Scenario Planning & Strategic Foresight

Why organisations work with Oleg Konovalov He has codified vision as a working leadership skill in The Vision Code (Wiley, 2021), drawing on primary interviews with senior visionary leaders rather than abstracted theory. He was named #1 Global Leading Coach at the Marshall Goldsmith Thinkers50 Awards, a credible signal of standing among working executive coaches. His Visionary Leadership Framework gives boards and executive committees a shared vocabulary for diagnosing where a vision is failing, before it shows up in numbers. He works on the C-suite side of the desk: the brief is usually about getting senior teams aligned and credible to their own organisations, not motivational set pieces. His earlier books on organisational anatomy and corporate culture mean he can connect a vision conversation to the structural and cultural conditions that allow it to land. Biography highlights Doctoral degree, Durham University Business School. Author of The Vision Code (Wiley, 2021), with foreword by Marshall Goldsmith. Author of LEADEROLOGY, Corporate Superpower, Organisational Anatomy, Hidden Russia, and The Fisherman’s Path to Leadership. Named #1 Global Leading Coach, Marshall Goldsmith Thinkers50 Awards. Shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Distinguished Award in Leadership, 2021. Listed in Global Gurus Top 30 in Leadership; Forbes contributor. Biography Most corporate visions do not survive contact with the operating year. They sit on a wall, get quoted in townhalls, and quietly disconnect from the decisions executives actually make. Oleg Konovalov’s work begins from that disconnect, and treats vision as a measurable leadership skill rather than a communications artefact. The Vision Code, published by Wiley in 2021 with a foreword by Marshall Goldsmith, set out his Visionary Leadership Framework. The book is built on primary interviews with senior leaders across industries, including Garry Ridge of WD-40 and the branding strategist Martin Lindstrom, and it argues that vision can be diagnosed, taught, and executed with the same rigour as any other senior capability. His earlier books, including LEADEROLOGY, Organisational Anatomy, and Corporate Superpower, sit alongside that work and connect the vision conversation to organisational design and culture. He holds a doctorate from Durham University Business School and writes regularly for Forbes. The recognition reflects working credibility with senior leaders rather than a media profile alone. He was named #1 Global Leading Coach at the Marshall Goldsmith Thinkers50 Awards, shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Distinguished Award in Leadership, and listed in the Global Gurus Top 30 in Leadership. Key speaking topics Visionary leadership Vision execution and strategy alignment Corporate culture in the digital era Leadership in disruption Organisational diagnosis Executive coaching and C-suite development Ideal for CEOs and executive committees setting or resetting strategic direction Board chairs and non-executive directors assessing senior leadership capability CHROs and chief learning officers designing senior leadership development Founders and scale-up leaders translating ambition into an operating vision Audience outcomes A working definition of vision that can be tested against the organisation’s current direction A diagnostic for where a stated vision is failing inside the leadership team A clearer view of how culture, structure, and vision interact in execution Practical questions senior leaders can take into their next strategy or board conversation

Why organisations work with Nouriel Roubini His 2006 address to the International Monetary Fund, which outlined the specific structural conditions (overleveraged housing markets, fragile credit instruments, unsustainable household debt) that caused the 2008 financial crisis before they were widely recognised, gives his risk scenarios a credibility that peer analysis rarely carries. The MegaThreats framework, the argument that ten overlapping structural forces, including sovereign debt, geopolitical rivalry, AI-driven labour displacement, and climate stress, reinforce one another, equips leadership teams to analyse compound risk rather than managing individual threats in isolation. As both an academic and an active strategist at Hudson Bay Capital and Atlas Capital Team, he connects macro-risk analysis to live capital allocation decisions, not retrospective commentary. His public-sector career spans the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the U.S. Treasury Department under Timothy Geithner, giving him a direct, lived understanding of how policymakers reason under pressure, and where their responses typically fall short. His forecasting runs in both directions. The economist who warned the IMF in 2006 has since argued, against consensus, that a technology-led productivity surge will sustain US growth towards 4% by the end of the decade, a case made in the Financial Times and Bloomberg. Boards get a weighed reading of upside and downside scenarios. Biography highlights Professor Emeritus of Economics and International Business, NYU Stern School of Business; previously on faculty at Yale University Author of MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, And How to Survive Them (Little, Brown, 2022) and Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance (Penguin Press, 2010) 2006 address to the International Monetary Fund accurately identified the structural vulnerabilities that precipitated the 2008 global financial crisis Ranked #4 on Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers” (2009); named among Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World (2009); multiple further appearances on Foreign Policy’s annual list Senior Economist for International Affairs, White House Council of Economic Advisers (1998–1999); Senior Adviser to the Undersecretary for International Affairs and Director of the Office of Policy Development and Review, U.S. Treasury Department (1999–2000) Chairman and CEO of Roubini Macro Associates; Senior Economic Strategist at Hudson Bay Capital; Chief Economist and Portfolio Manager, Atlas Capital Team Monthly columnist for Project Syndicate; profiled by the Financial Times, New York Times Magazine, and Bloomberg; PhD in Economics, Harvard University; BA, Bocconi University Biography Nouriel Roubini’s most consequential professional moment came at a 2006 address to the International Monetary Fund, where he outlined the structural conditions (overleveraged housing markets, fragile credit instruments, unsustainable household debt) that would produce the 2008 global financial crisis. The IMF’s own economists were, by contemporaneous accounts, sceptical. Within two years, the scenario had materialised almost exactly as described. That track record is the foundation of his authority. Roubini is a Professor Emeritus at NYU’s Stern School of Business and Chairman and CEO of Roubini Macro Associates, with a career spanning the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the U.S. Treasury Department under Timothy Geithner, and advisory roles at the IMF, the World Bank, and the Federal Reserve. His academic foundation rests on a PhD in Economics from Harvard and more than 70 published papers on sovereign debt, financial crises, and international capital