Organizational Agility speakers

Why organisations work with Steve Blank Co-creator of the Lean Startup methodology, the operating logic most corporate innovation programmes are now built on, taught by the person who designed it. His Lean LaunchPad curriculum became the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps, now the standard for commercialising research at the NSF, NIH and U.S. Department of Energy. Co-founder of Stanford’s Hacking for Defense programme and the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation, with direct experience deploying innovation methodology inside the U.S. defence and intelligence community. Twenty-one years inside eight Silicon Valley startups, with four IPOs including E.piphany. He built what he teaches before he taught it. Named one of 12 Masters of Innovation by Harvard Business Review and listed on the Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers. Biography highlights Adjunct Professor at Stanford University and Senior Fellow for Entrepreneurship at Columbia University. Author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany, The Startup Owner’s Manual, and Hacking for Defense: Innovation Doctrine. May 2013 Harvard Business Review cover story, “Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything,” defined the field. Co-founder of Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation; served on the Defense Business Board and the U.S. Navy’s Science and Technology Advisory Board. Lean LaunchPad class taught at 75+ universities globally; Hacking for Defense at 70+, with more than 70 dual-use startups and over $350 million in follow-on funding. Eight Silicon Valley startups across 21 years, four IPOs, including E.piphany, Zilog, MIPS and SuperMac. Biography Startups search for a business model. Large companies execute one. Conflating the two is what makes most corporate innovation programmes underperform: they apply planning, forecasting and accountability tools designed for known businesses to activities that are inherently exploratory. Steve Blank’s argument, developed across two foundational books and a 2013 Harvard Business Review cover story, is that innovation has to be run as a managed discipline with its own operating logic. The Lean Startup methodology he co-created treats new ventures as a search process, where customer development, hypothesis testing and minimum viable products replace the business plan as the primary instrument of decision-making. His credibility on this is built from doing the work, not just teaching it. He spent 21 years inside eight Silicon Valley startups, four of which went public, including E.piphany. He then took the same methodology into the U.S. federal system: his Lean LaunchPad curriculum was adopted by the National Science Foundation as I-Corps, now the standard for commercialising research at the NSF, NIH and Department of Energy. His Hacking for Defense programme, co-founded at Stanford with Joe Felter and Peter Newell, has produced more than 70 dual-use startups and over $350 million in funding. He teaches at Stanford, Columbia and Berkeley, advises the Department of Defense, and co-founded Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation. Harvard Business Review has named him one of 12 Masters of Innovation; Thinkers50 ranked him among the global top 50. The reason corporate audiences book him is straightforward: he is one of very few people who has built innovation processes that work inside the most rigid bureaucracies in existence, and he can show a senior team how to do the same. Key speaking topics Lean Startup methodology Corporate innovation at scale Customer development and business model search Entrepreneurship Disruption and incumbent response Innovation inside government and defence Ideal for Chief Innovation Officers and corporate venture leaders Boards and executive teams designing or resetting innovation programmes Government and defence leaders responsible for technology adoption and commercialisation Founders, scale-up CEOs and corporate accelerator leadership Audience outcomes A working distinction between executing a known business model and searching for a new one, with the implications for how each should be resourced, measured and led. The operating logic behind customer development, hypothesis testing and minimum viable products as decision-making instruments inside large organisations. Examples from the Lean LaunchPad, NSF I-Corps and Hacking for Defense programmes showing how the methodology has been deployed at federal scale. A diagnostic for why most corporate innovation programmes produce pilots and proofs-of-concept without commercial outcomes.

Why organisations work with Steven D’Souza The «Not Knowing» framework gives organisations a precise and credible language for something most leadership programmes refuse to address directly: that the expectation of certainty from leaders is itself a liability in complex environments. That reframe changes how organisations design capability programmes. His intellectual approach – drawing on Gestalt psychology, Theory U, Adaptive Leadership and Eastern wisdom traditions – produces a more durable intervention than conventional leadership tools. Organisations working on long-term leadership capability find it gives senior executives a framework rather than a set of techniques. His practitioner background spans Senior Client Partner of Leadership & Professional Development at Korn Ferry in London and Riyadh, Global Head of Leadership at Philip Morris International, VP of Leadership and Talent Management at Merrill Lynch, and Head of Diversity at Santander UK. That breadth of first-hand experience in high-stakes leadership contexts makes him unusually credible at board and C-suite level. His published body of work now spans six books – Not Knowing, Not Doing, Not Being, Shadows at Work, Brilliant Networking and Made in Britain – giving organisations a cumulative architecture for multi-year leadership development that moves from navigating uncertainty, to purposeful restraint, to identity transformation, to the unconscious patterns that derail capable leaders. A CMI Management Book of the Year and a Thinkers50 Radar recognition give senior buyers independently validated signals of intellectual credibility, reducing the due-diligence burden when positioning a leadership development investment internally. