Organizational Design

Why organisations work with Nilofer Merchant Her Onlyness framework offers a structural diagnosis for why innovation stalls inside organisations: not a confidence problem or a diversity problem, but a systemic filtering-out of unconventional ideas that the existing norms were built to do. Our Best Work (HarperBusiness, 2026) names 24 specific norms – including performance reviews, servant leadership, and “move fast and break things” – that actively undermine the conditions for great work, and provides a measurable, team-applicable alternative for each one. She holds a position few speakers occupy: genuine technology executive experience (Apple, Autodesk, Symantec; 100+ products; $18B in revenues) combined with management research that Thinkers50 cited as among the five ideas most likely to shape business for the next twenty years. She reframes the productivity and innovation conversation away from individual behaviour change – where most leadership speakers operate – and onto the systems and norms that leaders themselves control, which is a more actionable entry point for a board or senior team. Ranked by Thinkers50 as the “#1 person most likely to influence the future of management in both theory and practice,” her work carries both intellectual authority and practical application at the senior level. Biography highlights Author of four books on organisational performance and work design: The New How (O’Reilly, 2010), 11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra (Harvard Business Review, 2012), The Power of Onlyness (Viking, 2017), and Our Best Work (HarperBusiness, 2026) Thinkers50 “Future Thinker” Award, 2013; ranked #22 globally in 2017 ranking; Thinkers50 Top 50, 2021; The Power of Onlyness shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award TED mainstage speaker; “Sitting Is the Smoking of Our Generation” ranks in the top 10% of TED’s most-viewed talks Harvard Business Review contributor; media coverage includes Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, Bloomberg, Fast Company, and CNN Former executive at Apple, Autodesk, and GoLive; personally launched more than 100 products generating $18 billion in revenue across 25 years in technology Teaches business strategy and collaborative management at Stanford University and Santa Clara University; MBA, Santa Clara University Founder, The Intangible Labs; top 10 HR thinker, HR Magazine Biography Nilofer Merchant starts from an observation that most organisations resist: the management tools that delivered performance in the twentieth century are actively limiting performance now. From her position as founder of The Intangible Labs and author of four books on work design, she has spent twenty-five years building an evidence base for that claim, and an alternative. Her Onlyness framework, developed in The Power of Onlyness (Viking, 2017) and cited by Thinkers50 as one of five ideas most likely to shape business for the next twenty years, holds that modern value creation flows not from hierarchy or title, but from the distinct perspective that only each individual can bring. When organisations filter out that perspective through deference, conformity, and outdated norms, they lose the one input that capital and process cannot replicate. Our Best Work (HarperBusiness, 2026) takes that argument into the operational detail boards and leadership teams can actually act on. It names 24 specific norms – from performance reviews to servant leadership to “move fast and break things” – that suppress contribution, trust, and innovation, and pairs each with a measurable alternative. The argument is structural: the problem is not the willingness of people to perform, but the systems they are asked to perform inside. Merchant’s authority on this is grounded in operating experience. A former executive at Apple, Autodesk, and Symantec, she personally launched more than 100 products generating $18 billion in revenue. She has contributed to Harvard Business Review, been ranked #22 among the world’s top management thinkers by Thinkers50, and teaches business strategy at Stanford University and Santa Clara University. Her TED talk “Sitting Is the Smoking of Our Generation” ranks in the top 10% of TED’s most-viewed talks. Key speaking topics Organisational norms and performance systems The Onlyness framework and value creation Intangible value in modern organisations Collaborative strategy and execution Innovation and idea suppression in hierarchical structures Future of work and work design Culture change as systems change Ideal for CHROs and People leaders designing or overhauling performance and culture systems CEOs and senior leadership teams asking why execution consistently falls short of strategy Chief Innovation Officers and transformation leads examining why new ideas fail to scale internally Boards and executive committees evaluating whether their management models are still fit for purpose Audience outcomes A named diagnostic framework (Onlyness) for identifying where organisational value is being systematically suppressed – and why Specific understanding of which widely adopted management practices are actively limiting innovation and contribution in their own organisations A practical model for replacing competition-based and hierarchy-based norms with trust and collaboration-based alternatives, drawn from Our Best Work‘s 24-indicator framework Language for the gap between what organisations currently measure and what actually creates value – useful for board-level and senior team conversations Concrete team-level practices applicable immediately post-session, drawn from the chapter-by-chapter practice model in Our Best Work