flows. His 2022 book, MegaThreats (Little, Brown), advances a named framework for compound systemic risk. The thesis is precise: ten structural forces, sovereign debt at historic highs, geopolitical fragmentation, demographic pressure, AI-driven labour displacement, and climate stress among them, are not independent variables but mutually reinforcing ones. For organisations still using single-factor risk frameworks, the argument is a direct challenge to how they model exposure. Alongside his academic and research work, Roubini serves as Senior Economic Strategist at Hudson Bay Capital and as Chief Economist and Portfolio Manager at Atlas Capital Team, roles that keep his analysis connected to live capital allocation decisions. The crisis-prediction reputation understates the range of his judgment: he has recently argued in the Financial Times that a technology-led productivity boom will sustain US exceptionalism despite tariffs and fiscal strain. He is a monthly contributor to Project Syndicate and has been ranked #4 on Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.” Key speaking topics Global macroeconomic outlook and downside risk scenarios Sovereign debt, fiscal dominance, and currency risk Geopolitical fragmentation and its economic consequences US-China strategic rivalry and the restructuring of global trade Financial crises: structural causes, policy responses, and systemic aftermath Inflation, monetary policy, and central bank independence AI, automation, and structural shifts in labour markets Compound systemic risk: the MegaThreats framework Ideal for Boards and executive leadership teams stress-testing strategy against macro-economic disruption CFOs, CROs, and treasury functions making capital allocation and risk management decisions in volatile conditions Investment and financial services leadership, asset managers, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, requiring rigorous macro-risk briefings Government, public policy, and multilateral forums addressing fiscal strategy, monetary policy, and geopolitical-economic interdependence Audience outcomes A structured understanding of how macro forces, debt, geopolitics, monetary policy, interact and compound rather than operating in isolation Specific frameworks, drawn from the MegaThreats thesis, for anticipating systemic stress before it becomes visible in headline economic indicators Clarity on the geopolitical dynamics, particularly US-China rivalry, fiscal dominance risk, and the conditions for de-dollarisation, most likely to affect long-range strategic planning A more calibrated reading of central bank and government policy responses, and the structural conditions under which those responses typically fail or arrive too late Practical language and conceptual tools for articulating compound systemic risk to boards, investors, and regulators, beyond standard scenario planning conventions

Why organisations work with Nik Gowing A research base built from hundreds of confidential interviews with corporate, political and military leaders, distilled in the book Thinking the Unthinkable, which gives boards a vocabulary for the failures of imagination they recognise but rarely name. Forty years of front-line international reporting, from martial law in Poland to 9/11, that lets him press senior audiences on geopolitical and operational risk without flinching or flattering. A moderator’s authority earned at BBC World News and across hundreds of senior international forums, used to host board offsites, ministerial roundtables and CEO summits where the conversation has to go somewhere uncomfortable. Standing inside the institutions buyers trust: Distinguished Fellow at RUSI, Visiting Professor at Kings College London, former council member at Chatham House and ODI. A track record of making leaders engage with what they have been avoiding, rather than rehearsing the slide they came to deliver. Biography highlights Main news presenter, BBC World News, 1996 to 2014. Diplomatic Editor, Channel 4 News, 1989 to 1996; bureau chief in Rome and Warsaw with ITN. BAFTA, 1981, for coverage of martial law in Poland. Co-author, Thinking the Unthinkable: A new imperative for leadership in the digital age (John Catt, 2018), and founder of the Thinking the Unthinkable project. Author, Skyful of Lies and Black Swans, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford. Visiting Professor, Kings College London; Distinguished Fellow, Royal United Services Institute; Honorary Doctorates from the universities of Exeter and Bristol. Biography The leaders Nik Gowing has spent four decades interviewing, in studios, at summits and behind closed doors, share a pattern. They saw the signal. They had the data. They did not act. Thinking the Unthinkable, the project he founded in 2014 and the book he co-authored with Chris Langdon in 2018, is built on hundreds of confidential conversations with senior figures in business, government and the military about why that keeps happening, and what could change it. The credibility for that conversation comes from the years before. Gowing was a main news presenter on BBC World News from 1996 to 2014, on air for the announcement of Princess Diana’s death and through the live coverage of 9/11. Before the BBC he spent 18 years at ITN, as bureau chief in Rome and Warsaw and as Diplomatic Editor of Channel 4 News. A BAFTA followed his coverage of martial law in Poland in 1981. That broadcast career left him with a particular skill that boards now buy: the ability to chair a difficult conversation in front of senior people, on the record, without losing control of the room or the argument. He moderates regularly for institutions including the World Economic Forum, RUSI and Chatham House. The academic and institutional scaffolding is genuine, not decorative. He is a Visiting Professor at Kings College London’s School of Social Science and Public Policy, a Distinguished Fellow at RUSI, and a former council member at Chatham House and the Overseas Development Institute. The Reuters Institute at Oxford published his earlier study, Skyful of Lies and Black Swans, on institutional vulnerability in the modern information environment. Few moderators bring that depth into the room with them. Key speaking topics Leadership under disruption Anticipating the unthinkable in board strategy Geopolitical risk and the rules-based order Crisis communication and decision-making under pressure Institutional resilience in the digital information environment Senior conference moderation and panel chairing Ideal for Boards, CEOs and executive committees confronting strategic shocks they suspect they are under-rehearsing. Risk, strategy and corporate affairs leaders working on scenario planning, geopolitical exposure and institutional resilience. Convenors of senior international forums, ministerial roundtables and CEO summits who need a moderator who can hold the room. Audience outcomes A direct account of why senior teams systematically miss disruptive signals, drawn from confidential interviews with leaders who lived through it. A sharper read on geopolitical and information-environment risks, from someone who has reported them at first hand. The questions a board should be asking itself before the next unthinkable lands, not after. A working sense of what conformity costs at the top of organisations, and what it takes to break it.

