Talent Retention Strategies

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

Why organisations work with Herminia Ibarra She supplies the missing operating manual for executive transitions. Her research names the specific trap, clinging to a proven identity, that causes capable leaders to stall in bigger roles. She owns a published, citable framework. “Outsight”, the principle that leaders think their way into new behaviours by acting first, gives a leadership team a shared vocabulary it can actually use on a Monday morning. Her HBR article “The Authenticity Paradox” reframed a live boardroom debate. It is one of the few pieces of leadership writing that gives senior teams permission to experiment with styles that do not yet feel like “them”. She sits at the top of the field by external measure, not self-description. Fellow of the British Academy, multi-cycle Thinkers50 listee, 2013 Thinkers50 Leadership Award, Charles Handy Chair at LBS. She speaks to succession, sponsorship, and women’s advancement with the same empirical grounding, which matters for organisations running serious talent and inclusion agendas rather than performative ones. Biography highlights Charles Handy Professor of Organisational Behaviour, London Business School; prior faculty posts at INSEAD and Harvard Business School. Fellow of the British Academy (elected 2019). Multi-cycle Thinkers50 ranked thinker; winner of the Thinkers50 Leadership Award, 2013. Author of Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader (Harvard Business Review Press) and Working Identity (Harvard Business Press), translated into 16 languages. Judge, Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award; member, World Economic Forum Expert Network; Governor of London Business School. Ph.D. in Organisational Behaviour, Yale University (National Science Fellow). Biography Capable executives often stall in their first genuinely senior role. The research by Herminia Ibarra explains why: they try to think their way into the new job from the inside, when the only reliable route is the opposite. Act first, reflect later, and let the new behaviours gradually reshape how you see yourself. That argument, captured in her book Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader and in the “outsight” principle, is what most distinguishes her work. Her HBR article “The Authenticity Paradox” extended the case into one of the thorniest topics in executive development, how leaders can experiment with unfamiliar styles without feeling like frauds. Working Identity, her earlier book, has been translated into 16 languages and sits on the Thinkers50 Management Classics list. Ibarra holds the Charles Handy Chair at London Business School, with prior tenured posts at INSEAD and Harvard Business School. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, a multi-cycle Thinkers50 honoree, winner of the 2013 Thinkers50 Leadership Award, and a Governor of LBS. She also judges the Financial Times Business Book of the Year and sits in the World Economic Forum Expert Network. For a leadership team wrestling with succession, executive transitions, or the gap between the leader a company has and the leader it now needs, few academics anywhere offer a more precise diagnosis or a more usable set of moves. Key speaking topics Executive transitions and stepping up to bigger roles Leadership identity and the authenticity paradox Career reinvention and the “outsight” principle Leadership in the age of AI Sponsorship, succession, and women’s advancement Authentic leadership development Organisational reinvention under change Ideal for CHROs and chief talent officers redesigning executive development and succession pipelines CEOs and boards planning leadership transitions at the top team Senior leaders stepping into enterprise-wide or first-time general management roles Inclusion, sponsorship, and high-potential programmes for underrepresented senior talent Audience outcomes A clear diagnosis of why smart executives stall in bigger roles and what to do about it Language and examples for leading through a change in identity, not just a change in strategy A usable principle, “outsight”, that senior leaders can apply to their own weekly calendar A sharper view of authenticity that replaces “be yourself” with a more workable standard for growth Practical cues for building sponsorship and succession conversations that actually move careers

