An award-winning professor in the University of Michigan’s top-ranked Psychology Department and its Ross School of Business, Ethan Kross is one of the world’s leading experts in controlling the conscious mind. He studies how the conversations people have with themselves impact their health, performance, decisions, and relationships.

Kross’ bestselling book, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why it Matters and How to Harness It, was chosen as one of the best new books of the year by the Washington Post, and the Winning Winter 2021 selection for Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and Dan Pink’s Next Big Idea Book Club. He has participated in policy discussion at the White House and is the founder of the Emotion & Self Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan.

Turning Your Inner Critic Into Your Inner Coach

• Becoming your own most powerful coach: Strategies to boost motivation, overcome impostor syndrome, and hone your mental fitness
• Intentional leadership: Harnessing anxieties as a resource for increased productivity, strategic thinking, and better decision-making
• Stop overthinking, start living: How to distance ourselves from negativity and self-criticism, and improve mental clarity
• Unleashing potential: The science of mastering self-talk for better leadership

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 and 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

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 and CSX. Additionally, she is a Senior Fellow and Adjunct Professor of Executive Education at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and the author of LEAD BIGGER: The Transformative Power of Inclusion and The Leader’s Guide to Unconscious Bias: How to Reframe Bias, Cultivate Connection and Create High-Performing Teams.

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

Former Director of the CIA and United States Army General

A highly decorated general and one of the most prominent combat commanders in American history, Gen. David H. Petraeus, USA (Ret.) has dedicated his life to public service, leading military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and then serving as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.  His illustrious military career spanned over 37 years and included six command roles, five of which were during combat. General Petraeus is the only person in U.S. Army history to be the top graduate in both the U.S. Army’s challenging Ranger School and the year-long U.S. Army Command and General Staff College course. 

Post-military, he steered the CIA, amplifying global counterterrorism efforts and expanding intelligence outreach, before transitioning to the private sector, where he currently holds positions as a Partner at KKR, chairman of the KKR Global Institute, and a Kissinger Fellow at Yale University. 

Leadership in the Face of Adversity

• Understanding and embracing the tasks of strategic leadership in the 21st century
• Keys to making tough decisions in the face of adversity
• What it takes to be a resilient, effective strategic leader
• Insights into the significant global challenges facing countries and organizations today: The impact of ongoing international security issues and macroeconomic trends

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

World’s leading expert on organizational trust

Stephen M. R. Covey is the bestselling author of The SPEED of Trust and Trust and Inspire: How Truly Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others. He is the former CEO of Covey Leadership Center, which, under his stewardship, became the largest leadership development company in the world. Covey personally led the strategy that propelled his father’s book, Dr. Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, to become one of the two most influential business books of the 20th Century, according to CEO Magazine.

Trust and Inspire: Unleashing Greatness in Others

• Why the old rules of leadership no longer apply
• Trust and Inspire: A comprehensive framework for an alternative to command and control
• How trust and collaboration will be the foundation of the future of work
• Revealing the fundamental beliefs of a Trust and Inspire leader

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

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.

Driving Organizational Performance and Diversity

• Strategies organizations can employ to increase the diversity of their talent pool
• The biases that affect the recruitment and retention of women and people of color in companies
• How organizational environments can engender stress and the impact on individual and organizational performance
• Building businesses that increase employees’ productivity, enhance their creativity, and improve health outcomes

A renowned expert on organizational learning and leadership and the world’s #1 ranked management thinker, Amy Edmondson has been studying psychological safety and workplace behaviors for more than 20 years.  The Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, Edmondson helps organizations identify barriers to success that are often hidden inside a workplace culture. Her work has helped major firms vastly improve performance by building an environment of psychological safety, transparency and collaborative teaming.

She is the bestselling author of The Fearless Organization, and the recently published Right Kind of Wrong, which won the Financial Times Business Book of the Year 2023. 

Psychological Safety: Unlocking Growth Through Intelligent Failure

• How to nurture an environment where employees feel safe and empowered
• Improve learning, cooperation and performance by fostering a culture of psychological safety
• How leaders can transform their perspective on setbacks by embracing the intelligent failures that are vital to innovation
• Tailored practices, skills and mindsets for taking smart risks and using mistakes as springboards for profound learning and competitive differentiation

Musician and expert in entrepreneurship, innovation and virtuosity

With more than 25 years of entrepreneurial and senior management experience, Felipe Gómez has developed a powerful set of proven tools that helps leaders, teams and organizations to reach extraordinary performance. Leveraging his passion for music and with a grand piano on stage, Felipe will inspire his audience and provide tools to consistently aim for operational excellence, create meaningful connections and build effective cultures of innovation. Gómez is the author of the best-selling book, Attitude-E: The Method for Being Entrepreneurial and Fulfilling your Dreams.

The Power of Virtuosity

• What it means to be a virtuoso and why it’s a critical quality for organizations in today’s world
• Identifying the keys to be a virtuoso in everything we set out to do
• The mindsets and behaviors that leaders and companies should adopt to thrive
• The importance of perfecting our methods, being more aware of the attitudes we assume and doing everything we do with love and passion

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