Talent Retention Strategies speakers

Why organisations work with Stephen M. R. Covey He treats trust as a measurable economic input, not a cultural sentiment. The Speed of Trust sets out a framework, the 4 cores and 13 behaviors, that converts trust into quantifiable effects on speed and cost. His operating record gives the argument weight. As President and CEO of Covey Leadership Center, he grew the firm into the largest leadership development company in the world before its integration with Franklin Quest, with publisher sources citing a sixty-seven-fold increase in shareholder value during his tenure. Trust & Inspire gives senior leaders explicit operating content for the shift away from command and control, a transition that has been described in management literature for decades but rarely defined in practical terms. He writes from inside the discipline, not outside it. He leads FranklinCovey’s Global Speed of Trust Practice and has worked with organisations across business, government, military, education, healthcare, and NGOs in more than fifty countries. His authority on the subject is independently recognised. Trust Across America/Trust Around the World awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award for “Top Thought Leaders in Trust”. Biography highlights Author of The Speed of Trust, New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller, translated into 22 languages, over 2 million copies sold (Simon & Schuster). Author of Trust & Inspire, Wall Street Journal bestseller, named #1 Leadership Book of 2022 by the Outstanding Work of Literature Awards. Former President and CEO of Covey Leadership Center, which under his leadership became the largest leadership development firm in the world. Co-founder and current leader of FranklinCovey’s Global Speed of Trust Practice; co-founder of CoveyLink Worldwide. Harvard MBA. Has taught trust and leadership in over fifty countries to business, government, military, education, healthcare, and NGO audiences. Lifetime Achievement Award for “Top Thought Leaders in Trust” from Trust Across America/Trust Around the World. Biography Trust is usually treated as the residue of culture, something an organisation either has or does not have. The Speed of Trust argues the opposite: trust is an economic variable, with direct and measurable effects on the speed at which work moves and the cost at which it gets done. The book has sold more than two million copies and been translated into 22 languages, and it remains the reference work in the field. The author is Stephen M. R. Covey. Before he wrote it, he ran the company that taught his father’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to the world. As President and CEO of Covey Leadership Center, he led the strategy that turned the firm into the largest leadership development company in the world; publisher records cite a sixty-seven-fold increase in shareholder value during his tenure. The credibility of his trust thesis sits on that operating record. His second book, Trust & Inspire, takes the argument into leadership style. The case is direct: command and control was an industrial-age design, and most organisations still use it without naming it. Trust and Inspire describes the alternative in operating terms, not in slogans. The book was a Wall Street Journal bestseller and was named #1 Leadership Book of 2022 by the Outstanding Work of Literature Awards. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, leads FranklinCovey’s Global Speed of Trust Practice, and has taught the work in more than fifty countries across business, government, military, education, healthcare, and NGO settings. Trust Across America/Trust Around the World awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award for “Top Thought Leaders in Trust”, recognition from the body that has tracked the discipline for the longest. Key speaking topics Organisational trust Trust as a driver of speed and cost Trust-based leadership The 4 cores and 13 behaviors of high-trust leaders The shift from command and control to trust and inspire Leadership credibility High-trust culture and organisational performance Ideal for CEOs, executive teams, and boards setting the leadership tone for the organisation CHROs and chief people officers redesigning leadership development and culture programmes Transformation, M&A, and post-restructure leaders rebuilding credibility with employees and stakeholders Senior leadership conferences, partner meetings, and government leadership audiences Audience outcomes A working definition of trust as an economic variable, with named effects on the speed and cost of execution The 4 cores and 13 behaviors framework for diagnosing where trust is being earned, eroded, or paid for A clear distinction between command and control leadership and trust and inspire leadership, with operating content for the shift Specific moves for extending, restoring, and embedding trust at the team, organisation, and stakeholder levels A language senior leaders can use with their teams to make trust an explicit competency in hiring, promotion, and performance

Why organisations work with Stew Friedman Total Leadership is one of the few leadership methods built inside a Fortune 10 operating environment, Ford Motor Company, and then road-tested through a top-five business school for two decades. It has the rigour of academic work and the realism of factory-floor change. He gives executive teams a usable language for the trade-off they actually face, which is not work versus life but performance under pressure versus depletion of the people delivering it. His framework converts a soft topic into a measurable one. Participants run small structured experiments and report performance gains across four domains, which gives HR and L&D leaders something concrete to point at. Thinkers50 named him the world’s number one thinker on talent in 2015 and inducted him into the Hall of Fame in 2023, which is unusually strong recognition in a category that buyers are now under board pressure to take seriously. He works at the level senior buyers want, which is senior leaders and high-potential cohorts, and he is comfortable in front of a board, an executive offsite, or a long-form development programme. Biography highlights Emeritus Practice Professor of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, on faculty since 1984. Founder of the Wharton Leadership Program and the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, both established in 1991. Former senior executive for leadership development at Ford Motor Company, where he ran the Leadership Development Center and a corporate programme reaching 2,500 managers a year. Author of Total Leadership (Harvard Business Review Press), Leading the Life You Want, and Parents Who Lead. Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award for Talent, 2015, and inductee into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, 2023. Families and Work Institute Work Life Legacy Award, 2013. Host of Work and Life on SiriusXM Wharton Business Radio. Biography Ford Motor Company in the late 1990s was the proving ground for an idea that most leadership programmes still avoid: that the performance of senior leaders is inseparable from the rest of their lives, and that pretending otherwise produces fragile executives and exhausted teams. Friedman ran that experiment as the company’s senior executive for leadership development from 1999 to 2001, leading the Leadership Development Center and a programme that touched 2,500 managers a year. What he took back to Wharton became Total Leadership, the book and the method. The argument is simple to state and difficult to execute. A leader has four domains, work, home, community and self, and the job is to design small experiments that produce gains across all four at once. The method is taught inside Wharton’s MBA and executive programmes and has been delivered to thousands of leaders inside companies that cannot afford to treat senior burnout as a private matter. The intellectual home for the work is the Wharton Leadership Program and the Work/Life Integration Project, both of which Friedman founded in 1991 and ran for decades. He has written Total Leadership, Leading the Life You Want, and, with Alyssa F. Westring, Parents Who Lead. Harvard Business Review has carried more than fifty of his digital pieces. The external recognition matters because the category does. Thinkers50 ranked him the world’s number one thinker on talent in 2015 and inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2023. The Families and Work Institute gave him its Work Life Legacy Award. For a senior buyer trying to fix the gap between what their leaders are asked to deliver and what their workforce is willing to give, that is the body of work in the room. Key speaking topics Leadership impact in all parts of life Total Leadership and four-way wins Leadership development inside large organisations Work and life integration as a performance question Engagement and the contract between leaders and the people they lead Talent strategy and senior leader development Parenting, career, and the dual-career executive household Ideal for CEO, COO, and executive committees rebuilding the leadership model after restructure or sustained pressure CHRO and chief talent officers responsible for senior leader development and retention Boards looking at engagement and burnout as a governance and risk issue, not a perks question High-potential cohorts inside leadership academies and corporate universities Audience outcomes A different working definition of leadership performance, one that includes the durability of the leader and the team, not just quarterly output A simple structure for designing small experiments that improve performance and wellbeing at the same time A language senior teams can use with each other about pressure, depletion and trade-offs without it sliding into a wellbeing conversation A clearer sense of what the next generation of senior leaders actually need from their organisations, and what they will not accept

Why organisations work with Susan Cain A single, defensible thesis. Quiet sold over four million copies, spent multiple years on the New York Times bestseller list and translated into 40 languages, which gives a senior audience a shared reference point before she walks on stage. Operational, not theoretical. Through the Quiet Leadership Institute she has delivered corporate programmes at GE, LinkedIn, Procter & Gamble, NASA and the Dutch Air Force, and partnered with Steelcase to redesign office space around introvert-friendly workflows. Reframes inclusion in language that lands with sceptical executives. Personality bias is a talent and productivity argument, not a values argument, which makes the conversation possible in rooms where DEI has become contested. Cultural reach that pulls audiences in. The TED2012 talk has been viewed more than 30 million times and named by Bill Gates as a personal favourite, and Bittersweet was an Oprah’s Book Club pick in 2023. Biography highlights Honours graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School; former Wall Street negotiations attorney Author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, #1 New York Times bestseller, four million copies sold, 40 languages Author of Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, #1 New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club selection TED2012 talk “The Power of Introverts” viewed over 30 million times; named by Bill Gates as a favourite TED talk Co-founder of Quiet Revolution and the Quiet Leadership Institute, with corporate programmes at GE, LinkedIn, Procter & Gamble, NASA and the Dutch Air Force Recipient of Harvard Law School’s Celebration Award for thought leadership and the Toastmasters International Golden Gavel Award Biography A third to half of the workforce is introverted, yet most companies are built as though everyone in the room is an extrovert. Hiring rewards the candidate who presents best in an interview. Meetings reward whoever speaks first. Open-plan offices reward visibility over depth of thought. The cumulative cost in lost ideas, attrition and shallow decision-making is significant, and rarely measured. That is the operational problem Quiet named in 2012. The book has sold over four million copies, sat on the New York Times bestseller list for years and been translated into 40 languages, which is why senior leaders tend to arrive at the keynote already inside the argument. The accompanying TED2012 talk has been viewed more than 30 million times and was named by Bill Gates as one of his favourites. The work since then has been practical. Through the Quiet Leadership Institute, founded with former West Point professor Mike Erwin, Cain has run corporate development programmes for organisations including GE, LinkedIn, Procter & Gamble, NASA and the Dutch Air Force. With Steelcase, she co-designed the Quiet Spaces office concept, a direct intervention into the open-plan trend. Her second book, Bittersweet, debuted at #1 on the New York Times nonfiction list and was selected for Oprah’s Book Club in 2023, broadening the conversation into how organisations handle emotion, longing and creativity at work. Her Princeton and Harvard Law training, and her earlier career as a Wall Street negotiator, show up in the way she argues. The case is a talent and productivity case before it is a values case, which is what makes it land in rooms where leaders are tired of the usual inclusion language. Key speaking topics The hidden strengths of introverted leaders Personality bias in hiring, meetings and promotion Workspace and office