Organizational Design

Why organisations work with Andrew McMillan He ran customer experience for the John Lewis department store division across 26 UK shops, so he speaks from inside one of the most studied service cultures in British retail, not from a framework bought off a shelf. His central argument is operational, not motivational: customer experience is an output of employee engagement and leadership behaviour, and any programme that treats it as a frontline training problem will fail. He has tested the thesis outside retail, with Shell, Air France, United Airlines, Toyota, Barclays, Mercedes-Benz, RBS and NHS foundation trusts among the organisations he has advised through Engaging Service. He chaired Revo’s Customer Experience Committee for seven years, which gives him a sector-wide view of what separates shopping centres, high streets and service organisations that keep customers from those that do not. He is useful in the room with senior leaders because the conversation turns quickly to values, hiring, internal communication and manager behaviour, which is where service actually breaks. Biography highlights 28 years with the John Lewis Partnership, culminating in responsibility for customer experience across the department store division and its 26 UK shops. Founder of Engaging Service, a consultancy on employee engagement, customer experience and the leadership that links the two. Chair of the Customer Experience Committee at Revo from 2010 to 2017, overseeing the growth of the ACE Awards to more than 100 shopping centre entrants. Judge and adviser for the Customer Focus Award at the Lloyds Bank National Business Awards from 2015. Advised named organisations including Shell, Air France, United Airlines, Toyota, Barclays, Mercedes-Benz, RBS, Rightmove, MoneySuperMarket and the Law Society. During his tenure, John Lewis department stores were recognised for customer experience by Which?, Verdict and Retail Week. Biography Service cultures that customers notice are not built on the shop floor. They are built in hiring decisions, in what managers are promoted for, in what the organisation tolerates on a difficult Tuesday. Andrew McMillan spent nearly three decades inside a business that understood this, and now spends his time explaining to other organisations why their service programmes are not working. He joined the John Lewis Partnership as a management trainee at Brent Cross, led selling teams across several branches, headed a department at the Oxford Street flagship, and ran the department stores’ internal intelligence team before taking responsibility, from 2000, for customer experience across the entire department store division. That meant 26 shops and tens of thousands of customer-facing partners. During his tenure, the business was recognised for customer experience by Which?, Verdict and Retail Week. In 2012 he founded Engaging Service and has since worked with more than 40 organisations, among them Shell, Air France, United Airlines, Toyota, Barclays, Mercedes-Benz, RBS, Rightmove, MoneySuperMarket, the Law Society and several NHS foundation trusts. The work is consistent across sectors: diagnose the gap between the experience leaders say they want and the culture they are actually running, and rebuild the link between the two. He chaired Revo’s Customer Experience Committee from 2010 to 2017, growing its ACE Awards to over 100 shopping centre entrants, and has judged the Customer Focus Award at the Lloyds Bank National Business Awards since 2015. The through-line is practical: in an economy where product parity is the norm, the companies customers stay with are the ones whose people want to be there. Key speaking topics Customer experience as an output of culture Employee engagement and service performance Leadership behaviour and organisational values Building and sustaining a service culture at scale Retail and shopping centre customer experience Purpose, values and frontline behaviour Translating the John Lewis Partnership model to other sectors Ideal for CEOs, COOs and boards reviewing why customer experience investment is not producing the promised lift CHROs and heads of employee engagement connecting people strategy to commercial outcomes Customer experience, service and operations leaders in retail, financial services, hospitality, transport and healthcare Shopping centre and retail property leadership working on tenant mix, placemaking and visitor experience Audience outcomes A sharper view of why customer experience programmes fail when they are run as training rather than as culture change Specific, named examples from inside John Lewis of how engagement, leadership behaviour and service performance reinforce each other Practical questions to take back to their own organisation about hiring, manager behaviour and internal communication A clearer sense of where service sits in the operating model, and which leadership decisions actually move the needle