Why organisations work with Heather McGregor She has built the institutional machinery that other organisations cite. The Taylor Bennett Foundation, which she founded in 2008, remains a reference point for ethnic diversity in UK communications, and the 30% Club steering committee she helped found reshaped how FTSE boards talk about women’s representation. She speaks from the inside of a listed-company boardroom, not from the outside. She has served as Independent Non-Executive Director and Audit Committee member at IGT since 2017, which means her governance and risk arguments are tested against fiduciary duty. She runs a business school, having moved from Executive Dean of Edinburgh Business School to Provost and Vice Principal of Heriot-Watt University Dubai. Her view on executive development is shaped by curriculum decisions, not anecdote. She has 17 years of weekly Financial Times writing as Mrs Moneypenny behind her, plus three Penguin books on careers and personal finance. The clarity of argument is built in. A Dame and Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, with prior CBE for services to diversity. These are credentials that travel in board conversations where credibility is the constraint. Biography highlights Provost and Vice Principal, Heriot-Watt University Dubai; previously Executive Dean, Edinburgh Business School. DBE, 2023 New Year Honours, for services to education, business and heritage in Scotland; CBE, 2015, for services to business and diversity. Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Independent Non-Executive Director and Audit Committee member, International Game Technology PLC, since March 2017. Founder, Taylor Bennett Foundation; founding member, 30% Club steering committee. Financial Times columnist as Mrs Moneypenny for 17 years; author of three books published by Penguin and Portfolio. Biography The Taylor Bennett Foundation was set up in 2008 to address a specific failure: the UK communications industry was hiring from a narrow demographic and could not explain the pattern of its own succession. Heather McGregor founded it from inside her own executive search firm, alongside University of East London and Brunswick Group. It is now cited by more than 200 supporting organisations and remains one of the most concrete institutional answers to a problem most companies still describe as aspirational. That instinct to convert intent into operating practice runs through her career. She spent eight years as a sell-side analyst with ABN Amro across London, Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo, then bought and ran the executive search firm Taylor Bennett for seventeen years. Her Financial Times column under the name Mrs Moneypenny ran weekly for the same period, alongside three Penguin books on personal finance and women’s careers, including the bestselling Career Advice for Ambitious Women. In 2016 she moved into higher education as Executive Dean of Edinburgh Business School at Heriot-Watt University, and now serves as Provost and Vice Principal of the university’s Dubai campus. The portfolio also includes a non-executive directorship at IGT (now Brightstar Lottery), where she sits on the Audit Committee, and earlier work chairing Career Academies UK. The Royal Society of Edinburgh elected her a Fellow, and she was made a Dame in 2023 for services to education, business and heritage in Scotland. What she brings to a leadership room is the rare combination of practitioner, governor and educator on a single set of questions: how organisations actually promote, govern and allocate capital, and how those choices either widen the talent pool or quietly narrow it. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership and women’s progression Board governance and audit committee priorities Executive development and the modern MBA Diversity as a measurable operating outcome Personal financial literacy and women’s wealth Leadership careers across sectors and geographies Ideal for FTSE and listed-company boards, nomination and audit committees CHROs and heads of talent owning succession and diversity targets Business school audiences, MBA cohorts, executive education programmes Senior women’s leadership networks and ambitious mid-career professionals Audience outcomes A sharper sense of what diversity programmes need to look like to survive board scrutiny A working view of how governance, audit, and remuneration shape who actually rises in an organisation Practical reference points from the Taylor Bennett Foundation and 30% Club on what has and has not worked A direct read on financial literacy as a leadership capability, not a personal-finance topic Confidence to make the case for the next promotion, board seat, or capital decision

Why organisations work with Hayley Barnard Two decades advising executive boards at Microsoft, HSBC, Roche, Mercedes-Benz, Deloitte and Lidl on how inclusion changes the decisions leaders actually make about hiring and promotion. Through Mix Works, her 2025 AI and culture transformation firm, she advises leaders on responsible AI adoption and on where bias enters both human and machine decisions. Treats bias as a decision-quality problem, so leaders leave with checks they can apply in the next hiring round or AI deployment rather than a values statement. Uses her own endurance record, a solo English Channel swim and a Baffin Island traverse, as working material on decision-making under pressure. Co-designed the LeasePlan Women’s Arctic Challenge, a gender-balance campaign that ran as a verifiable all-female expedition. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Mix Diversity Developers (2014); founder and CEO, Mix Works (2025), an AI and culture transformation firm. Founder of MixLEARN, a digital DEI learning platform. Non-Executive Director, YHA; Trustee, UFI VocTech Trust (appointed March 2025). Clients include Microsoft, HSBC, Roche, Mercedes-Benz, Deloitte, Capital One, Lidl, Diageo, GSK, Virgin Media and Vodafone. Co-led the LeasePlan Women’s Arctic Challenge across Baffin Island, a DEI campaign built on a live all-female expedition. Solo English Channel swim (14h 12m, no wetsuit); 20 Bridges 46km Manhattan Island swim. Biography A hiring manager shortens a shortlist. A committee weighs two candidates for promotion. Increasingly, a screening tool ranks the first round before any human sees it. The biases that shaped those calls for decades are now being trained into the systems meant to remove them. This is the territory Hayley Barnard has worked in for two decades. As founder and CEO of Mix Diversity, the consultancy she started in 2014, she advises boards at Microsoft, HSBC, Roche, Mercedes-Benz and Lidl on inclusive leadership, unconscious bias and gender balance. The brief is operational: change how decisions get made, not add another module to the intranet. In 2025 she founded Mix Works to take that question into AI. The firm helps enterprises adopt AI responsibly and examines where bias enters automated decisions, the issue leaders now face as hiring and performance tools move into machine hands. It extends twenty years of work on human judgement into how machines make the call. Her route in was unusual. She ran Sir Chay Blyth’s Challenge Business at 23 and co-led the LeasePlan Women’s Arctic Challenge, an all-female Baffin Island traverse that doubled as the company’s gender-balance campaign. The throughline is decision-making under fatigue and pressure, the same problem on an ice cap as in a promotion committee. She has since swum the English Channel solo, no wetsuit, in 14 hours and 12 minutes. Key speaking topics Bias in human and AI-driven decisions Responsible AI adoption and governance Inclusive leadership Decision quality and fairness Gender balance and women’s leadership pipelines Leadership resilience under pressure Cross-cultural team performance Ideal for Executive boards and CEO-level teams setting direction on inclusion and on responsible AI. CHROs, CPOs and heads of talent accountable for hiring and promotion outcomes. Leadership teams introducing AI into hiring, performance or customer decisions. International Women’s Day and gender-balance programmes at enterprise scale. Audience outcomes A read on where bias enters their decisions, including the ones now made by AI tools, with the moments named. Behavioural checks leaders can apply in the next hiring or promotion cycle. Questions to ask before trusting an AI-driven hiring or performance decision. A commercial case for gender balance that holds up in a board conversation. Language to challenge inclusion theatre without stalling real change.