Leadership speakers

Why organisations work with Chad Foster He pairs a personal resilience story with a Fortune 500 sales record, which means he lands with revenue leaders, not only HR and culture audiences. The Blind Ambition Framework gives sales and operating leaders a structured five-step model rather than an inspirational set piece, and it has been delivered to 175,000+ attendees across six continents. He is credible on technology and commercial execution because he built the first CRM software for visually impaired users, a project Oracle had judged impossible. His Harvard Business School leadership credential, the first awarded to a blind executive, gives buyers cover when programming a resilience speaker for senior commercial audiences. Named client list includes Google, Salesforce, IBM, Microsoft, GE, Caterpillar and Nestle Purina, which signals comfort with the standards of large enterprise commercial events. Biography highlights First blind executive to graduate Harvard Business School’s leadership program. Author of Blind Ambition: How to Go from Victim to Visionary, HarperCollins Leadership, 2021. Creator of the Blind Ambition Framework, a five-step methodology applied across sales, leadership and culture programmes. Fortune 500 finance and sales executive credited with directing strategies tied to $45 billion in technology contracts. Built the first CRM software for visually impaired users. Keynote clients include Google, Salesforce, IBM, Microsoft, GE, Caterpillar, Nestle Purina and Amgen. Biography Resilience as a commercial topic has a credibility problem. Most speakers in the category sit on the personal side of the stage, helpful for a culture day, harder to programme into a sales kickoff or a senior leadership offsite. Chad Foster sits on the other side of that line. Foster lost his eyesight at twenty-one and went on to become the first blind executive to graduate from Harvard Business School’s leadership program. He then spent his career inside Fortune 500 technology companies, directing financial and sales strategies tied to $45 billion in contracts and building the first CRM software designed for visually impaired users, a project Oracle had said was not feasible. His book, Blind Ambition: How to Go from Victim to Visionary, was published by HarperCollins Leadership in 2021 and sets out the Blind Ambition Framework, a five-step methodology now used inside Google, Salesforce, IBM, Microsoft, GE, Caterpillar and Nestle Purina. He has delivered it more than 200 times to over 175,000 attendees across six continents. The reason buyers programme him into senior commercial settings is that the framework is presented as an operating discipline for performance under pressure, not a story about overcoming adversity. The personal account is the proof. The argument is about how leaders sustain judgement and revenue when the conditions stay hard for longer than the playbook assumes. Key speaking topics Resilience as a commercial leadership capability Performance under sustained pressure Sales leadership and revenue under disruption Mindset and decision-making for senior teams Inclusion and diversity as competitive advantage Change leadership and culture under strain Ideal for Sales kickoffs and CRO-led revenue events Senior leadership offsites and executive development programmes Culture, inclusion and people leadership conferences with a commercial audience Technology and financial services firms running multi-year transformation Audience outcomes A structured five-step framework for sustaining performance through disruption. A clearer language for resilience that travels into a sales and commercial setting. Specific tools for reframing setbacks into operating decisions. Renewed conviction at senior level on the link between mindset and revenue performance.

Why organisations work with Charlene Li Her central argument inverts the standard AI conversation: organisations do not need a separate AI strategy – they need AI deployed in service of the strategy already in place. That reframe moves boards from analysis paralysis to sequenced action, in a space where most external voices add complexity rather than remove it. The Disruption Mindset reverses thirty years of received innovation wisdom: disruption does not create growth – growth creates disruption. That distinction changes how leadership teams set strategy and allocate resources, not merely how they talk about change. Winning with AI (2025, co-authored with Dr. Katia Walsh, Harvard Business School’s inaugural Chief Digital Officer) is grounded in two years of research and 50+ executive interviews, and includes the Six-Quarter Walk planning tool – a practical sequencing instrument designed to be used without external consultants. Her research spans the full arc of technological disruption – internet, social media, digital transformation, generative AI – giving her longitudinal credibility when leadership teams are being asked to make bets on technologies whose business implications are still contested. As the founder of Altimeter Group, a firm built explicitly to compete with Gartner, Forrester, and IDC before being acquired by Prophet, Li has operated as both a researcher and an entrepreneur navigating the disruption she now advises on – a position most AI strategy voices cannot occupy. Biography highlights New York Times bestselling author of six books, including The Disruption Mindset, Open Leadership, Groundswell, and Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success (2025, co-authored with Dr. Katia Walsh) Founder of Altimeter Group (2008), a research and strategy firm that competed directly with Gartner, Forrester, and IDC; acquired by Prophet in 2015 Former Chief Research Officer at PA Consulting; currently leads Quantum Networks Group Graduate of Harvard College (magna cum laude, A.B.) and Harvard Business School (MBA) Named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company; Top 50 Leadership Innovators by Inc.; LinkedIn Top 10 Voices on Company Culture (2022) Keynote speaker at the World Economic Forum, TED, and South by Southwest; regularly cited in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Reuters; has appeared on 60 Minutes and CNBC Biography The most common failure point in AI transformation is strategic misdiagnosis. Charlene Li’s research – two years of fieldwork and more than 50 executive interviews for Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success (2025) – found that organisations treating AI as a strategy in its own right fall behind those that deploy it in service of the strategy they already have. That distinction, between AI as initiative and AI as instrument, is what separates pilot programmes from scaled competitive advantage. The same counterintuitive rigour runs through her earlier body of work. The Disruption Mindset (2019) challenged a core assumption of competitive strategy: disruption does not create growth – growth creates disruption. Companies that make disruption the goal, rather than the outcome of aggressively pursued growth opportunities, build the wrong culture and the wrong metrics. That argument, backed by research, has changed how board-level strategy conversations are framed, not just concluded. Li’s analytical