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Liminal Edge Consulting (UAE), and Senior Fellow and Executive in Residence at the Centre for the Future of Organisation, Drucker School of Management Author of Not Knowing – CMI Management Book of the Year, translated into ten languages – and the broader Not trilogy: Not Knowing, Not Doing, Not Being, published by LID Author of Made in Britain and Brilliant Networking by Pearson. Author of Shadows at Work (2026) – on unconscious behaviour, the leadership shadow, and how hidden traits shape organisational culture Named on the Thinkers50 Radar among management thinkers most likely to change the future of leadership thinking Named in HR Magazine’s Top 30 Most Influential Thinkers Guest faculty, Adaptive Leadership programme, Harvard Kennedy School; Associate Fellow, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford; Executive Fellow and Associate Professor, IE Business School Work featured in Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg, BBC, The Guardian and The Sunday Times Previous leadership roles: Senior Client Partner, Leadership and Professional Development practice, Korn Ferry London and Riyadh; Global Head of Leadership and Executive Development, Philip Morris International; VP Leadership and Talent Management, Merrill Lynch; Head of Diversity, Santander UK; Director of Programmes, FT/IE Corporate Learning Alliance Biography Not Knowing – co-authored with Diana Renner and published by LID – won the CMI Management Book of the Year and has since been translated into ten languages. Its central argument is that the pressure on leaders to perform certainty is itself a liability when the environment is genuinely ambiguous. That argument proved durable enough to generate two sequels: Not Doing, on the discipline of purposeful restraint in leadership, and Not Being, on identity, self-transformation and renewal. His 2026 book Shadows at Work extends that body of work into examining the leader’s shadow from the lens of psychology, biology, culture and meaning. He shows how the unconscious traits leaders repress become the behaviours that most undermine the cultures they are trying to build – and how to surface and redirect them. The trilogy draws on Gestalt psychology, Theory U, Adaptive Leadership and Eastern and Western wisdom traditions. That blend is not incidental – it is what separates D’Souza’s framework from leadership development built around models and process tools. The approach asks executives to examine how their identity as leaders shapes what they can see and do in genuinely complex situations. The practitioner credibility that anchors that philosophy is substantial. Steven was formerly a Senior Client Partner at Korn Ferry in London and Riyadh, speaking to C-suite audiences across consumer, energy, industrial and technology sectors. As Global Head of Leadership and Executive Development at Philip Morris International, he worked with the company’s top 200 leaders through a major industry transformation. As VP of Leadership and Talent Management at Merrill Lynch and Head of Diversity at Santander UK, he worked on the kind of complex, people-facing challenges that most leadership theorists observe at a distance. His academic record spans the Drucker School of Management where he is currently a Senior Fellow and Executive in Residence, Oxford’s Saïd Business School, INSEAD, IE Business School, and guest faculty status at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Adaptive Leadership programme. Thinkers50 named D’Souza among the management thinkers most likely to change the future of leadership thinking. HR Magazine included him in its Top 30 Most Influential Thinkers. His work has appeared in the Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg, the BBC, The Guardian and The Sunday Times. Key speaking topics Leadership under uncertainty and complexity The «Not Knowing» framework: turning ambiguity into organisational advantage Sustainable leadership and the discipline of effortless action Identity, self-transformation and leadership renewal Diversity, inclusion and social capital Leadership capability design for senior executives Contemplative and philosophy-based approaches to organisational development The leader’s shadow: unconscious behaviour, derailers and organisational culture Ideal for CHROs and Chief People Officers designing senior leadership development programmes Boards and C-suite teams navigating transformation, major strategic pivots or cultural change Executive education and MBA programme directors at business schools Learning and development leaders investing in long-term leadership capability at global organisations Audience outcomes A reframed relationship with uncertainty – from a condition to be managed to a resource to be developed as a leadership capacity A clear distinction between problems that respond to expertise and those that require adaptive, inquiry-led approaches – and practical tools for each Awareness of how leadership identity built on authority and answers can become a liability in genuinely ambiguous situations Practical techniques – drawn from philosophy, Gestalt psychology and organisational development – for leading with more presence, less reactivity and greater sustainability A framework for individual and team reflection on where current leadership practice is serving the organisation and where it is reinforcing defensive patterns

Why organisations work with Steven Pinker His argument that human cognitive biases – availability, confirmation, narrative distortion – are not random errors but predictable and correctable patterns gives organisations a diagnostic framework that most behavioural science speakers only gesture towards. The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now provide leaders with a rigorously evidenced counterweight to crisis-driven decision-making: a data-grounded case for long-run institutional progress that challenges the assumption that things are categorically worse than before. Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters grew out of a Harvard course on reasoning, and offers organisations a structured, named toolkit – logic, Bayesian probability, causal inference, game theory – applied directly to the kinds of collective judgments institutions face. His work on language and common knowledge (the study of what people know that others know they know) gives communicators and senior leaders rare analytical precision about why messaging fails, why consensus breaks down, and how shared understanding is actually constructed. Recognised by the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award and elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Pinker brings a level of peer-validated scholarly authority that very few public-facing intellectuals in this space can match. Biography highlights Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University; faculty career spanning Harvard, MIT (1982–2003), and Stanford Elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2016) Author of thirteen books, including The Better Angels of Our Nature, Enlightenment Now, and Rationality BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Humanities and Social Sciences (shared with Peter Singer) William James Book Prize (three times); Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize; Cundill Recognition of Excellence in History Award Ranked by Academic Influence as the second most influential psychologist in the world, 2010–2020 Regular contributor to The New York Times, Time, and The Atlantic; named to Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World and Foreign Policy‘s 100 Global Thinkers Biography Organisations that operate in complex, information-saturated environments face a specific and underappreciated failure mode: not a shortage of data, but a systematic distortion in how that data is processed. Leaders overweight vivid recent events, underweight statistical baselines, and build strategy around narratives that feel coherent rather than evidence that is reliable. The cognitive science underlying these failures is well-documented – but rarely applied with rigour inside institutions. Steven Pinker has spent four decades studying the mechanisms of language, reasoning, and human cognition at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. His research is not popularised work drawn from others’ findings: it is original experimental scholarship in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and the psychology of social relations, conducted at the Johnstone Family Chair in Harvard’s Department of Psychology. What distinguishes his public work is the consistent application of that scientific foundation to questions that organisations – and civilisations – actually face. His most argued books form a coherent intellectual project. The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) used historical data across centuries to make the case that violence and conflict have declined measurably – not as opinion, but as documented empirical fact – and identified the institutional and psychological forces responsible. Enlightenment Now (2018) extended that analysis across all major indicators of human welfare, arguing that reason, science, and Enlightenment institutions remain the engines of progress. Rationality (2021) turned the lens directly onto decision-making: what cognitive tools are required to think clearly, why they are rarely applied, and how organisations and democracies can build structures that reason more reliably. The book emerged from a course Pinker teaches at Harvard and addresses logic, Bayesian probability, causal inference, and game theory as practical instruments for institutional judgment. Recognised by the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Humanities and Social Sciences – for contributions to the understanding of human rationality and progress that have entered the mainstream of public debate – and elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Pinker occupies a rare position: a research scientist whose work is directly legible to senior leaders grappling with the quality of organisational reasoning and the reliability of their own institutions. Key speaking topics Cognitive biases and institutional decision-making Rationality and evidence-based reasoning Language, communication, and common knowledge The psychology and history of violence Enlightenment values and organisational progress Human nature and social behaviour Clarity and effectiveness in professional communication Ideal for C-suite and board audiences wrestling with strategic decision-making under uncertainty Policy, government, and public affairs leadership Strategy, risk, and scenario planning functions Executive development and leadership faculty programmes Audience outcomes A working understanding of how specific cognitive biases – availability, confirmation, narrative distortion – shape organisational decisions, and what structures can correct them A data-grounded framework for assessing long-run institutional and societal progress, reducing reliance on media-driven perception of perpetual crisis Practical reasoning tools from logic, probability, and causal inference, applied to the kinds of collective judgments senior leaders actually face Greater precision about how language shapes shared understanding – and why institutional communication so often fails to build the common knowledge it intends A clearer sense of where human nature helps and where it hinders, grounded in evolutionary psychology rather than management metaphor

Why organisations work with Dr Sue Mitchell Her PEP framework gives leaders a portable and memorable model for navigating uncertainty – field-tested across sectors from global pharma to policing, and consistently recalled by participants months after delivery. Her background in evolutionary ecology – studying adaptive strategies across complex, dynamic systems – informs an analytical approach to leadership that goes beyond behavioural coaching, connecting individual mindset to systemic structures. She completed training with Peter Senge in Compassionate Systems Leadership, giving her work a rigorous intellectual foundation that distinguishes her from practitioners working from applied psychology or HR frameworks alone. Her concept of “inner sustainability” reframes resilience as a proactive leadership capacity rather than a reactive stress-management tool – a distinction that senior leaders in high-change environments find practically useful. Biography highlights PhD in evolutionary ecology; post-doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh and a Max Planck Institute, Germany Trained in Compassionate Systems Leadership with Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline Author, The Authority Guide to Engaging Your People (SRA Books) Founder and Director, Aeona Ltd; clients include EY, Lloyds Banking Group, Bayer, Gilead Sciences, Scottish Enterprise, and Police Scotland Fellow and former Regional President (Scotland, 2019–2020), Professional Speaking Association UK & Ireland Co-founder, IDG Edinburgh Resilience Hub – applying the Inner Development Goals framework to leadership and organisational change Biography When engagement falls and burnout rises, the root cause is rarely individual. It is usually a leadership culture that was built for stability and has not been redesigned for permanent disruption. Dr Sue Mitchell has spent two decades