Leadership speakers

Why organisations work with Bjarke Ingels His “hedonistic sustainability” concept – coined in a 2011 TED talk with over two million views – gives leadership teams a credible, named argument against the assumption that environmental ambition and commercial performance are in tension. The Yes Is More manifesto argues against the choice between bold vision and practical delivery; it is taught beyond architecture because the logic is genuinely transferable to any organisation navigating competing strategic demands. BIG’s project portfolio – CopenHill’s waste-to-energy plant with a public ski slope, the BIG U flood-defence park in Manhattan, the Google North Bayshore campus co-designed with Thomas Heatherwick – gives executive audiences proof that resolving sustainability and desirability through design produces outcomes superior to either goal pursued alone. He has spoken at the World Economic Forum, TED, WIRED, and 10 Downing Street, meaning his frameworks have already been stress-tested in front of heads of government, technology leaders, and senior executives. Teaching at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Rice runs alongside leading a 400-person practice with major projects on four continents – his arguments carry the authority of both the seminar room and the construction site. Biography highlights Founder and creative partner of BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), established 2006; offices in New York, London, and Copenhagen; team of 400+ Originator of “hedonistic sustainability,” introduced in a 2011 TED talk now viewed over two million times Author of Yes Is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution (2009) and HOT TO COLD: An Odyssey of Architectural Adaptation Named to TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People (2016); WSJ Innovator of the Year in Architecture; Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business Awards include the Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2004), ULI Award for Excellence (2009), Danish Crown Prince’s Culture Prize (2011); Honorary Fellow of the AIA (2020) and RIBA (2015) Featured as opening subject of Netflix’s Abstract: The Art of Design; speaker at TED, the World Economic Forum, WIRED, and 10 Downing Street Has taught at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Rice Universities; honorary professor at the Royal Academy of Arts, School of Architecture, Copenhagen Biography CopenHill is a waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen that doubles as a public ski slope, climbing wall, and rooftop hiking trail. It is not a compromise between environmental performance and civic amenity. It is Bjarke Ingels’ most cited demonstration of what he calls “hedonistic sustainability” – the argument that reducing environmental impact and improving how people experience their city are the same design challenge. In his 2011 TED talk, now viewed over two million times, Ingels introduced the concept and set out the logic. His manifesto Yes Is More pushed the argument further, proposing “pragmatic utopianism” as a design principle: the deliberate rejection of the choice between visionary ambition and commercial delivery. The book was written for architects. It is now taught in business and strategy contexts because the core argument is transferable. Ingels founded BIG in Copenhagen in 2006, following earlier work at OMA under Rem Koolhaas and the co-founding of PLOT with Julien De Smedt. The firm now operates from New York, London, and Copenhagen with more than 400 staff. Its projects range from the BIG U – Manhattan’s Hurricane Sandy flood-defence infrastructure, redesigned as a continuous public park – to Google’s North Bayshore campus, co-designed with Thomas Heatherwick, where workplace performance and environmental targets were treated as a single design brief. TIME Magazine named him one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People in 2016. He holds the WSJ Innovator of the Year award, Honorary Fellowships from the AIA and RIBA, and has spoken at the World Economic Forum and 10 Downing Street. He has taught at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Rice. Netflix’s Abstract: The Art of Design featured him as its opening subject. His discipline is architecture; his primary value to organisations is a framework for dissolving the trade-off between ambition and pragmatism. Key speaking topics Hedonistic sustainability and design-led climate action Pragmatic utopianism and innovation strategy Urban resilience and large-scale infrastructure design Architecture’s role in organisational and civic identity Creative leadership at scale The built environment and corporate space strategy Design thinking across disciplines Ideal for C-suite and executive leadership teams at real estate, infrastructure, and large-scale development