Purpose-Driven Leadership

Why organisations work with Scott Deming He ran the agency before he ran the keynote. Deming built Ryan Communications to 70 staff and around USD 30m in revenue, serving clients including Benjamin Moore and The Scotts Company, so his views on brand and customer experience come from operating accountability rather than observation. His thesis in The Brand Who Cried Wolf (Wiley, 2007) is unusually concrete for the category: brand is the cumulative outcome of every customer interaction, and most brands fail because they over-promise in marketing and under-deliver in operations. Powered by Purpose gives leadership teams a working language for connecting individual values to customer-facing behaviour, which is where most culture programmes break down. Client list spans regulated and operationally complex environments: AT&T, Verizon Wireless, General Motors, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Delta Airlines, PwC, U.S. Treasury, McDonald’s of Eastern Europe. Useful when buyers want a speaker who has worked inside their kind of complexity, not adjacent to it. He writes regularly for Entrepreneur on customer experience, leadership and innovation, which keeps the material in active circulation rather than locked to a single book cycle. Biography highlights Author, The Brand Who Cried Wolf: Deliver on Your Company’s Promise and Create Customers for Life (John Wiley & Sons, 2007). Author, Powered by Purpose: Identify Your Values, Discover Your Purpose, and Build Success for Life! Founder of Deming Advertising in 1986, later Ryan Communications Inc.; grew the agency to 70 employees and approximately USD 30m in annual revenue before exit in 2003. Regular contributor to Entrepreneur on customer experience, brand, leadership and innovation. Keynote and training work for AT&T, Verizon Wireless, General Motors, Delta Airlines, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, PricewaterhouseCoopers, U.S. Treasury, Hershey Foods, McDonald’s of Eastern Europe, 3M, Chipotle and Frito-Lay, among others. Founder and former board member, Service Nation / Service Roundtable. Biography Brand promises are written in marketing and broken in operations. The book that captures this most directly is The Brand Who Cried Wolf, published by John Wiley & Sons in 2007. Its argument is that customer loyalty is built or destroyed in the routine interactions that no advertising campaign can paper over. That argument has a particular weight because the author spent seventeen years running the kind of agency that produces those campaigns. Scott Deming founded Deming Advertising in 1986 and rebuilt it as Ryan Communications Inc., growing the agency to around 70 staff and USD 30m in revenue before exiting in 2003. Clients included Benjamin Moore and The Scotts Company. The view of brand as an operating outcome, not a creative output, was formed inside that business. His second book, Powered by Purpose, extends the thesis inward. Customer experience is downstream of culture, and culture is downstream of whether individual employees understand their own values and how those values show up in the work. The book is the basis for his leadership keynote, which leaders use as the language for connecting purpose to customer-facing behaviour. The platform work spans large, operationally complex organisations: AT&T, Verizon Wireless, General Motors, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Delta Airlines, PricewaterhouseCoopers, U.S. Treasury, McDonald’s of Eastern Europe and others. He writes regularly for Entrepreneur on customer experience, brand, leadership and innovation, and he was a founding board member of Service Nation / Service Roundtable, the network for service-business owners in the trades. Key speaking topics Customer experience and brand loyalty Brand strategy and brand promise Purpose-driven leadership and culture Employee engagement and customer-facing behaviour Sales and customer service performance Innovation in customer-led organisations Ideal for CMOs, CXOs and brand leaders looking to close the gap between marketing promise and customer reality. CEOs and operating leaders accountable for culture as a commercial lever, not an HR slogan. Heads of customer service, sales and retail operations in regulated or franchised environments. Franchise networks, dealer groups and service-business associations where the brand is delivered by independently operated front lines. Audience outcomes A clearer test for whether your brand promise survives contact with your actual customer journey. A working model for connecting employee purpose and values to customer-facing decisions. Practical changes to customer service routines, from frontline scripts to escalation policy, that compound into loyalty. Confidence that culture work has a measurable commercial return, not just a wellbeing one. A shared internal language for talking about brand as an operational discipline rather than a creative one.