helping organisations close that gap. Her starting point is unusual. Before moving into coaching and leadership development, she was an evolutionary ecologist, with post-doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh and a Max Planck Institute in Germany. The discipline – studying how organisms sustain effective strategies across dynamic, interconnected systems – gave her a framework for understanding organisations that is structurally different from standard behavioural models. She later trained with Peter Senge in Compassionate Systems Leadership, deepening that foundation. That systems perspective runs through her proprietary PEP framework: a practical model for helping leaders maintain clarity, commitment and adaptability under pressure. It has been delivered across a client base that includes EY, Lloyds Banking Group, Gilead Sciences, Bayer, Scottish Enterprise, and Police Scotland. More recently, she co-founded the IDG Edinburgh Resilience Hub, bringing the Inner Development Goals framework – developed as a companion to the UN Sustainable Development Goals – into leadership and organisational practice. She is the author of The Authority Guide to Engaging Your People (SRA Books) and a Fellow of the Professional Speaking Association UK & Ireland, where she served as Regional President for Scotland. Through Aeona, her Edinburgh-based consultancy, she works across keynote speaking, executive coaching, and multiday leadership development programmes. Key speaking topics Adaptable leadership Navigating change and uncertainty Employee engagement and sustainable performance Systems thinking in organisations Organisational resilience Inner sustainability and mindset Diversity, decision-making and team dynamics Ideal for Senior leadership teams navigating restructure, sustained organisational change, or rapid growth HR directors and heads of OD commissioning leadership development programmes or all-staff development events Organisations in professional services, financial services, life sciences, or public sector seeking structured leadership development programmes Mid-to-senior management cohorts where engagement, performance, and wellbeing are competing tensions Audience outcomes A portable framework (PEP) for managing their own mindset and their team’s behaviour through uncertainty and change Clearer understanding of how unconscious mental models shape decision-making under pressure – and how to intervene A common language for discussing change, resilience and engagement across a leadership group Practical tools for sustaining performance without trading off wellbeing Greater awareness of how organisational systems and structures – not just individual behaviour – drive or undermine engagement

Why organisations work with Terence Mauri He gives leadership teams a defined decision framework, DARE (Data, Agility, Risk, Evolution), drawn from his Wiley and Thinkers50 book, that turns “respond to disruption” from a slogan into a working method. His vantage point sits across operating roles, not commentary alone: founder of Hack Future Lab, Entrepreneur Mentor in Residence at MIT, visiting professor at IE Business School. Senior audiences can tell the difference. The content is built for the AI era without becoming a technology lecture. The argument is about how executives think, choose, and govern when technology cycles are shorter than planning cycles. He writes for a senior business readership through a monthly Inc.com column, “Future Proof,” which means the room hears arguments that have already been pressure-tested in print. Biography highlights Founder of Hack Future Lab, a global management think tank focused on leadership, AI, and disruption. Author of The Upside of Disruption (Wiley, in partnership with Thinkers50, 2024), centred on his DARE framework. Earlier books include The Leader’s Mindset and The 3D Leader. Entrepreneur Mentor in Residence at MIT and visiting professor at IE Business School. Inc.com columnist, author of the “Future Proof” column. Described by Thinkers50 as “an influential and outspoken thinker on the future of leadership.” Biography The hardest part of leading through disruption is not recognising that the environment has changed. It is changing the way a senior team decides while the business still has to deliver this quarter. That gap, between awareness and operating practice, is the question Terence Mauri has spent his work addressing. His most recent book, The Upside of Disruption, was published by Wiley in 2024 in partnership with Thinkers50. It introduces the DARE framework, Data, Agility, Risk, Evolution, as a way of organising executive decisions when conditions will not stabilise. Earlier books, The Leader’s Mindset and The 3D Leader, traced the same thread through the language of mindset and leadership behaviour. The institutional ground underneath the work matters. Mauri founded Hack Future Lab as a global management think tank, and holds active posts as Entrepreneur Mentor in Residence at MIT and visiting professor at IE Business School. He writes the “Future Proof” column for Inc.com, which is where many of the arguments arrive in public before they appear in a keynote. Thinkers50, the management ranking authority, has called him “an influential and outspoken thinker on the future of leadership.” For a senior team weighing whether to put a speaker in front of their own leadership, the practical question is sharper: he gives them a structured way to talk about decisions in conditions of uncertainty, drawn from a published framework rather than a slide deck. Key speaking topics Leadership in the age of AI Decision-making under uncertainty Future readiness and organisational agility Disruption as a strategic input, not a threat Executive mindset and unlearning Innovation and growth in fast-changing markets Ideal for CEOs and executive committees setting strategy in conditions where AI and market shifts have shortened planning horizons. CHROs and chief learning officers redesigning leadership development for senior cohorts. Boards and transformation leads asking how the organisation should make decisions, not just which technology to adopt. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for how senior leaders make decisions when the operating context is actively changing. The DARE framework as a structure for diagnosing where the leadership team is strong and where it is exposed. A sharper read on the difference between adopting AI and leading through the AI era. A set of named behaviours, around unlearning, calculated risk, and trust, that senior teams can return to after the keynote.