Why organisations work with Aubrey Blanche-Sarellano She built the Balanced Teams Diversity Assessment used inside the Atlassian Team Playbook, giving People teams a measurement framework they can run themselves rather than a workshop they have to repeat. She has held the senior internal seat twice, at Atlassian and Culture Amp, so her recommendations come from running the function at scale, not from observing it. Her work on AI ethics is grounded in current academic study at Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre, which means the responsible-AI content is current with regulation rather than recycled from 2021 DEI decks. She treats equity as a product and operations problem. That makes her useful to CHROs, Heads of Product, and AI leads, not only to DEI specialists. She speaks credibly to the post-DEI-backlash context: how to keep inclusion outcomes when the political signalling has to come down. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of The Mathpath, advising on equitable operations, responsible AI, and ESG. Former Global Head of Equitable Design & Impact, Culture Amp. Former Global Head of Diversity & Belonging, Atlassian. Built the function from scratch. Inventor of the Balanced Teams approach and the Balanced Teams Diversity Assessment in the Atlassian Team Playbook. Master’s candidate in AI Ethics and Society, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. Board director at Circle of Blue and the Culture Amp Foundation; limited partner at Operator Collective. Featured in Wired, Wall Street Journal, Australian Financial Review, and USA Today. Biography Diversity programmes were designed for a political environment that no longer exists. Budgets are smaller, scrutiny is sharper, and the language that worked five years ago now invites litigation in some markets and ridicule in others. The companies that still want inclusion outcomes have a problem: they need the results, but they cannot keep running the programme in its original form. Aubrey Blanche-Sarellano works on that problem from the operations side. She built Atlassian’s Diversity & Belonging function from scratch and scaled it across the company’s international expansion, then joined Culture Amp as the first Global Head of Equitable Design & Impact. The Balanced Teams Diversity Assessment she developed at Atlassian became part of the company’s public Team Playbook, which is why her frameworks are familiar to People teams who have never met her. Through The Mathpath, her consultancy, she now advises leaders on the same question at a higher altitude: how to embed equity into talent processes, product decisions, and AI deployment so that the outcomes survive without the political infrastructure. Her current academic work at Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence sits behind the responsible-AI content, which has become a larger share of her client engagements. She is direct about what does not work. Unconscious bias training is not, in her reading, a solution. Equitable design is. Her audiences leave with a clearer view of where inequity is actually produced inside their organisation and which operating levers, talent process, product practice, AI tooling, will move it. Key speaking topics Equitable operations and organisational design Responsible AI and algorithmic bias Talent process redesign and ERG programmes Inclusion in a post-DEI-backlash context Equitable product development ESG and ethical business operations Ideal for CHROs and Heads of People rebuilding inclusion strategy under new constraints Heads of Product and AI leads embedding fairness into model deployment and product practice ERG sponsors and DEI leads under pressure to demonstrate operating impact, not activity Executive teams reviewing where to take DEI investment next Audience outcomes A clearer map of where inequity is produced inside your own talent and product systems A working definition of equitable design, with examples of where it replaces conventional DEI activity Specific guidance on evaluating AI tools for fairness risk before deployment A read on how to keep inclusion outcomes when the political signalling has to come down Language for talking about equity that holds up in front of a sceptical board

Key speaking topics In extremis leadership Leadership in crisis and high-risk environments Leader development in higher education Military leadership principles for business Organisational leadership capability building Executive coaching and performance under pressure Ideal for Senior executives and C-suite leaders Boards and governance groups Leadership development and talent teams Organisations operating in high-risk or high-stakes sectors Audience outcomes Clear understanding of leadership principles in extreme conditions Practical frameworks for leading under pressure Insight into structured leader development models Greater clarity on building leadership capability across institutions Why organisations work with Thomas Kolditz Combines senior military command experience with academic leadership and research expertise. Brings cross-sector credibility spanning defence, higher education, and executive coaching. Provides structured, research-informed approaches to leadership development. Offers practical insight into preparing leaders for complex, high-consequence environments. Biography Thomas Kolditz brings together senior military command, academic leadership and executive coaching to help organisations strengthen leadership capability in high-stakes environments. A retired U.S. Army Brigadier General and social psychologist, he is widely recognised for his work on leadership in extreme and crisis conditions. He is the founding Director of Rice University’s Ann and John Doerr Institute for New Leaders, where he shaped a comprehensive, institution-wide approach to developing leadership at scale. His work in higher education also includes serving as Professor in the Practice of Leadership and Director of the Leadership Development Program at Yale School of Management. Earlier in his career, he led the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, overseeing the development of leadership education within one of the world’s most established military institutions. His experience also includes service in Pentagon policy analysis and concept development roles focused on leadership and human performance. Kolditz is the author of In Extremis Leadership, a study of leading in life-threatening and high-risk situations, and co-author of Leadership Reckoning, which examines how higher education can more effectively develop the leaders society requires. His research includes work conducted during combat operations in Iraq and has contributed to the understanding of leadership under pressure. A Fellow of the American Psychological Association, he is a recipient of the U.S. Army Distinguished Service Medal and the Warren Bennis Award for Excellence in Leadership. He holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Missouri, a BA from Vanderbilt University, three Master’s degrees, and an ICF coaching credential, and has received an honorary doctorate from The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. Through Saxon Castle LLC, he advises senior leaders and institutions on building resilient, principled leadership in complex, high-consequence contexts.