Why organisations work with Tom Barton He has the rare combination of operator and supply chain reformer. Honest Burgers is a 39-site casual dining brand that buys whole carcasses directly from regenerative farms, a structural decision most restaurant groups have not been willing to make. His sustainability content carries weight because it is paid for. Honest absorbed the cost of switching to regenerative British beef rather than passing it to customers, a commercial decision a buyer can interrogate, not a marketing claim. He speaks credibly on building a brand from a market stall to a national footprint, with named milestones: the Brixton opening, the Cateys 2021 Restaurateur of the Year (Group) award, and the 2026 National Burger Awards win for “The Honest”. He is a useful voice for boards weighing ESG commitments against margin: the Honest Farming programme is a working example of procurement volume being directed at climate-smart agriculture, not a pledge. Biography highlights Co-founder, Honest Burgers, opened first site in Brixton Market in 2011 Honest Burgers now operates 39+ UK restaurants across London, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Brighton, Manchester, Liverpool and Reading Cateys 2021 Restaurateur of the Year (Group), with Phillip Eeles and Dorian Waite Created “The Honest”, named UK’s Best Burger at the National Burger Awards 2026 Built the first regeneratively farmed British beef supply chain in UK restaurants, in partnership with the Grass Roots Farming Cooperative Founder of the Honest Farming programme, supporting six regenerative farming families through premium pricing and whole-carcass procurement Biography A small marquee with a griddle and fryer at festivals in 2010 became one of the UK’s most respected casual dining brands. Tom Barton and Phillip Eeles ran outdoor catering for a year before raising investment with restaurant operator Dorian Waite and opening a first site in Brixton Market in 2011. The interesting story is what happened after the brand worked. Honest Burgers grew to 39 sites without selling to a private equity roll-up and without losing its product position. The Cateys 2021 award for Restaurateur of the Year (Group) recognised that scale, particularly through the pandemic. In 2026, “The Honest”, a recipe Barton created, was named UK’s Best Burger at the National Burger Awards. The more substantive contribution is a supply-chain one. Honest Burgers became the first UK restaurant group to build a regeneratively farmed British beef supply chain, buying whole carcasses directly from a small group of farming families through the Grass Roots Farming Cooperative. The company absorbed the cost rather than passing it to customers, on the argument that volume procurement is the lever climate-smart agriculture actually responds to. That is the practical content of what Barton brings to a senior audience. Casual dining is a low-margin, high-velocity category. Doing the harder thing on sourcing inside it, at scale, and paying for it out of margin, is a credible operating example for any board that has signed an ESG commitment and is now looking at the bill. Key speaking topics Brand building from start-up to national scale Regenerative agriculture in commercial supply chains Sustainability as an operating decision, not a marketing position Founder leadership through rapid growth Hospitality, food culture and consumer brand Procurement and whole-carcass sourcing Company culture under expansion Ideal for Founders and operating teams scaling consumer brands beyond their first ten sites or stores Boards and CEOs reviewing ESG commitments where supply chain is the largest source of emissions Procurement, sourcing and category leaders in food, retail and hospitality Investor and accelerator audiences interested in entrepreneurship in regulated, low-margin categories Audience outcomes A working example of a regenerative supply chain inside a competitive high-street category, with the commercial trade-offs named A first-hand account of how brand discipline is maintained as a hospitality business moves from one site to forty A clearer sense of where sustainability claims become operating substance, and where they remain marketing Specific decisions about pricing, procurement and farm partnerships that other operators can pressure-test against their own model

Why organisations work with Christie Watson Two decades on hospital wards, including paediatric intensive care and resuscitation roles at Great Ormond Street, St Mary’s Paddington, and Guy’s and St Thomas’, give her a direct authority on care under pressure that consultants and academics cannot replicate. The Language of Kindness reached number one in the Sunday Times list and stayed in the top ten for five months, evidence that her articulation of care work resonates well beyond a clinical audience. A Costa First Novel Award winner and a UEA professor, she translates the texture of frontline experience into language that lands with senior, sceptical audiences. She offers a serious counterweight to wellness-industry framing: a vocabulary for compassion, moral injury, and staff burnout that is grounded in lived practice, not vendor messaging. Biography highlights Author of eight books across fiction and memoir, including Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, The Language of Kindness, The Courage to Care, and Moral Injuries. Costa First Novel Award winner for Tiny Sunbirds Far Away (2011). Sunday Times number one bestseller for The Language of Kindness, with translations in 23 languages. Professor at the University of East Anglia, holding appointments associated with creative writing and medical and health humanities. Honorary Doctor of Letters, University of East Anglia. Patron of the Royal College of Nursing Foundation; contributor to The Times, Sunday Times, Guardian, Telegraph, and TEDx. Biography The hardest work in any organisation is usually the work that involves caring for other people, and it is also the work most likely to be reduced to a slogan. Christie Watson spent twenty years inside that reality as a nurse, in paediatric intensive care and as a resuscitation officer at Great Ormond Street, St Mary’s Paddington, and Guy’s and St Thomas’. Her writing started inside that experience and has stayed there. The Language of Kindness drew on those two decades and reached number one on the Sunday Times list, where it stayed in the top ten for five months. It has been translated into 23 languages and adapted for theatre. Her debut novel, Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, won the Costa First Novel Award in 2011. Later books, including The Courage to Care and the novel Moral Injuries, continue to sit at the meeting point of