One of the world’s most admired athletes and the most decorated Olympian of all time, Phelps competed in his first Olympic Games at the age of 15. He has a total of 28 medals, 23 of which are gold, and has participated in the Athens, Beijing, London and Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games. He is the first American male swimmer to earn a spot on five Olympic teams and at the 2016 Olympic Games, he became the oldest individual gold medalist in Olympic swimming history.

In 2008 Phelps created the Michael Phelps Foundation and in 2010 in collaboration with the Michael Phelps Swim School and KidsHealth.org developed the “im” program that teaches children the importance of being active and healthy, focusing on the sport of swimming. Since retiring from competitive swimming, Phelps has also been actively involved in mental health awareness and promotion.

Sustaining High Performance

• Insights on goal setting and the mindset necessary to prepare for success
• Keys to ensuring you perform at your best when the pressure is greatest
• Facing failure and self-doubt: Lessons learnt from when times were toughest
• Staying motivated: Developing the desire to keep setting the bar higher year after year
• The impotence of raising awareness around mental health and personal wellbeing to sustain high performance

Highly regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, Francis Ford Coppola’s most notable films include The Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now. Coppola’s success as a filmmaker and director has won him various nominations and awards including BAFTA and the Academy Awards. His work however expands outside Hollywood, having ventures in the wine and hospitality industry. Coppola is the creator of lifestyle brand Francis Ford Coppola Presents, which includes films, videos, resorts, cafes and a winery located throughout California, including 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
• How to deal with doubt and uncertainty when faced with obstacles and failures along the way
• The evolution of storytelling: How to develop powerful stories that capture people’s imaginations

Professor Muhammad Yunus is the founder and former Managing Director of Grameen Bank which provides micro-credit to millions of poor people in Bangladesh. In 2006, Professor Yunus and Grameen Bank were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He is one of only seven individuals to have received the Nobel Peace Prize, the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the United States Congressional Gold Medal. The success of Grameen Bank has been phenomenal and transformational. Today, it is a $2.5 billion banking enterprise in Bangladesh, while the microcredit model has spread to over 50 countries worldwide, from the U.S. to Papua New Guinea, Norway to Nepal.

Social business and the future of capitalism

• What is social business and how to put it into practice
• How entrepreneurial spirit and business smarts can be harnessed to create sustainable businesses
• Meeting the challenge of building a world without poverty
• The evolution of sustainable development: From CSR to ESG and beyond

Leading creative consultant Kevin Roberts was for over two decades the CEO at Saatchi & Saatchi, one of the most prestigious agencies worldwide, responsible for the effectiveness of several of the world’s leading advertising budgets including those of clients such as Toyota and Procter & Gamble. Among his bestselling books is Lovemarks: the Future Beyond Brands, a ground-breaking business book that coined the term Lovemarks, named one of ten Ideas of the Decade. As the founder of Red Rose Consulting Roberts currently counsels business leaders and employees on creative thinking, marketing, and leadership. His most recently published book is 64 Shots: Leadership in a Crazy World.

Building a Culture of Innovation

• The principle obstacles to creativity and innovation and how to overcome them
• A new model for solving problems, increasing competitiveness, driving business results, and winning in an always-on world
• Why you should never give your clients what they want – but something more powerful instead
• Why you need to give people room to fail and what this looks like in practice

A visionary leader and serial entrepreneur, Jon McNeill teaches organisations 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-sharing pioneer Lyft, where he helped prepare the company to go public, growing revenue from $800 million to $2 billion in the process. Currently, Jon 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 innovative ideas within your organisation: how to create an idea’s factory
• Taking risks: when it is time to move from analysis to action

A professor at Harvard Business School, Francesca Gino is an award-winning researcher who focuses on why people make the decisions they do at work, and how leaders and employees have more productive, creative and fulfilling lives. She is the author of Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules in Work and Life and will be publishing her latest book in September 2023.

Gino has won numerous awards for her teaching, including the HBS Faculty Award by Harvard Business School’s MBA Class of 2015 and has been honoured as one of the world’s Top 40 Business Professors under 40. Her studies have also been featured in leading publications including The Economist, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

Leading Collaboration in Diverse Teams

• Why more diversity does not automatically result in more inclusive workplaces
• Key ways to leverage diversity
• Best practices to manage conflict effectively
• Why inclusion requires vulnerability: looking at ourselves and committing to a different future
• Lead teams by creating spaces of psychological safety
• How-to turn conflict situations into opportunities

Jean is the founding CEO and President of Virgin Unite, an entrepreneurial foundation that builds collectives, incubates ideas and re-invents systems for a better world. Over the last 15 years, she has worked with partners to lead the incubation and start-up of several global initiatives, including: The Elders, The B Team, The Carbon War Room (successfully merged with the RMI) and The Branson Centres of Entrepreneurship among many others.

As part of her work over the last three decades, Jean has helped corporations put the wellbeing of people and the planet at their core, including working with over 25 Virgin businesses across 15 industries to help embed purpose in all they do. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed book Partnering: Forge the Deep Connections That Make Great Things Happen.

Powerful Partnerships for Transformational Success

• Why the ability to forge deep connections trumps technical skills when it comes to achieving success
• How we can increase the depth and meaning in all of our most important relationships: Lessons from some of the world’s most remarkable leaders
• Developing practical tools that allow you to disagree respectfully and virtues to deepen your relationships
• A blueprint for expanding small partnerships into large-scale collaborations

Peter Weill, award-winning author, research scientist and chair of the Centre for Information Systems Research (CISR) at the MIT Sloan School of Management, helps organisations design and leverage a powerful digital strategy so they can better compete in the 21st century. For years, he has been helping boards and executives digitally transform their institutions so they can exponentially scale business and sustain growth well into the future. He has conducted workshops for executive committees and boards of more than 50 companies globally, and for key conferences, including the CEO summits of both Microsoft and SAP. Weill also educates leaders about the role, value and governance of digitization within enterprises and their ecosystems.

Creating a Future-Ready Organisation

• Creating a winning digital strategy: Tools companies can use to tackle threats and leverage opportunities
• Developing a digital operating model to increase revenue and drive growth
• Steps decision makers need to take on their journey to becoming a digitally-savvy, future-ready organisation
• Forging partnerships and building a shared ecosystem so everyone can thrive

A paralympic swimmer, with 26 medals in 5 Paralympic Games, Teresa Perales is the most decorated Spanish athlete in history. At the age of 19, she suffered a neuropathy that caused her to lose mobility in her legs. Despite the obstacles facing her, she would go on to achieve unprecedented sporting success and position herself among the global sporting elite.

In addition to her sporting achievements, she has held different positions of public responsibility motivated by her commitment to society. She is an Ambassador for Inclusive Sport in Spain for Fundación Telefónica and has been a member of the Paralympic Games Commission of the International Paralympic Committee since May 2010. Writer of two books, Mi vida sobre ruedas and La fuerza de un sueño, in 2021, Teresa was awarded the 2021 Princess of Asturias Award for Sports, for her brilliant career, her active and courageous social commitment and for embodying the most admirable sporting values: effort and ability to overcome.

The Power of Attitude

• Reprogramming our attitude when it comes to accepting and dealing with difficult situations
• Learning to manage the way in which change affects us
• The decisive questions we must ask ourselves before starting on the path towards our long term objectives
• Applying the values of sport to business and organisational life