Talent Retention Strategies

Why organisations work with Sally Penni MBE She founded and chairs Women in the Law UK, the largest professional development network for women in the legal profession in the country, giving her firsthand evidence of what inclusion looks like when it is built as an institution rather than announced as a policy. Her authority on diversity is grounded in active legal practice at Kenworthy’s Chambers, a Bencher position at Gray’s Inn, and appointment to the International Criminal Court list of counsel. The argument carries weight because the practitioner is real. Through the Talking Law podcast she has interviewed Lord Pannick KC, Jolyon Maugham KC, the Treasury Solicitor and other figures at the top of the UK legal system, building a body of recorded conversation about leadership, culture and reform inside one of the most conservative professions. Her board portfolio spans the Royal Exchange Theatre, Arawak Walton Housing Association, the Access to Justice Foundation and a part-time judicial role at the Valuation Tribunal, so the perspective on inclusion is informed by governance experience across cultural, housing, legal and judicial settings. She was awarded an MBE specifically for diversity, social mobility and law, a recognition of practical contribution rather than profile, and one that signals to senior buyers that the work has stood up to external scrutiny. Biography highlights Practising barrister at Kenworthy’s Chambers, Manchester, specialising in criminal, employment, public, and data protection law. Founder and chair of Women in the Law UK, the professional development organisation she established in 2012. MBE for services to diversity, social mobility, and law, Queen’s Birthday Honours 2020. Two honorary doctorates in law, from Manchester Metropolitan University (2022) and the University of Salford (2023). Bencher of Gray’s Inn. Appointed to the list of counsel for the International Criminal Court. Companion of the Chartered Management Institute (CCMI) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA); author of the Talking Law book series; TEDx speaker. Host of two podcasts, Talking Law and The Law and Guidance Podcast. Talking Law features senior UK legal figures including Lord Pannick KC and the Treasury Solicitor. Non-Executive Director at the Royal Exchange Theatre and Arawak Walton Housing Association; Trustee, Access to Justice Foundation; part-time judge, Valuation Tribunal for England. Biography The legal profession is one of the most credentialled and slowest-moving institutions in British public life. It is also one of the places where the gap between stated values and lived experience is most visible. Sally Penni MBE has spent her career working that gap from the inside, as a practising barrister, an institution-builder and a public voice on what inclusion actually requires. She practises at Kenworthy’s Chambers in Manchester across criminal, employment, public and data protection law, and sits as a part-time judge on the Valuation Tribunal for England. She is a Bencher of Gray’s Inn and on the International Criminal Court list of counsel. The institutional standing matters because it is the basis on which the rest of the work is taken seriously inside the profession. In 2012 she founded Women in the Law UK, now the country’s largest professional network for women in legal practice. Her Talking Law podcast, and a second show, The Law and Guidance Podcast, have built a record of conversation with senior figures of the bar, including Lord Pannick KC and the Treasury Solicitor. Through the same network she has built a substantial body of work on women’s health at work, including menopause, and the legal duties employers carry. Outside the law she sits on boards across theatre, housing, and access to justice, including the Royal Exchange Theatre, Arawak Walton Housing Association, and the Access to Justice Foundation. That work has been recognised on its own terms. An MBE in 2020 for diversity, social mobility, and law, honorary doctorates in law from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2022 and the University of Salford in 2023, and appointment as a Companion of the Chartered Management Institute. The recognition points at one thing: a body of work that has changed institutions rather than commented on them, recorded in the Talking Law books drawn from the same conversations that built the podcast. Key speaking topics Inclusive and values-based leadership Women in leadership and the legal profession Diversity, equity and social mobility Mentorship and talent development Governance and board-level standards Wellbeing and resilience in professional careers Law, regulation and the future of the legal profession Women’s health, menopause, and the law at work Ideal for General Counsel, Chief Legal Officers and senior in-house legal teams setting standards on inclusion and culture Chief People Officers, CHROs and DEI leads designing inclusion strategy for professional and regulated workforces Boards, NEDs and chairs reviewing governance standards on diversity, social mobility and access Senior partners and managing partners at law firms, chambers and professional services firms Employers and people teams developing menopause and women’s-health policy under employment-law obligations Audience outcomes A clearer view of what inclusive leadership requires when the organisation is regulated, conservative and resistant to change Direct reference points from inside the legal profession on building durable institutions for under-represented talent A sharper standard for distinguishing inclusion as governance from inclusion as communication Practical perspective on mentoring, sponsorship and progression at senior levels A grounded view of employers’ legal duties around menopause, women’s health, and workplace inclusion, from a practising barrister rather than a consultant

