Regarded as the “CEO-Maker,” “DEI Professor,” and the “Cubicle to Corner Office Empress,” Dethra Giles is a workplace and career optimizer who advises organizations and individuals on how to chart their unique paths to success. She is a four-time TEDx speaker who has been named a “Top 100 HR Influencer” by Engagedly, and was selected by HR Gazette’s “HRchat” podcast as one of the “Top 22 Most Influential Figures in HR.” With clients including Kaiser Permanente, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), The Army Corp of Engineers, Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the Salvation Army, Giles shares a unique blend of advanced education and industry experience that has been described as “university-tested and industry-approved,” and can be implemented by organizations of any size, and across industries.

Combat tests you. Being a beat cop tests you. Life tests you. Three brothers and being the only girl...tests you. Vernice “FlyGirl” Armour has been tested her whole life. A gutsy trailblazer, her resume is an impressive collection of “firsts” including America’s first Black woman combat pilot. She served two tours of duty in Iraq as a Marine. She was also a diversity liaison officer to the Pentagon for Headquarters Marine Corps. After her military service, FlyGirl revved up her career in the private sector as an entrepreneur, consultant to business, and author of Zero to Breakthrough, The 7-Step, Battle-Tested Method for Accomplishing Goals that Matter. As a speaker, FlyGirl unleashes hard-hitting advice and amazing anecdotes from her adventures on the battlefield and in business. She helps individuals and organizations Get Gutsy and build a sustainable inner force and conviction, that results in accomplishing significant goals.

As a motivational keynote speaker, author, and entrepreneur, Laura Gassner Otting helps innovators, idealists, and iconoclasts get “unstuck”, increase confidence, and achieve extraordinary results. Laura inspires change agents, entrepreneurs, investors, leaders, and donors to push past the doubt and indecision that keeps great ideas in limbo. She delivers strategic thinking, well-honed wisdom, and catalytic perspective informed by decades of navigating change across the start-up, non-profit, political, and philanthropic landscapes. Laura dares listeners to find their voice, and generate the confidence needed to tackle larger-than-life challenges, and ultimately leads them to seek new ways of leading, managing, and mentoring others. Excited by the audacity of The Big Idea and the larger-than-life goal you just can’t seem to shake, she's an instigator, a motivator, and a provocateur, and she’s never met a revolution she didn’t like.

Candace Doby is founder of The Can-Do Company. She is a leadership development strategist, author of A Cool Girl’s Guide To Courage and professional speaker who works with organizations to create a culture of courage where employees spend less time and energy censoring and hiding themselves and more time performing at their highest potential. Candace combines a decade of research on courage with her experiences traveling the world solo and a 16-year, award-winning marketing career — much of which was spent leading teams at Chipotle. This unique combination equips her with the implementable strategies she has shared with thousands of leaders to help them courageously speak up, step up and show up in the workplace. Candace is known for delivering those strategies with a blend of truth, love and a bit of attitude to match the realness of courage, which prompts clients to refer to her in-person and virtual presence as "captivating." Her work has been featured on MSNBC, NPR and TEDx.

Molly Fletcher is a trailblazer in every sense of the word. She is a rare talent of business wisdom, relationship brilliance and unwavering optimism. As a CEO, she shares her unconventional and unique techniques that made her one of the first female sports agents in the high stakes, big ego world of professional sports and now a successful entrepreneur. As president of client representation for sports and entertainment agency CSE, Molly spent two decades as one of the world’s only female sports agents.

Early on in my career, when my company was in the aftermath of a $5B acquisition, I almost quit. Fueled by frustration and stress, I found myself on the precipice of walking out of the office and never coming back. Had I done so, I would have become another statistic. Yet another African-American female departed from a STEM-driven industry. Top talent voluntarily resigning during a time of significant organizational shift. Another change victim. But I didn’t. Instead, I woke up one day and decided to view those feelings as a signal that I was sitting in a moment of opportunity. An opportunity to transform that chemistry, that feeling into something better. To choose every day to do something, say something, behave in some way that would move the needle of my work experience towards a better feeling. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was cultivating a teachable strategy to inspire anyone to become enthusiastic about change, to find their unique power of resilience during turbulent times. Today, I help organizations disrupt ‘change as usual’. Through a practical and repeatable framework, I show them how they can transform their culture from surviving change to growing through change.