credibility was built at Altimeter Group, the research firm she founded in 2008 as a deliberate competitor to Gartner, Forrester, and IDC – and which was acquired by Prophet in 2015. She subsequently served as Chief Research Officer at PA Consulting before founding Quantum Networks Group. Across those institutions, she has worked with organisations including 14 of the Dow Jones Industrial 30. She holds a Harvard MBA and an undergraduate degree from Harvard College, earned magna cum laude. Named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company and one of Inc.’s Top 50 Leadership Innovators, Li has keynoted the World Economic Forum, TED, and South by Southwest, and is regularly cited by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. What distinguishes her from others working the same ground is the research arc: she has tracked and advised on each major wave of technological disruption – internet, social media, digital transformation, generative AI – from inside analytical and advisory institutions, not from the outside looking in. Key speaking topics AI strategy and competitive deployment Disruptive transformation and growth strategy Leadership in the digital age Future of work and AI’s workforce implications Organisational culture and the disruption mindset Strategic decision-making under technological uncertainty Business model disruption and innovation Ideal for C-suite and board members responsible for AI investment and transformation decisions Chief Digital Officers, Chief AI Officers, and technology transformation leads Strategy and innovation leaders at established organisations facing competitive disruption Senior HR and people leaders managing workforce implications of AI adoption Audience outcomes A clear framework for aligning AI with existing business strategy – rather than building a parallel AI initiative Understanding of why most AI pilot programmes stall and what organisationally moves them into scaled production The Disruption Mindset distinction: why pursuing disruption as a goal is a strategic error, and what to pursue instead Practical tools for sequencing AI investments against business priorities, including the Six-Quarter Walk planning framework A more confident leadership posture for communicating AI strategy internally – to boards, to workforces, and across the organisation

Why organisations work with Chip Conley He turned a single boutique hotel into a 50-property group as CEO of Joie de Vivre, then mentored Brian Chesky through Airbnb’s hospitality build-out. Few speakers can speak from inside both an independent operator and a category-defining platform. His Modern Elder thesis gives leadership teams a usable language for intergenerational collaboration at a moment when most companies are still treating age as a liability rather than a capability. He applied Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to corporate strategy in his book Peak and his 2010 TED talk, and the framework still reads as one of the more durable arguments for measuring culture, employee engagement, and customer experience as connected variables. The Modern Elder Academy he founded in 2018 is the only midlife wisdom school running at scale, with over 2,000 alumni and a second campus, which gives him real operating data on how mid-career professionals reset, retrain, and re-enter organisations. He is a New York Times bestselling author and three-time TED speaker, with books published across two decades that track the same throughline: human meaning as the underlying engine of commercial performance. Biography highlights Founder and former CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, which he built from a single property in 1987 into a portfolio of around 50 boutique hotels. Former Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy at Airbnb, mentor to CEO Brian Chesky during the company’s expansion to hosts in 191 countries. Founder and Executive Chairman of Modern Elder Academy, with campuses in Baja California Sur and Santa Fe and more than 2,000 alumni. Three-time TED speaker, including “Measuring what makes life worthwhile” (2010) and his 2023 talk on the midlife chrysalis. New York Times bestselling author of Wisdom@Work: The Making of a Modern Elder and Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age, alongside Peak, Emotional Equations, The Rebel Rules, and Marketing That Matters. Stanford BA and MBA. Named Most Innovative CEO in the Bay Area by San Francisco Business Times and recipient of the hospitality industry’s 2012 Pioneer Award. Biography The conventional career arc treats age as a depreciation curve. Chip Conley has spent two decades arguing the opposite, and building the institutions to prove it. He founded Joie de Vivre Hospitality in San Francisco in 1987, ran it for nearly 24 years, and grew it into one of California’s largest boutique hotel groups, around 50 properties at its peak. The book that came out of that period, Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, applied Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to employee, customer, and investor relationships, and remains the most cited articulation of his commercial argument that human meaning is the engine, not the decoration, of business performance. In 2013, Airbnb’s three founders asked him to become Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy. He mentored Brian Chesky and helped translate a tech platform into a hospitality company operating with hosts in 191 countries. The label he picked up there, “modern elder”, became the seed of his next institution. The Modern Elder Academy, which he founded in 2018, has campuses in Baja California Sur and Santa Fe and has now run more than 2,000 mid-career professionals through structured programmes on transition, longevity, and the social contract between generations at work. His more recent books, Wisdom@Work and Learning to Love Midlife, push that thesis into the corporate agenda directly: age as a category of workforce diversity, midlife as a strategic asset, and the intergenerational team as a more accurate model of how organisations actually learn. The argument is grounded in operating experience, not commentary, which is why boards and executive teams increasingly book him to challenge the assumptions inside their own talent strategy. Key speaking topics The multigenerational workplace and the case for age as workforce diversity Modern Elder leadership and the redesign of mid-career Culture and employee engagement built on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs Disruptive innovation in hospitality and platform businesses Customer experience as a function of internal culture Emotional intelligence in leadership Midlife transition, longevity, and workforce retention Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers redesigning talent strategy across five generations at work CEOs and boards facing attrition of senior expertise and weak intergenerational knowledge transfer Hospitality, travel, and consumer-facing leadership teams rebuilding culture as a commercial asset Executive development and leadership academy programmes focused on mid-career renewal and senior transition Audience outcomes A clearer operating definition of intergenerational collaboration, with concrete language for treating age as a diversity and capability question A reframed view of mid-career and senior employees as a strategic asset rather than a cost line A working model, drawn from Peak and Maslow, for connecting employee meaning, customer experience, and financial performance Specific, named examples from Joie de Vivre, Airbnb, and Modern Elder Academy that translate into practical policy and culture changes A more honest conversation inside the leadership team about ageism, longevity, and what wisdom is actually worth in commercial terms