Why organisations work with Laura Brown She runs the room. Six years at the helm of InStyle and a long-form interview track record from Harper’s Bazaar mean she can take a stage with a CEO, a celebrity, or a junior employee and get a real answer in front of a live audience. Her book with Kristina O’Neill, “All the Cool Girls Get Fired,” gives her a specific, named platform on what happens to senior women after a high-profile exit, which is rare content for a corporate stage. The Ladies First podcast has put her in conversation with hundreds of accomplished women across entertainment, business, and politics, which translates directly into informed moderation of women’s leadership panels and ERG events. An Australian Fashion Laureate for Lifetime Achievement and a long media career give her the standing to share a panel with founders, executives, and public figures without being out of place. Biography highlights Editor-in-Chief, InStyle, 2016 to 2022, leading print, digital, and 13 international editions. Eleven years at Harper’s Bazaar in features, special projects, and executive editor roles. Earlier roles as Senior Editor at W and Articles Director at Details. Host and creator of the “Ladies First with Laura Brown” podcast, launched at InStyle in December 2020. Co-author with Kristina O’Neill of “All the Cool Girls Get Fired” (Simon and Schuster, October 2025). Australian Fashion Laureate for Lifetime Achievement, 2019. Founder of LB Media and Chair of the Creative Council of (RED). Board member, Fashion Trust U.S. Biography The next chapter for senior women rarely arrives on schedule. Restructures and sudden exits now reach the most visible jobs in publishing, media, and corporate life, and the recovery script is unwritten. Laura Brown built her platform inside that gap. After eleven years at Harper’s Bazaar covering features, special projects, and executive editorial work, Brown took over InStyle in 2016 and ran the brand across print, digital, and thirteen international editions until early 2022. The “Ladies First with Laura Brown” podcast, launched at InStyle in December 2020, became the long-form home for her interviews with women across entertainment, business, and activism. The 2025 book “All the Cool Girls Get Fired,” co-authored with Kristina O’Neill and published by Simon and Schuster, turned that work into a direct argument: high-profile firings happen to capable people, and reinvention is a craft, not a consolation prize. Industry recognition includes the Australian Fashion Laureate for Lifetime Achievement in 2019. She now runs LB Media, chairs the Creative Council of (RED), and sits on the board of Fashion Trust U.S. Audiences book her for what she still does best on a stage: interview, moderate, and host candid conversation with the people in the room. Key speaking topics Women’s leadership and advancement Career reinvention after a senior exit Media, publishing, and the editor’s craft On-stage interviewing and event hosting Inclusion and representation in consumer brands Building a personal platform in a fragmented media landscape Ideal for CHRO and DEI leads programming women’s leadership and ERG events Conference organisers seeking a moderator or interviewer for a marquee session Brand and marketing leaders running consumer-facing fireside chats Executive coaching cohorts focused on senior women navigating career transitions Audience outcomes A clearer view of what reinvention looks like for senior women after an unwanted exit Practical perspective on building a public platform without an institution behind you Honest reference points from inside global media on inclusion, representation, and brand voice A live conversation that lands with real answers, not rehearsed talking points

Why organisations work with Maria Luisa Mariscal de Körner She addresses migrant and diaspora communities as both a workforce question and a consumer market, the two halves most diversity speakers and most marketing speakers each cover only one of. In her work the talent function and the brand function share a single conversation, which is rare. As a German immigration lawyer (Dr. iur.), she advises employers on what changed under the 2026 update to the Skilled Immigration Act: higher EU Blue Card salary thresholds and tighter compliance duties, translated into hiring decisions rather than general legal commentary. Operating experience in market entry, not analysis from outside the process. Her consultancy has advised foreign companies establishing operations in Germany, and German employers recruiting internationally, since 2014. A legally grounded case that cultural difference creates value twice over: in the workforce a company builds and in the market it sells to. Biography highlights Doctorate in law (Dr. iur.) with a focus on economics, diversity, and law, from the University of Würzburg; LL.M. in German and international law (magna cum laude); study in Bolivia and Germany. University lecturer since 2008 across nine institutions on three continents, in law and in business and innovation-management programmes. Founder since 2014 of Malu Mariscal, Innovation und Vielfalt, advising on market entry into Germany, international recruiting, and diversity and intercultural management. Author of four specialist and academic books and the bilingual children’s book “Der Herrscher der Berge: Eine unglaubliche Reise”, which addresses prejudice and difference. Co-founder of a migrant women’s network in Germany and initiator of free legal-advice services at universities. Winner of the first Bavarian Integration Award (Bayerischer Integrationspreis, 2012), as part of the Würzburg theatre group Tschungulung, recognised by the Bavarian Landtag and Integration Council. Works with a network of more than 200 advisors and freelancers across three continents; presents in German, English, and Spanish. Biography Most organisations treat migration as one problem: a recruiting and integration task solved once, at the point of hire. But the same communities a company recruits from are also markets it sells to, and the two functions almost never share data or a strategy. Maria Luisa Mariscal de Körner works on that gap. She is a German immigration lawyer and a Dr. iur. from the University of Würzburg. Her doctorate focused on economics, diversity, and law, and she holds an LL.M. in