Talent Retention Strategies speakers

Why organisations work with Adam Kingl A decade-plus of original research into how Generation Y expects to work and be led, conducted while at London Business School and Duke Corporate Education, now applied to advising boards on talent and culture strategy. Author of two books from mainstream business publishers (Next Generation Leadership with HarperCollins, Sparking Success with Kogan Page), the second shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2024 in the Smart Thinking category. Primary research inside the creative industries (Carnegie Hall, Disney Imagineering, Broadway theatre, the writers’ room of Friends) translated into leadership practice for companies including Pixar, Panasonic, Bosch and Netflix. Very few leadership speakers work from that source base. Adjunct teaching at UCL School of Management, Hult Ashridge, Imperial College Business School and the Møller Institute at Churchill College, Cambridge. These appointments come through competitive academic review and carry live executive programme responsibility. A decade as Executive Director of Thought Leadership at London Business School and Regional Managing Director (Europe) at Duke Corporate Education. He has designed and run executive development at scale, which shapes how he reads a boardroom. Biography highlights Author of Next Generation Leadership (HarperCollins, 2020) and Sparking Success (Kogan Page, 2023), the second shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2024 in the Smart Thinking category Former Executive Director of Thought Leadership and Learning Solutions at London Business School (nearly a decade in post) Former Regional Managing Director (Europe) at Duke Corporate Education, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University Adjunct Faculty at UCL School of Management, Hult Ashridge International Business School and Imperial College Business School Associate of the Møller Institute at Churchill College, University of Cambridge Contributor and interviewee for the Financial Times, Forbes, Fortune, The Guardian, Fast Company and The Sunday Times Biography 80% of CEOs name innovation and creativity among their top three priorities. In the same surveyed organisations, 94% of employees rate their company as poor at both. That gap, between what executives say matters and what their organisations actually produce, is the starting point for most of Adam Kingl’s work. Kingl spent nearly a decade as Executive Director of Thought Leadership at London Business School, then led Duke Corporate Education’s European business as Regional Managing Director. He now teaches at UCL School of Management, Hult Ashridge, Imperial College Business School and the Møller Institute at Churchill College, Cambridge. His material is built and tested inside those programmes before it reaches any commercial audience. Next Generation Leadership (HarperCollins, 2020) grew out of a decade of original research into how Generation Y expects to work and be led. It treats generational change as a management design problem. Kingl’s argument is that the old playbook, built on hierarchy and productivity, produces the disengagement and attrition the same playbook is then used to diagnose. Sparking Success (Kogan Page, 2023), shortlisted for the Business Book Awards in the Smart Thinking category, goes inside the arts. Carnegie Hall, Disney Imagineering, Broadway theatre and the writers’ room of Friends are interviewed on how they produce creative output under commercial pressure. Those habits are then mapped into corporate practice at Pixar, Bosch, Panasonic and Netflix. His advisory work spans the BBC, BP, Disney, HSBC, LVMH, Shell and the European Central Bank. Key speaking topics Generational paradigms in leadership Creativity and creative mindset in business Culture and talent strategy Future of work Leadership and management innovation Executive education and capability building Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers reshaping leadership development for a multigenerational workforce CEOs and executive committees where stated innovation and engagement ambitions are outrunning the culture and talent practices meant to deliver them Boards and executive education programmes investing in next-generation leadership capability Learning and development leaders designing curricula for leadership at mid-career and senior level Audience outcomes A sharper diagnostic for why stated priorities on innovation and engagement keep failing to show up in organisational behaviour A set of creative practices borrowed from arts organisations (including how Pixar, Disney Imagineering and the Friends writers’ room actually work) and a route to adopting them in a corporate setting A clearer read on what younger talent actually expects from work, and which of those expectations are non-negotiable for retention A vocabulary for talking about generational differences in the workplace that avoids the usual folklore about “millennials” and “Gen Z”

Why organisations work with Amy Cappellanti-Wolf She has held the CHRO seat at Dayforce, Cohesity, Symantec and Silver Spring Networks, including taking Silver Spring Networks public on the NYSE in 2013. Her HR career runs from Frito-Lay and The Walt Disney Company through Sun Microsystems and Cisco, so she can speak credibly to consumer, entertainment and enterprise tech leadership teams in their own language. At Dayforce she runs people strategy at an HR technology vendor and acts as “Customer Zero” for the company’s AI-powered HR releases, which gives her an unusually concrete view of where AI lands in real HR operations. She works at board and committee level on talent and rewards, currently as Compensation Committee Chair at Softchoice and as a director or advisor at D-Wave Quantum, Betterworks and Wellist. Recognised externally on people and tech leadership: National Diversity Council Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology, Silicon Valley Business Journal Women of Influence, and the Forbes Human Resources Council. Biography highlights EVP and Chief People Officer, Dayforce, since April 2024. Former CHRO at Cohesity, Symantec and Silver Spring Networks; led people strategy through Silver Spring Networks’ 2013 IPO. Earlier senior HR roles at Cisco Systems (2001 to 2009), Sun Microsystems, The Walt Disney Company and Frito-Lay (PepsiCo). Compensation Committee Chair at Softchoice (TSX: SFTC); board and advisory roles at D-Wave Quantum, Betterworks and Wellist. Forbes Human Resources Council member since 2018; National Diversity Council Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology. Inducted into the Roll of Distinguished Alumni, WVU’s John Chambers College of Business and Economics, in 2019. Biography Few CHROs have stood in the room for a Cisco-era leadership build, a Disney creative organisation, a Symantec security business and a Silver Spring Networks IPO. Amy Cappellanti-Wolf has. That cross-section is what gives her practical authority on what culture and talent actually take when a company changes shape. Her current seat sharpens the point. As EVP and Chief People Officer at Dayforce, she runs people strategy inside an HR technology vendor and uses Dayforce’s own platform as “Customer Zero” for AI-powered HR releases. That gives her a working view of where AI lands in payroll, performance and workforce planning, not as a forecast but as a live deployment. Boards use her where rewards, governance and people risk meet. She chairs the Compensation Committee at Softchoice, sits on the board at D-Wave Quantum, and advises Betterworks and Wellist. Her recognition track record, Forbes HR Council, the National Diversity Council Top 50 in Technology, Silicon Valley Business Journal Women of Influence, sits alongside the operating record, not in place of it. For senior buyers, the practical value is specific. She can talk credibly to a CHRO planning an IPO, a CEO integrating an acquisition, an HR team rebuilding engagement after a restructure, or a board asking what AI in HR really changes. The answers come from having done it, not from observing it. Key speaking topics People strategy through IPO, M&A and divestiture AI in HR and the future of the people function High-performance culture in scaling tech companies Diversity, equity and inclusion as an operating discipline Leadership and talent for enterprise transformation The CHRO as a board-level voice on people risk Ideal for CHROs and senior HR leaders preparing for IPO, M&A or large-scale restructure CEOs and boards weighing the people implications of AI deployment in core operations Compensation and talent committees considering rewards, succession and culture risk Technology, consumer and entertainment leadership teams running concurrent transformations Audience outcomes A clear sense of how to sequence people priorities through IPO, integration and restructure A practical view of where AI changes HR operations now, drawn from a live enterprise deployment Sharper questions for boards and executive teams on culture, rewards and talent risk Concrete language for inclusion outcomes that survive a politically contested environment

Why organisations work with Andy Lopata He reframes networking as a leadership discipline. The argument lands with executives who have dismissed the topic as junior or transactional, and gives them a structured way to think about who supports them, how, and why. The Relationship Matrix gives leaders a tangible way to audit their professional support system, identify where it is thin, and decide where to invest. Few speakers in this space work at that level of operational specificity. His mentoring work, anchored in The Financial Times Guide to Mentoring co-authored with Dr Ruth Gotian of Weill Cornell, gives organisations a serious reference point for designing mentoring programmes that retain senior talent. Twenty-five years inside the topic, recognition from the Financial Times and Forbes, and a 2025 Thinkers50 Coaching and Mentoring Award shortlist place him in a small group of speakers who have built genuine institutional credibility on professional relationships. He works with the cultural problem behind the leadership one: why senior people will not ask for help, and what it costs the organisation when they do not. Biography highlights Author of six books, including Connected Leadership (2020) and The Financial Times Guide to Mentoring (Pearson, 2024, with Dr Ruth Gotian). Shortlisted for the 2025 Thinkers50 Coaching and Mentoring Award. Two-time board member and former President of the Fellows Community of the Professional Speaking Association UK and Ireland; holder of the PSAE, the PSA’s Hall of Fame distinction. Fellow of the Learning and Performance Institute; member of the Association of Business Mentors and the Meetings Industry Association. Contributor to Harvard Business Review and Psychology Today; host of The Connected Leadership Podcast. Clients include PayPal, Google, Harrods, BBC, HSBC, GlaxoSmithKline, Allen and Overy, Saïd Business School and Brother International Europe. Biography Most senior leaders rise on technical and commercial credibility, then hit a level where the job is mostly relational. They under-invest in mentors, hesitate to ask for help, and end up isolated at exactly the point where their decisions carry the most weight. That gap is what Lopata’s work addresses. For more than twenty-five years he has worked on professional relationships as an executive capability rather than a soft skill. The Financial Times has called him one of Europe’s leading business networking strategists; Forbes has described him as a true master of networking. The label undersells the work. His Relationship Matrix gives leaders a structured way to audit who supports them, where the gaps are, and where to invest. Frameworks like the Seven Stages of Professional Relationships and The Influence Wheel extend that work into stakeholder mapping, influence and senior mentoring practice. His books map the territory in detail. Connected Leadership argues that executive success is built on a deliberate web of relationships, and was shortlisted for the Business Book Awards in 2021. The Financial Times Guide to Mentoring, co-authored with Dr Ruth Gotian of Weill Cornell Medicine in 2024, gives organisations a reference text for treating mentoring as a strategic retention and development tool. The book was a runner-up for Leadership Book of the Year at the 2024 Leadership Awards. The institutional weight follows the work. He is a former President of the Fellows Community of the Professional Speaking Association UK and Ireland and holds its PSAE Hall of Fame distinction. He was shortlisted for the 2025 Thinkers50 Coaching and Mentoring Award, contributes to Harvard Business Review and Psychology Today, and has worked with PayPal, Google, HSBC, GlaxoSmithKline, the