Ben Read

Minter Dial is an international professional speaker, elevator and multiple award-winning author. His core career stint of 16 years was spent as a top executive at L’Oréal, where he was on the Executive Committee Worldwide of the Professional Products Division. He wrote and produced a WWII documentary for PBS (The Last Ring Home) and authored 3 other award-winning books: Futureproof, You Lead and Heartificial Empathy, Putting Heart into Business and Artificial Intelligence (DigitalProof Press 2023). All his work, books and podcasts can be found on minterdial.com

Petter Björkebäck is the founder and CEO of Village Organizational Development, a People & Culture Partner that helps organizations grow sustainably and a community of practice. This follows his long experience from IKEA, latterly with a focus on People, Culture, Organization and Sustainability, with the sustainability area focusing primarily on inclusive design and social impact. He also serves in Jönköping International Business School Board of Advisors, and in this capacity, he has been working with the Inner Development Goals framework to support the school in the sustainable transformation. Petter is also a musician and choir leader, and curiously exploring how music could be an enabler to develop organizations.

Ben Read is a former sergeant in the British Army and is now the Founder & CEO of Redeployable, a business focused on building a community of career-driven, high-performance veterans.

Lena Robinson’s a straight-talking, non-conformist Kiwi. Her background is varied across multiple global and SME industries, but in the UK her background was mainly heading up new business for corporate global ad agencies. Leaving corporate life in 2014 she set up her own branding/marketing agency for agencies, selling it to her business partner in 2018 to launch FTSQ (‘F*** The Status Quo’), which pretty much sums up what Lena’s about. A maverick to the core. FTSQ was originally created to support non-conformist business owners, but unfortunately, just a few months after launch Lena fell chronically ill and had to stop working. It’s taken her years to recover and never one to do things the ‘easy way’, she’s fought to get her health back on track and relaunch FTSQ Consultancy and launch an additional business, The FTSQ Gallery where ‘art is legacy’. I met Lena briefly at a workshop on Meaningful Communications recently and just had to get her on the podcast, her brilliant contributions that evening were always meaningful!

Sean McGrath is Chief Executive of the Entrepreneurial Scotland Foundation, which is dedicated to building the belief and connections current and future leaders need to create prosperity in and for Scotland. A passionate advocate of entrepreneurial thinking, Sean firmly believes that Scotland’s future will be shaped by those who think, act and lead in an entrepreneurial way.

23 Years a Royal Air Force Engineer, Adie Holt was selected to help establish one of the MOD's most radical innovation units in 2017. The Strategic Command jHub was charged with delivering innovative capabilities into the hands of users faster. By learning from leading tech giants and world-class start-ups rather than following Defence policy and process, the unit delivered 18 capabilities in its first 18 months, unheard of in traditional defense procurement cycles. Adie left the military in 2020 to carve a niche at the intersection of public sector, industry, and the start-up/scale-up ecosystems, first establishing a Defence practice for Capita’s tech and digital-focused consultancy and later working with their corporate venturing arm Scaling partner. He is currently an advisor at Form1 Partners, a new scale-up growth engine, and co-founder of Author Insights, a novel forum for engineered serendipity. Adie and I first connected over the idea of Dunbar's number, which may well come up in our conversation!

Lena Rantsevich is a Fairness advocate, and the founder of Reputy.io

Ryan Jansen is a Feldenkrais Practitioner whom I have worked with to support my movement and general physical health through Functional Integration sessions for over five years now, as I wrote about in Feldenkrais: What I Learned from a Master Practitioner. I greatly look forward to listening to Ryan's thoughts as a master in his field.

Dave Stewart is the founder and chief executive at The Fresh Air Leadership Company, specialising in helping business leaders build highly effective teams. Core to his approach is the facilitation of inquiry into what it means to lead well in clients’ specific contexts. Place is also important. It impacts the way people think and engage with one another, and locations are carefully chosen to support clients’ needs. Dave’s passion for this work stems from earlier experiences and careers in a rock band, mountain rescue team, and the British Army (including battalion command and leadership of multi-disciplinary business units delivering £1bn portfolios of projects and services). Dave is a repeat guest on the show and I look forward to talking to him specifically about context-specific leadership of teams of different sizes and types.

Julie Smith is an executive coach who works with leaders to grow their impact and supports teams to grow their effectiveness. She is the author of Coach Yourself Confident. I enjoyed listening to Julie and hearing her thoughts on confidence.