organisations Chief Sustainability Officers and ESG leads seeking to reframe sustainability as a source of commercial advantage rather than compliance cost Corporate boards and transformation leads examining how built environment decisions affect organisational culture, talent, and long-term asset value Civic leaders and urban planners making large-scale public investment decisions Audience outcomes A named, transferable framework – “hedonistic sustainability” – for challenging the trade-off assumption in ESG, design, and innovation strategy conversations Concrete examples, drawn from BIG’s global project portfolio, of how resolving competing constraints through design produces outcomes that neither goal alone would generate A reframe of what “innovation” means in large-scale, long-horizon project environments where short-term pragmatism typically wins Greater confidence in presenting design ambition as a strategic argument rather than an aesthetic or cost preference Practical insight into building and leading a high-velocity creative organisation across multiple geographies and project scales

Why organisations work with Blaire Palmer She brings a BBC journalist’s instinct for the question leaders are avoiding, then makes the boardroom answer it in plain language. Her book Punks in Suits gives organisations a shared vocabulary for why old management habits, not strategy, are the real brake on growth. She has coached boards and executive teams across Airbus, Roche, Mattel, Santander, The FA, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, so the challenge lands with commercial credibility. She runs That People Thing as her own consultancy, which means the keynote is the leading edge of a deeper body of work on leadership transformation, not a standalone act. Biography highlights Chief Executive and founder of That People Thing, a leadership consultancy working with boards and executive teams on culture and change. Author of four books including Punks in Suits: How to Lead the Workplace Reformation (Rethink Press, 2024) and What’s Wrong with Work? (John Wiley and Sons, 2010). Former producer on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, where she spent a decade in UK news and current affairs. Trained as one of Europe’s first accredited executive coaches after leaving the BBC. Named clients include Airbus, Roche, Mattel, Santander, The FA, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Govia Thameslink Railway, and Centre for Army Leadership. Regular contributor to Medium and Authority Magazine on leadership and the future of work. Biography Most organisations are not structured to change. They are structured to protect the habits that made them successful, and the people defending those habits are often the most senior in the room. Palmer’s work starts from that observation and builds out. She spent a decade as a producer on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, interrogating ministers and chief executives at eight minutes past seven in the morning. The habit of asking the uncomfortable question did not leave her when she moved into coaching at 29. It became the method. Since then she has spent more than two decades advising boards and executive teams at Airbus, Roche, Mattel, Santander, The FA, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. She founded That People Thing to house that work. Her fourth book, Punks in Suits: How to Lead the Workplace Reformation, published by Rethink Press in 2024, sets out the argument that entrenched management orthodoxy, not competitive pressure, is what stalls most organisations trying to evolve. What a senior team gets from her is rare in the category. She has the reporter’s ability to cut through executive language, the coach’s patience to stay with a difficult conversation, and a published thesis specific enough to be argued with. That makes the keynote a starting point for a real internal debate rather than a motivational interval. Key speaking topics Leadership behaviour and change Workplace reformation and culture Trust and candour in senior teams Future of work Decision-making under pressure Leadership myths and orthodoxies Ideal for Boards and executive committees facing a culture or performance inflection point. CHROs and chief people officers leading leadership development at scale. CEOs integrating acquisitions or navigating a strategic reset. Leadership conferences for senior management populations. Audience outcomes A clearer view of which leadership habits are acting as a ceiling on organisational performance. A specific argument, drawn from Punks in Suits, that senior teams can take back into their own decision forums. Language for the conversations leaders have been avoiding with peers and direct reports. Recognition that culture and strategy move together, and a concrete starting point for aligning them.

