room in the first ten minutes. Adults arrive sceptical, the language is corporate, and the behaviours being asked of them feel performative. Laughology was built to solve that delivery problem. Stephanie Davies founded it in 2006 to pair applied psychology with the craft of stand-up, and uses humour as a mechanism for behaviour change rather than as decoration. The substance sits behind the style. Her book, Laughology: Improve Your Life with the Science of Laughter, sets out humour as a thinking skill, drawing on positive psychology and the cognitive research on how laughter shifts perspective and learning retention. Her master’s-level work in psychology runs through the firm’s programmes on engagement, leadership behaviour, and feedback. The client list reflects the practical bias. HSBC commissioned performance-conversation training for more than 500 leaders. Nespresso brought her in to strengthen retail leadership. Nando’s, Virgin, O2, and government departments have used Laughology for culture and behaviour work. Across these, the brief is consistent: get people to commit to a change in how they behave, not just understand why it matters. That practitioner record is what distinguishes her in a crowded happiness-at-work category. Most speakers in the space arrive from coaching, HR, or pop-psychology. Davies arrives from a working comedy career and a psychology specialism in humour, with twenty years of corporate delivery behind her. Key speaking topics Workplace engagement and culture change Psychology of humour at work Performance and feedback conversations Behaviour change in large organisations Leadership development and team culture Mental health and wellbeing in the workplace Resilience and positive psychology Ideal for CHROs and people directors running engagement or culture change agendas. L&D and OD leads commissioning leadership, feedback, or behaviour-change programmes. Boards and executive teams looking for a substantive culture session that an internal audience will actually engage with. Conference organisers programming a keynote that has to do real work on a wellbeing or culture theme. Audience outcomes A working model of humour as a behaviour-change tool, not as entertainment. Language and techniques for running performance and feedback conversations without avoidance. A clearer view of what drives engagement at the level of daily behaviour. Practical positive-psychology techniques for resilience and team morale. A session people actually remember, which is the precondition for any of the above changing behaviour.

Why organisations work with Katie Hilborn She has spent two decades making high-stakes calls in environments where missing a signal carried immediate human cost, so her account of judgment under pressure is operational, not theoretical. The Architect’s Read gives leaders a repeatable way to trace a problem from surface event to root structure, rather than a set of principles to admire and forget. As founder of Regenerative Infrastructure Holdings, she is building AI infrastructure in practice, which makes her credible on the human judgment the technology cannot replace. Recognition includes a Silver Anthem Award in the same cycle as the Dalai Lama and Jane Goodall, multiple Telly Awards, and the President’s Volunteer Service Award for Lifetime Achievement. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Compass Rose International, the nonprofit behind the Girls INpowerment Center in Nepal, which holds the GuideStar Platinum Seal of Transparency. Founder of Regenerative Infrastructure Holdings, developing AI data centres powered by renewable energy and governed by community trusts, with a first site under way in Nepal. Led 13 aid missions in Nepal after the 2015 earthquake; uncovered and reported a child-trafficking ring during relief operations. 10x award-winning humanitarian, including a Silver Anthem Award in the same cycle as the Dalai Lama and Jane Goodall, multiple Telly Awards, and the President’s Volunteer Service Award for Lifetime Achievement (AmeriCorps); member of the Forbes Nonprofit Council. Has spoken at RegenWorld, EarthX, the Global Family Office Investment Summit, and Northern Illinois University; featured in New York Magazine, NBC, and ABC. B.A., Colorado Mesa University; M.Ed., Grand Canyon University; certified secondary teacher. Biography The 2015 Nepal earthquakes flattened entire villages in minutes. Katie Hilborn flew in with no organisation behind her, led 13 aid missions across remote districts, and read what the relief effort had dismissed as chaos for what it was: a child-trafficking network preying on displaced girls. Spotting it was the easy part. Tracing it to the structure producing it, and building something that addressed it at the source, became the work of the next decade. That skill has a name in her work: pattern recognition under pressure. It is the ability to catch the weak signal everyone else rationalises away and to act while acting is still cheap. As organisations hand routine decisions to AI, this is the judgment that does not automate, and the one leaders need most when the stakes are highest. Hilborn now applies the same read at infrastructure scale. As founder of Regenerative Infrastructure Holdings, she is developing AI data centres powered by renewable energy and governed by community trusts, with a first site under way in Nepal. She continues to lead Compass Rose International, the nonprofit behind the Girls INpowerment Center, which holds the Guidestar Platinum Seal of Transparency. Her flagship keynote, Seeing What Others Miss, turns this into The Architect’s Read: a method for catching a problem at the surface, tracing it to the structure beneath, and acting where it resolves. The credibility behind it is a field record