Why organisations work with Ade McCormack His Intelligent Organisation framework gives leadership teams a concrete diagnostic model for identifying the gap between their current design and one capable of sustained adaptiveness in volatile conditions. He draws on evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and anthropology rather than management theory alone, making his arguments for organisational change more durable and harder to dismiss as trend-following or consultancy-derived. His intellectual trajectory, from astrophysics and the European Space Agency to a decade as a Financial Times columnist on digital leadership, gives him credibility at both the technical and executive levels that most leadership speakers do not carry. He authored the E-Skills Manifesto for the European Commission and has advised at policy level on digital workforce readiness, meaning his perspective on talent and transformation extends beyond corporate practice into systemic consequence. His involvement in executive education at the Moller Institute, University of Cambridge and at MIT Sloan means his frameworks have been stress-tested against academic scrutiny and refined for senior leadership audiences, not just configured for conference delivery. Biography highlights Former columnist for the Financial Times on digital leadership for approximately a decade Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management on digital leadership Executive leadership development at the Moller Institute, Churchill College, University of Cambridge Founder of The Intelligent Organisation, a think tank focused on how organisations must evolve to remain viable under permanent disruption Author of six books including Biz 4.0, The E-Skills Manifesto (commissioned by the European Commission), and Beyond Nine to Five Advisor to the European Commission on digital skills and e-skills policy Astrophysics graduate; early career includes software engineering at the European Space Agency Biography When organisations describe their transformation programmes, they usually mean technology deployment: new platforms, new tools, upgraded infrastructure. What they less often examine is whether the management model operating underneath those tools was designed for conditions that no longer apply. This is the central tension in Ade McCormack’s work. Most organisations are optimised for industrial-era stability but the environment they now operate in rewards adaptation. McCormack began his career as a software engineer. Trained in astrophysics, with early work at the European Space Agency, his background shaped his ability to think in systems and across disciplines. His trajectory took him eventually to the Financial Times, where he wrote on digital leadership for close to a decade. He has since worked with senior executives at MIT Sloan and at the Moller Institute, University of Cambridge, bringing the same argument into formal leadership education. His Intelligent Organisation framework sets out a model for the shift from process-driven, efficiency-optimised organisations to what he describes as living organisms; adaptive, distributed, and built to sense and respond rather than plan and execute. He draws on evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and anthropology to build this case, developing concepts such as super-resilience, synthetic certainty, and the cognitive gymnasium. These are not rhetorical devices. They map specific structural and cultural moves that organisations can make to function in conditions where certainty is the exception. As founder of The Intelligent Organisation and author of six books, including the E-Skills Manifesto commissioned by the European Commission, McCormack’s work spans individual performance, organisational design, and policy. For executive audiences, the diagnosis he offers is one most are reluctant to reach on their own: that the management model they have inherited is not underperforming, it was simply never built for the era they are operating in. Key speaking topics Adaptive leadership and post-industrial organisation design The Intelligent Organisation model and super-resilience Digital transformation and the limits of technology deployment Future of work and the human-centric organisation Talent, cognitive performance, and the workforce of tomorrow Leadership in conditions of sustained volatility Organisational agility and living-systems thinking Governance in an increasingly volatile world Ideal for C-suite executives and boards leading large-scale transformation programmes in established organisations CHROs and people leaders rethinking workforce design, talent strategy, and culture in the context of accelerating disruption Transformation programme directors and change leads where incumbent operating models are under structural pressure Senior leadership development cohorts at business schools and executive education programmes Audience outcomes A working vocabulary; super-resilience, cognitive athletes, synthetic certainty, to reframe internal conversations about organisational change and leadership capability A concrete framework (the Intelligent Organisation model) for diagnosing the structural gap between a current operating model and one capable of sustained adaptiveness A reorientation of technology investment decisions: from efficiency gains to adaptiveness enablement Clarity on why conventional strategic planning is inadequate under conditions of permanent volatility, and what a more adaptive posture requires in practice An argument, grounded in biology and human performance science, for why putting people, not process, at the centre of organisational design is a competitive necessity, not a cultural preference