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

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

Why organisations work with Tim Munden His “inner and outer game” framework gives leadership teams a practical diagnostic for the gap between leadership intent and leadership behaviour, and a structured path to close it He built and ran global leadership development for Unilever’s 135,000-person workforce, including pipeline programmes for the most senior roles in the organisation; he knows what works at enterprise scale, not just in the classroom Unilever’s “Discover Your Purpose” programme, which he designed and led, reached 56,000 employees and was validated through randomised controlled trials, a level of rigour that most leadership interventions never reach He co-founded the Global Business Collaboration for Better Workplace Mental Health, giving him a credible and practical perspective on the link between psychological safety, energy, and sustained organisational performance His Senior Associate role at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership connects his leadership frameworks to the strategic context that boards increasingly expect their senior teams to navigate: purpose, resilience, and transformation for the longer term Biography highlights Former Chief Learning Officer and Head of Wellbeing at Unilever, responsible for leadership development and learning across a 135,000-person global workforce Former HR Vice President for Unilever UK & Ireland, a €2.5bn business unit Senior Associate, Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), University of Cambridge Partner at inchigo, a leadership and culture consultancy Co-founded the Global Business Collaboration for Better Workplace Mental Health; represented Unilever on the UK Thriving at Work Leadership Council Developed Unilever’s “Discover Your Purpose” programme, reaching 56,000 employees with outcomes validated through randomised controlled trials Joined Unilever as a graduate trainee in 1993; career spans roles across the Netherlands, Belgium, the US, and the UK Holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from the University of Manchester and Manchester School of Management Biography Leadership development in large organisations has a persistent failure mode: it develops individuals in isolation from the organisational culture that will either enable or undermine everything they have learned. Tim Munden spent the better part of three decades inside one of the world’s most complex multinationals working on both sides of that problem simultaneously. As Chief Learning Officer and Head of Wellbeing at Unilever, Munden was accountable for leadership capability across a 135,000-person workforce. His approach centred on what he describes as the “inner and outer game” of leadership. The inner game is the psychological clarity, purpose, and resilience that allows a leader to act under pressure; the outer game is the cultural architecture and organisational design that gives people the conditions to perform. Neither works without the other. That dual framework now shapes how he advises executive teams and consults with organisations across financial services, technology, pharmaceuticals, and consumer goods. The practical rigour behind his work is verifiable. The “Discover Your Purpose” programme Munden designed at Unilever was completed by 56,000 employees, with outcomes tested through randomised controlled trials. Those outcomes included improved psychological safety, work fulfilment, and discretionary effort. He also co-founded the Global Business Collaboration for Better Workplace Mental Health and represented Unilever on the UK Thriving at Work Leadership Council, establishing workplace wellbeing not as a wellbeing initiative but as a leadership strategy with measurable business consequences. Since leaving Unilever, Munden has continued this work as a Partner at inchigo, a leadership and culture consultancy, and as a Senior Associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, where the link between leadership capability and long-term organisational resilience is a central research concern. He brings to boards and senior leadership teams a rare combination: he has operated at CLO level inside a global organisation and has built the frameworks to explain and replicate what makes leadership development work in practice. Key speaking topics Leadership capability for disruption and transformation Leadership agility, resilience and adaptability through change The inner and outer game of leadership Human skills for leadership in the age of AI Purpose-driven culture and organisations Workplace wellbeing as a performance strategy Leadership development at enterprise scale Psychological safety and organisational agility Ideal for CHROs, Chief People Officers, and senior HR leadership teams designing enterprise leadership strategy CEOs and executive committees navigating significant transformation or cultural change Learning and development leaders building or evaluating large-scale leadership programmes Boards and remuneration committees examining the link between leadership culture and long-term organisational resilience Audience outcomes A clear model, the inner and outer game, for diagnosing where leadership capability is breaking down and what to do about it Practical understanding of how purpose can be embedded in organisational culture at scale, with evidence from a large, tested programme A more precise vocabulary for the link between psychological safety, wellbeing, and sustained performance, moving the conversation beyond wellbeing as an HR initiative Insight into what enterprise-scale leadership development actually requires, drawn from direct experience at one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies Clearer thinking on the leadership capabilities most needed to maintain performance in periods of sustained uncertainty