German and international law. Her field is foreign law, immigration law, integration, and mediation, which she has taught since 2008 at nine institutions on three continents, including in business and innovation-management programmes. That grounding carries into current practice. The 2026 update to the Skilled Immigration Act raised EU Blue Card salary thresholds and tightened employer compliance, and her consultancy, Malu Mariscal, Innovation und Vielfalt, advises foreign companies entering Germany and German employers recruiting internationally on what those rules mean operationally. She works with a network of more than 200 advisors and freelancers across three continents. Her argument to leaders is concrete: cultural difference creates value in two directions at once, in the workforce a company builds and in the market it sells to. It does so only when the organisation removes the legal and cultural friction that keeps both at the edges. Key speaking topics The diaspora dividend: migration as workforce and as market Skilled-worker immigration law and employer compliance under the 2026 Fachkräfteeinwanderungsgesetz Market entry into Germany: where international companies actually fail Diversity as an innovation lever, not a compliance line Leading multicultural, multigenerational teams in the AI era Ideal for CHROs and heads of talent acquisition internationalising the workforce Marketing and brand leaders weighing diaspora and migrant communities as consumer markets Boards and executive teams in German-speaking markets reviewing international hiring strategy DEI leads who need a partner grounded in legal and economic detail, not awareness training Audience outcomes A single operating view of diaspora communities across talent and marketing, instead of two separate HR and brand problems A read on what the 2026 Skilled Immigration Act changes mean for their own hiring decisions, not just their legal team’s The specific points where international companies fail entering the German market, and the legal and cultural reasons why A legal and economic case for cultural difference as an innovation driver, distinct from a compliance argument

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 Caitriona Ellis She connects employee financial wellness directly to retention, giving HR and reward leaders a way to frame money support as a workforce outcome rather than a soft benefit. Her credentials as a qualified financial adviser mean the content stands up to scrutiny, which matters when an employer is putting financial guidance in front of staff. She speaks from a first-person recovery from serious financial difficulty, so audiences who feel quietly ashamed about money see someone credible who has been where they are. Her corporate sessions carry no product sales or advice agenda, which lets an employer put financial guidance in front of staff without the conflict of interest that adviser-led content usually brings. Biography highlights Qualified financial adviser with an honours Commerce degree and a career background in the banking sector. Founder of the Financial Wellness Academy, running structured financial wellbeing programmes for individuals and organisations. Buy-to-let property investor who acquired six properties remotely in the North East of England within a single 12-month period. Fellow of the National Estate Agents Association, with a Level 4 qualification in Residential Estate Agency. Delivers keynotes, workshops, and financial wellbeing programmes to employers, behaviour-led and free of any product or advice agenda. Regular speaker and podcast guest on financial wellness, including Institute of Directors International Women’s Day events and International Women Connected. Biography Money is the wellbeing problem most employers leave out. Mental health and physical health have a place in the corporate programme; financial anxiety, which sits underneath both, usually does not. Caitriona Ellis built her work in that gap, founding the Financial Wellness Academy to bring structured financial education to people who carry money stress quietly. Her authority rests on two things that rarely sit together. She is a qualified financial adviser with an honours Commerce degree and a banking background, so the technical content is sound. She has also worked her own way out of serious financial difficulty, which is why audiences who feel exposed about money tend to trust her rather than tune out. That credibility extends into practice. She is an active buy-to-let property investor who acquired six properties remotely in the North East of England inside a year, and a Fellow of the National Estate Agents Association. Her corporate sessions carry no product sales or advice agenda, so an employer can offer staff real financial guidance without the conflict that adviser-led content invites. For an organisation, the argument she makes is concrete: employees who feel in control of their money are easier to keep. She frames financial wellbeing as a retention lever, the part of the employee relationship that engagement surveys miss and exit interviews reveal too late. Key speaking topics Employee financial wellbeing Financial literacy and money confidence Financial wellbeing and staff retention Women and money Personal resilience and financial recovery Property investment and income diversification Ideal for CHROs, reward, and benefits leaders building or reviewing an employee wellbeing programme. Employee resource groups and women’s networks running financial confidence sessions. Organisations whose staff are visibly affected by cost-of-living pressure and financial stress. Audience outcomes Audiences leave able to name the first practical steps to take control of their own finances, regardless of starting point. Employees who felt isolated about money see that the problem is common and addressable, lowering the shame that keeps it hidden. HR and reward attendees leave with a clearer case for treating financial wellbeing as a retention issue, not a perk. Audiences gain a basic working understanding of income diversification and longer-term financial planning.

