Keynote Speakers

Professor Eddie Obeng

Professor Eddie Obeng is Founder Director of Pentacle the world’s first virtual business school and the first organisation to offer an integrated management approach specifically designed to meet the challenges of our fast changing, complex 21st century. He was previously an Executive Director at Ashridge Management College, having begun his career with Shell. Professor Obeng pioneered the concept of the ‘New World’ throughout the 1990's.

Eddie and his team have spent the best part of a decade re-writing the fundamentals of business management to create their own coherent, joined up New World approach. They have challenged all the established thinking from strategy as environmental fit to ‘hero’ leaders and re-interpreted the needs for the 21st century of complexity and fast change. Eddie brings genuinely new concepts, materials and practice. He has written up some of his work in over 12 books.

If you’re after the ‘same old - same old’, Eddie is not the speaker for you. Using his extensive experience and insights he will challenge your perceptions and help you to see the new reality. But more than just ‘talking concepts’ he will use examples from real life client assignments to illustrate and explain, proving, in his words that “The future is now because most of us are already late!”. Eddie is a genuine leader. He has the ability to bring a presentation to life, engage and involve the audience often on a tough thinking journey. Eddie’s legendary reputation for injecting energy means he is often offered the tough post-lunch ‘graveyard‘ slot at many conferences.

Eddie is an exciting, energising, thought provoking, rigorous and humorous speaker. His presentations are incredibly energetic and he is renowned as a powerful presenter and a wonderful speaker.

Simon Middleton

Simon Middleton helps clients dramatically innovate and change to gain marketshare in volatile modern markets.

With more than 20 years industry experience, he is founder of specialist consultancy Simon Middleton Company and co-founder of strategy and brand company Turton Middleton.

Simon’s reputation as an original thinker in the field of brands and creative-thinking for business development leads to regular appearances in regional and national media.

He consults, coaches, leads workshops and delivers keynotes for a wide variety of clients in the UK and Europe. He is also a Chartered Institute of Marketing regional Marketer of The Year.

Despite giving good strategic advice to others, he stubbornly persists in writing, singing and playing guitar for a country band.

Masterclass Facilitators

Stephen Brown

Blood looks black by moonlight. Under the lunar lantern, flesh wounds are rapidly spreading inkblots. Head shots are exploding carboys of Quink, with chunks in.

Not many marketing textbooks begin with sentences like the above. Not many textbooks start with flesh wounds and head shots, period. But then again, not many marketing textbook writers write like Stephen Brown.

The moon-black blood appears on page one of Brown’s forthcoming book, Agents & Dealers. It’s a prequel to his previous book, The Marketing Code, arguably the world’s first “management thriller.” Noticing that his students were unwilling to wade through the tedium of traditional textbooks, he elected to radically change the template: thrills replaced theories, corpses superseded case studies, and bullets were exchanged for bullet-points.

Some have observed that the titles of Stephen’s management thrillers are suspiciously similar to those of his best-selling namesake, Dan. Some have suggested that Stephen and Dan are twins, albeit separated at birth (one was brought up in the lap of American luxury, the other was raised by feral Irish wolfhounds in the wilds of the Emerald Isle). Some have even suggested that Dan and Stephen are one and the same, since they’ve never been seen in the same room together. But who knows the true secret of the Brown bloodline? Maybe it’s just a quirky conspiracy theory.

Quirky isn’t the only word used to describe Stephen Brown. Professor of Marketing Research at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, Stephen is widely regarded as the Antichrist of marketing. A danger to his discipline, he has challenged many of marketing’s most sacred cows and clashed with some of the field’s foremost gurus, including Philip Kotler and the late Ted Levitt. Perhaps Stephen’s greatest achievement was having an entire manuscript rejected by Harvard Business School Press. “They were appalled,” he says, “by my suggestion that marketing is the art of blowing smoke where the sun doesn’t shine.”

Stephen Brown has written twenty books in total; he is renowned for his sparkling conference presentations; he has been a visiting professor at the University of California, the University of Utah, and Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Oddly, they didn’t invite him back…

The turning point in Stephen Brown’s career occurred in a Salt Lake City bookstore. He came across a remaindered biography of P.T. Barnum, museum curator, circus impresario and perhaps the greatest marketer of all time.