Why organisations work with Nick Bostrom He authored Superintelligence, the text credited with bringing AI existential risk into mainstream policy, technology and boardroom discussion. The vocabulary leaders are now using to debate frontier AI traces back to this work. He led the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford for nineteen years, a research programme whose alumni now staff AI safety teams at the major frontier labs and policy units in Washington, London and Brussels. His simulation argument and work on anthropic reasoning have made him one of the few philosophers whose primary papers are read inside technical AI research, not just adjacent to it. Deep Utopia, his 2024 follow-up, addresses the strategic question most leadership teams have not yet started on: what an organisation is for in a world where AI systems can perform almost any cognitive task better than humans. He treats AI governance as a question about the shape of the future, not a compliance exercise, which is the register most senior leaders need but rarely get from technical or regulatory briefings. Biography highlights Founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, 2005 to 2024. Founder and Principal Researcher, Macrostrategy Research Initiative. Author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, New York Times bestseller, Oxford University Press. Author of Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World, Ideapress, 2024. Twice named on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers. Recipient of the Eugene R. Gannon Award; ranked on Prospect magazine’s World Thinkers list as the highest-placed analytic philosopher. Biography Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies arrived in 2014 with a thesis few mainstream readers were ready for: that advanced AI systems would, on plausible development paths, present a control problem of civilisational importance. A decade later the book sits on the desks of frontier lab leadership, AI policy officials and the boards of companies whose products now depend on the technology it described. The work came out of the Future of Humanity Institute, which Bostrom founded at Oxford in 2005 and led until its closure in 2024. FHI built the early academic infrastructure for what is now a global field, training researchers who now sit inside OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind and the UK AI Safety Institute. His earlier paper on the simulation argument, published in The Philosophical Quarterly in 2003, became one of the few philosophical works to be taken seriously by technical AI researchers and physicists. His 2024 book, Deep Utopia, turns the lens around. The question is no longer whether humanity survives advanced AI, but what people and organisations do in a world where machines can perform almost any cognitive task. For executives whose strategic plans assume scarce human cognitive labour as their basic input, this is the next problem to think about, and very few credible voices have started. Bostrom is now Founder and Principal Researcher of the Macrostrategy Research Initiative, continuing the long-range work on technology, governance and the human future that began at Oxford. Foreign Policy has twice named him among its Top 100 Global Thinkers; Prospect ranked him as the highest-placed analytic philosopher on its World Thinkers list. Key speaking topics Frontier AI and existential risk AI governance and alignment under uncertainty Long-range technology strategy The simulation argument and the limits of knowledge Post-AGI economics and the meaning problem Anthropic reasoning and decision-making under deep uncertainty The future of human enhancement Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting AI strategy and risk posture for the next decade Heads of state, regulators and policy units shaping national AI governance Frontier technology leadership and corporate venture teams Investor and asset-allocator audiences thinking about exposure to AI-driven structural change Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for talking about AI risk, capability and alignment with the same precision used inside frontier labs A clearer view of which AI governance questions are tractable now and which require long-range thinking A grounded sense of how to plan for a post-instrumental economy where human cognitive labour is no longer the scarce input Recognition of how anthropic reasoning and scenario thinking apply to corporate decisions under deep uncertainty Familiarity with the arguments shaping how regulators, AI labs and national security communities are now framing frontier AI

Why organisations work with Misha Glenny He treats cybersecurity as a geopolitical and criminal-economy problem, not an IT one, which is the framing senior boards now need. McMafia and DarkMarket are built on direct fieldwork with traffickers, money launderers and hackers. The case material is his own, not borrowed from analyst desks. As former Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and incoming host of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, he brings institutional weight that few commercial speakers in this category carry. He can move between a finance board on sanctions exposure, a security committee on ransomware, and a leadership audience on Russia, China and the fracturing global order, without changing voice. Biography highlights Former BBC Central Europe Correspondent. Reported the 1989 revolutions and the Yugoslav wars. Rector, Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna, May 2022 to March 2026. Incoming presenter of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, succeeding Melvyn Bragg from January 2026. Author of McMafia, DarkMarket, The Balkans 1804 to 2012 and Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio. Executive producer of the BBC One and AMC drama series McMafia. Sony Radio Academy Award for outstanding contribution to broadcasting. BT Information Security Journalist of the Year. Visiting Professor at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, teaching Crime in Transition. Biography International organised crime is no longer a vice problem on the edge of the economy. It is woven into legitimate supply chains, banking flows and the cyber infrastructure that companies depend on. The argument that organised crime could account for a significant share of global GDP, first set out in McMafia