Rita McGrath is a leading expert on growth strategy, the author of The End of Competitive Advantage, and one of Columbia Business School’s most popular professors. Named a top thought leader by Thinkers50, she shares insights and exercises on how to align business operations to the coming environment – capturing opportunities fast, exploiting them decisively, and quickly moving on – including disruptive innovation and the social and technological forces that create opportunity. Audiences value her ability to connect cutting edge research to practical business problems.

Over his 37-year career, Rishad Tobaccowala has worked across almost every area of marketing including brand advertising, media, database, as well as direct and interactive marketing. As a pioneer in digital marketing, Tobaccowala helped create one of the first interactive groups and digital agencies 20 years ago and has helped launch a series of initiatives over the years from groups focused on gaming, social, mobile, and search engine marketing. Starcom IP, Play, Giant Step, SMG Search, and Denuo are some of the brands Tobaccowala helped incubate.

Childhood best friends, Nick Friedman and Omar Soliman, were just twenty-two when they co-founded the now iconic junk removal and moving company, College Hunks Hauling Junk. Starting as an idea to earn some extra money over college break in a beat-up cargo van, the duo has grown College Hunks into a $300 million national franchise with more than 100 locations – truly demonstrating what it means to be both bold risk takers and modern leaders. The company and founders have been widely recognized and acclaimed for their world-class culture and service, as well as their progressive approach to doing business in the 21st century. Through lessons-learned from their monumental business growth, the pair discuss what it means to create a purpose-driven, customer-centric organization, while also sharing their secrets to success: patience, persistence, and standing out in a crowded landscape. Building their company around visionary leadership, Friedman and Soliman showcase how to craft a world-class organization by developing an entrepreneurial culture of strong, reliable teams.

A mission-driven innovator and entrepreneur, Seth Goldman is the founder of Eat the Change, a planet-friendly snack company and platform to inform and empower consumers to make dietary choices aligned with their concerns around climate and health. The first business launched under the Eat the Change umbrella was PLNT Burger, which is a plant-based quick-serve restaurant that offers delicious burgers, sandwiches, fries, and soft-serve. Goldman also serves as chair of the board of Beyond Meat, a publicly traded California-based enterprise on the cutting edge of plant-based protein.

Peter Sheahan is the former CEO of Karrikins Group – a global growth-oriented consulting firm focused on elevating their clients to be the obvious choice in the hearts and minds of their customers, communities, and employees. Peter is known internationally for his innovative business thinking and thought leadership. With staff in more than 23 cities across 7 countries, he knows firsthand the challenges of growing a business in these rapidly-changing times. Peter has advised leaders from companies as diverse as Apple, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Hyundai, IBM, Pfizer, Wells Fargo, and Cardinal Health.

As McDonald’s Corporation’s legendary vice chairman and CEO, Jim Skinner led a turnaround at the world’s largest food service company, leaving the chain with the best financial performance in its history. One of the architects of McDonald’s worldwide “Plan to Win” revitalization plan launched in 2003, he managed a successful shift in strategy that led to increased sales, reinvented menus, modernized restaurants, and innovative new offerings. Repeatedly hailed by media as the “CEO of the Year, Skinner addresses business strategy, turnaround stories, leadership, and managing change.

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.

Have you ever wondered why more salespeople buy BMWs than other cars? Or why a name’s popularity grows after a hurricane of that name hits? Jonah Berger has the answers. A marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the New York Times best-selling author of the books "Contagious: Why Things Catch On" and "Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces That Shape Behavior," Berger has spent the last decade studying how social influence works, why certain ideas and products catch on, and what we can do to make ourselves more influential. He shares with audiences the keys to harnessing this “influence” to forge great partnerships, sell slow-moving products, and be more intentional with business strategies. His work is regularly published in top-tier journals, he consults for a variety of Fortune 500 companies, and popular outlets like Harvard Business Review often cover his work.

Angie Bastian, entrepreneur, co-founder, and namesake of Angie’s BOOMCHICKAPOP, took a kernel of an idea and popped it into one of the fastest growing brands of natural popcorn. She and husband Dan founded their snack company in their Mankato, MN garage in 2001 as a means of creating a college fund for their children. Their gluten free, non-GMO, whole grain popcorn is proudly sold in natural food, grocery, club and mass retail outlets nationwide with a product presence in Canada, South Korea, Peru, Japan, the Caribbean and Mexico. The company is constantly innovating and is one of the fastest growing and most successful popcorn brands in the market today. Angie’s BOOMCHICKAPOP is loved by fans as an empowered, spirited brand that represents authentic, real food that delivers on the attributes of clean, transparent labeling and great taste experience.

Widely regarded as one of Britain’s greatest-ever skiers, Chemmy Alcott is a four-time Winter Olympian who has defied the odds in sport and life to inspire the world and show people that anything is possible when they’re willing to take risks. She represented Team GB throughout her 20-year sporting career, during which she became the eighth ranked skier in the world and the first British ski racer to win a run in the World Cup.

Martin McCourt has spent over 40 years working at the heart of British-based manufacturing, design and marketing for quality brands such as Dyson, Mars, Duracell, Toshiba and Pelikan. Martin was the CEO of Dyson for 15 years, the ideas to market-leading consumer products maker. As CEO, he devised and implemented a strategy that transformed the company from a single product, single market producer into one where 80% of the business came from over 60 markets around the world. In that time he increased UK skilled jobs, grew profits to over £300m and enabled James Dyson to keep on inventing. In 2011 Dyson hit £1 bn revenue for the first time. Martin was directly responsible for the establishment of Dyson subsidiaries in the USA, Japan, Switzerland, Austria and Germany. In total he took Dyson into over 60 markets, achieving market leadership in the majority including the USA.

Lisa Sun, founder and CEO of GRAVITAS, seamlessly blends stories from her data-driven insights from 11 years at McKinsey & Company and from her experience as an entrepreneur launching an innovative retail brand to offer talks that encourage audiences to choose self-confidence, work to harness their “superpower,” and use gravitas to advance personally and professionally. Sun explores why it’s vital to push past your potential, how to transform an idea into a movement, and why you’ve got to bet on yourself every single day. Sun has always had a passion for style, for inclusivity, and for helping people look and feel their best and was named one of Washingtonian Magazine's Best Dressed Women.