David Cooperrider is a University Distinguished Professor and holds the Fairmount Santrol – David L. Cooperrider Professorship in Appreciative Inquiry at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, where he is the faculty founder of the Fowler Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit.

David is best known for his original theoretical articulation of “AI” or Appreciative Inquiry with his mentor Suresh Srivastva. Today AI’s approach to strengths-inspired, instead of problematizing change, is being practiced everywhere: the corporate world, the world of public service, of economics, of education, of faith, of philanthropy, and social science scholarship—it is aff ecting them all. Jane Nelson, at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Leadership recently wrote, “David Cooperrider is one of the outstanding scholar-practitioners of our generation.”

David has brought Appreciative Inquiry and served as a business advisor to many Fortune 500 and international companies such as Apple, National Grid, Webasto, Sherwood Williams, Fairmount Santrol, as well as large systems such as the US Navy, the United Nations, and Red Cross. He has also served as advisor to Presidents or Nobel Laureates—leaders such as Bill Clinton, the Dalai Lama, and Kofi Annan.

Sarah Toms is Chief Innovation Officer at IMD. She leads information technology, learning innovation, Strategic Talent Solutions, and the AI Strategy. A demonstrated thought leader in education innovation, Sarah is passionate about amplifying IMD’s mission to drive positive impact for individuals, organizations, and society.

She previously co-founded Wharton Interactive, an initiative at the Wharton School that has scaled globally. Sarah has been on the Executive Committee of Reimagine Education for almost a decade, and was one of the ten globally to be selected as an AWS Education Champion. Her other great passion is supporting organizations who work to attract and promote women and girls into STEM.

She has spent nearly three decades working at the bleeding edge of technology, and was an entrepreneur for over a decade, founding companies that built global CRM, product development, productivity management, and financial systems. Sarah is also coauthor of The Customer Centricity Playbook, the Digital Book Awards 2019 Best Business Book.

Dr. Margaret Heffernan produced programmes for the BBC for 13 years. She then moved to the US where she spearheaded multimedia productions for Intuit, The Learning Company and Standard&Poors. She was Chief Executive of InfoMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation and then iCast Corporation, was named one of the ‘Top 25’ by Streaming Media magazine and one of the ‘Top 100 Media Executives’ by The Hollywood Reporter.

The author of six books, Margaret’s third book, Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril was named one of the most important business books of the decade by the Financial Times. Her TED talks have been seen by over fifteen million people and in 2015 TED published Beyond Measure: The Big Impact of Small Changes. Her most recent book, Uncharted: How to Map the Future was published in 2020. It quickly became a bestseller and was nominated for the Financial Times Best Business Book award, was one of Bloomberg’s Best Books of 2021 and was chosen as the ‘Medium Best of the Best’ business book. Her new book, Embracing Uncertainty will be published in March 2025.

She is a Professor of Practice at the University of Bath and, through Merryck & Co., mentors CEOs and senior executives of major global organisations.

In 2023 Margaret was inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame for her lasting contribution to management thinking.

She is a frequent broadcaster on BBC Radio 4 and the author of many broadcast plays. She writes for the Financial Times and is a parish councillor.

Prof. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is an international authority in people analytics, talent management, leadership development, and the Human-AI interface. He is the Chief Innovation Officer at Manpower Group, co-founder of Deeper Signals and Metaprofiling, and Professor of Business Psychology at both University College London, and Columbia University. He has previously held academic positions at New York University and the London School of Economics, and lectured at Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School, London Business School, Johns Hopkins, IMD, and INSEAD, as well as being the CEO at Hogan Assessment Systems. Dr. Tomas has published 10 books and over 200 scientific papers, making him one of the most prolific social scientists of his generation. He is a frequent contributor to Fast Company, The Guardian, Forbes, and the Harvard Business Review. 

Dr. Wanda Wallace, Managing Partner of Leadership Forum, helps leaders and teams improve the quality of their conversations in every aspect of organisational life from team debate to inclusivity, career goals, feedback cultures and strategic insight. Better conversations result in better relationships which lead to better performance.

Wanda speaks, coaches, conducts seminars and works with top teams in global corporations around the world. She is passionate about helping leaders recognise the choices they have, see the consequences, take control of their careers and build more inclusive teams. 

With her latest book, she draws on her experience watching men and women transition to more senior roles where the team knows more than the leader. This can be a trap for expert executors transitioning to roles with a greater span of responsibility. You Can’t Know It All:Leading in an Age of Deep Expertiseexplains what to do when it’s time to step outside of your comfort zone.

Dr. Wallace has forged close relationships with a number of blue-chip clients across many industries such as those in healthcare (AbbVie, GlaxoSmithKline, LifeScienceDynamics, Medtronic, Merck), insurance (Allianz Group, MetLife, Prudential, BCBSNC), manufacturing (Siemens, Ford Motor Company, amsOsram, Navistar, Kennametal, UPM, Ledvance), financial services (AllianceBernstein, American Express, Blackrock, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan 

Chase, Morgan Stanley, UBS, HSBC), accounting (Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers), legal (Herbert Smith Freehills, Linklaters, Norton Rose, Dentons), hospitality (Four Seasons), telecommunications (Ericsson, British Telecom, Vodafone) and oil and gas (British Petroleum). She has also worked with start-ups.