in 2008, has aged into a description that finance, security and policy audiences now treat as a working assumption. Misha Glenny built that argument on direct reporting. As the BBC’s Central Europe Correspondent through the 1989 revolutions and the Yugoslav wars, he reported the collapse of the old order from inside it. McMafia and the follow-up book DarkMarket took the same method into the criminal economy itself, with sustained fieldwork among traffickers, money launderers and the hackers running early carding forums. The BBC One and AMC drama series of McMafia, which he executive produced, gave the analysis a second life with a much wider audience. The institutional record matches the reporting. Glenny served as Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna from 2022 to 2026, one of central Europe’s serious advanced research institutions, and held a visiting professorship at Columbia’s Harriman Institute teaching crime in transition. In December 2025 the BBC announced him as the next host of In Our Time, succeeding Melvyn Bragg. For a leadership audience, the combination is unusual. Few speakers can talk about Russian power, Balkan history, Chinese strategy, ransomware economics and sanctions exposure as a single connected system. Glenny can, because he has spent thirty years reporting it as one. Key speaking topics Geopolitics and global disorder Cybersecurity as a board and national risk Global organised crime and illicit finance Russia, the Balkans and post-Soviet power Cryptocurrency, dark markets and the criminal internet Critical minerals and the new resource competition China, the United States and the contested world order Ideal for Boards and executive committees confronting sanctions, cyber and geopolitical exposure together CISOs, CROs and general counsel framing cyber and crime risk to the wider business Financial services, energy and industrial leadership teams exposed to sanctions, illicit flows and supply chain risk Policy, defence and intelligence audiences working at the seam of geopolitics and organised crime Audience outcomes A working model of how organised crime, cybercrime and state power now operate as one system A clearer view of where their own sector sits inside that system, from finance to energy to technology Specific case material from McMafia and DarkMarket that translates to live risk conversations Sharper questions to put to their security, legal and strategy functions on geopolitical exposure

Why organisations work with Mike Walsh He works on the leadership and operating-model question that AI keynotes usually skip: who decides, with what data, supported by which machine systems, and what that means for org design. His thesis is published, not improvised. The Algorithmic Leader (Page Two, 2019) sets out ten principles for leading in the algorithmic age and has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Polish and Russian. His next book, Abundant Intelligence, is being published by Harvard Business Review Press with Deloitte’s Global Head of AI Nitin Mittal, giving boards a current reference point on hybrid human and machine workforces. He brings in-the-room exposure to Fortune 500 reinvention programmes through Tomorrow, with named advisory work across the BBC, HSBC, Philips, Fujifilm, Richemont and Televisa. He writes for the audience he speaks to. As a regular Harvard Business Review columnist, his arguments are pressure-tested with the same readers buying him. Biography highlights CEO of Tomorrow, a global consultancy on designing companies for the 21st century. Author of The Algorithmic Leader (Page Two, 2019), translated into six languages. Forthcoming book Abundant Intelligence with Harvard Business Review Press, co-authored with Deloitte’s Global Head of AI, Nitin Mittal. Regular Harvard Business Review columnist; bylines in Inc., BusinessWeek, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal. Host of the Between Worlds podcast and the YouTube series The Future is Elsewhere. Founder of Jupiter Research in Asia Pacific and former senior strategy executive at News Corporation in the region. Biography Boards now buy AI tools faster than they redesign the organisations using them. The Algorithmic Leader, published by Page Two in 2019, was an early attempt to put that mismatch into a framework senior leaders could use, with ten principles for working in an environment where machine systems share the decision load. The book has since been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Polish and Russian. The work sits inside a longer career arc. Tomorrow, the consultancy Walsh founded in Hong Kong, advises CEOs and executive teams of multinationals including the BBC, HSBC, Philips, Fujifilm, Richemont and Televisa on reinvention in the algorithmic age. Earlier roles include founding Jupiter Research in Asia Pacific, an early tracker of e-commerce and digital business adoption, and senior strategy positions at News Corporation in the region. Publishing has been the spine of the practice. Futuretainment, published by Phaidon in 2009, won an Art Directors Club design award in New York. The Dictionary of Dangerous Ideas followed in 2014. As a regular Harvard Business Review columnist, with bylines in Inc., BusinessWeek, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, Walsh writes for the same audience he advises and speaks to. The forthcoming work is where the operating-model question gets sharper. Abundant Intelligence, due from Harvard Business Review Press, is co-authored with Nitin Mittal, Deloitte’s Global Head of AI, and examines how organisations orchestrate hybrid human-and-machine workforces. The thread across the books, the consultancy and the keynotes is consistent: the leadership question, not the technology question, is the one boards keep underestimating. Key speaking topics Algorithmic leadership and decision-making AI agents and digital labour Designing organisations for the 21st century Disruptive innovation and new business models Digital ethics in machine-led decisions The future of work in an AI-driven economy Strategic foresight for senior leaders Ideal for Boards and executive committees setting AI strategy beyond pilots CEOs, COOs and Chief Strategy Officers redesigning operating models Chief AI Officers, Chief Digital Officers and transformation leads Leadership and learning programmes preparing senior cohorts for AI-era decision-making Audience outcomes A clearer language for the leadership question inside AI investment, not just the technology question A framework, drawn from The Algorithmic Leader, for ten shifts in how senior teams decide and operate Named cases of how multinationals are restructuring around hybrid human-and-machine work A sharper view of which executive habits, hiring patterns and decision rights age badly in an AI-driven business A working definition of digital labour and what it changes for org design, talent and accountability