design for cognitive performance Talent strategy across the introvert and extrovert spectrum Creativity, deep work and the conditions for original thinking Inclusion framed as a productivity argument Emotion, longing and meaning at work (drawing on Bittersweet) Ideal for CHROs, talent leaders and heads of organisational development rethinking how they hire, promote and retain CEOs and senior executives whose workforce skews toward knowledge work, research, engineering or design Heads of workplace strategy and real estate teams designing the next generation of office space Learning and leadership development teams building inclusive leadership curricula that move beyond conventional DEI framing Audience outcomes A concrete vocabulary for the personality bias built into common hiring, meeting and performance practices Specific design choices to test, in meetings, workspaces and team rituals, to surface ideas from quieter staff A reframed argument for inclusion that survives executive scrutiny on commercial grounds A clearer view of where deep work and solitude belong in the operating model of a knowledge organisation

Why organisations work with Susie Wolff She is the only executive who has both experienced structural exclusion at the top of global motorsport as a competitor and then returned to redesign those structures, giving her an argument that runs deeper than advocacy. F1 Academy under her leadership secured the backing of all ten Formula 1 teams, partnerships with Charlotte Tilbury, American Express, TAG Heuer and The LEGO Group, and grew to become the second-most followed motorsport series after Formula 1 – these are not diversity metrics, they are commercial outcomes. Her work addresses a specific organisational failure that most DEI programmes miss: talent exclusion is not primarily a selection problem, it is a pipeline and development problem. She has built the operational case study. Her track record spans the full leadership arc – elite competitor, team principal, CEO, series director – giving her credibility in conversations about performance culture, high-pressure decision-making, and building organisations that win under scrutiny. Driven, her memoir, was an instant Sunday Times bestseller on UK publication by Hodder & Stoughton, and was released in the US by Henry Holt in April 2026 with a Booklist Starred Review and Lewis Hamilton endorsement, extending her reach beyond motorsport audiences into mainstream leadership conversations. Biography highlights Managing Director, F1 Academy (Formula 1’s all-female development series), appointed March 2023; reports directly to Formula 1 CEO Stefano Domenicali First woman to participate in a Formula One race weekend since 1992 – four FP1 sessions with the Williams F1 team, 2014–2015 Seven seasons in the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters (DTM) with Mercedes-Benz, 2006-2012 Team Principal then CEO, Venturi Formula E team, 2018-2022; took the team from the back of the grid to Formula E Vice-World Champions and oversaw its sale to Maserati on departure Founder, Dare To Be Different initiative (2016); merged with FIA Girls on Track (2019) Author, Driven (Hodder & Stoughton / Henry Holt) – instant Sunday Times bestseller; executive producer of Netflix docuseries F1: The Academy (2025) MBE (2017) for services to women in sport; Honorary Fellowship, University of Edinburgh (2013); CNBC Changemaker (2026) Biography Motorsport has long had a pipeline problem, not of talent, but of access. The structures that determined who made it to the top were built for a specific kind of competitor, and they were rarely questioned. Susie Wolff sat inside that system for over two decades: as a driver who pushed further into Formula One than any woman had in a generation, and then as the executive who went back to rebuild it. Her driving career ran from karting to the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters with Mercedes-Benz, then to Williams F1, where she became the first woman to participate in a Formula One race weekend since 1992 across four practice sessions in 2014 and 2015. When she retired from driving, she turned to the leadership side of the sport: first as Team Principal, then CEO, of the Venturi Formula E team. Over four seasons she took the team from the back of the grid to a Formula E Vice-World Championship finish, then oversaw its sale to Maserati before joining F1 Academy in March 2023. At F1 Academy, Wolff has built something that did not exist before: a commercially viable, Formula 1-integrated development series for female talent, which now carries the liveries of all ten F1 teams, holds partnerships with brands including Charlotte Tilbury, American Express, TAG Heuer and The LEGO Group, and has grown to become the second-most followed motorsport series after Formula 1. She executive produced the 2025 Netflix docuseries F1: The Academy alongside Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine. Her memoir Driven was an instant Sunday Times bestseller on UK publication by Hodder & Stoughton, and was released in the US by Henry Holt in April 2026 to a Booklist Starred Review. What Wolff offers corporate audiences is not a motivational narrative with a motorsport backdrop. It is a specific and replicable argument: that inclusive talent pipelines are not built by changing who you select, but by redesigning the conditions in which talent is identified and developed. She has built that case inside one of the world’s most commercially demanding sports, and has the results to prove it. Key speaking topics Inclusive talent pipeline design Leadership and performance under competitive pressure Organisational culture change in structurally resistant industries Executive leadership in high-performance sport Building commercial frameworks for underrepresented talent Resilience and ambition in elite environments Diversity as a strategic performance lever Ideal for C-suite and senior leadership teams working on talent strategy, diversity, or cultural transformation CHROs and People directors designing inclusive talent development programmes Leadership and strategy teams in automotive, engineering, technology, and financial services Sports business, sponsorship, and commercial leadership audiences Audience outcomes A clear framework for distinguishing between diversity as selection (reactive) and diversity as pipeline design (structural) with a real-world organisational example Understanding of how to build commercial buy-in for inclusion initiatives, grounded in F1 Academy’s partnership and broadcast growth Insight into high-performance decision-making and the leadership qualities required to build organisations under public scrutiny A more specific vocabulary for talking about talent exclusion as a performance problem rather than a compliance issue First-hand perspective on what resilience, ambition, and goal-setting look like at the elite level, and how these translate into organisational contexts