Why organisations work with Chris Baréz-Brown Twenty-five years working the commercial creativity brief as an operator, first agency-side and then running his own firm. The view is from inside the work, not from a research perch. Five Penguin titles set out a coherent published thesis on creativity as a learnable behaviour, so buyers can read the argument before booking the room. His Unilever programme was written up in Harvard Business Review, a rare credential in this territory. He ships a behaviour-change tool with the keynote. TiO and the Elvis Energy Lab let the room run the method the next morning, not just remember the speech. A repeat-booking record on the brand side that other creativity speakers don’t match. Biography highlights Founder of Upping Your Elvis, a creativity and energy consultancy working with global brands. Former director at innovation consultancy ?What If!, leading offices in London, New York and Sydney. Author of five Penguin books: Shine, Wake Up!, Free!, How to Have Kick-Ass Ideas, and Upping Your Elvis. Penguin’s bestselling author in 2014. Creator of TiO, a workplace mental wellbeing app with research from the University of Bristol. Featured in Harvard Business Review for the impact of his work with Unilever. Media appearances include the BBC, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, Fast Company and Calm. Biography Most creativity programmes inside large organisations fail at the same point. The room leaves energised, the workstreams revert, and within a quarter the operating model has absorbed the change. The problem is rarely a shortage of ideas. It is the absence of a daily practice that lets ordinary employees produce original work under commercial pressure. This is the territory Chris Baréz-Brown has worked in for twenty-five years. He spent over a decade as a director at ?What If!, the innovation consultancy, running the business across London, New York and Sydney before founding Upping Your Elvis in 2010. The premise of the firm is that human energy, not strategy decks, is the variable that determines whether a creative culture survives contact with the operating model. His five Penguin titles, including the bestseller Upping Your Elvis, set out a body of practice that treats creativity as a learnable behaviour rather than a personality trait. The work has run inside Nike, Coca-Cola, Diageo, Unilever, Roche, Microsoft and the WPP agency network on the brand side, with Harvard Business Review featuring the impact of the Unilever programme. What sets the offer apart from a standard creativity keynote is the post-event mechanism. Through TiO, an app developed with research from the University of Bristol, and the Elvis Energy Lab, audiences leave with a method they can run themselves. The thesis underneath all of it is commercial: brave thinking is a function of human state, and human state can be designed for. Key speaking topics Commercial creativity and innovation practice Energy management and human performance at work Mental and emotional wellbeing in high-pressure roles Leadership of creative teams Behaviour change and habit design inside organisations Brand-side innovation case studies Ideal for CMOs and brand leaders looking to lift creative output across marketing organisations Heads of innovation and R&D in consumer-facing businesses Senior HR and people leaders responsible for engagement and wellbeing strategy Leadership offsites where the brief is renewal of energy and creative confidence, not a strategy refresh Audience outcomes A working definition of creativity as daily practice, not occasional inspiration Specific behavioural tools, including TiO, that audiences can use the next morning A sharper read on how their own energy state is shaping the quality of their commercial decisions Case material on what holds up when a creative culture meets the operating model

Why organisations work with Chris Barton He built a product under conditions that proved his point: no smartphones, no app stores, no viable algorithm, and a consensus view from MIT and Stanford that the problem was unsolvable. Shazam survived six years of near-bankruptcy before the App Store arrived. That timeline is the argument, not a metaphor for it. His two named frameworks – «Start from Zero» and «Creative Persistence» – give innovation leads something to work with after the event: a method for stripping assumptions back to first principles, and a model for distinguishing productive persistence from sunk-cost thinking. His role building Android’s carrier distribution infrastructure at Google, and leading mobile carrier partnerships at Dropbox, means his perspective on how transformative products actually reach scale is drawn from the operational history of three category-defining companies. He holds 12 patents across Shazam, Google, and Dropbox – including one employed in the Google Search algorithm – and testified as a key DOJ witness in the Google antitrust trial on the mobile default deals he personally negotiated. That depth of institutional involvement in the mobile computing era is not a speaker credential; it is a primary source. Guard Inc., his current startup applying AI to drowning detection in swimming pools, is a live demonstration that his frameworks are not retrospective lessons from one successful exit – he is still using them on a problem that experts regard as unsolved. Biography highlights Co-founder and first CEO of Shazam; the company was acquired by Apple in 2018 for a reported $400 million and has been downloaded more than 2 billion times First business development employee at Google focused on mobile partnerships; led the carrier agreements with Verizon and AT&T that established Android’s distribution infrastructure One of the first 100 employees at Dropbox, heading mobile carrier partnerships Holds 12 patents across Shazam, Google, and Dropbox, including one employed in the Google Search algorithm BA Economics and MBA, UC Berkeley; Master in Finance, University of Cambridge; early career at L.E.K. Consulting Key witness for the U.S. Department of Justice in the United States v. Google LLC antitrust trial (2023), testifying on mobile search default agreements he personally negotiated Founder and CEO of Guard Inc., an AI startup building drowning detection technology for swimming pools Biography Most organisations treat innovation as a culture question. Chris Barton treats it as a methods problem. As co-founder and first CEO of Shazam – the music recognition app Apple acquired in 2018 for a reported $400 million – he built a category that did not exist, under conditions that should have made it impossible. When Barton conceived