Sheila is a Founder of Triad Consulting Group and co-author of two New York Times bestsellers, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, and Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well. Sheila turns the usual conversations on their head and shows leaders how they can transform the culture of learning in their organization

Future-of-work strategist Heather E. McGowan helps leaders prepare their people and organizations for the post pandemic world. As a keynote speaker, Heather gives lucidity to complex topics through her research rich, graphic frameworks, and powerful metaphors. In 2017, LinkedIn ranked her as its #1 global voice for education and in 2020 McGowan was listed as one of the Top 50 Female Futurists in Forbes. NYT columnist Thomas Friedman describes her as “the oasis” when it comes to insights into the future of work. McGowan is the coauthor of The Adaptation Advantage (April 2020) and the Empathy Advantage (March 2023).

Betsy Myers is currently the founding director of the Center for Women and Business at Bentley University. A leadership expert and author, she speaks around the world on the changing nature of leadership and women's leadership. Her book Take the Lead, Motivate, Inspire, and Bring Out the Best in Yourself and Everyone Around You, was released in September 2011. Myers experience spans the corporate, political and higher education arena. She was the executive director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government from 2003-2007. A senior adviser to two U.S. presidents, Myers was most recently the COO and chair of Women for President Obama’s 2008 national presidential campaign. During the Clinton Administration, Myers launched and was the first director of the White House Office for Women's Initiatives and Outreach. She also served as the director of the Office of Women's Business Ownership at the SBA. She currently lives in Boston with her husband and young daughter.

Susan David Ph.D. is one of the world’s leading management thinkers and an award-winning psychologist at Harvard Medical School. Co-founder and co-director of the Institute of Coaching at Harvard/McLean Hospital and an authority on leadership, organizational culture, and success, she has been named to the 2017 Thinkers50 Radar list; the thinkers most likely to shape the future of how organizations are managed and led, and is a highly-sought speaker and scientific adviser. She is the author of the acclaimed Emotional Agility, an Amazon Best Book of the Year, Axiom Business Book Award Medalist, and a Nominee for the Books for a Better Life Award 2017. Dr. David and Emotional Agility have been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, TIME, Business Insider, Fast Company, MSNBC, INC.com, Forbes, Strategy + Business, National Public Radio (Here & Now), PBS News Hour, Harvard Business Review and many other leading publications. Dr. David’s academic books include: The Oxford Handbook of Happiness (Oxford University Press) and Beyond Goals (Gower). Dr. David lives outside Boston with her family.

Frances West is an internationally-recognized thought leader, inspirational speaker, strategy advisor, author, and women in technology trailblazer known for her work in innovation, technology, and business transformation. She is the founder of FrancesWestCo, a global strategy advisory company focused on operationalizing inclusion as a business and technology imperative through her unique Authentic Inclusion™ blueprint. Her insightful and impactful approach comes from her unique personal background as a first-generation, no-English speaking immigrant to her trailblazing professional path as one of the first women in the technology field and her experience as a global executive in sales, marketing, business development, and research as well as her ground-breaking work in accessibility as IBM’s first Chief Accessibility Officer. Frances brings a valuable business perspective to this human rights-based initiative. Because of her expertise, she was invited as the sole IT industry representative to testify before the US Senate on the need to pass the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities and she holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Massachusetts in Boston in recognition of her work in accessibility, research, and digital inclusion.

Dr. Kim Hires is an international Keynote Speaker, Strategic Consultant, and Coach who is dedicated to leadership development and helping leaders achieve their highest potential. Her work focuses on burnout prevention and cultivating cultures of well-being which she has been doing for over a decade. Her client portfolio includes individuals and organizations across a variety of industries and sectors that generate over $1 billion in annual revenue. Dr. Kim is also the host of the Leadership Antidote Podcast and author of The Leadership Innovation Manifesto. When not working with leaders, Dr. Kim enjoys spending time with her husband and son in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.