medicine, ethics, and ordinary human life. She is a professor at the University of East Anglia, where she completed her own MA in creative writing and was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters in 2018. She is a patron of the RCN Foundation and a contributor to The Times, Sunday Times, Guardian, Telegraph, and TEDx. Her standing inside nursing and outside it is unusual and gives her a hearing in rooms that rarely listen to the same voice. For senior audiences, she offers something specific. A way of talking about compassion, moral injury, and staff wellbeing that does not rely on borrowed corporate framing, and a sense of what care actually costs the people who provide it. Key speaking topics Compassion and care in high-pressure organisations Moral injury and burnout in frontline workforces Storytelling as a tool for organisational understanding Mental health and wellbeing beyond the wellness industry The lived reality of healthcare and caring professions Kindness as an institutional discipline Ideal for CHROs, chief people officers, and wellbeing leads in organisations with frontline or caring workforces Healthcare boards, NHS leadership, and clinical executive teams Conferences on workplace mental health, employee experience, and the future of work in human-intensive sectors Universities, professional bodies, and membership organisations addressing the future of caring professions Audience outcomes A more honest vocabulary for compassion, moral injury, and burnout, grounded in twenty years of frontline practice A sharper sense of why standard wellbeing programmes underperform with fatigued workforces An authentic, first-person account that senior audiences remember and quote afterwards A reframing of care as a serious institutional practice, not a soft attribute

Why organisations work with Kailash Satyarthi He is the only living Nobel Peace Laureate whose work targets the exact intersection of supply chain, child labour, and corporate accountability that ESG committees now have to defend. He built GoodWeave, the first voluntary certification system that traced child labour out of the South Asian carpet industry, giving him operational experience of what works and what fails when companies try to clean a supplier base. His 1998 Global March seeded ILO Convention 182, the most ratified convention in the organisation’s history, which means he can speak to the policy frame that regulators and procurement teams now have to align with. Bachpan Bachao Andolan, the movement he founded in 1980, has freed more than 130,000 children in India, giving his arguments the weight of measurable on-the-ground results rather than advocacy alone. He raises the moral altitude of a leadership conversation in a way few speakers can, which is why boards bring him in when they want a corporate purpose programme to feel earned rather than performative. Biography highlights 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, awarded jointly with Malala Yousafzai for the struggle against the suppression of children and the right of every child to education. Founder of Bachpan Bachao Andolan (1980), credited with freeing more than 130,000 children in India from bonded labour, child labour, and trafficking. Founder of GoodWeave International (1994), the first independent certification system for child-labour-free carpets in South Asia. Architect of the 1998 Global March Against Child Labour across 103 countries, whose demands directly shaped ILO Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour. UN Sustainable Development Goals Advocate; recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award (1995) and the Defenders of Democracy Award (2009). Author of Every Child Matters and Will for Children (Prabhat Prakashan); co-author with the Dalai Lama of The Book of Compassion. Biography In 1980, an electrical engineer in India walked away from his profession to free children locked inside brick kilns, carpet looms, and quarries. The organisation he founded that year, Bachpan Bachao Andolan, has since liberated more than 130,000 children from bonded labour, child labour, and trafficking. Kailash Satyarthi has spent forty-five years turning that work into a system. The system has three layers that matter to corporate audiences. The first is rescue and rehabilitation, run through a network of activists and shelters in India. The second is certification: in 1994 he founded GoodWeave, which built the first credible voluntary label proving that a carpet was made without child labour, an early prototype for the supply chain audit regimes that are now standard in apparel, cocoa, and electronics. The third is policy. The Global March he led in 1998 covered 103 countries and 80,000 kilometres, and its demands fed directly into ILO Convention 182, now the most ratified convention in ILO history. The 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, shared with Malala Yousafzai, gave his argument a global platform. He uses it to press a single point at boards and policy bodies: child labour is not a problem of poor countries, it is a problem of global procurement, and any company with a multi-tier supplier base owns part of it. That framing is uncomfortable for executives who treat human rights as a CSR line item, which is exactly why it lands. His books, Every Child Matters and Will for Children with Prabhat Prakashan, and The Book of Compassion co-authored with the Dalai Lama, sit alongside his role as a UN Sustainable Development Goals Advocate. The through-line is consistent: moral authority backed by operational evidence, applied to the supply chains and policy systems that decide whether a child works or goes to school. Key speaking topics Child labour in global supply chains Ethical sourcing and supplier certification Human rights and corporate accountability Education as an economic and rights agenda ESG, purpose, and moral leadership Civil society movements and policy change Ideal for Boards and ESG committees defining human-rights and supply-chain commitments Chief procurement officers and CSR leaders auditing supplier networks Investor groups and policy bodies setting standards on labour and human rights Purpose, values, and culture programmes for global organisations Audience outcomes A clearer view of where child labour actually lives inside multi-tier supplier networks, and what credible mitigation looks like. A working understanding of the certification, audit, and policy levers that have moved the needle, and where they have not. A direct account of how ILO Convention 182 came to exist, and what it now requires of buyers and regulators. The moral and strategic case for treating human rights as a board-level commitment rather than a reporting category.

