Lynda Gratton

Putting people at the heart of your firm's strategy is what allows an organization to genuinely thrive. That means deliberately shaping a culture, a set of processes, and a people architecture that unlock energy and human potential rather than drain them. Lynda Gratton has spent three decades researching how to do this well, and her work on HR structure, alignment, and performance has shaped how leading companies think about talent. In this keynote, senior leaders walk away with a practical framework for aligning people strategy with corporate strategy — and a clear view of the mistakes that quietly erode both.

Leaders today operate under intense pressure: trust in institutions is under strain, employees and customers are more vocal than ever, and a new generation of stakeholders is actively reshaping expectations of what companies owe the world. Traditional leadership capabilities are no longer enough. In this keynote, Lynda Gratton explores the leadership mandate emerging to replace them — one grounded in authentic purpose, community, and the capacity to bring people along through sustained change. She gives executives a practical lens for rethinking how they lead, how they communicate, and how they build organizations worth belonging to.

Innovation does not happen in isolation — it happens where cooperation, trust, and diverse networks collide with a shared sense of purpose. Drawing on more than a decade of research funded by the Singapore Government, Lynda Gratton shows how high-performing organizations deliberately design three forces into their operating model: a culture of cooperation built through practices and processes; rich and diverse networks that let ideas move freely across the business; and what she calls a 'Hot Spot' — a purpose powerful enough to ignite collective energy. This keynote gives leaders a concrete playbook for turning cooperation into a renewable source of innovation.

What will working lives look like in the decades ahead — and how should leaders prepare their organizations today? In this keynote, Lynda Gratton draws on her bestseller Redesigning Work and her ongoing research through the Future of Work Research Consortium to lay out a blueprint for the hybrid era. She walks leaders through a four-step process — understand what matters, reimagine the future, model and test, act to create — and equips them with the questions, frameworks, and tough trade-offs required to build workplaces that are more productive, more human, and more ready for what comes next.