Why organisations work with Sydney Finkelstein His work is grounded in two decade-long research programmes: one into executive failure, published as Why Smart Executives Fail, and one into talent-generating leaders, published as Superbosses. Both give clients an evidence base that a typical leadership keynote does not. As Steven Roth Professor of Management at Dartmouth Tuck and Director of the Tuck Executive Program, he is embedded in the executive development the organisations he speaks to actually attend. Thinkers50 recognition, Fellowship of the Academy of Management, and multiple Best Paper Awards provide the independent external validation that boards and chief people officers look for before investing in a headline speaker. His client list, including American Express, Barclays, Boeing, Chevron, Deutsche Bank, GE, Glaxo and Heinz, means his material has been tested in front of some of the same leadership teams his audiences sit in. He presents research-heavy material in plain English, a point the Wall Street Journal called out explicitly in its review of Why Smart Executives Fail. Biography highlights Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College Director of the Tuck Executive Program Author of Superbosses (Penguin Portfolio, 2016) and Why Smart Executives Fail (Penguin Portfolio, 2003), among 20-plus books and 90-plus articles Thinkers50 ranked management thinker Fellow of the Academy of Management; Academy of Management Executive Best Paper Awards (1997, 2004) Regular BBC contributor; consulting clients including American Express, Barclays, Boeing, Chevron, Deutsche Bank, GE, Glaxo and Heinz Biography Why executives fail is a more answerable question than most organisations assume. Sydney Finkelstein’s career has been built around answering it. As Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and Director of the Tuck Executive Program, he has spent two decades combining academic rigour with the specifics of named corporate failures, a body of work that is now a standard reference in leadership and strategy literature. Why Smart Executives Fail, published in 2003 by Penguin Portfolio, remains the book that sets out the diagnostic pattern. The Wall Street Journal described it as «a marvel, a jargon-free business book based on serious research». His subsequent book, Superbosses, took the opposite question, why some leaders produce more outstanding talent than their peers, and spent ten years answering it through figures ranging from Ralph Lauren, Lorne Michaels and George Lucas to hedge fund founder Julian Robertson and chef Alice Waters. The thesis has since shaped how senior HR and CEO succession teams think about talent generation at the top of organisations. Finkelstein is one of the recurring names on the Thinkers50 list, a Fellow of the Academy of Management and the recipient of multiple Academy of Management Executive Best Paper Awards in 1997 and 2004. His writing extends beyond books to more than 90 articles, and he contributes regularly to the BBC. The consulting and speaking work sits with organisations including American Express, Barclays, Boeing, Chevron, Deutsche Bank, GE, Glaxo and Heinz. For boards and executive teams facing difficult succession, integration or leadership-change questions, the useful thing about Finkelstein is the combination of research archive and plain-language delivery. He arrives with frameworks his audiences have probably read in HBR, but with the corporate case material to apply them without slipping into abstraction. Key speaking topics Why smart executives fail Superbosses and talent-generating leadership Leadership decision-making under pressure Strategic renewal and «built to change» organisations Succession, talent pipelines and HR strategy for the C-suite Innovation leadership Ideal for Boards, CEOs and executive committees working through succession, turnaround or post-M&A leadership decisions CHROs and heads of executive development designing senior leadership and succession programmes Corporate universities and executive education programmes looking for a Thinkers50 headliner with teaching credentials Industry conferences and CEO summits where research-grade leadership content is expected Audience outcomes A specific framework for identifying the decision patterns that precede executive failure The Superbosses model of talent generation, translated into practical leadership behaviours Named case material drawn from high-profile corporate failures and successes, usable in the audience’s own context Reference points that connect academic research with clients including American Express, Barclays, Boeing and GE A sharper view of the link between leadership behaviour, talent pipeline and long-run organisational performance

Why organisations work with Tammy Erickson A trilogy of Harvard Business Review Press books on Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y built on primary research, not commentary, giving leaders a defensible base for talent and engagement decisions. A McKinsey Award-winning HBR article (“It’s Time to Retire Retirement”) that reframed how Fortune 500 employers think about late-career workers, still cited in CHRO conversations. Five appearances on the Thinkers50 ranking, evidence that her ideas have stayed relevant across more than a decade of workforce change. Operating credibility from board seats at PerkinElmer and Allergan, plus client work with General Electric, Bank of America and Novartis, so the workforce arguments land with senior commercial leaders, not just HR. Co-direction of London Business School’s “Leading Businesses into the Future” programme, which keeps her arguments calibrated to current senior-executive challenges rather than past research. Biography highlights Adjunct Professor of Organisational Behaviour, London Business School; co-director of the “Leading Businesses into the Future” programme. Founder and CEO of Tammy Erickson Associates, a workforce and engagement advisory firm. McKinsey Award winner, Harvard Business Review, for “It’s Time to Retire Retirement.” Author of the HBR Press generational trilogy: “Retire Retirement,” “Plugged In,” and “What’s Next, Gen X?” Co-author of “Workforce Crisis” (Harvard Business School Press) and “Third Generation R&D.” Former director of Fortune 500 corporations PerkinElmer and Allergan. Ranked on Thinkers50 five times, including 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017. Biography Most workforce strategies still treat the employee base as one undifferentiated group with a single set of motivations. That worked when one or two cohorts dominated the org chart. It does not work now, with Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z sharing teams