Why organisations work with Michio Kaku An active research physicist and co-founder of string field theory, not a commentator translating other people’s science. The substance underneath the foresight is his own. A read on AI, quantum computing and biotechnology that is grounded in physical constraints, useful for boards trying to test the credibility of internal technology roadmaps. A track record of corporate keynotes for Microsoft, Cisco, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, Sony, GE, Siemens and SAP, meaning he has briefed senior leadership in sectors with very different technology assumptions. The Henry Semat Chair at CCNY and four New York Times bestsellers give him a level of public authority that travels across investor days, leadership offsites and customer events. Biography highlights Henry Semat Chair in Theoretical Physics, City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center. Co-founder of string field theory; PhD, UC Berkeley; AB, Harvard, summa cum laude. Author of four New York Times bestsellers including The God Equation and The Future of the Mind. Most recent book: Quantum Supremacy (2023). Host of Science Fantastic, a nationally syndicated US science radio show; presenter of science series for BBC and Discovery Channel. Contributor to Time, Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Wired, New Scientist and the New York Times. Keynote speaker for Microsoft, HP, Cisco, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, Sony, GE, Siemens, SAP, L’Oreal, Walt Disney and Barclays, among others. Biography Most corporate strategy processes work in three to five year horizons. The technologies most likely to reshape those strategies, including quantum computing, advanced AI, brain-machine interfaces and fusion energy, will mature on much longer timelines and from physical principles most boards never have cause to revisit. Michio Kaku is one of the few public scientists with the standing to brief senior leadership on that gap. He holds the Henry Semat Chair in Theoretical Physics at City College of New York, where he has taught for over four decades, and he is a co-founder of string field theory, a working contribution to the search for a unified description of the fundamental forces. Alongside his research, Kaku has built a parallel public role. Four of his books, Physics of the Impossible, Physics of the Future, The Future of the Mind and The God Equation, have been New York Times bestsellers, and his most recent, Quantum Supremacy, sets out what quantum computing will and will not do for medicine, materials and AI. He hosts Science Fantastic, a nationally syndicated US science radio programme, and has presented science series for the BBC and Discovery Channel. For corporate audiences he has keynoted for Microsoft, Cisco, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, Sony, GE, Siemens and SAP, among others. The reason buyers keep returning to him is straightforward: they want a physicist’s read on which long-horizon technologies are real, on what timeline, and at what cost. Key speaking topics Quantum computing and its commercial implications Artificial intelligence in medicine, finance and pandemic response The next two decades of technology and the economy The physics of long-horizon innovation Brain-machine interfaces and the future of the mind The search for a unified theory and what it means for computing Science communication for senior audiences Ideal for Boards and executive committees making long-horizon technology and capital allocation decisions CEO and CTO leadership offsites focused on AI, quantum and biotechnology roadmaps Investor days, customer events and flagship conferences in technology, financial services, industrials and pharma Strategy and innovation teams testing internal assumptions against external scientific reality Audience outcomes A clearer view of which emerging technologies are bounded by physics and which are bounded by engineering effort A working sense of what quantum computing will and will not change in finance, materials and drug discovery A read on AI’s near-term and long-horizon trajectory from a physicist rather than a vendor Reference points for stress-testing internal technology and innovation roadmaps A vocabulary for senior leaders to discuss long-range science with their own technical teams

Why organisations work with Michael Raynor He has built a quantitative case, across more than 25,000 companies and forty-five years of data, for what actually separates exceptional performers from the rest. Boards get an evidence base, not an opinion. His Strategy Paradox framework gives leadership teams a way to commit hard to a chosen direction while building real options against the futures that strategy could not foresee. He is one of the few strategy thinkers to have co-authored disruption theory’s primary sequel with Clayton Christensen and to have stress-tested it experimentally with Intel’s new venture group and MBA cohorts. The work is field-validated, not theoretical. Two decades of Deloitte client work in telecoms, pharma, medical devices, energy and media means the frameworks land in operational language, not academic abstraction. Biography highlights Author of The Strategy Paradox, named one of BusinessWeek’s 10 Best Business Books of 2007 and a strategy+business top-five strategy pick. Co-author with Clayton M. Christensen of The Innovator’s Solution, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. Co-author with Mumtaz Ahmed of The Three Rules: How Exceptional Companies Think, based on a five-year study of more than 25,000 US-listed companies. Sole author of The Innovator’s Manifesto: Deliberate Disruption for Transformational Growth, applying disruption theory to controlled experiments at Intel and across MBA programmes including Harvard. Doctorate from Harvard Business School, recognised with the Dively Award for research