the idea in 1999, there were no smartphones, no app stores, and no algorithm capable of identifying music from ambient audio. Professors at MIT and Stanford told him the pattern recognition problem could not be solved. Shazam launched commercially in 2002 and survived six years of near-bankruptcy before the App Store created its distribution opportunity. It reached 300 million monthly active users before Apple acquired it. The timeline matters: this is not a story about a fast breakthrough. It is a story about sustained method under prolonged failure. His track record inside the companies that built mobile computing adds a different layer of authority. At Google he was the first business development employee focused on mobile, leading the carrier agreements with Verizon and AT&T that established Android’s distribution infrastructure. At Dropbox he was one of the first 100 employees, heading mobile carrier partnerships. He holds 12 patents across all three companies, including one used in the Google Search algorithm, and in 2023 testified as a key DOJ witness in the United States v. Google LLC antitrust trial – speaking to the mobile default deals he personally negotiated. His frameworks – «Start from Zero» and «Creative Persistence» – extract a repeatable method from that experience: how to strip assumptions back to first principles, and how to sustain focus on core insight when resistance is at its strongest. He applies both now as founder and CEO of Guard Inc., an AI startup building drowning detection technology for swimming pools – a problem, again, that multiple experts have called unsolvable. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and startup creation Innovation under expert and institutional resistance Consumer AI and the origins of mobile technology Friction elimination and product simplicity Creative Persistence as an organisational method Technology and business model disruption Assumption-stripping and first-principles thinking Ideal for Senior leadership and innovation teams at large organisations launching new products or business units against internal or expert resistance Chief Digital Officers, CTOs, and heads of innovation building internal capability for breakthrough thinking Entrepreneurial organisations and scale-up leadership navigating prolonged uncertainty Conference audiences of founders, technology executives, and business leaders in high-disruption sectors Audience outcomes A working understanding of the «Start from Zero» and «Creative Persistence» frameworks, and how to apply them when pursuing ideas facing expert or institutional opposition A concrete model for distinguishing productive persistence from sunk-cost thinking – drawn from six years of near-bankruptcy at Shazam before the product reached scale Specific techniques for identifying and eliminating friction – the unnecessary effort that prevents otherwise viable ideas from reaching users A revised understanding of how transformative consumer products (Shazam, Android, Dropbox) were built from first principles, not from incremental improvement Greater organisational confidence in pursuing ideas that current consensus dismisses

Why organisations work with Chris Dyer He ran the experiment before he taught it. PeopleG2 was a fully remote business through five Inc. 5000 listings and fifteen “best place to work” cycles, which means his culture and remote-work models come from operating evidence, not consulting observation. His “7 Pillars” (Transparency, Positivity, Measurement, Acknowledgement, Uniqueness, Listening, Mistakes) give an executive team a shared diagnostic vocabulary for culture, replacing the usual mix of values posters and engagement-survey theatre. He works at the intersection of culture and remote design, where most speakers pick a side. Buyers wrestling with hybrid productivity, distributed leadership, and connection in dispersed teams get one voice on both questions. Inc. Magazine named him the #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture, and his client roster includes NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Intuit, IKEA, and Southwest Airlines, which signals he holds a senior room across regulated, industrial, tech, and consumer settings. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of PeopleG2, a fully remote background-screening company, five-time Inc. 5000 honoree. Author of The Power of Company Culture (Kogan Page) and co-author of Remote Work (Kogan Page). Named #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture by Inc. Magazine; ranked #5 on the LeadersHum Power List. Listed among Global Gurus Top 30 Organizational Culture Professionals. Forbes Business Council member, Fast Company Executive Board member, and contributor to Inc.com. Keynote clients include NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Intuit, IKEA, and Southwest Airlines. Biography Most companies treat culture as something HR runs and leaders endorse. PeopleG2 was built the other way around. Chris Dyer ran the firm as a fully remote operation while it landed on the Inc. 5000 list five times and was repeatedly named a best place to work, which made culture a daily operating decision rather than an annual initiative. That experience produced a specific framework. The Power of Company Culture, published by Kogan Page, sets out seven pillars: Transparency, Positivity, Measurement, Acknowledgement, Uniqueness, Listening, and Mistakes. The book’s argument is operational. Each pillar maps to behaviours leaders can audit, and the cases used to test it sit inside companies like General Motors, Southwest Airlines, and VaynerMedia. His second book, Remote Work, also with Kogan Page, addresses the harder follow-on question: how do you keep a culture intact when your workforce is distributed. Inc. Magazine subsequently named Dyer the #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture, and his keynote work has placed him in front of leadership teams at NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Intuit, IKEA, and Southwest Airlines. What buyers tend to take from Dyer is permission to stop treating culture as soft. He gives senior teams a vocabulary, a diagnostic, and a set of operator decisions, grounded in a business he built and ran rather than a model he assembled from interviews. Key speaking topics Company culture as an operating system The 7 Pillars framework Remote and hybrid workforce design Employee engagement and retention Leadership in distributed organisations Future of work and AI integration in the workplace Burnout and recession-period leadership Ideal for CHROs and heads of People rebuilding engagement and retention strategy CEOs and executive teams setting the direction on hybrid or fully remote operating models Culture and transformation leads inside organisations carrying out post-restructure rebuilds Leadership development functions designing programmes for distributed managers Audience outcomes A shared diagnostic for which cultural levers in their organisation are actually moving performance A practical view of how to run a distributed or hybrid workforce without losing cohesion An operator’s account of how engagement, retention, and productivity reinforce each other when the right pillars are in place Concrete tactics from a CEO who tested them inside a five-time Inc. 5000 company