Key speaking topics Walkable city planning Urban design and street design Downtown revitalisation New Urbanism Smart growth Public realm and placemaking Transportation and city planning Ideal for City and regional leaders Urban planners and transport authorities Real estate and development professionals Corporate leaders involved in place-based investment Audience outcomes Clear understanding of the principles of walkable city design Insight into practical approaches to downtown revitalisation Frameworks for improving street design and public space Greater clarity on the economic and social value of walkability Why organisations work with Jeff Speck Combines public sector leadership experience with private consultancy practice. Brings published frameworks that have influenced urban planning debates. Offers practical, policy-relevant insight for cities and organisations shaping the built environment. Aligns design thinking with economic vitality and community outcomes. Biography Jeff Speck is a city planner and urban designer whose work focuses on helping cities and organisations create walkable, economically resilient communities. As a founding partner of Speck Dempsey, he advises public- and private-sector clients on urban planning, street design, and downtown revitalisation strategies that strengthen long-term value. His career combines national policy leadership with hands-on planning expertise. As former Director of Design at the US National Endowment for the Arts, he led design-related grantmaking and worked with initiatives including the Mayors’ Institute on City Design and the Governors’ Institute on Community Design, supporting civic leaders in shaping the built environment. Earlier, he spent roughly a decade at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co., where he became Director of Town Planning and contributed to the development and application of New Urbanist principles in practice. Jeff is the author of Walkable City and Walkable City Rules, and co-author of Suburban Nation and The Smart Growth Manual. His books are widely read within planning and design communities, and Walkable City has been translated into multiple languages, shaping debate around transportation, development, and the future of urban centres. He has delivered widely viewed public talks, including TED appearances, on walkability and urban design, and is a recipient of the Seaside Prize in recognition of his contribution to the field.

Why organisations work with Hollie Castro Operating record across the moments that test a people function: IPO transition at YETI, take-private of BMC Software under Bain Capital and Insight Partners, and VC-backed scale-up at Miro under Accel and ICONIQ. Sits credibly in the boardroom on AI and the workforce, co-chairing the NACD Austin chapter and leading director-level sessions on GenAI governance and the multigenerational workforce. Has actually run HR at global scale: workforces of 1,500 to 50,000, 90 countries, budgets to USD 200 million, 25-plus acquisitions integrated. Bridges Fortune 500 and late-stage start-up worlds, including current advisory work with HR-focused AI founders at Series A through her firm HC Advice. Recognised externally where it counts: Financial Times Group Top 100 Board Candidates and the HR Transformation award at Silicon Valley’s High Tech Symposium. Biography highlights Five-time CHRO and Chief Administration Officer: YETI, BMC Software, Talisman Energy, Miro, Kony. Co-Chair, Austin Advisory Board, National Association of Corporate Directors. Advisory Board Member, Texas A&M Mays School of Business Center for Human Resources. Stanford University and NACD certified Corporate Director; MBA, Thunderbird School of Global Management. Financial Times Group Top 100 Board Candidates; HR Transformation award, Silicon Valley High Tech Symposium. Published in Fast Company, Forbes, The Corporate Board, and Directors & Boards; featured at HR Retail and on the Revenue Builders podcast. Biography Few HR leaders have sat in the seat across as many high-pressure transitions. As CHRO, Castro took YETI through its IPO from private equity ownership at Cortec, led BMC Software through its take-private under Bain Capital and Insight Partners, and ran people strategy at Miro and Kony alongside Accel and ICONIQ Capital. The thread across those mandates is the same: HR as an operating discipline tied to capital events, not a support function. Her scope has been unusually broad. Workforces of 1,500 to 50,000, operations in 90 countries, budgets to USD 200 million, and more than 25 acquisitions integrated. That range includes the cultural architecture work that ESG and compensation committees now ask for, as well as the harder M&A integration calls that decide whether a deal earns its thesis. The board work has become a second discipline. Castro co-chairs the Austin advisory board of the National Association of Corporate Directors and led the 2024 NACD Director Summit conversation on how boards govern GenAI alongside a five-generation workforce. She is a Stanford and NACD certified Corporate Director, a Thunderbird MBA, and was named to the Financial Times Group’s Top 100 Board Candidates. Today she advises HR-focused AI founders at Series A through HC Advice and writes for Fast Company, Forbes, The Corporate Board, and Directors & Boards on the governance questions that follow when HR is asked to deploy AI at scale. Key speaking topics The CHRO as a strategic business partner Generative AI in HR and talent acquisition Global HR strategy and M&A integration Board governance of AI and the workforce Scaling people functions through IPO and take-private events ESG, compensation, and human capital in the boardroom The multigenerational workforce Agile HR and design thinking Ideal for CHROs, Chief People Officers, and CPO-track HR leaders preparing for board-facing roles. Boards, compensation committees, and audit committees engaging with AI, human capital, and ESG oversight. CEOs and executive teams in private equity portfolio companies or scale-ups preparing for IPO, M&A, or take-private events. Leadership programmes for senior women in operating and director roles. Audience outcomes A clearer picture of what boards now expect from HR on AI, talent risk, and human capital reporting. Specific reference points on integrating HR through IPO, take-private, and cross-border M&A. A working view of how generative AI is changing talent acquisition and the CHRO operating model. Director-level language for governing AI ethics, workforce design, and compensation in tandem.