Why organisations work with Blake Morgan Three books, each making a distinct argument about customer experience: the operational discipline of More Is More, the technology playbook of The Customer of the Future, and the leadership framework of The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership. Audiences leave with applicable frameworks they can put to work the following week. Over a decade of weekly interviews with chief customer officers and CEOs on The Modern Customer Podcast. That volume of primary-source research gives her keynotes a specificity and currency that circuit speakers cannot match. Before becoming a full-time author and speaker, Blake was a customer service leader inside a Fortune 100 company. She speaks to leadership teams as someone who has worked inside the operational machinery that turns CX strategy into delivery. Her work focuses on the question now dominating CX boardrooms: how AI and automation are reshaping what customers expect and how organisations respond. She handles both the technology substance and the human experience side with equal credibility. Biography highlights Author of three books on customer experience: More Is More (2017), The Customer of the Future (2019), and The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership (2024). The Customer of the Future was listed by Business Insider among the top 20 books executives were reading during the COVID-19 period, and placed on Book Authority’s Top 100 Future of Technology Books of All Time. Senior Contributor to Forbes, with additional bylines in Harvard Business Review and Hemispheres magazine. Host of The Modern Customer Podcast, featuring chief customer officers, CEOs and CX operators from across industries. Guest lecturer at Columbia University and UC San Diego; adjunct faculty in the Executive MBA program at Rutgers Business School. Dubbed “The Queen of CX” by Meta; LinkedIn Top Voice; named one of the Top 40 female keynote speakers by Real Leaders magazine. Biography Most organisations that describe themselves as customer-centric are not. They have customer language in the strategy deck and customer photographs on the wall, alongside operational decisions that point in a different direction. Closing that gap is the work Blake Morgan has done for most of her career. She was working in the field before customer experience existed as a named discipline. Three books have followed. More Is More argued that memorable customer experience requires sustained corporate investment and introduced her DOMORE framework for structuring the work. The Customer of the Future, published in 2019, set out ten principles for companies preparing for AI, automation, and rising customer expectations around frictionless experience. The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership, published in 2024, is a playbook for keeping a customer-centric strategy alive inside an organisation under pressure. What gives her work unusual breadth is the range of roles she holds in parallel. She is a Forbes Senior Contributor on customer experience, host of The Modern Customer Podcast with hundreds of chief customer officer interviews behind her, adjunct faculty in the Executive MBA program at Rutgers Business School, and an adviser to companies including Amazon, Marriott, Coca-Cola and the Federal Reserve Bank. Each role produces primary-source material for the others. The dominant CX question has moved on from whether to invest in AI-enabled customer experience design. It is now how to build AI that customers actively want to interact with, at scale, without losing the emotional quality of the brand. That is the question at the centre of Morgan’s current keynote, Designing AI Experiences That Customers Remember. Key speaking topics Customer experience strategy and operations AI-enabled customer experience design Customer-focused leadership Building customer-centric cultures across the organisation Employee experience as the foundation of customer experience The future of customer loyalty in the AI era Digital transformation in service-intensive businesses Ideal for Chief Customer Officers, Chief Experience Officers and heads of customer experience responsible for operationalising CX strategy across an organisation Senior leadership teams and boards deciding how to integrate AI and automation into customer-facing operations without eroding the brand CMOs and heads of digital who are moving their organisations from campaign-driven marketing to experience-driven growth Audience outcomes A usable framework for turning customer experience from a strategic slogan into a daily operating decision Specific examples from companies currently getting CX right, and those getting it wrong, drawn from Morgan’s primary-source interviews A specific assessment of where AI genuinely improves customer experience and where it currently makes it worse A checklist of what customer-focused leaders do differently, drawn from the research behind The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership

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.