Why organisations work with Tim Smit He does not make the case for sustainability in principle. Instead, he has built one of Britain’s most visited destinations on the premise that ecological purpose and economic return are the same project. The Eden Project’s contribution to the Cornish economy exceeds £1.9 billion. His KBE was awarded specifically for services to public engagement with science, recognition that his primary skill is making complex environmental challenges legible and motivating to non-specialist audiences, including sceptical ones. Where most ESG speakers work from frameworks or research, Smit works from operations: active international development projects in Colombia, Australia, China, and Northern Ireland, each built on the Eden model of derelict land, public-private partnership, and ecological purpose that also generates revenue. He reframes the internal sustainability conversation from risk mitigation and reporting into a question of commercial imagination, which is a materially different starting point for a leadership team than most ESG speakers offer. The Lost Gardens of Heligan, his account of the first restoration project, was voted Sunday Times Book of the Year in 1997, evidence of an unusual ability to make environmental ambition into a story that reaches well beyond specialist audiences. Biography highlights Co-founder and Executive Vice-Chair, Eden Project, Cornwall: former china clay pit transformed into one of Britain’s most visited destinations, contributing over £1.9 billion to the regional economy Director, Lost Gardens of Heligan: co-led restoration of the neglected Tremayne estate; his account of the project was voted Sunday Times Book of the Year, 1997 KBE (Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire), awarded 2011, substantive 2012, for services to public engagement with science RSA Albert Medal, 2003; Morgan Stanley Great Britons Award (Environment category), 2007; Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year special award, 2011 Speaker at TEDxKingsCross, 2021 – «How We’re Going to Solve Climate Change» (COP26 countdown event) Author of two books: The Lost Gardens of Heligan and Eden (Penguin, updated 15th anniversary edition, 2016) Biography The Eden Project began as a derelict china clay pit in Cornwall. It now attracts over a million visitors a year and has contributed more than £1.9 billion to the regional economy. Sir Tim Smit KBE conceived it in 1995, opened it in 2001, and has spent the intervening years using it as a working proof: that environmental ambition and commercial success are the same project, not a trade-off between them. Smit’s central argument is about courage as much as strategy. Most organisations approach sustainability as a compliance function; obligations to manage, metrics to report. Eden was built to demonstrate something more radical: that a project rooted in ecology, science communication, and community investment could produce a destination business with private financing, a £1.9 billion economic footprint, and a KBE from the Crown for services to public engagement with science. The model is now being replicated globally. Through Eden Project International, formally launched in 2017, Smit has secured partnerships with national governments in Colombia – working with the Humboldt Institute on a biome in one of the world’s most biodiverse regions, alongside active development projects in Australia, China, and Northern Ireland. The ambition is an Eden presence on every inhabited continent. For executives navigating the gap between ESG commitment and meaningful action, Smit’s contribution is specific and uncomfortable in equal measure. He has spent three decades demonstrating that the starting point for a new business model can be a landscape others have written off. The barrier, in his view, is not knowledge or resource; it is a failure of commercial imagination, and he has built institutions to fill it. Key speaking topics Environmental regeneration as a commercial business model ESG strategy and the economics of sustainability Entrepreneurship and large-scale transformational project delivery Science communication and public engagement with environmental issues Multi-stakeholder project leadership across public, private, and community sectors Climate action and biodiversity: the business opportunity framing Place-based and regional economic regeneration Ideal for CEOs and executive teams building or pressure-testing sustainability and ESG strategy Boards facing investor, regulatory, or employee pressure on environmental commitments Transformation and programme directors overseeing large-scale environmental, infrastructure, or regeneration initiatives Public sector and civic leaders working on regional development and post-industrial recovery Audience outcomes A reframe of sustainability from reporting obligation to genuine business model, with specific, quantified evidence from Eden’s own track record Practical understanding of how to structure and sustain multi-stakeholder projects at transformational scale A more ambitious and commercially grounded vocabulary for internal ESG conversations Exposure to a model of science communication that moves non-specialist audiences to change behaviour, not just awareness Confidence that large-scale environmental projects can attract private capital and deliver measurable economic returns alongside ecological impact

Why organisations work with Tom Cheesewright The Intersections methodology maps incoming macro trends against the specific stress points inside an organisation or sector; producing prioritised decision-points with the analysis behind them, not a generic forecast that leadership teams have to interpret themselves. The framework is teachable and licensable. Organisations leave with a repeatable process they can run internally, not a dependency on a single advisor. His published credentials – Future-Proof Your Business (Penguin; FT business book of the month) and High Frequency Change (Business Book Awards shortlist, 2020) – mean audiences arrive already oriented to his thinking. He does not need to spend the first third of a session building the intellectual case. A decade-plus of broadcast experience across BBC, Channel 4, and national press makes him unusually effective at translating complex AI and technology change for non-technical board audiences without losing analytical precision. Named clients across sectors – Google, Barclays, NASA, HMRC, BMW, Virgin Media, Visa – give procurement teams confidence in sector-agnostic credibility. This is not a speaker whose framework only works in one industry. Biography highlights Creator of the Intersections foresight methodology, now licensed and delivered to third-party organisations Author of High Frequency Change (LID Publishing, 2019) shortlisted, Business Book Awards 2020, ‘Leadership for the Future’ category Author of Future-Proof Your Business (Penguin Business Experts, 2020), Financial Times business book of the month Clients include Google, Barclays, NASA, HMRC, BMW, Visa, HSBC, Accenture, and Virgin Media and more than 30 Global 500 companies Regular contributor and broadcaster: BBC Breakfast, BBC Radio 4, Channel 4 Sunday Brunch, The Guardian, The Times, Evening Standard, The Daily Telegraph BEng in Mechatronics, Lancaster University; established as a full-time applied futurist in 2012 Biography Most organisations know they need to anticipate change. Very few have a structured way to do it. The annual strategic planning cycle and the technology roadmap were not designed to connect incoming macro trends to the specific decisions a leadership team faces this quarter. Tom Cheesewright built the Intersections methodology to close that gap. It maps macro trends, from AI capability shifts to demographic and regulatory change, against the existing pressures inside an organisation or sector, identifying the points where disruption will hit hardest and where meaningful opportunity sits. More