BBC and Saïd Business School on the same underlying problem: how senior people stop performing in isolation and start leading through the relationships around them. Key speaking topics Professional relationships as a leadership capability Mentoring strategy and programme design Asking for help and the cost of not asking Vulnerable leadership Referral and influence networks Connected leadership and executive support systems Psychological safety and speaking up at senior level Ideal for CEOs, executive committees and partners moving into senior leadership roles where the work becomes relational CHROs and learning leaders designing mentoring, succession and retention programmes Professional services and partner-track populations where business development depends on relationship quality Sales leaders rebuilding referral networks and account relationships Audience outcomes A clear framework, the Relationship Matrix, for auditing the professional support system around a senior role A different language for mentoring as a strategic asset rather than a benefit programme Specific shifts in how leaders approach asking for help, and why most do not A more honest read on where executive isolation is costing the organisation in retention, succession and decision quality Practical adjustments to how teams use referrals, networks and senior relationships in commercial contexts

Why organisations work with Andy Storch He has facilitated talent and leadership programmes for Salesforce, Oracle, Google, Toyota, Deloitte, EY, KPMG, Cisco, Sony, and Tiffany & Co., which means he has tested his career-ownership material against the most demanding corporate L&D functions in the market. He runs the room where his buyers meet each other. The Talent Development Think Tank conference, community, and podcast give him a working view of what CHROs and L&D leaders are actually trying to fix, before they brief a speaker. His thesis is concrete and actionable: career ownership is a learnable practice, not a slogan. Own Your Career Own Your Life breaks it into specific steps employees and managers can apply on Monday. His 2025 follow-up with Mike Kim, Own Your Brand, Own Your Career, gives organisations a practical handle on personal brand as a retention and internal mobility lever, not a LinkedIn exercise. He works equally credibly as a keynote, workshop facilitator, and community host. For talent functions running multi-day events, that flexibility is rare. Biography highlights Author of Own Your Career Own Your Life (2020) and co-author with Mike Kim of Own Your Brand, Own Your Career (2025). Founder and host of the Talent Development Think Tank podcast, conference, and community, sponsored by Advantage Performance Group. Has consulted, taught, or facilitated for Salesforce, Oracle, Google, Toyota, State Farm, Red Bull, Deloitte, EY, KPMG, HP, Sony, Cisco, and Tiffany & Co. MBA, USC Marshall School of Business (President of the MBA programme); BS, University of Florida. Host of three podcasts: The Talent Development Hot Seat, Own Your Career, and My NFT Journey. Workshop facilitator for global enterprises since 2011. Biography Career development inside large organisations has become a quiet contract failure. Employees assume their employer will plot the path; employers assume employees will take initiative; the middle is where engagement and retention disappear. Storch built a practice around closing that gap from both sides. His book Own Your Career Own Your Life sets out a step-by-step approach to career ownership for individual contributors and managers. The 2025 follow-up with Mike Kim, Own Your Brand, Own Your Career, extends the argument into personal brand as an internal-mobility and retention lever rather than an external marketing exercise. Both books are direct and operational, not motivational. The proof point most relevant to corporate buyers is who he works with. Salesforce, Oracle, Google, Toyota, Deloitte, EY, KPMG, Cisco, Sony, and Tiffany & Co. have used him to facilitate leadership and talent programmes. He has been running these workshops since 2011, which is what allows the keynote material to land in language a senior L&D function recognises. The Talent Development Think Tank, his podcast, conference, and community, gives him an unusual position in the market. He is not commenting on the talent development field from outside it; he is the convener inside it. For a CHRO or head of L&D, that means the speaker on stage has heard, in private, the same problems they are trying to solve. Key speaking topics Career ownership and employee development Talent development strategy Personal brand and internal mobility Leadership for managers of professionals Employee engagement and retention Future of work and talent trends Ideal for CHROs, heads of L&D, and talent development leaders running enterprise development programmes Annual talent and leadership offsites for managers of professionals Employee resource groups and internal high-potential cohorts Sales and account leadership conferences focused on retention and growth of top performers Audience outcomes A working definition of career ownership that managers and employees can apply to weekly conversations Specific tools to make personal brand work as an internal mobility and retention asset A clearer line between what the employer owes the employee and what the employee owes their own career Language to frame development conversations that does not collapse into performance review template A view of where talent development practice is heading, drawn from a sitting community of CHROs and L&D leaders