and reporting lines, each carrying different assumptions about authority, loyalty and what work is for. Erickson built her career on closing that gap. Her Harvard Business Review article “It’s Time to Retire Retirement” won the McKinsey Award and reframed how large employers thought about late-career talent. The argument was not nostalgic or motivational. It was an operating case for redesigning roles, hours and contracts to retain expertise that the demographics said would otherwise walk out. The HBR Press trilogy that followed, “Retire Retirement,” “Plugged In” and “What’s Next, Gen X?,” gave leaders something most generational commentary lacks: a research base built cohort by cohort, with practical implications for engagement, team design and career architecture. Her companion book “Workforce Crisis,” with Ken Dychtwald and Bob Morison, set the broader demographic context. “Leading Across the Ages” was named a Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea of 2008. That research sits on top of a working role at London Business School, where she co-directs “Leading Businesses into the Future,” and a track record of Fortune 500 board service at PerkinElmer and Allergan. The result is a voice on workforce questions that boards and executive teams take seriously, because it carries both the scholarship and the operating context. Key speaking topics Multi-generational workforce strategy Employee engagement and the changing employer-employee contract Workforce planning and talent shortage Collaboration in complex organisations Innovation in the intelligent economy Twenty-first century organisational design Future of work and changing assumptions about careers Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers redesigning engagement and retention strategy Boards and executive teams setting talent and workforce policy Heads of organisational development and learning leading multi-generational team programmes Leadership development faculty and HR conferences Audience outcomes A clearer read of how each generational cohort actually behaves inside organisations, beyond the stereotypes Specific implications for talent retention, engagement and team design across cohorts A reframed view of late-career workers as a retention and capacity question, not a cost question An organising frame for redesigning roles, hours and contracts to fit a five-generation workforce Vocabulary senior leaders can use in board and executive conversations on workforce strategy

Why organisations work with Tanya Menon A research voice on inclusion that starts with network structure, hiring data, and decision bias rather than identity language, useful for leadership teams that need substance under a contested topic. Tenured academic credibility: Stanford PhD, Fisher College professorship, Associate Editor at Management Science, a decade teaching Power and Influence at Chicago Booth. Co-author of Stop Spending, Start Managing (Harvard Business Review Press), which names five specific organisational traps including expertise lock-in and conflict avoidance, applied directly to senior team behaviour. A TED Talk with 1.8 million-plus views that translates weak-tie network research into a behaviour senior leaders and their teams can immediately recognise in themselves. Equally fluent on team performance, persuasion, and hiring, which makes her a credible single speaker across an HR or culture programme rather than one topic in a series. Biography highlights Professor of Management and Human Resources, Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University. PhD, Stanford Graduate School of Business; BA, Harvard University. Associate Editor, Management Science. Co-author, Stop Spending, Start Managing: Strategies to Transform Wasteful Habits, Harvard Business Review Press. TED Talk listed among TED.com’s most popular of 2018, with over 1.8 million views. Faculty for over a decade at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, teaching Power and Influence. Research cited in The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Guardian, The Times of London, Chicago Tribune, and Boston Globe. Biography Most senior teams know who they talk to every day. Far fewer can name who they have stopped talking to, and what that has cost the organisation. Tanya Menon’s research starts in that gap. Her work at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business, supported by a Stanford PhD and a decade teaching at Chicago Booth, focuses on how relationships at work shape decisions, hiring, and innovation. Her TED Talk, “The secret to great opportunities? The person you haven’t met yet,” reframes networking as a structural problem rather than a personal one. Drawing on Mark Granovetter’s classic work on weak ties, she shows why the routines that feel efficient inside an organisation quietly narrow the people, ideas, and candidates a leader ever encounters. Over 1.8 million people have watched it. With Leigh Thompson of Kellogg, she wrote Stop Spending, Start Managing for Harvard Business Review Press. The book identifies five concrete traps, including the Expertise Trap, the Winner’s Trap, and the Agreement Trap, that explain why competent teams burn time and money on the wrong problems. It is built for leaders who run real teams, not for a general management audience. She has been an Associate Editor at Management Science, and her research has been cited by The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Guardian, The Times of London, the Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Globe. The through-line is a usable diagnostic vocabulary for the parts of organisational life that look like soft skills until they start producing hard losses. Key speaking topics Networks and weak ties at work Inclusion through hiring and network design Team decision-making and productive conflict Power, persuasion, and influence Innovation and pattern-breaking Wasteful organisational habits and managerial traps AI and human decision-making in hiring Ideal for CHROs and Heads of Talent rethinking hiring pipelines and selection bias. Heads of DEI and culture leaders looking for a research-led, non-ideological frame for inclusion. Senior leadership teams under pressure to improve cross-functional collaboration. Learning and development leads designing executive programmes on influence, networks, and team performance. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the network and hiring habits that quietly limit inclusion and innovation. Five named organisational traps senior teams can test their own behaviour against. A research-grounded view of weak ties as a hiring, learning, and idea-generation lever. Specific tactics for breaking routine social patterns inside large organisations. A more defensible inclusion narrative grounded in network structure and decision data.