Why organisations work with Adam Braun He is a working CEO, not a retired one. Clarasight’s carbon planning software is in active commercial deployment with clients representing over $1 trillion in market capitalisation, so his content reflects current operating reality. He has built three organisations across three categories: a nonprofit started with $25 that grew to hundreds of schools globally, a venture-backed education startup acquired by WeWork, and a B2B sustainability platform. The pattern recognition across founder modes is rare. His “Build For Where The World Is Headed” framework gives leaders a teachable structure for anticipating change and committing capital before consensus forms, rather than another model for reacting after the fact. His Pencils of Promise origin story translates cleanly into a corporate room. Audiences leave with a specific argument about how individual conviction scales into institutional outcomes, evidenced by a real organisation, not an analogy. He pairs commercial credibility with a published, bestselling book on purpose-driven leadership, which means leadership development and culture briefs can be served by the same speaker without a register switch. Biography highlights CEO and Co-Founder of Clarasight, carbon planning and intelligence software, formerly Climate Club Founder and Chairman of Pencils of Promise, a nonprofit started with $25 that has built schools across Ghana, Guatemala, Laos and Nicaragua Co-Founder and CEO of MissionU, acquired by WeWork in 2018; subsequently served as a senior executive in the WeGrow business New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Promise of a Pencil, Simon & Schuster Selected by the World Economic Forum as one of the original ten Global Shapers; named to Business Insider 40 Under 40 and Wired’s “50 People Who Are Changing the World” Brown University graduate; began his career at Bain & Company Biography The hard part of strategy is not seeing change. It is committing capital and people before the change is obvious to competitors. Most operating cultures are built to do the opposite. Adam Braun has spent his career sitting in that gap as a founder. Pencils of Promise began with $25 and grew into a nonprofit operating schools across Ghana, Guatemala, Laos and Nicaragua. MissionU, the income-share-agreement college alternative he co-founded, was acquired by WeWork in 2018, where he then served as a senior executive in the WeGrow business. Clarasight, his current company, sells carbon planning software into enterprise clients representing more than $1 trillion in market value. That arc gives him an unusual operating vocabulary. He has launched a category from zero capital, raised venture funding and exited through acquisition, and is now running a B2B SaaS business in a buyer-relevant category. The framework he teaches, “Build For Where The World Is Headed,” is the synthesis of those three founder modes into a structure leaders can use to evaluate where to deploy effort before the market rewards it. His book The Promise of a Pencil, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller published by Simon & Schuster, gives the same argument a leadership-development register. He was an original World Economic Forum Global Shaper, has been named to Business Insider 40 Under 40 and Wired’s “50 People Who Are Changing the World,” and built his early career at Bain & Company after graduating from Brown. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and founder leadership Building organisations for future operating conditions Innovation under uncertainty Corporate sustainability as commercial advantage Purpose-driven business strategy Social entrepreneurship and scaled impact Ideal for Founders, CEOs and executive committees setting growth or transformation agendas Heads of strategy, innovation and sustainability shaping medium-term capital decisions Leadership development programmes for high-potential operators and emerging executives Conferences focused on entrepreneurship, scale-up leadership, or corporate climate strategy Audience outcomes A working framework for committing to direction before market consensus forms A founder’s view of how scaled impact actually compounds, drawn from three different ventures A practical read on where corporate sustainability becomes commercial advantage rather than reporting overhead A renewed argument for individual agency inside large organisations, evidenced rather than asserted

Meet Jade Simmons Named one of the Best Keynote Speakers of 2019, 2020, and 2021, Jade Simmons is a creator of transformational experience designed to activate audiences into becoming the biggest, boldest version of themselves possible. The world-class concert artist has been called a “musical force of nature” with an “uncanny ability to connect with the sounds of today.” Jade is the CEO of Jade Media Global, a revolutionary live experience and global content distribution company specializing in 360° personal development and strategic transformation. Following an artistic epiphany, she pivoted from playing the piano to impress audiences, to using music as the vehicle by which to provide the inspiration, entertainment, and transformation that profoundly moves them instead. Nicknamed “Classical Music’s #1 Maverick,” her electrifying, genre-bending concert adventures span Rachmaninoff all the way to rap and include virtuoso storytelling, uncommon insights, and boundless inspiration. Today, Jade’s experiences not only delight concert audiences, but her dazzling, high-impact presentations are fast becoming the go-to fuel for the world’s superlative brands and organizations from financial services, biotech, entertainment, education, energy and beyond. The likes of Dell, Raytheon, NBC Universal, Pfizer, Intuit Quickbooks, Nationwide, Hershey’s, and the Royal Bank of Canada are bringing Jade in to power up their people. In her inimitable career as a concert pianist, Jade has remained committed to expanding the boundaries of Classical music. Simmons has toured the US extensively in recital and with orchestra highlighted by performances at venues as wide-ranging as Ravinia, the Chicago Sinfonietta in Symphony Hall, New York’s Town Hall, Detroit Institute of Arts, and the halls of the White House. She has been named one of the Best of South By Southwest and has also received the Sphinx Organization’s Medal of Excellence in a concert held at the US Supreme Court.