Why organisations work with Grace Lordan She runs the only research centre of its kind inside a top-tier university focused on bringing behavioural science to inclusion at firm level, The Inclusion Initiative at LSE, which gives her findings weight that internal DEI teams cannot generate alone. Her work tells senior leaders which interventions actually shift hiring, promotion, and retention data, and which ones look good in a values statement but fail under measurement. She speaks the language of CFOs and boards, linking inclusion to productivity and performance, which is what gets budget approved and kept. She brings a practical behavioural toolkit, nudges, structured decision design, debiased processes, that leaders can install rather than aspire to. Her Penguin book Think Big has built a wide reader base among professionals, so audiences often arrive already familiar with her frame for individual career design, which makes the organisational material land faster. Biography highlights Associate Professor in Behavioural Science, London School of Economics and Political Science. Founding Director of The Inclusion Initiative at LSE, the research centre she established in 2020. Director of the MSc in Behavioural Science at LSE. Author of Think Big: Take Small Steps and Build the Future You Want (Penguin Life, 2021). Served on the UK government’s Skills and Productivity Board and the BEIS social mobility taskforce; advisory board member of the Women in Finance Charter. Contributor to Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Fortune, Fast Company, and Reuters; host of the Work FORCE podcast. Biography Inclusion work inside firms has a credibility problem. Budgets have grown for a decade, yet most leadership teams struggle to show a clean line between their interventions and real movement in who gets hired, promoted, and retained. That is the gap Grace Lordan has built a career around closing. She is an Associate Professor in Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and the founding director of The Inclusion Initiative, the LSE research centre she established in 2020 to bring behavioural science into how firms actually design talent decisions. Her research tests which interventions move the numbers and which do not, across hiring screens, promotion processes, and team composition. The work is published in peer-reviewed journals and picked up by Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, and MIT Sloan Management Review. She also directs the LSE MSc in Behavioural Science, teaches corporate decision-making to executive students, and has advised the UK government on skills, productivity, and social mobility. Her Penguin book Think Big: Take Small Steps and Build the Future You Want applies the same evidence base to individual career design, which is why professional audiences often encounter her ideas before they meet her in the room. What senior buyers get is someone who can talk to a CHRO about process design, to a CFO about productivity, and to a board about where their inclusion spend is working. The argument is built on evidence from an LSE research centre, not consultancy generalities. Key speaking topics Inclusion as a measurable driver of firm productivity Behavioural science applied to hiring and promotion decisions Designing teams for performance and progression The future of work and skills in a changing labour market Women’s progression and the economics of the gender gap Evidence-based leadership and debiased decision-making Ideal for CHROs and heads of talent responsible for moving measurable inclusion outcomes CEOs and boards allocating budget to DEI and wanting to know what actually works Financial services and professional services leadership teams working under the Women in Finance Charter or equivalent progression commitments Executive audiences across government, policy, and regulated sectors addressing skills and social mobility Audience outcomes A sharper read on which inclusion interventions have evidence behind them and which do not Specific behavioural design moves leaders can apply to hiring, promotion, and team decisions Language that connects inclusion to productivity and performance for CFO and board conversations A clearer view of where the future of work is moving for skills, talent pipelines, and progression Confidence to retire activities that signal good intent but fail on measurement

Why organisations work with Yves Morieux Smart Simplicity® is a proprietary BCG framework built on social science – game theory, organisational sociology, economics – not management intuition. Leaders take away a testable model, not a set of principles. His argument is counter-intuitive and specific: the problem is not complexity itself, but the organisational response to it. That reframe changes where leadership teams look for solutions. His two TED talks on the subject have exceeded 5 million views, which means senior audiences often arrive having already encountered the framework and wanting to operationalise it. Six Simple Rules, published by Harvard Business Review Press, gives organisations a durable reference point that outlasts a single event and shapes how teams implement change. His 2019 BCG Fellow research introduced “Relational Productivity”, extending the Smart Simplicity model into how digital ways of working reshape cooperation and output. Organisations dealing with hybrid work and digital transformation get a framework grounded in his earlier work but updated for current conditions. Biography highlights BCG Fellow since 2008; Managing Director and Senior Partner at Boston Consulting Group; Director of the BCG Institute for Organization Creator of Smart Simplicity®, BCG’s registered framework for managing organisational complexity and rebuilding cooperation Author of a second BCG Fellow research concept, Relational Productivity, developed in 2019 Co-author of Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014), with Peter Tollman Two TED talks on organisational complexity and workplace effectiveness, collectively exceeding 5 million views Published in Harvard Business Review, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Le Monde; author of more than 45 articles and book chapters Lecturer in the advanced sociology programme and professor in the master of public affairs programme at Sciences Po, Paris PhD in industrial marketing, University of Strathclyde; DEA in organisational sociology, Sciences Po Biography Organisations under pressure tend to reach for familiar tools: clearer accountability frameworks, more robust reporting, additional coordination structures. Yves Morieux has spent his career at BCG demonstrating that this instinct is the source of the problem, not the solution. The more complex the operating environment, the more those tools erode the cooperation that performance actually depends on. His framework, Smart Simplicity®, was developed through research at the BCG Institute for Organization where he has served as a BCG Fellow since 2008, and grounded in social science disciplines unusual in consulting: game theory, organisational sociology, economics. The six rules at its core are not management principles but structural interventions that change the conditions under which people decide whether to cooperate. His 2019 BCG Fellow work extended the model into Relational Productivity, examining how digital ways of working reshape those same dynamics. Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated, co-authored with Peter Tollman and published by Harvard Business Review Press, codified the framework for practitioner use. His two TED talks on the subject, delivered as part of a series curated with BCG, have collectively exceeded 5 million views, making Smart Simplicity one of the most widely seen management arguments of the past decade. Morieux also lectures in the advanced sociology programme and the master of public affairs at Sciences Po in Paris. His work has been covered and published in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Fast Company, and Le Monde, and spans more than 45 articles and book chapters. Key speaking topics Organisational complexity and its management Smart Simplicity® framework and the Six Simple Rules Cooperation as a performance driver Relational Productivity and digital ways of working Organisational design and behavioural architecture Leadership under complexity Productivity, engagement, and the failure of conventional management tools Ideal for C-suite and senior executive teams undertaking transformation or restructuring CHROs and people function leaders diagnosing engagement and performance gaps Strategy and organisational design leaders evaluating how structure is shaping behaviour Leadership teams navigating post-merger integration, scaling, or operating model change Audience outcomes A concrete diagnosis of how conventional management responses to complexity generate the performance and engagement problems they were designed to solve Understanding of the six Smart Simplicity® rules and how each changes the structural conditions for cooperation A framework to identify which processes, metrics, and accountabilities in their own organisation are creating complicatedness rather than managing complexity Exposure to the Relational Productivity concept and its implications for hybrid and digital-first operating environments Practical language to take back to leadership teams for evaluating organisational design decisions

Why organisations work with Richard Sennett A longitudinal sociological lens almost no other living speaker offers. Five decades on the same questions about what work does to people, running from The Hidden Injuries of Class (1972) through The Corrosion of Character (1998) to Building and Dwelling (2018). Reframes employee engagement as a question of craft. The Craftsman (2008) advanced the thesis that “making is thinking” and treats the desire to do a job well for its own sake as a workplace asset organisations either nurture or destroy. A serious framework for cooperation as a workplace skill. Together (2012) argues that cooperation is a craft learned through structured practice, and shows why short-term teams and constant reorganisation erode the conditions that make it possible. Direct involvement in shaping how cities and labour are governed. Sennett wrote the mission statement for UN Habitat III, helped organise COP26 work on cities and climate, and chaired the LSE Cities programme. Credentials at a level few corporate speakers reach: the Hegel Prize, the Spinoza Prize, the Centennial Medal from Harvard, an OBE for services to design and Fellowship of the British Academy. Biography highlights Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics; former University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. Author of The Hidden Injuries of Class, The Fall of Public Man, The Corrosion of Character, The Craftsman, Together, Building and Dwelling and The Performer. Founding director of the New York Institute for the Humanities (with Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky); former President of the American Council on Work; founder and chair of Theatrum Mundi. Senior Advisor to the United Nations Council on Urban Initiatives; wrote the mission statement for UN Habitat III; helped organise COP26 work on cities and climate. OBE for services to design (2018); Fellow of the British Academy; Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; recipient of the Hegel Prize, the Spinoza Prize and the Centennial Medal from Harvard. Senior Fellow at the Center on Capitalism and Society, Columbia University; Honorary Professor at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture and Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Biography The promise of flexible capitalism was that workers would gain real control of their own time and direction. The Corrosion of Character, published in 1998, showed in granular ethnographic detail what actually happened to dismissed IBM executives, Boston bakers and a barmaid turned advertising executive. The book established a thesis that has only sharpened with time: an economy built around “no long-term” produces people who struggle to sustain identity and craft over a working life. That argument matured over two decades into a trilogy on what Sennett calls Homo Faber, or “man the maker.” The Craftsman (2008) advanced a single thesis: making is thinking. It treated the desire to do a job well for its own sake as a workplace capacity organisations either nurture or destroy. Together (2012) extended the argument into the social. Cooperation is a craft, Sennett argued, learned through structured practice and degraded by short-term teams and constant reorganisation. Building and Dwelling (2018) carried the same lens into urbanism, distinguishing the ville (the built city) from the cité (how people actually live in it). Sennett’s intellectual lineage runs directly through David Riesman, John Rawls and Hannah Arendt at Harvard, where he took his PhD in 1969. Few living sociologists carry that depth of connection to the most serious thought of the twentieth century into corporate and policy conversations of the present. In 2024 he published The Performer: Art, Life, Politics, the opening volume of a new trilogy on performance, narration and image-making. Key speaking topics The future of work in flexible capitalism Craftsmanship and the conditions for good work Cooperation as a workplace skill Character and the personal consequences of “no long-term” employment Urbanism and the ethical city Public culture and authority in modern organisations Ideal for CHROs and senior people leaders moving past trend diagnostics into the deeper drivers of engagement and workforce design. Executive teams contending with the cultural costs of reorganisation, short-term teams and high turnover. Boards, CEOs and strategy leaders commissioning long-horizon work on the human foundations of organisational change. City leaders, urbanists and real-estate strategists working on the ethics and design of public space. Audience outcomes A vocabulary for what short-termism and perpetual reorganisation actually do to character and craft inside organisations. The “making is thinking” framework, which puts employee skill and the conditions for good work at the centre of strategic conversation. Cooperation reframed as a workplace craft, built through specific practices and degraded by structures many organisations now treat as normal. The ville/cité distinction as a tool for thinking about the human and built dimensions of any large environment, from offices to city districts. A historical lens on flexible capitalism that sets present-day workforce challenges in their actual fifty-year arc.