built under real operational stakes. She is a Silver Anthem Award winner recognised in the same cycle as the Dalai Lama and Jane Goodall, holds multiple Telly Awards and the President’s Volunteer Service Award for Lifetime Achievement, and sits on the Forbes Nonprofit Council. Key speaking topics Purpose-driven culture and leadership Heart-centric leadership through change Resilience and decision-making under pressure Social entrepreneurship and impact at scale Intuition and leadership judgment Employee engagement and meaning at work Humanitarian leadership lessons for business Ideal for CHROs and people leaders rebuilding engagement after restructure or mission drift CEOs and executive teams setting culture through integration, transformation, or strategic reset Foundations, family offices, and impact investors framing purpose for portfolio leadership teams All-hands and emerging-leader audiences where the brief is conviction and resilience, not content depth on a technical topic Audience outcomes A working definition of purpose that survives contact with budget, headcount, and reorganisation decisions A specific lens, drawn from frontline humanitarian operations, for making heart-led decisions that still hold up to scrutiny Renewed belief among leaders that conviction is a strategic asset, not a soft skill, with examples to back it up A vocabulary for talking about meaning at work that does not collapse into cliche when senior leaders use it Practical takeaways from Compass Rose’s operating record on building and sustaining mission-led teams

Why organisations work with Greg Orme A book-length, award-winning thesis behind every keynote. The Human Edge won Business Book of the Year 2020 and gives senior audiences a single, memorable framework, the four “superpowers”, they can apply to their own teams the next morning. London Business School pedigree as a builder, not just a teacher. He founded LBS’s Centre for Creative Business and ran executive programmes there for seven years, so the content has been pressure-tested on senior cohorts before it reaches a client stage. Recognised by peers in the people function. HR Magazine named him among its Most Influential Thinkers in 2022, which matters to CHROs sponsoring leadership and capability work. Translates the AI conversation into something a workforce can act on. Where most AI speakers describe the technology, Orme tells leadership teams what human behaviours their organisation now has to develop deliberately. Biography highlights Author of The Human Edge: How Curiosity and Creativity are Your Superpowers in the Digital Economy (Pearson, 2019), named Business Book of the Year 2020 and translated into Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese. Author of The Spark: How to Ignite and Lead Business Creativity (FT Publishing, 2014). Founding CEO of London Business School’s Centre for Creative Business; programme director and lecturer at LBS for seven years. Named to HR Magazine’s Most Influential Thinkers 2022. Forbes contributor writing on leadership, creativity and the digital economy. Clients include Microsoft, Accenture, BMW, EY, Sky, Virgin Media O2, ING, Novo Nordisk, the International Olympic Committee and the World Economic Forum. Biography The arrival of generative AI has forced a question that most leadership development programmes were not built to answer. If machines can now write, summarise, analyse and code, what exactly should an organisation expect from its human workforce? Greg Orme’s work is a direct response to that question. His book The Human Edge, published by Pearson and named Business Book of the Year 2020, argues that four human capabilities, consciousness, curiosity, creativity and collaboration, become more commercially valuable as routine cognitive work is absorbed by technology. The thesis has travelled. The book has been translated into Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese, and the framework now sits behind his keynote and executive education work. That work has institutional roots. Orme founded London Business School’s Centre for Creative Business and spent seven years there as a programme director and lecturer, building and running executive education for senior cohorts. He holds an LBS MBA. HR Magazine named him among its Most Influential Thinkers in 2022, a recognition that matters in the people function where his content is most often commissioned. What separates him from other voices in the AI conversation is the audience he is talking to. He is not selling tooling, and he is not forecasting. He is telling leadership teams what their organisations have to develop in their people, deliberately and at scale, so that an AI strategy produces advantage rather than displacement. Key speaking topics Human capability in the age of AI Leadership in the digital economy Creativity and innovation as organisational disciplines Curiosity and learning culture Purpose-driven leadership Influence and storytelling for senior leaders Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers redesigning leadership and learning around AI. Executive committees setting the human capability agenda alongside a digital or AI strategy. Senior leadership offsites where the brief is to reset behaviours, not roll out tools. Boards and partner groups in professional services confronting AI’s impact on talent value. Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary, the four superpowers, for what the organisation now needs from its people. A clearer view of where AI raises the value of human judgment and where it erodes it. Specific behavioural prompts senior leaders can model in their own teams the following week. A sharper sense of which leadership development investments still pay back in an AI-enabled organisation.