Why organisations work with Bonita Norris Her “Focus Not Fret” framework gives teams a specific, repeatable mechanism for redirecting attention under pressure, from what cannot be controlled to what can. Clients at Google and Alpine cite it by name as something still in use after the event. Her trajectory from complete novice to holder of two world records in three years is structurally identical to the challenge organisations face when asking teams to achieve stretch goals from a standing start, which is why the analogy lands rather than simply inspiring. The “Data Over Dogma” keynote reframes the 1953 Everest ascent as a triumph of scientific evidence over institutional resistance, creating a bridge to data and AI audiences that most expedition speakers cannot credibly make. She is the first British woman to summit Lhotse, the world’s fourth-highest mountain: a credential that goes beyond Everest and signals sustained, multi-year commitment to extreme performance, not a single peak. Winner of Best Speaker Storyteller at The Speaker Awards 2024, with verified feedback from organisations across financial services, technology, FMCG, and professional services, not a single sector cohort. Biography highlights Youngest British woman to summit Everest (2010); youngest person to reach both the summit of Everest and the North Pole First British woman to summit Lhotse, the world’s fourth-highest mountain (2012) Attempted to become the first British woman to climb K2, widely regarded as the world’s most dangerous mountain Author of The Girl Who Climbed Everest (Hodder & Stoughton, 2017); Amazon No. 1 in mountaineering and adventure (2022) Winner, Best Speaker Storyteller, The Speaker Awards 2024 Appearances on BBC News, ITV’s Lorraine, and BBC World Service; featured on HSBC’s Power Up Your Goals podcast (2024) Biography The question most organisations ask after a high-pressure failure is: what went wrong with the plan? The harder question and the more useful one is: what went wrong with the mindset? Bonita Norris has spent fifteen years developing a practical answer. She began climbing at twenty, having never touched a mountain. Two years later she stood on the summit of Everest, the youngest British woman to do so. A year after that she reached the North Pole, becoming the youngest person to hold both records simultaneously. None of it was the product of innate talent. It was the product of a specific way of managing fear, uncertainty, and the pressure of stretch goals: principles she has since codified and delivered in more than 650 corporate engagements worldwide. Her framework centres on three named concepts: “Success by Smallness”: the principle that ambitious goals are won through consistent, process-driven small actions; “Mountains of the Mind”: the argument that the limiting factor is almost always cognitive, not physical; and “Focus Not Fret”: a tool for redirecting attention from what is uncontrollable to what is actionable. These are not metaphors. They are structures that clients at Google, Clifford Chance, BlackRock, and Microsoft have applied directly. Her memoir, The Girl Who Climbed Everest, published in 2017, reached No. 1 on Amazon’s mountaineering and adventure chart in 2022. In 2024 she was awarded Best Speaker Storyteller at The Speaker Awards, recognition grounded in a consistent record of audience engagement across industries, not a single standout performance. Key speaking topics Resilience and mindset under pressure High performance in high-stakes environments Goal-setting and stretch ambition Overcoming fear and cognitive limitation Team cohesion and shared-goal culture Marginal gains and process-driven performance Data, evidence, and overcoming institutional resistance to change Ideal for Senior leadership teams navigating high-pressure transformation or uncertainty Sales and commercial organisations working toward stretch targets CHROs and L&D leads designing resilience or performance programmes All-hands and conference audiences where cross-functional alignment and shared motivation are the goal Audience outcomes A named, portable framework – “Focus Not Fret” – for managing attention and decision-making under pressure Clearer understanding of why ambitious goals fail at the mindset level, and what specifically to do about it A reframed relationship with failure: practical insight into how mistakes accelerate rather than derail progress Greater awareness of how small, consistent actions – not heroic moments – produce exceptional results over time A shared reference point for team culture conversations around resilience, ambition, and collective performance

Why organisations work with Bonnie Crombie A decade running Mississauga (population approaching 800,000) with operating and capital budgets in the billions, while Mississauga held a Triple-A credit rating from S&P for 17 consecutive years. Secured the initial $1.6 billion provincial commitment for the Hurontario LRT, the largest infrastructure project in Mississauga’s history, by building alignment across federal, provincial and municipal governments. Won three consecutive mayoral elections by wide margins (63.5%, 77%, and a decisive third win), and returned the Ontario Liberal Party to official party status in the 2025 provincial election, lifting its seat count from nine to fourteen. Brings two decades of corporate experience (McDonald’s Canada, The Walt Disney Company, and co-founding Cargo Cosmetics with a classmate from her MBA) into discussions of governance, growth and stakeholder management; supplemented by an ICD.D from the Institute of Corporate Directors at Rotman. Biography highlights Sixth Mayor of Mississauga, 2014 to 2024; three terms, each won by a wide margin. Leader of the Ontario Liberal Party, December 2023 to January 2026; led the party from nine seats back to official party status with fourteen. Liberal Member of Parliament for Mississauga-Streetsville, 2008 to 2011; co-chair