Why organisations work with Andre Agassi He has a documented, named comeback, world No. 141 in 1997 to world No. 1 in 1999, which gives leadership audiences a specific case study in rebuilding after public failure rather than a generic resilience message. He is one of nine men in history to complete a career Grand Slam, a credential that carries instant authority with sales, sports, and executive audiences without requiring any further framing. His second act is operational, not ceremonial. The Turner-Agassi Charter School Facilities Fund has developed more than 120 school buildings, which gives him genuine standing on scaling mission-led ventures, not just philanthropy as biography. Open, his memoir written with J.R. Moehringer, is a No. 1 New York Times bestseller treated seriously by literary critics, which signals the reflective honesty leadership audiences expect from a keynote on reinvention. He is one of very few speakers who can hold a corporate leadership room, a sales conference, and an education forum with equal credibility, because each credential is independently verifiable. Biography highlights Eight Grand Slam singles titles across the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and US Open, and a career Grand Slam completed in 1999. Olympic gold medal at the 1996 Atlanta Games, and member of three winning United States Davis Cup teams. 60 ATP singles titles, 101 weeks at world No. 1, and year-end No. 1 in 1999. Inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2011. Founder of the Andre Agassi Foundation for Education, which has raised over $180 million, and the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy in West Las Vegas. Co-founder with Bobby Turner of the Turner-Agassi Charter School Facilities Fund, a real estate vehicle that has financed more than 120 charter school facilities. Author of Open: An Autobiography, a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. Biography In 1997, the player who had won Wimbledon five years earlier was ranked No. 141 in the world. Two years later he won the French Open, completed the career Grand Slam, and finished the season as world No. 1. That arc is the reason serious leadership audiences listen to Andre Agassi. The eight Grand Slam titles, the 1996 Olympic gold, the 101 weeks at No. 1, and the 2011 induction into the International Tennis Hall of Fame are the headline credentials. What makes them useful in a boardroom is the honesty about what the comeback cost. Open, written with Pulitzer Prize winner J.R. Moehringer and a No. 1 New York Times bestseller, is the public record of that reckoning, treated by reviewers as a serious memoir rather than a sports book. His operating work has held up to the same scrutiny. The Andre Agassi Foundation for Education, founded in 1994, has raised over $180 million and anchors the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy in West Las Vegas. With investor Bobby Turner, he built the Turner-Agassi Charter School Facilities Fund, a real estate platform that has developed more than 120 charter school buildings serving tens of thousands of students. He is also a board member and investor in Square Panda, an early-literacy education technology company. For a senior audience, the value is the combination. Elite performance credentialed at the highest level, a comeback story that is specific rather than mythologised, and a post-career record built through institutional vehicles that other operators take seriously. A leader preparing for a period of pressure, transition, or public reinvention gets a case study, not a speech. Key speaking topics Performance under sustained public pressure Reinvention after a public setback Leadership through career transition Legacy and second-act ventures Scaling mission-led organisations Education reform and philanthropy at institutional scale Ideal for Senior leadership offsites and CEO forums working through a public reinvention or strategic reset Sales kickoffs and top-performer conferences where the brief is sustained performance under scrutiny Board and philanthropy events focused on legacy, second-act ventures, and mission-driven capital Education sector gatherings on charter school scaling, early literacy, and philanthropic models Audience outcomes A specific, named case study of rebuilding elite performance after public failure, drawn from the 1997 to 1999 comeback. A clear view of what separates a mythologised comeback story from a real operational reset, and what leaders can borrow from each. A working model for how a high-profile career transitions into institutional operating work, using the Agassi Foundation and Turner-Agassi fund as reference points. Renewed clarity on how personal authenticity, honestly examined in Open, functions as a leadership asset rather than a liability.

Why organisations work with Kian Bakhtiari Direct primary-source insight from a live community of 2,000+ Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha contributors across 50+ markets, rather than the lagged trend reports most boards are working from. A published, practitioner argument on purpose-led marketing through Kogan Page’s “Marketing for Social Change”, giving commercial teams a framework for purpose that survives the backlash cycle. Strategic credibility across two registers: the agency boardroom (former Head of Strategy at Dentsu Aegis Network) and the multilateral institution (WEF Agenda Contributor, UNFCCC advisor). Operating experience with consumer-facing brands that have to convert Gen-Z, including Adidas, Unilever, Diesel, L’Oreal, Danone, Innocent Drinks, Pentland Brands and Speedo. A Financial Times Top 50 Future Leaders listing, which gives a buyer external validation that the perspective is taken seriously by the business press. Biography highlights Founder of The People, a Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha cultural intelligence consultancy with contributors across 50+ markets. Author of “Marketing for Social Change: How to Turn Purpose Into Business and Social Impact”, Kogan Page (2024). Named in the Financial Times “Top 50 Future Leaders” for contributions to marketing. Agenda Contributor to the World Economic Forum; Advisor to UN Climate Change (UNFCCC). Forbes contributor on Gen-Z, brand and consumer culture; featured in Campaign, The Drum, Vogue Business and Rolling Stone. Former Head of Strategy at Dentsu Aegis Network; TEDx Brighton speaker on imagination and innovation. Biography Marketing teams have been trying to “reach Gen-Z” with the tools of the previous cycle: panels, focus