than 30 Global 500 companies and government bodies, including NASA, HMRC, Google, and Barclays, have put the framework to work. His two business books establish the intellectual foundation. High Frequency Change (LID Publishing, 2019; shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2020) sets out why organisations feel overwhelmed by the pace of change and what structural responses actually work. Future-Proof Your Business (Penguin Business Experts, 2020; Financial Times business book of the month) translates the methodology into practical tools for strategy teams. His sustained media presence – BBC Breakfast, Radio 4, Channel 4, The Guardian, The Times – means he is not an unknown quantity when he walks on stage. A mechatronics engineer by training, Cheesewright spent years in technology marketing and digital business before establishing himself as a futurist in 2012. That background – engineering logic, commercial experience, years of public communication about technology – is what keeps the Intersections work grounded. The output is not prediction. It is a structured process for stress-testing an organisation’s assumptions against what is actually coming. Key speaking topics AI and automation in strategic decision-making Scenario planning and applied foresight methodology Organisational agility and adaptive strategy Technology-driven disruption and competitive positioning The future of consumer behaviour and business models Change management in high-frequency environments Long-range strategic planning under uncertainty Ideal for Executive leadership teams and boards preparing long-range or scenario-based strategy Chief Strategy Officers and Chief Technology Officers navigating AI investment decisions Industry associations and sector bodies facing structural disruption from technology or regulation Conference audiences drawn from finance, technology, retail, government, or professional services sectors Audience outcomes A working understanding of the Intersections methodology and how to apply it to their own organisation’s planning process Clarity on which AI and technology developments are commercially significant in their sector, and which can be deprioritised A revised set of strategic questions, not just better answers to the existing ones Stronger language and frameworks for briefing boards and senior stakeholders on emerging technology risk and opportunity A clearer view of where their organisation is most exposed to macro-level disruption over the next three to five years

Why organisations work with Tonje Elisabeth Aarøe She brings a perspective built from both sides of the transformation equation: having seen digital change from inside Google and Microsoft, and then spent years advising organisations on why the people side of it breaks down. Empulse, the staff engagement diagnostic she co-developed with Professor Sut I Wong at BI Norwegian Business School, gives organisations a structured way to measure how employees are actually experiencing transformation, not how leaders think they are. FranklinCovey’s methodology underpins her advisory work, bringing a globally tested behaviour-change framework rather than a proprietary system built on personal experience alone. Her work addresses a specific failure mode – the 70% change project failure rate – with diagnostic and practical tools rather than motivational reframing. She has delivered in academic and executive contexts across institutions including BI Norwegian Business School and Durham University Business School, giving her work independent intellectual grounding beyond the speaking circuit. Biography highlights Country Manager Norway, FranklinCovey North; the globally recognised leadership and behaviour-change organisation Former Industry Manager, Google Norway; prior enterprise sales and marketing roles at Microsoft Co-developer of Empulse, an employee engagement survey built with Professor Sut I Wong of BI Norwegian Business School to measure employee experience during digital transformation Author of Ignite Your Inner Game Changer (2017) Founder of Growthitude, a transformation and engagement consultancy Guest lecturer at BI Norwegian Business School and Durham University Business School Certified Prosci Change Management Practitioner; certified NLP Trainer Contributor to PECB Insights on digital transformation topics Biography Most digital transformation programmes treat culture as the final phase; the communications plan, the change management appendix. Tonje Elisabeth Aarøe’s argument, built over a career inside Google and Microsoft and then sharpened through advisory work at FranklinCovey, is that this sequencing is the primary reason so many programmes fail. At FranklinCovey Norway, where she serves as Country Manager, Aarøe advises organisations on leadership capability and employee engagement using one of the most widely deployed behaviour-change methodologies in the world. Her practical toolkit includes Empulse, a staff engagement diagnostic she co-developed with Professor Sut I Wong at BI Norwegian Business School, which allows organisations to track how employees are actually experiencing transformation at pace, rather than retrospectively. Before moving into advisory work, she spent the better part of 15 years in corporate technology and digital sales at Microsoft and Google, working with enterprise clients across sectors on digital strategy and commercial execution. That background means she can describe transformation from inside the organisations that defined it, not only from the consulting room. She has guest lectured at BI Norwegian Business School and Durham University Business School, and contributes to PECB Insights. Her work sits at the intersection of operational credibility and structured methodology; a combination that tends to land in rooms where cultural scepticism about change consultants runs high. Key speaking topics Employee engagement in digital transformation Culture change management Change leadership in hybrid and international environments Building high-performing teams Behavioural change at organisational scale Leadership development and execution Digital work culture Ideal for CHROs and People Directors leading culture or engagement programmes during transformation CEOs and leadership teams managing organisation-wide change initiatives Transformation and change leads in mid-to-large organisations implementing new ways of working L&D and executive education programmes looking for practitioner-led content on digital culture Audience outcomes A clearer understanding of why employee engagement, not technology, determines transformation outcomes Practical framing of how culture and behaviour change can be managed alongside – not after – digital implementation Familiarity with diagnostic approaches (including pulse-survey methodology) for tracking engagement during change Specific leadership behaviours that sustain team performance under sustained organisational pressure A more honest account of how digital change actually lands inside organisations, drawn from inside Google and Microsoft

