WORLD BUSINESS FORUM 2024

Bestselling Author and Founder of The Optimism Company

Simon Sinek is an unshakeable optimist. He believes in a bright future and our ability to build it together. Described as “a visionary thinker with a rare intellect,” Sinek has devoted his professional life to help advance a vision of the world that does not yet exist; a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired, feel safe wherever they are, and end the day fulfilled by the work they do. 

He continues to share inspiration through his bestselling books, including Start with WHY, Leaders Eat Last . The Infinite Game, as well as his podcast, A Bit of Optimism. In addition, Sinek is the Founder of The Optimism Company, a leadership learning and development company, and he publishes other inspiring thinkers and doers through his publishing partnership with Penguin Random House called Optimism Press.

Leading and Managing Talent Through the Infinite Game

• Explore a new way of looking at your leadership, your organization, and the environment in which it operates
• Practices to maintain and rebuild trust, and how to avoid breaking it
• Learn how to build stronger relationships, which are the basis for the The Courage to Lead
• How to combat the inevitable stresses and dangers that threaten your organization, team, and each individual in your charge

Francis Ford Coppola is a highly renowned film director, producer, and screenwriter. He has won multiple prestigious awards, including five Academy Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, two Palmes d’Or, and a British Academy Film Award (BAFTA). Coppola’s most notable films, such as The Godfather trilogy – which transformed the gangster genre – and Apocalypse Now, have established him as one of the most significant filmmakers in American history.

His latest film, Megalopolis, is due to be released in 2024.  Apart from his filmmaking career, Coppola has expanded his horizons into the wine and hospitality industry, establishing the Francis Ford Coppola Presents brand, which offers various resorts, cafes, and wineries located in California, Guatemala, and Belize.

Leading Creativity: Lessons from a Master Director

• The skills and characteristics needed to consistently and effectively push creative boundaries
• Producing award-winning performances: How to identify and get the best out of your talent
• A different approach for dealing with doubt, uncertainty and failure
• The evolution of storytelling: Keys to develop powerful stories that capture people’s imaginations

Groundbreaking leader and former CEO at AT&T Business

With a remarkable career spanning more than 30 years, Anne Chow is a pioneering figure in the enterprise world. She was the first woman of color CEO in AT&T’s 140+ year history, overseeing AT&T Business, a global operating unit with a workforce of 35,000 and a value of $35 billion. She has been widely recognized as a role model for inclusive leadership, driving success at the intersection of people, culture, and technology. Twice named to Fortune’s Most Powerful Women in Business, Chow is currently Lead Director on the Board of Directors of FranklinCovey and also serves on the Board of Directors of 3M. Additionally, she is an Adjunct Professor of Executive Education at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

The Challenge of Realizing the Full Potential of Our Organizations

• Why high performance is anchored around culture: Recognizing the foundational importance of trust and transparency in relationships
• How our paradigms set us up for success – personally, professionally, and as a society
• Unlocking potential by recognizing bias, and emphasizing empathy and curiosity
• Tools to help you overcome unconscious bias and reframe unconscious thoughts

Modupe Akinola is a leading authority on organizational performance and diversity, and an Associate Professor of Management at Columbia Business School. She advises leaders on managing stress, diversity, equity, inclusion initiatives and women’s leadership and her research on stress and discrimination has been published in numerous academic journals and media outlets, including The New York Times, Forbes, and The Economist.

Before becoming an academic, Akinola was the head of diversity at Bain & Co., where she contributed to the organization’s recruitment and retention framework for people of color. She earned her Ph.D. in organizational behavior from Harvard.

Promover o rendimento e a diversidade nas organizações

• Estratégias para aumentar a diversidade nos grupos de talentos da sua organização
• Preconceitos que afetam o recrutamento e a retenção de mulheres e pessoas racializadas nas empresas
• Como o ambiente de trabalho pode causar stress e o seu impacto no desempenho individual e da empresa
• Chaves para construir organizações que promovam a produtividade dos trabalhadores, aumentem a sua criatividade e melhorem a sua saúde

Chris Gardner é um empresário, filantropo e autor dos bestsellers aclamados pela crítica À Procura da Felicidade . Start Where You Are: Life Lessons that will take you from where you are to where you want to be. Gardner foi produtor executivo da icónica adaptação cinematográfica do seu livro À Procura da Felicidade, protagonizada por Will Smith. A história de Gardner é uma história de auto-aperfeiçoamento e trabalho árduo, uma vez que, através da sua positividade, coragem e disciplina, deixou de viver nas ruas para se tornar uma das figuras mais reconhecidas de Wall Street, fundando a sua própria empresa de corretagem.