Why organisations work with Tim Campbell A founder’s view of what early-stage capital, mentoring and access actually do for people who do not start with networks, drawn from supporting more than 750 start-ups through the Bright Ideas Trust A senior commercial perspective on inclusion that connects diversity to talent acquisition and business outcomes, informed by his strategic adviser work in global recruitment Public recognition that opens doors at executive and audience level: MBE for Services to Enterprise Culture, two decades of broadcast presence on The Apprentice, and a seat on the Windrush Commemoration Committee A practitioner’s read on what makes a small business survive its first three years, codified in his co-authored book with Paul Humphries published by Headline Biography highlights Winner of the first series of BBC’s The Apprentice in 2005, hired by Sir Alan Sugar as Project Director of Amstrad’s Health and Beauty division Co-founder of the Bright Ideas Trust, which raised over GBP 3m and supported more than 750 start-ups from disadvantaged backgrounds Appointed MBE in 2012 for Services to Enterprise Culture Co-author of “What’s Your Bright Idea? The Journey to Starting Your Own Business” (Headline, 2010) Member of the UK Government’s Windrush Commemoration Committee Returned to The Apprentice as Lord Sugar’s permanent advisor from Series 18 onwards Biography The Apprentice in 2005 was the first time most British viewers had watched a hiring decision broadcast as entertainment. Tim Campbell, a senior planner at London Underground, won the series and took the GBP 100,000 job at Amstrad as Project Director of a new Health and Beauty division. The interesting work began two years later. In 2007 Campbell co-founded the Bright Ideas Trust with Paul Humphries and Richard Morris. The model was specific: equity-style early-stage capital and structured mentoring for 16 to 30 year olds who could not raise money through conventional networks. By the time the trust had matured, it had raised more than GBP 3m and supported over 750 start-ups. The work earned an MBE in 2012 for Services to Enterprise Culture and a co-authored book with Humphries, “What’s Your Bright Idea?”, published by Headline. The second arc of his career moved that founder perspective into large organisations. Campbell has held senior roles in talent acquisition and inclusion strategy, advising on diversity, equity and social mobility inside global recruitment, and sits on the UK Government’s Windrush Commemoration Committee. He returned to The Apprentice as Lord Sugar’s aide and now holds the role permanently from Series 18. The throughline is the gap between organisational claims about entrepreneurial culture and inclusion, and what actually happens to people inside the business and outside it. Campbell has worked both sides of that gap, as a founder building a vehicle for capital flow into underrepresented entrepreneurs, and as a senior adviser inside companies that have to decide whether their inclusion language is reflected in who gets hired, funded and promoted. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and early-stage business Inclusive talent acquisition and social mobility Resilience in a founder’s career Diversity and inclusion as commercial strategy Leadership through change Personal and organisational reinvention Ideal for Boards and executive teams reviewing the commercial logic of their inclusion strategy CHROs and talent leaders rethinking pipelines into underrepresented communities Founders, scale-up leaders and intrapreneurs inside corporate environments Audiences at staff conferences and ERG events seeking a credible voice on enterprise and inclusion Audience outcomes A clearer view of what early-stage entrepreneurial support looks like when it is built around access, not just funding A practical sense of how diversity commitments translate into hiring, promotion and supplier decisions A founder’s perspective on resilience, drawn from a public career and a charity built and run for over a decade A reframing of inclusion as a commercial discipline tied to talent and growth, not a separate values conversation

Why organisations work with Tim Ringo A practitioner thesis on productivity, not a survey of the field. Solving the Productivity Puzzle won the HR & Management category at the Business Book Awards because it sets out a specific operating model for connecting engagement, performance and learning, rather than describing the problem. Three decades inside the firms that built the modern HR function: Accenture, IBM and SAP SuccessFactors, including global leadership of IBM’s 1,500-strong Human Capital Management consulting practice and EMEA leadership at SAP SuccessFactors. A rare combination of HR strategy and workforce analytics credentials, evidenced by Calculating Success, his Harvard Business Review Press book on workforce analytics co-authored with Carl Hoffmann and Eric Lesser. Recognised peer authority: named to HR Magazine’s Most Influential HR Thinkers list in 2022, alongside the people the audience is reading. A working point of view on AI in the workplace from someone who has run global HR technology programmes, not a commentator new to the topic. Biography highlights Named to HR Magazine’s HR Most Influential Thinkers, 2022. Author, Solving the Productivity Puzzle (Kogan Page); Category Winner, HR & Management, Business Book Awards. Co-author, Calculating Success (Harvard Business Review Press), on workforce analytics. Former Vice President and Global Leader, IBM Human Capital Management consulting practice. Former Vice President for EMEA, SAP SuccessFactors. Chartered Fellow of the CIPD; BSc, Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University. Biography Most large organisations now spend more on HR technology, engagement programmes and learning platforms than at any point in their history. Productivity has not followed. Tim Ringo’s work begins where that gap sits, and treats it as a design problem inside the people function rather than a cultural mood. His 2020 book Solving the Productivity Puzzle, published by Kogan Page, won the HR & Management category at the Business Book Awards. The argument is operational: engagement, performance management and learning have to be wired together, and supported by analytics, before any productivity number moves. His earlier book with Carl Hoffmann and Eric Lesser, Calculating Success, was published by Harvard Business Review Press and helped to define what serious workforce analytics looks like inside an enterprise. The credibility behind the work is built over three decades. Ringo led IBM’s global Human Capital Management consulting practice, with more than 1,500 consultants worldwide, ran SAP SuccessFactors HR advisory across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and spent sixteen years as an executive partner in Accenture’s Human Performance service line. He is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD and was named to HR Magazine’s Most Influential HR Thinkers list in 2022. For senior HR audiences, that mix is unusual. Ringo can move from a board conversation about AI in the workforce to a working session on engagement metrics or HR technology investment, and bring the same operating language to both. His view on generative AI at work is a practitioner’s view, formed inside the systems that the rest of the function relies on. Key speaking topics Workforce productivity and engagement Digital HR transformation Workforce analytics Generative AI in the workplace Employee experience and retention Workforce wellbeing strategy HR technology investment Ideal for CHROs, CPOs and HR directors leading productivity, engagement or HR technology agendas Executive teams reviewing return on HR technology and workforce analytics investment HR leadership conferences, CHRO summits and people analytics events Boards considering the workforce implications of generative AI Audience outcomes A clearer view of where productivity is actually lost inside the organisation, and which HR levers move it. A working model for connecting engagement, performance and learning to business outcomes. A practical sense of what good workforce analytics looks like, and what most organisations are still missing. An informed perspective on how to introduce generative AI to the workforce without losing trust or governance.