Why organisations work with Stéphane J.G. Girod Co-author of Resetting Management (Kogan Page, 2021), shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2022 in Change & Sustainability, with diagnostic tools tested against the agility journeys of LEGO, General Electric, LVMH and ING. Co-edited the Summer 2023 California Management Review special issue on business agility with Julian Birkinshaw of London Business School and Christiane Prange, placing him at the academic centre of how agility is studied and taught. Directs IMD’s Luxury 2050 initiative and the Reinventing Luxury Lab, with named C-suite client work at Richemont, La Prairie, Cartier, PUIG, Mazda and Telenor. His Harvard Business Review article “Restructure or Reconfigure?” (with Samina Karim of Northeastern) gives executives the working distinction that one in three reorganisations get wrong: when to change the underlying structure and when only to recombine units within it. Biography highlights Professor of Strategy and Organizational Innovation at IMD Business School, Lausanne. Co-author, Resetting Management: Thrive with Agility in the Age of Uncertainty (Kogan Page, 2021); shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2022 in Change & Sustainability. Co-editor of the Summer 2023 California Management Review special issue on business agility, with Julian Birkinshaw and Christiane Prange. Forbes columnist on innovation and transformation in luxury industries. Research published in Harvard Business Review, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal and Long Range Planning. DPhil in Strategic Management, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford; MBA, Aalto University; speaks seven languages. Forthcoming with Wiley: Purposeful Luxury, on positive-impact sustainability strategies in luxury industries. Member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Entertainment and Lifestyle Economy, 2025 to 2026. Biography Most large organisations are not built for the speed at which their markets now change. Strategy cycles run on multi-year horizons. Org charts assume stable competitive advantage. Both premises are under sustained strain in consumer goods, banking, retail and luxury. Stéphane Girod has spent his academic career on the diagnostic question this raises: when planning fails, what replaces it? His book Resetting Management, co-authored with Martin Králik and shortlisted for the 2022 Business Book Awards in Change & Sustainability, sets out a framework for business agility tested against case studies of LEGO, General Electric, LVMH and ING. Agility, in his account, lives at three distinct levels: strategic, organisational, and leadership. Most companies confuse one for another. His base is IMD, where he is Professor of Strategy and Organizational Innovation, leads the Luxury 2050 initiative, and directs the Reinventing Luxury Lab. He works directly with executive teams at Richemont, La Prairie, Cartier, PUIG, Mazda and Telenor on strategy and transformation. His sectoral focus on luxury, retail and consumer goods places him close to the industries where the agility question has become most urgent, where consumer behaviour, digital channels and sustainability pressure are now moving faster than strategic planning can absorb. His research has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal and Long Range Planning. With Samina Karim of Northeastern University, his 2017 HBR article “Restructure or Reconfigure?” gave executives a working distinction between two organisational change strategies that produce very different financial results. He co-edited the Summer 2023 California Management Review special issue on business agility with Julian Birkinshaw of London Business School and Christiane Prange. Girod holds a DPhil from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, and speaks seven languages. He writes a Forbes column on innovation and transformation in luxury industries. His forthcoming book with Wiley, Purposeful Luxury, addresses how luxury houses move sustainability from brand narrative into operating substance. Key speaking topics Business agility in established organisations Strategy under uncertainty Organisational design and reconfiguration Digital execution in large companies Innovation and disruption in the luxury sector Sustainability strategy in luxury and consumer goods Leading large-scale transformation Ideal for Executive teams in luxury, consumer goods, retail and banking facing structural disruption Chief strategy officers and transformation leads designing the next planning cycle Boards of luxury and premium brands navigating polarisation, sustainability pressure and shifts in the Chinese market C-suites running a major reorganisation who need to choose between restructuring and reconfiguring Audience outcomes A working distinction between strategic, organisational and leadership agility, with a diagnostic for which one their company needs first A test for whether the next reorganisation should be a restructure or a reconfiguration, and what each implies financially Specific examples of how LEGO, ING, LVMH and General Electric have succeeded and failed at agility, with the lessons that travel across sectors A sector-specific read on how luxury and consumer-goods incumbents are responding to digital channels, sustainability pressure and shifts in the Chinese market