Liderar a transformação organizacional

• De viver nas ruas a trabalhar em Wall Street: lições de vida sobre como lidar com a adversidade e ultrapassar obstáculos
• Tornar possível o impossível: o que é a capacitação pessoal e como desenvolvê-la
• As chaves para sair do círculo e abrir a porta a novas oportunidades
• A filosofia de vida para ultrapassar os tempos difíceis e viver uma vida de sucesso e plena

World-renowned business thinker and management innovator

Gary Hamel is one of the world’s most influential and iconoclastic business thinkers who has led transformational efforts in some of the world’s most notable companies helping to create billions of dollars in shareholder value. For over four decades, Hamel has served on the faculty of the London Business School and he is the director of the Management Lab. Hamel is an author of landmark books such as Competing for the Future, The Future of Management . Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them. The Wall Street Journal has ranked Hamel as the world’s most influential business thinker, and Fortune magazine has called him “the world’s leading expert on business strategy.”

Building a Strategy for Evolutionary Advantage

• How to build an organization that can change as fast as change itself
• Why organizations must embrace new principles of experimentation, openness, meritocracy, freedom and audacity
• Adopting open strategy: The challenge of unleashing the collective intelligence in your organization
• How to make innovation a core competence: Revealing a systematic approach to increasing capacity for continuous, breakthrough innovation

Innovator and former President of Tesla Motors

A visionary leader and serial entrepreneur, Jon McNeill teaches organizations how to exponentially scale businesses and drive disruptive innovation. As former President of Tesla, he oversaw a 10-fold increase in sales from $2 billion to $20 billion in just three years. In 2018, he became COO at ride-hailing app Lyft, where he helped prepare the company to go public, growing revenue from $800 million to $2 billion in the process. 

Currently, McNeill is a Managing Director at DVx Ventures, a growth-stage venture platform, and serves on several boards of companies including General Motors, Lululemon and Stash Financial.

Lessons on Transformation and Growth from Inside Tesla

• Disruption, transformation and the Tesla case: The electric car everyone is watching
• Sleeping in the Tesla factory: Experiences and lessons learned with Elon Musk
• How to generate a culture of trust and accountability among employees
• Detecting and promoting disruptive and transformative ideas within your organization: How to create an ideas factory
• Taking risks: When it is time to move from analysis to action

Widely regarded as one of the greatest tennis players in history, Andre Agassi amassed an impressive record of 60 men’s singles titles, which included capturing eight Grand Slam championships, during his illustrious 20-year career. A former world no.1, Agassi went on to etch his name in the annals of tennis history by becoming the first male player ever to achieve the remarkable feat of winning all four Grand Slam titles and an Olympic gold medal. He was also a member of three winning Davis Cup teams in 1990, 1992, . 1995. 

Agassi also was notable for the charitable ventures he undertook, including the founding of the Andre Agassi Foundation (1994) to aid at-risk children. This foundation has played a pivotal role in education reform, raising over $180 million. His highly acclaimed autobiography, Open, was published in 2009 and it soared to the number one spot on the New York Times bestseller list. In recognition of his contributions to the sport, Agassi was rightfully inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2011.

From Talent to High Performance: Strategies for Sustained Success

• Talent is just the start: What it takes to become the best in the world and sustain success over the long term
• Developing the mental strength to give you the edge when the pressure is on
• Getting your team right: Identifying the skills and characteristics you need in those around you
• How to bounce back from the inevitable setbacks, failures and criticisms.
• Setting goals and staying true to yourself: On authenticity and the importance of giving back.

Consistently recognized over the past decade as one of the world’s top global executives, Angela Ahrendts DBE is best known for her tenure as Senior Vice President at Apple Retail and for her nine years as CEO at Burberry.  At Apple, Ahrendts was responsible for integrating Apple’s physical and digital businesses, creating a seamless customer journey for over a billion visitors a year and re-crafting roles for 70,000 employees globally.  At Burberry she transformed the fortunes of the brand, tripling the business and quadrupling the share price with a focus on culture and values.  Ahrendts is currently Chair of the Board of Save the Children and a member of the Board of Directors of Ralph Lauren Corp., Airbnb, WPP, and charity: water.