Why organisations work with Anj Handa She brings governance-level credibility into inclusion conversations that usually stop at HR, holding positions as Independent Governor of Leeds Arts University, Chair of Freedom Studios, and Fellow of the RSA. Her campaign craft is verifiable, not rhetorical. She built the legal team, petition, and media strategy on the Afusat Saliu FGM-asylum case, gathering 126,500 signatures and pushing FGM higher on the UK political agenda. She names the parts of inclusive leadership most speakers avoid: emotional correctness, healthy boundaries, psychological safety, and what allyship has to do that employee networks cannot. She offers a working alternative to the glass ceiling, the labyrinth, which describes the actual sequence of barriers women, and particularly Black and brown women, encounter inside large organisations. Forbes named her in its 10 Diversity & Inclusion Trailblazers list, and Grant Thornton UK featured her among its 100 Faces of a Vibrant Economy. The recognition tracks substantive work, not commentary. Biography highlights Founder of Inspiring Women Changemakers, an inclusive community and consultancy advising on equity, governance, and systems change. Independent Governor of Leeds Arts University and Chair of the Board of Freedom Studios. Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Named in Forbes “10 Diversity & Inclusion Trailblazers” and Grant Thornton UK’s 100 Faces of a Vibrant Economy (2018). Featured in Charity Times 2023 International Women’s Day list. Contributor to “Generation Share”, “Eradicating FGM in the UK” (Hilary Burrage), and “Refugee Tales” (Comma Press). Biography Most organisations have a diversity statement. Far fewer have governance and leadership practices that match it. The gap is where talent gets lost, complaints get managed, and senior leaders quietly accept attrition that the policy was meant to prevent. Closing that gap requires someone fluent in both the structural and the human side of the work. Anj Handa has spent more than two decades operating in that space. She is Founder of Inspiring Women Changemakers, an inclusive community and consultancy that advises senior leaders on inclusive governance, equity, and systems change. She is an Independent Governor of Leeds Arts University, Chair of Freedom Studios, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; positions she has often noted are held by fewer than one percent of Black and brown women in the UK. Her authority is not theoretical. In 2014 she led the high-profile asylum campaign for Afusat Saliu and her daughters, assembling the legal team, running a Change.org petition that drew 126,500 signatures, and bringing MPs and national media into the story. The work was later included in Hilary Burrage’s “Eradicating FGM in the UK” and the Comma Press anthology “Refugee Tales”. Forbes named her in its 10 Diversity & Inclusion Trailblazers list; Grant Thornton featured her among its 100 Faces of a Vibrant Economy. What separates her work for senior teams is the territory she is willing to name. Psychological safety, emotional correctness, healthy boundaries, allyship that is more than a network. She challenges the glass ceiling as a useful frame and offers the labyrinth in its place, a more accurate description of the sequence of barriers women encounter inside complex organisations. That precision is what boards and executive teams hire her for. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership and governance Equity, diversity, and structural change The labyrinth: rethinking the glass ceiling Allyship beyond employee networks Psychological safety and emotional correctness Self-care and resilience for changemakers Campaign craft and policy influence Ideal for Boards, governance committees, and executive teams setting inclusion strategy CHROs, Heads of DEI, and senior people leaders rebuilding programmes under scrutiny Public sector, charity, and arts leaders working on equity and safeguarding Women’s leadership and changemaker networks inside large organisations Audience outcomes A sharper vocabulary for the structural barriers women face beyond the glass ceiling A clear distinction between allyship as practice and employee networks as forum Specific governance-level questions to put to their own inclusion programmes Permission and language to address emotional correctness and boundaries in senior teams A view of inclusion that connects policy, governance, and lived experience without losing rigour

Why organisations work with Anna Allerton She built her authority inside a 17-year operational career at Sky, including founding and producing Sky’s Sportswomen programme, so she speaks about high-pressure performance from inside it rather than outside it. Her Management Today 35 Women Under 35 listing and editorial track record give buyers a credible name on the panel for senior internal audiences who are sceptical of the wellness market. She is qualified through the Academy of Executive Coaching, the triple-accredited UK training body, and runs a 1:1 executive coaching practice alongside the speaking work, which means workshop content lands as coaching, not awareness. Her client list, including Workday, IMG, the Premier League, Sky, The Forward Trust and NBCU New York, shows she has tested the same content across financial, sports, media and broadcast environments at senior level. She writes on the topic for serious audiences, including a co-authored chapter in Myths of Menopause (Sequoia Books, edited by Dr Nicky Keay), giving organisations published material they can circulate internally after the session. Biography highlights Founder and Director of Allerton Coaching & Consulting 17-year career at Sky, including roles at Sky Sports News from Sub-Editor through to Global Head of Internal Communications Founder and producer of Sky’s Sportswomen, launched in 2012 as the first dedicated women’s sport TV programme of its kind Named in Management Today‘s 35 Women Under 35 Trained and qualified executive coach with the Academy of Executive Coaching Co-author of a chapter in Myths of Menopause (Sequoia Books, edited by Dr Nicky Keay) Clients include Workday, IMG, Sky, the Premier League, The Forward Trust, Whisper, NBCU New York and Age UK Featured in Grazia, Stylist, Times Radio and We Are The City Biography Sportswomen launched on Sky Sports in 2012 as the first British TV programme dedicated entirely to women’s sport. Anna Allerton founded and produced it, and it ran inside one of the most demanding live broadcast environments in UK sport. That credit, alongside seventeen years of editorial and production roles at Sky Sports News, is the reason her work on women in the workplace lands differently from most. She came back from her second maternity leave at 38 with debilitating symptoms that took a year to be correctly diagnosed as perimenopause. The experience pushed her to retrain through the Academy of Executive Coaching, the UK’s triple-accredited training body, and to build a practice specifically around keeping experienced women in senior roles through their forties and fifties. The work now runs on two tracks. A 1:1 executive coaching practice for senior women, and a consulting and speaking offer for organisations