Why organisations work with Chris Grant He has run the room with senior leadership teams across government, professional sport, the NHS, financial services, and FTSE corporates, and is unusually fluent in moving a group from comfortable discussion to actual decision. His framework on decision-making, set out in Better Decisions (Quarto, 2020), gives executives a working language for how judgement degrades under speed, fatigue, and political pressure. He has chaired one of the largest public-facing behaviour change programmes in UK history (Chip & PIN), which gives him real authority on the gap between strategy and adoption at a population scale. He brings a substantive, non-performative line on inclusion, drawn from sport governance reform and his work as Chair of the British Basketball Federation, useful when boards are tired of theatre and want operating change. Audiences describe his style as “high energy calm”. He runs interactive keynotes, not lectures, which suits leadership offsites where the brief is to shift behaviour, not deliver content. Biography highlights OBE for services to sport, 2021 Queen’s Birthday Honours. Chair of the British Basketball Federation (2022 to present). Former CEO of Sported, the UK-wide London 2012 legacy charity supporting community sport. Author of Better Decisions: Direct your life. Influence your world. (Quarto, 2020). Independent Board Member, Sport England (two terms); board member, Financial Services Culture Board. Chaired the Programme Steering Committee for the UK rollout of Chip & PIN. Mentored Olympic and Paralympic medal-winning coaches; Deputy Chair, International Inspiration (London 2012). Biography Strategy is easier than execution, and execution is easier than getting a senior team to actually change how it behaves. Most leadership teams know what good looks like. The work that closes the gap between intention and operating reality is what Chris Grant has spent his career on, across government, professional sport, the NHS, financial services, and large corporates. The credentials sit behind that argument rather than in front of it. He led Sported, the UK-wide London 2012 legacy charity, as CEO. He chaired the Programme Steering Committee for the UK introduction of Chip & PIN, one of the largest public-facing behaviour change programmes the country has run. He served two terms as an Independent Board Member of Sport England and joined the Financial Services Culture Board. He was awarded an OBE in 2021 for services to sport, and now chairs the British Basketball Federation. His 2020 book Better Decisions (Quarto) sets out a 20-lesson framework on how senior leaders can hold their judgement when pace, politics, and uncertainty are pulling against them. It draws on thousands of facilitated days with executive teams and on his work mentoring Olympic and Paralympic coaches, where decision quality is measured in seconds and consequences. Grant runs interactive keynotes rather than lectures. Audiences leave with a sharper sense of how their team makes decisions, where group dynamics are quietly costing them, and what to change on Monday. The work is most useful to organisations that already understand the diagnosis and need help moving on to the cure. Key speaking topics Decision-making under pressure Organisational change and execution Group dynamics and team performance Inclusive leadership and culture reform Behaviour change at scale Strategy facilitation for senior teams Governance reform in sport and the public sector Ideal for Executive committees and boards working through restructure, succession, or strategic reset CHROs and chief people officers tackling culture, inclusion, and engagement as operating problems Leadership offsites where the brief is to shift behaviour, not deliver content Programme leads in large public-facing behaviour change or transformation rollouts Audience outcomes A clearer view of where their team’s decision-making degrades under pressure, and what to do about it Practical language for separating change (incremental) from transformation (structural), and choosing between them Tools from Better Decisions for stress-testing judgement before acting on it A direct read on inclusion as a leadership capability, not a compliance exercise Greater willingness in the room to name what is actually slowing the organisation down

Why organisations work with Chris Hirst He has actually run a 10,000-person global P&L. The leadership argument comes from a CEO seat, not a research role. He took Grey London from underperformer to a business that tripled in size and quadrupled profit in five years, then took Havas from also-ran to second in Campaign Magazine’s global rankings in three. That is the exact operating story most boards are asking for. No Bullsh*t Leadership won UK Business Book of the Year, an independently awarded credential rather than self-published positioning. The argument now runs across three books, on leadership, change, and career, together selling more than 100,000 copies in seven languages. His content travels into operating environments because it was built for one. Recent clients include Google, PepsiCo, PwC, Deloitte, Nissan, and Warner Music Group. He gives leadership teams a shared language for the small, repeatable behaviours that determine whether change actually happens, not another model to put on a slide. Biography highlights Former Global CEO, Havas Creative Group, leading more than 10,000 people across more than 100 countries. Took Havas from also-ran to second in Campaign Magazine’s global network rankings in three years; shortlisted by Campaign as Global CEO of the Year, 2022. Former UK CEO of Grey London (WPP); the agency tripled in size and quadrupled profit during his tenure. Author of three books, No Bullsht Leadership (UK Business Book of the Year 2020), No Bullsht Change, and Indispensable (Pan Macmillan), together selling more than 100,000 copies in seven languages. Host of the No Bullsht Leadership podcast (with Intelligence Squared), more than 500,000 downloads, and founder of the No Bullsht Leadership Academy. Now a Fractional Chair and Non-Executive Director to scaling companies; graduate of Brasenose College, Oxford (Engineering Science) and Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program. Biography Grey London was a struggling agency inside WPP when Chris Hirst took over as UK CEO. Five years later it had tripled in size and quadrupled profit. He then ran Havas Creative Group globally, more than 10,000 people across more than 100 countries, taking the network from also-ran to second in Campaign Magazine’s global rankings in three years. Campaign shortlisted him as Global CEO of the Year in 2022. That operating record is the foundation of his leadership work. No Bullsht Leadership, published by Profile Books in 2019, was named UK Business Book of the Year 2020. It argues that leadership is a small set of repeatable behaviours, not a personality type, and is written for people running things rather than studying them. The argument now runs across three books, No Bullsht Leadership, No Bullsht Change, and Indispensable, together selling more than 