Why organisations work with Tom Gimbel Twenty-six years running a staffing firm gives him unusually direct visibility into why employees actually leave: it shows up in his content as specific tactical guidance, not generalised culture theory. He treats middle managers as the operating layer where culture is either built or broken, and gives leadership teams a practical agenda for upgrading that layer. His perspective on hiring, onboarding and retention is the perspective of a CEO who has had to make payroll, not a consultant selling frameworks. Inc. 5000 recognition for twelve consecutive years and a Staffing Industry Analysts Staffing 100 listing back the credibility of his operating record on talent. Biography highlights Founder of LaSalle Network, a national staffing, recruiting and culture firm headquartered in Chicago. LaSalle Network named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies for 12 consecutive years. Named to Staffing Industry Analysts’ Staffing 100 list of the most influential people in staffing, multiple years. Inducted into the Chicago Area Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame; named to Crain’s Chicago Business 40 Under 40. Regular media commentator on hiring, careers and company culture across CNBC Squawk Box, TODAY, Fox Business, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, The New York Times and Entrepreneur. Board roles include American Staffing Association and Start Early; member of YPO, the Economic Club of Chicago and Entrepreneurs’ Organization. Biography People do not quit companies. They quit managers. That observation, which sits at the centre of Tom Gimbel’s work, sounds simple but is uncomfortable for most executive teams, because it locates the retention problem in the layer of the organisation where the least leadership development happens. Gimbel founded LaSalle Network in Chicago in 1998 and ran it as CEO for 26 years. The firm reached the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies for 12 consecutive years and was repeatedly named to “best places to work” lists by Glassdoor, Fortune, Inc. and Crain’s Chicago Business. He was named to Staffing Industry Analysts’ Staffing 100 list of the most influential people in the industry. That operating record is what makes his content credible to senior buyers. He is a regular commentator on hiring and culture for CNBC, TODAY, Fox Business, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, The New York Times and Entrepreneur, and his core argument is consistent across those appearances: middle-manager capability is the real engine of retention, and most companies underinvest in it. Gimbel’s keynote material focuses on the practical levers a leadership team can pull, hiring discipline, onboarding, manager development, the often-overlooked “B player” cohort, and how to build a retention-focused culture that survives growth. The audience is the CEO, COO and CHRO who already know they have a culture problem and want a sharp operator’s view on what to do about it. Key speaking topics Company culture and retention Middle-manager development Hiring, onboarding and talent strategy Employee engagement Building and protecting workplace culture through growth The labour market and the future of work Ideal for CEOs, COOs and CHROs leading high-growth or post-acquisition organisations facing retention pressure. Executive teams looking to upgrade their middle-manager population as a strategic priority. HR and talent leadership communities at industry conferences and association events. Audience outcomes A clear-eyed view of why retention numbers move and which decisions actually shift them. A specific agenda for upgrading middle managers from individual contributors to people leaders. Tactical guidance on hiring and onboarding processes that protect culture as headcount scales. An operator’s perspective on company culture, distinct from consulting frameworks.