Why organisations work with Terry Lundgren He executed one of the largest retail mergers in US history and rebranded more than 400 regional stores under a single national brand inside twelve months, a case study in integration that boards rarely get to hear from the person who ran it. He led a Fortune 100 retailer through the early omnichannel transition, making capital and organisational decisions that other CEOs were still debating. He sits on the board of Procter and Gamble and chairs its Compensation and Leadership Development Committee, which gives him a current view of how blue-chip boards are thinking about CEO succession and operating performance. His Deming Cup citation from Columbia Business School recognises sustained continuous improvement at scale, not a single transformation moment, which is the harder leadership question for most enterprises. Biography highlights Chairman and CEO of Macy’s, Inc. from 2003 to 2017; executive chairman until January 2018. Led the 2005 Federated/May acquisition, the largest US retail transaction at the time, creating a single national Macy’s brand from more than 400 regional stores. Director of The Procter & Gamble Company since 2013; chair of the Compensation and Leadership Development Committee. Executive in Residence, Columbia Business School; namesake of the Terry J. Lundgren Center for Retailing at the University of Arizona. Recipient of the National Retail Federation Gold Medal Award (2008) and the Columbia Business School Deming Cup (2012). Named one of Barron’s Top 30 CEOs in the World (2015) and WWD Newsmaker of the Year (2014). Biography Federated’s USD 11 billion acquisition of The May Department Stores Company in 2005 was, at the time, the largest retail transaction in US history. Inside a year, more than 400 regional department stores across the country had been rebranded under the Macy’s name. Terry Lundgren was the CEO who ran that integration. He had joined Federated in 1975, run Bullocks Wilshire at 35, served as Chairman and CEO of Neiman Marcus, and returned to Federated in 1994. By the time he became CEO of Macy’s, Inc. in 2003, he had spent almost three decades inside the operating layer of American retail. The fourteen years that followed are the substance of his speaking work. He launched the “My Macy’s” localisation programme in 2008, an early answer to the question of how a national chain competes with category specialists. He made the capital and organisational decisions that pulled Macy’s into omnichannel before most peers had committed. By his final year as CEO in fiscal 2016, the company was running sales of roughly USD 26 billion with about 140,000 employees. Since stepping down he has sat on the board of Procter and Gamble, chairing its Compensation and Leadership Development Committee, and served as an Executive in Residence at Columbia Business School. The Deming Cup citation from Columbia, awarded for continuous improvement at scale, is the credential that distinguishes him from CEOs known for a single defining moment. Key speaking topics Large-scale merger integration CEO leadership through structural change Omnichannel and the reinvention of retail Continuous improvement at enterprise scale Brand strategy and national brand building CEO succession and board-level talent decisions Ideal for CEO and board audiences working through merger integration or major restructuring. CHROs and Chief Talent Officers focused on CEO succession, executive development, and operating discipline. Retail, consumer, and consumer-adjacent leadership teams navigating channel transitions and brand consolidation. Senior leadership programmes inside large enterprises where the case studies need to come from someone who ran the company. Audience outcomes A first-hand account of what merger integration costs an organisation operationally, culturally, and in customer experience. A clearer view of the decisions a CEO actually faces when committing capital to a channel transition. Reference points from a fourteen-year tenure for how continuous improvement is institutionalised, not just announced. A board-level perspective on what compensation, succession, and leadership development look like inside a current Fortune 50 company.