Graeme Leach

Graeme Leach is Chief Economist and Director of Policy at the Institute of Directors, which he joined in August 1998. He is also visiting professor of economic policy at the University of Lincoln.

In 2006 he was appointed to the Shadow Chancellor’s Commission for Tax reform.

Prior to joining the IoD he was economics director at the Henley Centre, analysing future economic and social change. In 1998 he was awarded the WPP Atticus Award for original published thinking on futures issues.

Previously Graeme has worked as economic adviser to the Scottish Provident Investment Group and as a senior economic consultant with Pieda.

He is a frequent media commentator and in recent years has spoken at conferences in the USA, China, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Sweden, Ireland, Belgium, Greece, Taiwan and even Zimbabwe!

Penny de Valk: CEO Institute of Leadership and Management

Penny was appointed to the position of CEO of ILM in October 2007, prior to which she was Strategy director for Ceridian, a US based $1.5bn HR services organisation. She also headed up their employee support business for 4 years before joining the UK Board of Ceridian to develop and run HR services in the UK. With a BA and MBA Penny’s background includes corporate marketing, executive development and consultancy in business to business service environments. Before joining Ceridian, she was CEO of the Institute of Management in Auckland, New Zealand and is currently ranked 40th in the Top 100 HR magazine Most Influential league table.

Andrew Day BSc (Hons), MSc, C.Psychol, D. Psych

Andrew Day is an organisation psychologist and executive coach who specialises in working with organisations and groups engaged in the process of change. This includes helping them to develop strategies for change, to support groups and individuals in making transitions and to work with the dilemmas and tensions that are part and parcel of the process of change. He is a member of faculty for the Ashridge Masters in Executive Coaching.

Main areas of interest

Andrew has a strong interest in cross boundary working and collaboration in and between organisations. His consulting work has included:

• Helping to improve collaboration and understanding in a multiple organisation alliance,
• Helping an automotive group develop cross brand working and
• Implementing teamworking in manufacturing plants.

Andrew has over ten years experience of working with large complex organisations, particularly within the automotive and telecommunications industries. He has worked on many cross – cultural projects within Europe and between Europe and the United States.

He worked for eight years as an internal organisation development consultant for Ford Motor Company.

His research interests include group dynamics in response to change, transition and uncertainty; the role of similarity and difference in executive coaching and critical moments in coaching.

Qualifications

Andrew is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist with the British Psychological Society. He holds an MSc and a Doctorate in Occupational Psychology. In 2002 – 2004 he completed the Tavistock Institute's programme in Advanced Organisational Consultancy. Andrew holds the British Psychological Society’s Level A and B certificates in Psychological Assessment. He is currently completing a professional Doctorate in Counselling Psychology and Psychotherapist.

Gloria Moss BA (Hons), MA, FCIPD

Gloria Moss is a Human Resources expert who researches and writes about leadership and diversity issues.

She is a Senior Lecturer at the Business School at the University of Wales, Newport. She is also a Visiting Professor at the Ecole Superieure de Gestion (ESG), Paris.

Main areas of interest

Gloria has a strong interest in understanding and identifying the ways in which people’s thinking divides them. People may look broadly similar, and speak different languages, but it is their thinking that can ultimately be the biggest divide. Her research charts the way people’s gender, nationality and personalities can influence their thinking about leadership, teamwork and design, showing how differently men and women conceive of leadership, and how differently they conceive of good and bad design. She has also charted the impact of nationality on teamwork, showing how much easier it is to achieve teamwork in a collectivist than an individualistic country. She has also shown how men can prefer designs produced by men, and women designs produced by women.

Her research on leadership has shown that there is no single concept of leadership and that people from different nationalities and genders conceive of leadership excellence in different ways. A man and woman, therefore, may lead in very different ways, and produce different kinds of results.

Gloria has over ten years experience of working as a Training and Development manager in the UK and France, working for Courtaulds and Eurotunnel. She has published more than thirty peer reviewed articles on differences between people and has recently completed a book Gender, Design and Marketing (Gower). She is also working on a second book, Profiting from Diversity (Macmillan Palgrave). She has conducted consultancies on these topics for blue-chip countries such as Marks and Spencer, Ford, BT and Bounty.

Her research interests include the impact of diversity on leadership, teamwork, marketing and design.

Qualifications

Gloria is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, with a first degree in French and a Masters in History. She is a qualified user of the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) which measures differences in the way people conceive of the world around them.