on what a menopause-inclusive workplace actually looks like in operating terms. Clients to date include Workday, IMG, the Premier League, Sky, The Forward Trust, Whisper, NBCU New York and Age UK. She co-authored a chapter in Myths of Menopause, edited by Dr Nicky Keay and published by Sequoia Books, and has written and spoken in Grazia, Stylist and Times Radio. What makes her useful in a boardroom rather than a wellness slot is the angle. She frames menopause as a talent-retention question first and a wellbeing question second. She was named in Management Today‘s 35 Women Under 35 for her work in sports journalism, not for her current specialism, and that older credential is part of why senior internal audiences take the newer one seriously. Key speaking topics Perimenopause and menopause in the workplace Talent retention of women in their 40s and 50s Women’s leadership and career navigation through midlife Women in sport and women’s sports journalism Returning to senior roles after maternity leave Menopause-inclusive workplace policy and practice Mental health and wellbeing for senior women Ideal for CHROs, heads of DEI and talent leaders designing retention strategy for women in senior roles Executive teams and ERGs in financial, professional services, media and sport launching menopause workplace programmes Senior women’s networks and leadership development cohorts in the 35 to 55 age range Boards and ExCos commissioning a credible non-clinical voice on menopause as a business issue Audience outcomes A clear reframing of perimenopause and menopause as a talent-retention and performance issue, with management implications Practical language for line managers and senior women to use when the conversation comes up at work An honest account, drawn from a high-pressure broadcast career, of what symptoms actually do to focus, confidence and decision-making Specific organisational examples from work with Workday, IMG, the Premier League, Sky and others Reference material from Myths of Menopause and Allerton’s published writing for internal follow-up

Why organisations work with Anna Baréz-Brown A track record at scale: the Shine programme has reached thousands of women across four continents and more than 75 nationalities, with named corporate clients including WPP, Channel 4, TikTok, Rothschild & Co, and Google. Her work is built around retention and progression metrics, not engagement scores. Clients commission her when the gender balance of their senior roster needs to change, not when they need an inspirational keynote. She frames inclusion as a commercial discipline. Her core argument, that diversity fails in most companies because it sits with people who lack decision rights and budget, lands credibly with COOs and CEOs as well as CHROs. A corporate operator before a coach: a former European Sales Director responsible for 12 countries and 85 employees, with credentials as a CTI Leadership Coach, NLP Master Practitioner, and qualified Organisational Relationship Systems Coach. She talks to men as well as women. The programme deliberately addresses allyship, micro-aggressions, and the part male leaders play in changing the system, which makes her workable for organisations nervous about polarised DEI framing. Biography highlights Co-founder of Shine (now We Are Shine), launched 2013 with Caroline Whaley. Former European Sales Director with responsibility for 12 countries and 85 employees. Earlier roles at Axel Springer Verlag and Bertelsmann. Programme has worked with thousands of women across more than 75 nationalities and four continents. Named clients include WPP, Rothschild & Co, TikTok, Channel 4, Google, Channel 4, ITV, and EasyJet. Credentialled as a CTI Leadership Coach, Neuro-Linguistic Master Practitioner, and qualified Organisational Relationship Systems Coach. Biography Most diversity work fails on the same fault line. Programmes sit inside HR, measured by sign-up rates and sentiment, while the senior roster keeps reproducing itself. Promotion patterns do not move. Mid-career women leave. The gap between stated values and lived experience widens. Shine, the organisation Anna Baréz-Brown co-founded with Caroline Whaley in 2013, was built to attack that fault line directly. The programme is delivered into companies including WPP, Channel 4, TikTok, Rothschild & Co, and Google, and is measured against retention, promotion, and the gender balance of senior teams. It has worked with thousands of women across more than 75 nationalities and four continents. The credibility behind that work is corporate, not activist. Before launching Shine, Baréz-Brown ran a sales business as European Director with twelve countries and eighty-five staff reporting in, after earlier roles at Axel Springer Verlag and Bertelsmann. She is a CTI Leadership Coach, an NLP Master Practitioner, and a qualified Organisational Relationship Systems Coach. Her argument to senior teams is commercial. Diversity stalls because the responsibility is delegated downward, the investment is underestimated, and the conversation polarises before any system actually changes. Her work treats inclusion as a leadership discipline that involves men and women, allies and sceptics, and the operating decisions of the business itself. Key speaking topics Gender balance in senior leadership Inclusive leadership and allyship Building corporate leadership pipelines Coaching cultures and feedback Personal energy and performance at work Influence, impact, and executive presence Courageous conversations and managing micro-aggressions Ideal for CHROs, Chief People Officers, and Heads of D&I designing senior pipeline programmes. CEOs and ExCo sponsors who want gender balance treated as a commercial outcome, not a comms initiative. Leadership development teams running cohort programmes for high-potential women and their managers. Male executives and line managers being asked to act as allies and sponsors in practice. Audience outcomes A clearer view of why most diversity programmes do not move the senior roster, and what does. Language and tools for courageous conversations across difference, including on micro-aggressions. Specific practices for women navigating senior career transitions: stakeholder management, brand, energy, narrative. A framing of inclusion that male leaders can act on, not just endorse. A diagnostic for where their own organisation’s pipeline is leaking and who needs to own the fix.