Why organisations work with Vijay Govindarajan The Three-Box Solution gives leadership teams a concrete operating model for the hardest resource allocation decision in strategy: how much of the organisation’s attention, talent, and capital belongs to managing the present, letting go of outdated practices, and building the future – simultaneously, with different disciplines for each. His 2009 HBR article «How GE Is Disrupting Itself,» co-authored with GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt, introduced reverse innovation to the management canon; Harvard Business Review later named it one of the Great Moments in Management in the Last Century – a designation that marks a genuinely new idea rather than a refinement of an existing one. Fusion Strategy (HBR Press, 2024) gives leaders of industrial and asset-heavy companies a specific strategic answer to the AI competitive threat – not a general AI primer, but a framework for how manufacturers, infrastructure operators, and physical-product businesses can fuse operational excellence with real-time data intelligence. He developed these frameworks inside a Fortune 10 company: as GE’s first-ever Professor in Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant (2008–2010), he applied the ideas under operational conditions alongside a sitting CEO – a form of proof that most strategy academics cannot point to. Inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2019, and the only thinker to win Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Awards in two separate categories, VG’s standing in the field is independently credentialed – not a function of self-promotion. Biography highlights Coxe Distinguished Professor, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College – a Dartmouth-wide chair and the highest distinction awarded to Dartmouth faculty Inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame (2019); recipient of the Thinkers50 Distinguished Innovation Award (2019) and Breakthrough Idea Award (2011) – the only management thinker to win Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Awards in two categories Two-time McKinsey Award winner for best article in Harvard Business Review: «Engineering Reverse Innovations» (2015) and «Stop the Innovation Wars» (2010) Author of 15 books, including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller Reverse Innovation, The Three-Box Solution, and Fusion Strategy (HBR Press, 2024) First Professor in Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant at General Electric; former Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School Prior faculty at Harvard Business School, INSEAD (Fontainebleau), and the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad Inducted into the Academy of Management Journals’ Hall of Fame; HBR contributor with multiple all-time top-50 best-selling articles Biography Vijay Govindarajan has one central argument: that managing today’s performance and inventing tomorrow’s business require fundamentally different logic, and that running both inside one organisation is the hardest problem in strategy. His Three-Box Solution – now four decades in development at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business – gives executives a structural answer. Box 1 is the discipline of running the present core at peak efficiency. Box 2 is the harder discipline of letting go of practices, assumptions, and investments that made the organisation successful but will impede what comes next. Box 3 is the work of creating the future from genuinely non-linear ideas. The concept of reverse innovation, which VG introduced in his 2009 HBR article co-authored with GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt, extended this thinking to global strategy. Rather than adapting developed-world solutions for emerging markets, VG argued that innovation should begin in the developing world – where constraints force ingenuity – and then move upward. Harvard Business Review later named reverse innovation one of the Great Moments in Management in the Last Century. His most recent book, Fusion Strategy (HBR Press, 2024), addresses the AI disruption challenge directly – not in the abstract, but for a specific set of organisations. The three-quarters of global GDP produced by industrial and asset-heavy companies has yet to be transformed by digital technology. VG’s argument is that these companies must fuse their physical product strength with AI-powered, real-time data intelligence – or be eclipsed by digital-native rivals who will. It is the most commercially urgent application of his frameworks to date. VG served as GE’s first-ever Professor in Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant from 2008 to 2010, developing these ideas under operational conditions inside one of the world’s most complex industrial organisations. He is a two-time McKinsey Award winner in Harvard Business Review, a former Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School, and was inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2019 – the only management thinker to receive Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Awards in two separate categories. Key speaking topics The Three-Box Solution: managing present, past, and future simultaneously Reverse innovation and emerging-market growth strategy Fusion Strategy: AI, real-time data, and the industrial competitive frontier Business model reinvention in established organisations Innovation execution inside large corporations Global strategy and cross-border competitive advantage Scenario planning and strategic foresight Ideal for CEOs and executive teams of established or asset-heavy industrial companies facing digital disruption Chief Strategy Officers and heads of corporate innovation managing tension between core business performance and growth investments Boards and senior leadership teams evaluating long-term portfolio strategy against near-term performance pressure Global organisations with significant emerging-market presence or expansion ambitions Audience outcomes A working understanding of the Three-Box Solution and how to apply its logic to their organisation’s specific resource allocation, governance, and portfolio decisions A clear framework for identifying which current practices are protecting value versus those quietly preventing the next phase of growth A strategic lens for evaluating how AI and real-time data can be fused with their company’s physical product or service base to generate competitive advantage Recognition of the specific organisational tensions – in staffing, structure, incentives, and culture – that prevent innovation from scaling inside established businesses Practical language for taking the strategy-versus-innovation conversation to board level with greater precision and less abstraction