excellence; MBA with distinction from Ivey Business School. Associate Professor (Strategy) at Ivey Business School; long-tenured Deloitte advisor, including fifteen years as a Managing Director. Biography Most strategy is built on forecasts that turn out to be wrong. The interesting question is not whether forecasts will fail, but what a leadership team should do about that fact when it has to commit capital, talent and reputation to a single direction. This is the territory Michael Raynor has worked for over three decades, in research, in the boardroom and in print. Raynor’s first major contribution was The Strategy Paradox, which argued that the same commitments that produce extraordinary success also produce catastrophic failure, and that managing strategic risk requires building real options into the corporate structure itself. The book was named one of BusinessWeek’s 10 Best Business Books of 2007 and a strategy+business top-five strategy pick. With Clayton Christensen he co-authored The Innovator’s Solution, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller and the principal sequel to The Innovator’s Dilemma. The work that followed put the frameworks under empirical pressure. The Innovator’s Manifesto reported controlled experiments at Intel’s New Business Initiatives group and replications with 300+ MBA students at Harvard and elsewhere, showing measurable improvement in predictive accuracy when disruption theory was applied as a decision rule. The Three Rules, written with Mumtaz Ahmed, analysed more than 25,000 US-listed companies from 1966 to 2010 and identified 344 exceptional performers, distilling their behaviour to two priorities: better before cheaper, revenue before cost. This is what brings Raynor into board conversations. He arrives with a doctorate from Harvard Business School (Dively Award for research excellence), an MBA with distinction from Ivey, more than two decades of Deloitte client work across pharma, telecoms, medical devices, energy and media, and a current Associate Professorship in Strategy at Ivey. The frameworks are tested, the language is direct, and the argument is consistently the same: serious organisations need a defensible answer to the question of how they will commit, and to what. Key speaking topics Corporate strategy under uncertainty Strategic commitment and real options Disruptive innovation and growth Drivers of sustained superior corporate performance Innovation portfolio decisions Strategy execution at the board level Ideal for Boards and CEOs setting multi-year strategic direction in industries where forecasts are unreliable Chief Strategy Officers and corporate development leaders sizing innovation portfolios and capital commitments Executive leadership teams in pharma, telecoms, energy, medical devices and media wrestling with disruption risk Audience outcomes A direct argument for why strategic commitment is the source of risk, not its solution, and what that implies for the next planning cycle. The Better-before-Cheaper, Revenue-before-Cost decision rule as a working benchmark for everyday operating choices. A structured way to separate strategic uncertainty from operational uncertainty, and to push each to the right level of the organisation. An empirically grounded view of what 344 exceptional companies did differently over four decades, and how to test their behaviour against the audience’s own.

Why organisations work with Michael G Jacobides He is the academic most directly associated with ecosystem strategy as a formal discipline. His Strategic Management Journal paper “Towards a Theory of Ecosystems” is one of the most-read articles the journal has published, and is the reference point others build on. He gives leadership teams a working language for a question they keep asking badly. Are we an orchestrator, a complementor, or a component, and what does each role earn under AI. His policy work gives the room a regulatory lens most strategy speakers cannot offer. He served as Chief Expert Advisor on the Digital Economy to the Hellenic Competition Commission and contributes to the World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance. He has been ranked on the Thinkers50 list of the world’s top 50 management thinkers in four consecutive cycles since 2019, which is the credential boards recognise without needing to be briefed. His advisory base, BCG Henderson Institute and Evolution Ltd, keeps the content tested against live corporate decisions rather than against the conference circuit. Biography highlights Sir Donald Gordon Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation and Professor of Strategy, London Business School. Thinkers50 ranked management thinker in 2019, 2021, 2023 and 2025; Strategy Award shortlist, 2019. Co-Editor, Industrial and Corporate Change. Author of “Towards a Theory of Ecosystems” (Strategic Management Journal) and “How to Compete When Industries Digitize and Collide” (California Management Review, article-of-the-year). Academic Advisor to the BCG Henderson Institute; Lead Advisor of Evolution Ltd; contributor to the World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance. Former Chief Expert Advisor on the Digital Economy, Hellenic Competition Commission. Visiting Scholar, Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Financial Times and Forbes; commentator for BBC and CNN. Biography The boundary between industries is no longer the boundary between competitors. A bank now competes with a phone, a car company with a software platform, a retailer with an ad network. Jacobides has spent two decades building the academic framework that explains this, and turning it into language strategy teams can use. His paper “Towards a Theory of Ecosystems” in the Strategic Management Journal is the reference point most other ecosystem writing now builds on. The follow-up in California Management Review, on competing as industries digitise and collide, won the journal’s article-of-the-year and is widely used inside corporate strategy functions. The work is academic in origin and operational in use. That dual register is the reason boards book him. He holds the Sir Donald Gordon Chair at London Business School, co-edits Industrial and Corporate Change, and has been ranked on the Thinkers50 list of the world’s top management thinkers across four cycles. He also advises the BCG Henderson Institute, leads the advisory boutique Evolution Ltd, and