Why organisations work with Emilie Bellet She has built one of the UK’s largest women-focused financial education communities from scratch, which gives her a live read on what employees actually ask, avoid and misunderstand about money. She pairs a Lehman Brothers and Trilantic private equity background with a mass-market book and weekly podcast, so she can move between a CFO audience and a shop-floor audience without shifting register. Her work gives employers a concrete way to connect financial wellbeing, pay equity and retention of senior women, three agendas that are usually owned by different teams and rarely joined up. She is a named voice in the UK financial media (Financial Times, The i Paper, Vogue, BBC), which makes her credible to finance services clients where brand risk around money content is high. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Vestpod, a financial education platform and community for women. Author of “You’re Not Broke, You’re Pre-Rich” (Octopus / Little, Brown) and contributor to “The WealthTech Book” (Wiley). Host of “The Wallet”, a weekly personal finance podcast. Columnist for the Financial Times and The i Paper; featured in Vogue, Forbes, BBC, The Guardian, Stylist and Courier. Former private equity professional at Lehman Brothers Merchant Banking and Trilantic Capital Partners, London. Named in the Women in FinTech Powerlist (Rising Stars) and shortlisted for Disruptor of the Year at the Women in Finance Awards. Biography Most financial education inside large employers stops at pensions and payroll. It rarely answers the questions people actually carry into Monday morning: how to invest a first bonus, whether to buy, how to talk about money with a partner, what to do with a redundancy package. Vestpod was built to close that gap, and it has become one of the UK’s most engaged communities on women and money. The founder’s route in is unusual. Emilie spent seven years in private equity at Lehman Brothers Merchant Banking and Trilantic Capital Partners in London before leaving the buy-side to build a platform she felt the market was not serving. That background matters for corporate audiences because she is not a lifestyle commentator, she is a former investor who now translates institutional finance into language a general workforce can use. The work has two sides that employers buy together. “You’re Not Broke, You’re Pre-Rich”, published by Octopus, codified the personal finance curriculum; the weekly newsletter, The Wallet podcast and Money Matters festival keep it current. Inside companies, that content becomes workshops on investing basics, the gender wealth gap and financial confidence, delivered for names including Amazon, BCG, Coutts, NatWest and Palo Alto Networks. Her media footprint is the credibility backstop. Regular columns in the Financial Times and The i Paper, plus coverage in Vogue, Forbes, BBC and The Guardian, put her in front of the audience senior HR and DEI teams are trying to reach, and give risk-sensitive financial services clients a known name they can put on a programme. Key speaking topics Women and wealth Financial wellbeing in the workplace The gender wealth and investment gap Personal finance and investing fundamentals Financial confidence and money mindset WealthTech and financial inclusion Entrepreneurship and building a consumer brand Ideal for CHROs and heads of reward designing financial wellbeing into benefits strategy DEI and women’s network leads who need content beyond mentoring and panels Financial services and WealthTech firms running client-facing events for women investors Internal International Women’s Day, Financial Wellness Month and employee festival programmes Audience outcomes A clear picture of where the gender wealth gap comes from and which levers an employer can actually pull Specific language and frameworks employees can use to take the next step on saving, investing or debt Renewed confidence to engage with pension, share scheme and investment decisions that many defer by default A sharper internal case for treating financial wellbeing as part of retention and inclusion strategy, not a standalone perk

Why organisations work with Keely Cat-Wells She has built and sold the category. C Talent, the agency she founded in 2018, was acquired by Whalar in 2022 and remains the largest exit of a Disabled-led talent business in the sector. Her current company, Making Space, gives leaders an operating model rather than a manifesto: an employer-backed training and acquisition platform with reported lifetime earnings gains of more than $1.1M per learner. She speaks from inside the boardroom conversation, not next to it. As a Presidential Leadership Scholar, Obama Leader USA, and Forbes contributor, she carries credibility with executive audiences who are tired of generic DEI framing. She connects representation in media to talent strategy in the workforce, drawing on a roster that has placed Disabled creators in projects including The Last of Us, Avatar, and The Hunger Games. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Making Space, a venture-backed talent acquisition and learning platform for Disabled professionals. Founder of C Talent, acquired by Whalar in 2022. Co-founder, Making Space Media, with a first-look deal at Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine. 2025 Presidential Leadership Scholar, 2025 Obama Leader USA, inaugural Gloria Steinem Fellow. L’Oreal Paris 2025 Women of Worth, Forbes 30 Under 30, Diana Award, One Young World Entrepreneur of the Year 2022. Forbes contributor on disability, entrepreneurship, and inclusive workforce strategy. Biography The Disabled talent pool is one of the largest underused labour markets in the global economy. Most companies do not have a working strategy for reaching it. Keely Cat-Wells builds the infrastructure that closes that gap. She founded C Talent in 2018 after disability discrimination ended an early career in performing arts. The agency grew into the most prominent home for Deaf and Disabled creators in entertainment, placing talent in The Last of Us, Avatar, and The Hunger Games before being acquired by Whalar in 2022. It remains the largest exit of a Disabled-led talent business in the industry. Making Space, founded in 2023, is the operator-led answer to a different question: how do enterprise employers actually hire and retain Disabled professionals at scale. The platform pairs employer-backed training with talent acquisition, and closed a $2M pre-seed round led by Beta Boom in 2024. Its Ascend program reports projected lifetime earnings gains of more than $1.1M per participant. Cat-Wells writes for Forbes, sits on disability-focused boards, and was named the youngest Presidential Leadership Scholar in the program’s history. Her recognitions include the Diana Award, Forbes 30 Under 30, L’Oreal Paris Women of Worth, and Gloria Steinem Fellow. The credentials matter, but the harder evidence is the line item her work creates on a hiring scorecard. Key speaking topics Disability and workforce strategy Hiring and retaining Disabled professionals Inclusive talent acquisition platforms Representation in media and entertainment Building and scaling mission-led ventures Hidden disabilities in the workplace Founder experience in inclusive entrepreneurship Ideal for CHROs and heads of talent acquisition rebuilding disability hiring strategy Chief diversity and inclusion officers moving from awareness work to operational outcomes Boards and ELTs reviewing workforce, ESG, and human capital reporting Media, entertainment, and creative leaders accountable for on-screen and off-screen representation Audience outcomes A clearer view of where disability inclusion programmes break in practice and what to fix first. Specific tactics for sourcing, onboarding, and retaining Disabled professionals at enterprise scale. A founder’s view of how to translate inclusion strategy into measurable economic outcomes. Language and evidence senior leaders can use with their own boards on disability as a workforce issue.