groups, agency trend decks. The cohort itself has moved on, and most of the commercial signals reaching the boardroom are already a generation late. Kian Bakhtiari built The People to close that gap, running a live network of Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha contributors across 50+ markets that feeds primary cultural intelligence directly into client work. His background is unusually balanced for the field. Former Head of Strategy at Dentsu Aegis Network, he understands what the commercial brief looks like inside a holding company. As Agenda Contributor to the World Economic Forum and Advisor to UN Climate Change, he sees how the same generational questions land in policy and multilateral settings. The Financial Times named him in its Top 50 Future Leaders for marketing, an external read on where his work sits in the discipline. His book, “Marketing for Social Change” (Kogan Page, 2024), is the practitioner argument behind the consultancy. It sets out how brands can embed purpose into the operating substance of the business rather than the campaign layer, and how to avoid the backlash that hits when the two diverge. Clients he has worked with on this terrain include Unilever, L’Oreal, Diesel, Adidas, Danone, Innocent Drinks, Pentland Brands, Speedo and the BBC. What he gives a senior team is a route into a consumer base they cannot read with their existing tools, and a defensible position on purpose that holds up when scrutinised. That sits at the centre of how commercial strategy is now being rewritten for younger consumers and workers. Key speaking topics Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha consumer behaviour Purpose-led marketing and brand activism Cultural intelligence and foresight Marketing for social change The future workforce and generational diversity Brand communities and the creator economy Innovation, imagination and creativity Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and consumer insight leads recalibrating their approach to Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha audiences Chief Strategy Officers and growth leads in consumer-facing categories where younger cohorts decide the next decade of revenue Boards and executive committees stress-testing purpose, ESG and brand positioning against a more sceptical, more political consumer base CHROs and culture leads working on multigenerational workforces where Gen-Z is reshaping engagement and retention Audience outcomes A sharper picture of what Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha actually want from brands, employers and institutions, drawn from a live primary-source network rather than syndicated research. A practical test for whether a brand’s purpose can survive contact with the operating business, and where it most often breaks. A view of the commercial cost of getting generational signals wrong, and the categories where that cost is already showing up. Specific examples of brands that have moved purpose from campaign to product, and what made the difference.

Why organisations work with Pau Gasol Two NBA championships, three Olympic medals and a FIBA World Cup title give him a working definition of high performance grounded in repeated wins across cultures, coaches and rosters, not a single peak. He speaks credibly about the operating reality of elite teams: ego management next to a generational star (Kobe Bryant), role clarity, and the unglamorous habits that hold a group together across an 82-game season. A Basketball Hall of Fame induction in 2023 and a retired Lakers jersey place him among the small group of athletes whose authority on team and leadership is taken seriously inside a boardroom, not only on a stage. His work outside sport (Gasol Foundation on childhood obesity, IOC Athletes’ Commission, Gasol16 Ventures) shows a leader who has built institutions, not only played in them. The J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award is the NBA’s formal recognition of that. He presents fluently in English and Spanish, with direct experience of US, European and global organisations, which suits international leadership audiences without translation overhead. Biography highlights Two NBA Championships with the Los Angeles Lakers (2009, 2010); six-time NBA All-Star; four-time All-NBA selection. 2002 NBA Rookie of the Year, the first non-American player to win the award. Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, Class of 2023; jersey No. 16 retired by the Los Angeles Lakers. FIBA World Cup champion and MVP 2006; three EuroBasket golds with Spain (2009, 2011, 2015); two-time EuroBasket MVP. Three Olympic medals with Spain: silver in 2008 and 2012, bronze in 2016. President and co-founder of the Gasol Foundation; UNICEF Global Champion for Nutrition and Zero Childhood Obesity; member of the IOC Athletes’ Commission; 2012 NBA J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award. Biography Two NBA Championships, three Olympic medals and a FIBA World Cup title are not won by the same individual playing in different teams. They are won by leaders who help different groups behave the same way under pressure. Pau Gasol spent two decades inside the highest-stakes team environments in professional sport, with Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles, alongside his brother Marc on the Spanish national team, and across rosters in Memphis, Chicago, San Antonio and Milwaukee. The interest for senior leaders is not the trophy count. It is what it took to sit beside a generational star like Bryant and still deliver, year after year, in the locker room as much as on the court. Role clarity, ego management, honest conversations between named individuals, and a standard that did not move with the score. Gasol’s account of that period is one of the more credible insider readings of elite team performance available from any speaker in the market. His record off the court is unusually substantive for an athlete. He co-founded the Gasol Foundation in 2013 with Marc Gasol, working on childhood obesity and child wellbeing in Spain and the United States. He serves as UNICEF’s Global Champion for Nutrition and Zero Childhood Obesity, sits on the International Olympic Committee Athletes’ Commission, and runs Gasol16 Ventures, an investment platform in sport, health and wellness. The NBA recognised the community work with the 2012 J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award. Inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2023, with his number retired by the Los Angeles Lakers the same