100,000 copies in seven languages. It also reaches a podcast made with Intelligence Squared, a monthly Management Today column, and the No Bullsht Leadership Academy. Organisations that have worked with him include Google, PepsiCo, PwC, Nissan, and Warner Music Group. He still runs businesses too, now as a Fractional Chair and Non-Executive Director to scaling companies. What he gives a serious audience is rare on the leadership circuit: a former Global CEO who reduces leadership to behaviours a team can use the same week. His own equation, Impact equals Clarity times Action, is the spine of it, tested across more than a decade of running businesses and a billion-dollar global P&L. Key speaking topics Practical leadership and decision-making Leading transformational change Building high-performing cultures Turnaround and growth leadership Leading teams through AI-driven change Executive presence and credibility The behaviours of effective CEOs Ideal for CEOs, CHROs and executive teams running through restructure or growth Senior leadership populations inside large organisations rebuilding culture High-potential leadership programmes and talent cohorts Boards and partner groups in professional services and agencies Audience outcomes A working definition of leadership stripped of jargon and slogans His core equation for impact, Clarity times Action, and what it means when either side falls to zero A way to read culture as the behaviour of leadership, not a values poster, and to spot a culture problem before it becomes a performance one The 40/70 rule for making decisions without waiting for complete information A direct, occasionally uncomfortable challenge to current leadership habits

Why organisations work with Chris Moon Reference points for crisis decision-making come directly from surviving Khmer Rouge captivity in Cambodia and self-treating critical injuries inside a Mozambique minefield after a landmine explosion in 1995. Brings formal academic grounding to the subject: a Master’s in Security Management from the University of Leicester, focused on human behaviour and management theory. Credentials a senior audience registers immediately: an MBE awarded in 1996 for services to the HALO Trust, and honorary doctorates from the Universities of Plymouth, Leicester and Exeter. Has been booked by Microsoft, Ernst & Young, Autodesk, Skanska, Direct Line Group and London Business School executive programmes, typically on leadership in high-pressure environments. Biography highlights Former British Army officer, commissioned into the Royal Military Police after graduating from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Led landmine clearance operations for the HALO Trust in Cambodia and Mozambique from 1993; awarded MBE in 1996 for services to demining. Survived abduction by Khmer Rouge forces in Cambodia and negotiated the release of himself and two colleagues from captivity. Lost his right arm and lower right leg after a landmine explosion in a supposedly cleared safety lane in Mozambique in 1995. First amputee to complete the Marathon des Sables (1997); subsequently completed the Badwater 135 ultra in Death Valley and, in 2024, a solo unsupported 500-mile Camino de Santiago at age 62. Author of One Step Beyond (Pan Macmillan); Master’s in Security Management from the University of Leicester; honorary doctorates from Plymouth, Leicester and Exeter. Biography A landmine detonated in a supposedly cleared safety lane in Mozambique in 1995. Chris Moon, then running mine clearance for the HALO Trust, lost his right arm and lower right leg. He treated himself where he lay, and reached a South African hospital where doctors said they had never seen anyone survive with so little blood remaining. Moon came to the work through the British Army. After Sandhurst and three years of operational duty with the Royal Military Police, he left in 1993 to lead landmine clearance operations for the HALO Trust. Two years before the Mozambique explosion, he had already negotiated his way out of Khmer Rouge captivity in Cambodia along with two colleagues. The MBE followed in 1996, for services to demining. Within a year of leaving hospital he completed the London Marathon. In 1997 he became the first amputee to complete the Marathon des Sables, the 250km race across the Sahara. The Badwater 135 in Death Valley followed. At age 62, in 2024, he completed a solo unsupported 500-mile Camino de Santiago. Alongside the endurance work he holds a Master’s in Security Management from the University of Leicester and serves as an adviser to the NHS on prosthetics. The organisations that retain him now tend to be those in which decisions carry operational weight: Microsoft, Ernst & Young, Skanska, Direct Line Group, and London Business School executive programmes. In those rooms, his argument keeps coming back to one observation. The responses leaders fall back on under severe pressure are the ones they have already rehearsed in ordinary conditions. Key speaking topics Leadership and decision-making under pressure Crisis response and operational risk Resilience and human performance Safety culture in high-risk industries Personal accountability in operational settings Ideal for Senior leadership teams in operationally intensive industries: construction, utilities, energy, defence, transport Heads of risk, safety and security responsible for how the organisation performs in a crisis Boards and executive programmes working on leadership in high-pressure conditions Health and safety conferences where the audience is operational leadership Audience outcomes Recalibration of what operating “under pressure” actually involves when conditions are genuine A stock of specific, verifiable examples of decision-making in extreme conditions that audiences can apply to their own work Vocabulary for discussing risk, accountability and resilience that is grounded in operational terms A baseline for what sustained performance under difficult conditions looks like across three decades

Why organisations work with Chris Roebuck He designed and ran the leadership programme for UBS’s top 500 that is now taught at Harvard Business School as UBS: Towards the Integrated Firm. Few speakers can point to a live HBS case as evidence that their approach works at scale. He coined the corporate application of entrepreneurial leadership and has spent twenty years refining it in banks, government, healthcare, and the military. The Wikipedia entry on entrepreneurial leadership cites his definition. He operates as a practitioner first and a speaker second: former British Army officer, Head of Management Development at HSBC Investment Bank, Global Head of Leadership at UBS, Head of Culture Change at London Underground. The credibility in a boardroom is built in. HR Magazine named him one of HR’s Most Influential Thinkers ten times between 2009 and 2021, and inducted him into the HR Hall of Fame in 2025. That is the longest sustained recognition of any thinker on the list. Biography highlights Global Head of Leadership and Talent, UBS (2004 onward), leading the development programme for the bank’s top 500 leaders that became Harvard Business School case UBS: Towards the Integrated Firm Honorary Visiting Professor of