Why organisations work with Meridith Elliott Powell A researched 9-Step Formula for Thriving in Uncertainty, drawn from a study of nine companies that have survived since the late 1700s through wars, depressions, and pandemics. The framework gives sales and leadership teams a repeatable playbook rather than a motivational prompt. Twenty-five years of operating experience across banking, healthcare, and finance, including C-suite roles. The advice lands with sales leaders because it was built inside the function, not observed from outside it. Inducted into the National Speakers Association Speaker Hall of Fame (CPAE) in 2022, an award restricted to a small number of speakers globally. A credential that buyers recognise as a quality bar. A body of work that connects three commercial problems most organisations treat separately: sales performance, leadership development, and succession planning. Useful when a sponsor wants a single voice across a sales kickoff, a leadership offsite, and a board session. Biography highlights Inducted into the National Speakers Association Speaker Hall of Fame (CPAE Council of Peers Award for Excellence), 2022 Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), held by fewer than twelve percent of professional speakers globally Author of Thrive: Strategies to Turn Uncertainty to Competitive Advantage, Gold Award winner, Nonfiction Authors Association Author of Who Comes Next? Leadership Succession Planning Made Easy and co-author of The Best Sales Book Ever with Connie Podesta Member of the Forbes Coaching Council LinkedIn Learning instructor, including “Personalizing Your Customer’s Buying Experience” Biography Most sales playbooks assume the operating environment is broadly stable. Powell’s research started from the opposite premise. She studied nine companies founded in the late 1700s and early 1800s that have survived wars, depressions, financial crises, and pandemics, and reverse-engineered what those companies did consistently that newer competitors did not. The output is her 9-Step Formula for Thriving in Uncertainty, set out in Thrive: Strategies to Turn Uncertainty to Competitive Advantage, which won a Gold Award from the Nonfiction Authors Association. That research sits on top of twenty-five years of operating experience in banking, healthcare, and finance, including C-suite roles. The framework was built for sales leaders and general managers who own a number, not for a leadership-development audience. The practical claim is straightforward. Uncertainty is not a phase to wait out; it is the structural condition under which growth has to happen, and organisations that accept that can take share from competitors who are still waiting. Powell’s wider body of work extends the thesis into adjacent commercial problems. Who Comes Next? Leadership Succession Planning Made Easy addresses the pipeline problem most sales and leadership teams under-invest in until it becomes urgent. The Best Sales Book Ever, co-authored with Connie Podesta, sets out the seller behaviours that survive volatile markets. Her LinkedIn Learning courses, including “Personalizing Your Customer’s Buying Experience”, carry the same operational register into shorter-format material. The recognition is consistent with the work. Powell holds the Certified Speaking Professional designation, sits on the Forbes Coaching Council, and was inducted into the National Speakers Association Speaker Hall of Fame in 2022, a credential held by a small number of speakers globally and one buyers use as a quality filter when commissioning sales and leadership keynotes. Key speaking topics Sales strategy in uncertain markets Business growth and competitive advantage Leadership succession and pipeline development Sales team performance and culture Resilience and mental toughness in commercial roles Customer experience and buyer behaviour Ideal for Chief revenue officers, sales directors, and commercial leadership teams running national or global sales kickoffs CEOs and executive teams setting growth strategy under volatile demand conditions HR and talent leaders responsible for leadership succession in commercial functions Industry associations in banking, financial services, healthcare, and distribution sectors Audience outcomes A named nine-step framework for turning uncertainty into a source of competitive advantage, tied to real company evidence Specific commercial behaviours sales teams can adopt when the macro environment is working against them A succession-planning lens leaders can apply to the next eighteen months, not the next five years Sharper language for talking to customers when buying decisions are slower and more conservative

Why organisations work with Samantha Clarke Treats workplace wellbeing as a design problem. Her Masters-level training in Neuroaesthetics and Global Innovation Design gives her a scientific framework for how physical space and sensory conditions shape performance. It is territory most workplace wellbeing consultants never enter. Teaches regularly at three distinct platforms: The School of Life, Simon Sinek’s Inspire U, and The Guardian Masterclasses. The material has been refined across years of teaching, not just delivered on a speaker circuit. Author of Love It Or Leave It: How to Be Happy at Work (Octopus Publishing Group, 2020). The book sets out a framework for career fit decisions that HR leaders have used to structure retention and talent development conversations with senior talent. Qualified as a Bhutanese Gross National Happiness Facilitator, one of few workplace speakers with formal training in a non-Western model of measuring wellbeing. The credential brings practical weight to what otherwise risks becoming a philosophical conversation about happiness at work. Client roster includes JP Morgan, LVMH, Accenture, Samsung and Pinterest. The work holds up in performance-first cultures where wellbeing programmes are often treated with suspicion. Biography highlights Author of Love It Or Leave It: How to Be Happy at Work (Octopus Publishing Group, 2020) TEDx speaker, “Are You Ready to Break Up With Work?” (TEDxRoyalTunbridgeWells) Faculty lecturer at The School of Life; lecturer and facilitator at Simon Sinek’s Inspire U platform; facilitator for The Guardian Masterclasses Masters-level training in Neuroaesthetics and Global Innovation Design for Social Change; qualified Bhutanese Gross National Happiness Facilitator; MIT training in Neuroscience for Business; ICF-accredited Co-Active and ORSC coach Appeared in conversation with Hillary Rodham Clinton and Angela Duckworth