As a consultant and educator who is equally at ease in the distinct worlds of business and research, she is an integrator of ideas, putting the best of what she sees to practical application. She also is the author of Reaching the Top, Factors that Impact the Careers and Retention of Senior Women Leaders along two reports co-authored with Corporate Research Forum entitled Diversity and Business Performance (2011) and Developing and Broadening Specialists (2012). In addition, she hosts a weekly podcast entitled ‘Out of the Comfort Zone’. She describes her podcast as her learning lab where she explores new ideas in collaboration with leading thinkers and integrates those ideas into her practice. 

Dr. Wallace received her Ph.D. from the Psychology Department at Duke University with special emphasis on cognitive and thought processes. Prior to founding Leadership Forum, she was an associate professor in Marketing and then Associate Dean of Executive Education at The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and Executive Vice President at Duke Corporate Education.

Howard Yu, hailing from Hong Kong, is LEGO® Professor of Management and Innovation at IMD. He leads the Center for Future Readiness, founded in 2020 with support from the LEGO Brand Group, to guide companies through strategic transformation. Recognised globally for his expertise, in 2023 he was honoured with the Thinkers50 Strategy Award, recognising his substantial contributions to management strategy and future readiness. His additional inclusion into the Thinkers50 list places him among the top global management thinkers.

Back in 2015, Yu was already named among the world’s top business professors under 40 by Poets&Quants, and in 2018 he appeared on the Thinkers50 Radar list. Notably, in 2023, his work with the LEGO Group was recognised with an EFMD Gold Award for organisational development and a Brandon Hall Group Gold Award for advancing learning strategies and competencies development.

Today, Yu co-directs the Strategy for Future Readiness programme and has delivered tailored training to global companies including ABB, Bosch, the LEGO Group, Novo Nordisk, Electrolux, Heineken, Maersk, and many others.

His ongoing work has been published in journals such as Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. His case studies have won several awards from the European Foundation for Management Development and The Case Centre. He regularly appears on media outlets including Bloomberg, CNBC, and the BBC.

His book, LEAP: How to Thrive in a World Where Everything Can Be Copied, published in 2018, has earned multiple awards, including an Axiom Business Book Awards Gold Medal and the strategy+business Best Business Book award.

He joined IMD in 2011 after completing a doctoral degree at Harvard Business School. He worked in Hong Kong as a banker at the start of his career.

Rahaf Harfoush is a Strategist, Digital Anthropologist, and New York Times Best-Selling Author who focuses on the intersections between emerging technology, innovation, and digital culture.

She is the Executive Director of the Red Thread Institute of Digital Culture and teaches “Innovation & Emerging Business Models” at Sciences Politique’s school of Management and Innovation in Paris. She is currently working on her fourth book.

Rahaf is a member of France’s National Digital Council. In 2021 she joined The Oxford Internet Institute as a Visiting Policy Fellow.

Her third book, entitled Hustle & Float: Reclaim Your Creativity and Thrive in a World Obsessed with Work, was released in 2019. She has been featured by Bloomberg, The CBC, CTV, and Forbes for her work on workplace culture. It has been translated into Chinese and French.

Formerly, Rahaf was the Associate Director of the Technology Pioneer Program at the World Economic Forum in Geneva where she helped identify disruptive-startups that were improving the state of the world.

Rahaf is the co-author of The Decoded Company: Know Your Talent Better Than You Know your Customers, published in early 2014 and listed on both the New York Times and USA Today best seller lists. It won a 2015 Gold Axiom Award for Best Business Technology Book. The Decoded Company explores how big data is providing an unprecedented opportunity for organisations to dramatically improve their decision making, increase their performance and, most importantly, intentionally create happy and vibrant work cultures.

Ian Goldin is Professor of Globalisation and Development at the University of Oxford, Professorial Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford University, and from 2006 to 2016 was the founding Director of Oxford University’s interdisciplinary Oxford Martin School. He currently leads the Oxford Martin research programmes on Technological and Economic Change, Future of Work and Future of Development. He has published over 60 journal articles and 23 books, most recently Rescue: From Global Crisis to a Better World.

Gianpiero Petriglieri is Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD, and an expert on leadership and learning in the workplace. His award-winning research and teaching focus on what it means, and what it takes, to become a leader. He is particularly interested in the development of leadership in the age of “nomadic professionalism,” in which people have deep personal bonds to work but loose affiliations to organisations, and authenticity and mobility have replaced loyalty and advancement as hallmarks of virtue and success. Gianpiero’ research has appeared in leading academic journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Learning & Education, and Organization Studies. He also writes regularly for the Harvard Business Review, where five of his essays have been included among the “ideas that shaped management” in the last decade. His work has been featured in a range of media including the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, Businessweek, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and El Pais. He has chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on new models of leadership, and was recently named one of the 50 most influential management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50.