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 Bobby Umar He treats connection as a teachable skill, not a personality trait. The 5 C’s of Connection framework, drawn from his TEDxUWO talk, gives leaders and employees a structured way to build trust, credibility and influence inside and outside the organisation. His background is unusually broad for the topic: engineering at Bombardier, brand marketing at Kraft and Unilever, and Second City improv training. That mix shows up in how the work lands, structured enough for senior audiences, performative enough to hold a room. He is a recognised authority on LinkedIn as a professional channel. Multiple LinkedIn Top Voice designations, including an early Presentation Skills badge, mean leaders learn from someone who has built an audience the way they are being asked to. Inc. Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker and five-time TEDx speaker, which gives senior audiences confidence that the craft and delivery will match the content. Biography highlights Five-time TEDx speaker, including “The 5 C’s of Connection” (TEDxUWO) and “School: Learning to Fly” (TEDxUTSC). Inc. Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker, listed alongside Richard Branson and Brené Brown. LinkedIn Top Voice, with early badges for Presentation Skills, Thought Leadership and Personal Branding. Author of How to Network Anytime, Anywhere, With Anyone (#1 on three Amazon bestseller lists). Founder of DYPB (Discover Your Personal Brand), described as North America’s largest personal branding event, with 60 experts and over 300 delegates. Career background spans Bombardier (engineering), Kraft and Unilever (brand marketing) and Second City (performing arts). B.Eng., McGill University; MBA, McMaster University. Biography Most leadership development still treats connection as a soft skill that either comes naturally or does not. Bobby Umar’s work argues the opposite. His 5 C’s of Connection framework, popularised through a viral TEDxUWO talk, breaks authentic relationship-building into components that can be taught to engineers, sales teams, senior executives and entry-level employees alike. That argument is grounded in an unusual professional path. Before becoming a speaker, Umar trained as an engineer at McGill, ran brand marketing for Kraft and Unilever, took an MBA at McMaster and studied improv at Second City. The result is a practitioner who can move between the analytical and the performative without losing either audience. His credentials inside the speaking and creator economy are deep. Five TEDx talks. Inc. Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker. LinkedIn Top Voice across several categories. Author of How to Network Anytime, Anywhere, With Anyone, a #1 Amazon bestseller. Founder of DYPB, the personal branding conference that became the largest of its kind in North America. What makes him commercially useful to organisations is the translation step. Personal branding, networking, social audio, vulnerable storytelling: these are not pitched as marketing tactics but as the connective infrastructure of modern professional life. For organisations trying to develop influential leaders, engaged employees and externally visible experts, Umar offers a practical, structured account of how connection actually works. Key speaking topics Authentic networking and relationship-building Personal branding for leaders and employees LinkedIn presence and professional digital reputation Vulnerable storytelling and leadership communication Heart-centred leadership Employee advocacy and internal brand-building Connection skills in hybrid and remote teams Ideal for CHROs, talent and L&D leaders investing in employee engagement, advocacy and internal communication. Marketing, communications and executive leaders building external thought leadership programmes for senior teams. Sales and business development functions where individual networking capability drives revenue. Conference organisers building agendas on leadership, future of work, employee experience or culture. Audience outcomes A working language for connection, anchored in the 5 C’s framework, that audiences can apply immediately to internal and external relationships. A clearer view of how personal branding intersects with leadership credibility, especially on LinkedIn. Practical methods for using storytelling, vulnerability and digital channels to build trust at scale. A reframing of networking as a professional discipline, not a transactional activity reserved for extroverts. Confidence to put senior leaders and frontline employees on visible platforms without sounding scripted.