of the Liberal Caucus Outreach Committee alongside Justin Trudeau; Liberal critic for Crown corporations. Mississauga held a Triple-A credit rating from S&P for 17 consecutive years during her tenure; secured full provincial funding for the Hurontario LRT, the largest infrastructure project in the city’s history. Co-founder of Cargo Cosmetics; previously held marketing roles at McDonald’s Canada and The Walt Disney Company, and managed government relations at the Insurance Bureau of Canada. MBA from Schulich School of Business, York University; ICD.D from the Institute of Corporate Directors at Rotman School of Management; awarded the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012. Biography Mississauga was Canada’s seventh-largest city when Bonnie Crombie became its sixth mayor in 2014. Her predecessor, Hazel McCallion, had been mayor for 36 years and built an institution shaped by her own personal authority. Crombie inherited that organisation and had to make it work for a more diverse and more demanding electorate. Over a decade in office, she ran budgets that scaled into the billions while the city preserved its Triple-A credit rating from S&P for 17 consecutive years. She secured the initial provincial commitment for the Hurontario LRT, the largest infrastructure project in the city’s history, and won three consecutive mayoral elections by margins above 60 per cent. Before public life she spent two decades in business, including marketing roles at McDonald’s Canada and The Walt Disney Company and co-founding the cosmetics company Cargo with a classmate from her MBA program. She holds an MBA from Schulich at York University and an ICD.D from the Institute of Corporate Directors at Rotman. In 2023 she was elected leader of the Ontario Liberal Party; she resigned the role in January 2026, having returned the party to official status with fourteen seats. That decade of operating experience gives her a working vocabulary for how senior leaders hold credibility inside large, politically scrutinised organisations. Decisions are made in public and stakeholders are fragmented. Outcomes are measured in budgets held and infrastructure delivered. Few keynote speakers have run an organisation at this scale and complexity; fewer still have done so through three consecutive electoral mandates. Key speaking topics Leadership in large, complex organisations Public sector governance and fiscal discipline Major infrastructure and city-building Decision-making under public scrutiny Stakeholder negotiation across tiers of government Women in political and executive leadership Ideal for Boards and senior leadership teams in regulated or publicly scrutinised industries (utilities, financial services, healthcare, real estate, infrastructure). Public sector and government audiences navigating multi-stakeholder reform, urban growth, or major capital projects. Women’s leadership conferences and senior women’s networks across business, government and the professions. Industry associations, chambers of commerce, and economic-development summits focused on competitiveness, investment attraction and urban prosperity. Audience outcomes How senior leaders hold fiscal discipline while delivering major capital projects under public pressure. The specific moves that build stakeholder alignment when constituencies do not share incentives. How to manage sustained public scrutiny and political attack, from someone who has been on the receiving end of both. A working vocabulary for leadership transitions and reform inside long-established organisations. For women in senior roles, a candid account of leading at the top of politics and business, and of the double standards that come with it.

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 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 Brenda Romero Forty-plus years inside a creative industry as designer, studio CEO and educator, with credits on roughly 49 shipped titles including the Wizardry series, Jagged Alliance, Ghost Recon and Empire of Sin. A working perspective on running an independent creative business: she co-founded Romero Games in Galway in 2015 and has built it through publisher deals, original IP and the realities of indie studio economics. An unusual record on the question of how design carries meaning. Her Train (2009) and the broader The Mechanic is the Message series are studied in academic literature as examples of game mechanics used to communicate difficult historical material. Formal industry recognition that buyers can reference without explanation: BAFTA Special Award (2017), GDC Ambassador Award (2015), Fulbright Scholar (2014). An educator’s clarity. As Director of the MSc in Game Design and Development at the University of Limerick (2016 to 2019) she taught the craft to a graduate cohort, and co-authored Challenges for Game Designers with Ian Schreiber, a standard text in the field. Biography highlights Co-founder and CEO, Romero Games Ltd, Galway, Ireland (2015 to present). BAFTA Special Award, 2017, for creative contribution to the games industry. Game Developers Choice Ambassador Award, 2015. Fulbright Scholar, 2014. Director, MSc in Game Design and Development, University of Limerick, 2016 to 2019. Designer of Train (2009) and the The Mechanic is the Message series; works held by the Strong National Museum of Play; TED speaker on games for understanding. Biography Most discussions of innovation get stuck at the level of culture. Romero’s career is a sustained argument that it is