at the Hillary Rodham Clinton Global Challenges Summit Featured in Forbes, Fast Company, Monocle, Stylist, Harper’s Bazaar, Psychologies, Evening Standard, BBC Woman’s Hour and BBC Radio 4 Client work across JP Morgan, LVMH, Accenture, Samsung, Pinterest, Unilever, Nespresso, ITV and the NHS Biography Organisations spend more on wellbeing than at any point in their history, and employee engagement keeps falling. The gap between intention and outcome is where Samantha Clarke works. She treats wellbeing as a design problem: something shaped by how work is structured, led and experienced, before any programme begins. Her methodology draws on neuroaesthetics, coaching practice and positive psychology. The Masters-level training in Neuroaesthetics and Global Innovation Design equipped her to think about how physical space and sensory design shape cognitive and emotional capacity. A Bhutanese Gross National Happiness Facilitator qualification adds a non-Western model for measuring wellbeing; MIT Neuroscience for Business adds the biological layer. She teaches at The School of Life as a faculty lecturer, and runs programmes for Simon Sinek’s Inspire U platform and The Guardian Masterclasses. Her TEDx talk “Are You Ready to Break Up With Work?” takes the central question to a wider audience. Her book Love It Or Leave It: How to Be Happy at Work (Octopus, 2020) takes the same argument to individuals: a framework for deciding whether a role still fits. The material on resilience and sustainable performance also draws on her lived experience of sickle cell anaemia and chronic pain. That experience is the reason her work on stress and burnout sits on a different foundation from motivational treatment of the same topics. Clients including JP Morgan, LVMH, Accenture, Samsung, Pinterest, Unilever, Nespresso and the NHS have brought her into senior teams where those topics matter. Key speaking topics Workplace wellbeing and culture design Happiness and fulfilment at work Burnout prevention and sustainable performance Employee engagement and retention Leadership in change and transition Resilience and stress management Neuroaesthetics and workplace environment design Ideal for CHROs and People leaders reviewing wellbeing and engagement strategy Senior leadership teams addressing burnout and retention in high-performance environments Culture and transformation leads designing new operating rhythms HR directors shifting from programme-led to design-led wellbeing Audience outcomes Specific reasons their wellbeing initiatives have failed to improve engagement, and what is missing Language to distinguish wellbeing-as-benefit from wellbeing-as-design inside their own organisation Methods to identify signature drop-off points in the employee experience before those become attrition problems Rhythms leaders can install in their own teams without adding another programme layer A sharper view of when individual performance issues are in fact organisational design issues

Why organisations work with Chris Roebuck He designed and ran the leadership programme for UBS’s top 500 that is now taught at Harvard Business School as UBS: Towards the Integrated Firm. Few speakers can point to a live HBS case as evidence that their approach works at scale. He coined the corporate application of entrepreneurial leadership and has spent twenty years refining it in banks, government, healthcare, and the military. The Wikipedia entry on entrepreneurial leadership cites his definition. He operates as a practitioner first and a speaker second: former British Army officer, Head of Management Development at HSBC Investment Bank, Global Head of Leadership at UBS, Head of Culture Change at London Underground. The credibility in a boardroom is built in. HR Magazine named him one of HR’s Most Influential Thinkers ten times between 2009 and 2021, and inducted him into the HR Hall of Fame in 2025. That is the longest sustained recognition of any thinker on the list. Biography highlights Global Head of Leadership and Talent, UBS (2004 onward), leading the development programme for the bank’s top 500 leaders that became Harvard Business School case UBS: Towards the Integrated Firm Honorary Visiting Professor of Transformational Leadership, Cass Business School (2009–2021, the institution later rebranded Bayes) Inducted into the HR Hall of Fame by HR Magazine, July 2025; named one of HR’s Most Influential Thinkers ten times between 2009 and 2021, a record on the list Author of five leadership books, including Lead to Succeed (2014) and Strategic Leadership Development, co-authored with Professor Colin Carnall Expert panel member for the UK Government’s Engaging for Success review (2009), and author of The King’s Fund report on NHS leadership (2011) Contributor to Newsweek; quoted on leadership and organisational performance in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review China; 350+ television interviews across BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, Sky, and Al Jazeera Biography UBS between 2002 and 2006 is a useful place to start. A newly integrated global bank, 70,000 staff, a top team of 500 whose behaviour had to shift if the merger was going to hold. Chris Roebuck was the person, as Global Head of Leadership and Talent, who designed and ran the programme that got that behavioural shift. The work is now a Harvard Business School case study, UBS: Towards the Integrated Firm, and it is where the concept of entrepreneurial leadership, taking the behaviours of successful entrepreneurs and transplanting them into a large corporate, was first systematically applied in the corporate world. That practitioner record sits behind everything he now says from a stage. Before UBS, he was Head of Management Development at HSBC Investment Bank and ran culture change at London Underground during the partial privatisation. After UBS, he was commissioned by The King’s Fund to report to the UK Government on leadership in the NHS, and sat on the expert panel behind Engaging for Success, the UK Government’s review of employee engagement. He was Honorary Visiting Professor of Transformational Leadership at Cass Business School, now Bayes, from 2009 to 2021. The argument Roebuck brings to senior audiences is a hard one, because it refuses the usual levers. He tells leaders that the performance they are looking for is not hiding in a new strategy, a new tech stack, or a restructure. It is hiding in the way their top 200 people behave on a Tuesday morning. His Accelerate Your Success approach is built to make that behavioural gap visible, then close