Why organisations work with Reed Hastings The «Freedom and Responsibility» framework – documented in the Netflix Culture Deck and codified in No Rules Rules – gives organisations a named, sequenced model for replacing bureaucracy with accountability: not a philosophy, but a tested operating system built across a 200-person startup through to a 300-million-subscriber global company. Hastings applied the same cultural principles across four distinct business-model transitions at Netflix – DVD rental, streaming, original content production, and global expansion into 190 countries – providing evidence that the model holds across radically different operating contexts, not just favourable ones. His 2025 appointment to the board of Anthropic by its Long Term Benefit Trust positions him to speak directly to AI governance challenges at board level, based on direct engagement with one of the sector’s leading AI safety organisations – not commentary from the outside. He has publicly documented a major failure – the 2011 Qwikster decision, widely covered in the press – as a case study in what his own cultural model gets wrong under pressure, giving audiences honest access to failure alongside success. A $50 million commitment to Bowdoin College’s AI and Humanity research programme gives him a substantive, funded position on AI’s workforce and societal impact – relevant to CHROs, boards, and executive teams now building their own AI governance frameworks. Biography highlights Co-founder and executive chairman of Netflix; CEO from 1998 to 2023 – led the company through four business-model transformations, from DVD rental to global streaming platform and original content studio Co-authored No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention (2020) with INSEAD professor Erin Meyer – New York Times bestseller, shortlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award Two published TED talks: «How Netflix changed entertainment – and where it’s headed» (TED2018) and «3 secrets to Netflix’s success» (TED2020) Former board member of Microsoft (2007–2012) and Facebook/Meta (2011–2019); current board member of Bloomberg and Anthropic (appointed 2025) President of the California State Board of Education (2000–2004); current board member of KIPP, City Fund, and the Charter School Growth Fund BA in Mathematics, Bowdoin College; MSCS in Artificial Intelligence, Stanford University; Peace Corps mathematics teacher in Swaziland Biography Reed Hastings built the management case at Netflix – across 25 years and four business-model transitions – that organisations scale best when they remove controls, not add them. The result was the «Freedom and Responsibility» framework, first documented in an internal Culture Deck made public in 2009. Hastings and INSEAD professor Erin Meyer later codified it in No Rules Rules (2020), a New York Times bestseller shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year. The framework’s argument runs in sequence: high talent density creates the conditions for radical candor, which in turn enables leaders to eliminate policies, approval layers, and bureaucratic controls. This ordered logic is what separates the Netflix model from generic arguments for employee autonomy. It was not derived from a single favourable configuration – it was tested across DVD, streaming, original production, and international expansion simultaneously, and it broke and was rebuilt along the way. Hastings has spoken publicly about the Qwikster decision as a case in what the model costs when applied badly. Before Netflix, Hastings founded Pure Software in 1991, took it public in 1995, and sold it to Rational Software. That experience of scaling an engineer-led startup into a public corporation shaped his understanding of what happens to culture as organisations grow and complicate. It is the origin of the argument, not merely its backdrop. Hastings sits on the board of Anthropic, appointed in 2025 by its Long Term Benefit Trust to help guide AI development for long-term societal benefit. A $50 million gift to Bowdoin College to establish an AI and Humanity research programme adds institutional weight to that engagement. For boards and leadership teams now navigating AI governance, he brings a practitioner’s perspective – not an observer’s. Key speaking topics Organisational culture and management design The Freedom and Responsibility framework Talent density and high-performance teams Scaling technology-driven businesses AI governance and the societal impact of technology Corporate governance and board-level leadership Education reform and systemic institutional leadership Ideal for CEOs and executive leadership teams navigating growth, culture change, or organisational redesign CHROs and people leaders building high-performance cultures at scale Board directors and governance leads in technology, media, and high-growth organisations Senior leadership teams with active AI governance or AI adoption agendas Audience outcomes A concrete understanding of the «Freedom and Responsibility» framework – and the specific conditions (talent density, radical candor) required before eliminating controls, not after Clarity on how Netflix’s cultural principles functioned as a sequenced system across multiple business-model transitions, including where the model failed A working frame for evaluating which management policies and controls serve organisational performance and which impede it Board-level perspective on AI governance and the human-impact questions that senior leaders now need to address with institutional seriousness Practical reference points from a 25-year operating record – including documented failures – for leadership teams working through their own culture and performance challenges