Why organisations work with Jacco van der Kooij He built the operating language that serious SaaS revenue teams already use. Bowtie, SPICED and Revenue Architecture are not proprietary curiosities; they are the common vocabulary at companies like DocuSign, Uber Eats, Adobe and MURAL. His work treats go-to-market as a designed system, not a set of sales tactics. Leadership teams leave with a structural view of acquisition, retention and expansion as one connected revenue engine. He has operating credibility from inside enterprise technology. Senior roles at Kontiki, Qumu and Technicolor sit underneath the frameworks, so the advice is grounded in execution, not theory. He is published where serious readers look. Harvard Business Review (with Frank V. Cespedes of Harvard Business School) and a shelf of best-selling books including Revenue Architecture and Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization. He advises the capital side, not just the operating side. Growth advisory to Notion Capital, Reach Capital, Astella and Storm Ventures gives him a cross-portfolio view of what compounds and what breaks. Biography highlights Founder of Winning by Design, a go-to-market consulting and training firm working with hundreds of recurring-revenue companies worldwide. Creator of the Bowtie customer-journey model, the SPICED qualification framework and the Revenue Architecture operating model. Author of Revenue Architecture (2023) and co-author of Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization and The SaaS Sales Method series. Co-author with Frank V. Cespedes of the Harvard Business Review article “Hiring Star Salespeople Isn’t the Best Way to Grow” (February 2016). Clients and training partners include Uber Eats, DocuSign, Adobe, MURAL, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and OwnBackup. Growth advisor to Notion Capital, Reach Capital, Astella and Storm Ventures. Keynote speaker at Dreamforce, SaaStock Dublin, SaaS Growth London, MarketingProfs and RD Summit Brazil. Biography Recurring revenue rewrote the economics of B2B software, but most companies still run sales, customer success and marketing as separate departments with separate targets. Winning by Design, the firm Jacco van der Kooij founded in 2012, exists to correct that. The core of his work is a set of frameworks that have become standard vocabulary inside serious SaaS revenue teams. The Bowtie extends the funnel into onboarding, adoption and expansion, so leadership can see acquisition and retention as one connected system. SPICED gives every customer-facing function a shared qualification model. Revenue Architecture, the 2023 textbook of over 250 diagrams and blueprints, ties the two into an operating design for recurring-revenue growth. His authority is grounded in operating history before it is grounded in publishing. Senior sales and strategy roles at Kontiki, Qumu and Technicolor sit underneath the frameworks. Harvard Business Review published his co-authored work with Frank V. Cespedes of Harvard Business School on why hiring star salespeople is a weaker growth lever than organisational design, a piece that now reads as the seed of the larger thesis. Today his focus is how compounding growth systems behave under AI. He advises executive teams and venture capital firms, including Notion Capital, Reach Capital, Astella and Storm Ventures, on redesigning go-to-market operating models where probabilistic modelling and AI-enabled workflows replace linear funnel thinking. The training side of the business has equipped revenue teams at Uber Eats, DocuSign, Adobe, MURAL and Hewlett Packard Enterprise with the same operating language. Key speaking topics Revenue Architecture for recurring-revenue businesses The Bowtie customer-journey model SPICED qualification and customer conversations Go-to-market operating design for B2B SaaS AI-enabled go-to-market and probabilistic growth modelling Sales organisation design and scaling Executive growth governance Ideal for CROs, CCOs, VPs of Sales and VPs of Customer Success rebuilding the revenue engine around recurring revenue B2B SaaS founders and executive teams moving from founder-led selling into scaled, systematised go-to-market Venture capital firms and boards overseeing growth-stage portfolio companies Corporate transformation leaders inside enterprise technology businesses shifting to subscription or consumption models Audience outcomes A shared operating language across sales, marketing and customer success that replaces siloed vocabulary. A structural view of the full customer journey through the Bowtie, from acquisition into retention and expansion. A working grasp of SPICED as a qualification and conversation model any customer-facing team can deploy. A clearer read on where AI meaningfully changes go-to-market design and where it is overclaimed. Specific diagnostic questions leadership teams can use to locate the actual bottleneck in their growth system.