it, with the bottom line as the test. HR Magazine has named him one of its Most Influential Thinkers ten times; in July 2025 it inducted him into the HR Hall of Fame. The rare thing he does is connect that leadership argument to hard numbers. He is a trained economist, not a behavioural coach; he served as an officer in the British Army before moving into business; he has run programmes inside a global bank, the UK Civil Service, and a 1.4-million-person healthcare system. When he says ten percent of organisational performance is sitting unused, the claim is backed by work done at UBS, in the NHS, and at KPMG rather than by a slide deck. Key speaking topics Leadership during integration, transformation, and culture change Entrepreneurial leadership in large organisations Senior team behaviour and executive performance Talent identification and leadership pipelines Employee engagement as an organisational lever Leadership in conditions of uncertainty Human leadership in the AI era Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and C-suite teams running integrations, post-merger transformations, or major operating model change CHROs and Chief People Officers building a leadership and talent strategy that senior business leaders will take seriously Board and executive committee offsites where the subject is how top leadership needs to behave differently for the organisation to perform Public sector and military audiences looking at leadership reform in large, complex institutions Audience outcomes A clear view of where performance is being lost inside their own organisation, and which leadership behaviours are causing it The specific mechanics of how entrepreneurial leadership was built at UBS, and which elements transfer to their own sector A short set of actions senior leaders can take in the weeks after the session, tied to business outcomes rather than general development A more useful language for talking about leadership with their board, their HR function, and their top 100

Why organisations work with Lecyca Curiel A first-person Gen Z voice grounded in anthropological field research, rather than a marketing-agency reading of survey data. Affiliation with WHETSTON, the Dutch strategic foresight house that briefs senior leaders across Europe, gives her work analytical weight beyond the usual “young person on stage” booking. Track record of putting the Gen Z question in front of buyers who are unusually demanding: Walmart international executives, Google marketing managers, the European Parliament Youth Outreach Unit, BDO Norway. Recognised by Het Financieele Dagblad in its 2019 list of 50 most promising young talents in the Netherlands, a credential that signals she was taken seriously inside Dutch business media before the speaking circuit picked her up. Brings an inclusion lens shaped by Indonesian and Dutch Caribbean heritage and a Humanity in Action fellowship, so DEI inside her sessions reads as substance, not decoration. Biography highlights Generation Z researcher and keynote speaker with WHETSTON, the strategic foresight think tank founded by Thimon de Jong. Selected by Het Financieele Dagblad as one of 50 promising young talents in the Netherlands, 2019. Studied Liberal Arts and Sciences with a Cultural Anthropology focus at Erasmus University College, Rotterdam. 2019 Amsterdam Fellow with Humanity in Action; co-author of an action project on inclusive Dutch national remembrance. Speaking clients include Walmart, Google, the European Parliament Youth Outreach Unit, BDO Norway, FRED Leadership Forum, and Institute for the Future. Working anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, with projects on cultural heritage, decolonisation, and intergenerational memory. Biography Generation Z is the first cohort that grew up entirely inside the platforms most companies are still learning to manage. The numbers are familiar to any CHRO. The interpretation of those numbers, almost without exception, is filtered through people who are not part of the cohort. Lecyca Curiel works on the other side of that filter. She joined WHETSTON, the Amsterdam-based strategic foresight think tank founded by Thimon de Jong, after he scouted her at age seventeen following a public talk at the IMC Weekendschool. She has been delivering keynote work and strategic research for the firm since, with clients that include Walmart international executives, Google marketing managers, the European Parliament Youth Outreach Unit, BDO Norway, and FRED Leadership Forum. Het Financieele Dagblad named her one of 50 promising young talents in the Netherlands in 2019. Her academic grounding is in Cultural Anthropology at Erasmus University College, and she works in parallel as a documentary filmmaker on questions of heritage, memory, and decolonisation. As a 2019 Amsterdam Fellow with Humanity in Action she co-led a project on whether Dutch national remembrance is genuinely inclusive. The combination matters in the room. When she discusses what young employees actually want from work, it lands as field observation, not opinion. The argument she brings to leadership teams is narrower and harder than the usual generational keynote. Stereotypes about Gen Z are inexpensive to repeat and expensive to act on. What organisations need, on her reading, is a working model of intergenerational collaboration that makes sense to a 58-year-old executive and a 24-year-old engineer in the same conversation. That is the work she does on stage and in the strategy rooms WHETSTON is invited into. Key speaking topics Generation Z in the workforce Intergenerational collaboration Diversity, equity and inclusion from a Gen Z perspective Mental health across generations Future of work and talent retention Strategic foresight on cultural and demographic change Ideal for CHROs and heads of talent designing retention and engagement strategy for a multigenerational workforce. Boards and executive committees stress-testing assumptions about younger consumers and younger employees. DEI leads moving from awareness programmes to operational change. Leadership development teams building cross-generational management capability. Audience outcomes A clearer, evidence-based picture of what Gen Z employees and consumers actually expect, sourced from inside the cohort. Specific entry points for retention and engagement work in organisations with four or five active generations. A working language for intergenerational conversations that does not collapse into stereotype. A sharper read on where DEI commitments stall between stated policy and daily management.