Why organisations work with Annicken R. Day She built the culture inside Tandberg, the Norwegian video conferencing company acquired by Cisco for $3.5 billion, which gives her a rare operator’s view of what a high-trust, high-performance culture actually looks like at scale. She held the Chief Culture Officer role before the title was fashionable, so she speaks about culture as a built system, not a brand exercise. Her Scandinavian leadership lens gives executive teams a working alternative to command-and-control models, grounded in trust, autonomy and psychological safety as commercial mechanisms rather than soft values. She is a published thinker as well as a practitioner, with co-authorship of Creative Superpowers, a bestselling novel translated into multiple languages, and columns in Forbes, Business Insider and Huffington Post. She is fluent in the hybrid and remote question, having advised leadership teams in over 50 countries on how culture survives when proximity disappears. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Corporate Spring, advising leadership teams from startups to Fortune 500 organisations. Former Chief Culture Officer at Tandberg, the Norwegian technology company acquired by Cisco for $3.5 billion in 2010. Co-author of Creative Superpowers: Equip Yourself for the Age of Creativity. Author of the bestselling novel Fly, Butterfly, translated into multiple languages. TEDx speaker and speaker at the United Nations. Columnist for Forbes, Business Insider and Huffington Post. Biography Most companies talk about culture. Far fewer can show the operating choices, leadership habits and team rituals that produce one. Annicken R. Day spent the formative part of her career inside that gap. As Chief Culture Officer at Tandberg, the Norwegian video conferencing business later acquired by Cisco for $3.5 billion, she helped build a workplace that won repeated Best Place to Work recognition while the company became a global category leader. That experience shaped her thesis. Culture is not the residue of value statements. It is a deliberate system of leadership behaviour, communication norms and trust mechanisms that determines whether strategy converts into performance. Her work at Corporate Spring, the consultancy she founded after Tandberg, applies that thesis to executive teams in more than 50 countries. Her writing has reached a wider audience. She co-authored Creative Superpowers: Equip Yourself for the Age of Creativity and wrote the bestselling novel Fly, Butterfly. She has contributed columns to Forbes, Business Insider and Huffington Post, and spoken at TEDx and the United Nations on culture, creativity and the human side of business. What sets her apart in a crowded culture-and-leadership field is the combination of operator credibility and a Scandinavian frame. Trust, autonomy and joy show up in her work as commercial levers, with the trail of retention, engagement and performance to back them up. Key speaking topics Culture as a strategy for growth High-trust, high-performance teams Scandinavian leadership models Hybrid and remote culture design Employee engagement and retention Creativity and innovation in the workplace Executive leadership development Ideal for CHROs, Chief People Officers and CEOs reframing culture as a commercial mechanism Leadership teams managing distributed and hybrid workforces across geographies Founders and executive teams in scale-up companies are inheriting a culture they did not design Boards and executive committees preparing for, or recovering from, post-acquisition cultural integration Audience outcomes A working definition of culture as a system of behaviours, decisions and rituals, not a values statement Leadership habits that build trust at the speed required by hybrid and distributed teams A view of Scandinavian leadership principles, including autonomy and psychological safety, as commercial mechanisms Concrete examples from a $3.5 billion exit story of how culture compounded into competitive advantage A vocabulary for diagnosing where culture is undermining strategy and what to address first

Why organisations work with Anton Gunn He has operated at the level his audiences operate at. Advising a President on national health policy and running diversity and external affairs inside a federal department is not a case study he read; it is the room he was in. His World-Class Culture framework gives executives a named, structured approach to retention and culture rather than another values poster. It has been applied inside Pfizer, KPMG, Microsoft, HCA Healthcare and Mercedes-Benz Vans. He talks about inclusion as an operating capability, not a political position. For boards navigating contested ground on DEI, that distinction is the reason he gets booked. His credibility carries on both sides of the executive table: a Harvard Institute of Politics fellow with a Certified Speaking Professional designation, an MSW, and seven years inside senior healthcare leadership at MUSC. Biography highlights Former senior advisor to President Barack Obama; Director of External Affairs, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, leading stakeholder engagement for Affordable Care Act implementation Former Executive Director and Chief Diversity Officer, Medical University of South Carolina Resident Fellow, Harvard Institute of Politics Bestselling author of Just Lead, The Presidential Principles, and The Audacity of Leadership Certified Speaking Professional, a designation held by fewer than 10 percent of professional speakers worldwide Featured in TIME, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, NPR, BBC and Good Morning America Biography The Affordable Care Act needed people to believe in it before it could function. As Director of External Affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Anton Gunn led the stakeholder engagement that turned a contested federal statute into something hospitals, employers and citizens could act on. That work, advising President Obama and Secretary Sebelius, is the reference point his clients hire him for. He has since spent close to a decade translating that experience into a body of executive practice. As Chief Diversity Officer and Executive Director at the Medical University of South Carolina, he ran inclusion as an operating function inside a complex healthcare institution, not as a communications exercise. His framework, World-Class Culture, codifies the seven behaviours he saw separate retention-positive cultures from the rest. His three books trace the same argument from different angles. The Audacity of Leadership set out the principles. The Presidential Principles distilled what he learned watching Obama lead in real time. Just Lead, his 2022 bestseller, gave operators 44 specific actions for retention and culture. Pfizer, KPMG, Microsoft, T-Mobile, SHRM and Mercedes-Benz Vans have all brought him in to apply that work. He is a Harvard Institute of Politics fellow and a Certified Speaking Professional, a designation held by under 10 percent of speakers globally. The combination buyers respond to is rarer than either credential alone: a former White House operator who has also run culture and inclusion inside a 17,000-person institution, and who can talk to a board in the language of accountability rather than aspiration. Key speaking topics Values-based leadership Workplace culture and retention Inclusive leadership Trust as an executive capability Crisis leadership and recovery Talent strategy in healthcare and regulated industries Ideal for Boards and CEOs navigating culture and retention under restructure CHROs and Chief Diversity Officers building inclusion as an operating discipline Senior leadership teams in healthcare, financial services and regulated industries Public sector and policy audiences working at the boundary of government and enterprise Audience outcomes A named, repeatable framework for diagnosing and rebuilding workplace culture A clearer view of where executive trust is earned and where it is forfeited Concrete actions for retention drawn from the Just Lead framework A working definition of inclusive leadership that holds up in front of a sceptical board An inside view of decision-making at the senior levels of the Obama administration

