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Chris is interested in the area where strategy, leadership and change come together. He is passionate about flourishing organisations on a sustainable earth. He believes in the unlimited potential of people to make amazing things happen, if we are curious, work together and dare to imagine what’s possible. His talks will always be 100% tailored to the client’s situation and need, but if it’s in any way connected to these themes, it’ll be worth giving him a call.
Some of the recent ways he has turned his passions and experience into powerful keynotes are illustrated here. There are many more! Let’s talk ….
Never see strategy the same way again! This client wanted to get their senior leadership team (top 200) thinking more strategically, to have more people looking for opportunities to add value to the strategic thinking around them. The trouble is that many leaders think they’re not “strategic” and see strategy as “someone else’s job”. This talk busts that myth and gets people seeing how they can make an excellent strategic contribution.
This talk brings strategy alive, stopping people thinking about strategy as dry analysis, or a plan, that’s just a dead document. Real strategy is a living thing, something that acts as the glue and lubrication in your organisation, helping people make choices and keeping their eyes on what matters. This talk, and the invitation it brings, is about setting a course towards better thinking, better collaboration, better decisions and more success.
It’s also a great talk for new directors. It has been delivered as a guest speaker in-house senior leadership programmes and at several business schools and professional associations in several countries.
Sometimes clients are undertaking a merger or thinking about using acquisition as a growth strategy. Chris has contributed to a number of leadership away-days and retreats, helping teams to think about making sure their deal is one of the best.
Chris worked in corporate finance for many years, and saw deals fly and saw deals fail. Almost all mergers work on paper, that’s not the problem! In this talk, he explores life lessons from some of the deals I’ve seen, and what made the great, or what lost them value.
This can be pitched when you’re thinking about what deal to do, or post-merger when you want people working hard on the cultural value drivers that mean the merger flies or founders.
This client discovered in their staff survey that its people often don’t see the link between their day-to-day work and where value comes from in the organisation. In this talk, Chris helped everyone see how value comes about, through front line stories and customer experiences.
It’s a powerful way to engage people in strategy and action. It makes strategic choices come to life, linking them directly to customer experiences and decisions to buy. It invites people to talk to each other about how our day-to-day actions build shareholder value and market success. It’s a great talk to get use to get people motivated to think about how their work matters, to customers, to the future and to the value they create.
Change is inevitable, but it often causes trouble. Why is that? And what can be done to make change go better? Lots of clients ask me to talk to their teams about change.
This talk looks at why some of the most popular approaches to change are too mechanical to do the job, and how using some simple humanity can beat hiring a change management firm.
After this talk people will understand what change is and how it happens and will know the power and limits of some of the famous approaches. They’ll come out of the session with new ideas on what they can do as leaders to work well with the change around them, with the positive changes you want to bring about.
It’s easy to get stuck. The more successful we are, the more there is a danger that we become blinded to other ways of seeing and doing things. Our recipes of success can become blinkers that stop us seeing better ways of doing things.
One of his most frequently requested and highly valued talks is about different ways of seeing. He has spoken on this theme all over the world – from scientists looking for new organic molecules to engineers trying to find new ways of collaborating with their customers. Chris has worked with cosmetics and skincare, foods and pharmaceuticals, governments, and space agencies.
He has made a life out of finding new ways of seeing things and have collected hundreds of practical stories of where different ways of seeing have changed the world. People love these stories and come out inspired and empowered to be more curious, look at things in a new way, and bring about new and valuable changes in their work.
Chris is passionate about people and their limitless potential to do amazing things. His passion is infectious. He is an advocate for exploring and learning as super-powers – and he doesn’t mean courses, he means the vital business of learning rigorous lessons from what happens every day. Get this right and this is where your organisational future gets built.
For years he has worked with the messy truth of a VUCA world. Everything is shifting and it is really difficult to rely on experience and expertise – some of the challenges faced are questions where there isn’t an expert yet, and where no-one has all of the experience of having done it before.
How do you lead brilliantly, inviting others to come with you, when you don’t know the answer? You do it by knowing how to explore, and how to create teams of brilliant exploration around you. This talk shows you how to do it, and gets people excited about their own ability to explore and to join in exploration with others. It’s one of the most popular and essential talks he gives, and it remains as essential today as it has ever been. We need new work at the frontier of what is known, and your organisation needs to be great at doing it. Leading beyond the familiar, creating the future – tomorrow will be shaped by those who explore best.
Many of his clients call because they need innovation, and particularly they want new ideas for being a successful business that is at ease with its contribution to making a healthy and flourishing planet. Often, it’s really successful companies that call, particularly ones with a long history and a great heritage. How do you reimagine a brilliant company with a hundred-year history?
This is one of his favourite sweet spots. For many years Chris ran a Masters degree in sustainable management, and was Professor in Systems Change at a business school and taught at Schumacher College, one of the world’s leading centres for thinking about how to work and live in ways that respect living systems. Out of this has grown a wealth of insights and stories about how to reinvent and reimagine what we do and how we do it. You might call it regenerative organisations, circular economy, sustainable business or eco-literacy, it’s all the same thing! The core question is “how do we have brilliant organisations, providing great services and contribute to a vibrant living planet?” That’s exactly the question this talk addresses.
People come out of this one inspired, fired up, wanting to do more, ready to join in … and hungry to put their energy to work in doing this in your business or organisation.
Sometimes it’s time for a real change. The business must make a radical departure. A team or division has to reinvent themselves totally. A successful business has to be let go. How do you do it well? How do the people involved move on to something new?
Chris is old enough to have been part of several reinventions and fresh starts, personal and organisational. As a result he has been asked to speak to executive teams and who orgaisations at pivotal points in their history helping them prepare to make the next step.
These have included an entrepreneur owned hospitality business, preparing to be sold into a new corporate future; a food business, moving from being owned by its founders to becoming an employee owned business; a 150 year old firm moving from one business entirely into another, and taking as much of its heritage with it as it could; a monastic community looking to find a new spiritual leader and form a new community, and many more examples ….
Chris has also worked with smaller groups of senior executives about to depart from businesses, helping them to find a new life after their corporate success.
Drawing on his own stories of reinvention, of developing beginner’s mind, drawing on the spiritual truths of letting go so that “every day we begin again” – this is a powerful and personal exploration of the pain and power of starting anew, leaving people ready to explore the future with hope and some clues to what to expect on the pat.