Why organisations work with Debra Corey She built the Engagement Bridge, a ten-element model set out in Build It (Wiley, 2018) and road-tested across Reward Gateway’s client base. It gives HR and executive teams a shared diagnostic for where engagement is actually breaking. Her Bad Bosses Ruin Lives work names ten specific manager archetypes and the behaviours that produce them. It gives senior leaders a way to talk about poor management without it becoming personal. She has sat in the seat, twenty-plus years of senior HR roles at Gap Inc., Honeywell, Quintiles, Merlin Entertainments, and Reward Gateway. The case studies she uses are operational, not theoretical. HR Magazine ranked her on its Most Influential Thinkers list in 2021, and Inspiring Workplaces has named her on its Top 101 Global Employee Engagement Influencers list for multiple years running. She writes and speaks as a practitioner. Her six books give leadership teams a common vocabulary for engagement, recognition, values, and HR communication that outlasts the keynote. Biography highlights Author or co-author of six books on engagement, recognition, values, leadership, and HR communication, published with Wiley and Kogan Page among others. Creator of the Engagement Bridge model and the Great Boss Building Block framework. Former senior HR leader at Gap Inc., Honeywell, Quintiles, Merlin Entertainments, and Reward Gateway. Founder of DebCo HR Ltd (operating as Step It Up HR), established 2019. Ranked on HR Magazine’s HR Most Influential Thinkers list in 2021. Named Employee Benefits Professional of the Year by Employee Benefits Magazine. Biography Most organisations know their engagement scores are soft. Fewer can say where the break is, whether it sits in recognition, in values, in manager behaviour, or in how HR itself communicates. Debra Corey’s working career has been spent inside that diagnostic question. Twenty-plus years in senior HR at Gap Inc., Honeywell, Quintiles, Merlin Entertainments, and Reward Gateway gave her a view across retail, pharma, manufacturing, hospitality, and HR tech. In 2019 she left corporate life and founded DebCo HR, operating as Step It Up HR, to work on the same problem from the outside. The Engagement Bridge model, set out in Build It: The Rebel Playbook for World-Class Employee Engagement (Wiley, 2018, with Glenn Elliott), is the framework most associated with her. It breaks engagement into ten concrete elements, from purpose and reward through to manager behaviour, and gives HR and executive teams a shared way to identify which element is actually failing. Her later books push into specific pieces of that terrain: Appreciate It! on recognition, Bringing Your Values Out to Play on operationalising values, and Bad Bosses Ruin Lives (2023, with Ken Corey) on the ten archetypes of poor management. HR Magazine placed her on its Most Influential Thinkers list in 2021, and she has featured repeatedly on Inspiring Workplaces’ Top 101 Global Employee Engagement Influencers list. The through-line across the books, the consultancy, and the speaking is narrow and deliberate: make the gap between HR design and daily behaviour smaller. Key speaking topics Employee engagement and the Engagement Bridge model Employee recognition and appreciation Organisational values in practice Manager effectiveness and the Great Boss Building Block Workplace culture and employee experience HR communication and the IMPACT model Ideal for CHROs, Reward Directors, and People and Culture leads designing or resetting engagement and recognition programmes Executive teams where engagement or culture scores have stalled and the board wants a diagnostic, not a pep talk Organisations rolling out revised values or manager-capability frameworks and needing external credibility behind the launch HR conferences, leadership off-sites, and people-manager summits where the audience is operational, not theoretical Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for engagement rooted in the ten elements of the Engagement Bridge A working view of where recognition programmes typically fail and what a working one looks like A practical read on the ten bad-boss archetypes and the behaviours that produce each A method for moving organisational values from poster to operating practice Named examples from Gap, Honeywell, Merlin Entertainments, Reward Gateway, and the wider client base in her books