Why organisations work with Tracey Neville She has the rare credential of turning a chronically second-tier national team into a major-tournament winner inside one Games cycle, against opponents with deeper systems and bigger budgets. She speaks credibly about selection, the hardest part of senior leadership, because she made the call to drop senior England players whose form had slipped, and held the room through it. Her coaching record holds up to scrutiny: Superleague titles at Manchester Thunder, three Netball Europe Open Championships, World Cup medals at both ends of her England tenure, and gold at the Commonwealth Games. An MBE for services to netball and a continuing senior coaching role in Australia’s Super Netball mean her authority is current, not retrospective. Biography highlights Head Coach, England Netball, 2015 to 2019. Gold medal, 2018 Commonwealth Games. Bronze medals, 2015 and 2019 Netball World Cups, as Head Coach. Head Coach, Manchester Thunder; Netball Superleague champions, 2012 and 2014. MBE, 2016, for services to netball. 81 senior caps for England as a player; bronze at the 1998 Commonwealth Games and 1999 World Championships. Sky Sports netball pundit; Vitality ambassador; current senior coaching role in Australia’s Super Netball. Biography England had never beaten Australia or New Zealand to win a major netball title. In April 2018, on the Gold Coast, the team Tracey Neville had taken over three years earlier as an interim appointment beat Australia in the final by a single goal. That result reset the order of a sport that two countries had owned for forty years. The job she walked into in 2015 was a programme that had earned bronzes and lost finals. Neville had a Superleague pedigree from Manchester Thunder, where she had won the domestic title twice, and 81 England caps as a player, but no senior international head coaching record. She made the appointment permanent inside six months by taking England to bronze at the 2015 World Cup, then spent the next two years rebuilding selection, fitness standards, and the squad’s tolerance for being told it was not yet good enough. What she offers corporate audiences is the substance of how that rebuild was done. The recognisable parts of high-performance coaching, marginal gains and culture work, sit underneath harder questions about who plays, who is dropped, who is told the truth about their form, and how a head coach holds the room when those decisions are unpopular. She is direct about the cost of those calls, including her own, which gives senior leaders a usable account of selection and accountability rather than a motivational set piece. Her authority is also current. After leaving England in 2019 she moved into senior coaching roles in Australia’s Super Netball, the strongest domestic league in the sport, which is the same competitive environment she beat at the Commonwealth Games. She holds an MBE for services to netball and continues as a Sky Sports pundit on the international game. Key speaking topics High-performance team building under competitive pressure Selection and accountability in senior leadership Leading through transition and interim mandates Resilience and composure in decisive moments Inclusive team culture in elite environments Succession and bench strength Ideal for Executive teams rebuilding standards after a period of underperformance HR and talent leaders working on selection, succession, and bench depth Sales and commercial leaders running through a major competitive cycle Women’s leadership programmes and senior development cohorts Audience outcomes A concrete account of how a head coach makes and communicates hard selection decisions A working model of building winning culture without abandoning standards under pressure Honest perspective on the personal cost of accountability at the top of a programme Practical reference points for leading a team through a defined competitive cycle

Why organisations work with Wema Hoover She ran global DEI inside four of the most scrutinised employers in the world: Google, Pfizer, Sanofi and Bristol-Myers Squibb. The advice is shaped by what survives in regulated, multinational environments. She separates the politics of DEI from the operating substance, which lets boards keep the practice going without the labels that now invite litigation and activist pressure. Her work covers the full stack: hiring, promotion, belonging, manager capability, and how leadership teams behave under public scrutiny. Not awareness training. She writes for Fast Company on the structural questions, gender investment, leadership double standards, beyond the DEI backlash, which means buyers get a thinker, not a workshop facilitator. Coqual Hidden Brain Drain Task Force membership signals she works alongside the most serious researchers in this field, not adjacent to them. Biography highlights Former Global Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Google Former Chief Diversity Officer / Global Head of DEI at Pfizer, Sanofi and Bristol-Myers Squibb Published contributor at Fast Company, Inc. and Diversity Magazine Member, Coqual Hidden Brain Drain Task Force Board member, Ten By Three MSc Human Resource Management and Master’s Certificate in Organizational Change Management, The New School; BA Psychology, Rutgers; GPHR certified Biography The DEI conversation has fractured. Court rulings, shareholder activism and political pressure have made the language toxic in some markets, while the underlying organisational questions, who gets hired, who gets promoted, who feels they belong, are now more commercially material than they have been in a decade. Wema Hoover spent the last fifteen years running that practice inside large, regulated, global employers. As Global Head of DEI at Google, and in equivalent senior roles at Pfizer, Sanofi and Bristol-Myers Squibb, she designed and operated inclusion programmes in the kinds of environments where the work has to clear legal, board, regulator and workforce scrutiny. That operator background is what makes her useful now. She is not arguing for DEI as a value; she is showing leadership teams how to keep the operating substance, hiring discipline, manager capability, advancement pipelines, belonging metrics, without the rhetorical scaffolding that has become a liability. Her Fast Company writing and her “Beyond the DEI Backlash” work track the same argument in public. She holds an MSc in Human Resource Management and a Master’s-level Certificate in Organizational Change Management from The New School, a BA in Psychology from Rutgers, and a Global Professional in Human Resources certification. She sits on Coqual’s Hidden Brain Drain Task Force, the working group most senior corporate DEI heads consult on talent equity research. Key speaking topics Inclusion strategy after the DEI backlash Belonging and culture inside global, regulated employers Women’s advancement, sponsorship and the leadership double standard Manager capability for inclusive teams Cross-cultural leadership in multinational workforces Executive coaching for senior leaders navigating cultural change Ideal for CHROs and Chief People Officers managing inclusion programmes through political and legal headwinds Boards and ExCos that need to reset their position on DEI without abandoning the substance Global employers with regulated workforces (pharma, tech, financial services) where inclusion is tied to talent risk Senior leadership development programmes for newly promoted women and underrepresented executives Audience outcomes A clear read on what has changed in the DEI landscape, in the US and globally, and what that means for their own programme design A working distinction between inclusion as compliance theatre and inclusion as operating capability Practical decisions on which existing initiatives to keep, which to retire and which to rename Confidence in how to brief their board on DEI in the current environment without overpromising or retreating A sharper view of where sponsorship and advocacy, not training, actually move the dial on women’s advancement