Why organisations work with Ravin Jesuthasan He gives boards and executive teams an actual blueprint for moving from jobs to skills, not a slide about why it matters. The Work Without Jobs framework, developed with John Boudreau, is the reference text on the subject and is taught inside MIT Sloan and Kellogg. His day job is doing this work. As Mercer’s Global Leader of Transformation Services, he advises some of the largest employers in the world on workforce redesign, so the keynote is built on live engagements, not theory. He sits where AI, automation and human capital actually intersect. His four-step framework for applying automation to work, from Reinventing Jobs, has become a standard tool for HR and operations leaders trying to decide what to automate, what to augment, and what to leave alone. He brings institutional authority that buyers can verify. World Economic Forum Steering Committee on Work and Employment, Thinkers50 Radar, FT Book of the Month, fifteen pieces in HBR and MIT Sloan Management Review. His material is built for the CHRO and the CEO in the same room. Many future-of-work speakers pitch to one or the other. He frames the work redesign question as a board-level operating decision, which is how it now needs to be sold internally. Biography highlights Global Leader of Transformation Services at Mercer. Executive Fellow and Adjunct Lecturer of Executive Education, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Author of five books including Work Without Jobs (MIT Press, 2022) and The Skills-Powered Organization (MIT Press, 2024). Wall Street Journal bestseller; Financial Times Book of the Month, October 2024. Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2020; shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Talent Award 2023. World Economic Forum Steering Committee member on Work and Employment. Over 200 published articles, including 15 in Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review; regular Forbes contributor. CFA charterholder and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA). Biography The job, as a unit of organisational architecture, is starting to look obsolete. Roles are static, skills inside them decay in months rather than years, and AI is now capable of doing chunks of work that used to define entire functions. Most large employers know this. Very few know what to replace the jobs-based model with. This is the territory Ravin Jesuthasan has spent two decades mapping. As Global Leader of Transformation Services at Mercer, he advises multinational employers on how to rebuild their workforce architecture around skills and tasks rather than fixed job descriptions. The same body of work runs through Work Without Jobs, written with John Boudreau and published by MIT Press in 2022, and its 2024 follow-up, The Skills-Powered Organization, written with Tanuj Kapilashrami and named Financial Times Book of the Month in October 2024. The institutional credentials match the intellectual claim. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Steering Committee on Work and Employment, holds an Executive Fellow and Adjunct Lecturer appointment at the Kellogg School of Management, and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2020 before being shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Talent Award in 2023. He has written more than 200 articles, including fifteen pieces for Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review, and contributes regularly to Forbes. For boards now being asked how AI will reshape headcount, productivity and capability, his contribution is not a forecast. It is an operating model: a structured way of deciding what work gets deconstructed, which tasks get automated or augmented, and how the organisation acquires the skills it will actually need next year, not the jobs it posted last year. Key speaking topics The skills-powered organisation Reinventing jobs through automation and AI The future of work and the work operating system Workforce transformation and human capital strategy Human-AI collaboration in the enterprise The future of the Chief People Officer role Sustainable digital transformation Ideal for CHROs and Chief People Officers rebuilding the workforce model around skills and AI. CEOs and boards making capital-level decisions on AI, automation and headcount. Transformation, operations and strategy leaders responsible for redesigning how work gets done. Executive teams preparing for skills-based talent markets and post-jobs operating models. Audience outcomes A working definition of the skills-powered organisation and how it differs from a jobs-based model. A four-step method for deciding what to automate, what to augment, and what to leave to humans. A board-ready argument for treating work design as a strategic operating decision, not an HR programme. Specific case examples from global employers already deconstructing jobs into tasks and skills.