Transformational Leadership, Cass Business School (2009–2021, the institution later rebranded Bayes) Inducted into the HR Hall of Fame by HR Magazine, July 2025; named one of HR’s Most Influential Thinkers ten times between 2009 and 2021, a record on the list Author of five leadership books, including Lead to Succeed (2014) and Strategic Leadership Development, co-authored with Professor Colin Carnall Expert panel member for the UK Government’s Engaging for Success review (2009), and author of The King’s Fund report on NHS leadership (2011) Contributor to Newsweek; quoted on leadership and organisational performance in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review China; 350+ television interviews across BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, Sky, and Al Jazeera Biography UBS between 2002 and 2006 is a useful place to start. A newly integrated global bank, 70,000 staff, a top team of 500 whose behaviour had to shift if the merger was going to hold. Chris Roebuck was the person, as Global Head of Leadership and Talent, who designed and ran the programme that got that behavioural shift. The work is now a Harvard Business School case study, UBS: Towards the Integrated Firm, and it is where the concept of entrepreneurial leadership, taking the behaviours of successful entrepreneurs and transplanting them into a large corporate, was first systematically applied in the corporate world. That practitioner record sits behind everything he now says from a stage. Before UBS, he was Head of Management Development at HSBC Investment Bank and ran culture change at London Underground during the partial privatisation. After UBS, he was commissioned by The King’s Fund to report to the UK Government on leadership in the NHS, and sat on the expert panel behind Engaging for Success, the UK Government’s review of employee engagement. He was Honorary Visiting Professor of Transformational Leadership at Cass Business School, now Bayes, from 2009 to 2021. The argument Roebuck brings to senior audiences is a hard one, because it refuses the usual levers. He tells leaders that the performance they are looking for is not hiding in a new strategy, a new tech stack, or a restructure. It is hiding in the way their top 200 people behave on a Tuesday morning. His Accelerate Your Success approach is built to make that behavioural gap visible, then close it, with the bottom line as the test. HR Magazine has named him one of its Most Influential Thinkers ten times; in July 2025 it inducted him into the HR Hall of Fame. The rare thing he does is connect that leadership argument to hard numbers. He is a trained economist, not a behavioural coach; he served as an officer in the British Army before moving into business; he has run programmes inside a global bank, the UK Civil Service, and a 1.4-million-person healthcare system. When he says ten percent of organisational performance is sitting unused, the claim is backed by work done at UBS, in the NHS, and at KPMG rather than by a slide deck. Key speaking topics Leadership during integration, transformation, and culture change Entrepreneurial leadership in large organisations Senior team behaviour and executive performance Talent identification and leadership pipelines Employee engagement as an organisational lever Leadership in conditions of uncertainty Human leadership in the AI era Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and C-suite teams running integrations, post-merger transformations, or major operating model change CHROs and Chief People Officers building a leadership and talent strategy that senior business leaders will take seriously Board and executive committee offsites where the subject is how top leadership needs to behave differently for the organisation to perform Public sector and military audiences looking at leadership reform in large, complex institutions Audience outcomes A clear view of where performance is being lost inside their own organisation, and which leadership behaviours are causing it The specific mechanics of how entrepreneurial leadership was built at UBS, and which elements transfer to their own sector A short set of actions senior leaders can take in the weeks after the session, tied to business outcomes rather than general development A more useful language for talking about leadership with their board, their HR function, and their top 100

Why organisations work with Chris Voss He brings a method built in the only setting where negotiation failure is counted in lives, then translated into vocabulary sales, procurement, and executive teams can apply on Monday. Tactical Empathy, mirroring, labeling, and calibrated questions are named, teachable moves, which means the approach survives the room and becomes company muscle memory rather than a memorable keynote. The Black Swan Group is a working consultancy, so the same principles that land on stage can be extended into deal-desk coaching, procurement clinics, and bespoke leadership training. His credibility reads instantly to a sceptical senior audience: 24 years in the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit, the US National Security Council Hostage Working Group, lead negotiator on the Jill Carroll and Steve Centanni cases. “Never Split the Difference” has made his vocabulary common currency across revenue, HR, and leadership functions, so a keynote plugs into language teams already recognise. Biography highlights Former FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator, 2003 to 2007, inside a 24-year FBI career across more than 150 international hostage cases. Founder and CEO of The Black Swan Group, a negotiation training and consulting firm serving corporate clients globally. Co-author of “Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It” with Tahl Raz, reported at more than 5 million copies sold. Adjunct professor at Harvard Law School and Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business; lecturer at the USC Marshall School of Business. Represented the FBI on the US National Security Council’s Hostage Working Group. Instructor of the MasterClass “Chris Voss Teaches the Art of Negotiation”; recipient of the Attorney General’s Award for Excellence in Law Enforcement. Biography Jill Carroll was held in Iraq. Steve Centanni was held in Gaza. Chris Voss was the lead FBI negotiator on both. That is the operational record that sits underneath his commercial work, and it is why his language about negotiation reads differently from most of what senior teams have heard before. For 24 years inside the FBI, including four as the Bureau’s lead international kidnapping negotiator, he worked cases where concession logic, position-trading, and splitting the difference were not available moves. The alternative he developed, and later named Tactical Empathy, is a discipline of understanding the counterpart’s emotional world accurately enough to influence the decision in front of them. Mirroring, labeling, and calibrated questions are the operating components. In 2008 he founded The Black Swan Group to teach that discipline to commercial teams, and in 2016 he codified it with Tahl Raz in “Never Split the Difference”. The book has moved more than 5 million copies and reshaped how