Why organisations work with Arsène Wenger He is the only senior practitioner in any field who built and led a team through an entire unbeaten top-flight league season – a 38-game case study in what sustained, system-level performance actually requires, fully documented and independently verifiable. His most instructive period for organisations is arguably not the Invincibles season but the decade that followed: leading under financial constraint, serial talent loss, and rivals with structurally larger budgets, while still maintaining Champions League qualification and winning trophies. This is the pressure most organisations recognise. His framework for leadership – distinguishing clearly between the structural long-term work of the manager and the motivational short-term work of the coach, and insisting both must operate simultaneously – gives senior leaders a concrete architecture for their own role, not a motivational analogy. Cross-cultural management experience across France, Japan, and England, combined with an economics degree from the University of Strasbourg, means his account of how performance systems are built is structural and comparative, not anecdotal. His current role at FIFA – overseeing global coaching standards, the IFAB rules-making body, and technical analysis of international tournaments – extends his perspective from club performance to institutional design and global governance, a dimension no other speaker in this market shares. Biography highlights Managed Arsenal for 22 years (1996-2018) – the longest tenure in the club’s history and in the history of the Premier League; won 3 Premier League titles and a then-record 7 FA Cups Architect of the 2003-04 Arsenal “Invincibles” – the only team to complete an unbeaten top-flight English league season in the modern era (38 matches) Previously managed AS Monaco (Ligue 1 title 1988; Coupe de France 1991) and Nagoya Grampus Eight, Japan (Emperor’s Cup; J-League Manager of the Year, 1995) Three-time Premier League Manager of the Season (1997-98, 2001-02, 2003-04) FIFA Chief of Global Football Development (appointed 2019); chairs the FIFA Technical Study Group and oversees IFAB and global coaching education Awarded the Légion d’honneur (2002) and an Honorary OBE (2003); inducted into the English Football Hall of Fame (2006) Autobiography My Life in Red and White (Orion, 2020) – Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller; the second football manager ever to reach No. 1 overall Economics degree, University of Strasbourg; fluent in six languages Biography The 2003-04 Arsenal season – 38 Premier League matches, zero defeats – remains the only unbeaten campaign in English football’s modern era. What made it possible was not an exceptional squad alone, but a system: nutritional standards that transformed player fitness, analytical scouting methods, and a culture whose values were defined by players and coaching staff together at the start of each season. Arsène Wenger’s career was cross-cultural long before that was a leadership virtue. He won the French league title with AS Monaco in 1988, then moved deliberately to Japan – taking Nagoya Grampus Eight to the Emperor’s Cup and the J-League Manager of the Year award in 1995. Managing across France, Japan, and England gave him a comparative framework for what in performance systems is universal, and what depends on context. At Arsenal, the decade after the Invincibles season is often more instructive for organisations than the unbeaten campaign itself. Wenger sustained Champions League qualification and FA Cup success while operating under severe financial constraint and losing key talent to better-funded rivals – conditions organisations recognise more readily than an anomalous trophy season. His autobiography, My Life in Red and White (Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller, 2020), and public appearances – including at the Bank of America Global Investor Summit and the Gartner IT Symposium – return consistently to a single structural argument: effective leadership requires the manager’s long-term, institutional work and the coach’s short-term, motivational work to operate simultaneously, not in sequence. Since 2019, Wenger has served as FIFA’s Chief of Global Football Development, overseeing global coaching education, the IFAB rules-making panel, and technical analysis of international tournaments. He holds an economics degree from the University of Strasbourg, France’s Légion d’honneur, an Honorary OBE, and a place in the English Football Hall of Fame. His perspective on competitive sustainability is drawn from specific, verifiable decisions made under extreme and sustained pressure – which is precisely what distinguishes it. Key speaking topics Sustained high performance and competitive advantage Talent identification, development, and succession systems Organisational culture and values-based leadership Long-term strategy under short-term performance pressure Cross-cultural team management Performance science and the modernisation of professional sport Global football governance and institutional development Ideal for C-suite and board-level leaders accountable for long-term competitive positioning CHROs and people directors designing talent development and succession pipelines Senior leadership conferences in financial services, professional services, and sport Transformation leaders managing performance culture through periods of resource constraint or competitive disruption Audience outcomes A clear, applicable distinction between managing (structural, long-term) and coaching (motivational, short-term) – and why both must run in parallel rather than sequence A concrete, verified case study in what sustained competitive advantage looks like in practice: the talent, culture, and decision-making systems behind it Practical perspectives on leading through constraint and transition – not just peak success – drawn from a decade of performing under significant competitive disadvantage An understanding of how cross-cultural experience informs more resilient, adaptive performance systems A framework for building culture from the inside: how shared values, standards, and accountability are established, maintained, and renewed across successive generations of people