really a question of craft. She began at Sir-tech Software in 1981 on the Wizardry role-playing series, and has since shipped credits on roughly 49 titles across PC, console and mobile, including Jagged Alliance, Ghost Recon, Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes and Empire of Sin. In 2015 she co-founded Romero Games in Galway with John Romero, where she is CEO. The studio sits outside the conventional tech hubs, an operating choice rather than an aesthetic one, and a useful case study for any leader thinking about how to build a creative organisation away from the talent magnet cities. The work spans publisher partnerships, original IP and the day-to-day of running a creative business through cycles. Alongside the commercial work, Romero has used game design to address serious historical material. Train (2009) and the wider The Mechanic is the Message series treat the mechanics of a game, the rules players agree to follow, as the message itself. Train won the IndieCade Vanguard Award and is studied in academic literature on serious games and design ethics. The credentials line up around a consistent argument. BAFTA Special Award in 2017. GDC Ambassador Award in 2015. Fulbright Scholar in 2014. Director of the MSc in Game Design and Development at the University of Limerick from 2016 to 2019. Co-author with Ian Schreiber of Challenges for Game Designers, a standard text used in graduate programmes worldwide. Key speaking topics Creative leadership in technology and entertainment The discipline of design and managed innovation Building and running an independent creative studio Games as a medium for communicating complex ideas Women in technology and the games industry The economics of creative work and intellectual property Ideal for Leaders of creative, R and D, brand and product organisations. Boards and executive teams in entertainment, media and consumer technology. Innovation and transformation leads looking for a working studio perspective on creative output. Talent and learning leaders building creative capability inside a corporate environment. Audience outcomes A working operator’s view of how creative output is produced under commercial pressure. A clearer picture of what good design discipline looks like when the subject is hard or contested. Reference points from inside the games industry that translate into corporate creative function. A frank account of building a creative business outside the obvious geographies, with the trade-offs named.

Why organisations work with Brendon Burchard He brings a named, testable framework. The six High Performance Habits (clarity, energy, necessity, productivity, influence, courage) are drawn from his research with the High Performance Institute and its validated High Performance Indicator Assessment. The research scale is unusual in this field. Survey work across more than 30,000 respondents in 190 countries, followed by structured interviews with the top-scoring subjects, gives leaders a source of advice that is not anecdotal. He has built and run the organisations he speaks about. Founder and CEO of GrowthDay, founder of the High Performance Institute, architect of the Certified High Performance Coaching programme operating across 100 countries. His content travels inside companies. Fortune 500 leadership teams and Vistage member groups have used the High Performance Habits material as a shared language for team standards, not a one-off keynote. Three-time New York Times bestselling author with a fourth title, High Performance Habits, selected by Amazon editors as a Top 3 Business and Leadership Book of 2017. Biography highlights Three-time New York Times bestselling author: The Motivation Manifesto, The Millionaire Messenger, and further titles, with High Performance Habits reaching Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. Founder and CEO of GrowthDay, a personal development platform, and founder of the High Performance Institute. Architect of Certified High Performance Coaching, operating across 100 countries with over 150,000 logged coaching sessions per Institute figures. Led the research programme behind High Performance Habits, including survey work across 30,000-plus respondents in 190 countries and more than 100 structured interviews with top-scoring performers. Twice profiled on the cover of Success magazine; named by Success and O, The Oprah Magazine as one of the most influential leaders in personal growth. Earlier career at Accenture before moving into performance research and executive coaching. Biography Most leaders know what to do. The harder question is why capable teams, with the right strategy and the right people, still underperform their potential. Brendon Burchard’s research argues the answer lies in a set of daily habits that sustained high performers practise and that most organisations leave to chance. That research is the backbone of his work. With the High Performance Institute, Burchard surveyed more than 30,000 people in 190 countries using the High Performance Indicator Assessment, then ran structured interviews with the top-scoring subjects. The output is a six-habit model (clarity, energy, necessity, productivity, influence, courage) published in High Performance Habits, selected by Amazon editors as a Top 3 Business and Leadership Book of 2017 and a Wall Street Journal bestseller. He has also built the organisations he talks about. As founder and CEO of GrowthDay and founder of the High Performance Institute, Burchard runs the Certified