Key speaking topics High performance and talent development Sustaining success in organisations Organisational culture and performance environments Leadership and decision-making Data-informed performance and recruitment in sport Talent hotbeds and performance ecosystems Avoiding complacency after success Ideal for Senior leadership teams and executives Organisations focused on performance culture and talent development Sports organisations and performance teams Strategy, HR and organisational development leaders Audience outcomes Insight into how high-performance cultures are developed and sustained Practical lessons from elite sport applied to organisational leadership Understanding of how environments shape talent and performance Frameworks for avoiding complacency after periods of success Perspectives on the role of data and decision-making in performance environments Why organisations work with Rasmus Ankersen Combines experience in elite sport leadership with research into performance environments. Provides cross-industry insight by translating lessons from high-performance sport into organisational contexts. Offers practical perspectives on talent development, culture and sustaining success. Draws on leadership experience within professional football and investment in global sports organisations. Biography Rasmus Ankersen is widely recognised for his work exploring how high-performance cultures are built, sustained, and replicated. Drawing on deep experience in elite sport and leadership environments, he helps organisations understand how talent develops, how performance cultures emerge, and how successful organisations avoid complacency. He is Co-Founder and CEO of Sport Republic, the investment firm that owns a controlling stake in Southampton FC. He previously served as Co-Director of Football at Brentford FC, overseeing football operations during the period that culminated in the club’s promotion to the Premier League after more than seventy years outside the top tier. Alongside his executive leadership in professional football, Rasmus is an author whose work examines the systems and environments that produce exceptional performance. His books include The Gold Mine Effect, which investigates “talent hotbeds” that consistently produce world-class performers, and Hunger in Paradise, which explores how successful organisations can maintain momentum and avoid complacency. His research has taken him inside some of the world’s most effective performance environments. Through extensive fieldwork, he has studied Brazilian football development systems, East African distance running cultures and other high-performing sporting communities, analysing how culture, environment and decision-making shape elite performance. Rasmus has also directed the documentary The Hockey Miracle in the Middle of No Where, which explores how the Danish town of Herning produced five NHL players within a nine-year period. The project reflects his broader interest in understanding why certain environments repeatedly generate exceptional talent. Earlier in his career, he played football in Denmark before injury ended his playing ambitions. He subsequently gained UEFA coaching qualifications and moved into coaching and football administration, experiences that continue to inform his work on leadership, talent development and performance cultures.

Why organisations work with Peter Senge Built the framework that defined organisational learning. The Fifth Discipline has sold over two million copies; Harvard Business Review named it one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years, and the Financial Times listed it among the five most important management books ever published. Treats systems thinking as a leadership discipline. The Five Disciplines (personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking) give executives a working method for changing the structures that produce their hardest recurring problems. Three decades of applied work with Ford, Shell, BP, Unilever, Intel, and Saudi Aramco, alongside cross-sector initiatives on global food systems, climate, and education. Named “Strategist of the Century” by the Journal of Business Strategy, one of 24 figures judged to have had the greatest influence on 20th-century business strategy. The Fifth Discipline is now in its fourth decade of continuous use on MBA syllabuses and inside operating companies. Biography highlights Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Sustainability at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Founding Chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) and co-founder of the Academy for Systemic Change. Author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, with over two million copies sold worldwide. Co-author of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, The Dance of Change, Schools That Learn, Presence, and The Necessary Revolution. Named “Strategist of the Century” by the Journal of Business Strategy; ranked among the world’s top management thinkers by the Financial Times and BusinessWeek. Convened the Sustainable Food Lab, bringing major food companies and NGOs into shared work on sustainable agriculture. Biography The Fifth Discipline, published in 1990, gave senior executives a working vocabulary for something they kept hitting in practice but could not name: the structure of an organisation tends to produce the very problems its leaders are trying to solve. Thirty-six years later the book is still in print and still the reference text for the field. Peter Senge wrote it at MIT, where he is Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Sustainability at the Sloan School of Management. He is founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning and co-founder of the Academy for Systemic Change. The Fifth Discipline has sold more than two million copies. Harvard Business Review named it one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years; the Financial Times listed it among the five most important management books ever published. The book is organised around five disciplines: personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking. The core argument is that the only sustainable competitive advantage is an organisation’s ability to learn faster than its environment changes. Senge’s later work extended the method into education through Schools That Learn, into large-scale change through The Dance of Change, and into sustainability through The Necessary Revolution. His applied work has run through Ford, Shell, BP, Unilever, Intel, and Saudi Aramco, and across cross-sector initiatives including the Sustainable Food Lab, which brought major food companies and NGOs into shared work on sustainable agriculture, and the Compassionate Systems community in primary and secondary education. The Journal of Business Strategy named him a “Strategist of the Century,” one of 24 figures judged to have had the greatest influence on 20th-century business strategy. Key speaking topics Systems thinking Organisational learning Leadership in complex systems Sustaining change in large organisations Cross-sector collaboration Sustainability and systemic change Ideal for CEOs and senior executive teams running multi-year transformation programmes Heads of strategy and transformation leads diagnosing why change initiatives stall Chief sustainability officers and ESG leads working across sector and stakeholder boundaries Senior leaders in education, healthcare, and government addressing complex public-system challenges Audience outcomes A new vocabulary for talking about why their hardest organisational problems keep returning The Five Disciplines as a working method, applied through cases drawn from Ford, Shell, Unilever, and the Sustainable Food Lab Language to make the structural causes of organisational performance visible to senior teams A sharper read on what leadership in complex, multi-stakeholder environments demands