Why organisations work with Beth Davies She ran learning and development at Tesla through a workforce expansion from roughly 600 to 33,000 employees, so her playbook on hypergrowth culture is built from the inside, not observed from outside. She led retail talent development at Apple during the iPhone launch and was on the founding team that built Microsoft’s retail stores from zero to fifteen in eighteen months, giving her rare comparative insight into how two very different consumer technology giants trained their customer-facing workforces. She teaches on IE University’s Master in Talent Development and Human Resources, which keeps her arguments tested against the next generation of HR leaders rather than frozen at the point she left corporate roles. McKinsey invited her into its Consortium for Advancing Adult Learning and Development, a signal that her views on workplace learning are taken seriously by the people advising the world’s largest employers. She speaks in concrete operational detail: what the onboarding looked like, how the first week was designed, what broke at which headcount, what the CEO actually said in the room. Biography highlights Former Director of Learning and Development, Tesla (2011 to 2017) Former Director of Retail Talent Development, Apple (2003 to 2008) Former Director of Customer Experience and Training, Microsoft (2009 to 2011) Adjunct Professor, Master in Talent Development and Human Resources, IE University, Madrid Founder and host of the Career Curves podcast JD, Stanford Law School; BA, Indiana University; named Luminary by Indiana University in 2016 Biography Tesla grew from around 600 people to 33,000 in the six years Beth Davies ran its learning and development function. That scale of expansion usually breaks culture. Keeping it intact was her job. Before Tesla, she had already done two of the hardest workforce build-outs in modern retail. At Apple, she was head of retail talent development during the years the stores were becoming the company’s most important customer relationship. She trained teams across the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia and prepared thousands of store employees to sell the iPhone on day one. At Microsoft, she joined the small founding team that built the company’s own retail operation from zero to fifteen stores in eighteen months, setting the customer experience standards and the training that went with them. Her argument to senior leaders is that culture is not a slogan or a values poster. It is the behaviour that shows up in onboarding, in manufacturing floor routines, in how a new hire’s first week is designed, and in what managers are actually trained to do. When companies scale quickly, those details get delegated and diluted, and the product suffers. Protecting them is a leadership discipline, not an HR programme. She now teaches on IE University’s Master in Talent Development and Human Resources, advises EdTech founders, and hosts the Career Curves podcast. McKinsey’s Consortium for Advancing Adult Learning and Development invited her in as one of forty thought leaders it wanted in the room. Her Stanford law training shows up in how she structures an argument: specific, evidenced, and unsentimental about what works. Key speaking topics Scaling culture through hypergrowth Onboarding design for new hires Leadership development inside fast-moving companies Learning and development strategy on constrained budgets Customer experience training for retail and consumer businesses The CHRO agenda in technology-led organisations Talent retention in competitive labour markets Ideal for CHROs and heads of L and D in companies scaling past 1,000 employees CEOs and founders protecting culture through a growth phase Retail, consumer, and manufacturing leaders rebuilding customer-facing training HR leadership teams redesigning onboarding and manager capability Audience outcomes A concrete view of what culture preservation looks like at Tesla and Apple scale, in the detail of day-one onboarding and manager routines A sharper test for whether their current learning investment is protecting or eroding the customer experience Specific design principles for onboarding that holds up when headcount doubles A more honest read on which parts of their people strategy are load-bearing and which are ceremonial Comparative lessons from two consumer technology giants that solved retail workforce problems very differently

Why organisations work with Brant Menswar A defined methodology, Black Sheep Values, that gives leaders a shared language for the five values their organisation will not trade away under pressure. Behavioural-science grounding through an eCornell Psychology of Leadership certification, applied to the everyday mechanics of trust, vulnerability and team performance. Author of two trade-published books on the same thesis: Black Sheep (Page Two, 2020) and Designing Momentum (Wiley, 2025), giving the work a documented intellectual spine rather than a slide deck. A 20-year career as a recording artist before the speaking work, which means a keynote that lands as a live performance, not a talk read off a screen. Track record inside large, brand-sensitive organisations including Netflix, Verizon, Microsoft, ESPN and Hilton, where the culture stakes are high and the audience is sceptical of motivational content. Biography highlights Author, Black Sheep: Unleash the Extraordinary, Awe-Inspiring, Undiscovered You (Page Two, 2020). Author, Designing Momentum: A Big Goal Blueprint for Transforming Everyday Moments into Massive Success (Wiley, 2025). Certified in Psychology of Leadership, eCornell, Cornell University. Founder and CEO of Black Sheep Foundry; previously founder of Rock Star Impact and partner at Banding People Together. Host of Just a Moment, a podcast distributed by SURROUND Podcast Network. Keynote work delivered for organisations including Netflix, Verizon, Microsoft, ESPN, Hilton, Anthem, Sony Pictures and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Biography Most companies can recite their stated values. Far fewer can name the values their teams actually use when a project slips, a leader leaves or a quarter goes sideways. That gap is the working territory of Brant Menswar’s keynote practice and the through-line of his two books. The methodology has a name and a structure. Black Sheep Values are the five non-negotiable values that, in Menswar’s framing, sit underneath every meaningful decision a person or a team makes. The argument is that culture only holds when those values are explicit, shared, and used as a decision filter, rather than printed on a wall poster. Black Sheep (Page Two, 2020) introduced the framework. Designing Momentum (Wiley, 2025) applies it to how teams convert ordinary moments into compounding progress. The credentials behind the work are concrete. Menswar holds a Psychology of Leadership certification from eCornell at Cornell University, and built the consulting practice through Banding People Together and Rock Star Impact before founding Black Sheep Foundry in 2023. The client list, including Netflix, Verizon, Microsoft, ESPN, Hilton, Anthem, Sony Pictures and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, sits inside industries where culture programmes are routinely cynical, and where a generic motivational keynote does not survive the room. What separates the delivery from a standard culture talk is the craft of the room itself. Menswar spent twenty years as a recording artist before the keynote work, and the live performance discipline shows: pacing, music, structure, and a refusal to default to slide-driven exposition. The result is a session leadership teams can recall in detail months later, which is the only useful test of a culture keynote. Key speaking topics Values-based culture and the Black Sheep Values methodology Connection, trust and team vulnerability Employee engagement and retention through values alignment Leading change without losing the workforce Personal and team resilience under pressure Authenticity and identity in professional life Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers rebuilding culture after restructure, merger or rapid growth Sales, customer and client-facing leadership teams whose performance depends on trust All-employee or all-leader gatherings where the brief is engagement and connection, not strategy content Organisations using offsites to reset team norms after a period of fatigue or turnover Audience outcomes A method for naming the five non-negotiable values a team will not trade away A clearer read on why specific cultural commitments are failing in the organisation today Language and a shared frame leaders can use back at work, not just in the room A more honest conversation about trust, vulnerability and what teams owe each other