Why organisations work with Amit Joshi His work gives leaders a precise diagnosis of the “islands of excellence” problem – why AI generates results in one function but fails to cross organisational boundaries – and a practical application logic for what has to change structurally and strategically for it to scale. His 2025 book The AI-Centered Enterprise introduces the 3Cs framework: Calibrate, Clarify, Channelize, a practical decision architecture for leaders redesigning organizations around context-aware AI, grounded in documented case studies across multiple industries. He publishes in both Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review and has twice won the MSI/H. Paul Root Award for best paper in the Journal of Marketing: a combination that places analytical rigour and commercial applicability in the same conversation. As Co-Director of IMD’s AI Strategy and Agentic Implementation program and Director of its Generative AI for Business Sprint, he works continuously with senior executives from banking, pharma, telecoms, and retail navigating live AI transformations, not retrospective case analysis. Named one of Switzerland’s Digital Shapers in 2020 by a consortium of Swiss media including Bilanz, Handelszeitung, and Le Temps: one of a small group identified as shaping the European digital economy. Biography highlights Professor of AI and Strategy, IMD Business School, Lausanne; joined IMD in 2017 Co-Director, AI Strategy and Agentic Implementation program; Director, Generative AI for Business Sprint and Business Analytics for Leaders program, IMD Author of The AI-Centered Enterprise (2025) and GAIN: Demystifying GenAI for Office and Home (2025) Two-time winner of the MSI/H. Paul Root Award for best paper in the Journal of Marketing (2010 and 2015); Robert D. Buzzell Best Paper Award (2006) Named a Digital Shaper by Bilanz, Handelszeitung, Le Temps, and Digitalswitzerland (2020); voted favourite professor by IMD MBA Class of 2024 Published in Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Journal of Marketing, and Marketing Science; cited in the Financial Times, Bloomberg, NPR, CNN, and Forbes Led panel discussion at the World Economic Forum, Davos (2020) PhD, UCLA Anderson School of Management; PGDM, Indian Institute of Management Calcutta Biography Most senior leaders now have AI running somewhere in their organisation. The harder question – one that Joshi has built a body of work around – is why it rarely runs everywhere. As Professor of AI and Strategy at IMD Business School in Lausanne, Amit Joshi directs the Generative AI for Business Sprint and co-directs the AI Strategy and Agentic Implementation program, working with executives from banking, pharma, retail, and telecoms on both the strategic and application decisions that determine whether AI scales. His work with organizations across banking, pharma, retail, telecoms, and financial services has produced a sharply specific diagnosis of where enterprise AI goes wrong: not in the technology, but in the organization built around it. The concept he returns to is what he calls “islands of excellence”, AI that works in one function, under one champion, without the structural conditions to spread. His 2025 book The AI-Centered Enterprise, co-authored with Ram Bala and Natarajan Balasubramanian, addresses this directly. The book’s 3Cs framework – Calibrate, Clarify, Channelize – gives leaders a practical architecture for moving from point-solution AI to systems that understand organizational context, intent, and workflow. His earlier book GAIN, co-authored with Michael Wade, makes the strategic case that generative AI is a paradigm shift, not an upgrade, and that the organizational response should reflect that distinction. His research on marketing strategy, analytics, and AI applications has been published in the Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science, Harvard Business Review, and MIT Sloan Management Review. He has twice won the MSI/H. Paul Root Award for best paper in the Journal of Marketing and was named one of Switzerland’s Digital Shapers by a consortium of Swiss media in 2020. His analysis is regularly covered in the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Forbes, and NPR, and he led a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Joshi holds a PhD from UCLA Anderson School of Management and a postgraduate management diploma from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. He started his career as a sales manager at Cadbury India: a background that continues to shape an approach to AI strategy grounded in commercial reality rather than technical possibility. Key speaking topics Enterprise AI strategy and scaling Generative AI implementation Context-aware AI and organizational design Data and analytics capability building AI and commercial strategy Digital transformation