contributes to the World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance. His former role as Chief Expert Advisor on the Digital Economy to the Hellenic Competition Commission means he reads platform and AI regulation as a participant, not a spectator. What a senior buyer gets in the room is a strategist who can take an executive team from “AI is reshaping our industry” to a specific decision about where in the new value architecture the firm should sit, what it should orchestrate, what it should cede, and what regulators will let it own. Key speaking topics Ecosystem strategy and value migration Generative AI and competitive advantage Digital platforms and industry convergence Orchestrator, complementor and component positioning AI governance and competition policy Business model reinvention under digital disruption Boardroom strategy in technology-driven industries Ideal for Boards and group executive committees redrawing strategy as AI and platforms reshape their industry Chief Strategy Officers, Chief Digital Officers and Heads of Corporate Development assessing ecosystem positioning Banking, telecommunications, FMCG, healthcare and industrial leadership teams facing convergence pressure Private equity and investor audiences pricing platform exposure and ecosystem risk Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for ecosystem roles: orchestrator, complementor, component, and what each earns A clearer view of where AI shifts value inside the audience’s specific industry, not in general A framework for testing current strategy against the way industry boundaries are actually moving Sharper questions for the next board strategy session on platform exposure and regulatory risk A read on how competition policy and AI governance will constrain the playing field

Why organisations work with Sir Michael Arthur He has sat on both sides of the table that boards now worry about: thirty-eight years inside the British Foreign Office at the most senior level, then eight years inside Boeing as a vice president and council member. He led the Maastricht Treaty negotiating team and the EU Single Market legislation team. When he speaks about how European policy is actually made, he is describing rooms he was in. As President of Boeing International he was the first non-American on the Executive Council, with operational responsibility for Boeing in 65 countries. That is rare ground for a former diplomat to occupy. His four years as High Commissioner in New Delhi give boards a Europe specialist who is also fluent on India, at a moment when very few people credibly cover both. He speaks German and French and held the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. On Berlin, he is read inside Berlin. Biography highlights British Ambassador to Germany, 2007 to 2010. British High Commissioner to India, 2003 to 2007. Director General for Europe and Economic Affairs, Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Led the Maastricht Treaty negotiating team and the EU Single Market legislation team. Senior Vice President of Boeing and President of Boeing International, 2019 to 2023; first non-American member of the Boeing Executive Council. Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG); recipient of the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Board of Directors, Stimson Center; Non-Executive Director of a Tata Consultancy Services UK subsidiary; co-founder of The Ambassador Partnership LLP. Biography Most boards are now exposed to political decisions they cannot price. Tariffs, sanctions, industrial policy, export controls, the next German coalition, the next Indian budget. The standard inputs (bank research, consultant briefings, the FT) tell you what happened. They rarely tell you what the people who made the decision were trying to achieve, and what they will do next. Sir Michael Arthur has spent his career on the inside of those rooms. As British Ambassador to Germany from 2007 to 2010 and High Commissioner to India from 2003 to 2007, he ran two of the UK’s most consequential bilateral relationships at a moment when both countries were redefining their place in the global economy. Earlier he led the Maastricht Treaty negotiating team and the team that wrote the EU Single Market legislation. The European architecture that companies now operate inside is partly his handiwork. What sets him apart from the diplomatic-speaker norm is what came next. In 2014 he joined Boeing as President of Boeing UK and Ireland; in 2019 he became Senior Vice President of Boeing and President of Boeing International, the first non-American on the Boeing Executive Council. For four years he carried operational responsibility for the company in 65 countries and 18 regional offices. He left the diplomatic register and learned the executive one. The result is a speaker who can move between a board’s geopolitical question and its commercial answer without losing precision in either direction. He sits on the Board of Directors of the Stimson Center, on the board of a Tata Consultancy Services UK subsidiary, and co-founded The Ambassador Partnership LLP. He is a fluent German and French speaker and holds the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Key speaking topics Germany, the Eurozone and the European political economy UK and EU relations after Brexit India as a strategic partner for Western business Transatlantic relations and the US-Europe-China triangle International negotiation and corporate diplomacy Political risk inside global supply chains Ideal for Boards and executive committees with material exposure to Europe, India, or transatlantic policy. Heads of strategy, government affairs, and corporate affairs at multinationals. Industrial, aerospace, defence, and financial services leadership teams managing political risk. Investor and partner gatherings where senior decision makers want a credible read on Berlin, Brussels, New Delhi, and Washington in the same room. Audience outcomes A grounded read on what Berlin and Brussels are likely to do next, from someone who has been on both sides of those negotiations. A clearer view of India as a commercial partner, drawn from four years running the UK’s mission in New Delhi. A useful frame for thinking about political risk as an operational variable, not a footnote in the strategy deck. A sharper sense of how diplomatic and commercial logic interact inside large international firms.