year, Gasol now speaks to leadership audiences in English and Spanish on what it actually takes to build a team that wins more than once. Key speaking topics Leadership and team performance under sustained pressure Building trust and role clarity inside elite teams Resilience and self-leadership through injury, transition and setback Sport as a model for organisational culture and standards Purpose-driven leadership and life after a professional career Child health and the leadership case for long-term social investment Ideal for Senior leadership offsites and CEO conferences focused on team performance and culture Sales kick-offs and annual conferences seeking a credible voice on resilience and standards Sports, health and consumer-brand audiences engaging with athlete leadership International audiences requiring delivery in English or Spanish Audience outcomes A working picture of what elite team performance looks like behind the result, told by someone inside it A direct view of how leaders manage ego, role and trust around a dominant individual Specific reference points for resilience and decision-making through injury, transition and public scrutiny A leadership case for long-term investment in people and purpose beyond the immediate quarter

Why organisations work with Andy Milligan Seven books across Kogan Page and Financial Times imprints, including Bold (CMI Management Book of the Year, e-book category, 2012) and On Purpose with Shaun Smith, give him a documented track record on brand-led growth that consultants without published evidence cannot match. He works the full chain from purpose to promise to operational delivery, which is rare. Most advisors stop at strategy or stop at touchpoint design. He has spent thirty years on the connection between them. Client work spans Nissan, McLaren, Barclays, Unilever, FIFA, IHG, Roche and WWF across Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the USA and Europe. The breadth of categories and geographies means his examples land with audiences in heavily regulated, consumer, and B2B sectors equally. His starting position is that brand lives in employee behaviour before it lives in customer perception. For leaders trying to align a fatigued workforce behind a customer promise, that is the more useful framing. Biography highlights Founding partner of The Caffeine Partnership, the UK brand and growth consultancy he co-founded in 2006. Began his career at Interbrand in London; ran the firm’s Singapore office and later led its Internal Brand Management practice. Co-author of On Purpose (Kogan Page, 2015) and Bold: How to be Brave in Business and Win with Shaun Smith. Bold won the CMI Management Book of the Year award in the e-book category in 2012. Co-author of Myths of Branding with Simon Bailey (Kogan Page, 2017; second edition 2022). Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; media commentator for BBC, Sky and CNN on brand issues. Biography Brand is an operating discipline, not a marketing one. That has been the thesis of Andy Milligan’s work since his time at Interbrand in the 1990s, where he ran the Singapore office and later led the firm’s Internal Brand Management practice. The argument is now unfashionable enough to be useful again: customers do not experience strategy decks, they experience employees, products and service moments. In 2006 he co-founded The Caffeine Partnership, a brand and growth consultancy that has advised Nissan, McLaren, Barclays, Unilever, FIFA, IHG, Roche, WWF and Thai Airways across Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the USA and Europe. The work moves between purpose definition, customer experience design and employee engagement, treated as one connected problem rather than three departmental ones. The same argument runs through seven books. Uncommon Practice and See, Feel, Think, Do with Shaun Smith examined the link between corporate culture and brand experience. Bold: How to be Brave in Business and Win won the CMI Management Book of the Year in the e-book category in 2012. On Purpose (Kogan Page, 2015) set out a practical framework for translating purpose into a branded customer experience. Myths of Branding with Simon Bailey, now in its second edition with Kogan Page, dismantles the assumption that brand work is a logo problem. Milligan is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and comments regularly for BBC, Sky and CNN. The reason senior teams bring him into commercial growth conversations is straightforward: he has spent thirty years arguing that organisations get the customers their employees deserve, and he can show them where the gap is. Key speaking topics Brand-led business growth Customer experience strategy Employee engagement and brand Purpose and commercial strategy Brand culture and organisational alignment Marketing and brand myths Ideal for CMOs, CCOs and brand directors aligning marketing with operational delivery CHROs and CPOs connecting employee engagement to customer outcomes CEOs and boards repositioning a business around a sharper purpose Customer experience and transformation leads moving from strategy to execution Audience outcomes A clearer view of where brand promise and customer experience are diverging in their own organisation A working definition of purpose that can be tested against employee and customer behaviour, not slogan Named case examples across consumer, financial services, automotive and sport that translate to the audience’s category A short list of brand myths their leadership team is probably still operating under

Why organisations work with Ben Keene Twenty years of founding and running purpose-led ventures, from a crowdfunded Fijian island community to a climate startup platform, gives him a practitioner’s view of what actually holds communities together under pressure. A repeatable community-building method, the “5 R’s”, field-tested inside Rebel Book Club across 10 cities and 5,000 members, and translated for corporate audiences. Author of “Tribe Wanted” (Ebury Press, 2008), the book behind the BBC2 series, which gives his community thesis a public, documented origin story that most speakers in this space do not have. Equally comfortable hosting, facilitating, and running workshops, which means the same brief can be delivered as a keynote, a leadership offsite session, or a multi-day internal accelerator. Active founder work in climate and AI through Raaise and Good with AI, so his material on sustainability communication and responsible AI comes from current operating experience, not commentary. Biography