leadership Building AI-ready organisations Ideal for C-suite leadership teams shaping or accelerating enterprise AI strategy CDOs, CTOs, and Chief Analytics Officers leading AI and data transformations Boards evaluating AI investment priorities and organizational readiness Senior executive education cohorts in banking, pharma, telecoms, retail, and financial services Audience outcomes A named diagnostic framework for identifying where and why AI is stalling in their organization Clarity on the distinction between context-aware AI and point-solution AI, and its strategic implications for investment and organizational design A practical model – the 3Cs: Calibrate, Clarify, Channelize – for moving from AI pilots to scaled enterprise capability A sharper understanding of how data infrastructure, organizational structure, and AI strategy need to be aligned, not sequenced The ability to evaluate AI proposals against a strategic rationale rather than a technology roadmap alone

Why organisations work with Tammy Erickson A trilogy of Harvard Business Review Press books on Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y built on primary research, not commentary, giving leaders a defensible base for talent and engagement decisions. A McKinsey Award-winning HBR article (“It’s Time to Retire Retirement”) that reframed how Fortune 500 employers think about late-career workers, still cited in CHRO conversations. Five appearances on the Thinkers50 ranking, evidence that her ideas have stayed relevant across more than a decade of workforce change. Operating credibility from board seats at PerkinElmer and Allergan, plus client work with General Electric, Bank of America and Novartis, so the workforce arguments land with senior commercial leaders, not just HR. Co-direction of London Business School’s “Leading Businesses into the Future” programme, which keeps her arguments calibrated to current senior-executive challenges rather than past research. Biography highlights Adjunct Professor of Organisational Behaviour, London Business School; co-director of the “Leading Businesses into the Future” programme. Founder and CEO of Tammy Erickson Associates, a workforce and engagement advisory firm. McKinsey Award winner, Harvard Business Review, for “It’s Time to Retire Retirement.” Author of the HBR Press generational trilogy: “Retire Retirement,” “Plugged In,” and “What’s Next, Gen X?” Co-author of “Workforce Crisis” (Harvard Business School Press) and “Third Generation R&D.” Former director of Fortune 500 corporations PerkinElmer and Allergan. Ranked on Thinkers50 five times, including 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017. Biography Most workforce strategies still treat the employee base as one undifferentiated group with a single set of motivations. That worked when one or two cohorts dominated the org chart. It does not work now, with Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z sharing teams and reporting lines, each carrying different assumptions about authority, loyalty and what work is for. Erickson built her career on closing that gap. Her Harvard Business Review article “It’s Time to Retire Retirement” won the McKinsey Award and reframed how large employers thought about late-career talent. The argument was not nostalgic or motivational. It was an operating case for redesigning roles, hours and contracts to retain expertise that the demographics said would otherwise walk out. The HBR Press trilogy that followed, “Retire Retirement,” “Plugged In” and “What’s Next, Gen X?,” gave leaders something most generational commentary lacks: a research base built cohort by cohort, with practical implications for engagement, team design and career architecture. Her companion book “Workforce Crisis,” with Ken Dychtwald and Bob Morison, set the broader demographic context. “Leading Across the Ages” was named a Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea of 2008. That research sits on top of a working role at London Business School, where she co-directs “Leading Businesses into the Future,” and a track record of Fortune 500 board service at PerkinElmer and Allergan. The result is a voice on workforce questions that boards and executive teams take seriously, because it carries both the scholarship and the operating context. Key speaking topics Multi-generational workforce strategy Employee engagement and the changing employer-employee contract Workforce planning and talent shortage Collaboration in complex organisations Innovation in the intelligent economy Twenty-first century organisational design Future of work and changing assumptions about careers Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers redesigning engagement and retention strategy Boards and executive teams setting talent and workforce policy Heads of organisational development and learning leading multi-generational team programmes Leadership development faculty and HR conferences Audience outcomes A clearer read of how each generational cohort actually behaves inside organisations, beyond the stereotypes Specific implications for talent retention, engagement and team design across cohorts A reframed view of late-career workers as a retention and capacity question, not a cost question An organising frame for redesigning roles, hours and contracts to fit a five-generation workforce Vocabulary senior leaders can use in board and executive conversations on workforce strategy