Why organisations work with Max Tegmark He sits at the centre of the global AI safety conversation. As President of the Future of Life Institute, he organised the 2023 “Pause Giant AI Experiments” open letter signed by Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk and more than 30,000 others, and FLI’s policy work fed directly into the EU AI Act. He brings a working physicist’s discipline to AI claims, not a commentator’s. His MIT research group studies the physics of intelligence itself, which lets him tell a board what current systems can and cannot do without selling either fear or excitement. He has shaped how non-specialists think about AI through a New York Times bestseller. Life 3.0 framed the alignment problem and the long-run scenarios for governments, executives and the public, and remains a reference point for senior policy and corporate audiences. He is one of the few speakers TIME placed on its inaugural TIME100 AI list whose authority rests on peer-reviewed research rather than commercial position. He talks to leaders the way he talks to physicists. Specific mechanisms, named risks, concrete governance options, no jargon stack. Biography highlights Professor of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Co-founder and President, Future of Life Institute Author, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Knopf, 2017), New York Times bestseller Author, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (Knopf, 2014) Named to TIME100 AI, the inaugural TIME list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence Fellow of the American Physical Society; Packard Fellow; Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science Gold Medal (2019); contributor to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Biography The 2023 open letter calling for a six-month pause on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 was the moment AI safety stopped being a niche concern and became a board-level question. The letter was organised out of the Future of Life Institute. Its president is Max Tegmark. Tegmark is a Professor of Physics at MIT whose research moved from precision cosmology, including significant work on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, to the physics of intelligence itself. That trajectory matters. He approaches AI not as a technology commentator but as a working scientist asking what these systems are, what they can be made to do safely, and where the limits of current understanding sit. Through the Future of Life Institute, which he co-founded with Anthony Aguirre, Tegmark has built one of the most consequential policy voices in AI. FLI’s work shaped key provisions of the EU AI Act, and the 2023 pause letter, signed by Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Yuval Noah Harari among more than 30,000 others, reframed the global conversation about frontier model risk. His writing carries the same authority into a wider audience. Life 3.0 became a New York Times bestseller and remains a reference text for leaders trying to understand what alignment means and why it is hard. Our Mathematical Universe, published by Knopf in 2014, lays out his case that physical reality is, at the deepest level, a mathematical structure. He was named to TIME’s inaugural TIME100 AI list in 2023, awarded the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science Gold Medal in 2019, and elected Fellow of the American Physical Society for his contributions to cosmology. Key speaking topics Frontier AI capability and risk AI governance and regulation AI safety and alignment The future of work in an age of capable AI Existential risk and transformative technology Cosmology and the nature of reality Physics of intelligence Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting AI strategy and governance Policy, regulatory and public-sector leaders working on AI rules Chief Technology Officers, Chief AI Officers and heads of research Investor and academic audiences engaging with frontier technology Audience outcomes A clearer view of what current AI systems can and cannot do, separated from vendor and media framing A working mental model of the alignment problem and why frontier-model governance is hard Concrete reference points from the EU AI Act and the FLI policy agenda for corporate AI policy Sharper questions to put to internal AI leads, vendors and external advisers A scientifically grounded sense of which long-run AI scenarios are plausible and which are not

Why organisations work with Matteo Renzi His grasp of European political risk comes from having run a G7 government, chaired the EU Council Presidency, and participated in three G7 and three G20 summits – not from studying these institutions but from operating inside them at the highest level. His current role as Strategic Counsellor at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change connects his analysis to live government reform agendas across more than 40 countries, making his perspective current rather than retrospective. The Renzi government’s Jobs Act labour market overhaul, Madia Reform of public administration, and gender-equal cabinet were each delivered against significant institutional resistance – giving him specific, hard-won insight into what it actually takes to move reform through complex political systems. His co-authorship of the 2025 Tony Blair Institute paper “Europe in the Age of AI” – alongside Tony Blair and former Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin – positions him as a substantive current voice on technology governance and European competitiveness, not only on political history. For boards assessing exposure in Italy or the broader Southern European bloc, he provides a counterweight to the Germany-and-France framing that tends to dominate European political risk analysis in international advisory markets. Biography highlights Prime Minister of Italy, 2014 to 2016 – youngest ever Italian PM and youngest G7 leader at appointment Mayor of Florence 2009-2014; President of the Province of Florence 2004-2009; Senator for Florence since 2018 Founder and leader of Italia Viva (since 2019); previously Secretary of the Democratic Party, 2013-2018 Ranked #3 on Fortune’s 40 Under 40 (2014); included in Foreign Policy’s 100 Global Thinkers Strategic Counsellor, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (since 2024); co-author of “Europe in the Age of AI” (2025) with Tony Blair and Sanna Marin Author of 15+ published books on Italian politics and governance; teaches “The Challenges of Europe” at Stanford University’s Florence programme Biography EU Council negotiations, coalition formation, and regulatory direction are shaped by decisions made under intense political pressure by a small number of insiders. Matteo Renzi was one of them. He served as Prime Minister of Italy from 2014 to 2016, becoming at 39 the youngest person ever to hold that office and the youngest leader in the G7. His government moved fast. The Jobs Act overhauled Italy’s labour market. The Madia Reform digitised public administration and introduced digital ID as a central pillar of state infrastructure. His cabinet became the first in Italian history to achieve gender equality between women and men. He chaired the EU Council Presidency in the second half of 2014 and represented Italy at three G20 and three G7 summits. Italy’s signature on the Paris Agreement on climate change was made under his government. Since leaving government, Renzi has stayed operationally active. He serves in the Italian Senate and leads the centrist party Italia Viva. Since 2024, he has been a Strategic Counsellor at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, advising political leaders on reform strategy across more than 40 countries. His course “The Challenges of Europe” at Stanford University’s Florence programme brings that accumulated experience directly into academic debate. For organisations that need to understand how European coalitions form, how reform agendas succeed or fail under institutional pressure, and where geopolitical risk translates into policy, Renzi provides the granular, first-hand intelligence that covers the full range – from city government to the G7 table. Key speaking topics European political risk and governance EU institutional mechanics and reform Coalition politics and government formation Italian and Southern European political economy G7 and multilateral decision-making Digital transformation in government and public administration Political leadership under institutional pressure Ideal for Boards and C-suite executives with significant EU or Italian market exposure Government affairs and public policy functions within multinational organisations International business forums focused on European geopolitical and regulatory risk Senior leadership programmes and policy institutes requiring first-hand governmental perspective Audience outcomes A clearer working model of how EU institutions make decisions and where the real pressure points are – moving beyond election-watching to structural analysis Specific insight into how reform agendas succeed or collapse inside complex political systems, drawn from the Renzi government’s own record A realistic account of what political risk in Italy and the Southern European bloc means for organisations with exposure in those markets Context on how European governments are approaching digital transformation, labour market flexibility, and AI governance A framework for separating structural political change from short-term electoral noise in European markets