sales, procurement, legal, and executive teams in large organisations talk about difficult conversations. He has carried the same material into classrooms at Harvard Law School, Georgetown McDonough, and USC Marshall. What buyers get when they book him is the original source of that vocabulary, with the cases that generated it. The US National Security Council’s Hostage Working Group asked him to represent the FBI on it. The Attorney General’s Award for Excellence in Law Enforcement went to him on the strength of the same work. A room of senior commercial leaders is a softer setting than the one that built his method, which is precisely why the method holds. Key speaking topics High-stakes negotiation Tactical empathy and influence Sales and commercial negotiation Procurement and deal-desk strategy Crisis communication Leadership under pressure Conflict resolution Ideal for Chief Revenue Officers, sales leadership, and enterprise account teams preparing for contested renewals and complex deals. Chief Procurement Officers and commercial directors leading supplier and cost negotiations with long-term partners. C-suite and board audiences managing stakeholder, activist, regulator, or crisis conversations where positions harden fast. Senior legal, HR, and people leaders handling disputes, restructurings, and executive-level conflict. Audience outcomes Specific language moves (mirroring, labeling, calibrated questions) the audience can test in their next live call. A reframe of empathy as a commercial tool, separated from concession and rapport. A shared vocabulary across revenue, procurement, and leadership functions for the deals and disputes that matter. Sharper preparation habits for high-stakes conversations, including how to identify the “Black Swans” that reset a negotiation. Confidence handling the counterpart who will not move, drawn from cases where not moving had life-or-death consequences.

Why organisations work with Christian Gansch His work draws directly on the governance and communication structures of professional orchestras to diagnose alignment failures inside organisations – not as analogy, but as operational system analysis. Leaders leave with a replicable model, not just a perspective. His 14 years as a senior producer at Deutsche Grammophon (1990-2003) mean he has exercised genuine executive authority – across production, marketing, sales, and commercial strategy – inside a major global institution. This is the experience of a manager who performed at the highest level, not a performer who later studied management. His book «From Solo to Symphony» (2006) gives his framework a named, tested structure that organisations can return to. The central argument – that orchestras are precision operating systems, not just inspiring metaphors – is the intellectual spine of every engagement. He puts a question to leadership teams that most frameworks avoid: how many high-performing soloists can a team accommodate before individual excellence starts to fracture collective output? The orchestra offers a concrete, daily-tested answer. He speaks and consults in both English and German, making him an operationally practical choice for pan-European organisations and those with significant DACH-region leadership presence. Biography highlights Leader (concertmaster) of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra from 1981 to 1990 Senior producer at Deutsche Grammophon from 1990 to 2003; responsible for approximately 190 classical recordings including productions with Pierre Boulez, Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Lang Lang, and Anna Netrebko Multiple Grammy Award winner as a producer; recipient of the Record Academy Award Tokyo (Gold) in the Best Concerto Disc category Conducted major orchestras internationally, including the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France Paris, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Russian National Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo, and BBC National Orchestra of Wales BBC Proms debut at the Royal Albert Hall; conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the orchestra and chorus of Teatro La Fenice, Venice; opera credits include Le nozze di Figaro with Opera North Author of «From Solo to Symphony – What businesses can learn from orchestras» (2006) and a second German-language business book; corporate consulting and keynote work with clients including Airbus, BASF, Deloitte, and Roche since 2003 Biography Christian Gansch spent a decade as leader of the Munich Philharmonic. He then spent fourteen years as a senior producer at Deutsche Grammophon. In both roles, the daily challenge was identical: turning highly skilled, independently minded specialists into a functioning collective. His book «From Solo to Symphony» (2006) makes a specific argument from that experience. Professional orchestras are not simply compelling analogies for corporate life – they are operational systems, with precise structures for authority, communication, and coordination. Most large organisations have never consciously built those structures. The gap shows up in execution. His 190 recordings at Deutsche Grammophon were produced across commercial, artistic, and logistical functions simultaneously. That cross-functional executive experience – managing complexity at the level of a major global label – is what separates his framework from that of performers who later turned to speaking. Gansch operated inside the institution, not just on stage. Since 2003, his consulting and keynote work has taken him to organisations including Airbus, BASF, Deloitte, and Roche. The question he brings to every leadership engagement is the one an orchestra solves in every rehearsal: when each individual in the room is an expert in their own domain, what structure of communication and authority allows the group to act as one? Key speaking topics Orchestral leadership and organisational alignment High-performance team dynamics in expert-driven environments Communication and authority structures in complex organisations Leadership decision-making under pressure Managing the tension between individual excellence and collective output Change readiness and adaptability Ideal for C-suite and senior leadership teams working on alignment, coordination, and collective performance CHROs and organisational development leads designing performance culture in large, expert-heavy organisations Executive conferences and leadership summits with DACH-region or international audiences Organisations in professional services, engineering, or life sciences navigating cross-functional complexity Audience outcomes A named operational framework – the orchestral model – for thinking about authority, communication, and coordination in large organisations Specific diagnostic questions for their own leadership teams about the relationship between individual performance and collective output A clearer vocabulary for the gap between team capability and team alignment – and what structures close it Practical perspectives on decision-making under pressure, drawn from the specific demands of conducting at the highest level A changed understanding of what «communication» requires at an organisational level, beyond cultural aspiration