Why organisations work with Maya Townsend She brings organisation network analysis into the room as a working tool, not a slide. Leaders leave knowing which specific people inside their business carry influence that the org chart hides. She has co-edited the OD Network’s Handbook for Strategic HR (AMACOM, 2012), giving her work a peer-reviewed foundation that most change speakers cannot point to. She advises Gartner on change management and organisation network practice, which means her frameworks have been pressure-tested with the analyst body that many of her clients buy research from. She is one of three US-certified Lewis Method of Deep Democracy trainers, so when polarised teams are stuck on a decision she has a specific method for moving them, not a general facilitation style. She works the seam between strategy and adoption. Clients booking her are usually past the point of needing a diagnosis and want someone who can name the next intervention. Biography highlights Founder and lead consultant, Partnering Resources, an organisation development practice focused on networks, collaboration, and change. Co-editor, Handbook for Strategic HR: Best Practices in Organization Development from the OD Network (AMACOM, 2012). Chapter author, “Organization Network Dynamics and Analysis,” in the NTL Handbook of Organization Development and Change. Adviser to Gartner on change management and organisation network practice. Contributor to strategy+business, People + Strategy, Nonprofit Quarterly, CIO, and Inc.com. MS in Organization Development (with distinction), American University / NTL Institute; certified Lewis Method of Deep Democracy trainer, one of three in the United States. Biography Every large organisation has two structures. There is the one on the chart, and there is the network of relationships that actually moves information, decisions, and trust. Townsend’s work starts from the second one. She runs Partnering Resources, the change and organisation development practice she founded, where she uses organisation network analysis to show leaders the brokers, connectors, and quiet experts their formal hierarchy hides. The diagnosis is concrete: specific names, specific gaps, specific places where a transformation is going to fail unless someone intervenes. The intellectual base behind this work is unusually deep for a speaker in her field. She co-edited the OD Network’s Handbook for Strategic HR with AMACOM, contributed the chapter on network dynamics to the NTL Handbook of Organization Development and Change, and writes regularly for strategy+business, People + Strategy, and CIO. Gartner uses her as an adviser on change management and network practice. What that produces in a keynote setting is a practitioner who can move from the science of how organisations actually behave to the next concrete move a leadership team should make on Monday morning. She has presented at Gartner and Inc. 500 or 5000 events, taught networked leadership at Boston University and Northeastern, and is one of three Lewis Method of Deep Democracy trainers certified in the United States, which she draws on when teams are polarised and stuck. Key speaking topics Organisation network analysis Change leadership in complex systems Collaboration across silos and ecosystems Conflict and polarisation in leadership teams Talent and influence mapping Strategy adoption and organisational resilience Ideal for CEOs and transformation leads landing a strategy that depends on cross-functional adoption. Heads of strategy, OD, and change running enterprise change programmes that have stalled at the middle. Senior HR and talent leaders identifying who actually carries influence in a high-potential population. Leadership teams stuck on a polarised decision and looking for a method, not a facilitation pep talk. Audience outcomes A working picture of the informal networks inside their own organisation, and where those networks are blocking or accelerating strategy. Specific moves to identify the brokers and connectors who decide whether a change effort lands. A sharper read on why past change programmes stalled, anchored in network evidence rather than personality. A method for engaging conflict in leadership teams that turns disagreement into a decision rather than a stalemate.