High Performance Coaching programme, operating in 100 countries with over 150,000 logged sessions according to the Institute’s own figures. Earlier books, including The Motivation Manifesto, The Charge, and The Millionaire Messenger, each reached New York Times or Wall Street Journal bestseller lists, giving him a readership and coaching network few performance researchers can match. For an executive audience, his value is specific. He gives leadership teams a shared vocabulary and a measurable standard for what sustained performance looks like, then ties it to the decisions senior people actually make: where to spend energy, what to cut, and how to hold a team to a clearer standard than comfort allows. Key speaking topics High performance habits Executive and team performance Personal and organisational productivity Leadership development Motivation and behavioural change Coaching culture and performance standards Influence and communication Ideal for CEOs and executive committees setting performance standards for a full leadership team Heads of sales and revenue leaders running large annual kick-offs or incentive events Chief learning officers building a coaching culture or leadership development programme Founder-led businesses scaling from owner-operator mode into managed performance Audience outcomes A shared six-habit model leadership teams can use as a common performance vocabulary A clearer view of which habits correlate with sustained results versus short-term output Specific daily practices senior people can apply to protect energy and clarity during high-load periods Language for holding teams to a higher standard without defaulting to pressure or burnout A research-backed case for treating performance as a set of trainable behaviours, not a trait

Why organisations work with Brent Adamson He co-authored the two books that redefined how serious B2B organisations think about commercial effectiveness; the Challenger thesis is now the reference point most large sales transformations are measured against. His research at CEB and Gartner, conducted over nearly two decades with thousands of B2B sales organisations, gives him a dataset on buyer behaviour that almost no individual practitioner can match. He gives commercial leaders a specific diagnosis of why win rates fall in complex deals, decision complexity, information overload, implementation uncertainty and value opacity, and a vocabulary their teams can act on. He works at the boundary between sales and marketing, which is where most B2B revenue problems actually live, and addresses both functions as one commercial system. His sensemaking and buyer-confidence work has moved the conversation past closing technique into the harder question of how customers come to a decision they will defend internally. Biography highlights Co-author, The Challenger Sale (Portfolio, 2011) and The Challenger Customer (Portfolio, 2015), with Matthew Dixon, Pat Spenner and Nick Toman. Chief storyteller for CEB, now Gartner’s, sales, marketing and customer service practices, 2003 to 2022; Distinguished Vice President at Gartner. Current Global Head of Research, Advisory and Communities at Ecosystems, a SaaS platform for collaborative customer value management. Harvard Business Review contributor, including “Sensemaking for Sales” (January to February 2022) and “Traditional B2B Sales and Marketing Are Becoming Obsolete” (2022). Originator, with colleagues, of the Mobilizer profile, Buyer Enablement and Customer Decision Confidence as working concepts in B2B sales. MBA, University of Michigan Ross School of Business; PhD in Applied Linguistics, University of Texas; former faculty member at Michigan State University. Biography The Challenger Sale argued, on the basis of CEB research across thousands of B2B reps, that the best performers do not build relationships and then sell. They teach, tailor and take control of the conversation. Published in 2011, it became the reference text for a generation of sales transformation programmes. That book was the first chapter of a longer argument. With The Challenger Customer in 2015, Adamson and his co-authors turned their attention from the seller to the buyer, showing that the average B2B purchase now involves more than five stakeholders and that consensus, not persuasion, is the binding constraint. The Mobilizer, the stakeholder willing to drive change inside their own organisation, became the figure most B2B commercial teams now train to find. From 2003 to 2022, Adamson served as chief storyteller for CEB, later Gartner, where he held the role of Distinguished Vice President. His “Sensemaking for Sales” article in the Harvard Business Review set out the next step in the work: in markets saturated with information, the seller’s job is to help the buyer make sense of what they already know, not to add to the pile. He now leads research, advisory and communities at Ecosystems, a SaaS platform for collaborative customer value management. The throughline across two decades is the same question. What does an effective commercial organisation look like when the buyer has more information than they can use and less confidence than they need to act on it? Key speaking topics B2B sales effectiveness and the Challenger model Buyer enablement and customer decision confidence Sensemaking as a commercial discipline Mobilizers and consensus selling in complex B2B deals The sales and marketing operating system Commercial leadership for digital-first buyers Ideal for Chief revenue