highlights Founder, Tribewanted (2006-2016); built a crowdfunded sustainable-tourism community on Vorovoro, Fiji, later extended to Sierra Leone and Umbria. Author, “Tribe Wanted: My Adventure on Paradise or Bust”, Ebury Press, 2008. Subject of a five-part BBC2 series on the Fiji project, broadcast winter 2008. Co-founder, Rebel Book Club, a paid non-fiction reading community operating across 10 cities. Former lead of The Escape School at Escape the City; business advisor and mentor at Virgin StartUp. Founder of Raaise (climate startup fundraising platform) and Good with AI (AI education cohorts). Biography Building a physical community on a remote Fijian island with strangers recruited online is not a business-school case study. It is what Ben Keene did in 2006 when he co-founded Tribewanted, and the project ran for a decade across Fiji, Sierra Leone, and Umbria. It produced a BBC2 series, a book with Ebury Press, and several million dollars of investment into the regions it touched. The interesting part, for organisations, is what he took from it. Communities with paying members do not behave like audiences or customers. They need rhythm, roles, and a reason to return. Keene has spent the years since codifying how that works, most visibly in Rebel Book Club, the non-fiction reading community he co-founded in 2015 and grew to around 5,000 members in 10 cities. He applies the same lens to the commercial problems leaders actually bring him: why sustainability messaging lands with colleagues but not customers, why purpose programmes fade after the launch moment, why AI adoption stalls when it is framed as a tool rather than a practice. His current work through Raaise and Good with AI keeps him inside those problems as a founder, not a commentator. The through-line is specific. He is a founder who has repeatedly built communities that people pay to belong to, and he has turned the method into something organisations can use. Key speaking topics Community building inside organisations Purpose-driven business and impact entrepreneurship Sustainability communication and consumer behaviour Responsible AI and practical adoption Employee engagement through shared rituals and rhythm Founder lessons from climate and impact ventures Ideal for CHROs and internal communications leads designing engagement, belonging, or community programmes. Sustainability and ESG leads who need to translate strategy into language that customers and employees act on. Founders, innovation teams, and corporate venture units looking for a practitioner view of how purpose-led businesses scale. Learning and development leads building cohort-based programmes on AI, climate, or entrepreneurial mindset. Audience outcomes A clear method for building an internal or customer community, drawn from the “5 R’s” framework he has tested at scale. Honest distinctions between communities, audiences, and networks, and what each actually requires from the organisation. Concrete examples of where sustainability messaging fails with consumers and what reframing it around customer value looks like. A founder’s view of responsible AI adoption inside teams, grounded in his current cohort work rather than abstract policy. Renewed conviction that purpose and commercial outcomes reinforce each other when the community layer is built deliberately.

Rahul Kapoor’s Background Over the last two decades, through hundreds of talks, he has ignited and transformed the mindsets of lakhs of individuals, hundreds of teams and large scale organizations including Fortune 500 companies across India, Canada, Malaysia, Singapore, UAE and the United States. Through a unique combination of psychology, science and spirituality, Rahul Kapoor uses insights to draw out the potential in each individual. He helps them understand how to unlock and ignite their abilities in order to live a life charged with purpose and positivity, thus creating better workplaces, better relationships and better homes. Every participant at his talks has come away feeling transformed, and has shown tremendous improvements in their health, relationships and rise in productivity. Credentials: Executives flock to his workshops from companies like Accenture, Biocon, Cisco, Dell, Google, Hewlett Packard, HDFC Ergo, Microsoft, Philips, Samsung, Volvo and countless more. They seek guidance and mentoring in the areas of purpose, relationships, performance, and leadership. He is a guest faculty at IIM Bangalore since 2009 where he conducts the ‘Bond and Learn’ sessions for Executive General Management Program (EGMP), Entrepreneurs & Family Businesses and Armed Forces Program He has authored two books: Workwise – Lessons in Excellence for Young Professionals which was published by The Times Group Books and Dad & I – Inspiring Stories for Teens. Both the books have had a tremendous impact on the readers. A regular contributor to The Times of India – Education Times, Dainik Bhaskar and Feelings Magazine, his perspectives on peak performance are widely sought after in various media channels. Awards and Achievements He had the privilege and honour of working with Hon. President of India Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam and launched Ignite India Initiate program to inspire the youth in India. He was the official Host for Royal Challengers Bangalore Cricket Team in Indian Premier League – DLF IPL Seasons 3, 4 and 5 during which time he worked and interacted with leading international cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar, Virat Kholi, MS Dhoni, Shane Warne, Chris Gayle among others. Rahul has been conferred with the prestigious Outstanding Young Persons of India Award, 2010 in the category of Personal Improvement and Acomplishment by Junior Chamber International and Young Achievers Award 2016 in the category of Social Entrepreneurship at Young India Conclave. His work has been extensively covered across the media, including The Times of India, The New Indian Express, Deccan Herald, The Week, The Hindu, Rajasthan Patrika among others. Why Rahul? WELL RESEARCHED & TAILOR MADE CONTENT Each program is designed and customized for maximum results SESSIONS ARE CONDUCTED IN ENGLISH & HINDI Powerful messages are delivered using simple languages to create a bias for action RAHUL CREATES ENERGY AND PASSION Every session is incorporated with examples, exercises, live sharing and soul stirring music to keep the attendees engaged throughout EVERYONE IS INSPIRED TO TAKE ACTION Every talk has a strong call for action that leads into noticeable change and improvement