The most successful Olympian of all time

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 importance 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 Talent: 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

As former Chief Marketing Officer at Nike, Greg Hoffman is a world-class expert on creating brand experiences. During his career of more than 27 years at Nike he led teams tasked with envisioning the future of storytelling and consumer experiences for the brand.
Through his leadership, Nike drove themes of equality, sustainability, and empowerment through sport in some of its most significant brand communications.

He has been recognized as one of Fast Company magazine’s Most Creative People in Business as well as featuring on Business Insider’s list of 50 Most Innovative CMO’s and AdAge’s Power Players annual lists. In 2023, Greg’s new book Emotion by Design: Creative Leadership Lessons From a Life at Nike will be published for the first time in Italy. Today as founder and principal of Modern Arena, Greg advises Fortune 1000 brands, startups, and nonprofits in creating brand strength, business growth, and social impact.

Creative Leadership Lessons from a Life at Nike

• The keys to build strong emotional connections with your consumers
• Creativity as a team sport: how to embrace curiosity and risk-taking at the workplace
• Learn a practical methodology to embody innovation within your organization
• Develop a powerful lasting legacy through storytelling
• How creativity can shape tomorrow’s leaders

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 Innovation and Growth from Inside Tesla

• Disruption, leadership, innovation 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 innovation 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

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, Gómez 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 an important 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 organizations should adopt to thrive in the #NewNormal
• The importance of perfecting our methods, being more aware of the attitudes we assume and doing everything we do with love and passion

Beatrice Maria Vio, better known as Bebe, is a symbol of dedication, resilience in the face of adversity, and joie de vivre. Passionate about fencing since childhood, her sporting dreams were nearly shattered when she contracted a particularly virulent form of meningitis at the age of 11 that resulted in the amputation of both her legs and forearms. Determined not to give up on her sporting ambitions, Bebe recovered and took up wheelchair fencing.

Since 2014, she has won every major world competition: European Championships, World Championships, Rio 2016 Paralympic Games, where she was also the flag bearer at the closing ceremony, and Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games, where she was the flag bearer at the opening ceremony.

In 2009, together with her parents, she founded art4sport, a non-profit association established to help children and young people with limb amputations take back their lives through sports. In 2021, the Bebe Vio Academy, a project designed by Bebe in partnership with Nike with an inclusive program focused on the athlete’s main purpose: to make sport accessible for all, officially kicked off.

If it Seems Impossible, then it Can Be Done!

• What it takes to face fears and obstacles with a smile
• Overcoming prejudices to create opportunities for all
• Building the right team to achieve your goals
• How to turn your perceived weakness into your greatest strength