officers, chief sales officers and chief commercial officers leading B2B sales transformation Chief marketing officers in B2B environments aligning demand and revenue functions Sales enablement and sales operations leaders rebuilding methodology and training Boards and executive teams reviewing the commercial model in complex, multi-stakeholder markets Audience outcomes A clear diagnosis of why complex B2B deals stall, framed around decision complexity, information overload, implementation uncertainty and value opacity A working vocabulary for buyer enablement, sensemaking and customer decision confidence that sales and marketing teams can apply together A concrete picture of the Mobilizer profile and what it changes about how teams qualify and pursue accounts A sharper view of where the commercial organisation needs to invest next, beyond seller skills, into how customers actually buy

Why organisations work with Brian Burke He has run four NHL franchises and acted as the league’s chief disciplinarian, so the material on accountability, conduct, and hard personnel calls is drawn from decisions he actually made, not cases he studied. He built the Anaheim Ducks team that won the 2007 Stanley Cup and the U.S. squad that took Olympic silver in 2010, giving him a credible answer to how standards and culture translate into results. He co-founded the You Can Play Project after the death of his son Brendan, an inclusion initiative that became the operating standard for LGBTQ+ acceptance across professional sport. As first Executive Director of the Professional Women’s Hockey League Players’ Association, he has worked on institution-building inside a league designed from scratch, not just running established franchises. Harvard Law School training and five years as NHL Executive Vice President mean he speaks to the legal, governance, and reputational dimensions of leadership with specific authority. Biography highlights Juris Doctor, Harvard Law School, 1981 Captain of Providence Friars men’s ice hockey, NCAA (1976-77) NHL Executive Vice President and Director of Hockey Operations, 1993-1998 General manager of Hartford Whalers, Vancouver Canucks, Anaheim Ducks (Stanley Cup, 2007), and Toronto Maple Leafs General manager, United States men’s Olympic hockey team, Vancouver 2010 (silver medal) Co-founder, You Can Play Project (2012) Inductee, U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame, Class of 2023 Author, “Burke’s Law: A Life in Hockey” (Viking, 2020), with Stephen Brunt Executive Director, Professional Women’s Hockey League Players’ Association (2024) Biography The Anaheim Ducks won the Stanley Cup in 2007 under a front office that had been rebuilt almost from scratch. Brian Burke was the general manager who rebuilt it. That pattern, inherit a struggling operation, set hard standards, make uncomfortable personnel decisions, has defined four decades of his career across Hartford, Vancouver, Anaheim, Toronto, Calgary, and Pittsburgh. Before any of that, he trained as a lawyer. Burke took a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1981, then spent five years inside the NHL league office as Executive Vice President and the chief disciplinarian for on-ice conduct. The legal training shows up in how he talks about leadership: precise about process, unsentimental about accountability, aware that every decision by a senior executive is a decision the organisation will have to defend. The work changed after his son Brendan, who was openly gay, died in a 2010 car accident. With his son Patrick, Burke launched the You Can Play Project in 2012 to end homophobia in sport. The initiative has since become the reference standard for LGBTQ+ inclusion across professional leagues, and the experience gave Burke an unusually direct perspective on how cultural change happens inside organisations built around a narrow definition of toughness. His 2020 memoir “Burke’s Law: A Life in Hockey,” co-authored with Stephen Brunt, was a number one Canadian bestseller. In 2023 he was inducted into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame. In 2024 he took on the first executive directorship of the Professional Women’s Hockey League Players’ Association, a mandate to build institutional foundations for a league being designed in real time. Key speaking topics Leadership in high-performance sport Culture, conduct, and accountability inside elite organisations Inclusion and the You Can Play Project Decision-making under public scrutiny Building and running championship teams Governance and discipline in professional leagues Resilience and personal loss Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting conduct and accountability standards CHROs and chief culture officers working on inclusion in tradition-bound organisations Leaders running high-profile operations where decisions are reviewed in public Sports and entertainment businesses, and organisations that work closely with them Audience outcomes A concrete read on how senior leaders hold conduct standards when the easy move is to look the other way Specific examples of what it took to build a Stanley Cup-winning organisation and an Olympic medal-winning team A direct account of how the You Can Play Project changed LGBTQ+ inclusion across professional sport A sharper sense of how legal, reputational, and competitive considerations collide in senior personnel decisions Perspective from a leader who has made high-consequence calls under sustained public pressure and can explain the reasoning