Why organisations work with Lynda Gratton A research base CHROs cannot replicate in-house: the Future of Work Research Consortium has run for over a decade with executives from more than 60 companies, generating comparative evidence on what is actually working in hybrid, skills and workforce design. Co-author of The 100-Year Life with economist Andrew Scott, the book that reframed longevity as a workforce and strategy issue and was shortlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year. Practical playbook for hybrid: her HBR cover piece How to Do Hybrid Right and Redesigning Work give leadership teams a four-lens method (jobs, employee preferences, projects, inclusion) rather than a slogan. Policy-grade credibility: co-chair of the WEF Global Future Council on Work, Wages and Job Creation, and adviser to the Japanese Prime Minister’s council on a 100-year-life society. Thinkers50 Hall of Fame member, which signals to a board that the perspective in the room has been independently judged against a global field over more than a decade. Biography highlights Professor of Management Practice in Organisational Behaviour, London Business School. Founder of HSM Advisory and the Future of Work Research Consortium, working with executives from more than 60 companies. Author and co-author of ten books, including The 100-Year Life (with Andrew Scott), Redesigning Work, The Shift, Glow and Hot Spots. Thinkers50 Hall of Fame inductee; long-running presence in the Thinkers50 ranking since 2011. Co-chair, WEF Global Future Council on Work, Wages and Job Creation; former chair of the WEF Council on Leadership. Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Financial Times and The Times. Biography Most large organisations are running 2025 strategies on a workforce model designed for 2015. Roles, careers and contracts assumed predictable lifespans, fixed locations and a clear line between work and the rest of life. None of those assumptions hold, and the cost of pretending they do shows up in attrition, productivity disputes and stalled transformation programmes. This is the territory Lynda Gratton has worked in for more than two decades from London Business School, where she is Professor of Management Practice in Organisational Behaviour. Through HSM Advisory and the Future of Work Research Consortium she founded in 2009, she has built a continuous comparative dataset on how more than sixty global companies are redesigning jobs, hybrid arrangements and skills, and what separates the redesigns that hold from the ones that quietly revert. Her books anchor the argument. The 100-Year Life, written with economist Andrew Scott, became a bestseller in Japan and was shortlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year, reframing longevity as a strategic issue for governments and employers, not a personal finance question. Redesigning Work translates the same rigour into a four-lens method for hybrid: jobs and tasks, employee preferences, projects and workflows, inclusion and fairness. Her Harvard Business Review cover piece How to Do Hybrid Right and her ongoing MIT Sloan Management Review column put that method into the hands of operators. Boards engage her when they need to move past slogan-level answers on hybrid, skills and longevity. Her co-chairmanship of the WEF Global Future Council on Work, Wages and Job Creation, and her advisory work with the Japanese Prime Minister’s office on a 100-year-life society, are evidence that the same frameworks travel from a single CHRO conversation to national policy. Key speaking topics Future of work and hybrid organisational design Redesigning jobs, careers and skills for longer working lives The 100-year life and longevity as a workforce strategy Workforce transformation in large, complex organisations Hybrid work productivity, fairness and inclusion Leadership in the post-pandemic operating model Talent, retention and the changing employee contract Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers leading hybrid, skills and workforce redesigns. CEOs and executive committees stress-testing their operating model against longer careers and tighter talent markets. Boards and remuneration committees confronting longevity, retention and multi-generational workforce questions. Government, public-sector and policy audiences working on labour market and ageing-society agendas. Audience outcomes A clear method for redesigning hybrid work across jobs, employee preferences, projects and inclusion, drawn from her HBR and MIT Sloan research. A sharper read on what longevity does to careers, learning and talent pipelines, grounded in The 100-Year Life evidence base. Comparative benchmarks from the Future of Work Consortium on what more than sixty global companies are doing on hybrid, skills and workforce design. A board-ready language for distinguishing surface adjustments from genuine workforce redesign. Concrete prompts for the next ninety days of CHRO and ExCo workforce decisions.