Leading Change with Humility, Humanity and Heart

• Connecting with people in a way that encourages everyone to shape the future of the organization
• How to convey complex ideas with clarity and authenticity to foster alignment and shared purpose within organizations
• Amplifying human attributes in an artificial world: A new paradigm of leadership to thrive in the age of AI
• Leveraging technology to unleash a new wave of creativity and innovation

Autoridade e referência global em matéria de confiança e modelos organizacionais

Stephen M.R. Covey é o autor do bestseller The SPEED of Trust . Magazine. Como CEO do Covey Leadership Center, transformou a organização na maior empresa de desenvolvimento de liderança do mundo. Covey também concebeu e liderou a estratégia que trouxe sucesso ao livro do seu pai, Dr. Stephen R. Covey, Os 7 Hábitos das Pessoas Altamente Eficazes, to become one of the two most influential business books of the 20th Century, according to CEO Magazine.

Confiar e inspirar para despertar a grandeza nos outros

• Porque é que as regras da liderança tradicional já não se aplicam
• Confiar e inspirar: uma abordagem holística para desafiar o paradigma de liderança de comando e controlo
• As bases do futuro do trabalho: confiança e colaboração
• As chaves para ser um líder que confia e inspira as suas equipas

Tony Fadell is an active investor and entrepreneur with a 30+ year history of founding companies and designing products that profoundly improve people’s lives. He is the Principal at Build Collective, an investment and advisory firm coaching deep tech startups. Currently, Build Collective is coaching over 200+ startups innovating game-changing technologies. He is the founder and former CEO of Nest, the company that pioneered the “Internet of Things.” Fadell was the SVP of Apple’s iPod Division and led the team that created the first 18 generations of the iPod and the first three generations of the iPhone. Throughout his career Fadell has authored more than 300 patents. In May 2016, TIME named the Nest Learning Thermostat, the iPod and the iPhone as three of the “50 Most Influential Gadgets of All Time.” He is a bestselling author of BUILD: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making.

An Innovator’s Guide to Making Things Worth Making

• Innovation and how deep tech can change the world
• Learning from failures to creating the iPod and founding Nest
• Addressing consumer needs and pain points: how to approach product development and design
• Strategies for effective leadership and team management to nurture innovation, experimentation and continuous improvement

Especialista no estudo da felicidade e do bem-estar na University of British Columbia

A Dra. Elizabeth Dunn é professora de Psicologia na University of British Columbia e uma das maiores especialistas no estudo da forma como o tempo, o dinheiro e a tecnologia influenciam a felicidade. O seu trabalho de investigação foi publicado em revistas de renome - incluindo três artigos na Science - e foi apresentado em meios de comunicação internacionais como The New York Times, The Atlantic e CNN. Dunn é coautora do livro Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending, que foi reconhecido pelo Washington Post como leitura essencial para os líderes.

O poder das relações sociais

• Como aumentar a felicidade dos funcionários em um ambiente de trabalho em evolução
• Estratégias cientificamente comprovadas para criar ligações fortes no trabalho
• Porque é que as ligações pessoais são um recurso valioso para as organizações, especialmente em tempos difíceis
• How  artificial interactions affects our feelings of happiness and social connection
• Equilíbrio entre a tecnologia e o fator humano: uma competência essencial para as empresas incorporarem eficazmente as ferramentas de IA na sua estratégia

As the Chief Strategy Officer at Wieden+Kennedy New York, and a marketing Professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Marcus Collins bridges the academic-practitioner gap for blue-chip brands and startups alike. Over the course of his career, Collins has developed a practice for creating culturally contagious ideas that inspire people to take action. In addition, he served as Head of Digital Strategy for Beyoncé.

His acclaimed book For The Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be examines the influence of culture on consumption and unpacks how everyone from marketers to activists can leverage culture to get people to take action. He is a recipient of Advertising Age’s 40 Under 40 award and Crain’s Business’ 40 Under 40 award, and a recent inductee into the American Advertising Federation’s Advertising Hall of Achievement.

The Future of Brands

• Why culture is the most powerful vehicle for influencing behavior and what this means for brands
• The underlying physics of how culture works and how to leverage its way to get people to take action
• What it takes for brands to effectively engage with communitiesl
• Understanding consumption as a cultural act – and the implications for the brands of tomorrow
• From Beyoncé to the Fortune 500: Sharing practical lessons from the field